Mike Shatzkin, a charismatic publishing consultant who counseled industry figures on nearly every facet of the trade, from inventory management to supply-chain quandaries to the seismic paper-to-digital transformation of book selling, died on Nov. 7 in Manhattan. He was 77.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of a rare and untreatable form of lymphoma, said his wife, Martha Moran.
With a bushy head of hair, a tendency to shout (he was practically deaf) and obsessions that included baseball statistics, Diet Coke and climate change, Mr. Shatzkin was a quintessential Renaissance man of Midtown Manhattan, where he lived and worked.
As the founder of the Idea Logical Company, he mentored publishing executives, served as a go-to expert for reporters and was a popular speaker at conferences. His blog, The Shatzkin Files, was an essential read for industry insiders — if they could keep up with his output. (“I type 100 words a minute,” he once boasted.)
“Mike was one of a kind,” Michael Cader, the founder of Publishers Marketplace, an industry news publication, said in an interview. “He was enormously likable. He was an enthusiast. He was an optimist. He was opinionated, and he was outgoing, so he shared those opinions, whether you wanted to hear them or not.”
Mr. Shatzkin was among the first in the industry to metaphorically shake publishers into confronting the digital disruption of their old-world enterprise.
In the introduction to a 2011 ebook collection of his blog posts, he wrote: “The fact that the transition from reading and distributing print to largely reading on screens and distributing print online makes much of their skill sets and business models obsolete is not their fault. Nor is the fact that preserving their old business, and the cash flow it still yields, sometimes interferes with inventing the new one.”
Mr. Shatzkin’s authority and in-the-weeds know-how came from growing up in the business.
His father, Leonard Shatzkin, joined Doubleday after working as a scientist on the Manhattan Project. He standardized the sizes of the company’s books, championed paperbacks, and helped bookish executives better understand profit-and-loss statements. He later started the Two Continents Publishing Group, a book distributor, with his wife, Eleanor Shatzkin, a physicist.
Mike Shatzkin began working for his parents in 1972. He started the Idea Logical Company, a largely one-man operation, in 1979.
One of his longtime clients, John Ingram, the chairman of the global book distributor Ingram Industries, called Mr. Shatzkin his “thought partner.”
“Mike deeply understood everything in publishing, all of its intricacies and idiosyncratic ways,” Mr. Ingram said in an interview. “But he also knew how to see ahead of what was coming, and that made him valuable to me.”
Mr. Shatzkin, who read lips to compensate for his hearing loss, did not communicate his views via PowerPoint.
“It was more like getting together over scrambled eggs,” Mr. Ingram said. “We’d go have breakfast or lunch, and Mike would say things like: ‘I came across this. Have you thought about it? Do you know about this?’ It was organic and interactive, and he made you think.”
Michael Shatzkin was born on June 6, 1947, in Manhattan and grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., in Westchester County. His parents were cerebral and quirky. They spent their honeymoon in 1940 campaigning for Norman Thomas, the six-time Socialist Party candidate for president.
Growing up, Mike was obsessed with baseball, a fixation his parents could not comprehend. His father took him to a Yankees game one Sunday and spent the entire afternoon in the stands reading The New York Times.
When Mike was 15, his father helped him get a job as a sales clerk at the Rockefeller Center bookstore Brentano’s. His hearing issues, which stemmed from a childhood infection, were a constant impediment.
“When people told me their names, I almost never could hear them well enough to get it straight, so I routinely would ask them ‘please spell it,’” he wrote in a blog post. “That was the simplest way for me to get it right. The embarrassing moment came when I asked John Dos Passos to ‘please spell it.’ I became mortified on the ‘capital P-a-s …’”
Mr. Shatzkin studied political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated in 1969. He worked on George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972.
He also dabbled in music. In 1969, under the name Shaz, he recorded “Wanted,” an album on which he sang and played acoustic guitar; it was produced by J.W. Alexander, a key figure in the careers of Lou Rawls and Sam Cooke. He and Ms. Moran, whom he married in 1976, later managed a New Zealand rock band, the Drongos.
Mr. Shatzkin published several books, including “Baseball Explained” (1987), “The Ballplayers” (1990), “The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Baseball Quizzes” (1999) and, with Robert Paris Riger, “The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know” (2019).
He had recently become active in efforts to combat climate change. He and Lena Tabori, a former publishing executive, founded the nonprofit organization Climate Change Resources in 2021.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Shatzkin is survived by his sisters, Nance and Karen Shatzkin.
Mr. Shatzkin was optimistic about the future of reading and book selling, but he thought the industry would not survive in a form that looked anything like the one he had grown up in. Self-publishing, eBooks and digital sales, he believed, would accelerate the upheaval already underway.
“Book publishing is not going to stop, or even slow down,” he wrote on his blog in 2020. But, he added, “general trade publishing will be soon recognized as an artifact of a trade that no longer exists.”
And so might Mr. Shatzkin.
“We have lost one of publishing’s most iconic characters,” Mr. Ingram said. “The type of person he was, the history he had, it’s not obvious to me if there’s somebody out there who can replace him.”
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