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Between the first and second world wars, a number of
gifted men in London started their own publishing houses using
their own names. These included Jonathan Cape, Michael Joseph,
Victor Gollancz and the first prominent newcomer of the difficult
1930s, Hamish Hamilton. This was a brave step for a young man.
Half Scot and half American, Jamie Hamilton (Hamish – the
Celtic form – was adopted for the company) had read modern
languages at Cambridge, studied for the bar and then worked as an
assistant at Harrods book department. He had rowed for the
British Olympic Eight and won a silver medal at the Amsterdam
Olympics in 1928.
He served his apprenticeship at Jonathan Cape and then, aged
twenty-five, moved to the American firm of Harper and Brothers,
where he learned the ropes with Cass Canfield, the publisher that
famously said 'I am a publisher, a hybrid creature: one part
stargazer, one part gambler, one part businessman, one part
midwife and three parts optimist.' According to Canfield, Jamie
soon showed an 'acute editorial instinct' and the 'intelligence and
furious energy' that were later to prove the driving force behind
the success of Hamish Hamilton Ltd.
The combination of friends and books was an essential part of
Jamie's life as a publisher. Authors, and colleagues such as Roger
Machell, became close friends. However as well as having great
friendships, Jamie was also capable of intense hatred for his
enemies and would refuse to enter a room if someone he disliked
was there. His attitude towards publishing was very personal and to
lose an author to another publisher was a personal tragedy, even if
he remained on good terms with the author. Jamie would be dismayed
too, by an unfavourable reception of the books he published,
which he usually chose himself and in which he firmly
believed.
As well as being an emotional man, he was also extremely competitive.
This competitive streak was clear from his success at the
Olympics and it carried through into his work as a publisher,
where he would pursue books and authors tenaciously.
The first book to be published by Hamish Hamilton was Time Was,
the reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson, a man who in the
years between 1890 and 1910 was friend and confidant to many
celebrities including Rossetti and Wilde. The book remained in
print until 1981, but no one could have called this a spectacular
launch, just as no one could have gone on to predict that Hamish
Hamilton would eventually publish and house some of the most
talented authors in the publishing world.
Soon, there were a number of major additions to the list including
John Dickson Carr, Lillian Hellman, R. J. Narayan and
Angela Thirkell. In non-fiction the most enduring author from
that first decade was John Gunther, whose Inside Europe and, subsequently,
Inside Asia and The High Cost of Hitler set the agenda for the
appeasement debate of the late 1930s, and were huge bestsellers.
By the end of the decade, Jamie had established a distinctive and
successful company with a character and special brand of publishing
that have endured to the present day. Because of strong links
with the States, Hamish Hamilton became a major publisher of
important American authors, such as Raymond Chandler and
James Thurber. Chandler was to become a close friend of Jamie,
relying on him greatly in his dark periods of depression, but he
was also befriended by Vince, the ferocious warehouse manager
with whom he went on serious drinking sprees whenever he was in
London.
The 1930s were difficult years for trade publishing and there were attempts at
diversification. In 1939
Jamie created Hamish
Hamilton Law books and
Hamish Hamilton Medical
books, each with its own
colophon. Neither was to
last, perhaps because of the
war, or perhaps because no
one could feel really passionate
about Treatment of War
Wounds and Fractures or The Law
Relating to Private Street Works
(2nd edition) as they could
about The Big Sleep or French
Without Tears. In any event
professional and academic
publishing was a short-lived
experiment.
During the war, Jamie Hamilton worked for the
American Department of the Ministry of Information, where he
maintained his company and managed to obtain paper (which was
scarce) for printing books, as well as encouraging Anglo-American cultural contact and, whenever possible, inviting
authors and publishers to come to England despite the conflict.
Here he also met Roger Machell, a major who had been invalided
out of the Army. They became great friends, and by the end of the
war Machell was a partner in Hamish Hamilton Ltd, a gentler foil
to the dynamic and entrepreneurial Hamilton. Machell has been
described as 'a great editor', who had a faultless instinct for what
was right and wrong with a manuscript and was always unfailing
with helpful advice to all of his authors.
At this time, Hamish Hamilton's offices were at 90 Great Russell
Street, at the heart of the literary world in Bloomsbury. Life in
Great Russell Street was not uneventful. In Roger Machell's
words, 'We've had our occasional dramas – the time for instance,
when our old office in Great Russell Street burned down and
Stanley Unwin (one of the company's biggest rivals) rang Jamie's
house at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning. "Hamilton," he said
"I know most publishers don't go to their offices on Saturday
mornings. Well, I do and I thought I should tell you that yours
seems to have been on fire all night. Let me know if I can lend you
some typewriters or anything. Goodbye."' Jamie had to call the fire
brigade before rushing to the scene. Luckily the damage was only
minor.'
The late 1940s and 50s were great years for Hamish
Hamilton. In 1940 Jamie had married Yvonne Pallavicino and
their home in Hamilton Terrace became a haven for authors and
international publishers. The Hamiltons of Hamilton Terrace
were famous hosts and their dinner parties did much to lure and
cement authors to the firm.
These were the years in which Hamish Hamilton published A. J. P
Taylor, D. W. Brogan, Alan Moorehead, Terence Rattigan, Nancy
Mitford and the great French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and
Albert Camus. Georges Simenon, who was to become a close
family friend of the Hamiltons, with two of his novels being translated
by Jamie's son Alistair, also began his prodigious output
during these years. Roald Dahl joined the list with Over to You: Ten
Stories of Flyers Flying. Unfortunately, it was to be his only book for
Hamish Hamilton before he defected to arch-rival Stanley Unwin.
