My mentor died last weekend, and the only way I can process my grief is to write it down. I sure as hell wish he were here to give it an edit.
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In 2001, after the bursting dot-com bubble ended my freelancing dreams, I applied for a job as an editorial assistant at Booklist, a book-review journal published by the American Library Association. I did it grudgingly. Already 32, I thought I was too old to be an editorial assistant. But no one else would hire me.
Although my first job at Booklist was in reference books (where I wrestled multivolume sets such as The Encyclopedia of Meat Sciences), and my first supervisor was Mary Ellen Quinn, the editor of that section, I found out later it was editor and publisher Bill Ott who had spotted my resume in the pile and thought, Maybe this guy can write.
Bill was big on writers. Most of the two dozen or so staffers contributed reviews, regardless of job description, and I suspect he would have loved it if every single one of them did. Bill was also big on identifying talent and promoting from within.
I was scared of him at first. He looked intense, with dark, fierce eyes framed by impressive eyebrows and a bushy white beard. As I pushed book trucks past his office, I would see him glaring at his computer or hear him issuing directives to the section editors. At editorial meetings, Bill talked while we listened. It took a while for me to learn how funny he was and how much he loved to laugh—how much he loved telling a good story.
Within a few months, I was writing for the magazine, too, which made the rote tasks of my job more bearable. And while my first assignments came from Mary Ellen and also Brad Hooper, the adult books editor, my first lessons were delivered by Bill. He’d wander into my work area holding a printout of my latest review and say something like, “This is really good, but your central premise is all wrong.”
Forthrightly—neither gently nor harshly, but almost with a twinkle, as though he was amused and assumed that I would be, too—he’d explain where I went astray. One time, I naively stated that the art world was a rare setting for a thriller, even though the art world was at that time a trendy setting for thrillers. (Remember, I was new to the trade.) So while Bill respected my opinion that the novel was good, he told me he’d be rewording my claim that it was unique.
Sometimes he caught embarrassing grammatical errors that had eluded others, such as dangling participles (which he lovingly called “danglers”). Sometimes he just struck a sentence that clearly never needed to be written. I’ve worked with many editors since then, and I’ve never found a better one. It’s so rare to find someone who both teaches you and tells you the truth.
Bill himself was a clear and elegant writer, both in his reviews and his Back Page column, about which he was always self-deprecating. He had started it as a way to sell more ads on the inside back cover and figured literary quizzes were a good way to save librarians from having to do actual work. But he often wrote essays—about authors and books, mostly, but also about life at Booklist and life in general—that were as good as anything in the New York Review of Books. Actually better, because Bill’s clarity of thought made reading every one a pleasure. I think the real secret to his success was that he never thought of Booklist as a trade journal or a review mill. He thought of it as a bona fide literary publication that always respected the intelligence of its librarian subscribers. He often reminded me that the single most important thing was the quality of our reviews.
The magazine was then publishing 7,000 or 8,000 reviews per year and Bill taught me that every word mattered. In addition to his duties overseeing ad sales, circulation, layout, printing, and postage—not to mention dealing with a handful of editorial advisory boards—he read every line of every issue (22 per year) and delivered his feedback in person. Not everyone loved seeing Bill walk through their door, but that was how he managed, and in a world of remote work with video conferencing and Slack channels and endless emails we knew him in a way few people ever get to know their bosses. He was a real father figure at Booklist, and we were his unruly, carping kids. At times the family was a little dysfunctional—but it was a family.
Despite the writing opportunities I’d been given, I saw no room for advancement, because in those days, nobody ever left Booklist. When I tried to leave for Time Out Chicago after a few years, Bill asked me to be patient and stick around, explaining that he had plans for me. Old-school Bill, who loved ink on his fingers, had decided we needed to invest big in Booklist Online, and he thought I could run it.
I stuck, and even though it took a while, Bill made good on his promise. From editorial assistant, I became senior editor, then full editor, then executive editor, working with him closely every day for a decade and a half. I can’t begin to count the number of meetings we sat in together, or the conferences we attended, or the dinners and drinks we shared. I heard some of his stories so often that I could have told them word for word.
It wasn’t always easy being mentored by Bill. We sometimes argued about how to do things. And for reasons I struggled to understand, he would lead me just so far before reining me, never fully giving me the responsibility I craved. I think now that he just loved Booklist so much he could never quite relinquish control, even to someone he trusted.
I know he wanted me to succeed him as editor and publisher, and he did almost everything he could to position me for that role. I also know that being Bill’s man was a double-edged sword. He had never been a yes-man, and despite his stunning ability to earn a profit for the ALA, the higher-ups had always craved someone a little more malleable. They didn’t allow him to choose his successor.
And so I didn’t get the job. Shortly after helping organize Bill’s own retirement festivities, and editing a mock issue of Booklist in tribute (“A Hard-Boiled Gazetteer to Bill Ott”), I tendered my own resignation. I never got to put all those lessons from Bill to use in running the magazine. I would have done a lot of things differently. But I would have done some of the most important things the same.
Bill and his wife Ilene Cooper (my mentor in children’s books, but that’s another story) remained friends, our friendship even closer now that he was no longer my boss. We’d meet for dinner, or drinks, at a party, or at Ravinia. Bill threatened to teach me how to golf, and oh how I wish I’d let him.
On Sunday, March 26, Laura Tillotson, a former books for youth editor at Booklist and one of Bill’s closest friends, called to tell me Bill had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He had been intending to tell me himself but hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to do it. Bill began treatment the next day but his health quickly collapsed. A few days later he was in the ICU. And on Saturday, April 8, he died, with his daughter Molly and Ilene holding his hands, Ilene singing to him and reading messages of love. It all happened so fast that I never got to speak to him or see him again. His last text to me, after his first day of treatment, had ended, Will write more soon.
Outwardly, Bill was a proud throwback, a grizzled editor who warred with his superiors and challenged orthodoxy—any orthodoxy—and who eschewed fashionable thought. For years, he didn’t even vote, though he would delightedly follow the campaigns of what he called “crackpot candidates” for any office. (Only late in life did the politically passionate Ilene reform Bill enough to get him to a polling booth.) And I know from personal experience that Bill made many of his subordinates grind their teeth with his relentless push to work harder—even though none of us worked harder than he did.
I also know that beneath that gruff exterior was a huge-hearted man who always put people first, was surprisingly progressive, and was an unwavering champion of his friends. The man cared. He cared if a sentence was good and he cared if a book was good and he cared if people were intellectually honest or mere poseurs. Maybe the reason he sometimes came off as a cynic was that he just couldn’t believe people could be so stupid when the right answers were there in front of all of us.
More than anything, Bill loved being alive. He loved, with unwavering devotion, Ilene. He loved his daughter Molly and his son-in-law Jordan and especially his grandson, Elliott. He loved Dewar’s on the rocks, grilled salmon, Oregon pinot noirs, healthy salads, cold martinis, classic jazz, lurid paperback covers (on both potboilers and literary classics), trench coats, fedoras, and cats. He loved his loft in Printers Row with the L train clattering by but he loved Ilene so much more that he left it for Highland Park, where he never felt quite comfortable with the commuting class he called “train weasels.” (But he really loved telling stories about train weasels.)
In short, Bill loved being alive. And for all of us who loved him, too, it’s just unthinkable that he’s not.
