Book marks
I continue to watch the career of Old Etonian Christopher Shaw with an appalled admiration. Bookbuyer's regular readers will know Mr Shaw as the man who, in the early 1960s, helped launch a magazine called Topic which closed quite quickly; who, in the late 1960s, ran the paper back publishers New English Library which in successive years lost £307,000 and £335,000; who, in an effort to expand into hardbacks, did a deal with colourful American publisher Bernie Geis which seems to have made the fortune neither of NEL — the agreement was terminated a year later — nor of Bernard Geis Associates, the subsequent victims of US bankruptcy proceedings. It was the same Mr Shaw who, in the early 1970s, moved to head the Los Angeles Times Mirror subsidiary World Publishing which was losing money when he left; who, in 1973, returned to Europe to help found the financial holdings outfit Communica Europa with the aim of acquiring British publishing houses; who, after being shown the door by at least two such houses, managed finally to acquire Barrie & Jenkins, which was in a state of variable health then and is in no less variable health still (the full saga of Highbury Crescent has yet to be revealed in Book Marks); and who, with a rare feeling for life's little ironies, is now poised to acquire a company called Business Books. Let's hope he reads some of them.
Men's lib
The admirable Allen and Unwin, publishers of such free-thinking spirits as Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley, are advertising for a new sponsoringeditor. The successful applicant, say A & U, "will have wide freedom of action to develop his own list for which he will have full editorial management and commercial responsibility". Fringe benefits include "generous provisions for profit sharing, pension (including wife).. ."
In other words, if you're an aspiring sponsoring editor and a woman, get lost darling.
Sir Allen Lane
It is five years this month since the death of Sir Allen Lane, founder of Penguin and pioneer of the mass-market paperback movement. Ironically the only public mention of the great man comes from America where Sir Allen's erstwhile heir apparent, Tony Godwin, has some caustic recollections on his former chief. In an interview with Publisher's Weekly — published on the very date, July 7, of Sir Allen's death — Godwin throws new light on the now famous rupture with Penguin which followed Sir Allen's decision to withdraw a book of cartoons by the savagely anticlerical French cartoonist Sine, after tht board and Sir Allen himself had, according to Godwin, already given their approval to the book.
"A few days later," says Godwin, "he had me to dinner and said: 'Tony, you've got to go — I'm not prepared to discuss it, and there's nothing you can do to fight it'." Godwin, who had no contract, asked for £20,000 as compensation; Sir Allen said he would not hear of that much. After some wrangling Sir Allen agreed to the figure suggested by the company treasurer (which was £18,000) and Godwin there and then wrote out a two-sentence agreement which Sir Allen signed. "After that," says Godwin, he made every effort to break the agreement but it turned out to be unbreakable." What Godwin does not mention is that Sir Allen decided to waive part of his own dividend ensuring that mot all of the £18,000 came from Penguin .capital. I sometimes wish a few other company directors would think in these terms, and whatever Sir Allen Lane's later failings, I would prefer him to be remembered for that gesture on the fifth anniversary of his death.
Bookbuyer
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