April 6, 1935: Mark Linz is born in Cologne, Germany. He studies in Germany and the US, including a time studying humanities at the University of Frankfurt.
1954: The launch of Linz’s publishing career came at the 1954 Frankfurt Book Fair. He was later celebrated there, in 2004, in a celebration of 50 strong years in publishing.
1960: Linz moves permanently to Rye, New York and became a naturalized United States citizen.
1960-1970: Linz is alternately Treasurer, Sales Director, Marketing Vice President, Executive Vice President & Associate Publishing Director successively at Herder & Herder New York.
1970-1972: Mark is Publisher and General Manager of the Herder & Herder Division at the McGraw-Hill Book Company.
1973: Linz becomes Seabury’s President and Publisher.
1979: Linz leaves Seabury to establish the Continuum and Crossroad Publishing Company, a new and independent publishing house. He served as the Continuum Group’s President and Publisher in New York from 1979 to 1999. The academic publisher Continuum International Publishing Group developed some 600 new publications annually and a backlist of more than 6.000 books — since Sept 2012, they are under the imprint Bloomsbury Academic.
1984 – 1986: Linz’s first stint as Director of the American University in Cairo Press. During this time, his with Mahfouz was very important: he published several Mahfouz novels and also signed the comprehensive foreign rights agreement with Mahfouz in 1985 (three years before the Nobel Prize in 1988), by which the AUC Press became his literary agent worldwide for all languages except Arabic.
1996: Linz returns to take the helm of the AUCP again and to reorganize and redirect the press, which has since become a major regional and international house, the leading publisher of Arabic literature in translation. Linz did work with five popes and five Nobel laureates, including Elias Canetti, Czesław, and most prominently Naguib Mahfouz.
1996: Almost immediately upon his return to Cairo, Linz collaborated with Naguib Mahfouz to establish the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, an annual literary prize for a work of fiction in Arabic.
2011: In 2011, Linz published the Naguib Mahfouz Centennial Library: 43 books in 20 hardback volumes. He also stepped down as director of AUC Press.
2011-2012: Linz continued to serve as Special Advisor to the President of the American University in Cairo and as a consultant to other publishing organizations in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
