CAP'N BOB ON THE TROT
The media: to stay healthy you have to keep moving
FEW industries are now subjected to more technological and industrial change than publishing. The old 'occupation for gentle- men' has been internationalised, giganti- cised, and buoyed up and buffeted by global market forces which seem to have little directly to do with the actual publica- tion of books and learned journals. The scale and range of the industry were illustrated by the sale last week of Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press to Elsevir for the handsome sum of £440 million cash. Maxwell is said to owe a lot of money to banks, borrowed to finance his ambitious purchases of recent years, though quite how much is speculation, since Captain Bob's finances vanish into the impenetr- able obscurity of a Liechtenstein trust. The impending flotation of the Mirror Group is also designed to produce cash. Parting with Pergamon must be something of a wrench to Maxwell, since unlike the International Printing Corporation, which he rescued from bankruptcy, making himself a multi- millionaire in the process, he built up Pergamon himself, having the bright idea, in 1945, of reprinting runs of important German scientific and technical journals which had been unobtainable in the West during the war years.
Some indication of the international nature of publishing is conveyed by the fact that Maxwell negotiated with Springer, the largest German publisher, Thomson, the Canadian giant, and other big firms on both sides of the Atlantic, before settling for the Dutch firm. It must be one of the oldest publishing groups in the world, inventor of the famous Elsevir type, but is very much part of the big-money game now. Recently it garnered £165 million by selling its 33 per cent stake in another huge Dutch publishing firm, Wolters Kluwer, which itself has just acquired the American publisher Lippincott. And Pearsons, the vast British conglomerate, which owns Longmans, plus the Financial Times, the Economist and many other things, has sold Its 22.5 per cent of Elsevir's shares. So la ronde goes on. Maxwell himself says he only decided to sell Pergamon because he was frustrated in his own bid to buy the huge American publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, by the ruthless use of what is known as a 'poison pill' defence. Maxwell wanted to be the world's biggest scientific- academic publisher. Now Elsevir gets the title. But Maxwell hangs onto Pergamon's electronic database, said to be worth £150 million, and he can have fun, if that is the word, with his latest acquisition, the New- York Daily News. I do not think the unions there, who led the previous owners, the Chicago Tribune Group, such a dance, quite understand the formidable nature of their new proprietor. They will learn, the hard way. But while the titans above wheel and deal, the humble and indeed not-so- humble people who actually bring out books in the publishing industry are under- going a hard time at present. In London, sackings have been ferocious, and have involved highly-regarded editors who must have imagined their jobs were safe. The recession is partly to blame — explains why publishers are now scrapping the Net Book Sales agreement — though its effects tend to be patchy. As one notably experienced and cunning publisher said to me recently, `Customers will cut down on trash but I don't see why serious books need suffer. Many better-off people who are feeling the pinch will buy a good book at £15.95 instead of a £60 opera seat.' Also being blamed is the reckless folie de grandeur which led publishers, in recent years, to outbid each other for fashionable authors by offering huge advances which could not be earned even with the help of expensive publicity campaigns. Needless to say, greedy agents, who encouraged successful authors to be even greedier, played their part in the Gadarene rush. Then there is the insidious turnover argument, which persuades publishers to measure their out- put by quantity rather than quality. As a result the number of titles published (some, it is true, re-issues) continues to expand — well over 60,000 last year just in Britain.
Whatever the reason, jobs have gone in painful numbers over the last few weeks. Casualty lists in the Bookseller include 14 out of 130-odd at Faber, 54 out of 337 at Ladybird, 31 at Random Century, 60 at HarperCollins. When Butterworths moved to Oxford last year it cut 85 jobs and nearly 50 have gone at W.H. Allen. At Hodders, in a drastic move to save itself from being swallowed up by a giant no less than 120 out of 640 jobs have gone. Jobs in pub- lishing used to be regarded as ill-paid but civilised; that is, no one bothered much to enforce strict office hours, there was a strong element of enthusiasm and bohe- mianism, and people were rarely sacked: rather, they moved on occasionally to another firm. Today, jobs seem less secure in publishing than in almost any other culture-trade, excluding the theatre.
They are still ill-paid, however. A few do very well indeed. The Bookseller reports that the accounts up to end December 1989 from Thames and Hudson, the publishers which specialise in high-quality art books, show that one person, presumably the managing director, was paid £236,000. But the average staff salary was £12,652, which means some must have got quite a bit less. That's not much for someone working in central London. For purposes of compari- son, I noted that the junior NCO in the cavalry who was recently convicted of rape at a Commemoration Ball was paid £14,500, plus board and lodging. So most people must still be in publishing for love, which makes it doubly hard when you get the chop. Nor is there any prospect of stability in the trade. The technological changes are relentless. The market in art videos, for example, has just started. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I used to make television documentaries on arty subjects; in the late 1960s and 1970s I often wrote art books. If I were beginning again, I would make art videos with an accompanying illustrated text. To stay healthy in pub- lishing now you have to keep moving. Bob Maxwell gives his birth-date in Who's Who as June 1923 and so is in his late sixties. Like him or not, he sets a good example by always staying on the trot.
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