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girls wearing their shalwar kameez. I was naturally terrified, having had no time to prepare for this. However I was saved as, after start- ing hesitantly, I discovered that I had to pause after each sentence so that it could be translated into Urdu thus giving me a moment to think what next to say. When at the end there was a Q & A session I must admit I made up most of my answers but nobody seemed to notice. This was a useful experience as it taught me that I should always be prepared to speak wherever I went. The following years saw a great transition in the publishing world. The Standard Book Numbering system was being introduced and I was made responsible for responsible for implementing the system for Murray’s. Much of my time was now spent away from editing books as I became involved in the business side of the firm. Clearly if Murray’s was going to survive, it had to move with the times. So gradually we moved the entire business onto computers. Meanwhile we had a warehouse in Clerkenwell Road on five floors with a lift that moved at a snail’s pace. We were often several weeks behind with orders, and unbelievably still had an employee who remembered as a boy making deliveries to bookshops with a horse and cart. We decided to sell the warehouse and put our distribution in the hands of Grantham Book Services part of the Random House group. This proved an excellent move as Murray’s were publishers not distributors and had none of the essential skills needed for han- dling orders. During this time our sales were increasing considerably. Civilisation was selling vast numbers both in hard cover and paper- back and we were also selling millions of copies of D.G.Mackean’s Introduction to Biology. On the general side, 1975 saw the publication of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel Heat and Dust that won the Booker Prize and was later made into a film by Merchant Ivory Productions. In 1978, Patrick Leigh Fermor received the W.H.Smith Literary Award for the first volume of his travel autobiography, A Time of Gifts. Without our new distribution arrangement we would have been in serious trouble . Throughout my working life, and in the same way as my pre- decessors, I was totally immersed in the family publishing business not simply as a profession but as a way of life. To be working in
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