MY BACK PAGES (MY BACK PAGES: An undeniably personal history of publishing 1972-2022)

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By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin ‘The Importance of Collecting and Analyzing Data’ I‘m writing this on January 1. It’s exactly 50 years since I turned up at the side entrance of George G.Harrap & Co., at 182-184 High Holborn, London, WC2, on January 1, 1972, having been interviewed and accepted for the job of a “Young Scientific Assistant Editor.” January 1 wouldn’t become a bank holiday in England until 1974. Finally, the ability to promote a book via other media—newspapers, radio, TV, movies—is also becoming more global, either through media conglomeration (for example News Corp) or by Internet penetration (for example The Guardian or the Daily Mail digital footprint in North America). ‘A Sea Change in Trade Book Publishing’ I mean we really were a bunch of amateurs,” he said. “Today people are more professional at their expertise. For example, the publicity people are now publicity professionals, not like before. But very few people are all-rounders in publishing.” And then last year, a longtime family friend and Bloomsbury author, Tom Campbell, offered to become my Dr. Boswell. We agreed to meet a few times to see if my incoherent memories might form the basis of notes which could become sentences and paragraphs and which in turn might come together as a highly informal history of the book business in the last exciting 50 years.

MY BACK PAGES (MY BACK PAGES: An undeniably personal history MY BACK PAGES (MY BACK PAGES: An undeniably personal history

What’s it like publishing a fellow professional? If all publisher/author relationships worked like this, our lives would be much easier than my experience tells me they are.

Print in the new world is akin to the old French tradition of delivering the mail by postmen on stilts—charming but ridiculous.

My Back Pages by Richard Charkin | Goodreads

Richard Charkin’s experience as a publisher is unique among his generation. Over the past half century he has been a scientific and medical publisher, a journal publisher, a digital publisher and a general publisher. He has worked for family-owned companies, public companies and start-ups. In this memoir he uses his unrivalled experience to illustrate the profound changes that have affected the identity and practices but not the purpose of publishing. I found it fascinating and full of interest....Your early years in the business are particularly riveting to somebody who joined much later on." Antony Topping, Managing Director, Greene & Heaton Literary Agency

Meet the menschiest man in publishing

Richardson was appointed by the University of Oxford to take charge of its sprawling, unprofitable, arrogant, and inward-looking publishing, printing, and papermaking operation at a time of hyperinflation, economic recession, and overbearing trade union power. He had no significant experience of management, publishing, or business. He made no grand statements nor speeches to “rally the troops.” All this points to a sea change in trade book publishing, a change which has been signaled for decades but has been obstructed by squabbles such as EU exclusive rights and the short-term-ism of hunting the biggest possible advance as opposed to the best possible deal. Reading between the lines Charkin is aware that he was not great as a trade publisher, although it is clear that Reed the real problem was the corporate culture. Charkin’s boss at Reed, Ian Irvine raved about how the profits of consumer book publishing added up to “the square root of bugger all”, but never questioned the extraordinary extravagance of Reed at the holding company level. Irvine had a chauffeur-driven Bentley to take him to work and indeed so many other executives enjoyed similar perks that there was a drivers’ waiting room at Reed HQ to house them all. In spite of the media coverage of growth in the audiobook market it turns out that only a very few audio titles really perform well and even then the financial return after the digital retail distributors have taken their cut is disappointingly small. There are, of course, exceptions but I have to admit failure, really, in this field, although that could change significantly with the release of audio publisher Bolinda‘s audiobook edition of Delia Smith’s You Matter: The Human Solution (coming march 3). Cons and Pros We’ve published 14 titles, the bulk of them having been supported admirably by Bloomsbury’s sales, rights, and production teams and MDL’s distribution. Four have been published using IngramSpark’s self-publishing platform. I’ve managed to run the business with no full-time staff but a wonderful freelance team of editors, designers, and publicists.

