In 1978 Peter Mayer, who has died aged 82, was drafted in from the US to rescue a moribund Penguin Books. He took the beloved but by then loss-making publisher and turned it into a global brand, along the way transforming the publishing industry as a whole. The greatest publisher of his generation, Mayer was also the most charismatic. Handsome, charming, witty and at times infuriating, he was also brave, defending to the hilt Salman Rushdie and his novel The Satanic Verses (published in 1988 by Viking Penguin) and refusing to go into hiding when a fatwa was issued against Rushdie, as he was advised.
Mayer was a great intellectual but what made him unique was the combination of erudition, an overarching vision and commercial savvy. Among his first acts at Penguin, where he arrived amid the winter of discontent, was to put a pair of bare legs on the cover of Susan Isaacs’s novel Compromising Positions and to pay a lot of money for MM Kaye’s Raj novel The Far Pavilions, publish it in a pricy new-fangled format called a trade paperback and pile it high in bookshops. It was a very slow burn. There was outrage at a brash American defiling a British institution and it took three years before Mayer’s work began to bear fruit, which it did, in abundance, as he reshaped the company, working with Peter Carson and Philippa Harrison, his joint editors-in-chief.
“The figures were dismal and it looked like our battered bird would not rise,” Mayer reflected in April 2008 as he accepted the London Book Fair’s lifetime achievement award with a speech that offered a masterclass in publishing. Rare words of thanks came on a visit to Penguin’s Harmondsworth warehouse – a young woman told him she had been able to buy a Ford Fiesta and take her family to Ibiza for a fortnight. How so, the CEO wondered? “Returns are up up up, ever since you came. I get overtime nearly every day now. We hope you stay with us for ever.” Mayer recalled: “I looked for hemlock in the cafeteria.”
Both Isaacs and Kaye eventually paid huge dividends, as did other endeavours, such as the purchase of Frederick Warne, which enabled Mayer and his colleagues at Puffin to oversee the revamp of the Beatrix Potter titles, a process that disclosed once again the brushstrokes and vibrant colours of the Potter originals.
Mayer had read them as a child in prewar Britain, where he was born, his parents, Lee and Alfred, Jewish immigrants from continental Europe, having moved to the UK as storm clouds gathered. They were on a family visit to the US in September 1939 and so remained there, settling in Queen’s, New York. The local library was young Peter’s home from home.
At 16, Mayer attended Columbia University, New York, on a Ford Foundation scholarship. He spent a year at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, returning to New York to graduate summa cum laude in English literature. He served in the merchant marine before taking up a graduate fellowship to study comparative literature at Indiana University and then won a Fulbright scholarship to study German literature at the Freie Universität in Berlin.
He took his first steps in New York publishing in 1961 as a gofer, and began a 14-year career at Avon Books the following year. He rose to become editor-in-chief and publisher, a tenure that immersed him in mass-market publishing. He reflected that he spent his early years “with thrillers and romances and little packages of print and paper, sometimes with buxom blondes and surly-looking hunks on the cover. In other words, we earned our lunches running profitable enterprises.”
Nevertheless, in 1964 he gave new life to Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep, published 30 years earlier: it sold a million. Next stop was Simon & Schuster, where he was appointed president of Pocket Books, but soon came the summons to London from Lord Blakenham, chairman of Pearson, Penguin’s owner.
Allen Lane, who founded that most beloved of British publishers, had died a few years earlier. Penguin had passed its 40th birthday, and to make its 50th urgent work was needed. Lane had fought to publish the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a correct defence of literature, but was what Mayer called “toffee-nosed” about commercial fiction, and had turned down popular books such as The Dam Busters.
Mayer recognised that it was not enough for Penguin to be simply a cultural institution: if it were to survive it had also to be a business. Penguin’s licences were expiring and would not be renewed. Some of its crown jewels would shortly be out of copyright. Mayer could see that, as so-called vertical publishing (hardback and paperback houses under one roof, titles migrating from the former to the latter after a year) proceeded, Penguin would be a backlist publisher with no backlist.
With the launch of the Viking and Allen Lane hardback imprints, Mayer enabled his colleagues to “buy vertically” (hardback and paperback rights) but it was the 1985 purchase of the hardback houses of Hamish Hamilton and Michael Joseph that secured and expanded Penguin’s copyright base.
This “big bang” changed the face of British publishing, but it was a necessary strategic move. “I think size is now the driver,” Mayer told me in 1999, two years after retiring from Penguin, adding that acquisition alone would not solve publishing’s woes. By then an independent publisher (he leaves behind Overlook in the US and Duckworth in the UK), he resisted any temptation to criticise publicly, but it is clear he felt the merger of Penguin and Random House a bridge too far. “Publishing is what you publish. That’s how you are really successful. Much of the rest is quite a bit of spin-doctoring via accountancy.”
Mayer’s vision was global. Criss-crossing the Atlantic at least once a month, he built up Penguin US, in 1986 acquiring New American Library/Dutton (the first global deal) and was responsible for the “invention” of local publishing. On his watch, Penguin operations in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and Canada became much more than mere outposts of empire. In India, he was 20 years ahead of everyone else, and it is to Mayer that Indian publishing (including major literary festivals) owes its vibrancy. Other innovations included the Penguin 60s range of minibooks marking the company’s 60th anniversary; and a greater emphasis on merchandising.
The Rushdie affair was immensely demanding of time, attention and emotion. Had it not been for that, Mayer might have remained with Pearson beyond the age of 60. As it was, he was happy to become an independent publisher: Overlook was co-founded in 1971 with his father, as a “home for distinguished books ‘overlooked’ by larger houses”; Duckworth was acquired from receivership in 2003. He relished the hands-on experience – “a more personal approach to the same work” was how he put it.
But independence, he believed, was “a quality of mind” and “freedom to express dissent” was always dependent on “owners with a commitment to liberal ideals”. Mayer was, he admitted, “a bit of a trouble-maker by nature”, but he believed that “trouble is at the heart of what we do, in the sense that worthwhile books trouble our complacency – sharpening our minds and senses. Some are even dangerous, and they too must be published.”
He had none of the grandeur or pretension that afflict so many publishing chiefs. His Wiltshire country bolthole was “straight out of Cold Comfort Farm”, the literary agent Deborah Owen, a neighbour, remembered. “Ed Victor referred to it as ‘the capital of shit’ but Peter loved it.” He was kind, once plunging besuited into a nearby pond to help rescue a cow, and applying hot compresses to her husband David’s bad back while Deborah cooked Christmas dinner. And during the publisher Paul Hamlyn’s long stay in hospital Mayer would regularly turn up with homemade soup. When he retired from Penguin, he set off, alone, with a backpack, to the far east.
When he was in the US, Mayer lived and worked in Greenwich Village, New York’s perennial bohemia (“it’s human scale, and of course you can smoke”), where he fitted right in. It was there, cab-driving his way through college, that one long-ago New Year’s Eve he picked up Allen Ginsberg and his partner. “Hey, let’s go see Lawrence,” the poet decided, meaning Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco poet and bookseller. And off Mayer drove, returning a week or so later to a reprimand from the cab company. What a trip it must have been.
He is survived by his partner, Sophy Thomson, by his daughter, Liese, from his marriage to Mary Hall, which ended in divorce, and by a granddaughter, Stella.
• Peter Michael Mayer, publisher, born 28 March 1936; died 11 May 2018
