New York Review’s First Publisher Dies at 75

A. Whitney Ellsworth, the first publisher of the New York Review of Books, died Saturday at the age of 75. He was a young editor at The Atlantic Monthly when he joined the New York Review as publisher in February 1963, just shortly after its first issue. The New York Review had launched during the printers’ strike that shutdown newspapers that year. Ellsworth had wanted to be an editor but said later that “the glory of the Review trumps the regret.” “He understood what we were trying to do, and the kind of writing we admired,” Robert Silvers, one of the Review’s founders and its editor still today, tells The New York Times. “That was crucial. He saw the scale on which a small paper might survive, and through advertising and circulation he ensured it.”