OBITUARY - Trevor Glover

Distinguished publisher who turned Penguin Australia into a big business and then took his talents to Boosey & Hawkes

Trevor Glover made an outstanding contribution to two famous publishing companies, to Penguin Books and subsequently to the leading music publishers Boosey & Hawkes.


He began his career in Penguin in 1970, joining as sales manager from McGraw Hill and becoming sales and marketing director in 1975. After a brief secondment to Penguin USA, he was appointed in 1976 as managing director of Penguin Australia where he was to flourish.

Since its foundation in 1946 Penguin Australia had developed from a purely importing business to publishing its first list in 1963, and by the time of Glover’s arrival it had become a significant Australian publisher with a distinctive editorial flair and a growing reputation. It was on this firm base that he, together with a succession of talented and ambitious publishers and support staff, were to build an exceptionally successful business which grew from a turnover of A$ 10 million to nearly A$ 100 million by 1978 when he returned to the UK.

As well as being a likeable and friendly man with a talent for drawing his staff together into a mutually sup-portive and enterprising team, he was a consummate manager with exceptional organisational abilities and understanding of systems that make a business work.

Under him the company grew in stature and authority to be the leading general publisher whose lists included many bestsellers, for both adults and children, and grew in confidence to take bold initiatives, none more so than commissioning the former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s The Truth of the Matter, which was written and published in six weeks, an excoriating riposte to the Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s Matters for Judgement on the constitutional crisis of 1975.
While the publishing continued to expand and diversify, winning many awards, with the children’s list in particular showing spectacular growth, the importing business was also growing rapidly, partly through acquisitions in the UK and US and partly through taking on agencies such as Faber and Little, Brown. Glover’s skills ensured that the crucial operations of sales and marketing, computer systems, warehousing and distribution always kept pace with this progress and that the company’s high reputation for service was safeguarded.

By the late 1980s Glover and his team had built a substantial, broadly based business which was playing a significant part in Penguin’s worldwide operations. He himself had become a figure in the cultural world, president of the Publishers Association, and an effective protagonist for the interests of the book world, leading the successful campaign against tax on books.

During Glover’s time in Australia, a new group chief executive had arrived, the brilliant and forceful American, Peter Mayer, who, by the mid1980s, had transformed the business, rejuve-nating its publishing, restructuring its organisation and making strategic acquisitions. The important acquisition in 1986 of New American Library in the US led Mayer to move his base from London to New York and the following year Glover was appointed to the new position of managing director of Penguin UK.


It was a very different company to the one he had left in 1975 and he was never entirely comfortable in the new structure. However, Penguin’s operations were overshadowed in September 1988 by the Salman Rushdie affair, ignited by the publication of The Satanic Versesand followed by the fat-wa on the author’s life early the next year. This put the whole organisation under extreme pressure, and crisis management became an important part of his job for some two years.

Glover was passionately interested in music and had a fine bass voice, singing in the Melbourne Chorale and the London Symphony Chorus. In 1996 he made a career switch which combined this interest with a new role as managing director of the music publishing division of Boosey & Hawkes, a business concerned with the licensing and promotion of composers’ works rather than just publishing scores.

His warmth and talent for team building made him an immediate success and in the five years until his retirement in 2001 he brought his skills and experience to bear to exceptional effect. His signing of new composers outside the traditional classical field, the relaunch of a service supplying music to the media industry, and the restructuring of warehousing and distribution all brought important improvements to the business.

In 1988, marshalling the public support of the estates of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Britten and others, he mas-terminded and led the successful all-out campaign to prevent Boosey & Hawkes being sold to a hostile bidder and all the damage such a change might cause to composers’ interests.

His most significant achievement was the acquisition of 40 of Rachmaninov’s late works, which allowed the company to promote almost his entire output. This led to a close association with the composer’s family and, on his retirement, Glover ran the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation.
He was president of the Publishers Association in 1997, when he wrestled with issues associated with market rights and photocopying in universities, and he became chairman of Book-trust in 2002, presiding over the initiation of the Bookstart scheme.

His wife, Carol, founder of a school in Melbourne and headmistress in London, died in 2005. He leaves a son and a daughter.
Trevor Glover, publisher, was born on April 19, 1940. He died of cancer on September 12, 2007, aged 67

Trevor was a great friend of mine and when I learned of his death last week I wrote the following to a bookseller friend:

I owe him a lot. He appointed me to the board of Penguin Australia & he was on my Penguin NZ board. He taught me a great deal about publishing, he introduced me to opera, and he always insisted I stay with him and his wife Carol whenever I was in Melbourne. He was a well read, well educated , interesting gentleman for whom I had a great deal of affection. He was an active chorister all his life and loved music of all kinds. He was also wily and ambitious and when he went back to the UK as MD there after many years in Australia there were many noses put out of joint and a lot of hostility displayed.

R.I.P Trevor, and thanks for everything mate.