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Peter Owen: Sixty years of innovation

Kicking off a new series celebrating small publishers, a tribute to a publisher who has backed his own tastes for more than half a century
Peter Owen covers
'Literary acumen and a business mind' ... Peter Owen covers
'Literary acumen and a business mind' ... Peter Owen covers

Last month, Peter Owen celebrated 60 years running his eponymous publishing house, which has become a byword for a sense of literary adventure and experimentation. Most publishing founders – Jonathan Cape, Martin Secker, Andrew Chatto – are long gone, their names living on only as labels for imprints of large conglomerates. Is it only small houses that can retain their independence, and maintain their identity, today?

Owen set up his eponymous company in 1951, after leaving The Bodley Head where he worked for Stanley Unwin ("a dreadful old shit"), with one typewriter and £900. His first editor was Muriel Spark, whom he referred to as "the best bloody secretary I ever had", and who later drew on her memories of working with Owen for her novel A Far Cry from Kensington. He looked – then and now – for writing "slightly out of the ordinary", and scored an early hit with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha ("I still think it's one of the best books we've ever published"). Back in the 50s, Owen says, "we were one of the only publishers seeking out such writers. No one had the foresight to get into Hesse, they didn't even know he existed or know who he was" – despite his having won the Nobel prize in literature in 1946.

Since then Owen has published a staggering array of writers outside the mainstream. My own reading pleasures from his list include Anna Kavan (who changed her name to that of one her own characters, and reportedly died with enough heroin in her home to kill the whole street), Tarjei Vesaas (whose novel The Ice Palace explores child sexuality in a way that still seems ahead of the time, 50 years on) and Blaise Cendrars (bizarrely productive writer, influence on modernists and friend of everyone from Hemingway to Braque).

It cannot simply be good luck that leads one man to publish such an embarrassingly long list of riches. Owen is clear that both "literary acumen and a business mind" are essential. He has survived where other publishing houses forging a similar path, such as those of Marion Boyars and John Calder, have been closed or sold, and had their lists filleted by larger houses; if you are just "an editor buying books you like, with no idea how to run a business," Owen says, "you don't stand a chance." For him, a distinctive look helped: bold (and presumably inexpensive) two-colour covers by Keith Cunningham may have lacked the cool of Jan Tschichold's Penguin templates, but gave the list a uniform feel. The odd commercial success helped more, with titles which caught the public mood such as Siddhartha and The Man Who Planted Trees. Owen may not always have liked his authors (Salvador Dali was "a creep [but] not as mad as you'd think. When you mentioned money, he suddenly became very sane"), but it's hard to question his commitment to new and avant-garde writing.

Many of Owen's writers – Henry Miller, Hesse, Yukio Mishima, Joseph Roth – have gone on to become part of the canon and have been taken up in turn by commercial publishers. Others remain not just ahead of their time but outside of time, fashion and commercial tastes: that is, they're still not popular, and may never be. Alan Bennett once said, "They should have a sign at the entrance to the National Gallery saying You Don't Have To Like Everything." Tastes differ, in other words, and when we describe books as "commercial", all it means is that they reach a wide range of tastes. Uncommercial books are by definition less likely to strike a common chord and, to me at least, are consequently more interesting. Even if a particular book doesn't tickle me, I'll be glad I read it because it showed me something different, which much literary fiction from mainstream publishers does not.

For my part, what I want is to see books published purely because someone with an eye for literature believes they are good; that they deserve, and can reach, an audience. It's a forlorn hope because large publishing houses have big overheads and need to make lots of money. A book needs a marketing angle, and simply being a brilliant piece of writing isn't enough. In relation to one such "very very good" book, a publicist told me that although their house could make money on it, they would reject it because they could make more money from expending the same amount of effort on a more commercial title. The agent for that "difficult" book took a year to sell it "because every publisher took fright at the past sales figures", despite agreeing on the book's brilliance.

In this climate, it's vital still to have publishers who back their taste. In bigger houses, this can be done in the traditional way, by taking on commercial titles that subsidise books they couldn't otherwise afford to risk. A master of this practice is the redoubtable Christopher MacLehose, formerly of Harvill Press and now running his own imprint at Quercus. MacLehose, as the agent above put it, "can now afford to buy decent French literature by selling Stieg of the Dumpbin". Elsewhere, though, the biggest risks are taken by the smallest publishers, like Peter Owen.

Amazon and the supermarkets are taking an increasing share of book sales, and the discounts they demand seem to make large publishers more and more wary of taking risks or permitting talented editors to follow their tastes. The future for marginal, difficult, interesting books in big houses looks bleak (perhaps it always has). It's likely that small presses will play an ever greater role in producing the sort of books that I, and many others, most want to read. They can survive, if not thrive, on lower turnover. Peter Owen, through stubbornly or ingeniously refusing to compromise, may have paved the way for the future of publishing literature in the UK. As Dan Franklin, publisher at Jonathan Cape, said, Owen is "a maverick who seems to break all the rules but might, I suspect, simply be publishing books the way they used to be published before the big money arrived and will be published again when the big money has gone."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jul/04/peter-owen-sixty-years-innovation
www.theguardian.com
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