Janice Goldklang Out At Pantheon



The New York Observer has the most prompt and professional initial piece on Pantheon publisher Janice Goldklang having ended 25 years at Random House in a second round of layoffs and restructuring one guesses beginning today at RH after an initial burst of massive changes instigated early last month. I believe Pantheon operates under Knopf. Like the newspaper industry, book publishing has been wrestling with a variety of factors in maintaining position and profitability: the increased arts consumption choices out there, the changing nature of reading and readership, and the impact of new media via factors like on-line publishing and the possibilities seen in things like digital distribution. These very hot and pressing issues have become super-heated by the external pressures of the ongoing, general, worldwide financial trauma. Excising even successful publishing figures and perhaps moving away from the larger publishing houses as constellations of stand-alone fiefdoms seem to be parts of this ongoing industry transition period -- in the general sense, it's not surprising; in the specific, I'd say it is.

(I don't really know Goldklang's exact history with Pantheon; her tenure with Random House seems to put her at that company while Andre Schiffrin was still at Pantheon -- he ended his time there in 1990. I guess the assumption is that maybe she was in that publisher's role since then -- but I don't think that's true; I'm guess it was the late 1990s. I can find one generic reference of her in a leadership role with Pantheon dated 1997, but also other articles between then and now that refer to her as an editorial director and a publishing director as opposed to a publisher. I'm afraid I know more about the inner workings of the Avengers than I do how book publishers have organized themselves in the last two decades.)

Pantheon is important for its role in both the late 1980s book publishing flirtation with comics (best remembered with Maus) and the current, more severe and involved romance with the medium (best seen in Persepolis, but also involving authors like Chris Ware, Jessica Abel, David B. and Joann Sfar). Goldklang wasn't a part of the first, but was definitely a part of the second. If there's one imprint that can be aligned with the success of literary comics in book publishing, Pantheon's the one, so Goldklang's departure should make everyone with even the tiniest interest in the future of comics publishing sit up and take notice along with the book publishing world. No successor was named, although the functional editorial apparatus at the company still seems to be in place.
 
posted 12:30 pm PST | Permalink
 

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