One on 1 Profile: Editor/Publisher Nan Talese Continues Her Legacy in the World of Books
By Budd Mishkin
In any book, one of the most heartfelt thank yous from an author usually goes to the book editor, and for many years, some of the most prominent authors have thanked Nan Talese. NY1’s Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile.
Nan Talese was once dubbed the “high priestess of all New York editor/publishers.”
“People have said, ‘I’m so glad to meet you,'” she says. “Now, I cannot figure it out. (laughs).”
Talese: The hard thing is to write. What I do is easy.
Mishkin: Maybe it’s easy for you.
Talese: It’s easy for me.
Talese is held in such high regard that she has her own imprint, akin to her own department of the publishing giant Doubleday.
On the walls of her Midtown office hang pictures of some of the writers with whom she’s worked for decades, including best-selling authors Margaret Atwood and Pat Conroy.
At her Upper East Side home, there are notes from book projects both present and past.
“What I usually do is – I won’t do it because it’s undignified – I lie down here with my feet up here and I read the manuscripts,” Talese says. “I read very, very slowly. because I hear the words.”
Her appreciation for what writers endure is helped immensely by the fact that she lives with a writer, and a pretty fair one at that: her husband of more than 55 years, Gay Talese.
“As Gay writes his book, I read aloud the pages as they come out, and I think it puts me in the atmosphere of the writer’s working,” Nan Talese says. “I think it’s helped me a great deal.”