MY BACK PAGES: An undeniably personal history of publishing

Charkin’s time as both head of reference and managing director at Oxford University Press was incredibly influential to the evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary. Known as “the Shark” around Oxford, Charkin cemented himself as an assertive and confident figure looking to improve both the functional and international purposes of the Press. In 1982, he pitched the idea of abandoning manual editing/publication for a more efficient, computerized editing/publishing system. By 1983, Charkin secured a deal with both IBM and ICC to get the necessary equipment and assistance for the computerization of the Dictionary. By 1984, Oxford University had approved Charkin and co.’s project, which confirmed the digitized future of the OED. Many members of the Press wondered if Charkin’s successful ruminations would lead to the end of the Print, worrying that the introduction of the “New OED” project would far exceed the popularity of the original edition. For the next five years, Charkin and co. worked tirelessly to merge the Supplements with the OED in preparation for the 1989 release of the Second Edition. Charkin and the University Press agreed that, after this Edition, they could finally begin expanding upon the long-awaited distribution of CD-ROMs containing OED text. In 1992, this was made a reality, thanks to the efforts of Charkin, alongside John Simpson, Ed Weiner, the Tim Benbow, Julia Swanell and more. The Internet was still not a public tool at this point, making CD availability a big deal for readers and editors alike. This was achieved through the project team’s painstaking effort of manually inputting the whole text of the OED, a personal choice that was made to honour the traditional print-based method. Charkin’s willingness to push the Press in a bigger and bolder direction gave the team confidence to see the digitization project through, an accomplishment that evolved the art of lexicography and paved the way for the future of online publication. If you were perfect, you’d be disgusting. Absolutely ghastly. So, we do our best to be upstanding, but we don’t always succeed.”Straight out of university, Charkin entered through the tradesman’s entrance expressly designated for employees as assistant science editor at Harraps. Smoking was de rigueur, women relegated to the typing pool, luncheon vouchers provided, letters carbon copied, and tea ladies omnipresent. Charkin would witness the emergence and obsolescence of microfilm, the fax, dictaphones, CD ROMS and the demise of the typing pool and the tea lady.

My Back Pages by Richard Charkin Title Detail: My Back Pages by Richard Charkin

Of course he includes stories about authors and books he has published and people he has worked with. But this prime purpose is to tell us through the lens of his own extraordinary experience the story of the dramatic changes of the past fifty years that have transformed the publishing industry. On these walks, I tend to think a little less practically than usual and right now I’ve been thinking about a great 20th-century CEO who may be unknown to 99.9 percent of today’s publishing industry. It’s a truism, but helping authors create their books and find their markets and share a common set of goals is immensely rewarding–when it works The book brings to life various phases of the publishing industry, with early chapters describing a time when people knew much less what they were doing – Charkin recalls being hired “purely on the basis that I had a science degree, and was young and thus inexpensive” – drank a lot more, and had ruthless editors.Charkin remembers when his employer bought the rights to Madonna’s controversial erotic photography book SEX in 1992. It was a risk that paid off, with the book selling out on the first day. I was certain I wanted to publish his book. Richard, who is an instinctive dealmaker, immediately went into negotiation mode. How much I paid for his manuscript will remain a tightly guarded secret. When it comes to negotiation, I am no rival to my author! Of course there are stories about well-known personalities he has encountered - Madonna, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Maxwell, Paul Hamlyn, Mohammed Al-Fayed and many more. But his primary purpose is to provide an insider’s account of the social, technological, commercial and geographical developments as seen through the eyes of a gifted all-round publisher who has made a very significant contribution to the profession. That was then and now we say goodbye to 2021, a revolutionary year in many ways for the publishing industry. Richard Charkin's experience as a publisher is unique among his generation. Over the past half century he has been (at different times) a scientific and medical publisher, a journal publisher, a digital publisher and a general publisher. He has worked for family-owned, publicly-owned, university-owned companies and start-ups. In this memoir he uses his unrivalled experience to illustrate the profound changes that have affected the identity and practices but not the purpose of publishing.