Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Jamie Byng

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Jamie Byng is the CEO and publisher of the independent publishing firm Canongate Books. When Canongate was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1994, Byng, then in his mid-20s, bought it with a business partner. His first move in overhauling the company's image was to establish the ultra-hip Payback and Rebel Inc. imprints, dedicated to championing cult authors. Over a series of years, the publisher became a radical underdog success story not only publishing wonderful books by Miranda July and The Mighty Boosh but also two books by an, at the time, little-known Senator in Barack Obama—Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Jamie continues to be a maverick and taste-maker in the industry, taking chances on bold titles and authors and navigating an industry with an ever-consolidating base of power. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Manna Vitality https://mannavitality.com/ ------- Squarespace  https://squarespace.com/tetra ------- LMNT Electrolytes  https://drinklmnt.com/tetra  ------- House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

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Tetragrammerton Tetragrammerton Tetragrammerton Very active and a little kid like I was which running around I was always kind of a nut game so it wasn't like I was a total bookworm and I was the youngest of four children so it was a kind of it was a busy house in terms of like just energy difference between you and your siblings. My eldest brother he's five years older than me and I got sister's four years and the sister's two years older so it's four of he's five years older than me, and I've got sisters four years,

and then the sister two years older. So it's four of us within five years, yeah. And then a younger brother, with my mom, and I had second husband, my stepfather, arrived 13 years after I was born. So I was the youngest for a good chunk of time. So, and all that goes with being the youngest in the family. I think your tastes were shaped by your siblings? It's hard to tell isn't it? I think definitely my musical taste was shaped by my elder brother.

He was like going up to his room. There was a lot of vime in there. He was really into heavy metal. He got me into like, Led's there. If he got me into Black Sabbath and Rush and Genesis. He was kind of into that sort of music. But my parents were like, there were more books, there was more books than music in the house, put it that way. There was a record player and we did listen to music, but it was, as far as I kind of, we like listen to the charts together and stuff like that, me and my siblings, and apart from my brother who got really into a particularly kind of area of music, but it was a house full of books. Kind of, there were, if not books in every room, and it was quite a big house, there were books in multiple rooms that always felt to me like books were just part

of the reality that I knew as a child. Yeah, there's a lovely line in David Mitchell's novel, a thousand orders of Jacob de Zoot, where this guy, Dr. Marathonness is explaining to Jacob de Zut the protagonist how about his child and he was brought up by these two women in this house that had an amazing library and he said to this printed garden, I was given the keys, which I just love.

A printed garden is the most beautiful description of a library and I kind of, I remember when I read that phrase and when I was reading this book, I was kind of given keys to a printed garden as a child and that garden has just got bigger as I've grown, as I've just discovered more books that have been involved in the creation of books, the garden has just kind of been multiplying. Were both your parents' big readers? My dad was a gardener and he was a riverkeeper. He was really into history and my mum definitely loved reading, but I wouldn't say they were

books weren't their life in the way that they are some people. So how did it occur for the house to be so full of books? Because I think they were kind of culturally curious people and books were just part of the kind of broader fabric of what. But what was also beautiful, Rick, was there was so much, there were so many beautiful things in the house. Books being one of them, my mum was amazing, isn't it? She's still alive, amazing collector of art and sculptures and beautiful furniture and

tables. So my sense of aesthetics was really kind of honed in this beautiful house. But it was also a big garden with a stretch of the river itch and at the bottom and my father spent most of the time outdoors working. So my sense of connection with nature from a very young age. I was allowed to kind of run wild and there were these woods in the garden and this stretch of the river and my dab was always kind of was building bomb fires with him. So I was kind of, I had that other side which in certain respects was a bigger part of my father's life than say books but it was a lovely balance and combination. I feel very blessed to have had that kind of... How would you describe the area where was the

house on the... It was in the south of England in a county called Hampshire, so it's kind of an hour southwest of London. And yeah, it's a pretty part of England and we were, it was very lovely. How's the growing? If you were to go shopping from groceries, where would you go? Probably Winchester was the kind of closest city that one would kind of do shopping in. There was a big vegetable garden there as well at that house, so there was, not a huge amount of grown, there was not like we were kind of self-sufficient to picture. The city was it one row of...

No, there was a whole... Do you know Winchester is like an ancient city, it was, I think it was the capital of Wessex in kind of 1,080, it's got one of... I think it's got one of the longest names of any cathedral in the world. Winchester Cathedral is an extraordinary cathedral, so it's an ancient city, and I went to school there as well at a school called Winchester College, which is, I think, it's the oldest school in England, so it's got, like, it's got an amazing history as a city, so it was, but not big. It didn't feel metropolitan or kind of urban. It was like a big town is what it felt like,

but it also had kind of things like this extraordinary cathedral and yeah, it had a real deep sense of history as a place. Yeah, and that was only four miles from our house or something. But where we felt, felt really in the country, it was like a felt, you felt a removed from kind of urban life then. And then when at school would you say music was a major part of your life? No, I was, I think like I was into it. I really into music but I wasn't playing any instruments for example and I was a DJ. That's what I'm saying. But not at that age, I got into DJing.

I really got deeply into music when I went to Edinburgh University. I was already really into music, but I was very fortunate in my first year at Edinburgh University. I lived in a private flat rather than going to kind of student halls. Someone had said, a friend who was already a university, a friend of one of my sisters said, don't go into Pollock calls. You know, there's so many better options and she hooked me up with this guy called Charlie McVeigh. And so I lived with, he was in his third year and there were two other third years when, and I was in my first year and I walked into Charlie's flat and I reckon there were like

1,000, 200, 2,000 records in this house and he had the most beautiful magpie I and ears when it came to records. It was like jazz and funk and Latin and hip hop and reggae and folk and country and classical and opera and it was really and a lot of rare vinyl particularly for America. So it was and I was suddenly like I had this incredible kind of space to learn and he taught me also buying secondhand records. We got a lot of secondhand records shops and that's when I got really into jazz and funk and soul and hip-hop and reggae. And that, that's what ultimately led to me starting this club in my third year at university

when all these, a lot of my peers had left and I also, no one was playing in any club, the sort of music I wanted to dance to. So it was a kind of, on one level, a purely selfish thing. I wanted to play the kind of music I loved on a big sound system and had enough of a sense of its quality and belief in its quality and just its beauty, its dance music that, if I loved it that much, why would other people love it? And that turned out to be true, so we used to get just great crowds turning up at the club. It's interesting that back when we were growing up, the access was such a key. I remember in terms of music, I had one cousin when I went to his house. He had springsteen records and more like traditional rock records.

And then I had another cousin who had craft work albums and talking heads albums. And more modern sounds. But that was the only access. It's in those days if you didn't have access to these albums. To the actual physical thing. Couldn't really hear that music. There was no way to access it other than buying the albums or knowing someone who had them.

Completely, you know, kind of, the first record Charlie ever played me, I remember, he was almost like vetting me to see if he was willing, you know, if I was someone he'd want to have in his flat for a year. And he'd just come back from New York as his mum and dad were American. And he'd just bought that second Semandé album called Promise Tights. I don't know if you know it.

Oh, it's Delasoul of the first album, Three Feet Hinerizing. I think they take four or five of the samples of it. And there are a lot of samples on that record. Four or five come from the first two Semandé albums. Let's see. Let's play a little clip from it. The first plaikic track you play was called The Recloos.

Okay. Um, and it's Semandé CY-M-A-N-D-E. Let's play a little clip from it. The first plaikic track you play was called the recluse. Okay. And it's Cement de C-Y-M-A-N-D-E. Climbing ladders in my mind Seeking, finding, ways to hide We were darkness gone to set me free and comfort me And the fact that it was, as long as it was, and you remember this particular track, is incredible. Tick to try, this must be 1988 on Charlie's flat on Guitware's Parans, not flat, House on Gilston Road in London. I walk in and I've never met him before. We have this mutual friend called Lucy

and we're just chatting away and he's just come back from New York and it's got a beautiful cover of the promised heights as the name of the album. I remember him getting it out, putting it on. There's the first song you play me and I was just like, I'd never heard anything like before and I was like, a meager guy, whoa, that's beautiful.

The whole record's beautiful and the first album is also great. And it was interesting, like the first album has a song called The Message on it, which you not as in grandma's to flash as the message, but there's a beautiful cover by Blue Mitchell, the trumpeter of it in 1973, which is probably one of the hardest funk tracks I've ever heard. Also a cover of Samantha's The Message is a beautiful more reggae version of the message. I forget who did that. And he kind of got me realizing there's this huge kind of world of music that I didn't know anything about. So to then be in this flatware and Charlie, because he was very into this music and he found someone

who was a kind of almost like a kind of disciple who was like, just wanting to just, I just had a huge hunger for. And also we happened to like a lot of the same music in terms of the, but it was such an eclectic range. It wasn't like we were just one kind of need. So I felt what a blessing when I look back and hindsight that age 19, I was suddenly living in this flat with a beautifully curated collection by this guy who had magnificent taste in music.

And it just opened so many doors in my mind and in my... I went to so many places thanks to being in this flat. And it kind of... It was from there that my kind of real passion and love of music. And particularly, you know, I think it was black American and Jamaican and American music. That's with so much of what we were listening to, the blues, the funk, the soul, the reggae, the dub, but you know, and it goes back to that point, you're making the less obvious stuff

that you wouldn't hear. I would never... Certain radio stations might play if you were lucky. If you didn't go to that house that day, you may have never heard any of that music in the rest of your life because it's not around. I mean, now we can access it. Yeah. But unless you knew to look for it, yeah, you wouldn't look for it. Yeah. No, it was great. I remember, I remember, of something you were talking about, which reminded me of the experience when we were, when I was running the club chocolate city, these two DJs, Andy or A1, as he was known,

he was kind of brilliant hip hop DJ and kind of scratching champion in Scotland. And this other guy, John, like the scratching champion of Scotland, the idea that that exists. Yeah, they had a competition for like kind of, and they were both brilliant hip hop DJs. So their skills of mixing would just wave your mind. I was more of a selector than a really technically brilliant mixer. And it was lovely. We used to do the club chocolate

city every Thursday and sometimes it was every other Thursday. And I remember we'd kind of, we'd get to the club and one of us would have just suddenly gone a record that the other two had heard about, but it never heard before. And it's like, so he would suddenly , John would suddenly bring out, like, so he would suddenly, John would suddenly bring out like, I've just got this incredible soul search that's out from the night. We're putting it on it.

