Almanac of Story Tellers: Judith Jones

  Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of March 10th

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    It is the 69th day of the year, leaving 296 days remaining in 2022.

 

   On this date in 1924, Judith Jones, a book editor in Paris and New York, was born.

    

    Jones was also a writer who told her own stories. But her biggest accomplishments were allowing and assisting other people to tell their stories.

    She is best known for rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from a reject pile while working in Paris for Doubleday books. As the story goes, she found the book, which had been released in German and Dutch and whose French edition was going nowhere, and picked it up because she was intrigued by the cover photo of Anne Frank.

    She continued the story in a 1998 interview with National Public Radio:

I read all afternoon with the tears coming down my face. When my boss got back, it was evening by then. He said, "What are you still doing here?" And I said, "We have to have this book." And he said, "What? That book by that kid?"

    Indeed, the diary of that kid was eventually published, in English, in the United States, and has since become one of the most widely translated and read books in the world.

    Jones is also credited with helping to expand the selection of cookbook authors when she insisted that her then-employer, Alfred A. Knopf books, publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by a little-known chef and instructor, Julia Child. Jones then sought out a wider range of chef-authors, among them James Beard, to bring a more sophisticate cuisine to home cooks.

    She also worked with authors Anne Tyler and John Updike.

    Jones died at her home in Vermont in 2017.