After nearly 14 years of publishing, Spiegel & Grau, the celebrated imprint launched by successful editors Cindy Spiegel & Julie Grau, is being shuttered. With the closure, the imprint's eponymous founders are leaving Penguin Random House.
The news comes on the heels of another reorganization at PRH, as the publisher made shifts to its Crown division. While Spiegel and Grau's departures are, arguably, a surprise, they are not the only high-profile editors and executives to leave PRH since the merger of Random House and Crown was announced last year. in the Crown reorg, both Molly Stern (who had been senior v-p and publisher of Crown) and Maya Mavjee (who had been president of Crown and was just named to a top post at Macmillan) left PRH.
Launched in 2005, at a then Penguin-less Random House, Spiegel & Grau was an upmarket imprint that did a mix of commercial and high brow fiction and nonfiction, reflective of the tastes of celebrated editors who founded it. Before starting the imprint, the pair had been co-publishers of Riverhead. S&G, which was housed under the then Doubelday Group, launched with Suze Orman's Women & Money; that book would go on to become a major bestseller that, per PRH, sold over 1 million copies.
Citing a few of the bestsellers S&G published over the years, PRH called out titles like Piper Kerman's Orange Is the New Black (which is the basis of the same-titled Netflix series); Sara Gruen's At the Water's Edge; Jay-Z's Decoded; Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz's Beastie Boys Book; Trevor Noah's Born a Crime; and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me.
Speaking to the fate of the books still scheduled to be published by S&G, PRH said that the imprint's "amazing authors will be fully and proudly supported by Random House, The Dial Press, and One World."
