The Globe and Mail carries an interview with Judith Jones – the editor who brought Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the world. Judith is 85 and still working. The article is interesting enough but what really stood out was that Jones also spotted another book of rather more significance than Child’s cookbook.

Long before Ms. Jones discovered Julia Child, she had earned some fame for insisting that The Diary of Anne Frank be published in the United States. After the war, she was working for Doubleday in Paris. “I was just a girl Friday, answering the mail, and my boss one day went off to lunch, and said, ‘There’s a pile of manuscripts I’ve looked at. Would you get rid of them?’ One was a book in French, but it hadn’t been published. It was a bound galley, and I was drawn to it because of the face on the cover. It had a picture of Anne Frank. I started reading and I read all afternoon, and when my boss came back, I said, ‘We have to get this book to New York. This has to be published.’ And he said, ‘What? That book by that kid?’ A lot of editors had turned it down in New York.”

The publishing industry appears to be populated by the brightest but also the most short-sighted people at the same time.