Jamie Byng

23:52And then in 1991, I write or 1990. I'm trying to think when I started, I write my dissertation from my English degree, it's called a development of the Black Oral tradition, the hip hop lyric. And I was really interested to see where hip hop had evolved from particularly lyrically, but actually just in all sorts as a kind of form of art. The political, the socio -economic, the musical, the literary, the kind of drawing off the oral tradition in all these ways that, you know, there were, it was a kind of area that I was really interested in. I read Ben Sidren's brilliant book called Black Talk.

24:26It's where that book I was telling you about last night, Leroy Jones' book, Blues People, it's when I first read that. And Gil is a very significant figure in this. If you think of, you know, the Revolution will not be televised from 1970, you, his whole style of delivery and you even get a little flavor of that and the H2O gate blues. You can see why it was never a title. He was comfortable with, but he was called the Godfather of Rap and all of that. Because he, if you listen to particularly something like the Revolution will not be televised with that kind of recurring baseline. It's almost like it's a sample in terms of where it's being used.

24:57So I ended up writing about Gil and I was writing about Public Enemy and I was writing about Sil Johnson and James Brown and Millie Jackson and Ice Tea and just people that I thought were kind of part of this interesting kind of journey from the 60s through to basically we're talking late 80s in terms of hip hop. And during this time I discovered a few things which then affected the publishing I did later. First of all, that Gil had written a novel when he was 21 in 1970 called The Vulture and he wrote a novel when he was 23 in 1972 called The Nigger Factory. So not only did I run about my dissertation, but I was reading about this other work of his, which was kind of unknown to most people who went to his music.

25:38The books had never been published in the UK before. And when I ended up taking over Caningate in 94, and that's fast forwarding a bit in terms of this story, but I ended up getting into publishing and I ended up taking over this publishing house that I joined in 92 in 94. One of the first people I call, one of the first things I wanted to do is to reprint these novels of Gills because I knew there'd be an audience for them. You knew there'd be an audience, you, you would be artists like you knew. Exactly. You wanted these books. And that was my guiding principle, both as a DJ and as a publisher, is if I want to listen to it, if I want to read it, I don't believe I'm going to be on my own because I think I've been reading enough and listening enough to know what is good and what's got kind of lasting value or real impact.

26:21Something's really affecting me. I'm not alone. I'm just... You're a human. I'm a human. We're all connected in profound fundamental ways. So, and if something affects you profoundly and fundamentally, then my belief is that it's going to affect... Good chance. Yeah, there's a good chance. Best chance you have. It's the best guide you've got. The market's going to tell you nothing about that. The market is this kind of... not even worth talking about on one level, that we have to operate within it, but it's not a guiding principle. And as a DJ, I wasn't playing the music, I thought they were gonna like, they've happened to love the music we were DJing, because we loved it.

26:57Yes. And so that was why the DJing, because I ended up fast -forwarding a little bit, do my dissertation on hip hop lyrics. So I'm gonna get hip hop lyrics and the evolution of the Black Royal tradition. And I'm getting more and more into music, And then I get to this stage where I realize that the kind of music that I'm increasingly becoming kind of knowledgeable about and loving is not being played in any clubs in Edinburgh. It's seriously occasionally you might hear a DJ drop one track that would be drawing from this incredible period of like 68 to 74 for black American music is just like to me like in terms of dance music and it was just a very purple patch of extraordinary.

27:39It's off stage that wasn't brilliant music I'm looking for and brilliant after but that was a kind of particularly incredible moment when all those jazz musicians went electric and all that kind of stuff that happened in the late 60s. Anyway, so the club Chocolate City, which was what it was called, that was named, I'm sure you know, this Parliament record from 1975, which again, jumping ahead and doing a full circle here, little did I know when I was calling my club Chocolate City at the lyrics or part of the kind of George Clinton rap in Chocolate City is, they still call it the White House, but that is a temporary condition.

28:15In my house, Stevie Wonder will be the Minister of Final. Richard Proud will be the Secretary of Entertainment. A wreath of Franklin will be the First Lady, and everyone will have to carry a James Brown pass. And in just chocolate cities with vanilla suburbs, it felt like a great name for a club chocolate city because of the music we're playing. I didn't know that in then in 2008, I would end up acquiring, before it even declared he was going to run for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton. I would acquire Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father, and he would then become the fucking president of the United States.

28:48So, you know, this was Clinton's vision for they still call it the White House, but that's a temporary condition. And when Obama went in, it was still obviously called the White House, but it changed its color in certain respects. The things are understanding of what was possible. Yeah, exactly. So I love these kind of, I had no idea when this club I started in 1990. I didn't know that it was going to have such a profound impact on my life because it kept me in Edinburgh after I finished university and it was because I stayed in Edinburgh that I ended up working as a voluntary worker for this publishing house.

29:22I joined it in November 92. I joined Caningade and I've been there ever since.

29:30Tell me your first role and how did your roles progress within the company? I was, I don't think I had a job title again, I was just like a voluntary work ride. I'd written to Stephanie Wolf Murray, who's the name of the woman who was then running canningate, but I actually founded it in 1973 with her husband Gus Wolf Murray and a guy called Charles Wilde. It was still a relatively new company, 10 years ago. No, 73. So it was, and I was joining in 92. So it was 19 years it had been going. And it had been kind of publishing some interesting books during that time, but it was, It had gone into receivership, it had been put into bankruptcy in 1990 before I joined it, and then Stephanie bought back her business, but never had enough kind of working capital.

30:13So it had been kind of limping on through 91, and when I joined in November, I did not only, did I probably deserve not to be paid down, because I knew nothing, but they also couldn't afford to pay me anything. and then they got bought in March 93 by a big school and library supply, called Albany Books. That was when I was first given a formal job title and a contract. And I was working in the publicity department. But I was always, because I've done my degree in literature and I was like a big reader, I was definitely just saw in me someone she could share manuscripts with or I would come across something and say, I think this is really, and I had this insatiable curiosity as I just generally do to learn about every aspect to publishing.

30:56I was fast. I was the first book I ever worked on was an extraordinary new translation of the complete works of the Russian poet Anna Akmatova, done by this American woman called Judith Hemshman. They're just these extraordinary translations. And I'd studied Russian history and Russian literature as part of my degree. So I was aware of Akmatova, not like an expert on her, but I was very aware of she was a very significant, you know, Russian poet of the 20th century. and so the head of publicity was on maternity leave at that time. So I'd been kind of circondered into that department. I was reporting into her assistant and I said, I'm not really intact model.

31:33I'd love to look after the publicity for this book. And I ended up writing to every literature editor in the country writing a very impassioned letter about why I thought this book was so good. And it ended up getting literally blanket coverage every single newspaper. paper. And Andrew Motion wrote this kind of extraordinary review in the observer, just saying this is the kind of supreme achievement of lyric poetry, Michael Hoffman in the Times wrote this amazing review. And before we published the book, I knew that I was going to get a lot of review attention. So I was like, I was asking Stephanie about how the books got sold into the book shops and the reps go around with their bags and they show them the covers.

32:09And I looked at the advance orders of this book and I could see they were like 100 orders for the book across the UK. And I'm like, but we're going to be getting like like the most insane amount of publicity. So I then start working the phones in the evening at the end of the day calling the poetry departments, trying to talk to the buttery bar at Waterston's Dean's Gate in Manchester or Waterston's in Gowestry or borders on Charing Cross Road. And I think I like quadruple the sub for the book, the advanced orders just on the telephone. And then the book ends up selling and reordering. And we sell like way more copies than anyone ever expected us to sell of this book.