It's a track that's already got a track, and it's already been sampled by public enemy or whatever. We're like, oh my God, that's the fucking original. Or listening to kind of Herbie Hancock's, WikiWare, because it called the one that backed by Doctamand Samples. And it's like, oh my God, we're listening to the original or blow up the Herbie Hancock's wiki work, is it called the one that are backed by Doctomans samples and it's like, oh my god, we're listening to the original or blow up the Herbie Hancock, which is then

taken by groovers in the heart by Delightier. The sense of like, oh my god, you're holding almost like like holy relics, it felt like for us, because also as bits of art, setting a cyborgs in the record. Just the physical object. This was often it was like deleted vinyl and you'd be getting this pressing from 1972 and it's the original thing and it felt holy to us. And it was like the source code. It was the source code.

And it was like, and we taught each other, we brought into each other's lives, all sorts of music over this four years of running this club together. And I was like running it, but they were the kind of two main DJs and my girlfriend who was actually Charlie's younger sister. So I met my first wife through Charlie. Not only did he introduce me to this whole extraordinary kind of world of music, but I might not have otherwise realized he also introduced me to my first wife, the mother of mildest two kids.

And so I feel very indebted to Charlie and that circumstance is the result of this living with each other for a year and then, you know, living with his his sister for 12 years or something. And it reminds us that when you were looking for a place to live, you weren't looking for that experience. No. You were looking for a place to live while you weren't looking for that experience. No. You were looking for a place to live while you were going to school. Yeah. Exactly.

No idea. The universe provided this opportunity for you and you recognized it and dove in. And grabbed it with both arms because I could feel there was something really of value and of joy and of meaning because it ended up having a very significant impact on my life in lots of ways. In fact, it was Charlie. I went to Edinburgh to do history of art, was the degree I was kind of nominally, you had arrived to do, but the lovely thing about the Scottish University

system is it's four years rather than three years, and as long as you do the necessary modules in your first two years, you can actually just, you don't have to fix on your honours degree until your third year. And he was, he was doing literature and he said, you know, I was, I was trying to work out which of the other subjects I would do along with history of Alchair. I had to do is one of my three modules and I did English Lit one and English Lang one and I ended up doing my degree in literature, partly because again Charlie's saying, you know, history of art is great, but literature I think would be more interesting for you and he was I think right. And then again, it was with Charlie, I mean a record-shock of vinyl villains at the top of Leithwort, which is this long road that goes from the center of it, Edinburgh down to the

docks. And there's a record-shock of vinyl villains and we're like going through the bins together and we'd often going through the bins together and we'd often got buying records together and it was a great time for buying interesting vinyl. You never knew what you were going to find in a shop. I see this Reggae Sun Splash record from 1980 and it's got a Gil Scott Heron track on it. It's mainly Reggae artists. It's Mitch Gunn and Smiley. It's Sugar Minor. but there's a Gillscott Heron live track of, there's a recording of him performing live a song he wrote about nuclear power stations, called Shut Him Down. And I'd heard in someone else's flat, just two weeks earlier, someone had put on the H-208 blues by Gillscott Heron off the other Winter in America. And again,

I was like, who is this? Sigging. I'd never heard Gil's voice before. And the guy who's called John Trigg, he's like, I just guy called Gil's got Aaron. And I don't know how well you know that song, the H-2-A-Gate Blues. It's Gil's decimation of the Nixon administration. Let's listen to a little bit. I don't want to be involved in this man. This is going to be a blues number. But first I want to do a little bit of background on the blues and say what it is. Like there are six cardinal colors and colors have always come to signify more than simply that particular shade like red neck Or got the blues That's where you apply colors to something else. You know to come up with what it is you trying to say

So there are six cardinal colors yellow red orange green blue and purple and there are three thousand shades And if you take these three000 shades and divide them by 6 you'll come up with 500 meaning there are at least 500 shades of the blues for example there's I ain't got me no money blues there is it I ain't got me no woman blues there's I ain't got me no money and I ain't got me no woman which is the double blues. And for years it was thought that black people was the only one who could get the blues. So so the blues hadn't come into no international type of fame. But lately we didn't have Frank Rizzo with the lie detector blues. We've

had the United States government talk about the energy crisis blues. And we're going to dedicate this next poem here too. The Spirit Head X. The X Second In Command in terms of this country. And the poem is called H2O G-A-T-E blues. And if H2O is still water and G-A-T-E is still gait, what we get ready to deal on is the water-gate blues. Let me see if I can dial this number right away. Click.

I'm sorry. The government you have elected is an operative click Inoperative Just how blind will America be the world is on the edge of its seat defeat on the horizon very surprising that we all can see the Plighten still could not let me do that part again Just how blind will America be the The world is on the edge of its seat, defeat on the horizon, very surprising that we all could see the plight and claimed that we could not just how blind America, just as Vietnam exploded in the race, snap crackle and pop, could not stop people determined to be free. Just how blind will America be.

So, just play that age 19. I was like, fuck me, this guy is, he's got it all. He's got humor, he's got political sharpness, he's satirical, he's got a gorgeous voice, the music with Brian Jackson and him just with these incredible kind of creative partners. And yeah, that record came out in 1973. So just after Watergate, he drops that like three months after Nixon's been impeached. And it's just like, and I was like, wow. And then I'm in this record show going through the bins. And it's this Reggie Sun splash. I see Gil Scott, how in some, I'm like,

whoa, that's kind of an It's All Sarner. His dad was actually Jamaican so that's not reason why he was in Kingston but he always had a connection with Jamaicas. His dad was actually the first black footballer to play in the Scottish leagues. He was called the Black Arrow and he played in the 1950s, played for Celtic in Glasgow. So I pick up this record. I've still got it. It's £2.50 from vinyl villains. And then another beautiful thing, Gil is playing at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh in four weeks' time.

I'm going, no fucking way. This guy, you know, I've just heard two weeks ago and then I've just bought this record by a week ago or 10 days ago. He's playing in Edinburgh. So that's like, I've got to go and see this guy. By this stage, I'm starting to listen to some of his other music and just

I have an idea how often do artists come through Edinburgh. Reastably often, but I can't, it probably hadn't been there for at least two or three years, but he loved tour, kind of the first time he loved playing live and he loved the UK, he always had a strong kind of, he had a strong set, a lot of friends here, a lot of connections with the... Here, Ann around Europe, he used to play. He was particularly popular in France and Italy and Spain. He loved playing shows in Europe. So I'd get my ticket. I think Charlie's there too.

We've a bunch of us going to see Gil. I witnessed one of the most... At that point in my life, hands down the most remarkable life shot I'd ever seen. And he's... I don't know if you ever saw Gil play live, but he was as beautiful a communicator the way he worked with audience where he spoke to audience he would begin he was a standup comedian as well as a brilliant so he would he would sit on stage to begin

with without the rest of the band in front of the keyboards and he would just start rapping and chatting and he would be like so good at ad libbing so something something yelled something out for the crowd his just his comebacks were so sharp and funny and beautiful. There was a kind of, there was a soulfulness to him and a kind of wisdom, but with this kind of gorgeous humor overlaying everything that, and then, he and his band are fucking awesome. And he's got a voice, one of the great, to me, great voices and music. And afterwards, on my own, I remember, I taught my way backstage, and I brought this copy.

I brought you now. It's like 19. I got the copy of this from this Reggae Sun Splash from my Nady. I taught my way backstage. It's not that I've got to get backstage, but I just said I'd love to say thank you and to say hello to Gilles Cout-Harrin. And anyway, it's not, he's not like super tight about that kind of Gilles doesn't really give a shit. So he's like, yeah, within 50 minutes, I'm chatting to Gilles, I'm just like, oh, I've only come to your music recently

and he can tell I'm just someone who's clearly been profoundly affected by his work and what artist doesn't in some way connect with that. And then after about five minutes of chatting where I bring out this record and he just goes, what fuck is this? I've never seen this record in my life. And I know, I just boarded it. And I'm like, right, Barrett's bit, it's kind of funny that Gilles has seen the record before. Anyway, we have a real laugh about that. I think it's very amusing. And then he's like, he calls me Bingo from the worst guy. And they Bingo. I'm doing a residency at the

jazz cafe in Camden next week. John want to kind of put your own my guest list and I was like, I would love to be here. So I go back there, I go and see him again. Second time, second shows every bit as good as the first, similar in ways, very different in others. And again, afterwards I go backstage and we keep on chatting.

And so this is all in 1989. And we end up kind of just staying in touch. And whenever he's playing in the UK, he's always puts me on his guest list. And then in 1991, I write or 1990. I'm trying to think when I started, I write my dissertation of my English degree is called a development of the Black Oral tradition, the hip hop lyric. And I was really interested to see where hip hop had evolved from particularly lyric,

but actually just in all sorts as a kind of form of art. The political, the socio-economic, the musical, the literary, the kind of drawing of the oral tradition in all these ways that, you know, there were, it was a kind of area that I was really interested in. I read Ben Sidren's brilliant book called Black Talk. It's where that book I was telling you about last night, Lee Roy Jones's book, Blues People.

