In 1984, when I started working at the book trade journal The Bookseller, many of the most prominent publishers of the day were within walking distance of our office near New Oxford Street. Jonathan Cape, the Bodley Head, Michael Joseph and Hodder & Stoughton were in Bedford Square. André Deutsch, publisher of Updike, Naipaul and Rhys, was in Great Russell Street. Sidgwick & Jackson, where a sales director called Nigel Newton was dreaming of his departure to set up the firm that, thirteen years later, would publish Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, occupied a warren next door to St George’s Church, Bloomsbury. William IV Street was home to Chatto & Windus, the loos of which were refuges for young, tearful publicists who had displeased the demanding managing director, Carmen Callil. 

Secker & Warburg occupied a town house in Poland Street. One day I climbed the narrow, steep, listed staircase to the attic cubbyhole occupied by Robin Robertson, poetry publisher and himself a very fine poet. He was a stimulating interviewee. In the basement was Barley Alison, former deb and Special Operations Executive agent, who was the trusted UK editor of Saul Bellow. To help me illustrate my piece, she handed over a photo of the victorious Bellow and his international publishers at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm in 1976. She was standing to his right and he had his arm around her. At the end of the row was Secker MD Tom Rosenthal, who, Barley felt, had attended simply in order to grab some undeserved kudos; she asked me, in all seriousness, to crop him out.

In May 1985, Penguin bought Michael Joseph, Hamish Hamilton (office in Long Acre) and others, setting in motion a sequence of mergers that created the giant conglomerates that dominate publishing today. The Penguin group moved to Wrights Lane in Kensington and is now, as part of Penguin Random House, in Nine Elms, which is some distance – literally and spiritually – from Bedford Square. Secker found itself at Michelin House in Chelsea with bosses who did not like books or authors (it was rumoured) mucking up the place; after another sale and then a merger, Secker (as Harvill Secker) has become part of what is, in modern corporate speak, the Penguin Random House ‘family’. But families such as this are the products of so many agglomerations that, if imprints were children, the family heads would be at a loss to tell you how many they had.

HarperCollins, which as William Collins in 1984 was engaged in a long-running attempt to fend off the attentions of Rupert Murdoch, now has its home, alongside other News UK organisations (proprietor R Murdoch), in the giant News Building near London Bridge. In Carmelite House on the opposite bank of the Thames is Hachette, home to Hodder, Weidenfeld and Virago, among others. No narrow staircases and attic cubbyholes here.

Publishing nowadays is obviously less congenial than it was forty years ago. But is it worse? Are authors and readers worse off? The most authoritative recent explorer of these questions is Dan Sinykin, a US English professor who in Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia University Press) offers an unflattering portrait of corporate publishing in the United States (the scene of similar trends to those outlined above), where economic rather than artistic imperatives are said to prevail. I cannot match Sinykin’s erudition, and in any case I don’t think convincing answers to the questions are possible, but I do have a few observations on how certain components of publishing have changed.

First, authors. It’s often said that authors aren’t edited any more. I’ve had two books published by conglomerates and it seemed to me on both occasions that I received careful and insightful notes about my texts. (I may have hoped for more proactive publicity efforts, but no author is ever satisfied on this score.) The novelist Margaret Forster once told me that editing by her celebrated, old-school publisher consisted of half an hour’s chat, aperitifs and an agreeable lunch. She was astonished to discover that a meeting with a subsequent editor, Carmen Callil, involved going through the text line by line.

Next, payment. When the BBC in the early 1990s broadcast a documentary about publishing, one of the stars of the show was Duckworth proprietor Colin Haycraft (double first in classics and a triple blue). He was pictured browsing his warehouse at the Old Piano Factory in Camden and testing the thickness of the dust on the books. Haycraft seemed the embodiment of independent publishing: civilised, erudite, eccentric. Only after his death at the age of sixty-five did Beryl Bainbridge, his star author and former lover, discover that he had been underpaying her for years. There are many more stories like this one: publishers struck the deals they could get away with. Contracts are much fairer now, though still not generous enough. Authors are badly paid, as they have always been.

Next, readers. The conglomerates still seem to me to be responsible for plenty of exciting books, subsidised of course by the likes of Colleen Hoover and Richard Osman, but if you don’t agree with me, you have the lists of numerous vibrant independents to explore – the likes of Oneworld (responsible for three Booker Prize winners in the past eight years), and Fitzcarraldo Editions (four Nobel Prize winners in the same period). In the 1980s and 1990s, a leading light in radical and translated fiction was Samuel Beckett’s publisher John Calder, which published books with numerous misprints and execrable jackets. Indeed, production standards among most of the smaller independents were dismal. They are much higher now.

If you were LGBTQ+, or neuro-diverse, or non-white, or from outside the southeast, publishing in 1984 did not serve you well, as author or reader. My impression from most of the new acquisitions announced in publishers’ press releases is that this is no longer the case. 

It is a truism among bien pensants that conglomeration is the enemy of culture. You’ll have gathered from the above that I’m not young. One of the symptoms of ageing, I find, is a curmudgeonly attitude to accepted views, especially to ones that I’ve found sympathetic for most of my life. This is the mood in which I present these observations.