32:43And it got this extraordinary attention and it became clear to me that so much of what determines a success of a book is the kind of energy that you pour into it and at some point books can sell themselves, but your responsibility when you're launching a book is to help raise a level of awareness. At least people know about it. If you don't need a review and it's not in a bookshop, the likelihood of you even coming across it is this again, it's pre -intinating here. It's pretty small. So that was a very kind of instructive, first experience of publishing working on this act, Mardiver book, and also believing, I know nothing about publishing.

33:20I don't know anything about publicity, really, except I've been running a club, so I knew a little bit about marketing and publicity of that, but I knew that if you approach someone in the right way and it's genuine, your belief and passion for something, you can be persuasive, and I persuaded all these literary editors to review this book, which got more coverage than any candidate book they'd published, had gotten, like, years. So it was also a book that felt very significant. So on one level, I had a great thing to be working with, but it was a very Proc persuasive is an interesting word. It's accurate, but there's something negative about persuading someone It may I feel like you were sharing something I was evangelizing.

33:59I was evangelizing about it And it ended up having the impact of them commissioning you're right I wasn't maybe persuading persuading could be seen as a pejorative word it almost suggests you're getting someone to do something against their wishes. Exactly. And it doesn't sound like that. It's like you're sharing something you love. And it's exciting. It's an exciting feeling. And they appreciate the fact that I was bringing it up. Absolutely. It's their attention because then the people they commissioned to review it wrote, it got, not only did it get Blanket Review coverage, the reviews were kind of out of this world as the people saying, this is a major book, this is a major poet, you must buy it kind of thing.

34:33And so a literary editor, they like it when they're, whoever they assign it to review you really respond strongly to a book and says, that's what a great literary industry I'd be doing is commissioning reviews of the books that really deserve merit attention. So that was a very, I very quickly at my time at Caningate, I'd experienced a game in more confidence what I was doing, and also made Stephanie say, well, wow, you did that with this. And so it became almost without it being, I was still a voluntary worker, by the way, when I was doing that on the Ag Marathon, but then I became formally part of the kind of, the team and the company in March of 1993.

35:08This was in February of 1993, I wish this act might have a book. And then the company got bought and without getting into all the details of that, they then got into financial difficulties. So in 94, it became clear that this wasn't really sustainable the kind of business for them and their own core business, this school and library supply was starting to filter. And Stephanie who become a really good friend of mine by then, and she was very open to me about the kind of perilous nature of the kind of business and that it was probably going to be put into receivership for a second time within four years.

35:40And that's when I started thinking, there's a way to do this that's different from the way it's been done today. And also, it was an amazing opportunity for me because the sum of money that we ended up paying for the business was actually a pretty small amount of money. and of course we had to get working capital as well, but by September 94 we'd completed a management buyer of it. We effectively bought it as a going concern, although Albany put it into receivership for various financial reasons. It was better for them to do that and to write off all the money they owed to different people. And anyway, that's more 10.

36:17That's more detail than one needs. You were able to acquire the company for very little. And save it from probably going away. Yeah, I think it would have gone away. There wasn't enough of a kind of brand of cannegate, and it didn't have a strong enough identity, or even a core list of back catalogues to make it for one of the big, it would be in a London group, say, oh, we want to buy cannegay as an imprint. So it probably would have disappeared entirely, and those books would have remained in the world, but in some of them might have been picked up for reprint rights at another publishing house.

36:46But yeah, we probably, by doing what we did, ensured that cannegate has a publishing imprint and as a kind of as an entity, it changed from canagate press to canagate books for legal reasons, we had to change its name in that respect, but it canagate as a result of that. Had it the third kind of stage of its life as an entity and it's just celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, which I look back on and think, how did that happen? Because it was not always straightforward and it never is publishing, but it was particularly hand to mouth for the first kind of five years and it's always been a bit of a road at Coast Dresden and it's so difficult to kind of predict how books gonna do.

37:30It sometimes should disappoint. It sometimes you're absolutely delighted and things and we thankfully have had a more than our fair share of kind of breaks and bits of luck that have ended up with a book selling way more copies than we'd expected. So you love that as you told that story the Bill Then you kept it. It felt good. The world was agreeing with your story. And we just glued up. As of these swallows which I absolutely love. I've been your swallows here. It's just, well they swifed. Well they swallows. I think the swallows are they? I think the swallows. All I know is that they migrate here from Africa every year.

38:03The same birds come to the exact same spot every year. And then when the season changes they go back to Africa and then they fly back this time next year you will see these same birds building nest in the exact same location, not in the same area. Exactly. No, we had them at the house I grew up outside of Winchester, which we talked about at the beginning. It's called Abbott's Sworthy, and we had these stuff incredible swallows coming there. My mum, I was actually born in this house, in the actual house. My mum had her fourth child me in the house, and she said when she was at the last week or so, and she had bed rest, she was like, she could see this nest where the swallow, So the swallow was had its young and she was watching this as she was going through the final stages of her pregnancy with me.

38:48And then so, I've always had this lovely connection with, in terms of the beginning of my life and my mum. How often do you come across something that you're excited about to publish? Tell me about what the life of a publisher is like. Well, the good thing at Cannegate is there are lots of routes by which books come into the publishing house for us to kind of think about. And sometimes we go out and get things or we commission things or there's an old book that we buy the reprint rights. So it's no one proactively comes to us with it, we go out and try and make something happen. But I have an amazing group of colleagues at Caningate.

39:23They're a 60 of us in total now at the company. And in terms of the commissioning team in the editorial side, there are six active commissioning editors who have all have different relationships with different agents, with different authors, with different international publishers. So I feel like every week, one or two, maybe sometimes three interesting projects coming in, that doesn't mean we're gonna make an offer for them, but things that we're an editor saying, this is worth a conversation, this is worth sharing, and can we get many, many more things than that a week? But the ones that actually get to the editor saying, this is worth our broader attention.

40:03That's probably about, on average, a couple of projects a week, maybe three. And of those, we only publish 40 originals a year, so we have to end at least half of those with people we've been working for for many years. So the kind of number of free slots as it were on our list, because we don't want our list to be too big. We've actually been getting it smaller and smaller, rather than even though the business has grown, the new title publishing counter has reduced over the last few years. And I think for very good reasons, it's allowed us to focus more on each book can publish it. But more attention on each thing that you're releasing.

40:36You give it its full. And then in terms of when interesting things, you know, when does something come in that get really excited about? Well, actually quite often because there's a lot of really interesting things out there. There are certain things that for me personally, I read and think is really, I admire it and I like it a lot. I can see why it's an exciting thing for us to try and acquire and publish. And then there are the kind of obviously the passion projects where you feel So especially connected to the book, its contents, the author, kind of the creative act was a good example of that.

41:06This was something that I had a very hands -on role and continued to have a very hands -on role because this is something that will always be publishing your book. So we're on this kind of long journey we feel with every book. It's not just, are we published it and then you move on to the next thing. You should always be kind of publishing everybody but you publish it in a way but you can't do that. All thousand. That's an interesting idea. I don't know that the bigger corporate publishers look at it that way. I think there's more of a sense of how the new release comes and goes and then on to the next.

41:36There's a lot of great publishing going on at the big corporates, but I do sometimes as an outsider to it, because I've never worked in a restaurant canager. I know it worked in corporate publishing, but I've co -published books with lots of corporate publishers and I have lots of friends working in corporate publishing all around the world. And I sometimes feel just the sheer, you know, It's unfair to say it's like a conveyor belt. Certain imprints, I think it really is like a conveyor belt, but the sheer volume of titles means that unless something has had a lot of money paid for it, or unless it's by some will be the really high profile, and it's often one of the same, it's very easy for a book not to kind of get an essay, attention in a house that it deserves.

