John Tebbel, the former head of New York University’s journalism department and an author whose best–known work was the four–volume A History of Book Publishing in the United States, died in his sleep last weekend at age 91. As Margalit Fox notes in a New York Times obituary, Tebbel’s book on publishing was 20 years in the making, but only a part of a multi–faceted career that saw him working for numerous major newspapers, as a book editor (at E.P. Dutton) and as an educator. As he once explained, “At 10, living on a farm in the middle of Michigan, with Manhattan as remote from me as the moon, I told inquiring relatives that when I grew up I intended to go to New York and be a writer.”