There was a time, decades ago, when the mark on the spine of a book told a reader something real about the publisher. That was back when you could lookup Simon & Schuster’s address, for instance, and send a letter to Dick Simon or to Max Schuster. Today, most of the venerable names one associates with a publisher’s logo have nothing to do with the person who edited or published the book. Both Simon and Schuster are long dead, as are Charles Little and James Brown, James and John Harper and William Collins, Charles Scribner (and his sons), Alfred A. Knopf, and Messrs. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
It’s different for editor and publisher Amy Einhorn, who is alive and well as the head of Amy Einhorn Books, an imprint of the Penguin Random House division G. P. Putnam’s Sons (also deceased). She started her eponymous imprint in 2007 and published its first title, Kathryn Stockett’s No. 1 best-seller The Help, in 2009. Since then, the novel has gone on to sell millions of copies.