CASS CANFIELD

CANFIELD--Cass Jr., distinguished book publisher and editor, and dear husband, father, grandfather, friend and mentor, died peacefully on July 30th at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. He was born in New York City on May 4th, 1923, the eldest son of Katharine Temple Emmet and Augustus Cass Canfield. He graduated from St. Bernard's and St. Mark's schools and attended the University of Chicago prior to enlisting in the Army in 1943, where he served in the Signal Corps in the Pacific until the end of World War II. After military service he followed his father's footsteps into the book business, initially taking a job as a salesman in the Doubleday bookstore in Grand Central Station. After holding publishing positions at McGraw Hill and Coward, McCann, he joined what was then Harper and Brothers in the mid-1950s. He rose quickly to head the high-growth trade paperback department in the 1960's, and occupied several other management roles, including vice president and publisher of the paperback, religious and medical divisions. He served on the company's board of directors from 1967 to 1987. In his long career he was known for publishing books of quality and lasting influence. With the help of his colleague Hugh Van Dusen, he initiated Colophon Books and reorganized and developed the Perennial line of paperbacks. He also created the Icon Editions imprint, a line of accessible academic art history titles in paperback. He was responsible for bringing a number of distinguished Latin American authors into English translation for the first time, including Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortazar, Reinaldo Arenas, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro, Alvaro Mutis, and Ilan Stavans, as well as Nobel Prize winners Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Among the many authors he worked with were Peter F. Drucker, Craig Claiborne, Hugh Thomas, Enrique Krauze, Otto Friedrich, Paul Johnson, and art historians Robert Rosenbloom, Laurie Schneider Adams, Irving Sandler, and Bruce Cole. He adored his family, and considered his six children as his greatest life accomplishment. He plunged with joy into sailing, skiing and large dinners with his family at home, taking great pride in his roasts, risottos, and his famous boiled dinner with green sauce. He was proud of his Irish American heritage, taking his family to Ireland in 1998 for the 200th anniversary of the rebellion of the United Irishmen, in which his ancestor Thomas Addis Emmet (an Attorney General of New York State, and prominent lawyer in the Jeffersonian period) was a main participant. He is survived by his wife of 40 years, Abigail Angell Canfield, his sons Thomas, Temple, Lewis, Michael and Nicholas Canfield, daughter Susannah Canfield Hurd, granddaughters Juliana and Sophie Canfield and Ellory Hurd, grandsons Samuel Canfield and Ethan Hurd, daughter-in-law Danielle Parris, son-in-law Stephen Hurd, and dear step-sister Isabel Fuller Fox. His brother Michael Temple Canfield died in 1967. A memorial celebration will be held on Saturday, December 14th at the Lotos Club in New York at 5:00pm.