John Lewis Michel 3rd

I am the editorial director at CUP, and I hired John Michel 13 years ago. Working with someone for 13 years—seeing someone five days a week year after year but not socializing with them outside of work--you get to know them in that peculiarly close but also distant office kind of way.

So I'd say that I and my colleagues knew a certain John Michel, and that John Michel was a neat, organized man, a knowledgeable and dependable colleague, who always arrived before 8:00, always went out to get lunch at 12:15, and always left on the dot of 5:00. Each Friday afternoon at 4:45 he borrowed my feather duster (an impulse purchase I never used myself) to clean his office before he left for the weekend. He inevitably grumbled or threatened to work at home whenever it rained or snowed (I often thought he should have lived in the desert because he hated inclement weather so much). But mainly John was a wonderful editor, much loved by his authors.

But if I said only that I would be missing a key ingredient of John's character. Above all, John was funny. He was so funny, in fact, that he often had us in tears, usually poking good-natured fun of people. It is not without some trepidation that I stand here to memorialize him, because I have the very distinct feeling that somewhere right now he is making fun of me even as I stand here and speak!

One afternoon he stopped in my office just as I was closing down my computer for the day. John always required immediate attention, and I knew that I postponed a discussion with him at my peril, but I was rushing out to get my son from school and take him to the doctor. When I explained this to John and said that I'd have to speak to him first thing the next morning, without skipping a beat he said "Oh don't worry I was just stopping by to tell you I have to leave early to go home and feed my hamster."

John had some unique work habits. Most people hand in their expense reports once a month or at most once a week. John handed one in each and every time he spent a dime of his own money on Press business. I must have signed two or three expense reports a week for him during his entire thirteen years at the Press. Our controller told me that he was on the phone to her every week asking where his reimbursement check was, always with a joke or two. As fastidious as he was about his expense reports, John never kept any other kind of paper record, as far as I could see. His desk was always spotless. And he used his computer as a typewriter, immediately deleting files once he'd created a hard copy. His preferred tool at work, in fact—and he was an excellent acquisitions editor who brought us many wonderful authors—was not the computer but the telephone. John was on that phone several hours a day with his authors, developing and cultivating their friendship. I would walk by and see him at his desk, with his feet up, facing the window, talking and laughing, and I know the person on the other end of the phone was laughing as well.

It was not only John's humor but, it must be said, his love of gossip—no, in fact, his finely honed skill at gossip—that at times seemed to form the very glue of our office. We had all heard the rumor of the moment, and it was so cleverly—one might say stealthily-- planted that it seems to me that we only rarely traced it back to John, who I am now absolutely certain was the source of all of them. I know this because we just haven't had that many rumors in the months since he's been gone.

John even kept his sense of humor until the very end of his life. Knowing his interest in American history, and knowing he couldn't read or easily watch television after his operation, I went to Barnes and Noble with the idea of buying him an audio book. I stared for a long time at two copies of Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton. One was an abridged version and the other was the complete biography—36 hours. I couldn't decide whether this would be too much for John, or whether, if I bought the abridged version, he would berate me for not getting him the whole thing. I finally decided on the complete version. I called a few days after I mailed his gift. I said "John? It's Jennifer." He said "36 hours???"

I and my colleagues at the Press will all miss John. He built up an extraordinary stable of authors, gave us a strong list of books to publish, and made many lasting friendships. I think of him daily—when I open my messy desk drawer, I can hear his voice calling it a "rat's nest," and when I wonder whether one of his books is really right for the market he claimed for it on his editorial memo, I can hear him saying, "Trust me."

I know he will live on in the hundreds of books that he published and, of course, in his own book, "Antiquing New York", written with his wife Barbara, which just came off press last week, and which will be read, I know, by thousands of antique lovers as they forage throughout New York State in the coming seasons.