NEW YORK – Walter Zacharius, a publisher and iconoclast who released an unauthorized version of the erotic classic “Candy” and had the savvy and sales talk to help romance novels make the transition from drugstores to superstores to the Internet, has died. He was 87.

Zacharius was the founder and CEO of Kensington Publishing Corp., a leading publisher of romance fiction and among the last independent publishers of mass market paperbacks.

Zacharius died of cancer Wednesday at his Manhattan apartment, according to Kensington spokeswoman Karen Auerbach.

 


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