Our Award-winning Team

   After graduating the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, Les Krantz, a US Air Force veteran, worked at the Chicago Tribune and Esquire magazine before venturing out to publish books about art, photography, and architecture. Soon after, he began to publish popular reference books on a wide variety of topics.

   In 1990 he founded Facts That Matter, Inc. and began building relationships with America’s most-established publishing companies that today partner individual titles as  co-publishers. As the company grew, three-way partnerships formed with outside organizations as diverse as the American Management Association, the Smithsonian, and the Sporting News.

   Fascinated by design himself, he later began to publish high-design illustrated books on history, entertainment, and sports. Among them are video-enhanced books; that is, books with documentaries on DVDs that supplement the printed pages. Some have been acquired for worldwide television and dubbed in a variety of languages. He also  serves as a book consultant on a selective basis.

   The most-awarded and honored among the Facts That Matter group, Dave learned book editing at Publications International and became their top book editor and later an author and scriptwriter of note.

   His warehouse of expertise in American history and sports resulted in many books on our list. Among his valuable contributions to our books is his outreach to an outstanding stable of writers that contribute to our works.

   Dave is also our best “idea man.” Brainstorming with him is an exercise in tapping creativity. He has a way of looking at popular subjects and coming up with new, unexpected ways of presenting them to readers. They include one of our bestsellers, JFK 50 Days.

   Dave wrote scripts for many of our books that were enhanced with documentaries including those narrated by Jim Lampley and Joe Garagiola of NBC. Other documentaries he wrote for us appeared on worldwide television including titles Sweet Ali with Bert Sugar and The Beatles: Fifty Fabulous Years.

   After earning his master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, Tim came on board as the manuscript editor for our first film book, Their First Time in the Movies. He went on to edit many of our subsequent books, including the award-winning All Money in the World by Douglas Mudd, a partnered title with the Smithsonian. 

   His editing skills, combined with his ability to write with authority about almost any subject we publish, impressed not just his colleagues at Facts That Matter, but several of our co-publishers as well, especially HarperCollins, Running Press, and Metro Books. Each of these publishing houses co-published titles with us about film, naming Tim as the author. His editing duties were cut back and he became one of our most important authors. 

   Tim, a self-proclaimed bookworm, was also a major contributor and the editor of our “Good Reads Book Series,” including the #1 bestseller The Book of Books and a companion title, Best Fiction.-