It's when I first read that. And Gil is a very significant figure in this. If you think of, you know, the revolution will not be televised from 1970, you, his whole style of delivery. And you even get a little flavor of that and the H2O gave blues. You can see why it was never a title. He was comfortable with, but he was called the Godfather of Rap and all of that and the H2O gate blues. You can see why it was never a title. He was comfortable with

but he was called the Godfather of Rap and all of that because he, if you listen to particularly something like the Revolution will not be televised with that kind of recurring baseline, it's almost like it's a sample in terms of the way it's being used. So I ended up writing about Gil and I was writing about Public Enemy and I was writing about Sil Johnson and James Brown and Millie Jackson and I.C.T. and just people that I thought were kind of part of this interesting kind of journey from the 60s through to basically we're talking late 80s in terms of hip hop. And during this time I discovered a few things which then

affected the publishing I did later. First of all, that Gil had written a novel when he was 21 in 1970 called The Vulture and he wrote a novel when he was 23 in 1972 called The Nigger Factory. So not only did I run about my dissertation, but I was reading about this other work of his which was kind of unknown to most people who went to his music.

The books had never been published in the UK before. And when I ended up taking over Caningay in 94, and that's fast forwarding a bit in terms of this story, but I ended up getting into publishing and I ended up taking over this publishing house that I joined in 92 in 94. One of the first people I call, one of the first things I wanted to do is to reprint these novels of Gills, because I knew there'd be an audience for them. You knew there'd be an audience. You, you would be artists like you knew. Exactly. You wanted these books.

And that was my guiding principle, both as a DJ and as a publisher, is if I want to listen to it, if I want to read it, I don't believe I'm going to be on my own, because I think I've been reading enough and listening enough to know what is good and what's got kind of lasting value or real impact. Something, if something's really affecting me, I'm not alone. Like I'm just, I'm one of you. You're a human. I'm a human. We're all connected in profound, fundamental ways. So, and if something affects you profoundly and fundamentally, then my belief is that it's going to affect our

chance. Yeah, there's a good chance. You have. It's the best guide you've got. The market's going to tell you nothing about that. The market is this kind of, it's not even worth talking about. One love on it, we have to operate within it, but it's not a guiding principle. And as a DJ, I wasn't playing the music. I thought they were gonna like, they're happy to love the music we were DJing because we loved it.

Yes. And so that was why the DJing, because I ended up fast-forwarding a little bit, I'd do my dissertation on hip hop lyrics, I find it hip hop lyrics and the evolution of the Black Royal tradition. And I'm getting more and more into music and then I get to this stage where I realize that the kind of music that I'm increasingly becoming kind of knowledgeable about and loving is not being played in any clubs in Edinburgh. It's seriously occasionally you might hear a DJ drop one track that would be drawing from this incredible period of like 68 to 74 for black American music.

It's just like to me, like in terms of dance music and it was just a very purple patch of extraordinary. It's obviously there wasn't brilliant music happening before and brilliant after, but that was a kind of particularly incredible moment when all those jazz musicians went electric and all that kind of stuff that happened in the late 60s. Anyway, so the club Chocolate City, which was what it was called, that was named, I'm sure you know, this Parliament record from 1975, which again, jumping ahead and doing a full circle here, little did I know when I was calling my club chocolate city,

the lyrics or part of the kind of George Clinton rap in chocolate cities, they still call it the White House, but that is a temporary condition. In my house, Stevie Wonder will be the Minister of Fine Arts. Richard Proud will be the Secretary of Entertainment. A wreath of Franklin will be the first lady and everyone will have to carry a James Brown pass. And it just chocolate cities with vanilla suburbs. It was just, it felt like a great name for a club chocolate city because of the music we're playing.

I didn't know that in then in 2008, I would end up acquiring, before it even declared he was gonna run for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton, I would acquire Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father. And he would then become the fucking president of the United States. So you know, this was Clinton's vision for, they still call it the White House, but that's

a temporary condition. And when Obama went in, it was still obviously called the White House, but it changed its color in certain respects, our understanding of what was possible. Yeah, exactly. So I love these kind of, as I said, I had no idea when this club I started in 1990. I didn't know that it was going to have such a profound impact on my life, because it kept me in Edinburgh after I finished university.

And it was because I stayed in Edinburgh that I ended up working as a voluntary worker for this publishing house. I joined it in November, 1992. I joined Caningade. And I've been there ever since. High above the clouds in the Himalayan mountains, grows a little known super-forward used by ancient warriors. This gaselecza was referred to as the destroyer of weakness.

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Tell me your first role and how did your roles progress within the company? I was, I don't think I had a job title before. I was just like a voluntary work right. I'd written to Stephanie Wolf Murray, who's the name of the woman who was then running Caningate, but I actually founded it in 1973 with her husband Gus Wolf Murray and a guy called Charles Wilde. It was still a relatively new company, 10 years old. No, 73.

And I was joining in 92. So it was 19 years it had been going. And it had been kind of publishing some interesting books during that time, but it had gone into receivership, it had been put into bankruptcy in 1990 before I joined it. And then Stephanie bought back her business, but never had enough kind of working capital. So it had been kind of limping on through 91.

And when I joined in November, 1902, not only did I probably deserve not to be paid and I think because I was just, you know, I knew nothing. But they also couldn't afford to pay me anything. And then they got bought in March, 1903 by a big school and library supply called Albany Books. That was when I was first given a

formal job title and a contract and I was working in the publicity department. But I was always, because I've done my degree in literature and I was like a big reader. I was definitely just saw in me someone she could share manuscripts with or I would come across something and say, I think this is really, and I had this insatiable curiosity as I just generally do to learn about every aspect to publishing. I was fast, I was the first book I ever worked on was an extraordinary new translation of the complete works of the Russian poet Anna Akmatova,

done by this American woman called Judith Hemshman, they're just these extraordinary translations. And I'd studied Russian history and Russian literature as part of my degree. So I was aware of Akmadava, not like an expert on her, but I was very aware of she was a very significant, you know, Russian part of the 20th century. And so the head of publicity was on maternity leave

at that time. So I'd been kind of circonded into that department. I was reporting into her assistant and I said, I'm not really in tech, Madava. I'd love to look after the publicity for this book. I ended up writing to every literature editor in the country writing a very impassioned letter about why I thought this book was so good. I ended up getting literally blanket coverage every single newspaper. Andrew Motion wrote this kind of extraordinary review in the observer, just saying this is the kind of supreme achievement of lyric poetry. Michael Hoffman in the Times writes this amazing review.

And before we published the book, I knew that, as we were going to get a lot of review attention. So I was like, I was asking Stephanie about how the books got sold into the book shops and the reps go around with their bags and they show them the covers. And I looked at the advance orders of this book, and I could see they were like, 100 orders for the book across the UK. And I'm like, but we're going to be getting the most insane amount of publicity. So I then start working the phones in the evening at the end of the day, calling the poetry departments, trying to talk to the buttery bar at Waterston's

Dean's Gate in Manchester, or Waterston's in, in Gowestry, or borders on Charing Cross Road. And I think I quadruple the sub for the book, the advanced orders just on the telephone. And then the book ends up selling and reordering. And we sell like way more copies than anyone ever expected us to sell of this book. And it got this extraordinary attention.

And it became clear to me that so much of what determines a success of a book is the kind of energy that you pour into it, and at some point books can sell themselves, but your responsibility when you're launching a book is to help raise a level of awareness. At least people know about it. If you don't need a review and it's not in a bookshop, the likelihood of you even coming across it is this again is pre-intenated. It's pretty small. So that was a very kind of instructive first experience of publishing, working on this act, Mardiver book, and also believing,

I know nothing about publishing, I don't know nothing about publicity really except I've been running a club, so I knew a little bit about marketing and publicity of that, but I knew that if you approach someone in the right way and it's genuine, your belief and passion for something, you can be persuasive. And I persuaded all these literary editors to review this book, which got more coverage than any can and get book they'd published it got in like years. So it was also a book that felt very significant. So on one level, I had a great thing to be working with, but it was a very... But persuasive is an interesting word. It's accurate, but there's something negative

about persuading someone. It may be. And I feel like you were sharing something. I was evangelizing. I was evangelizing about it. And it ended up having the impact of them commissioning. You're right. I wasn't maybe persuading persuading could be seen as a pejorative word. It almost suggests you're getting someone to do something against their wishes. Exactly. And it doesn't sound like that. It's like you're sharing something you love. And it's exciting. It's an exciting feeling. And they appreciate the fact that I was bringing it up.

Absolutely. And because then the people they commissioned to review it wrote, it got, not only did it get Blanket Review coverage, the reviews were kind of out of this world, as in people saying, this is a major book. This is a major power. You must buy it kind of thing. And so a literary editor, they like it when a, whoever they assign it to review really responds strongly to a book and says, that's what a great literary

editor should be doing is commissioning reviews of the books that really deserve merit attention. So that was a very, I very quickly at my time at Caningate, I'd experienced a game even more confidence in what I was doing. And also made Stephanie say, well, wow, you did that with this. And so it became almost without it being, I was still a voluntary work. And by the way, when I was doing that on the Ag Marathon, but then I became formally part of the kind of the team and the company in March of 1993.

This was in February of 1993. We published this Ag Marathon book. And then the company got bought and without getting into all the details of that, they then got into financial difficulties. So in 94, it became clear that this wasn't really sustainable, the kind of business for them and their own core business, this school and library supply was

starting to filter. And Stephanie, who become a really good friend of mine by then, she was very open to me about the kind of perilous nature of the kind of business and that it was probably going to be put into receivership for a second time within four years. And that's when I started thinking there's a way to do this that's different from the way it's been done today. And also it was an amazing opportunity for me because the sum of money that we ended up paying for the business was actually a pretty small amount of money and of course we had to get working capital as well.

But by September 94 we had completed a management buy-out of it. We effectively bought it as a going concern, although Albany put it into receivership for various financial reasons. It was better for them to do that and to write off all the money they owed to different people. Anyway, that's more detail than one needs. You were able to acquire the company for a very little. And save it from probably going away. Yeah, I think it would have gone away.

