musings from 50 albemarle street
I was always determined that neither of our two sons should feel obliged to join the firm. Octavius, our elder son, after a period as a drummer in a band, performing on one occasion at Glastonbury, studied Typography and Graphic Design at Reading University and Edinburgh College of Art. He is now a free-lance graphic designer and occupies an o Y ce at the back of No. 50. He designs books for the Bodleian, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Collections Trust and Kew amongst others. He has also designed several books for me including the book I wrote for the Roxburghe Club, The Brush has Beat the Poetry ! Illustrations to Lord Byron’s Works. It was the first Roxburghe Club book to be produced by a member and designed by his son. Now that the publishing house has been sold there is no danger that either he or our younger son, Charlie, who has gone into television, will be will be sucked into Murray’s as I was. By the late sixties authors began to use literary agents to negotiate for them. In most of my father’s time there were few middlemen and he always dealt directly with his authors and in this way had built up a very close and loyal relationship with them. This also meant that he would often look after much more than just their books, acting as a kind of confidante to them and more often than not sorting out their financial or sometimes their amatory a V airs. His great strength was that his authors always trusted him. He would give them sound advice on any problems they had and this was why they remained so loyal to him. Those who did leave him tempted away by high advances from literary agents quite often returned when they found that their new publisher did not give them the support they had received at Murray’s. My father was also particularly fortunate in attracting authors with private means who were not dependent on advances and who appreciated the Murray’s special qualities that their extraordinary history and friendship could o V er. When Billy Collins, head of the publishing giant William Collins, took Patrick Leigh Fermor to lunch and promised to double any advance that Murray’s o V ered him, Paddy was sharp with his answer: ‘Mr Collins, do you realise that Jock Murray is my publisher?’ and walked out. Billy Collins tried this on many Murray authors and received the same brush-o V . However, Murray’s never stood in the way of an author who wished to leave because of financial reasons.
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