Thomas J. McCormack Dies at 94; Transformed St. Martin’s Press

Thomas J. McCormack, an iconoclastic chief executive and editor who transformed St. Martin’s Press into a publishing behemoth with best-selling books like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “All Creatures Great and Small” and its own mass-market paperback division, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Jessie McCormack, said.

The few props that Mr. McCormack employed from the 18th floor of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan — an ancient adding machine, his cigar and the daily tuna sandwich that substituted for the typically well-lubricated publishers’ lunch — belied a rare fusion of marketing savvy, which enabled him to buy future best-sellers, and editorial scrupulousness, which led him to make good books even better.

During his tenure as chairman, chief executive and editor in chief of St. Martin’s, Publishers Weekly called him “one of the great contrarians of publishing, who believed, against the publishing grain, in volume at all costs.”

Mr. McCormack, the magazine said, had turned St. Martin’s “from an insignificant trade house on the brink of bankruptcy to a quarter-billion-dollar powerhouse with one of the most extensive lists in the business.”

In book publishing, where executives have customarily shied from innovation, Sally Richardson, publisher-at-large of Macmillan, St. Martin’s parent company, said of Mr. McCormack in 1997: “He was never afraid to zig when the industry zagged.”