There wasn't enough of a kind of brand of cannegate and it didn't have a strong enough identity or even a core list of back catalogs to make it for one of the big, it would be in one of the London groups, say, oh, we want to buy Cannegay as an imprint. So it probably would have disappeared entirely. And those books would have remained in the world, but some of them might have been picked up for reprint rights at another publishing house. But yeah, we probably, by doing what we did, ensured that Kanagai as a publishing imprint and as a kind of as an entity, it changed from Kanagai press to Kanagai books for legal reasons, we had to change

its name in that respect, but Kanagai as a result of that had it's the third kind of stage of its life as an entity and it's just celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, which I look back on in England. How did that happen? Because it was not always straightforward and it never is publishing, but it was particularly hand-to-mouth for the first kind of five years and it's always been a bit of a road of coastress and it's so difficult to kind of predict how books going to do. It's sometimes too disappoint. It's sometimes you're absolutely delighted and things. And we thankfully have had more than our fair share of kind of breaks and bits of luck that have ended up

with a book selling way more copies than we'd expected. So, it loved it as you told that story, the Bell Ring. Then you kept it. For good. The world was agreeing with your story. And we used to eat it. As of these swallows, which I absolutely love. I've been your swallows here.

I swished, so they swallows. I think the swallows are there. I think the swallows. All I know is that they migrate here from Africa every year. The same birds come to the exact same spot every year. And then when the season changes, they go back to Africa. And then they fly back. This time next year,

you will see these same birds building nest in the exact same location, not in the same area. Exactly. No, we had them at the house I grew up in outside of Winchester, which we talked about at the beginning. It's called Abbotsworthy, and we had these tough incredible swallows coming there. My mom, I was actually born in this house,

in the actual house. My mom had her fourth child me in the house. And she said when she was at the last week or so, and she had bedrass, she was like, she could see this nest where the swallow, the swallow was had its young. And she was watching this as she was going through the final stages of her pregnancy with me.

And then so, I've swallows, I've always had this lovely connection with in terms of the beginning of my life and my mum. How often do you come across something that you're excited about to publish? Tell me about what the life of a publisher is like. Well, the good thing at Canagay is there are lots of routes by which books come into the publishing house for us to kind of think about. And sometimes we go out and get things or we commission things or there's an old book that we buy the reprint rights. So it's no one proactively comes to us

with it. We go out and try and make something happen. But I have an amazing group of colleagues at Caningate. They're a 60 of us in total now at the company. And in terms of the commissioning team and the editorial side, there are six active commissioning editors who have all have different relationships with different agents, with different authors, with different international publishers. So I feel like every week, one or two, maybe some of the three interesting projects coming in, that doesn't mean we're going to make an offer for them, but things that we're an editor saying, this is worth a conversation, this is worth sharing and can we get many, many more things than that a week, but the ones that actually get to the editor saying this is worth

our broader attention, that's probably about on average a couple of projects a week, maybe three, and of those we only publish 40 originals a year, so we have to end at least half of those with people we've been working for for many years. So the kind of number of free slots as it were on our list, because we don't want our list to be too big. We've actually been getting it smaller and smaller rather than even though the business has grown, the new title publishing counter has reduced over the last few years, and I think for very good reasons it's allowed us to focus more

on each book and publish each more attention on each thing that you're releasing, give it, it's full. And then in terms of when interesting things, when just something come in that get really excited about, well actually quite often because there's a lot of really interesting things out there. There are certain things that for me personally I read and think is really, I admire it and I like it a lot, I can see why it's an exciting thing for us to try and acquire and publish. And then they're the kind of, obviously, the passion projects where you feel especially connected to the book, its contents, the author, kind of the creative act was a good example of that. This was something that I had a very

hands-on role and continued to have a very hands-on role because this is something we'll always be publishing your book. So we're on this kind of long journey we feel with every book. It's not just I'll be published and then you move on to the next thing. You should always be always be kind of publishing everybody but you publish it away but you can't do that. All thousand. That's an interesting idea. I don't know that the bigger corporate publishers look at it that way. I think there's more of a sense of how the new release comes and goes and then on to the next. There's a lot of great publishing going on at the big corporates, but I do sometimes as an outsider to it because I've never worked in a restaurant canyons. I know

worked in corporate publishing, but I've co-published books with lots of corporate publishers, and I have lots of friends working in corporate publishing all around the world. And I sometimes feel just the she of, you know, it's unfair to say it's like a convey about. Certain imprints I think it really is like a convey about, but the she of volume of titles means that unless something has had a lot of money paid for it or unless it's by someone with a really high profile and it's often one of the same,

it's very easy for a book not to kind of get an essay, attention in house that it deserves. And I think, you know, we're not alone, but I think independent publishers generally because they're list some more focus, because they're not publishing these big brand name bestselling authors. They have to be more creative in launching new voices and publishing, bringing what they compare to the publishing process, which is energy and focus and curation and real attention to detail. And these are the things that I think are vital for successful publishing. And particularly for things that don't have an obvious market for them when you first put them

out into the world. So we're ultra selective about the things we take on and there has to be, it's not that everyone in the company has to love a book equally, but there has to be a genuine passion amongst at least some, if not all of the people in the company, to say this is what we have to publish. This is what we need to publish, because we think it's doing something, adding something really significant to the conversation. Always just hugely entertaining, or as many things

of books do, they don't want to be serious. Some of the authors that you've repeatedly published. Well, the one that's probably the kind of best known right now because of this extraordinary trajectory he's been on is a writer called Matt Haye, he's a British writer, he writes children's books and he writes adults books and he writes nonfiction as well as fiction. So he's quite unusual in that respect. And he came to us in 2010 having published his first three adult novels with Jonathan K, you know, very prestigious imprint within Penguin Random House. And they dropped him for his fourth novel, a novel called The Radleys. And France is our

publisher at large, brilliant editor, and he and I have been working together for 22 years now. He, I remember him calling me very excited, saying, Matt Hague just got in touch with me. He's just sent me directly his, this novel called The Radleys. Jonathan Cape turned it down. He said, would we be interested in looking at it? And France is, it was already a fan of Matt's writing

and Matt very generously quoted on some, he, there was already a shared sensibility. He was already a big supporter of some of the other writers on our list and I'd never read Matt at this stage, but we end up acquiring this book and it's a wonderful book about a family of abstaining vampires and the two teenage kids don't know they're vampires at the beginning of the book. It's a, but it's a serious book about addiction. It's a serious book about desire. It's also an incredibly funny kind of family novel, just a social comedy of sorts. So we end up buying the book. The fact that he's been on a downward decline with sales, Jonathan

K. It doesn't bother us one bit because we're just reading the book thinking this is fucking funny and this is a very, this is a book that's got real commercial potential. So that was back in 2010 and we acquired world rights in the book. So we ended up selling him into quite a lot of languages and for a lot more money than we paid for the book. So even before we published it, we started to create something of a kind of event around this book. And then the book was published and it did well.

Then it ended up being picked for a biggest book club in the country at the time called the Rich and Judy book club. So we did really nicely with it. But we've since then we have published with Matt, four adult novels, six children's books, and three books of nonfiction. So a lot, and he's also prolific as well as brilliant. And he'd never published nonfiction until he started working

with us. He wrote a book called Reasons to Stay Alive, which is a book about depression and anxiety. He tried to kill himself in a beathor in this mid-20s, having been kind of working in the club scene there at Manumission and stuff. He and his girlfriend, now wife Andrea, were in a Beether for a few years. He was at a very, very low point of his life. And he wrote about it in this beautiful, kind of very personal and very original way of writing. It wasn't a conventional memoir at all, kind of there's a, there's just one little poem in it called Self Help, which is just a four-line

poem. It dropped on just one page when you read it. There is a kind of linear flow to it as a book, you can read from beginning to end, but you could also drop in at certain points and just read a standalone essay, not unlike the creative act on one level. It's got multiple access points. And this was his big breakout book. We've done really nicely with his first two novels. We published the Radleys and a book called The Humans, but reasons to stay like became a big, big best seller for us. And then we published a book called A Boy Called Christmas, which was a brilliant children's book inspired by his son saying to it one point during Christmas, he was father Christmas like when he was a little boy and he thought he didn't have an answer to what father Christmas likes a little boy.

So he wrote a novel in response to his son's question and we don't really publish children's books, but we followed Matt in down that route. We had a huge success with a boy called Christmas. It was then turned into a great film that came out a couple of years ago. And we're now at this point, Rick, where his last novel called The Midnight Library is being published in 54 countries around the world. It's spent 106 weeks on the New York Times best cellist, the hard cover list. I think globally the sales are somewhere between seven and eight million copies. So again, when we bought the Radleys back in 2010, he'd just been dropped by Jonathan

Cape. There was no idea for him or us of where the journey we were on. So we've been on this beautiful journey with Matt for the last 13 years. And I can't even tell you what the title of the new novel is, we've got to under wraps till we announce in September. But the new novel, I've been thinking about it a lot, again, when I was reading, You're In Jack's book, there's all sorts of interesting connections. The protagonist is called Grace, and there's all sorts of beautiful, it's all set in a beether,

and it's a book about, it starts with that gorgeous, Borgas quote, where he says, reality is not probable, nor is it likely. And it's about the kind of the mystery of life in without one or something to kind of crash. But it's a beautiful new book. So this is exciting.

We're going to publish this in September 24. We're just starting to share it with his kind of publishers around the world. And that's probably the most for me, certainly from a kind of impact, it's had a can of it. That's the single most important journey we've been on with an author, but there are many. Can we publish this woman called Ruth Azeki who came into my life when I was ill, her agent, out of the blue, dropped some email saying, I've never done this to you before, but there's a book I really need and want you to read because I think it's amazing. It's called A Tale for the Time Being. Jesus Zen Buddha's Priest as well as being an incredible writer, Amruth Azekki. We end up buying this book and

ends up being shortlisted for the Book of Prize. We've gone this amazing journey together. We find a 25 publishers around the world that's been translated in her last novel called The Book of Form and Emptiness, one the women's prize. So, and we've done a beautiful book with her called Time Code of a Face, which I think you would love. I'm not going to get into the details of it now, but it involves her staring at mirror for three hours as a kind of meditative practice and writing about what happens in the course of this three-hour journey she goes on just looking at her face. It's a very, very remarkable piece of writing. So Ruth's just one of many other writers that we've been on in interest. Jan Martell, when we published Life of Pine in 2002, that was the first time we had published everything of Jan since then. And we don't think of publishing books, we think of

publishing authors. So we like going on a long journey and going where they want to. As long as we think it's a sensualing for them to go on, we're very happy to say, you know what, this isn't working for us or maybe this is not going to be the next thing you should publish. And I think it's always important to have those honest and kind of frank conversations. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy using one of Squarespace's best in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus.