42:13And I think, you know, we're not alone, but I think independent publishers generally, because they're lists of more focus, because they're not publishing these big brand name, best -selling authors, they have to be more creative in launching new voices and publishing, bringing what they compare to the publishing process, which is energy and focus and curation and real attention to detail. And these are the things that I think are vital for successful publishing. And particularly for things that don't have an obvious market for them when you first put them out into the world. So we're ultra selective about the things we take on and there has to be, It's not that everyone in the company has to love a book equally, but that has to be a genuine passion amongst at least some if not all of the people in the company to say this is but we have to publish This is what we need to publish because we think it's doing something adding something really significant to the conversation Always just hugely entertaining or you know there's many things that books do it's they don't be some of the authors that you've Repeatedly published well the one that's probably the kind of best known right now because of this extraordinary trajectory he's been on is a writer called Matt Haye, he's a British writer, he writes children's books and he writes adults books and he writes non -fiction as well as fiction so he's quite unusual in that respect.

43:35And he came to us in 2010 having published his first three adult novels with Jonathan Kaye, you know, very prestigious imprint within Penguin Random House and they dropped him for his fourth novel, a novel called The Radleys. and France is our publisher at large, brilliant editor, and he and I have been working together for 22 years now. He, I remember him calling me very excited, he's saying, Matt Hague just got in touch with me. He's just sent me directly his, this novel called The Radley's, Jonathan Cape returned it down. He said, would we be interested in looking at it? And France is, it was already a fan of Matt's writing and Matt very generously quoted on some, he, there was already a shared sensibility.

44:14He was already a big supporter of some of the other writers on our list. And I'd never read Matt at this stage, but we end up acquiring this book, and it's a wonderful book about a family of abstaining vampires, and the two teenage kids don't know their vampires at the beginning of the book. It's a, but it's a serious book about addiction. It's a serious book about desire. It's also an incredibly funny kind of family novel, just a social comedy of sorts. So we end up buying the book, the fact that he's been on a downward decline with sales at Jonathan K. Doesn't bother us one bit, because we're just reading the book thinking, This is fucking funny and this is a very, this is a book that's got real commercial potential.

44:49So that was back in 2010 and we acquired world rights in the book so we ended up selling him into quite a lot of languages and for a lot more money than we paid for the book. So even before we published it we started to create something of a kind of event around this book and then the book was published and it did well then it ended up being picked for a biggest book club in the country at the time called the Rich and Judy book club. So we did really nicely with it but we since then we have published with Matt Now, four adult novels, six children's books, and three books of nonfiction. So a lot, and he's also prolific, as well as brilliant.

45:23And he'd never published nonfiction until he started working with us. He wrote a book called Reasons to Stay Alive, which is a book about depression and anxiety. He tried to kill himself in a beathor in this mid -20s, having been kind of working in the club scene there at Manumission and stuff. He and his girlfriend, now wife, Andrea, but they were in a beathor for a few years. He was at a very, very low point of his life. And he wrote about it in this beautiful, kind of very personal and very original way of writing. It wasn't a conventional memoir at all. There's just one little poem in it called Self Help, which is just a four -line poem.

46:02It dropped on just one page. When you read it, there is a kind of linear flow to it as a book. You could be getting to it, but you could also drop in at certain points and just read a standalone essay, not unlike the Creative Act 1 level. It's got multiple access points. And this was his big breakout, but we've done really nicely with his first two novels. We published the Radleys in a book called The Humans, but reasons to stay like became a big, big best seller for us. And then we published a book called A Boy Called Christmas, which was a brilliant children's book, inspired by his son saying to it one point during Christmas.

46:36It was Father Christmas like when he was a little boy and he thought he didn't have an answer to what Father Christmas likes a little boy. So he wrote a novel in response to his son's question and we don't really publish children's books, but we followed Matt in Downmat, we had a huge success with a boy called Christmas. It was then turned into a great film that came out a couple of years ago. And we're now at this point, Rick, where his last novel called The Midnight Library is being published in 54 countries around the world. It's spent 106 weeks on the New York Times best cellless, the hard cover list.

47:09I think globally the sales are somewhere between seven and eight million copies. So, again, when we bought the Radleys back in 2010, he'd just been dropped by Jonathan K. There was no idea for him or us of what the journey we were on. So we've been on this beautiful journey with Matt for the last 13 years. And I can't even tell you what the title of the new novel is. We've got to under wraps until we announce it in September. But the new novel, I've been thinking about it a lot again when I was reading your and Jack's book. There's all sorts of interesting connections. The protagonist is called Grace, and there's all sorts of beautiful, it's all set in a beether, and it's a book about, it starts with that gorgeous, Borgas quote where he says, reality is not probable, nor is it likely, and it's about the kind of the mystery of life in without one of some two kind of crafts, but it's a beautiful new book.

48:01So this is exciting. We're going to publish this in September 24. or we're just starting to share it with his kind of publishers around the world. And that's probably the most for me, certainly from a kind of impact it's had on Canigate. That's the single most important journey we've been on with an author. But there are many. Can we publish this woman called Ruth Azechi who came into my life when I was ill, her agent, out of the blue, drops me an email saying, I've never done this to you before, but I've, there's a book I really need and want you to read because I think it's amazing. It's called a tale for the time being.

48:34Jesus Zen Buddhist priest as well as being an incredible writer, Amruth Azekki. And we end up buying this book. It ends up being shortlisted for the Book of Prize. We've gone this amazing journey together. We find a 25 publishers around the world. It's being translated in her last novel called The Book of Form and Emptiness. One, The Women's Prize. And we've done a beautiful book with her called Time Code of a Face, which I think you would love. I'm not going to get into the details of it now. but it involves her staring at mirror for three hours. It's a kind of meditative practice and writing about what happens in the course of this three hour journey she goes on just looking at her face.

49:12It's a very, very remarkable piece of writing. So Ruth's just one of many other writers that we've been on in interest. Jan Martell, when we published Life of Pine in 2002, that was the first time we published it. We published everything of Jan since then and we don't think of publishing books. We think of publishing authors. So we like going on a long journey and going where they want to as long as we think it's Sensualing for them to go on with very happy to say you know what This isn't working for us all maybe this is not gonna be the next thing you should publish and I think it's always important I have those honest and and kind of frank conversations

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51:18Tell me about the editor's role in a book project in the extremes from the least hands on to the most hands on. Well, the least hands on is literally an author is so skilled at the kind of self editing and stuff that they deliver something to you where you barely need to copy editing. kind of it's kind of word perfect as it were. Now that is pretty rare, even very established in the claim writers, benefit from that objective perspective, the particularly an editor. Sometimes agents, some agents were editors and play a very important role in that early shaping of a manuscript. And there are other books where the authors really want and need that kind of editorial back and forth with an editor they trust who's got real skills in being able to take that step back, which the author can't and look at the overall structure and say, you know what, you need to introduce that character earlier or this scene needs explaining more fully in it.

52:19Some books get almost rewritten as part of that thing and that they look so different the final book gets published from say the first draft that an author delivered. Some authors don't deliver first drafts, they'll do multiple drafts before they deliver it. I don't mean it doesn't need a lot of work, but it really varies enormously. And I think it's one of the hidden aspects of publishing is the role that I'd added to complain in the actual creation of the thing that you read. Because normally you just think, well, it's the book. It's got the author's name on it. You might read the acknowledgments and they'll say, thank you so much for X or Y who really played a real role in the kind of gestation and kind of evolution of this book's being.

