Mentors and Friends: Short Lives of Leading Publishers and Booksellers I Have Known - Tapa dura

"'To those (like me) who believe that the corporate ethos and the digital onset have devalued history and neglected lessons that would help today's practitioners, I highly recommend this book' Gordon Graham: Logos"

It may seem to some who read this that I have attempted to portray a golden age of the book trade, peopled by Olympians...That is not my intention. It is natural for the old to veer towards the belief that everything was better ordered in their younger days. At almost all periods of history this has been untrue just as it is equally inaccurate to suppose that things are bound to improve. The only certainty is that they will change...Ian Norrie is a former bookseller and a chronicler of the book trade. The first of his two revisions of F. A. Mumby's classic, "Publishing and Bookselling" was published by Jonathan Cape in 1974, updating that history from 1870; the second, from Bell & Hyman (1982), described the trade's development in the twentieth century; both established his permanent interest in the history of the trade. "Mentors & Friends" has a more idiosyncratic approach. Norrie's Hampstead bookshop was surely one of the best known and appreciated independent bookshops in the country. For over thirty years, Ian and his late wife Mavis, co-editor with him of "The Book of Hampstead", mixed and worked with numerous publishers and booksellers. He wrote for The Bookseller and Publishing News and engaged in voluntary work with the National Book League, The Society of Bookmen, the Book Trade Benevolent Society, and the Booker Prize Management Committee, which helped to give him the unique experience underlying his lives of eleven publishers and booksellers. He knew all of them and some became close friends. Their careers spanned the century; their achievements - and failures - still impact on the trade today. They are: Basil Blackwell, Stanley Unwin, Christina Foyle (and the founding brothers), Allen Lane, 'Jock' Murray, Ian Parsons, Alan Hill, Andre Deutsch, Paul Hamlyn, Elsie Bertram; and, in a postscript Alan Steele, who also knew and worked for almost all of them as bookseller, publisher and printer. Driven by a need to correct and extend published obituaries, often written in haste or tactfully omitting reference to the less admirable characteristics of the deceased, Ian Norrie began what he came to realise was in fact an outline history of the British book trade in the Twentieth century. "Mentors & Friends" will engage anyone who has worked in this strange, but fascinating business. It will also provide younger members of that trade the understanding to know more about the world from which their present experience has evolved.