He took it like a man, but the reprobate’s spirit was broken at last. Michael Wharton records in his memoirs how a sozzled Fry tried to pick him up in a Fleet Street pub; and late one afternoon Gibbs was rung at the office to be told that Fry was dead. His body had been found in a house off the Fulham Palace Road, and beside it were two empty bottles of gin, a bottle of whisky and an empty box of phenobarbitone. A note nearby suggested that ‘if you wish to enquire further into the reasons for my action, I suggest you get in touch with Brian Cook-Batsford and Mr Anthony Gibbs’. Gibbs went down to identify the body. ‘He was unrecognisable,’ he wrote later. ‘He lay with his face turned sideways. He was bloated and blotched and three little runnels of dried blood ran from his nostrils and one corner of his lips,’ and his hair was now ‘snow white’. With any luck he was already happily ensconced in one of the loucher wings of Heavenly Mansions, W1, every now and then whipping out his powder-puff before setting out to ‘find a man’.
Forty years ago, when I started out at the bottom of the pile, publishers were public figures, known to the world at large. They have long ago been elbowed aside by celebrity chefs, footballers’ wives, telly personalities and the other heroes of a less literate age, but in those days George Weidenfeld, André Deutsch, Tom Maschler and Tony Godwin were profiled in the colour supplements, and their activities recorded by Atticus, Pendennis, Peterborough and other pseudonymous gossip columnists; Allen Lane’s death in 1970 was front-page news, and not just in the upmarket papers, as had been his very public sacking of Tony Godwin three years before. Peter Mayer, the onetime ruler of Penguin, and Carmen Callil of Virago and Chatto were the last newsworthy publishers, hogging the column inches back in the 1980s, but although bestselling books and their authors attract more attention than ever, the men and women behind the scenes have become objects of indifference, except to their authors. The odd literary agent sticks his head above the parapet, but beyond the trade papers publishers receive about as much attention as actuaries or quantity surveyors.
This reflects, in part, the competition of rival media and, some would say, a general dumbing-down and shortening of attention spans – and the fact that publishing is a less colourful, individualistic business than it once was. Familiar names, once run by their founders or family members, have been swallowed up by American, French or German conglomerates. John Murray has exchanged its Albemarle Street home for a tower block in the Euston Road, Cape has traded in Bedford Square for the anonymity of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and the traditional publishing office in a ramshackle Georgian house in Bloomsbury or Covent Garden – the entrance hall clogged with brown paper printers’ parcels, every square inch brimming over with teetering mounds of books, files, press cuttings, proof copies, photographs, letters waiting to be signed, discarded display material and recently emptied wine glasses – has become a relic of times past, to be recollected with rose-tinted nostalgia by watery-eyed old hands reminiscing over the whisky bottle. In working hours, though not thereafter, it is a more sober, less bibulous business than it was. Twenty years ago the long, boozy publishing lunch became the object of widespread disapproval, and steak and kidney pudding washed down with two bottles of claret was dropped in favour of smoked salmon, a lettuce leaf and Perrier water, while the long, rambling, after-lunch dictating of letters has given way to emails fired off left and right.
In those days the top echelons of the trade were white-haired, elderly and male, as often as not rather red in the face and prone to wearing tweed or chalk-striped suits. ‘Billy’ Collins, my first boss, and Hamish Hamilton were in their late sixties when I started out, ‘Fred’ Warburg and Victor Gollancz were even older, and judging by the photographs in the trade papers, Sir Stanley Unwin looked as old as the hills with his Colonel Sanders goatee beard, wire-rimmed specs and Shavian knickerbockers. Nowadays women predominate, both numerically and in terms of power exercised within the trade, but in the old days they were limited to being secretaries and receptionists, with a small band of heroic spinsters looking after children’s books or acting as underpaid and overworked editorial dogsbodies, devoted to their often tyrannical masters, lugging bags of proofs and typescripts home in the evenings and at weekends, and holding the fort while the menfolk moved on to the brandy at the Garrick or the Gay Hussar. Eunice Frost at Penguin and Norah Smallwood at Chatto were the first to reach the top in an all-male trade, followed shortly after by Diana Athill and Livia Gollancz. Reviewing my biography of Allen Lane, Carmen Callil reproved me for applying the word ‘formidable’ to Eunice Frost and Norah Smallwood, somehow suggesting that only an unreformed male chauvinist would instinctively employ such a word to clever and successful women: but my use of it was descriptive rather than mocking or pejorative, since those two in particular had to be tough, determined and seemingly thick-skinned to get where they did.
In the days of my youth, publishers ruled the roost, not only within their firms but in the trade at large. Booksellers were regarded as humble, impoverished, rather impractical folk who wore moth-eaten maroon cardigans, lettuce-green shirts, baggy cords and Pirelli slippers, and were grateful to be offered a discount of one third off the published price. Salesmen were there to obey, and wore nylon shirts with vests visible beneath, well-ironed grey suits and highly polished black shoes, which they burnished on the calves of each trouser-leg when summoned to report to the sales manager. Accountants were black-clad figures who announced their arrival with a deferential cough (‘Ahem’) and stood dutifully to attention behind their masters, pointing out items in the handwritten ledger with marbled endpapers as and when required; I like to think they came equipped with thin grey moustaches, Homburg hats and the kind of glasses worn by Reginald Maudling, the frames of which were tortoiseshell around the top half of each lens and transparent plastic below. Those working in production and design might get away with a black shirt with a red knitted tie, while corduroy and slip-on shoes were making inroads among the younger editors.
Publishers alone decided what should be published. The idea of consulting salesmen, let alone booksellers, about what to publish and what kind of jacket a book should wear would have seemed pernicious nonsense to the old guard, and close to lèse majesté. Books were costed, and memos written, on the backs of envelopes; deals were famously sealed over post-prandial glasses of port; meetings and paperwork were kept to a minimum, partly because the publishers saw no need to consult anyone other than their editorial advisers – the rest were told what to do, most particularly at the six-monthly sales conferences – and partly because computers, photocopiers and pocket calculators were either waiting to be invented or were great lumbering machines with wheels juddering and rotating in all directions, fed by spools of punctured paper, tended by men in white coats and emitting the occasional puff of smoke. For all the talk about ‘paperless offices’, technology is productive of bumph, and bumph is productive of meetings and the exhalation of hot air, and publishers of the old school would have been baffled and irritated by both.
All this began to change in the 1970s. For some inexplicable reason, the City began to show an interest in publishing – and not just in the less glamorous areas of publishing like legal, medical or academic textbooks, where advances to authors were unknown, discounts to the trade were minimal, the market was assured and quantifiable, price was no object to potential purchasers, and profits were large and dependable, but in the altogether more risky realm of ‘trade’ or ‘general’ publishing. There was much excited talk, seldom translated into action, about ‘synergy’: no one seemed to know what it meant, but it was thought to involve the interdependence of books and other media, and cooperation between the New York and London arms of multinational empires. Family firms, from the mighty Collins to the venerable John Murray, gradually sold out to conglomerates, as did all but a handful of independents. The grand old men of publishing died or retired or were put out to grass, and life continued much as before. It was generally agreed that publishing had fallen into the hands of accountants and sales managers,