53:00It really messes. It varies enormously. It's a kind of... And also, there's sometimes an author needs a lot more work with help on one book and another book just comes more easily. So it's... There's no kind of rules there. I think it's in a way it's beautifully varied and to me it doesn't... All that matters is the fine book. It doesn't matter how you get there and whether an editor plays a really pivotal role in it or not. Frankly, it's whatever's needed. It's whatever's needed exactly. I can remember a picot higher telling me a story that one of his most popular books he wrote on the suggestion of his editor.

53:34His editor said, I think this would be a good book for you to write on this topic and he wrote and it was wildly successful. I tend not to think of authors in that way as someone who might almost take an assignment, but it can work that way as Yeah, one of the projects that I'm really most proud of that we created at Cannegate was we called it the Cannegate Myths Projects and it's spun out of a project I did in 98 called the Pocket Cannons, where we broke up the Bible into individual books and commissioned. In all instances, bar one, secular writers, in fact bar two, secular writers to introduce that, and we use the King James version of the Bible because of its incredible kind of Shakespearean literary qualities in terms of the language.

54:14And having published the second series of books, I felt like I was scraping the barrel of the Bible. We'd done like 20 of them. There's only so So many books you want to reprint from the Bible. That actually can be read as works of literature and the four gospels are great examples of that as his genesis, as his ecclesiasties, as his Psalms. And I was thinking, you know, when I was young, it wasn't the Bible that interested me, it was myths. I was obsessed by Greek myths, particularly as a kid. But I like the other mythological kind of traditions, but the Greek myths just captured my imagination as a kind of young boy.

54:48And I was thinking, you know, there was something to satisfying about the Bible project. We got these amazing people involved, but they just wrote a 2000 word introduction. What about if I went to an author and said, look, you can take whatever myth you like and retell it in whatever way you choose, have 25 ,000 words and make of it what you will. In a kind of way of, there was almost an extension of what's going on anyway with myths, which is it's the constant retelling of stories, you know, so that's, that's, they're so primary in our way of kind of connecting with others and reinventing stories and retelling them.

55:20There's no set version of the myth of Eadipus. You know, it's a myth that has been told multiple times and will be told multiple times in the future. So in this instance, rather than going to authors first, I went to a bunch of publishers I've been getting to know around the world and said, look, I want a commission in the first instance. Half a dozen of these books are you in? And I just went to a brilliant publisher called Salamander in Spain, went to Ritsoly in Italy, went to Flamari in France, went to Cennot Fin Canada went to Grove in America, text in Australia, there's a cabay in Holland, and by the time, before I'd even commissioned a book, I had basically 10 publishers saying, on board, Louis Schwartz, a company of Dasletras in Brazil.

56:00So when I then went to the author and said, look, this is something I'm hatching. Can I get what's still pretty unknown as a publishing entity then? I was saying, look, I want to commission you to do this book, and you're going to be published by Company of Dasletras in Brazil by Salamander in Spain, by Cunothin Canada by, you know, Berlin, Vellagin, Germany. And the first person I asked to do this was, I think it was the first, was Margaret Atwood, who was immediately like, I love this idea. She retold the myth of Penelope in Odysseus, but I'd call it the Penelope ad, and Philip Paulman took the myth of Jesus and wrote this one book called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which is brilliant.

56:36David Grossman took the myth of Sampson and wrote a book called Lions Honey, which was just beautiful. Jeanette Winston took the myth of Atmos and Heracles and called it Wait and Karin Armstrong. I've been in an event with one of our old school Richard Holloway used to be the Bishop of Edinburgh. I was with Michael and Archie who I've been hoping I might persuade to do one of these books and it's a book about the Buddha because Karin had just written a book about it and Richard at one point right at the beginning of the event said Karin I'd love you for the sake of the audience to just to kind of expand upon your kind of definition between Mythos and Logos.

57:12And she then goes into this incredible riff about Myth. And I'm with Michael, I've just been telling about my Myth series before and I'm thinking God of Enhance and the making one to do it. Think, kind of car and just explaining why the Myths and the Retelling of Myths are so important. So straight after that event, I'm in the kind of year at the end of the festival and I go to Karen Armstrong and say, I'm working on this Myth project. Would you write a short history of Myth Forest? It's not a specific retelling of one myth, but actually give us a, you know, where, where kind of storytelling animals is one of the lines from it, which is not a particularly new phrase or idea because it's been around for centuries that we are storytelling animals.

57:46But anyways, she wrote a book about a short history of myth. So that whole series, I commissioned writers to do something which they wouldn't have otherwise done. And in the case of Margaret Atwood, so we launched the series. I start working on it at Frankfurt in 1999 is when I start having these conversations with these publishers and then I start going to authors I think in 2000 we launched the series five years later at the Frankfurt Bookware with 40 publishers around the world launching the series in their own countries. It was incredibly moving. We had a big press conference with Grossman, Atwood, Armstrong, Genet, Winstson.

58:24We had all the internet publishers. There was media, TV, like incredible kind of launch. And then there's Margaret Atwood, who ends up doing a whole tour with the other authors, actually, but then she ends up, we come back to London for a kind of closing event in London at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. And afterwards we're having dinner. And I say to Peggy at one point, he said, this was an incredible gift. You agreeing to retell this story, the story of Pinot Pinedesius for our series. And I just wanted to say thank you, because all the writers were good who were part of it. Having Margaret Outwood as part of that launch, she not only had real international kind of appealed, critically and commercially she had a big writer.

59:07She's someone who sits in that interesting space that not all literary writers do. Anyway, she was very modest and sweet. I'm just so happy you asked me to do it because I really enjoyed running this book and I loved this book and I wouldn't have written it if you hadn't asked me. She claims I jumped out from behind a gauze bush before she'd had sufficient coffee in the morning and uses a kind of mythological trope to how I managed to persuade her when she was vulnerable and disarmed to say yes. I had her morning coffee. I had her morning coffee and it was again it was up in Edinburgh during a book festival up there maybe in 2000, 2001 that I jumped behind this gorse bush kind of low key light.

59:46Tell me about Edinburgh I've never been paint me a picture of Edinburgh. It's surrounded by seven hills and it's got incredible kind of topographical kind of Variety within it, the kind of the castle is on a hill right in the middle of the city. You've got this old volcano called Arthur's Sea, which is kind of a counterpoint to, which is probably a mile and a half away, which is magnificent. Got these things called the Sosbury Crags on the front of it. It's like just visually stunning. You can see down to the sea from there. It's not on the sea, Edinburgh, kind of leaf and portobello, the kind of the satellite tells.

1:00:22It's been minutes to the sea driving. If you're going down to Least, it's probably 15 minutes. It's close, 20 minutes. And then if you look up the other way, you've got the Firth of Firth, which is, you know, you go over the Firth Road Bridge and that takes you into Firth. So you're kind of on this interesting corner in the northeast tip of the southern bit of Scotland before you get into, basically, you go north up into the Highlands and beyond. So geographically, it's set in this stunning place. Architecturally, it's... It's very old. bits of it are very old. It's got, and you know, the new town as they call it, was actually built in the very late 18th, early 19th century.

1:01:01That's called the new town because it's in contrast to the old town, which is the really ancient part of the city, which is where Cunninghate's offices were just off the Royal Marl. The Royal Marl literally goes from the castle. It's a beautiful street, goes for a mile down to Hollywood Palace. And would that be a thousand years old, like that part? The castle, I think, bits of the castle are like, go back to like 600 or 700, so like 1600, 1500 years old. So you've got a real sense of history when you're in there. But it doesn't feel urban, doesn't feel like a big city in certain, because it's small -ish.

1:01:36You can, the population's, I think, only half a million or something, or 600 ,000. And it's spread out a bit. Ultimately, it's spread out a bit with its suburbs and stuff. But actually, what I would regard as Edinburgh, the city of Edinburgh, is, you know, You could walk really from all the key places in the centre -end, from one place down there, not more than half an hour. So it feels quite compact as a city, and it's got wavily station, the trains go right through the middle of it, which is kind of cool. It's an all railway station, and it's kind of... I think underground, do you see them? You can see them from certain points.

