Larry Ashmead

Lawrence Peel "Larry" Ashmead (July 4, 1932 – September 3, 2010) was an American book editor who helped create many books featuring such authors as Isaac Asimov, Quentin Crisp, Tony Hillerman, Susan Isaacs, Michael Korda, and Helen Van Slyke, for a series of publishers including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Lippincott, Harper & Row and its successor HarperCollins.He later recalled having been a model for a Kodak photograph and then seeing an enlargement of his picture blown up to billboard size when visiting Grand Central Terminal and assumed that they did that for all visitors.When he was nine years old he heard a writer speak at a local library and was less fascinated by the author's writing than by the fact that he worked amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan editing books.After completing his military service, he studied for a doctorate in geology from Yale University as part of a program where the cost of his education was covered by an oil company.Though Asimov was able to show in almost all cases that his writing was correct, he was impressed that anyone would devote so much attention to a manuscript and asked that Ashmead be assigned to edit his books.