Kenneth Auchincloss

'Newsweek' editor and bibliophile

Kenneth Auchincloss, journalist and book collector: born New York 3 July 1937; Managing Editor, Newsweek 1975-96, Editor at Large 1996-2002; Editor, Newsweek International 1986-95; married 1971 Eleanor Johnson (one son, one daughter); died New York 4 March 2003.

Kenneth Auchincloss wrote for Newsweek magazine from 1966 until last year and for 21 years was the magazine's popular managing editor – for nine of them also editor of the overseas edition, Newsweek International. Outside Newsweek, he was an active bibliophile.

He came from a distinguished New York family. His father was an editor at Time magazine, his grandfather a Congressman, Jackie Kennedy's stepfather was a distant relation, the writer Louis Auchincloss a cousin and his own brother David publisher of Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly.

After graduating from Harvard and Balliol he worked in the Commerce Department of the John F. Kennedy administration. He joined Newsweek after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and became Managing Editor in 1975, stepping down to be Editor at Large in 1996 and only retiring last year.

Ken Auchincloss had a passion for fine printing and private press books that began when he discovered the printing shop at Groton School in Connecticut in his teens. Over the years he had built up one of the finest collections of contemporary private press books in private hands, and in their New York apartment he and his wife, Lee, played host to memorable gatherings of printers, artists and wood-engravers from both sides of the Atlantic. With his booming laugh and engaging presence, he was a ceaseless and generous encourager of printers and engravers.

He wrote as eloquently as he spoke, and his New York Revisited, with coloured wood-engravings by Gaylord Schanilec, was published in a limited edition of 250 copies by the Grolier Club of New York not long before he died. The book was two and a half years in the making. As he wrote of himself before it was published:

I would be not only an ignorant author, but a slow one. As a magazine editor, I knew that was not a promising combination. If I'd had any choice I never would have hired me!

It turned out to be a remarkably concise and lively account of the city he loved and where he was born and died.

John Randle