• General Notes

  MELVIN BRISK, FOUNDER OF QUADRANGLE BOOKS
  The New York Times 4 July 1981
  
  Melvin J. Brisk, a literary agent and book-marketing consultant who founded and ran Quadrangle Books Inc. before selling it to The New York Times in 1969, died of a heart attack at his home in Winnetka, Ill., on Thursday. He was 56 years old.
  
  Born in Cleveland on Aug. 23, 1924, Mr. Brisk went to work as a reporter in Cincinnati after graduating from Ohio State University. After several years, he moved to New York and became a reporter for The World Telegram.
  
  In 1952 Mr. Brisk moved to Chicago to become a freelance journalist, and in August 1959 he founded Quadrangle Books there. At the time he sold Quadrangle in 1969, the publishing company had 200 titles in print. Among the authors the firm published were the historian Alan Nevins, the poet and essayist Karl Shapiro, the French philosopher and essayist E.M. Cioran and the sociologist Morris Janowitz.
  
  Mr. Brisk is survived by his wife, Rachelle, a freelance journalist; a son, Alan, and a daughter, Susan.
  

Details of Melvin's family with Rachelle Durall Vosse