This is how I met John F. Baker.

In 1986, I’d arrived in New York, having spent most of a year in a Chinese publishing house, and before that, working as an editor of educational books in London. A bumper crop of job rejections told me I knew nothing about U.S. trade publishing, and was too old to be an assistant. While in China, I’d published a handful of “letters” from Beijing at the behest of the Bookseller, but never thought of myself as a writer; each time I faced my typewriter, I turned to jelly. However, my job prospects nil, I sent copies of the letters to the editor-in-chief of PW, suggesting I do something on Chinese publishing. Four weeks passed, no reply. When I finally dialed PW and asked to speak to the editor-in-chief, I was jelly once again.

A man with a British accent got on the line. I started to explain who I was, and he stopped me: “I know who you are. I ran a report by a China consultant not long ago, and don’t need another. But I liked your pieces. I think you can write about other things. Let’s have lunch.”

Tall, middle-aged, tweed-hatted, and oh-so-chipper, John F. Baker had sought the kind of freedom that New York is good at providing for a certain kind of British intellectual not born to the upper class. He met me in a midtown restaurant, and was witty and warm. I knew nothing about feature writing. He reckoned I could learn. I did: by sitting in the PW library, reading back issues full of features he’d written. It was a course in publishing history, and in style and clarity. He gave me a chance: I wrote one feature, then another. It led to a job and changed my life.

Baker was an internationalist: PW had to cover the globe. He himself greatly enjoyed taking trips to fairs like Guadalajara and further afield; he sent me back to China a few times; and kept Herb Lottman, the Paris-based international correspondent, busy (although agreeing about page budgets was a different matter).

He was also a bibliophile, like everyone who found a home at PW, and in many ways an extreme version, walking around 42nd St. and then Chelsea like a Dickens character, lost in a book in the days before cellphones made that kind of distraction ubiquitous. An ex-newspaper and wire service man, the one real journalist among us, there was much all of us could and did learn from him, by example. He and his number two, the wonderful Daisy Maryles, created a PW team, letting people be themselves. Working for them was the best job I ever had.

Times changed. I left the staff. Things changed for Baker, but he stayed on. It wasn’t always easy, but he churned out the articles. Even after he retired from PW, he helped his wife with her literary agency, before his health declined. In January, I am publishing a biography of Random House’s founder, and am so very sorry John will not be around to see it in print. In doing the research, I came across some of his articles again. They held up very well, exemplars still. I cite them in my endnotes. Without his mentorship and the gamble he took on me, that book would never have been written.

Gayle Feldman is a PW contributor and the author of the forthcoming Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, which will be published by Random House on January 13.

Former PW editorial director John F. Baker died October 23 at age 93.