Bookend
Mr Geoffrey Cass, up until last week chief executive and group managing director of Allen and Unwin Ltd, "left the firm," so we are told, " after disagreements on matters of policy." In fact, he was pushed out rather more forcibly than that suggests. Why this should be is not entirely clear; but one can hazard a few guesses.
The firm is mostly owned by Rayner Unwin and the Unwin family. Charles Knight, once Sir Stanley Unwin's office boy, is finance director; and another very senior gentleman is Charles Firth, one of the editors and a director of the firm since 1949. Under pressure from Charles Knight, Rayner Unwin brought in Geoffrey Cass some six or eight years ago as a management consultant. Cass had already taken a few spanners out of the works of the Cambridge University Press, and proceeded to clean up Allen and Unwin in similar fashion, so that, for example, they now quite often head the table of "quick distribution" of books to booksellers — an important promotional advantage, as any publisher's traveller will tell you.
Not so long ago, Cass was put in charge of both the Hemel Hempstead and the London branch of Allen and Unwin — and therefore nominally above Charles Knight, who works at Hemel Hempstead. His entrepreneurial ideas (" every editor should be his own boss ") may well have annoyed Charles Firth; but it seems that basically Charles Knight decided that Cass "wasn't contributing enough to the company," and once more brought pressure on Unwin — this time to remove him. Allen and Unwin is making a great deal of money, being well managed, and may well go on making money; but will not be getting a replacement for Mr Cass. Or for his Bentley.
Anthony Blond's The Publishing Game, reviewed last week in the book pages, has been getting a bad press for •its inaccuracies. There have been letters in The Bookseller, and Jonathan Cape circulated a warning to reviewers that a statement on page eighty about Macmillan "registering losses for three years runfling" is "entirely untrue and unreservedly withdrawn." In fact, of course, there is no better way for a publisher to down a rival than by publishing his own book, full of hidden libels and innuendoes, with the rival publisher, and then withdrawing discreetly while the writs are contested. But Mr Blond, I'm quite sure, had no such intention — for one thing, Blond and Cape are rivals only in misfortune. Last year, Cape's profits dropped from £100,000 to £26,000; and Anthony Blond Ltd. (since dissolved and re-established on a different footing) lost £27,000.
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