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

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So they don’t want the rest. But, nonetheless, a huge number of extremely good books are being written by extremely good people, desperate to see the light of day.” Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here.

Title Detail: My Back Pages by Richard Charkin

My challenge began some years ago when a handful of people asked me if I was ever going to write my memoirs. I said no for many reasons. I’ve consistently argued for editorial specialization. Just because an editor is a good judge of literary fiction doesn’t make that editor a good judge of history or cooking or politics. I’m sure that still holds true for larger publishers, but small ones have to be opportunistic and Mensch’s range of titles shows absolutely no evidence of focus whatsoever. 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.This is the first lesson for a young publisher coming out of Charkin’s book. Look at who is running the business you work for. Some of them have been in more or less the same position for more than 30 years. Do you trust them with your career? If not you must agitate for change This means Charkin has closer relationships with his authors than he had in posts at Bloomsbury and Oxford University Press, for example, and is always at the end of the phone when needed. “Because there isn’t anyone else to talk to,” he says, laughing. “Which is why I restrict the number of titles that I publish. So, I have a one-on-one relationship with every author.” What will the book look like? The book was printed and distributed by the brilliant team at IngramSpark, but until you hold a book in your hands, you simply don’t know. Phew, I said to myself, as the first copy arrived. It was beautifully designed and manufactured, better even than I’d anticipated.

MY BACK PAGES: An undeniably personal history of publis…

Authors can meet resistance when they go off piste as Smith did with a personal tome about “the phenomenon of existence”. rather than yet another book of reliable recipes. 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. Absolutely,” he says emphatically. “I think it is really dangerous.” There could have been “a little bit of that” in the Smith book saga, he says. From Reed Charkin went on to the Current Science Group, Macmillan, then Bloomsbury, where he built hugely successful businesses largely on the academic side. He doesn’t present himself as a publishing genius however. Rather he comes across as someone with infectious enthusiasm, bundles of energy and most of all a love of the people he worked with. It’s about time that trade book publishers took the plunge and offered their authors genuine worldwide support through their extensive infrastructures. And it’s about time that literary agents focused on their authors’ careers rather than the next big advance.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. The lawyer in the United States from whom he tried to buy the URL mensch.com does not appear to have even tried to live up to the word. “I wrote to him saying, ‘Would you sell it to me?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, for a million dollars.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not very menschlich. You don’t deserve it.’” He laughs. “Which is why we’re menschpublishing.com.” 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.

Richard Charkin: A prince of publishing looks back on the Richard Charkin: A prince of publishing looks back on the

The first buyer was Lynette Owen, the megastar of international rights and editor of the indispensable Clark’s Publishing Agreements: A Book of Precedents [Bloomsbury, 2022].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 The post-COVID-19 launch parties will be digital. Many more people can and will attend. The wine and refreshments will be top-notch. The author can be heard and seen. The event can be recorded and shared universally. 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. Traditionally, publishers were country-located and principally served their home markets, thus requiring a partnership or license deal with other publishers for other markets. What an amazing career. I can’t think of anyone else who has been active in such a wide range of sorts of publishing. I should think there will be a host of people who know you through the sector of publishing that they are in but will be interested in your experience of all the other sectors that they don’t know about." Andrew L Schuller, Publishing Consultant, Formerly Editorial Director Humanities and Social Sciences OUP