‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry.
As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond’s The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards’s Author Hunting (1934); and there is the emollient, if not absolutely vainglorious, reminiscence, most recently on display in Tom Maschler’s Publisher (2005).
That such books no longer seem to make it on to publishers’ lists has an economic explanation – they don’t sell and are essentially vanity projects – but also a structural underpinning. Here, in a more corporate age, the big beasts of old-style publishing, those legendary autodidacts and self-made bruisers who trampled on their competitors like so much chaff, are most of them gone. The days when Chatto & Windus’s Carmen Callil could run her firm at a loss that exceeded its annual turnover seem as remote as the Battle of Lepanto.
Anthony Cheetham, the author of this slim, reticent yet lavishly produced volume, is a major player. In fact a glance at the CV laid out in successive chapters of A Life in Fifty Books reveals that among the handful of survivors capable of writing a history of British publishing since the mid-1960s, he is the best qualified of all.
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