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NEW YORK, NY/ APR '97--Penguin Putnam Inc. (PPI) implemented eighteen changes in top management early this month. Penguin Group CEO Michael Lynton and Phyllis Grann, president of PPI, jointly made the announcements.

Five top level managers at Putnam and one from Penguin will now report directly to Grann. Many will add new responsibilities, but retain their original positions. Reporting to Grann will be:

- David Shanks, COO of the combined unit. He continues as president of Putnam Berkley. - Susan Peterson, president of Viking, Penguin and Riverhead Books. She continues as publisher of Riverhead Books, a Putnam imprint - Elaine Koster, president of Dutton, Plume and Signet and senior vice president of Penguin Putnam. Koster, who has been with Penguin, most recently senior vice president and publisher of Dutton, Plume and Signet and senior vice president of Penguin USA. - Douglas Whiteman, executive vice president of PPI, in charge of operations of the combined children's divisions. He also continues as president and publisher of Putnam Grosset. - Marilyn Ducksworth, senior vice president, corporate director of public relations for the combined unit. She also remains as associate publisher and executive director of publicity for Putnam. All PPI publicity directors will report to her. - Carol Peterson, vice president, corporate human resources at PPI.

Executives reporting to David Shanks will be:

-Michael Fragnito as senior vice president of PPI production. -Ken Lockhart, vice president, building administration of PPI -Kevin Shannon, named senior vice president of PPI.

Shannon will oversee:

-Robert Badum, vice president, information technology -Jim Clark, vice president, fulfillment operations -Carl Jolley, vice president, distribution -Thomas McArdle, vice president information technology -Andrew Orlando, vice president, transportation.

Promoted to senior vice presidents and reporting to Susan Peterson are: -Kathryn Court, continuing as senior vice president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Penguin -Barbara Grossman, senior vice president and publisher of Viking -Cathy Hemming, senior vice president and executive director of marketing of Viking/Penguin.

Marvin Brown, president of Penguin USA since 1995, will leave the company.

HarperCollins

Adult Trade Makes

Key Editorial Changes

HarperCollins has streamlined its operating unit to give editors greater entrepreneurial control, and the ability to react faster to market trends.

Harper Business and Harper Prism imprints are now organized as stand-alone publishing divisions. Publishing directors Adrian Zackheim (Harper Business) and John Silbersack (Harper Prism) have been promoted to senior vice presidents, to reflect the new status of their operations.

HarperCollins has also named Diane Reverand as publisher of a new unnamed imprint covering a broad range of titles. Ms. Reverand is the former Adult Trade vice president, and associate publisher and editor in chief. Joelle Delbourgo, former vice president and editorial director, will fill Reverand's previous post.

Majorie Braman, formerly of Bantam Doubleday Dell, joins HarperCollins as vice president of Adult Trade, and publishing director for HarperPaperbacks. Her task will include bolstering commercial fiction acquisitions, and overseeing all hardcover/softcover deals.

Kheradi To Head

Simon & Schuster

International Sales

NEW YORK, NY/APR '97--Cyrus Kheradi has been named vice president and director of international sales at Simon & Schuster. He succeeds Seth Russo, who resigned. Kheradi had worked as international sales manager at Simon & Schuster under Russo. Before joining S&S, he served as international sales for Warner Books and Little Brown.

Time-Life Targets

Teachers, Librarians

With Electronic Catalogue

NEW YORK, NY/APR '97--Time-Life Education early this month launched an on-line version of its education products catalogue, where teachers and librarians can instantly order books.

The site features some 850 titles from Time-Life Education and sister companies within Time Warner Inc., including Time-Life Books, Warner Books, Court TV and Little Brown. The site also include selected books by outside publishers. Books are offered in a wide range of categories, such as history, science, social studies and world civilization.

Proxicom, an Internet consulting firm has teamed with Time-Life to develop the new site.

Time-Life Education can be accessed at www.timelifeedu.com

Proxicom's Web address is: www.proxicom.com

TransMedia PR

To Expand

Into Publishing

BOCA RATON, FLA/APR '97 -- TransMedia Public Relations, one of South Florida's largest public relations firms, has expanded into book publishing by forming a separate company, TransMedia Publishing, Inc.

Thomas J. Madden, who co-founded the public relations firm with his wife, Angela, in 1981, will head the new publishing entity as president and will also serve as chairman of the PR firm. Joella Cain, a former columnist and feature writer for The Chicago Tribune will be executive vice president.