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Launch an online store. The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. Tell me about the editor's role in a book project in the extremes from the least hands on to the most hands on.

Well, the least hands on is literally an author is so skilled at the kind of self-editing and stuff that they deliver something to you where you barely need to copy editing. It's kind of a word perfect as it were. Now that is pretty rare, even very established in the claim writers, benefit from that objective perspective, the particularly an editor. Sometimes agents, some agents were editors and play a very important role in that early shaping of a manuscript. And there are other books where the authors really want a need that kind of editorial back and forth with an editor they trust who's got real skills in being able to take that step back which the author can't and look at the overall structure and say, you know what, you need to introduce that character earlier or this scene needs explaining more fully and it, some books get almost rewritten as part of that thing and that they, they look so

different the final book gets published from say the first draft that an author delivered. Some authors don't deliver first drafts, they'll do multiple drafts before they deliver it, that doesn't mean it doesn't then need a lot of work, but it really varies enormously and I think it's one of the hidden aspects of publishing is the role that an editor can play in the actual creation of the thing that you read, because normally you just think, well, it's the book, it's got the author's name on it. You might read the acknowledgments and they'll say, thank you so much for to X or Y who really played a real role in the kind of gestation and kind of evolution of this book's being.

It just, it really messes. It varies enormously. It's a kind of, and also there's sometimes an author needs a lot more work with help on one book and another book just comes more easily. So it's, there's no kind of rules there. I think it's in a way it's beautifully varied and to me it doesn't. All that matters is the fine book. It doesn't matter how you get there and whether an editor plays a really pivotal role in it or not. Frank would have just needed it. It's whatever's needed exactly. I can remember Pico higher telling me a story that one of his most popular books he wrote on the suggestion

of his editor. His editor said, I think this would be a good book for you to write on this topic and he wrote and it was wildly successful. And I tend not to think of authors in that way as someone who might almost take an assignment but it can work that way as well. Yeah, one of the projects that I'm really most proud of that we created at Cannegate was we called it the Cannegate Myths Project and it's spanned out of a project I did in 98 called the Pocket Cannons where we broke up the Bible into individual

books and commissioned in all instances bar one secular writers, in fact bar two secular writers to introduce that and we use the King James version of the Bible because of its incredible kind of Shakespearean mystery qualities in terms of the language. And having published the second series of books, I felt like I was scraping the barrel of the Bible. We'd done like 20 of them. There's only so many books you want to reprint from the Bible. It actually can be read as works of literature, and the four gospels are great examples of

that, as is Genesis, as is Ecclesiastes, as is Psalms. and I was thinking, you know, when I was young, it wasn't the Bible that interested me, it was myths. I was obsessed by Greek myths, particularly as a kid, but I like the other mythological kind of traditions, but the Greek myths just captured my imagination as a kind of young boy. And I was thinking, you know, there was something dissatisfying about the Bible project. We got these amazing people involved, but they just wrote a 2000 word introduction. What about if I went to an author and said, look, you can take whatever myth you like and retell it in whatever way you choose, have 25,000 words and make of it what you will. In a kind of way of, there was almost an extension of what's going on anyway with Miss, which

is it's the constant retelling of stories, you know, so that's, they're so primary in our way of kind of connecting with others and reinventing stories and retelling them. There's no set version of the myth of Eda Pus, you know, it's a myth that has been told multiple times and will be told multiple times in the future. So in this instance, rather than going to authors first,

I went to a bunch of publishers I've been getting to know around the world and said, look, I want a commission in the first instance, half a dozen of these books, are you in? And I just went to a brilliant publisher called Salamander in Spain, went to Ritzoli in Italy, went to Flamari on France, went to Cennot, in Canada, went to Grove in America, text in Australia, B a cabay in Holland, and by the time, before I'd even commissioned a book, I had basically ten publishers saying, on board, Louis Schwartz, a company at Asletras in Brazil. So when I then went to the author and said, look, this is something I'm hatching. Can I get it still pretty unknown as a publishing entity then? I was saying,

look, I want to commission you to do this book, and you're going to be published by a company at Asletras in Brazil by Salamander in Spain, by Kannoff in Canada, by, you know, Berlin, Vellag in Germany. And the first person I asked to do this was, I think it was the first, was Margaret Atwood, who was immediately, like, I love this idea. She retold the myth of Penelope in Odysseus. But I'd call it the Penelope ad and Philip Paulman took the myth of Jesus and wrote this one book called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ which is brilliant. David Grossman took the myth of Sampson and wrote a book called Lions Honey which was just beautiful. Jeanette Winston took the myth of Atmos and Heracles and called it Weight and Caron Armstrong. I've been in an event with one of our old school Richard Holloway used to be the Bishop of Edinburgh.

I was with Michael Ondarchi, who I'd been hoping I might persuade to do one of these books, and it's a book about the Buddha, because Karin had just written a book about it, and Richard at one point, right at the beginning of the event, said, Karin, I'd love you for the sake of the audience, too, just to kind of expand upon your kind of definition between Mythos and Logos. And she then goes into this incredible riff about myth. And I'm with Michael, I've just been telling about my myth series before, and I'm thinking kind of, any something I'm making want to do, I think kind of car and just explaining

why the myths and the retelling of myths are so important. So straight after that event, I'm in the kind of year to the end of the festival, and I go to car and I'm still, so I'm working on this Miss project. Would you write a short history of myth for us, not a specific retelling of the fest, and I go to Karen Armstrong, and so I'm working on this Miss Project, would you write a short history of myth for us, not a specific retelling of one myth, but actually give us a, you know, where kind of storytelling animals is one of the lines from it, which is not a particularly new phrase or idea

because it's been around for centuries that we are storytelling animals. But anyways, she wrote a book about a short history of myth. So that whole series, I commissioned writers to do something which they wouldn't have otherwise done. And in the case of Margaret Atwood, so we launched the series. I start working on it at Frankfurt in 1999, is when I start having these conversations with these publishers. And then I start going to authors, I think in 2000, we launched the series five years later at the Frankfurt Bookware with 40 publishers around the world

launching The series in their own countries. It was incredibly moving. We had a big press conference with Grossman Atwood Armstrong, Jeanette Winstson We had all the internet publishers. There was media TV like incredible kind of launch And then there's a Margaret Atwood. We'll ends up doing a whole tour with the other authors, actually, but then she ends out, we come back to London for a kind of closing event in London at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank.

And afterwards we're having dinner. And I say to Peggy at one point, he say, this was an incredible gift. You agreeing to retell this story, the story of Panopinodicious for our series. And, you know, I just wanted to say thank you because all the writers were good who were part of it. Having Margaret Outwood as part of that launch, she not only had real international kind

of appeal, critically and commercially, she's a big writer. She's someone who sits in that interesting space that not all literary writers do. Anyway, she was very modest and sweet. I'm just so happy you asked me to do it, because I really enjoyed running this book and I loved this book and I wouldn't have written it if you hadn't asked me. She claims I jumped out from behind a gorse bush

before she'd had sufficient coffee in the morning and uses a kind of mythological trope to how I managed to persuade her when she was vulnerable and disarmed to say yes. And had her morning coffee. I had her morning coffee and it was, again, it was up in Edinburgh during a book festival up there, maybe in 2000, 2001 that I jumped behind this gorse bush, kind of lowkey-like.

Tell me about Edinburgh, I've never been. Paint me a picture of Edinburgh. It's surrounded by seven hills, and it's got incredible kind of topographical kind of variety within it. The kind of the castle is on a hill right in the middle of the city. You've got this old volcano called Arthur's Sea,

which is kind of a counterpoint to it, which is probably a mile and a half away, which is magnificent. Got these things called the Sosby Crags on the front of it. It's like just visually stunning. You can see down to the sea from there. So it's not on the sea Edinburgh, kind of leaf and portobello are the kind of the satellite tells. Many minutes to the sea driving. If you're going down to the east, it's probably 15 minutes. It's close, 20 minutes. And then if you look up the other way, you've got the Firth of

4th, which is, you know, you go over the Fourth Road Bridge and that takes you into five. So you're kind of on this interesting corner in the northeast tip of the southern bit of Scotland before you get into basically going north up into the Highlands and beyond. So geographically, it's set in this stunning place. Architecturally, it's very old. Bits of it are very old. And the new town, as they call it, was actually built in the very late 18th,

early 19th century. That's called the new town, because it's in contrast to the old town, which is the really ancient part of the city, which is where Cunninghate's offices, we're just off the Royal Mile. The Royal Mile literally goes from the castle. It's a beautiful street,

goes for a mile down to Hollywood Palace. And would that be a thousand years old, like that part? The castle, I think, bits of the castle are like, go back to like 600 or 700, so like 1,600, 1,500 years old. So you've got a real sense of history when you're in there. But it doesn't feel urban, doesn't feel like a big city and so because it's small-ish,

you can, the populations, I think only half a million or something or 600,000, you can walk. And it's spread out a bit. Ultimately, it's spreader out a bit with its suburbs and stuff, but actually what I would regard as Edinburgh, the St. Fred and Brote is, you know, you could walk really from all the key places in the centre-end, from one place down there,

not more than half an hour. So it feels quite compact as a city, and it's got wavly station, the trains go right through the middle of it, which is kind of cool, it's an all railway station, and it's kind of... I think, underground, or do you see them? You can see them from certain points. It's got another beautiful hill called Carton Hill,

which has got almost like this unfinished, a croplice on it, which is like they didn't finish it, which is kind of magnificent. So it's got this kind of neoclassical part to some of its architecture from the kind of 19th century, but it's a lot of cobbled streets, which is nice, not all, and like in many cities in the UK, terrible things was done in the 60s and 70s where they just knocked down beautiful crescents and stuff to put these kind of ugly monstrosities up for reasons that no one can really understand now. It seems kind of brutal what they did.

