the book collector
he enjoyed exploring the building and watching the sta V at work packing books. At his request, the same wrapping paper was used for the dust jacket of the first edition of Summoned by Bells . My father had great charisma and taught me how to get on with even the most di Y cult authors. An example of this is how he won over Kenneth Clark. Murray’s had published a few of Clark’s books before the enormous success of Civilisation in 1969. While the television series and book were being discussed with the BBC, Clark came to see my father and said, ‘Jock, I’ve signed and sealed the contract with the BBC.’ My father, in a way that only he could do, persuaded him that Murray’s would serve him best and he amazingly agreed that he should renegotiate the book rights with the BBC. This was a demonstration of Clark’s loyalty to my father, and it became the BBC’s first book to be jointly published with a commercial publisher. That year my father arranged for K’s royalty cheque to be put in the toe of his Christmas stocking. Who else could have got away with this? When I became a publisher myself I learnt a similar lesson. A publisher’s job was, it seemed to me, to give the best advice to an author for the success of his/her book. However, I quickly found that this was not always easy as authors rightly tend to be very pos- sessive about their writing and are usually experts on their subject. This was certainly the case with Peter Hopkirk who came to me with the typescript of his first book Foreign Devils on the Silk Road . This taught me that any ideas an editor may have, if they were to be adopted, should appear to come from the author. Having read the first draft of Peter’s book I realised it needed considerable attention and when I returned it to Peter, it was covered with my pencil sug- gestions. First, we immediately agreed on one point: that the end of one chapter should irresistibly lead the reader to the next one, an idea that Peter adopted as his own for this and all his later books. We had many tussles in the future but ours was a creative relationship. I had learnt always to see myself as a general reader and to persuade authors that a book was of little use if it was not intelligible to people like me. It was, I think, always assumed that I would join the family firm and in hindsight I suppose I should have seen myself as an iron filing
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