As I Hear . . .

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31304, 25 February 1967, Page 16

As I Hear . . .

(Bv

J.H.E.S.)

The death of Sir Victor Gollancz, one of the most notable of modern English publishers —by whom can he be rivalled but his senior, Sir Stanley Unwin?—recalls to me one or two facts outside his cabled obituary. He began as a junior in Benns, not a very progressive publishing house. Presently, we were startled by the appearance, over the Benn imprint, of detective stories by Dorothy Sayers and Michael Innes. These were got up in yellow jackets and stark black titles. Impossible to miss them! They were as good as their get-up declared. Next, Benns issued a long series of very cheap, paper-covered monographs on a wide range of current topics, economic, social, scientific, and so on. In due and early course Victor Gollancz left Benns, which he had experimentally and successfully rejuvenated, and founded his own publishing house, to which of course he carried over his stark black-and-yellow jacketing and his enterprise in designing and conducting cheap series, notably the Left Book series, which did more than anything else, I fancy, to alert and inform the public during the years running up to the Second World War and some way through it. It may have included, no doubt it did, some ignorantly or wilfully slanted books; I cannot remember. But the total effect was to clear a foggy air. * * *

This sounds as if Victor Gollancz had two interests, within his proper purpose of making a success of publishing: to cash in on the vogue for detective stories, and to cash in on the radical trend in politics. Undoubtedly he had those two interests. On the hunt for good new detective stories, I look for the Victor Gollancz yellow-and-black jackets first and am generally rewarded. Hilary Waugh? Judson? Ransome? And so on. On the second point, Victor Gollancz never hesitated to identify himself with international and humanitarian causes, and to use his business to promote them —always remembering that it was his business to publish good books, not bad books in a good cause. But to say this is only to defer saying that Victor Gollancz did as much as any contemporary publisher, and more than most, to publish books of firstclass quality, well away from the line of good detective stories and from that of radical political thought. I offer only one example: that the

novels of Ivy ComptonBurnett have latterly been printed or reprinted by Victor Gollancz, and that no publisher could reach greater honour, in these days, than by identifying himself with these exquisitely dry, witty, stylised fictions. He * *

Thirty years ago, being in London, I called on most of the publishers who regularly sent books to “The Press” for review: Chatto and Windus, Dents, Allen and Unwin, Hamish Hamilton, Fabers, and so on. At most of these offices I was shown into deepcarpeted, dark-hushed, sparely but richly furnished rooms. With the elegant young men who came to talk to me I managed very well indeed: so well that I got what I wanted—parcels of books delivered to the Rotorua to amuse and busy me on the voyage home. I remember Aldous Huxley’s “Eyeless in Gaza” among them. But there were two exceptions to the rich hangings and the deep-piled carpets. Sir Stanley Unwin I approached up a creaking staircase into small, dingy room; and with him I had my most profitable conversation with a publisher—then as now the veteran and the leader of his business. He sent for ledgers that showed at a glance how this or that book had fared: Condliffe’s primary work on the New Zealand economy, for instance. This was both a useful, and an immensely agreeable occasion, followed years later by another, when I went to see Sir Stanley in his Wellington hotel and took him two quite perfect nectarines, just plucked from my marvellous terrace tree, and had the pleasure of hearing that the nectarine was his and Lady Unwin’s favourite fruit. (Yes indeed; but the confounded tree has since died!) The other exception to rich hangings and deep carpets was the Victor Gollancz headquarters: a vast factory floor, the walls