WILLIAM TARG, a lifelong bookman who had been by turns bookseller, collector, noted editor, publisher of limited editions and author, died July 22 after a long illness. He was 92.
Targ, a high school dropout, started work as an office boy at Macmillan; opened his own bookstore in Chicago in 1928 and ran it until 1942; then went to Cleveland as an editor for World Publishing. Moving to New York in 1945, he opened World's trade book division and became its editor-in-chief before moving to Putnam in 1964. It was there that he made his reputation as a savvy commercial editor, publishing Mario Puzo's The Godfather sight unseen, and also handling work by authors as various as Simone de Beauvoir, Art Buchwald, George Burns, Harry Golden and Edward Gorey.
In private Targ was a passionate bibliophile who collected rare editions and, after his retirement in 1978, began to publish limited-edition books, as William Targ Editions. A small book he did with Henry Roth was credited with breaking Roth's 40-year writer's block and leading to a late flowering. In 1975 he published Indecent Pleasures with Macmillan, one of the frankest publishing memoirs ever written, in which he lamented the overproduction of unworthy books and extolled the craft of fine bookmaking.
He is survived by his wife, Roslyn, a noted literary agent.
