ANNE FRANKS EDITOR DIES
Saved Diary from publishing scrap pile
Judith Jones, a legend in the New York publishing world who plucked “The Diary of Anne Frank” out of a rejection pile, died Wednesday at her summer home in Vermont. She was 93.
Jones worked for Knopf publishing for more than five decades, joining the company in 1957 and retiring in 2011. Over the course of her storied career, she convinced Alfred Knopf to publish Julia Child’s now-iconic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 1961, and championed other cookbook authors, including James Beard, Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich, and literary writers like John Updike, Anne Tyler, William Maxwell and Sharon Olds.
“It is impossible to imagine book publishing without Judith,” said Knopf Chairman and editorin-chief Sonny Mehta. “Her authors have been recipients of five Pulitzer Prizes, five National Book Awards and three National Book Critics Circle Awards.”
Prior to joining Knopf, Jones worked as an assistant at Doubleday, first in New York and then in Paris. It was there she noticed Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diary in a slush pile of books that had been rejected by other publishers for translation into English.
When Anne’s father, Otto, returned to Amsterdam after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, he went to see Miep Gies, who was one of the people who helped hide the Frank family in a secret annex above Otto’s business. Gies had found the diary after the Gestapo raid of the annex and hid it, unread, hoping Anne would one day return for it.
But Otto would be the only member of the eight annex residents to return. Anne died in March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, only about two months before the Germans were defeated.
Anne made it clear in her diary that she wanted it published. Despite initial misgivings, Otto followed her wishes. The diary was printed in Dutch in 1947 and in German and French in 1950, but had not been translated into English when Jones found it.
Jones was drawn by Anne’s picture on the advance copy of the French edition, and spent all day reading it, in tears.
“When my boss returned, I told him, ‘We have to publish this book.’ He said, ‘What? That book by that kid?’ ” Jones explained in a 2001 interview with The Associated Press.
She brought the diary to the attention of Doubleday’s New York office, and the book was published in the United States in 1952.
Jones recalled, “I was so taken with it, and I felt it would have a real market in America. It’s one of those seminal books that will never be forgotten.”