Marc Jaffe was at a New Year’s Eve party of Hollywood types in 1967 when a screenwriter named William Peter Blatty began chatting him up.
Mr. Blatty said he had tried and failed to sell an idea for a novel — about a young girl possessed by a demon and the tortured priest who tries to save her. But Mr. Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam Books, the paperback publishing house in New York City, thought the idea sounded pretty good.
A few days later, Mr. Blatty wrote to him about a dream: “I saw you standing at the confluence of Hollywood and Vine holding a massive cornucopia that spewed forth paperbacks and doubloons.”
Mr. Blatty’s dream was indeed prescient, and Mr. Jaffe gave him an advance of $26,000 (the equivalent of about $211,000 today) to secure the rights for the novel, “The Exorcist.” Mr. Blatty delivered the manuscript in 1970, and Mr. Jaffe arranged for the book to be published, first in hardcover in 1971 by Harper & Row. It sold nearly a half-million copies and made the best-seller lists.
But the Bantam paperback edition, published a year later, was a blockbuster. So was the 1973 movie adaptation, directed by William Friedkin, which in turn boosted more paperback sales. By 1974, 10 million copies had been sold, making it, at the time, the second-best-selling paperback of all time, behind Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and ahead of Erich Segal’s “Love Story.”
“An editor is lucky,” Mr. Jaffe told Clarence Petersen, author of “The Bantam Story: Thirty Years of Paperback Publishing” (1975), “if he has one like that in his career.”
Mr. Jaffe, as it happened, had many. As a longtime editor, he oversaw a boom in paperback publishing that began in the 1960s, putting out hitmakers from “The Catcher in the Rye” to “Jaws.”
He died at 102 on Dec. 31 at his home in Williamstown, Mass., his daughter Eva Jaffe said.
“Marc was the epitome of a great editor,” Alberto Vitale, the former chairman of Random House, who worked with Mr. Jaffe at Bantam for a time, said by phone. “He had a great nose for fiction and for nonfiction, and he had a great nose for what sells.”
Mr. Vitale recalled the success of “Jaws” in paperback, propelled in part by the book’s terrifying cover — showing an enormous, toothy shark ready to swallow an unsuspecting swimmer — which was commissioned by Oscar Dystel, Bantam’s president, and painted by Roger Kastel. Mr. Jaffe worked hard to promote the book around the world, though there was a bit of pushback from Bantam’s subsidiaries in England and Australia. As Mr. Vitale told it: “The Brits said, ‘But we don’t have sharks.’ The Australians said, ‘We have plenty of sharks, but we don’t like them.’”
Nonetheless, Mr. Jaffe prevailed, and, Mr. Vitale said, “the damn book sold another million and a half copies in the Commonwealth.”
Mr. Vitale also remembered the speed at which Mr. Jaffe could wrangle a book into print after a news event. In June 1976, an Air France flight with 245 passengers was hijacked by terrorists and flown to Entebbe International Airport in Uganda; many passengers were freed, but 100 passengers, mostly Israeli, were held hostage. A week later, Israeli commandos rescued the hostages in a 90-minute nighttime raid, during which three hostages, an Israeli officer, 20 Ugandan soldiers and seven terrorists were killed.
“Marc jumped on a plane and flew to Israel and within two weeks he had a book,” Mr. Vitale said. That was “90 Minutes at Entebbe,” by the author and journalist William Stevenson.
In 1978, when Representative Leo Ryan of California and others were shot in Guyana, where they were investigating the unfolding horror of the Peoples Temple, the cult led by Jim Jones that ended in mass suicide, Mr. Jaffe reached out to a team of San Francisco Chronicle reporters, whose colleagues had also been attacked. Within a month, as The New York Times reported, 350,000 copies of “The Suicide Cult: The Untold Story of the Peoples Temple Sect and the Massacre in Guyana” had been printed.
In 1979, Mr. Jaffe paid the author Judith Krantz — the wildly popular creator of the “sex-and-shopping genre of fiction,” as Margalit Fox of The Times wrote in Ms. Krantz’s 2019 obituary — a record-breaking advance of more than $3.2 million (more than $14 million today) for her second novel, “Princess Daisy.” Mr. Jaffe’s bet was a sound one, and the book, about the enormously complicated adventures of the orphaned daughter of an actress and a Russian prince, rode atop the best-seller lists before becoming a television mini-series in 1983.
But the author whose work was closest to his heart, and who sold more books for him than any other writer, was Louis L’Amour, the stunningly prolific creator of irresistible Westerns, with whom he published more than 100 titles.
Marcus Henry Jaffe was born on Nov. 6, 1921, in Philadelphia. His father, Samuel Jaffe, was a family doctor. His mother, Lily (Bailey) Jaffe, was a teacher and a social worker.
Marc was 16 when he entered Harvard, where he studied literature and history. After graduating in 1942, he joined the Marines and earned a Bronze Star for his combat service in the Pacific theater in World War II.
After the war, Mr. Jaffe moved to Provincetown, Mass., where he worked as a scallop fisherman. By 1948, he was in New York City, working first for the men’s magazine Argosy and then for New American Library, the paperback house, editing writers like Mickey Spillane and Gore Vidal.
By 1961, Mr. Jaffe was editorial director at Bantam Books, where he stayed for nearly two decades. He worked next at Ballantine Books and then founded Villard Books, for Random House, in 1983. By 1986 he had started another imprint, under his name, for Houghton Mifflin, where he published an eclectic mix of titles, including “A Place for Us,” by Nicholas Gage (1989), a sequel to “Eleni,” the author’s account of his mother’s murder by Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war.
Mr. Jaffe left Houghton Mifflin more than two decades ago to work as a freelance editor with his second wife, Vivienne (Sernaqué) Jaffe, who survives him. He was still working at his death.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Eva, he is survived by another daughter, Nina; his sons, David and Ben; and seven grandchildren. His marriage to Grace Cohen ended in divorce.
Among Mr. Jaffe’s many wins was coaxing J.D. Salinger into publishing “The Catcher in the Rye” with Bantam in the early 1960s by promising to produce the book with no illustration on its cover. (Mr. Salinger would have preferred that it be produced in mimeograph form, as Mr. Jaffe told Kenneth C. Davis, author of the 1984 book “Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America.”) The novel had first appeared in 1951 in hardcover, under Little Brown, and then as a Signet paperback, whose illustration the author loathed.
Mr. Jaffe had at least one miss. As he told the Massachusetts newspaper The Berkshire Eagle in 2021, a few weeks before his 100th birthday, he spotted John Steinbeck on the street in Sag Harbor, N.Y., in the 1960s. He thought, “Here’s my chance,” and quickly introduced himself.
The author ignored him, and walked away.