But it's retained a lot of its character and it's a capital city. It's got two brilliant, three great galleries, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art. It's got a lot of things going for it, and I think it's a truly kind of international city. It feels lovely being out of London as well. It was for me, I think, a very important part of what fed my kind of outlet being, I think being an independent publisher, being out of London, being away from what felt like the kind of mainstream on certain types of ways.

I felt Admiral Space to kind of experiment and do things there, but also, you know, independence of freedom is so connected, those two ideas. And I think for us as a kind of publishing force, I think being independent and the freedoms that come with that have enabled us to do things that I don't think we would have done if we were in London. I think it's fundamentally altered our our being as a publishing in-house as a group of people as a collective because of where we're situated. There's also an amazing tradition of Scottish writers and Scottish. So it's rich in other ways too, but I think the very fact that we are out of

London and it just reinforced our independence in a way. One of the people I spoke to who works at Canning Gate in London though came from the Edinburgh office said, people in London look inward, people from Edinburgh look outward. I think that's so true and I'm so glad I lived in Edinburgh for 15 years. I didn't move down to London until 2004, so in fact, yeah. It's one of the things that growing up in a big city has almost a perocule view of this is how it is. You talk about it in a number of the podcasts you did when talking about your journey and being in Long Island and coming to the city and the kind of, first of all, the attractions of the city on one level, but also the different perspective it gave you.

They're not the freedom to not fall into the single vision of this is the way things are done. Yeah, because I think there are multiple visions in any city of the way things are done, but there was something it's more to do with the kind of, there's so much going on within the city of London or within any other big capital cities that the need or the feeling of the need to look out with is just, is diminished somehow. And I think that point you make that this colleague of mine said is something I felt really strongly. I think my natural engagement with publishers from all around the world was partly fueled by being in Edinburgh than London. I'm not saying I wouldn't have wanted to have relationships

with all sorts of publishers around the world. If I was in London. I'm not saying I wouldn't have wanted to have relationships with all sorts of pubs around the world. If I was in London, I'm in there. But I think it was part of my out-quality. It was the outlook, it's a different mentality. So I think, we've been there for 50 years in Edinburgh, and it will always be, cannegade's heart will be in that city.

So for me, and for the reasons we talked about earlier, it's the city where, because of living with Charlie my first year, and meeting my, because of living with Charlie my first year and meeting my, Whitney my first wife, my first two children being born there and there's so many reasons why that city has, I feel I owe it a huge amount, it's, it's enabled me to grow in ways that are probably different from any other, if I'd grown up in any other city and gone through my kind of early adulthood in, in any other city. I think I would have probably possibly been a done different things, you know. LMNT. Element electrolytes.

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And stay salty with Elements Electrolytes. L-M-N-T. L-M-N-G. You mentioned earlier going from Chocolate City and the reference to the White House to eventually publishing Obama's book. Being an independent publisher, how did you come to publisher Obama's book? Well, that book has a very interesting publishing history, so it was published in 1994.

Dreams from my father was published. And this was pre-politics. He was just starting to get involved in kind of local politics in Illinois, Chicago area, but he had been this, he had been a Harvard Law School he'd been to. And he'd, anyway, he was commissioned to write this memoir in his early 30s. Publishers the book, it has a modicum of success in America and then goes out of print. And then he gives his famous speech in 2004 at the Democratic nomination where he's this kind of young senator from Illinois. And he gives this speech that kind of lit the world up, particularly in America. People are like, wow, who is this guy? And so someone, a smart editor working at Crown called Rachel Plamen.

She was like, she was googling around Barack Obama. And so I was like, we published his memoir fucking ten years ago. And it was out of print. So they reprinted it. And I have a very close publishing partner in Australia called Michael Haywood runs a great independent called text which can negate own 70% of for a chunk of time. We were in indirect business in that kind of way for seven-year period. But we've always co-published a book together. He did the myth series,

he did the Bible series. We've shared writers and books since we first met in 1997 at a book fair in Chicago. And I was actually in the Bayer, I was in Berkeley at a sales conference because we used to work with very closely with Grover Atlantic in America publishing our books in the States. So I've been doing this sales conference with P.D.W. and Berkeley. And I remember I'm walking in San Francisco and I've just had some great lunch eating amazing oysters and stuff and I'm walking along and I remember I'm walking in San Francisco and I've just had some great lunch eating amazing oysters and stuff and I'm walking along and I get a call out of the blue from Michael and I'm outside a bookshop where he calls me just by complete round of chance. He calls me and says, hey Jamie, hey, Dane, is this now a good time to come to the absolute?

I'm just struggling in San Francisco and he's like, I've just read this memoir by this guy called Barack Obama. And I don't know if you've heard of him, but I don't know where he's going, but this is a beautiful memoir. And I really want to buy the rights, the Australian New Zealand rights, and it's not being published in the UK either. And at this stage, we still,

we owned a big chunk of the business, not that he was needing to get kind of my approval. It was simply just excited about it. Excited, and you should read it. As I'm talking to him, kind of my approval. It was simply just excited about it. Excited, and you street it. As I'm talking to him, I kid you not. They've got a cutout of Barack Obama in the window of the bookshop that I'm standing outside. And I'm like, you're not gonna believe this.

And the Audacity of Hope would just come out at this point, which was his next book. That was the phrase he used at the Democratic nomination. It was the Audacity of Hope, was this thing that captured people's imaginations. And I say to Michael, no kidding, I'm looking at Barack Obama right now. I walk in, I get a copy of both the new book, The Audacity of Hope and dreams from my father, read dreams from my father on the way back to the UK.

We end up buying the rights for both books. So we originate, The New book, the audacity of hope, but then do dreams for my father, and then he declares he's gonna run against Hillary. And to begin with, it's like, well, that's great that he is, that'll be good for the book, but no expectation that you can have. You can possibly kind of take on the Clinton machine

and like, and he was black and all the reasons, but for reasons that have obviously been well-documented, what he did and at a grassroots level. And interestingly, I've always thought, if he hadn't written that book, he wouldn't have gotten the White House. Because by the time the election actually happened, that book had some like four million copies in America. And if you read that book, you get a sense of that person that is very attractive that someone who's open and I, there were a lot of factors that led to him getting into the White House, but I wouldn't, I would say it was a significant factor that memoir in people trusting him, believing him and

realizing this is someone who's got a vision for this country that is a vision that I kind of subscribe to as well. So that's how that happened. It was just one of these, you know, serendipitous things, very fortunate when I look back on it and obviously then became president and the book ended up selling close on two million copies for it. So it was like we didn't buy it with that expertise. We bought it because it was a brilliant memoir. Yes. Yeah, no expectation, of course. And that's a very, there's nothing wrong with having aspirations and hopes for a book when you buy them. You need to, in a way, you have to have a kind of vision of how, but that vision is not

quantified simply in sales. It's like you've got a vision of how you want to put this book into the world. Whether it then takes, is out of your control at the end of the day, was only, you only got a little bit of impact on that. At the end of the day, other forces, not least readers, take over. Yes. Tell me about how publishing has changed over the course of your career. Wow, that's an interesting question.

And not an easy one to answer succinctly, other than to say it's changed a lot. Kind of the digital revolution is just one aspect of what's happened and all the not only in terms of formats because the ebook didn't exist when I joined publishing, audiobooks did exist but on cassettes this was even pre-CD and thinking or maybe CDs we just just happen when the point is audio was not a format that was what it's become. But significantly, we didn't have online retailers. And so Amazon didn't exist, can I think Jeff Bezos?

I think Jeff Bezos was at book expo America. I think it first time he kind of exhibited Amazon there. I think, maybe I'm getting the decade wrong, but I think it was 2004. Maybe it was earlier than that, but the point is he had a little stall and he was kind of, he was just like an exhibitor at the book expo America, no one who made him then thought this was guy was going to have the impact he did, not just on bookselling, but on commerce and e-commerce and the internet didn't really exist, you know, but social media, as we know, it didn't exist. So I'm not saying these things have all changed publishing completely, but they've all played significant

effects, both positive and negative, on the way books get red, the way books get found. Kind of, it's been a, it's the cliche of the double-edged sort. There's been so many positives, I think, that have come about from this. And there's, I'm questioning it being negatives as well. And, you know, I was talking with my dear friend and one of my many mentors in publishing, just dinner a couple of nights ago, a man called Morgan Entrachini who runs Grover, Atlantic, in New York. And we were willing to chat about one point. It's not something that's new to me, but just kind of, Morgan just articulating it again. When I first met him in the in 95, the literary landscape in America was one that had most

newspapers had a dedicated book section to them. There was the discourse around books with in-print media was very significant. It's been decimated. You've got the New York Times book review, you've got books occasionally get reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and stuff, but there's a tiny fraction now of what used to exist. But he created as a result something called the literary hub, LitHub, which is now become using obviously digital technology as an online platform, get something like 7 million visits a week for, you know, articles that they post and they're kind of trawling the, what's going on around the world, really interesting articles to do with literature or stuff, putting them up there. So it's an amazing free kind of resource for people.

What's it called? It's called LitHub. LitHub. That's the short-hand literary hub, LitHub. And he started it with no idea of where it was going to go. But it was almost because of this diminishing of the kind of discourse around books in the traditional media, he felt something needed to be a kind of corrective to that. So he created Lit Harbazer as a kind of spin-off from Groved Atlantic. So that's a good example of where what's happened has been both good and bad in the last 30 years, kind of the diminishing of traditional book coverage in newspapers.

It's sad, I think, because it's made it harder to publish certain kinds of books and break new writers in the way that papers could really help that. But then podcasts and websites like this, social media, there are all sorts of things that have provided a kind of account about to some of the things that have made it harder to publish. There are lots of things that made it easier to publish, easier to get word out about a book and actually give less the gatekeepers of the newspapers, how all the broad, the traditional media had such a control over it. Now it feels like there's a much more open playing field in some ways. As an independent publisher, I feel that where it's a good time to be an independent publisher. Also because the broader industry has just, it's consolidated a lot,

you know, as, and this Simon and Schuster acquisition by Penguin Real House was actually not backed by the DOJ in America just recently, but that would have been yet another massive piece of kind of conglomerization. But you've basically got five, you know, super groups in the English language. There's Bertelsman, those penguins around the house, and hundreds of imprints you've got hashet, the Frenchone that has, you know, is a little brown and a lot of publishing in the US.