One book deserves special mention because it exemplifies Jamie's
adventurousness. In 1951 J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was
published to huge critical acclaim. It was the novel of an era,
bridging two generations, and in Penguin has sold over 2 million
copies. But, at the time, Jamie Hamilton saw it as a risk. He wrote
to John Betjeman: 'I think that Salinger, whose first novel this is,
has remarkable talent and that the book is extraordinarily funny,
though whether the idiom of adolescent American will appeal to
English readers I cannot say.'
Throughout the 1950s the list grew richer and stronger. L. P.
Hartley's outstanding The Go-Between was published in 1953 and
Raymond Chandler's books continued to enjoy enormous
success. One of his many fans was Truman Capote, who sent this
cable to Hamilton in 1958: 'See in the paper you have published a
new Raymond Chandler. I wish you would be so kind as to send it – I'm a fan,' and then another: 'Bless you for the Chandler; so
sorry Marlowe is getting married: great mistake.' After his collection
of short stories and a novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's, which was to
become a memorable film with Audrey Hepburn, Capote
branched into something completely different. In Cold Blood was
based on a true murder story. Hamilton's reaction when he saw
the manuscript was typically effusive. A cable to Capote in
November 1964 said:
In 1965, Jamie decided to sell Hamish Hamilton to the
Thomson Organisation, the Canadian media conglomerate, who
were themselves shortly afterwards bought up by Illustrated
Newspapers. He was prompted partly by the need for new capital
to finance the expanding company and partly by the decision of
his only son Alistair to pursue a career as an academic rather than
a publisher. However, he retained a considerable degree of personal
control, remaining managing director.
When in 1972
Jamie relinquished the managing
directorship, his years
at the helm were crowned
with a spectacular success.
The actor David Niven was an
old friend and had promised
Jamie a book of memoirs. The
Moon's A Balloon was published
in the autumn of 1971 and
went on to sell 100,000
copies in hardback and 5
million in paperback. In the
years that followed, Jamie
continued to play an active
role staying on as chairman and then president of the company
until his death in 1988. Colleagues and authors expressed the
esteem in which he was held in a privately circulated collection of
tributes published for his eightieth birthday in November 1980.
Five hundred copies were printed, of which the first ten were
bound in leather. It was called simply Jamie.
In 1974 Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, who had been an editor
with the firm for thirteen years, became managing director.
He rapidly established a close-knit and successful team, and
developed an unrivalled reputation for looking after his authors.
This instilled an enduring loyalty and deep affection for both the
man and the company. Although many established authors
continued to write successful books for Hamish Hamilton
throughout the 1970s, the decade is best remembered for the
launch of new writers who have since gone on to become amongst
the most important of their generation. They include Paul
Theroux, William Boyd and Peter Ackroyd.
By 1978, the company had outgrown its Great Russell
Street offices and moved to Garden House in Long Acre, where it
was to remain for eight years – happy ones characterized by the
same mixture of high-quality literature and commercial publishing
that had been the hallmark of Hamish Hamilton since the
1930s. In 1986 the Thomson Organisation sold the company,
together with Michael Joseph and Sphere,
to Penguin. It was the second time Hamish Hamilton had changed
hands, but this time it was accompanied by another move:
to Penguin's new offices in Wrights Lane, off High Street
Kensington.
The change of ownership made no difference to the calibre of
Hamish Hamilton's output. There were important and distinguished
bestsellers each year, Patrick Suskind's chilling olfactory
murder story, Perfume, in 1986; William Boyd's The New Confessions
and Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde in 1987. The latter was notable
not only for selling 75,000 copies in hardback but also for creating
a new interest in literary biography as a significant genre. But
these years also saw the company slipping into serious financial
difficulties, and various tensions with the new owners arose. In
1989 Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson resigned to set up his own
company, and a number of staff and authors followed him.
Christopher's departure was traumatic for Hamish Hamilton and
1989 was a difficult year, though it was greatly helped by two
Booker shortlisted titles: Rose Tremain's Restoration (which went on
to win the Sunday Express Award) and Sybille Bedford's Jigsaw.
1990 was a year of rebuilding. The company was given
a fresh face with a revised colophon. Book and cover design were
revitalized, and the number of books published was trimmed in
order to devote more energy to each author and title. In this era
the list was ably steered by a group of talented publishers and
editors, including Andrew Franklin, Alexandra Pringle and Kate
Jones.
After their departures in the late 1990s, Simon Prosser
joined the imprint as its publisher. Publishing
between 25 and 35 books a year, the list has become a home for
writers both young and old, embracing the innovative, the experimental
and the new, while maintaining a deep commitment to literary
and political values. In recent years Hamish Hamilton has
also worked closely with the great American journal McSweeney's,
producing special issues with such writers and artists as Michael
Chabon and Chris Ware.
Its offices have now moved – with the rest of Penguin – to 80
Strand, a stone's throw from the old Hamish Hamilton quarters
in Long Acre.
Seventy-three years ago, Jamie's first catalogue opened with the
words: 'This first Hamish Hamilton list looks like the start of a
new lighthouse – it will be noticeable at a great distance in the
dark.'
It is still alight and burning brightly.
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