Bookend
The departure of Brian Thompson, John Boothe, William Miller and Ken Banerji from Granada Publishing represents the most influential mass resignation from a company since Lord Thomson took over Michael Joseph. It must have been a particularly shattering surprise for Lord Bernstein (although he accepted the resignations "in good spirit ") because Panther Books of which the four were directors, is the most profitable branch of Bernstein's publishing empire. It has been able to help subsidise the less successful Granada imprints — although contrary to rumour, Paladin Books in the last few months, in particular since the paperbacking, of The Female Eunich has been selfsupporting.
Thompson, Miller, Boothe, and Banerji intend to start up their own publishing company, with effect from August 1; although until they have all been signed off from Granada with three-months'-notice pay cheques they are understandably vague about details. The key word seems to be flexibility — flexibility of approach towards new MSS, and of decision-making about format, price and market depending on individual titles or groups of titles — and it is not unfair to draw from this the conclusion that one of the chief disadvantages of an organisation the size of Granada Publishing is the impersonality of the decision-making process and the priority of the cost-effectiveness criterion.
Indeed the exodus of talented, experienced publishers in their mid-thirties from established companies has recently been one of the salient features of the publishing scene. Many of them leave to set up their own imprints, and it is perhaps significant that of the four or five who spring immediately to mind — -Tim O'Keefe, Maurice Temple-Smith, Reginald Davis-Poynter, Oliver Cadecott, Dieter Pevsner, and, to a literary agency, Giles Gordon — two come from Granada Publishing and two from the LongmansPenguin group. It may be (if Bookbuyer be allowed one of his rare generalisations) that a really good publisher, that is a publisher interested in the management as well as the commissioning of titles, cannot be at ease in a large publishing house in which control is effectively vested in a board or a holding company. For example Lord Bernstein, whose day-to-day interest in Granada Publishing must necessarily have waned when he relinquished its chairmanship well over a year ago, continues to make top appointments within it, and in general to have the final word.
Enoch Powell, whose review of Richard Crossman's lectures on Prime Ministerial government appears in this week's Spectator book pages, was originally asked by Crossman to review them in the New Statesman. Unfortunately this was the day before Crossman was sacked, and it seems clear that from then on his influence over the New Statesman book pages dimi nished. Bookbuyer
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