1:02:08It's got another beautiful hill called Carton Hill, which has got almost like this unfinished acropolis on it, which is like they didn't finish it, which is kind of magnificent. So it's got this kind of neoclassical part to some of its architecture from the kind of 19th century, but it's a lot of cobbled streets, which is nice, not all, and like in many cities in the UK, terrible things were done in the 60s and 70s, where they just knocked down beautiful crestins and stuff to put these kind of ugly monstrosities up for reasons that no one can really understand now. It seems kind of brutal what they did.

1:02:41But it's retained a lot of its character, and it's a capital city. It's got two brilliant, it's got three great galleries, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art. It's got a lot of things going for it and I think is a truly kind of international city. It feels lovely being out of London as well. It was for me, I think a very important part of kind of what felt my kind of outlook being, I think being an independent publisher, being out of London, being away from what felt like the kind of mainstream in certain ways. I've had more space to kind of experiment and do things there, but also, you know, independence of freedom is so connected, those two ideas.

1:03:24And I think for us as a kind of publishing force, I think being independent and the freedoms that come with that have enabled us to do things that I don't think we would have done if we were in London. I think it's fundamentally altered our being as a publishing in -house, as a group of people, as a collective because of where we're situated. There's also an amazing tradition of Scottish writers and the Scottish. So it's rich in other ways too, but I think the very fat that we were out of London and it just reinforced our independence in a way. One of the people I spoke to who works at Canningate in London, though, came from the Edinburgh office, said, people in London look inward, people from Edinburgh look outward.

1:04:05I think that's so true and I'm so glad I lived in Edinburgh for 15 years. I didn't move down to London until 2004. So in fact, yeah, it's one of the things that growing up in a big city has almost a parochial view of this is how it is You talk about it in a number of the podcast you did when talking about your journey and being in Long Island and coming to the city and and the kind of First of all the attractions of the city on one level, but also the different perspective it gave you They're not the freedom to not fall into the single vision of this is the way things are done Yeah, and I think there are multiple visions in any city of the way things are done, but there was something it's more to do with the kind of there's so much going on within the city of London or within any other big capital cities that the need or the feeling of the need to look out with is just is diminished somehow.

1:04:56And I think that point you make that this colleague of mine said, it's something I felt really strongly. I think my natural engagement with publishers from all around the world was partly fueled by being in Edinburgh than London. I'm not saying I wouldn't have wanted to have relationships with all sorts of puppets around the world if I was in London. I know, I'm in there. But I think it was part of my out -quality. It's a different out -quality. It was the outlook. It's a different mentality. So I think we've been there for 50 years in Edinburgh and it will always be Canegate's heart will be in that city.

1:05:25So for me, it's and for the reasons we talked about earlier, it's the city where because of living with Charlie my first year, I'm meeting my, Whitney my first wife, my first two children being born there, and there's so many reasons why that city has, I feel I owe it a huge amount. It's, it's enabled me to grow in ways that are probably different from any other, if I'd grown up in any other city and gone through my kind of early adulthood in, in any other city. I think I would have probably possibly being a done different things, you know.

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1:07:36You mentioned earlier going from the Chocolate City and the reference to the White House to eventually publishing Obama's book, being an independent publisher. How did you come to publish Obama's book? Well that book has a very interesting publishing history so it was published in 1994, dreams from my father was published. And this was pre -politics. He was just starting to get involved in kind of local politics in Illinois, Chicago area, but he had been this, he had been at Harvard Law School he had been to. And he, anyway, he was commissioned to write this memoir in his early 30s, publishes the book, it has a modicum of success in America and then goes out of print.

1:08:17And then he gives his famous speech in 2004 or at the Democratic nomination, where he's this kind of young senator from Illinois. And he gives this speech that kind of lit the world up, particularly in America, people are like, wow, who is this guy? And so someone, a smart editor working at Crown called Rachel Plamen, she was like, she was googling around Barack Obama. And so it's like, we published his memoir fucking 10 years ago, and it was out of print. So they reprinted him. And I have a very close publishing partner in Australia called Michael Haywood runs a great independent called text which can get own 70 % off for a chunk of time.

1:09:00We were in direct business in that kind of way for a seven year period. We've always co -published a lot of books together. He did the myth series, he did the Bible series. We've shared writers and books since we first met in 1997 at a book fair in Chicago. And I was actually in the Bayer. I was in Berkeley at a sales conference because we used to work very closely with Grove Atlantic in America, publishing our books in the States. So I've been doing this sales conference with PGW in Berkeley. And I remember I'm walking in San Francisco and I've just had some great lunch, eating amazing oysters and stuff, and I'm walking along and I get a call out of the blue from Michael and I'm outside a bookshop when he calls me just by complete round of chance.

1:09:44He calls me and says, He just, hey, Jamie, hey, doing this now, I could talk on the app. Absolutely, I'm just struggling in San Francisco. And he's like, I've just read this memoir by this guy called Barack Obama. And I don't know if you've heard of him, but I don't know where he's going, but this is a beautiful memoir. And I really wanna buy the rights, the Australian New Zealand rights. And it's not being published in the UK either. And at this stage, we still, we owned a big chunk of the business, not that he was needing to get kind of my approval. It was simply just excited about it. Excited, and you street it.

1:10:13As I'm talking to him, I kid you not. They've got a cutout of Barack Obama in the window of the bookshop that I'm standing outside. And I'm like, you're not gonna believe this. And the Audacity of Hope would just come out at this point, which was his next book. That was the phrase he used at the Democratic nomination. It was the Audacity of Hope was this thing that captured people's imaginations. And I said to Michael, no kidding. I'm looking at Barack Obama right now. I walk in, I get a copy of both the new book, the Adestive Hope and Dreams From My Father, read Dreams From My Father on the way back to the UK.

1:10:48We end up buying the rights for both books. So we originate the new book, The Adestive Hope, and then do Dreams From My Father, and then he declares he's going to run against Hillary. And to forgive me, it's like, well, that's great that he is. That'll be good for the book, but no expectation that he can possibly kind of take on the Clinton machine and like, and he was black and all the reasons, but for reasons that have obviously been well -documented, what he did and at a grassroots level. And interestingly, I've always thought, if he hadn't written that book, he wouldn't have gotten the White House.

1:11:19Because by the time the election actually happened, that book had some like four million copies in America. And if you read that book, you get a sense of that person that is very attractive that someone who's open and I, there were a lot of factors that led to him getting into the White House. But I wouldn't, I would say it was a significant factor that memoir in people trusting him, believing him and realizing this is someone who's got a vision for this country that is a vision that I kind of subscribe to as well. So that's how that happened. It was just one of these, you know, serendipitous things, very fortunate when I looked back on it and I was actually then became president and the book ended up selling close on two million copies for us.

1:12:04So it was like, we didn't buy it with that expertise. We bought it because it was a brilliant memoir. Yes, yeah, no expectation, of course. And that's a very, can there's nothing wrong with having aspirations and hopes for a book when you buy them? You need to, you have to have a kind of vision of how, but that vision is not quantified simply in sales. It's like you've got a vision of how you want to put this book into the world. Whether it then takes, is out of your control at the end of the day, or is only, you've only got a little bit of impact on that. At the end of the day, other forces, not least readers, take over.

