An exceedingly fortuitous moment

The Bloomsbury Miracle, Chapter 2

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This is chapter two of our look at Bloomsbury Publishing, the most successful new book publishing venture in the last half century. Last week, we left Nigel Newton, leader of the founding team, just as he’d hooked up with book packager David Reynolds. The two were working on a business plan for “a new, independent, medium-sized publisher of books of editorial excellence and originality with high standards of design and production … [that would] publish literary authors of the highest quality and sales potential.”

Their timing couldn’t have been better.

It was an unusual moment in book publishing. In an eighteen-month period in the mid-1980s, American and European publishers spent more than $3 billion (USD) buying each other up. All this merger-and-acquisition activity made book publishing alluring to investors in a way it never had been before and hasn’t been since. In the two years before Bloomsbury launched, several companies in the UK were able to raise six or seven figure sums to launch new publishing companies, including Century, Boxtree, and Headline. People with deep pockets were throwing money at the book trade.

I can’t stress how novel this was. Publishers through history have been miserably under-capitalized. They have generally started on a shoestring and, if lucky, grown organically over a long period of time. Some have had family money or have found wealthy benefactors who supported them as an act of philanthropy or as a hobby or out of a sense of cultural mission. But precious few have attracted serious investors. Smart money doesn’t look at book publishing and think “I can make a killing here.” Except in unusual times.

Capital, if you can get it, is useful to publishers. It allows them to pay salaries, and sign authors, and incur expenses for editing and printing for months and years before books hit the market and revenue begins to trickle in. The more capital you have, the more you can do. Newton and Reynolds wanted to run with the big dogs. They intended to hire some of the best people in the business, compete for new works by high-profile authors, and produce 100 books a year. They wanted to raise £2 million, or about $8 to 10 million (USD) in today’s money.

Your average thirty-something publishing type doesn’t think this way. Only someone with Newton’s privilege and audacity does. It took him one call to get a next-day appointment with a venture-capital firm. That opened a series of doors. Eventually, he said in one of his rare public utterances, “I was introduced to the 33-year-old managing partner of a San Francisco-based venture capital firm operating in Jersey.” This was Mike Mayer, probably an associate of Newton’s San Francisco-based father. Mayer made “hundreds of hours of advice available to me free of charge, and being a venture capitalist, he was invaluable in advising me as to the likely responses of the people I would be approaching.”

Newton also hired big-time accountants—Price Waterhouse—and expensive lawyers. He was swimming in expert advice. By spring 1986, he and Reynolds were shopping a fifty-page, five-year business plan with 200 pages of financial projections. By summer, they were confident enough of funding to start making commitments.

In particular, they were looking to round out their team. They needed an editor. Newton was a book marketer, and Reynolds was a book packager. They could talk about “editorial excellence and originality,” but neither had much direct experience of producing it. Newton set his sights on Liz Calder.

I admire that Newton, despite his family money and prep-school-and-Cambridge background, surrounded himself with people distinguished by merit rather than pedigree. Reynolds is of undistinguished lineage, and Liz Calder, according to The Guardian, “was born Elisabeth Nicole Baber in 1938 in Middlesex, the eldest of four children, and lived above her parents' grocery in Edgware, north London.”

Her Welsh father, Ivor, was a pacifist, socialist, and Methodist lay preacher; her mother was a music teacher. They belonged to the Left Book Club and protested fascism in the 1930s. As a conscientious objector, her father drove an ambulance during WW2. Later, the family emigrated to New Zealand where Ivor took up sheep farming.

Encouraged by her mother, Liz developed a love of reading and studied literature at the University of Canterbury. Soon after graduating, she married an engineer, Richard Calder, and travelled with him to the UK, Canada, and the US before landing in Brazil during the bossa nova years. Now a mother of two, Liz found her way into journalism and the fashion milieu. She became a catwalk model for Biba and Paco Rabanne. She also fell in love with Brazil: “The heat envelopes you,” she said, “the smells, the tropical vegetation, the gashes of red earth, and the racial mix which I find appealing.”

