Elliott Kastner obituary
John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that's what publishers must give them
Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.
Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.
The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.
Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron's delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson's diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.
Innovation
"It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," he says. "Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers."
Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: "I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn't come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they're writing about."
The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show's music soundtrack and Follett's video diary during the making of the series.
For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.
"You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can't tell the consumer to go away. So we didn't participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it."
He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for "apps", creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.
Penguin's profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: "We can't pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places."
About 8% of the publisher's sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin's founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books "by" Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?
"Allen Lane's view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices," Makinson says. "I'm not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved."
Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin's parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community's chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.
He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: "I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas's argument was, 'all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant'. Well, it hasn't happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.
"The reason it doesn't work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it." In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.
Clubbable
Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.
But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.
"We are all terribly sentimental about books," Makinson insists. "It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this," he points to the books on the shelves behind him, "which I am not."
CV
Born: 1954, Derby.
Education: Graduated from Cambridge with honours in English and History.
Career: 1976-1979, journalist, Reuters; 1979-1986, journalist, Financial Times; 1986-1989, vice-chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi; 1989-1994, co-founder of capital markets advisory firm Makinson Cowell; 1994-1996, managing director, Financial Times; 1996-2002, finance director, Pearson; 2002-present, chairman and chief executive Penguin Books.
Other interests: chairman of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a director of the National Theatre and of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation.
Family: Married with two daughters.
The nostalgia narrative now aches to a different tune | John Freeman
Late-flowering writer of biographies and children's books
Verily Anderson, who has died aged 95, published more than 30 books – memoirs, biographies, children's stories and work ranging from personal reminiscences to Shakespeare scholarship and 10 Brownie books. She was a late starter: her breakthrough as a writer came in 1956, at the age of 41, when she published Spam Tomorrow, a deft and frequently uproarious account of her wartime experiences on the home front. Critics hailed it as a new kind of memoir, one of the first to explore the lives of women in wartime.
Before the success of Spam Tomorrow, she led a life that was colourful but frequently impecunious. Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, the fourth of five children of the Rev Rosslyn Bruce and his wife Rachel (nee Gurney), Verily was always certain that she wanted to be a writer. As children, she and her brothers edited and wrote a nursery magazine which they called the News of the World. Verily's haphazard schooling ranged from a few years at Edgbaston high school for girls to being taught at home by her mother, to a brief and unsuccessful stint at the Royal College of Music in London. She said she worked at "100 different jobs" (including writing advertising copy, illustrating sweet papers and working as a chauffeur) before the outbreak of the second world war, when she enlisted with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, on the grounds that if there were going to be a war, it would be "less frightening to be in the middle of things".
During the war she met Donald Anderson, a writer who specialised in military history. They married in 1940 and had five children. With his encouragement, she made a precarious living as a freelance writer, while papering her lavatory walls with rejection slips received from publishers for her book projects. Her persistence was at last rewarded with the success of Spam Tomorrow – and a further half-decade on the bestseller lists. These years included a film adaptation of her 1958 memoir, Beware of Children, called No Kidding and starring Leslie Phillips and Geraldine McEwan (1960).
Donald died in 1956, and by the mid-60s Verily was again struggling financially. She was rescued by the actor Joyce Grenfell. They had struck up a friendship when Verily interviewed Grenfell for the BBC. Grenfell was so shocked at the conditions she found Verily living in that she bought her a home in Northrepps, a village in Norfolk, where she stayed for the rest of her life, writing dozens more books (including the critically acclaimed The Northrepps Grandchildren in 1968) and glorying in the role of matriarch to an ever-expanding family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When Verily married Paul Paget, architect and surveyor to the fabric of St Paul's Cathedral, in 1971, Grenfell was matron of honour.
In 2008 I conducted what turned out to be Verily's last interview. Letting myself in after some fruitless bell-ringing, I followed the sounds of a piano to her study door. "Oh my dear," she said, looking up at my knock. "There you are. Now – shall we have a gin, before we start?"
I had already heard all about Verily through her daughter, my friend the writer Janie Hampton, and so had a good idea what to expect. Janie's main piece of advice on hearing that we were going to meet was: "Whatever you do, don't let her pick you up from the station – she's half-blind." She also said: "Don't eat any of the cake she offers. She's always got some, and it's always about five weeks old."
Verily did have cake and it was past its best – but Verily definitely was not. She regaled me with anecdotes. I came away with the image of a woman with a twinkle in her eye, who after eight decades of writing was still full of energy and enthusing about her latest project. This – a memoir of the time she spent at Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex, in the 1930s and 40s – was completed the day before she died.
Verily is survived by her children, Marian, Rachel, Eddie, Janie and Alexandra, 16 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren – and Alfie, her beloved RNIB guide-dog.
• Verily Anderson, writer, born 12 January 1915, died 16 July 2010
Tom Stoppard returns to BBC with Ford Madox Ford adaptation
The American literary genre of you can't go home again – that fertile ground farmed by Faulkner, Twain and Kerouac – has in the last half-century found a new voice abroad
At six foot, six inches tall, Thomas Wolfe had trouble entering most rooms. But he also had a problem with going back through them, especially if they led to the past. He had told too many truths – and too many lies – about where he came from in North Carolina.
In his posthumous 1940 novel, You Can't Go Home Again, he gave Americans a literary catchphrase for the pain so many of us who wind up far from where we grew up feel acutely.
After all, in the case of many Americans, if you leave the provinces only to return home, you are marked as a failure. At the very least, you run the risk of finding that flight has spoiled any fond memories you managed to smuggle out.
Think of the successful ad-man hero of John Updike's The Farm, who returns to his family's crumbling Pennsylvania farm for an emotionally fraught visit, or Quentin Compson of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, shivering in his dorm room at Harvard, who begins his defence of the American south with the ringing endorsement, "I don't hate it ... I don't hate it."
This thread of conflicted nostalgia is strongest in America's most autobiographical novelists, especially the ones who had to leave to write but continuously dial back the past in their work: writers such as Jack Kerouac, who frantically travelled America, but wrote most of his later books about Lowell, while living with his mother in Queens and Florida.
Then there's Mark Twain, whose autobiography appears in the new issue of Granta, who rose out of Missouri and saw the world, but settled in Hartford, Connecticut in a white mansion that everyone around him could see looked exactly like a river steamboat.
But like so many things America feels it has invented, from democracy to baseball, the you-can-never-go-home again narrative is hardly unique to it. In fact, in the last half-century (and especially in the last 20 years, as diaspora writers from the Dominican Republic to Nigeria to India and Pakistan have emerged as some of our most vigorous storytellers), nostalgia – which is a combination of "returning home" and "ache" – has taken on a different texture.
In Granta's new issue, there's a story by the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, about a young man who has come to London from Khartoum to study mathematics. His mother, who worries he will never return, arranges for him to marry a devout Muslim wife – a move which backfires when she comes to London and reminds him of everything he left behind. Chimamanda Adichie, meanwhile, has a story about a Nigerian "big man" whose life is turned upside down when his ex-girlfriend announces she has come back to Lagos. As he speculates about the reasons for her return, Adichie's hero worries whether he has sacrificed something essential in his rise to the top.
In stories like these, not to mention the novels of Monica Ali or Kiran Desai or Uzma Aslam Khan, the export duty to elsewhere is high. The past isn't just the past – it's another country. And for reasons political and personal, there is no going back.