1:12:37Yes. Tell me about how publishing has changed over the course of your career. Wow, that's an interesting question. And not an easy one to answer succinctly, other than to say it's changed a lot. Kind of the digital revolution is just one aspect of what's happened and all the not only in terms of formats, that's because the e -book didn't exist when I joined Publishing. Audio books did exist, but on cassettes, this was even pre -CD and maybe CD's would just happen when the point is audio was not a format that was what it's become. But significantly, we didn't have online retailers and so Amazon didn't exist.

1:13:21I think Jeff Bezos was at book expo America. I think it first time he kind of exhibited Amazon there. I think, maybe I'm getting the decade wrong, but I think it was 2004. Maybe it was earlier than that, but the point is he had a little stall and he was kind of, he was just like an exhibitor at the book expo America. No one who made him then thought this was guy was gonna have the impact he did, not just on book selling, but on commerce and e -commerce and the internet didn't really exist, you know, but social media, as we know, it didn't exist. So I'm not saying these things have all changed publishing completely, but they've all played significant effects, both positive and negative, on the way books get red, the way books get found.

1:14:11Kind of, it's been a, it's the cliche of the double -edged sword. There's been so many positives, I think, that have come about from this. And there's, I'm questioning, it being negatives as well. and you know, I was talking with my dear friend and one of my many mentors in publishing just dinner a couple of nights ago, a man called Morgan Entrick and he runs Grove Atlantic in New York. And we were willing to chat about one point. It's not something that's new to me, but just kind of Morgan just articulating it again. When I first met him in the in 95, the literary landscape in America was one that had most newspapers had a dedicated book section to them.

1:14:52There was the discourse around books with in -print media was very significant. It's been decimated. You've got the New York Times book review, you've got books occasionally get reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and stuff, but there's a tiny fraction now of what used to exist. But he created as a result, something called the Literary Hub, Lit Hub, which is now become using obviously digital technology is an online platform, get something like 7 million visits a week for articles that they post and they're kind of trawling what's going on around the world, really interesting articles to do with literature or stuff, putting them up there.

1:15:33So it's an amazing free kind of resource for people. What's it called? It's called LitHub. That's the short -hand literary hub, LitHub. And he started it with no idea of where it was going to go, but But it was almost because of this diminishing of the kind of discourse around books in the traditional media, he felt something needed to be a kind of corrective to that. So he created Lit Harbazer as a kind of spin -off from Grove Atlantic. So that's a good example of where what's happened has been both good and bad in the last 30 years. The diminishing of traditional book coverage and newspapers, it's sad, I think, because it's made it harder to publish certain kinds of books and break new writers in the way that papers could really help that.

1:16:16But then podcasts and websites like this, social media, there are all sorts of things that have provided a kind of account balance to some of the things that have made it harder to publish. There are lots of things that made it easier to publish, easier to get word out about a book, and actually give less the gatekeepers of the newspapers, how all the broad, the traditional media had such a control over it. Now it feels like there's a much more open playing field in some ways. I, as an independent publisher, I feel that where it's a good time to be an independent publisher. Also because the broader industry has just, it's consolidated a lot, you know, as and this Simon and Schuster acquisition by Penguin R.

1:17:00House was actually not backed by the DOJ in America just recently, but that would have been yet another massive piece of kind of conglomerization. But you've basically got five, you know, super groups in the English language. And there's Bertelsman, that owns Penguin Random House and hundreds of imprints. You've got Hashet, the French one that has, you know, is a little brown and a lot of publishing in the US. And you've got Hop Collins, which is a kind of another of these huge groups. And you've got the Holt Spring group that owns McMillan and Piccadour and all of that. And Simon and Schuster is the other one.

1:17:33And kind of these entities didn't exist 40 years ago. You were just seeing the beginnings of the kind of, the acquiring of independent publishers and bolting them together to create these kind of bigger businesses and all the kind of benefits of scale that can be enjoyed if you're a bigger business. So that's just increased and increased over the last 30 years. But this new independence popping up and I think the independence that are still around, there are some really kind of in Britain, which is the market, I know most there are this favour and there's Serpent's Tale profile and there's Granter and there's Aslan, there's Pushkin and there's Atlantic and there's there are a number of independence who are doing I think brilliant work and can publish it at a level that can compete with the biggest publishing groups because of this kind of level of playing field uncertain in certain respects.

1:18:26I think it's I think if you're focused in your sharp and you're kind of careful about what you publish and how you publish it, I I think it's actually a really exciting time to be a publisher. I certainly feel as excited now as I have at any point in the 31 years I've been at Calhoun. How have bookstores changed? Well, that again is an interesting thing where in the UK, all the book chains, the kind of specialized bricks and mortar book chains have disappeared apart from waterstones. The only other one that's on the high street that's a chain is W -H Smiths and they sell stationary and all sorts.

1:19:00They're not really a bookseller. I do have book sections. They're often in airports as well. Yeah, and often in airports. They're significant there. But all the other chains that used to be around, they've all been hoovered out partly by Waterstones, but also because of Amazon. Yeah, Amazon has had a very negative impact on the traditional bookshop. The ones that kind of Waterstones and Balton Noble are now owned by the same company run by this guy, James Dorne on both sides, who started life as an independent bookseller, running dance in Marlowe and Heistry, and then he built a small group which still exists of six or seven independent bookstores or part of the dance chain.

1:19:38And partly due to him he's turned both of those businesses around and kind of because they were really flailing in the noughties and they didn't know how to compete with Amazon and what what James did which was so good and it's what all the great independent booksellers do is they made a virtue of their independence, their relationship with their customers, their curation of the space. All the things that Amazon are not very good at doing. And Amazon is great, you want to buy a book, you already know what it is, but for discovery, it's not. It's also interesting that Amazon has grown into what it's grown into, starting with the just books.

1:20:15It is, isn't it? Because while we love them, feel niche compared to everything else. And the fact that the entire Amazon business was began with that just books. But I think bezels has talked about that. Coming about books is like other kind of perishable goods and style fits like, first of all, in the warehousing of them, they're relatively high priced for the amount of space they take up and that they, as Inventory to sit on it, you know, you, I think it has a kind of longer life than some Inventory doesn't have to be turned around as quickly you've got. And also he recognized that there was no competition for what he, you know, he was, I think that brand was the biggest bookshop in the world.

1:20:56Yeah. And it was a really simple but true proposition that he had 250 ,000 titles in his inventory to begin with and a big bookshop, a big bookshop has like 50 ,000. Yeah. And often a bookshop will only have 4 ,000. Yes. So he recognized an opportunity and a very kind of state. What you lose with that scale is the curation. Absolutely. The curation, the table of the new leases, what's up front. And they don't give a fuck about curation Amazon. and there was a time when they started, they had brilliant editors who were doing Amazon staff picks, were actual individuals, were reading books, highlighting them within the ecosystem of Ammon and saying, this is our book of the month, and you'd actually get a person writing something really smart and incisive saying, this is a book worth your attention.

1:21:41And I think they just said, oh, we don't really need that, it's like a cost that we can write. It's also an opportunity for someone who wants to start a business to be an overlay on the Amazon fulfillment center of, this is my independent bookshop online, my digital independent bookshop. Well, you know the whole bookshop .org, you know about bookshop .org, which is a fascinating online bookselling kind of platform, which started this Guy Andy Hunter, again, Morgan who started Lit Hub runs grove was involved in helping Andy set that up too, and he launched it literally six weeks before the first lockdown happened.

1:22:18And what he did, which is very good, is he's basically harnessed all the independent booksellers in the country. So they kind of harness all the orders online from these bookshops. You can have their own website, do their own fulfillment, but they really engage with the independence and then they split a portion of all the profits that come from bookshop to all amongst all the independent booksellers. So it's kind of it's created a central hub. So they can do the fulfillment of books that the independent bookshop It's neither, either neither tooled up in terms of the actual dispatch or even just the stock to be able to do it.

