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Peter Mayer - Making friends in the world of publishing (23/99)

87 views · Published 23 August 2017 · 3:19 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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British-born Peter Mayer (1936-2018) was an independent American publisher who, as head of the New York-based Avon Books, successfully introduced the trade paperback to the mass market. From 1978 to 1996, he was CEO of Penguin Books. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: September 2014-January 2015]

TRANSCRIPT: Well, I had some editorial responsibilities at Orion and did publish quite a few books. But somebody was watching over me, this man Howard Greenfeld and… who became a friend.  When I went to Avon [Books], I was now in charge of the company, well, first I was the education editor which somebody said, what does that mean, I said, well I'm in charge of the better socks and shoes, and I had this unexpected success with a book that I mentioned to you, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, which led to my becoming the editor-in-chief and finally the publisher.

And I think I had to hire people now, and I knew something about what was required in every department because I'd had some experience in two places, Avon, where I was working, but also at Orion before that.  I had some friends in publishing as well.  I pretty much knew what I wanted, I didn't know if we would be successful or not, but we were successful.  We were very successful, we were the tiniest of publishing companies and we took on the largest. The largest company was Bantam and we were the smallest; there were about ten companies between Bantam, the largest, and ourselves at Avon, the smallest. But we had best-seller after best-seller.  Books got offered to us, just as they were offered to the other ten paperback publishers, and we sometimes won the rights for them at auction, sometimes expensively, sometimes not so expensively.  But we were right very often. I had wonderful colleagues, a woman named Judith Weber, who came actually from Bantam, Nancy Coffey who came, I think, from Putnam or Coward-McCann, I've forgotten, and more than anyone else, Bob Wyatt, who came from a book store where I used to buy books and I discovered he knew as much as I did about books and probably more.  So, get him off the shop floor and get him into my publishing company. 

We worked together for 10 or 11 years, we are still friends and he's not working in publishing any more, as I probably shouldn't be either, but I still am.  He's probably wiser.  And he still does a lot of editorial work though, but he does it not working for a company, he does it on his own.  I'm still a besotted publisher.

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