Save the great names of publishing
Conglomerates buying up famous imprints should remember that if the names stop mattering, the quality of the books may stop mattering too

This interesting comment from Nicholas Clee, Guardian blogger.

Oscar Wilde, above, original Bodley Head author.

Random House's Bodley Head is about to relaunch as an adult non-fiction imprint, with titles including a history of America by Simon Schama and a biography of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff. For those with a sense of book trade history, it is a pleasing revival. The Bodley Head name dates from the late 19th century, when it published Oscar Wilde; in the 20th, it has been associated with Graham Greene, Charlie Chaplin, and Kobbe's Opera Book. The first Penguin paperbacks appeared under its aegis.

Such has been the complexity of mergers and takeovers in the past 25 years that many famous book trade names are buried within giant conglomerates. The publishing concerns of Anthony Blond, who died earlier this year, lie alongside the Bodley Head somewhere within Random House. So does Barrie & Jenkins, which was once Herbert Jenkins, the imprint on the spines of P G Wodehouse's novels.

There are people who feel strongly about these apparently arcane issues. An outcry greeted Random House's merger of its Secker & Warburg list with Harvill Press, the home of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Joy Adamson. Penguin's abandonment of Pelican, its list of serious non-fiction, caused a similarly heated reaction. When Peter Mayer, the brilliant American publisher, arrived at Penguin at the end of the 1970s to oversee the publication of M M Kaye's The Far Pavilions and Shirley Conran's Lace, he was accused of sullying the Penguin tradition.

John Murray, publisher of Byron and Darwin, is now part of Hachette, and has a list including commercial women's fiction. The news that the firm was preparing this list provoked the publisher Christopher Hurst, who wrote about his feelings to the Bookseller, to "nausea combined with rage". Hurst went on: "Why keep the illustrious John Murray name if they only want to prostitute it?" You might ask the same question of the owners of Andre Deutsch, where the distinguished editor and author Diana Athill once worked on the manuscripts of V S Naipaul, John Updike, and Jean Rhys. Now part of Carlton, Deutsch specialises in popular non-fiction such as showbiz biographies.

Does any of this matter, except to a few book industry fogeys? Not to most book buyers, who pay little attention to the imprints on the books. Not to the past publishers at these firms. Six generations of publishing Murrays are dead, and the seventh John Murray, who sold the firm, is philosophical about the transaction. Andre Deutsch and Allen Lane - the founder of Penguin - were publishing businessmen first, and pursuers of excellence second.

Nevertheless, you do not have to swallow all the contemporary marketing lore about "brands" to feel that names should mean something. A publisher at the Bodley Head, or at Jonathan Cape, or at Faber & Faber, will have a sense of what those firms stand for at their best, and will publish better as a result. If the names stop mattering, the quality of the books will stop mattering too.