Margie Adleman becomes president of TransMedia Public Relations.

Forthcoming TransMedia Publishing titles include autobiographies: "From Rexall To Riches," the story of Rexall Sundown Founder Carl DeSantis' rise to the pinnacle of the vitamin and nutritional supplement industry, and "The Cuban Cop," covering the colorful and exciting law enforcement career of former Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro, credited with helping to bring "COPS," the first reality police show to television. The show is now in its 10th season.

Other titles to debut at the May Book Expo in Chicago are Madden's own book, "Adventures of the Spin Man," a satiric look at the PR business; and "The Last Resort Diet" by nutritionist Kresent Thuringer, exposing snake-oil type diabetic controls, weight loss products and potions, for which she substitutes common sense combined with nutritional data and diets.

TransMedia's books will be sold at bookstores nationwide and promoted on broadcast and in print media, as well as marketed on the Internet.

Before joining the PR firm, Madden was vice president and assistant to the president at NBC.

Adult Hardcover

Sales Decline

In January

Domestic book sales for adult hardcover titles declined 37.8% in January 1997, according to the Association of American Publishers, and average returns as a percentage of gross sales were a shocking 54.5% for the month.

The January decline was nearly equal the steep declines of last year's June (declining 38.1%) and July (down 47.5%) periods.

Sales of mass market paperbacks also sagged slightly during the month, at 5.1%. Adult paperbacks showed a modest 2.5% gain. Sales for juvenile hardcover and paperback titles dipped 1.2% and 5.9%, respectively. Due to major adoption years in several states, elementary and high school textbook sales predictably rose 27.1% in the month, higher than any other category.

Reader's Digest

Declares Dividend

PLEASANTVILLE, NY/APR '97--The board of directors of the Reader's Digest Association, Inc. (NYSE:RDA,RDB) has declared a regular quarterly dividend of 45 cents per share of Class A non-voting and Class B voting common stock.

The 29th consecutive dividend paid by Reader's digest since going public in 1990, will be paid on May 6, 1997 to stockholders of record as of he close of business April 24, 1997.

John Updike To Make

Rare Appearance

For Editor Maxwell

CHAMPAIGN, Ill./APR '97-- Author John Updike will pay tribute to his former fiction editor, William Maxwell, during a program April 24 at the University of Illinois.

The program celebrates the life and distinguished career of Maxwell, 88, and his recent major gift to the U. of I. Library. A native Illinoisan and U. of I. alumnus (he earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1930, and worked toward a doctoral degree from 1931 to 1933), Maxwell has given his personal papers - including manuscripts of his novels, short stories andessays, and thousands of letters from major literary figures - to his alma mater.

Many of the letters were written while Maxwell was fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine. During his 40-year tenure there (1936 to 1976), he worked with some of the century's most famous authors and produced four of his six novels, several of which went on to collect major awards. Nearly all of his work draws on his memories of his early life in the heart of America's heartland. The Maxwell program will begin at 4 p.m. CDT in the Foellinger Auditorium, 709 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. Updike, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, will talk about his 30-year association with Maxwell. Other speakers will be U. of I. English professor Emily Watts and Maxwell scholar/biographer Barbara Burkhardt. A visiting professor in the U. of I. library, Burkhardt is working with Maxwell's papers and expanding her dissertation on Maxwell into a critical biography. Maxwell, who lives in New York, will participate in the event by way of a videotaped interview. In the piece, he discusses his route to a career in writing and his views on writing fiction.

"... Life is the great storyteller," he said, "and you can't improve upon it."

At The New Yorker, Maxwell edited work by John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger, Updike, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams, among others. The bulk of the papers he is giving the U. of I. is correspondence with these and other acclaimed writers. "He was a beloved and respected editor," Burkhardt said, "but the core of his literary contribution is his own fiction. The wise and sensitive narrator of his later work is one of the most distinctive of the 20th century. Maxwell has a rare ability to capture the nuance of family interaction and the childhood mindset with a spare, graceful prose. His body of work simultaneously reveals the beauty and haunting sadness of human experience."

Maxwell was born and raised in Lincoln, Ill., but it was at the U. of I. that he obtained "a wonderful education," he said. Giving his papers to the university was "my way of paying [it] back." His most recent awards include the 1995 Penn/Malamud Award for short fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for lifetime achievement in publishing, for his collected stories, "All the Days and Nights." Items from Maxwell's personal papers will be on display through May in the U. of I. Rare Book and Special Collections Library.