“The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.” —Andy Warhol

By Richard Charkin, Columnist

Iam a keen student and reader of publishing company results announcements. Almost without exception, and quite understandably, they emphasize the positives—record sales, excellent profits, highest number of bestsellers ever, huge progress on new initiatives, fantastic management team, brilliant editorial and marketing, better-than-ever author roster. And so on.

Unsurprisingly, there is usually little mention of how costs are rising faster than revenue, huge write-offs of advances paid to authors, stock never shipped, or shipped and returned unsold, catastrophic IT and distribution projects, or ghastly legal and accounting crises.

Apart from a nod to the importance of backlist from time to time, there is little about the core backbone of most publishing businesses, which is their inheritance, their legacy from previous administrations. Such publishing legacies can be:

Financial: For instance, a sizeable cash reserve as like the one Harry Potter bequeathed to Bloomsbury, as Harry might not have found a home without the risk-taking and verve of the company’s founders.

Reputational: such as the journal Nature bestowed on SpringerNature, as Nature itself was founded by Alexander Macmillan and Norman Lockyer back in 1869.

Strategic: The acquisition of the Peter Rabbit series gave such a legacy to Penguin’s children’s business, but let’s not forget Allen Lane, the person who saw a future for affordable books for everyone, and invented Penguin.

Market and global positioning:  As the merger of Reed International and Elsevier Science led to the formidable RELX. Elsevier was established in 1880, with roots even further back with the Elzevir family in Leiden.

Managerial:  James Daunt has led bookseller Waterstone’s brilliantly, but there would have been no Waterstone’s had Tim Waterstone not used his redundancy money from W.H.Smith to found the high-quality bookshop chain rather than secure his personal future.

And, finally, a legacy can be cultural, as I shall now describe from my own experience.

‘Inestimably Valuable’

I worked at Oxford University Press from 1975 to 1988, from the age of 26 to 39, the formative years of my publishing career. I was lucky—right place, right time, and I managed to help move the business from the Victorian to the Elizabethan age, from hot-metal typesetting to CD-ROM and floppy discs.

I was also able to cajole some very good writers and scholars to contribute to various aspects of the business. In short, when I left, I was pretty pleased with myself. It took a while for me to realize that life was a lot tougher for a publisher whose business card no longer carried the Oxford University badge of honor.

Letters from me at OUP to the likes of Umberto Eco, Philip Larkin, Lord Dainton, Sir John Fairclough, Anthony Kenny were nearly always replied to within days. It was, of course, nothing to do with me. It was all about the cultural legacy we had inherited from previous generations.

Take, for instance, the scarily labelled International Series of Monographs on Physics, first imagined in the 1930s. OUP realized early on that many of the most brilliant physicists were working under Nazi rule and would almost certainly emigrate, along with their brains and knowledge. Dirac, Mott, Chandrasekhar are some of the authors which formed the basis of OUP’s science publishing business.

Or, take another legacy from World War II: An OUP salesman, John Brown (later Sir John and always known as Bruno) was captured by Japanese forces and incarcerated in Changi Prison, along with many others. A fellow prisoner, A.S.Hornby, was working on the second edition of his book first published by the British Council in Tokyo. The book was a dictionary of English, specifically written for non-English-speaking students.

Bruno negotiated for OUP to take it over and the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (OALDCE) was born. Not only was that book probably the most profitable book of any kind in the 20th century, it turned out to be the catalyst for the creation of Oxford’s market-leading English Language Teaching business.

Maybe Oxford’s greatest intellectual property came from the decision to take over the compilation and completion of the New English Dictionary, which was languishing unfinished at Mill Hill School. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) became and remains OUP’s flagship product. I was fortunate enough to be involved in its next iteration—the creation of a digital, revised edition in print, CD-ROM, and ultimately fully online.

I remain chuffed at this bit of my publishing life. But, of course, the really clever thing happened more than a hundred years earlier. I was the beneficiary of an inestimably valuable legacy gift.

A different sort of legacy was set in train by another OUP salesperson, Raymond Brammah. He was sent to Malaysia to set up a branch and to take advantage of the growing Bahasa Malay educational market. This formed the basis for long-term investment throughout Asia—Japan, Hong Kong, Korea—creating powerful markets to add to OUP’s existing Commonwealth-facing branch network.

Remember the Titans

OUP celebrated its quincentenary in 1978 (although there is some debate about the actual date of its foundation). Over the centuries, it has built one of the largest and most prestigious catalogues in the world. It uses the legacies from previous decisions and efforts to invest further in its publishing, and to pay dividends to its owners, the University of Oxford.

Of course, its annual reports praise its most recent successes and, modestly, its organization. What cannot be so easily measured in the accounts, however, is the value of the corporate culture which underpins everything.

I do not underestimate the importance of current success—or failure. Nor do I intend to diminish the value of investing in the future, particularly as now in this volatile, AI and tech-fuelled environment. But as today’s leaders pursue the publishing industry’s next advances, a few nods to the legacies on which their success is built would not go amiss. Nor would a thought about the legacies they will leave for future generations. Perhaps they might even like to consider whether their legacies, however measured, might outweigh the costs of their tenure.