And you've got hop Collins, which is a kind of another of these huge groups. And you've got the Holt Spring group, that owns McMillan and Piccadour and all of that. And Simon and Schuster is the other one. And kind of these entities didn't exist 40 years ago. You were just seeing the beginnings of the kind of, the acquiring of independent publishers

and bolting them together to create these kind of bigger businesses and all the kind of benefits of scale that can be enjoyed if you're a bigger business. So that's just increased and increased over the last 30 years. But this new independence popping up and I think the independence that are still around, there is some really kind of in Britain which is the market. I know most there of this favour and there's Serpent's Tale profile and there's Granter and there's Aslan, there's Pushkin and there's Atlantic and there's there are a number of independence who are doing and they're selling their stuff, they're selling their stuff, they're selling their stuff, they're selling their stuff. And then, you know, you're like,

you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're focused on your sharp and you're kind of careful about what you publish and how you publish it, I think It's actually a really exciting time to be a publisher. I certainly feel as excited now as I have at any point in the 31 years I've been at Calhoun.

How have bookstores changed? Well that again is an interesting thing where in the UK All the bookchains the kind of specialized bricks and mortar bookchains have disappeared apart from waterstains. The only other one that's on the high street that's a chain is W.H. Smiths and they sell stationary and all sorts. They're not really a bookseller. I do have book sections.

They're often in airports as well. Yeah, and often in airports, they're significant there. But all the other chains that used to be around, they've all been hoovered out partly by waterstains, but also because of Amazon. Yeah, Amazon has had a very negative impact on the traditional bookshop. The ones that kind of waterstones am balanced and nobler now owned by the same company run by this guy, James Dawn, on both sides, who started life as an independent bookseller, running

Dawne's in Marlburn, High Street, and then he built a small group which still exists of six or seven independent bookstores or part of the Dorns chain. And partly due to him, he's turned both of those businesses around and kind of because they were really flailing in the Nazis and they didn't know how to compete with Amazon and what What James did, which was so good, and it's what all the great independent booksellers do,

is they made a virtue of their independence, their relationship with their customers, their curation of the space. All the things that actually Amazon are not very good at doing. And Amazon's great, you want to buy a book, you already know what it is, but for discovery, it's not. That's so interesting that Amazon has grown into, what it's grown into,

starting with the just books. It is, isn't it? Because while we love them, Phil Neesh compared to everything else. And the fact that the entire Amazon business was began with that... Just books. But I think Bezos has talked about that. Coming about books is like other kind of perishable goods and style fits,

like, first of all, in the warehousing of them, they're relatively high priced for the amount of space they take up and that they as inventory to sit on it, you know, I think it has a kind of longer life than some inventory. It doesn't have to be turned around as quickly you've got. And also he recognized that there was no competition for what he, I think that branding was the biggest bookshop in the world. And it was a really simple but true proposition that he had 250,000 titles in his inventory to begin with and a big bookshop,

a big bookshop has like 50,000. And often a bookshop will only have 4,000. So he recognized an opportunity and a very kind of stay. What you lose with that scale is the curation. Absolutely. There's the curation, the table of the new releases. And they don't care about curation, Amazon. There was a time when they started. They had brilliant editors who were doing Amazon staff picks. We're actual individuals. We're reading books, highlighting them within the ecosystem

of Ammon and saying, this is our book of the month, it's, you know, and you'd actually get a person writing something really smart and incisive, saying, this is a book worth your attention. And I think they just say, oh, we don't really need that. It's like a cost that we can write, you know, it's also an opportunity for someone who wants to start a business to be an overlay on the Amazon fulfillment center of, this is my independent bookshop online, my digital independent bookshop. Well, you know the whole bookshop.org, you know about bookshop.org, which is a fascinating online bookselling kind of platform, which started this guy, Andy Hunter,

again, Morgan, who started Lit Hub, runs grover's, involved in helping Andy set that up too. And he launched it literally six weeks before the first lockdown happened. And what he did, which is very good is he's, he basically harnessed all the independent booksellers in the country. So they kind of harnessed all the orders online from these bookshops. You can have their own website, do their own fulfillment, but they really engage with the independence. And then they split a portion of all the profits that come from bookshop to all amongst all the independent booksellers. So it's kind of, it's created a central hub. So they can do the fulfillment of books that the independent

bookshop is neither, either neither tooled up in terms of the actual dispatch or even just the stock to be able to do it. So they have the equivalent of Amazon type, site, inventory of stock. So you have a bookshop in Minnesota, you know, if you go via bookshop.org, and you're a customer of Minnesota Bookshop, you find your book, and then you end up buying it on bookshop.org.

Loads of authors have been really supportive of it, so they're brilliant lists from authors of 10 books that they love, that they, so it's really curated as a space and it's harnessing all the independent books, sellers kind of kind of communities and it's then sharing profits from it throughout the whole independent book selling sector. So it's created a very interesting alternative to Amazon and the timing on its launch was just incredible. So I think Morgan, he was telling me over dinner that when he and Andy were talking about projections for their first year, they'd, I think, Andy would do like four and a half million dollars or something like that.

And Morgan was talking to a friend of his at Ingraham's saying, what do you think of this? I think it's maybe, both Phil and he was saying, maybe it's more like, little hides, probably like three and a half or something. They did $41 million turnover in their first 12 months. So it kind of got off to this incredible start, which was almost a proof of it of concept, helped by the timing, obviously, but nevertheless, and then they've started bookshopped at organ of the UK,

which has become a, so I was big as it is in America for obvious reasons, it's just much smaller market, but it's become a very important alternative to Amazon for online retailing. And Wadastons.com is now got it shit together, which he didn't for the first. You know what Wadastons did for the first five? I think for the first five,

possibly even like seven years of Wadastons.com, their online telling books. They allowed Amazon to do all the full film and keep all the data for every transaction that took pace on the Waterston's website. It's like, because they, first of all, they were slightly dismissive of Amazon. They didn't need Amazon,

we're ever going to kind of threaten their core business of book shops, physical book shops. And they thought online was just a small add-on. So they gave it literally, but ended up becoming their art rival. They gave them their entire online business. Seven years, just amazing. Yeah, do you know the clothing store the gap?

Of course, okay. So the gap started as a seller of Levi's jeans. That's what they were known for. If you want Levi's, you've got to the gap everywhere. And then at one point whoever was running the gap decided, why don't we just make our own jeans? Why are we buying them from Libas? And then one day, all of the people who are going to buy their Libas, all of a sudden the jeans, and now they look the same, but now they're gap jeans.

I didn't know that. That's a... I didn't know that. That's a... It's wild. These relationships that we think of as solid in business, there are a lot of pieces involved. Yeah. And we maybe exhausted the kind of subject of, is solid in business. There are a lot of pieces involved. Yeah. And we maybe exhausted the kind of subject of,

although it's, as I said, it's a lot has changed in, in the last 30 years in the publishing landscape. But the change of formats has been interesting. And it's interesting how there was a point about 10 years ago when the e-book was really, or maybe even 13 years ago, 2009, 2010, I think was when the kind of e-book format started to really get kind of traction and it wasn't just the Kindle and Amazon, it was like Sony had their e-book reader and there were other things. It grew so fast

so quickly that people were like, if it continues at this rate, basically print publishing as we know it and the reading of the physical book, and all these doomsayers saying, it's only a question of time before everyone goes digital and turn up the utter nonsense. It actually plateaued after about three or four years and is now, I think, slightly declining ebook sales. So it's kind of interesting as I think as an overall part of the market. I don't think they're more than 15% now. And it might even be more like 12 or one point they were up at 20. And for some areas of genre of fiction, in particular, you know, for crime and thrillers

and romance, kind of very disposable things, I think they have a, they do have a bigger market share. But what's, also there's a, aren't getting exhausted looking at a screen. Completely, that's part of what's happening. Yeah, but this has happened. I also think publishers around the world have raised their game when it comes to the physical book, the production values, the amount of time

spending on the typography, the covers, the cover finishes so that the thing itself becomes even more distinctive than a digital version. And I think the map of a book and your ability to navigate it is totally different with a physical book in the way you can, you know, it's a physical object. So it feels like it's got a cartography

that doesn't exist with a digital version of it because it's actually, it's three-dimensional. So you can't go into the book in literary. I think you go into the story in a profoundly different way when you're reading a physical book as opposed to something on screen. Welcome to the house of Macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious, super food, sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of Omega-7, linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias, art healthy and brain boosting fats. Macadamias, paleo-friendly,

keto and plant-based macadamia. No wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMOs, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar, the house of macadamias. I roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Goat and white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadam's dot com slash tetra. Russell Brandt, who you've published, told me a story. He said he was having a conversation with you and he was referencing a book

and he said in the book that he was referencing was a self-help book. And you said to him, all books are self-help books. I believe that. It's a great way of seeing it. Yeah, I also think every reader is a bookseller. Yeah. Which is something I've always been passionate about. Every reader is a bookseller. If you don't get that, then you're missing something very important about the role you have and engaging readers on behalf of the writers whose books you're responsible for taking care of. You have a real responsibility and duty as a publisher to look after those stories and to take those stories to people who can evangelize and share those stories more widely. I don't know if we've talked

about something I initiated in 2011, I did it called World Book Night where we ended up giving a million books to a million people in one day. Oh, beautiful. I got every publisher in the UK involved and they were not every but there were 25 titles in the thing. We printed 40,000 copies of each. Have you decided on what the books to give? I got a group, I think we had a group of about 15 people on this committee to help us

decide to come up with an amazing mix of 25 books. We had 2,000 libraries and bookshops who were involved as pick-up points for the givers who each got 50 copies of a book that they loved, which they were then encouraged to give out in their community to anyone who they thought would, you know, it was amazing, Rick. We launched a Trafalgar book square with 7,000 people on a night in March 2011. And Nick Cave performed. He read the beginning of Lolita, Margaret Outwood, read from the blind assassin. John LeCarrie closed the show reading the last opening lines of the spy who came in from the cold. Tracey Shevalier did this incredible reading from Beloved. Sarah Waters was there, David

Nichols, Stanley Tucci, DBC Pierre. It was a Graham Norton, was the compare for the night. So that's how we kicked it off, and then the next day, yeah, a million books were given to a million people. And you know what started that was Margaret Atwood, when we were having this dinner about the myths, and I I said that was a beautiful gift. You're agreeing to retell a myth for the myths. She said, I was glad you asked me, I would have done it. Do you know the gift by Lewis Hyde and I'd never heard of this book and she said, this is one of my, I've given more copies of this book away than any other book ever written, including any of the books I've written. And she said, you've got to make me a promise.

