Nearly 50 years ago, a rediscovered diary enchanted the nation. Edith Holden’s Nature Notes for 1906 – published in 1977 as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady – captured the artist and schoolteacher’s observations on the English countryside’s changing seasons, accompanied by exquisite illustrations of its flora and fauna.
My friend Richard Webb, who has died aged 81, was the man who saw the potential of a dusty manuscript and turned it into a global bestseller. He had been shown the illustrated diary in 1976 by Holden’s 22-year-old great-niece Rowena, then a student at Exeter Art College, whom he had met at a party, and he brought the book out the following year. “Country Diary chimed perfectly with those times – it was rural nostalgia with a safe, beautiful look people wanted after the 1970s recession,” Richard later told an interviewer.
The diary sold more than 3m copies around the world and was spun off into gift merchandising ranging from dinner plates to duvet covers, as well as a 12-part television dramatisation in 1984. It transformed the fortunes of Webb & Bower, the small independent Devon publisher that Richard had founded with his friend Delian Bower in 1975.
The son of Lt Col Richard Webb and his wife, Iris (nee Ingram), he was born in Reigate, Surrey, where his father was stationed at the time. Although he grew up in a military rather than a literary family, Richard was an instinctive publisher.
After school at Marlborough college and a very brief stint as a Royal Navy officer cadet, he studied at the City Lit in London and the London College of Printing and in 1966 landed a gofer job with Condé Nast. Before long he was in charge of its publishing division and nurtured books from contributors as diverse as Mary Berry and David Bailey.
Richard was especially proud of his role in publishing Bailey’s Goodbye Baby and Amen (1969), a photographic essay on the swinging 60s, which could have been Richard’s own diary of life in Chelsea at that time.
He had great charm and a formidable work ethic, a combination that saw him appointed publicity director of the publishing house Michael Joseph aged just 27. He worked with a wide range of authors, including James Baldwin and Spike Milligan, enjoying their company as much as they did his.
Despite Richard’s success in London, his heart was in the West Country, and specifically Dartmouth in Devon, where his mother came from and to where his family had returned during his childhood. By 1994, after many years living in Exeter, he headed back to Dartmouth, planning on semi-retirement in a cottage next to the river.
But he was too much of a natural publisher to sit and watch the River Dart flow past his window. The local historian Don Collinson brought him a manuscript, and The Chronicles of Dartmouth: An Historical Yearly Log, 1854-1954 (2000) became the first of a dozen books he produced involving the town and its people.
“As a teenager I couldn’t wait to get out but I now think it’s an amazing place,” he would tell visiting friends.
In 1992 Richard married Gilly Jenkins, and she survives him.