1:22:51So they have the equivalent of Amazon type site inventory of stock. So you have a bookshop in Minnesota, you know, if you go via bookshop .org and you're a customer in Minnesota bookshop, you find your book and then you end up buying it on bookshop .org. Loads of authors have been really supportive of it. So they're brilliant lists from authors of 10 books that they love that they, so it's it's really curated as a space and it's harnessing all the independent booksellers kind of kind of communities and it's then sharing profits from it throughout the whole independent book selling sector. So it's created a very interesting alternative to Amazon and the timing on its launch was just incredible.

1:23:32So I think Morgan, he was telling me over dinner that when he and Andy were talking about projections for their first year, they'd, I think, Andy would tell I would be and Morgan was talking to a friend of his at Ingram, saying, what do you think of this? I think it's maybe in both Phil and he was saying, maybe it's more like little hides, probably like three and a half or something. They did $41 million turnover in their first 12 months. They kind of got off to this incredible start, which was almost a proof of its concept, helped by the timing, obviously, but nevertheless, and then they've started bookshopped at organ the UK, which has become a, so I was big as it is in America for obvious reasons, it's just much smaller market, but it's become a very important alternative to Amazon for online retailing.

1:24:16And Wadestons .com is now got it shit together, which he didn't for the first. You know what Wadestons did for the first five? I think for the first five, possibly even like seven years of Wadestons .com, their online telling books. They allowed Amazon to do all the fulfillment and keep all the data for every transaction that took pace on the Wadestons website. It's like, because they, first of all, they slightly dismissive of Amazon. They didn't even have an Amazon where we're ever going to kind of threaten their core business of bookshops. Physical bookshops and they thought online was just a small add -on.

1:24:48So they gave it to literally what ended up becoming their art rival. They gave them their entire online business. Seven years. Just amazing. Yeah. Do you know the clothing store, the Gap? Of course, yeah. Okay. So the Gap started as a seller of Levi's jeans. That's what they were known for. If you want Levi's, you've got to the Gap. everywhere. And then at one point whoever was running the gap decided, why don't we just make our own jeans? Why are we buying them from Leibas? And then one day, all of the people who are going to buy their Leibas, all of a sudden the jeans, now they look the same, but now they're gap jeans.

1:25:22I didn't know that. That's... I didn't know that. That's... It's wild. These relationships that we think of as solid in business, there are a lot of pieces involved. Yeah, and we maybe exhausted the kind of subject of, although it's, as I said, it's a lot has changed in the last 30 years in the publishing landscape. But the change of formats has been interesting, and it's interesting how there was a point about 10 years ago when the e -book was really, or maybe even 13 years ago, 2019 -2010, I think was when the kind of ebook format started to really get kind of traction and it wasn't just the Kindle and Amazon, it was like Sony had their ebook reader and there were other things.

1:26:08It grew so fast so quickly that people were like, if it continues at this rate, basically print publishing as we know it and the reading of the physical book, all these doomsayers saying, it's only a question of time before everyone goes digital and turn up the utter nonsense. It actually plateaued after about three or four years and is now I think slightly declining e -book sales. So it's kind of interesting as I think as an overall part of the market. I don't think they're more than 15 % now and it might even be more like 12 or one point they were up at 20. And for certain areas of genre of fiction in particular, you know, for crime and thrillers and romance, kind of very disposable things.

1:26:46I think they have a they do have a bigger market share, but what's also there's a people who aren't getting exhausted looking in a screen. Completely. That's part of what this has happened. I also think publishers around the world have raised their game when it comes to the physical book, the production values, the amount of time spent on the typography, the covers, the cover finishes so that the thing itself becomes even more distinctive than a digital version. And I think the map of a book and your ability to navigate it is totally different with a physical book in the way you can, And it's a physical object, so it feels like it's got a cartography that doesn't exist with a digital version of it because it's actually three -dimensional.

1:27:28So you can't go into the book in literary. I think you go into the story in a profoundly different way when you're reading a physical book as opposed to something on screen.

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1:28:47Visit houseofmacademius .com slash tetra.

1:28:59Russell Brandt, who you've published, told me a story. He said he was having a conversation with you and he was referencing a book. And he said in the book that he was referencing was a self -help book. And you said to him, all books are self -help books. I believe that. It's a great way of seeing it. Yeah, I also think every reader is a bookseller. Yeah. Which is something I've always been passionate about. Every reader is a bookseller. And if you don't get that, then you're missing something very important about the role you have in engaging readers on behalf of the writers whose books you're responsible for taking care of.

1:29:33You kind of, you know, you have a real responsibility in duty She is a publisher to look after those stories and to take those stories to people who can evangelize and share those stories more widely. I don't know if we've talked about something I initiated in 2000 and I used to 2011 I did it called World Book Night where we ended up giving a million books to a million people in one day. Beautiful. I got every publisher in the UK involved in it, well not every but there were 25 titles in the thing. We printed 40 ,000 copies of each. decide on what the books to give. I got a group, I think we had a group of about 15 people on this committee to help us decide to come up with an amazing mix of 25 books.

1:30:14We had 2 ,000 libraries and bookshops who were involved as pick -up points for the givers who each got 50 copies of a book that they loved which they were then encouraged to give out in their community to anyone who they thought would, you know, it was amazing, Rick. We launched a Trafalgar book square with 7 ,000 people on a night in March 2011. And Nick Cave performed. He read the beginning of Lalita, Margaret Outwood, read from the blind assassin. John LeCarrie closed the show reading the last opening lines of the spy who came in from the cold. Tracey Shevalier, did this incredible reading from Beloved.

1:30:52Sarah Waters was there. David Nichols, Stanley Tucci, DBC Pierre. It was a Graham Norton with the compare for the night. So that's how we kicked it off and then the next day. Yeah, million books were given and two million people. And you know what started that was Margaret Atwood, when we were having this dinner about the myths, and I said that was a beautiful gift. You agreeing to retell a myth for the myths. So she said, I was glad you asked me, I would have done it. Do you know the gift by Lewis Hyde? And I'd never heard of this book. And she said, this is one of my, I've given more copies of this book with any other book ever written, including any of the books I've written.

1:31:29And she said, you gotta make me a promise. I'm gonna send you this book. and if you love it as much as I think you will, you've got to reprint it. And I was like, well, that's pretty easy, promised to come into, so I said, sure. We ended up publishing this book in 2008, I think it was. People who had never read it before, I say, the Smith game is amazing quote for it. David Foster Wallace wrote this beautiful thing for the book jacket. And anyway, when we paperback the book in the spirit of Lewis's book, which is about the kind of intrinsic nature of the gift that makes something that is given different from something that's been bought this part of a kind of commercial transaction.

1:32:06I was to my colleagues, look, when we published the paperback, let's give, we'll do it on the South Bank in London and I'm lowly in road and then let's give 500 copies of the paperback away to whoever, you know, there's just like, let's stop, you know, you've got to have someone who, the person who's giving away has to do something about the book. Otherwise, it just feels like you're giving out kind of one of those Bible jovers witnesses is kind of literally. And we did that in 2009 when the paperback came out and I can't 100 % kind of prove that it's why the gift of the paperback did so well, but the book ended up doing so well in paperback for us.

1:32:41And I feel by short circling the process by which books actually get read. I putting them into bookshops, someone's got to go into the bookshop, they've got to pay money for it, they've got to find it amongst the sea of books by short circling it by going straight people and saying, this is a book I want you to have. Read this. Read this. We did something which I think directly impacted, not the entire reason the book sold, but it had a very beneficial impact on it. So I've always believed that one of the smartest things you can do as a publisher, so I've always given so many. I never travel anywhere without books on me.