I'm going to send you this book and if you love it as much as I think you will, you've got to make me a promise. I'm going to send you this book, and if you love it as much as I think you will, you've got to reprint it. And I was like, well, that's pretty easy. You promised to give me a lot of commitment. So I said, sure, we ended up publishing this book in 2008. I think it was. People who had never read it before, I say, this myth game is amazing quote for it.

David Foster Wallace wrote this beautiful thing for the book, Jack Edden. Anyway, when we paperbacked the book in the spirit of Lewis's book, which is about the kind of intrinsic nature of the gift that makes something that is given different from something that's been born this part of a kind of commercial transaction. I was to my colleagues look when we published the paperback let's give, we'll do it on the South Bank in London, I'm lowly in road number, let's give 500 copies of the paperback away to whoever, you know, there's just like, let's stop, you know, you've got to have someone who, the person is giving any way has to be something about the book. Otherwise, it just feels like you're giving out kind

of one of those Bible, jovers, witnesses, kind of literature. And we did that in 2009 when the paperback came out and I can't 100% prove that it's why the gift of the paperback did so well, but the book ended up doing so well in paperback for us. I feel by short circling the process by which books actually get read. I'm putting them into bookshops. Someone's got to go into the bookshop. They've got to pay money for it. They've got to find it amongst the sea of books by short circuitting it by going straight to people and saying,

this is a book I want you to have. Read this. Read this. We did something which I think directly impacted, not the entire reason the book sold, but it had a very beneficial impact on it. So I've always believed that one of the smartest thing you can do is a publisher, so I've always given so many, I never travel anywhere without books on me. And I give people books randomly on the street, as you've seen from some of those photos I've sent you with the creative act. And when you give someone something like that

in that way with sincerity, with no expectation of anything in return, it does something beautiful between the interaction, between two humans. And then the thing that you've given is invested with something that it didn't have pride in being given in that way. So this was the thinking that's at the heart of Lewisides the gift, which informed the paper backing of the gift, which then created

World Book Night, which was, you know, it's still going. It's a kind of initiative that I'm so proud of being part of. But I kind of, it was my idea originally, and I then brought this one, Julia Kingsford and I really kind of honed the thinking together and then brought a whole of the kind of publishing industry in the UK on board with it. Come about letters live. Oh God, where does Star come? Come about Bill Letter's books first. Yeah, we published in September 13, two books about letters.

One was called Letters of Note. The subtitle is Correspondence, deserving of a wider audience. Always loved that subtitle of short. It's great. Curated by this guy, Sean Usher, started a blog in 2009, became really popular this blog

because he posted Correspondence, deserving of wider audience. He ended up getting some incredible traction with his kind of blog. He ended up finding out about him through the blog. And do you find out about him through the blog? No, I found out about him through a friend of mine called John Litchson who started a crowd funding, really interesting publishing model.

Almost going back to the 19th century, when often books were subscribed to before they were published. You became, basically, you crowd-funded the publication of Alexander Pope's poetry or whatever. Now, this is how a lot of books came to be. So they were kind of printed toward a 500 copies of the first printing to 500 people at all who played all-painted guinea or whatever it was to do it.

So he used this model, obviously harnessing the power of the internet. First, we'll ever signed up with Sean Asher's letters of note because it already had this kind of online kind of presence and following. And John who I knew pretty well, he'd been at Harville press the independent publishing house. In fact, at first when he was head office back in the day of Waterstance, we ended up publishing that book together and we did another brilliant book by Simon Garfield called To the Letter, which was a kind of a narrative non-history

of the kind of the evolution of the letter within culture, within society, around the world. And I did this put this show on called Letters Live, which we did in a small little theatre in West London called the Tabernacle. And Nick Cave is in the original volume Letters of Note. We published a very brilliant, funny, memorable letter about to MTV. He's just been nominated for the Best Male Artist Award. Partly, well only because of this duet he's done with Kylie Minogue. He thinks first of all it's ridiculous that I'm being nominated for it. They've never even played a bad seedstrike on MTV or barely any. So he writes a letter basically explaining why he doesn't want to be considered for the best male artist award

He has his memorable phrase my muse is not a horse. I'm in a race with them when she scares easily And so I called up Nick and said look I'm thinking about doing this event Where I'm gonna get people to read letters on stage Would you come and read your letter to mtv? And he was like sure I'd love to read that letter And I said well if you're gonna come if I get a piano on stage, will you play your son love letter as well? Because that would be beautiful. I love that song. That's gorgeous song. And he said yes. And then the next person I contact was Julian Anderson, who I happened to just know in London. And there's a letter from Catherine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy in the book that was written, I think 15 years after Spencer Tracy

died. And it starts dear spence. And it's just this beautiful letter from Catherine Hepburn to the love of her life just saying, I'm still missing you and you know, just reminiscing about him and their relationship. And I sent that to Jillian and she immediately was like, this is an amazing letter. I've got to read it. So suddenly I had Nick Cave and Jillian

answered with the first two to say yes. And it all just grew from there. You know, we ended up putting on that show. Benedict Cumberbatch took part in that, so did Juliette Stevenson, so did Neil Gaiman. We had about a cast of 12, I think. And then it just evolved from there and off. Three of the first four shows Benedict did.

So I went to Benedict and his partner Adam, who'd also been his TV and film producing partner, and said, look, I want to move this concept out of Kanagay and as a standalone business led us live, do you want to come in as partners? And so Sean who's the curator of the leders of notebooks and the website and Sonny March which is the name of Benedict and Adam's TV and film company in Kanagay, it's a kind of joint venture between the three of us And where the next shows are the Royal Albert Hall on November 16, sold 5,000 tickets in a day. And we don't announce who's ever going to perform.

Amazing. So you get to come to one, but I can't wait for you to experience one. Because it's a beautiful show because letters are these incredible little time capsules. And kind of our whole, when we're producing the shows, you want to take people through the emotional ringer, we want to make them cry, we want to make them laugh, we want to transport them to places they've not been to make them think about things in a way that they've never thought about them and let us allow you to do that in a very exciting way. We've always had charities involved in every single show we've ever done, we've raised money for charity, we work a lot with literacy charities, which is something that's very dear to my heart.

But also this great organisation could choose love, who do just really important work with refugees around the world. They were the beneficiaries of the last Royal Abbot Hall Show, last autumn, and they're going to be the beneficiaries of the show this November. And now Monblanc has become our global sponsor for Letters Live, which is a lovely fit. So it's one of the other hats I wear beyond running Canningay is being a kind of a key part of Letters Live. I love it. Beautiful.

And it sounds like the kind of thing that there could be more live events related to reading and related to literature. You're proving that the written word performed live is a value. Yeah, and other people are doing it. I think we're doing it in a very specific way with letters live, but as or letters live as I sometimes like to call it as well, but it's letters live. It is letters live because we bring letters back to life through the through the performance of them. But letters make up words which make up words which make up sentence which which make up books.

So, you know, letters live is actually as an overall rank, be used to doing things beyond specifically, a letter form in that kind of, in that kind of more reductive sense. So it's, I've sometimes thought we could do things that didn't say have to involve the performance of letters. We always have music as part of every show, because that's an important part of the journey

that we take the audience on. We always begin and end every show with a piece of music, so it's not just letters, but yeah, the bringing kind of performance of the poets have been doing it for a long time in a very exciting way. But there are very few and far between it. I don't know of any poetry events that are happening at the Albert Hall. Not on a regular basis. The guy Matt Todd there just yesterday we having an exchange about that portrait of Tuma, I was saying. What he's done with Purge and about, we should do a one-on-shive the Royal Album band. And Michael Horowitz did this famous thing in the 60s at the Royal

Abel Hall, the poetry Olympics, which had Alan Ginsberg out, was like this incredible pact. And I think your right letters lie to just show the appetite for this for audiences. And I think poetry is another brilliant format of writing that really lends itself to performance. And because of its often short form nature, to this kind of a collective show where you get a number of poems read, like you get a number of letters, by different people. So I'm... Yeah. tell me how you came to publish the peanuts. As a kid, the Observer magazine at the back would always print one of those kind of landscape peanuts cartoons, not the kind of single strips,

but like three columns. So as a kid, I would literally would cut out the kind of thing. And my wallpaper and my bedroom was made up of peanuts cartoons. I was obsessed by snoopies. A. I like Woodstock and other whole crowd. But you know, out of Snoopy as King. Snoopy as King at Woodstock is a very, for me, the kind of, his little kind of court

gesture. Or, it's a Woodstock and Snoopy were important figures in my, in my kind of childhood world. So we ended up partnering with phantographics who did this incredible, the complete works of peanuts. So we joined them early on it. So we've done all 26 volumes of everything Schultz ever did and then we've done these little spin-off books.

And to me, it's just a kind of, it's more than a labor of love, they actually do really well, but there were such beautiful things to be representing to the world. I think he's, I think, Charles Schultz was a genius. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, and to be doing it here, I can't think of a better place to be having a conversation with you Rick, it's a joy and a pleasure.

Thank you. you you