The family moved back to England in 1968, accompanied by Liz’s Amazonian parrot. The marriage fell apart, and she began her publishing career as a publicist at Victor Gollancz Ltd., named for its founder, the pacifist and socialist intellectual who had been an inspiration to her parents before the war. It wasn’t much of a leap from modelling. According to a colleague, “We were used as come-on creatures. Liz was chased around the room.” Literary editors at the time were all men. On one occasion, the publicity girls were lined up as a chorus line and asked to kick their legs.

Eventually, Liz Calder was able to switch to the editorial department. “It was a hard school,” she said, “but a great experience: you had to argue for hours. That’s what publishing a book is—arguing your case.” In 1978, she acquired UK rights to John Irving’s The World According to Garp, and caught the attention of Tom Maschler, head of Jonathan Cape.

At the time, Maschler was a force in London literary circles, instrumental in the founding of the Booker Prize. Jonathan Cape, under his leadership, published exciting new work by Ian McEwan, Bruce Chatwin, and Joseph Heller (it had bought the rights to Catch 22 for £250). Calder was hired in 1979 and added to the riches, editing Julian Barnes’ first four novels, and acquiring rights to works by Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje, among others. She brought in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, both of which won the Booker. Rushdie was a real gamble: “preconceptions and received wisdom was that books by Indians or set in India don’t sell,” she said. “Foreign fiction was very much foreign then; anyone with a funny name was suspect.”

Her cosmopolitanism and feminism cut a distinctive profile in British publishing in the seventies, and one not really appreciated at Cape. “I was taken aback by the maleness of it all,” she said, “the hierarchical set-up, with the men at the top in great luxury, and all the workers in linoleum-floored cubicles.”

There were also issues of recognition. Maschler had “the uncomfortable ability to take credit for things not entirely his doing. There was a time in the early ‘80s when I was doing a lot of the buying and had an effect on the list, opening it up to more women and writers from outside the UK. There’s no point getting bitter and twisted, but it’s only natural to be irritated.”

By the time Nigel Newton was looking to hire in 1986, Calder was among the most eminent editors anywhere. She had a magical knack of finding books of high literary merit that produced strong sales. She’d also established herself as something of a community builder, co-founding Women in Publishing in 1979, and six years later the Groucho Club, a Soho sanctuary for authors, publishers, and other creative types wanting an alternative to the stuffy gentleman’s clubs of the time. Newton liked that she had come up from outside the Oxbridge system, and that she had an independent mind. He called her up:

We arranged what she thought was a social lunch, but she then delayed it for three weeks, which had me on tenterhooks. I suddenly realized that the whole enterprise David Reynolds and I had created on paper, with its total emphasis on the quality of its publications and its service to authors, was dependent on Liz Calder joining us. How could she join us if she kept cancelling lunch?

When I finally managed to get her sitting across the table, her jaw dropped as this friendly lunch in an extremely out-of-the-way restaurant turned into an opportunity for her to resign from her present, very desirable employment as editorial director of Jonathan Cape. Liz was much taken with the emphasis on quality, which is the keynote of Bloomsbury, and the independence of the firm. Several meetings later, including one in the roof-top bar of the Hilton Hotel in which we debated the importance of editorial independence, she decided to join us. It was a great day for Bloomsbury.

Calder, by her own account, didn’t find it a difficult decision. She was “fed up not being party to what was going on at Cape. The men at the top called the shots.” Attracted to the idea of a start-up, she didn’t trust her business acumen to go it alone. She was looking for a partnership. Newton showed up as an “answer to my prayers.”

After snagging a first-rate editor, Newton poached another star, Alan Wherry, director of sales at Penguin Books. He became sales and marketing director of Bloomsbury. Newton, Reynolds, Calder, and Wherry were the core team.

The name Bloomsbury had been chosen as a deliberate echo of traditional British independent publishing. Calder suggested Diana, goddess of hunting, for their logo. On Friday, August 29, 1986, the four partners orchestrated simultaneous resignations from their existing jobs. Remembers Newton:

This was bold indeed, considering we had not raised the full £2 million, and it had been made clear to us from the start that if we did not have all of the money, we would not get the part that had already been pledged by the first two investors. Between us, we were supporting three spouses and eight children, and so the decision to resign from the very acceptable jobs we all held was not one to be taken lightly. However, we all took the plunge with great belief in our future.

The money was eventually secured. Offices were leased above a Chinese restaurant in Putney. The team set about hiring thirty more employees and commissions the hundred books they hoped to publish in their first year.

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