The Editor by Sara Franklin is an exhaustive biography of Judith Jones.  For over 60 years, she was the ground-breaking editor of authors such as Anne Tyler, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath.  She also worked with a murderers’ row of cookbook authors – Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, and James Beard.

Jones led a Forrest Gump-like life – from postwar Paris where she came across a manuscript by Anne Frank and she “rescued [it] from the reject pile” and then throughout the years she spent at Knopf. For example, she worked with philosophers and poets, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Langston Hughes,

The latter part of the book is devoted to how Jones virtually invented a new genre – that of the literary cookbook. The years Jones spent in France were critical to her success with Child, and Jones also became an expert in the cuisine of India and the Middle East through her work with Jaffrey and Claudia Roden.

It’s a story of sexism – neither Blanche Knopf nor Jones were as well known or compensated (in Jones’ case)  as their male counterparts. It’s a fascinating history of the heyday of big publishing houses in New York, when authors and books had almost unlimited time and attention from their publishers and editors. Franklin goes into minute detail about every stage of the process – from how books and authors are shopped around to how cover art and book titles were chosen. With Child, Jones revolutionized how books were promoted by creating the publicity tour.  These geeky details were perhaps my favorite part of The Editor.