Advertisement
Telegraph.co.uk

Tuesday 28 July 2015

Nick Robinson

Nick Robinson, who has died aged 58, created one of Britain’s last genuinely independent publishing houses, Constable & Robinson, with particular strengths in modern fiction, “cosy crime” and psychology.

His Victorian ancestor, Henry Tate, had achieved success by purchasing a German patent to make sugar cubes; Robinson brought the same entrepreneurial zeal to books. He spotted opportunities and gaps, broadening into new areas — from China and supermarkets to e-books and websites (he was responsible for setting up honestjohn.co.uk, a site for car-buyers).

As a result, he survived and thrived in an era especially difficult for independent publishers, and showed how an old firm could adapt. “In some paradoxical way,” he said only recently, “there’s never been a better time to be a small publisher.”

Though deeply literary, Robinson was no traditional literary publisher. He rarely thought in terms of individual books, but in terms of lists. Just as John Murray depended on Kennedy’s Latin Primer to fund its other titles, so the Mammoth books of True Crime, Horror and Science Fiction enabled Robinson to build up a formidable operation.

Yet the business did not dominate his life . Rather it was a means to get out of the office and on to the grouse moor near Cambusmore, a Scottish estate on the coast near Golspie where he spent many summers; and latterly, in to the woods around Wardour, Wiltshire, with a Harris hawk called Jess clamped to his wrist. If there was an individual book that gave him most pleasure to publish, it was probably The Doomsday Book of Giant Salmon.

Nicholas John Winwood Robinson was born on February 18 1955 in Cheltenham, the second son of Major ERW Robinson, MC, and Prudence (neé Arthur), and grew up at Moor Wood farm outside Cirencester. He was educated at Winchester, where he was expelled from the college fishing club for laying night-lines on Meads, and for using “bombers” — huge (and illicit) lures.

Academically a slow-burner, he liked to tell how he got into Cambridge to read Archaeology and Anthropology by memorising a learned essay on King John by his fellow Wykehamist Christopher Vajda (now a European Court judge). At Downing College, he changed to History of Art under David Watkin.

The death of his mother when he was 21 left an all-male household at Moor Wood. After his father’s death in 1985, a second home was Essex House at Little Badminton, where his great-uncle, the diarist James Lees-Milne, lived. “Nick is the best man in the world, and the human being I am now most fond of,” Lees-Milne wrote in his journal. “His very presence does me good. He arrived like a breath of fresh Scotch air. In a neatly-fitted tweed suit.” Lees-Milne gave him intellectual guidance and stimulation, and introductions to the London publishing scene which were invaluable in the late 1970s.

Through Lees-Milne’s contacts, Robinson worked for Denys Sutton at the art magazine Apollo (1978-79) and for Norah Smallwood at Chatto & Windus (1979-82). He set up his own imprint after three years with the book packagers Breslich & Foss (1982-85).

He founded Robinson Publishing in 1983, operating out of his one-bedroom flat in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. His formula was simple: to repackage and republish out-of-copyright classics, such as HE Bates’s In the Heart of the Country, and to pan through the detritus of the big publishers. An early Robinson author was the neglected Boston crime-writer George V Higgins, who flew to London, keen to be shown Robinson’s premises.

Finally admitted into the Robinson bedsit, Higgins looked around, and seeing a rotting pheasant hanging outside the bathroom and two spaniels, said: “I need a drink.” Robinson then invited him to the Flyfishers’ Club for lunch .

An important break came in 1989 when Robinson met Guy Parr, founder of Parragon , which distributed titles to Asda and Sainsbury. Parr had grown up on a Liverpool council estate and had to fight to get into the business: “Nick was the first person in the publishing establishment who was prepared to listen to me, and one of the first to see the potential of getting books into supermarkets.” Through Parr, Robinson sold, in prodigious quantities, the cheapest complete works of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world (for £1.99), and the mini Oxford English Dictionary (for 99p), which sold 1.5 million copies.

Another stroke of luck was Robinson’s meeting in Frankfurt with the New York publisher Herman Graf, who agreed to take any Mammoth title in America. Together they published more than 90, of which The Mammoth Book of True Crime, compiled by Colin Wilson, was the most successful; it remains in print.

One of the earliest British publishers into China in the 1990s, Robinson secured the UK rights to the novel Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui, which was banned in China. It sold more than 200,000 copies, and with the proceeds Robinson was able to secure the future of Britain’s oldest independent publisher, Constable & Co, which he bought to create Constable & Robinson.

Robinson was wary of fiction, partly because he saw how much could be wasted in large advances. He veered away from trophy authors, not least because he was bankrolling the company from his own pocket . A fundamentally modest and private man, the trophies he came to cherish were the Bookseller Industry Awards in 2012 for Independent Publisher of the Year and Digital Publisher of the Year.

In 2009 Robinson was diagnosed with colon cancer, which he fought with courage and without self-pity.

In 1990 Nick Robinson married (dissolved) Alice Webb, who survives him with their son and daughter. In 2010 he married Nova Jayne Heath, who becomes chair of the board.

Nick Robinson, born February 18 1955, died August 30 2013

Top news galleries

How we moderate
telegraphuk
blog comments powered by Disqus
Advertisement

More from the web

Advertisement
Advertisement

More from the web

More from the web

Back to top

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2015

Terms and Conditions

Today's News

Archive

Style Book

Weather Forecast
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10329179/Nick-Robinson.html
www.telegraph.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-32
129360
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:IR4NCBL3CJBILZO4P7DGABRDUHCZCB3N
<urn:uuid:51e6b3d1-7192-4d70-9eb4-eef87178904b>
2015-07-28T13:34:07Z
23.3.13.9
sha1:PVFHNMWK7JOA6MKDN5LJSUUA7MBSXN72
<urn:uuid:00cbf87b-5a0b-44de-a674-6842596dd28f>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10329179/Nick-Robinson.html
response
<urn:uuid:f7b32806-165e-496a-9960-7d918c967fac>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-236-191-2.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-32
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf