Sir Stanley Unwin’s book, The Truth about Publishing, was revered when I worked briefly in that curious trade some ten years ago. I read it and received an impression of its formidable author through his rather dry prose. Here was a man who clearly had little time for fools. While excited by the book trade, he saw it as a business, not a cultural quest. He had little veneration for authors and certainly possessed no literary ambitions. Perhaps this cool commercial approach was one of the reasons for his success; he was not tempted to play the impresario to the wilder types of experimentalism as an antidote to a frustrated creativity of his own.

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