Bookend
Call it a trade, a profession, or what you will, the actual nature of the publishing business, outside of the specialized presses, is no more settled today than it has ever been. On the one side are the players, who will tell you that publishing is selling a market-researched product as efficiently as possible. On the other are the gentlemen who believe that the primary task of a publisher is to educate the public by producing good books for them to read.
Not so long ago it was possible for gentlemen and players to work together profitably in the same firm. Martin Secker, later with Fredric Warburg, built up a successful firm on the sales of Orwell, Kafka and Thomas Mann. Jonathan Cape and Geoffrey Faber managed to establish very reputable publishing houses which combined high standards of literacy with a steadily expanding turnover. But, as in most financial enterprises, the larger these operations grew the more vulnerable they became. Firms have combined, accountants have moved in, and first novels and
' experimental ' fiction or poetry have tended to go the way of all unquantifiable products — out of the window. Editors who for years have been peacefully steering through their moderately successful authors suddenly find themselves overruled by committees, their topical projects defeated by interminable production schedules. Even Cape, who have published so much splendid fiction over the last few years, are having to cut down on some of their more original novelists.
In this situation there has been one encouraging response. A number of mostly youngish publishing people are following Maurice Temple-Smith's lead in breaking away from the larger firms and starting small hardback publishing companies of their own.
Davis-Poynter Ltd, the Rivers Press, Wayland Ltd, Orbach and Chambers — the list is lengthening. The most recent example is the firm of Martin Green and Timothy O'Keefe, which plans to publish its first four books (including Patrick Kavanagh's autobiography, The Green Fool) in late autumn, or early spring next year. Both of them used to work for
MacGibbon and Kee, but the disillusion, as Martin Green describes it, is a common enough symptom in many publishing houses: "In the early days, the books we handled made a slow but recognizable profit. After Granada took over, the running costs and overheads suddenly became gigantic. The firm couldn't afford to take on a book which wasn't going to show a profit within two years. We were in no position to take risks with first novels. And our hands were tied in other ways. It became impossible to act on a hunch, to perhaps agree to take on a book over the telephone. When Bernadette Devlin's best-seller was offered to us, for instance, it took weeks of steering it through meetings and committeess before finally Lord Bernstein, chairman of Granada, announced that the girl would be forgotten in a couple of months, and turned it down."
Martin Green and O'Keefe are hoping to expand to a maieimum of fifteen titles a year. If they can survive on this basis, it will be a small victory for individualism over the increasing uniformity of the rest of the trade.
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