1:33:13And I give people books randomly on the street as you've seen from some of those photos I've sent you with the creative act. And when you give someone something like that in that way with sincerity, with no experience expectation of anything in return. It does something beautiful between the interaction between two humans. And then the thing that you've given is invested with something that it didn't have prior to being given in that way. So this was the thinking that's at the heart of Lewisides the gift, which informed the paper backing of the gift, which then created World Book Night, which was, you know, it's still going.

1:33:45It's a kind of initiative that I'm so proud of being part of. But I kind of, it was my idea originally, and I then brought this one, Julia Kingsford and I really kind of honed the thinking together and then brought a whole of the kind of publishing industry in the UK on board with it. Come about letters live. Oh God, where does Star come from? Come about the letters books first. Yeah, we published in September 13, two books about letters. One was called Letters of Note. The subtitle is Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience. Always loved that subtitle of short. It's great. Curated by this guy, Shaw Nashur, started a blog in 2009, became really popular this blog because he posted correspondence deserving of wider audience.

1:34:26He ended up getting some incredible traction with his kind of blog. And do you find out about him through the blog? No, I found out about him through a friend of Michael John Mitchson who started a crowd funding, really interesting publishing model. Almost going back to the 19th century went off and books were subscribed to before they were published. You and it became basically you crowd -funded the publication of Alexander Pope's poetry or whatever. This is how a lot of books came to be. So they were kind of printed toward a 500 copies of the first printing to 500 people at all, who played Orpeda Guinea or whatever it was to do it.

1:35:01So he used this model, obviously harnessing the power of the internet. First, we'll ever sign up with Sean Nash's letters of note, because it already had this kind of online kind of presence and following. and John who I knew pretty well, he'd been at Harville Press, the independent publishing house. In fact, at first, he was head office back in the day of Waterstones. We ended up publishing that book together and we did another brilliant book by Simon Garfield, called To the Letter, which was a kind of a narrative non -history of the evolution of the letter within culture, within society, around the world.

1:35:36And I did this show on called Letters Live, which we did in a small little theatre in West London called the Tabernacle. And Nick Cave is in the original volume letters of note we published a very brilliant, funny, memorable letter about to MTV. He's just been nominated for the best male artist of all. Partly, well only because of this duet he's done with Kylie Minogue. He thinks, first of all, it's ridiculous that I'm being nominated for it. They never even played a bad seedstrike on MTV or barely any. So he writes a letter basically explaining why he doesn't want to be considered for the best male artist award He has his memorable phrase my muse is not a horse.

1:36:16I mean a race with no one she scares easily And so I called up Nick and said look I'm thinking about doing this event Where I'm gonna get people to read letters on stage? Would you come and read your letter to TV and he was like sure I'd love to read that letter And I said well if you're gonna come if I get a piano on stage really play your soul love letter as well Except for beautiful. Yeah, I love that song That's gorgeous song. And he said yes, and then the next person I contact was Julian Anderson, who I happened to just know in London. And there's a letter from Catherine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy in the book that was written, I think 15 years after Spencer Tracy died, and it starts dear spence.

1:36:50And it's just this beautiful letter from Catherine Hepburn to the love of her life, just saying, I'm still missing you. And you know, just reminiscing about him and their relationship. and I sent that to Jillian and she immediately was like, this is an amazing letter, I've got to read it. So something I had Nick Cave and Jillian answer with the first two to say yes. And it all just grew from there. You know, we ended up putting on that show. Benedict Cumberbatch took part in that, so did Juliette Stevenson, so did Neil Gaiman. We had about a cast of 12, I think. And then it just evolved from there and off.

1:37:25Three of the first four shows Benedict did. So I went to Benedict and his partner Adam, who'd also been his TV and film producing partner and said, look, I want to move this concept out of Canne Gay and as a standalone business led us live, do you want to come in as partners? And so Sean, who's the curator of the led us of notebooks and the website and Sonny March, which is the name of Benedict and Adam's TV and film company in Canne Gay, it's a kind of joint venture between the three of us. And where the next shows are the Royal Albert Hall on November 16, sold 5 ,000 tickets in the day and we don't announce who's ever going to perform amazing.

1:37:59So you get to come to one but I can't wait for you to experience one because it's a beautiful show because letters are these incredible little time capsules and kind of a whole, when we're producing the shows, you want to take people through the emotional ring that we want to make them cry, want to make them laugh, you want to transport them to places they've not been to make them think about things in a way that they've never thought about them and letters allow you to do that in a very exciting way. We've always had charities involved in every single show we've ever done. We've raised money for charity.

1:38:30We worked a lot with literacy charities, which is something that's very dear to my heart. But also this great organization could choose love who do just really important work with refugees around the world. They were the beneficiaries of the last Royal Abbot Hall show, it's last autumn, and they're going to be the beneficiaries of the show this November. And now Monblanc has become our global sponsor for Letters which is a lovely fit. So it's one of the other hats I wear beyond running Caningay is being a kind of a key part of Letters Live. I love it. Beautiful. And it sounds like the kind of thing that there could be more live events related to reading and related to literature.

1:39:10You're proving that the written word performed live is a value. Yeah and other people are doing it. I think we're doing in a very specific way with Letters Live, but as, or Letters Live as I sometimes like to call it as well, but it's Letters Live. It is Letters Live because we bring Letters Back to Life through the, through the performance of them. But Letters Make Up Words, which make up sentence, which is make up books. So, you know, Letters Live is actually as an overall rank or be used to doing things beyond specifically, a letter form in that kind of, in that kind of more reductive sense.

1:39:45So it's, I've sometimes thought we could do things that didn't say have to involve the performance of letters. We always have music as part of every show because that's an important part of the journey that we take the audience on. We always begin and end every show with a piece of music so it's not just letters. But yeah, the bringing kind of performance of poets have been doing it for a long time in a very exciting way. But there are very few and far between it. I don't know of any poetry events that are happening at the Albert Hall. No, not on a regular basis. The guy Matt Todd there, just yesterday we having an exchange about at Portra Go Tumor, I was saying, what he's done with Portra and about, we should do a one -on -shive, the Royal Album Ball.

1:40:25Yes. You know, Michael Horowitz did this famous thing as a 60s at the Royal Abel Hall, the poetry Olympics, which had Alan Ginsberg out, was like this incredible pact. And I think you're right, let us know to just show the appetite for this for audiences. And I think Portra is another brilliant format of writing that really lends itself to performance and because of its often short form nature to this kind of a collective show where you get a number of poems read, like you get a number of letters by different people. So I'm... Yeah. Tell me how you came to publish the peanuts. As a kid, the Observer magazine, at the back, would always print one of those kind of landscape peanuts cartoons, not the kind of single strips, but like three columns.

1:41:05So as a kid, I would religiously would cut out the kind of thing. and my wallpaper in my bedroom was made up of peanuts, cartoons. I was obsessed by Snoopy as a kid. I like Woodstock and other whole crowd, but you know, out of Snoopy as King. Snoopy's King as Woodstock is a very, for me, the kind of, his little kind of court gesture. Boy, he's a Woodstock and Snoopy were important figures in my kind of childhood world. So it was, we ended up partnering with phantographics who did this incredible, you know, the complete works of peanuts. So we joined them early on it. So we've done all 26 volumes of everything Schultz ever did and then we've done these little spin -off books and to me it's just a kind of small little labour of love.

1:41:47They actually do really well but there was such beautiful things to be representing to the world. I think he's, I think Charles Schultz was a genius. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, I don't know if you're doing it here. I can't think of a better place to be having a conversation with you Rick, it's a joy, it's a pleasure, head on in.