BOOKMAN BEATTIE SO THRILLED TO READ THIS IN PN ABOUT HIS FORMER BOSS AND WISHES HE COULD HAVE BEEN THERE.

MUCH EMOTION AS PETER MAYER RECEIVES LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

THERE WERE TEARS in many eyes here yesterday when Peter Mayer, the charismatic and much-loved former CEO of Penguin accepted the LBF/Trilogy Lifetime Achievement Award from Ed Victor.

“My old pal,” was how the agent addressed Mayer, whom he'd met when the latter was at Pocket Books in New York and had issued an edict that British publishers were not to put their books into the open market until three months after publication, to give the Yanks a better chance to sell their own. Victor arranged a lunch to tell him he thought it unfair, and was told “get yourself a Peter Mayer to fight for you”. Recalled Victor: “I thought, what a jerk”. But they have been friends ever since and Victor described Mayer, whom he had once invited to join his agency, as “a publisher to his core and to his fingertips”.

Mayer, pinstriped and remarkably unrumpled, said his thank-you with a speech that was like a masterclass in publishing and, perhaps, with daughter Lise in the audience - along with all the key figures in transatlantic publishing and a host of former Penguin colleagues, including his secretary Betty Hartell - that was how he intended it to be heard.

He spoke of arriving in Britain during the Winter of Discontent in 1978 and, against a good deal of opposition, beginning the reinvention of Penguin, which involved among other things a battle with the NUJ. There were precious few words of praise and encouragement, for he was thought “un-Penguin and un-British”, so Mayer was thrilled to be greeted warmly by a member of the team at the old Harmondsworth warehouse. She thanked him for improving life at Penguin, and said her husband and children were similarly grateful. Mayer asked what she did. “The Returns room. 'Returns are up, up, up - ever since you came. I get overtime nearly everyday now.' I went to the canteen in search of hemlock.”

He quoted Kafka as he spoke of the publisher's dilemma of aspiring to the heavens while being chained to the earth. But he reminded all those present that they had “started their lives among the buxom blondes and hunks” of mass-market publishing and warned against the dangers of being chained too closely to the heavens. He spoke with a notable tone of regret of present-day editorial's often too-close alliances with marketing and of the “merchandising” of authors, of publishing as “a retailer-driven enterprise”. But he also suggested that authors should share “more in performance than in up-front sums based on the promise of performance”. Independence, Mayer concluded, “is a quality of mind”, and corporate agendas should not dictate what is or is not published and that all publishers need “the courage to keep publishing contrary opinions”.

FOOTNOTE

Peter was always an inspiring speaker, and leader, and I offer him my warmest congratulations on this award. The publishing programme carried out by Penguin Books New Zealand today has its origins in Peter Mayer's arrival as CEO of the Penguin Group and his insistence that I get a local publishing programme underway.