Rebel with a Cause
Matthias Mueller talks to publishing legend Peter Mayer
When I meet Peter Mayer, a few days before the London Book Fair, he’s constantly on the move despite a recently broken leg, and occupies himself with a steady succession of cigarettes. He has thick, bushy white hair and a rare sense of dynamism – an almost manic desire to do as much as possible all the time. Perhaps he would be best described as a perfectionist.
Mayer’s background inevitably draws comparisons with rough contemporaries and fellow Jewish New Yorkers, JD Salinger and Arthur Miller, and it somehow comes as no surprise that Mayer is a kind of legend to many in the publishing industry.
Whilst at paperback giants Avon in the early seventies he managed to find time to found The Overlook Press as a home for distinguished work that had been overlooked by bigger houses. Never one to rest on his laurels, he continued to combine work at Overlook with more high profile roles, most notably a long and successful stint as Chief Executive of Penguin. After retiring to concentrate on Overlook, he couldn’t resist adding to his empire British publishers Duckworth, renowned for authors such as Woolf and Lawrence and, more recently, the bestselling Layer Cake. A somewhat enigmatic and truly charismatic figure, Peter Mayer kindly agreed to answer some questions about his life in publishing.
1. How and why did you first get involved in publishing?
I knew from my last year at university that whatever I did, which included thoughts of journalism and writing, it would be something to do with words.
I got involved in publishing by chance. After I was discharged from the army I didn’t have a bean in my pocket and needed a job. Fortunately, I ran into an old girlfriend on the street who said she was working for a book designer and she took me along to meet him. He sent me to five book publishers, none of whom had a job for me but one knew someone at the New York Times. The job I got there was as a night-time messenger at $47 a week, and it was years before I got a job in a publishing company.
2. During your time spent at Penguin, what would you say was the highlight, and the low-point?
I especially enjoyed setting up Penguin India and seeing it become India’s largest trade publisher, and, in fact, seeing every Penguin company all over the world not only importing books from the UK but also becoming major publishers in their own countries.
In some ways the most exciting book I published was a book whose politics and economics I did not agree with. There was great upset when I published Milton Friedman’s book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement because many people in the company felt it was not appropriate to publish books on the right. My view was that supply-side economics and Friedman’s role as guru to Mrs Thatcher meant that every British person should have an interest and Penguin certainly had a right to publish a book by a man whose views were determining the future direction of the country. [It] … was the best selling Pelican of the last ten years, and the importance of the book to me was certainly not its message but that Penguin was free to publish whatever it wanted to publish, regardless of anyone’s view inside or outside the company … [The fact that] Penguin has often been seen as an institution meant, to me [at least] that precisely because of
this we had an obligation to publish serious books as material for national debate, regardless of their colouration.
Publishing The Satanic Verses was not a low point, in many ways it was a high point, but both the distress and discombobulation it caused through Penguin all over the world and the dangers we feared for the author and all of us who worked at Penguin made this a grim period.
3. Why did you decide to leave Penguin?
After nearly twenty years at Penguin – without getting a promotion – I saw greener fields. In other words, Overlook, the very tiny publishing company in America that my Father and I started in the seventies. I have now added to it the even tinier Duckworth here in the UK. We are a little bit like a Russian doll: open us up and there is always something smaller inside, but we are not owned
by any corporation and we do as we like.
4. Do you think books are dying?
No.
5. What, if anything, do you feel distinguishes book publishing from any other sort of business?
As a business, book publishing is not different from any other business but the product we produce – a book – plays a different role in people’s lives than does a washing machine.
6. Who is your favourite author?
William Faulkner, though I wonder sometimes why I don’t have more time to reread him.
7. What would you say are the biggest challenges/threats facing the publishing industry today?
The biggest challenge facing the traditional publishing industry is not screen-based entertainment or information, but the shape of current book retailing. It’s a world in which retailers rent the space they occupy and then rent the space back to the publishers who are nearly always the creative force for authors. The entire thrust of chain retailing is to sell more and more of fewer and fewer books,
quite efficient for retailing but a disaster for people who have some serious views about what the best publishing is about. One always has to make a buck, but increasingly life is only about making a buck.
8. We spoke to one of your authors, Iain Hollingshead. What attracted you to his novel, ‘Twenty Something’?
I like the contemporary feel of the book, because I know that many people today of a certain background and education wind up in jobs that are rather well paying but which they loathe. I think the reason for this is that young people have a romantic and idealistic streak about them, and when they enter the corporate and financial world, the hard bottom line is just to make money for the company – to keep one’s nose clean and advance through the corporate ranks. Iain Hollingshead describes this situation and his efforts to get fired in a most amusing way, with a wonderful counterpoint having to do with his ending romances and possible beginnings of romances. I thought Mr Hollingshead was very talented [...]
Duckworth as a company currently has great new energy. It was, as you know, one of the great literary imprints in Britain and remains a great academic publisher. But Duckworth is eager to find young writers with careers and show Duckworth’s currency, not just our fabled history. Twenty Something and Iain Hollingshead suited us perfectly … [it’s] funny, current and intelligent … I think Hollingshead has considerable potential as an author. Twenty Something is a very polished debut, and while it certainly wasn’t written effortlessly, it reads effortlessly with the mark of strong storytelling and characterization, which I’m sure will take on depth and further richness as Hollingshead develops.
9. What advice could you give to aspiring authors and publishers?
Keep writing. Keep publishing. James Jones only wrote one good line in his life worth remembering, although he wrote quite a few good books. He said ‘a man should be what he can do’. The best authors have to write, it’s their inner drive. The best publishers have to publish books. For someone like me, it is all I know how to do.
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Related article: Life Begins at Twenty (something), interview with Iain Hollingshead
