It started with Pan. Not Peter Pan, but Pan Books.
I had been wondering why Pan Macmillan was called Pan Macmillan. The answer led me back to Pan Books and to the familiar little colophon figure of the Greek god Pan playing his pipes.
That is when I discovered who had designed that original Pan emblem.
Mervyn Peake.
I knew Peake, of course, as the author of Titus Groan and the extraordinary Gormenghast novels. What I had somehow never properly appreciated was that he was also an accomplished artist and illustrator, responsible for memorable editions of books by Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Coleridge and others.
And suddenly there he was, hiding in plain sight in the history of one of Britain's best-known publishing houses.
The Pan design also comes with a wonderful publishing story. According to Peake's daughter, Clare, he was offered either £10 for the design outright or a royalty of one farthing for every book sold. He took the £10.
Perhaps the story has acquired a little polish in the telling over the years, but it is almost too perfect not to love: a brilliant artist, a small drawing, a modest fee and absolutely no idea that millions of books would one day carry some version of that image.
Just an artist's luck.
It also made me think about something I have often wondered during my years in bookselling: the names on books.
Macmillan. Heinemann. Gollancz. Jonathan Cape. Michael Joseph. Frederick Warne. Allen Lane. John Murray. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
We see these names on book spines without thinking. They have become companies, imprints and logos. Some have been bought and sold several times over. Their names feel institutional.
But they were people.
They had tastes and prejudices, enthusiasms and rivalries. They borrowed money, backed writers, lost authors, stole authors, got things wrong and occasionally made decisions that changed publishing forever.
Take Macmillan.
Today the name belongs to a great international publishing business, but Daniel and Alexander Macmillan began with a bookshop.
In 1843 the brothers took premises at 57 Aldersgate Street in London. They had very little money and initially leased the shop and its furnishings for only three months. Daniel wrote that establishing the business was “very uphill work” and complained, with the eternal frustration of a bookseller, that if people had any sense they would come to them for books: the brothers could sell them as cheaply as anyone else and, more importantly, give good advice about them.
As a bookseller, I understand that.
One of the great publishing houses began, at least partly, with the conviction that booksellers knew what people ought to be reading.
The distance between bookselling and publishing was once far smaller than it is today. The person standing behind the counter might also identify what readers wanted, commission it, finance it and publish it.
Jonathan Cape also began his working life in the bookselling trade. In 1921, with Wren Howard, he launched the publishing house that carried his name. The young company went on to publish T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and, eventually, Ian Fleming.
Frederick Warne began in bookselling too, entering the trade through the business of his brother-in-law George Routledge before establishing Frederick Warne & Co. in 1865. Decades later, that firm would publish Beatrix Potter, although, wonderfully, Warne first rejected The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
That is a story I shall come back to.
John Camden Hotten was another bookseller and publisher; the business he founded would eventually become Chatto & Windus.
The modern book trade was not designed as an industry. It grew from individuals trying things.
William Heinemann founded his company in 1890 and struck gold almost immediately with Hall Caine's The Bondman. Heinemann became one of the defining names of British publishing, but before the name became a brand, William Heinemann was simply making decisions about which books he believed people might want to read.
Then there was Victor Gollancz, whose personality seems almost impossible to separate from his publishing.
His famous yellow jackets turned books themselves into advertisements. Gollancz was not interested in being an invisible publisher. He campaigned, argued and used books to enter political and cultural debate.
Michael Joseph, meanwhile, had already been a successful author before deciding that he wanted to become a publisher himself. When he founded Michael Joseph Ltd in 1935, the same year Penguin appeared, he set out to build a list around the sort of popular books he believed deserved to reach enormous audiences.
That is exactly the kind of connection I find fascinating.
Today these names sit on different branches of enormous publishing family trees, but behind the logos were individuals who knew one another, competed with one another, backed one another and occasionally moved between the same companies.
And the connections continue.
Allen Lane was already a publisher at The Bodley Head when, according to the famous story, he found himself at Exeter St David's railway station in 1934 after visiting Agatha Christie. Looking for something decent to read for the journey home, he was unimpressed by what the station bookstall offered him.
Why, he wondered, couldn't good books be made cheaply and sold everywhere?
Within a year Penguin existed.
Its books cost sixpence. They were colour-coded by genre and could be bought not only in traditional bookshops but at railway stations and in ordinary shops. Penguin even experimented with vending machines.
A frustrated reader waiting for a train helped change the way an entire country bought books.
But this story cannot simply be a parade of men whose surnames became publishing companies.
That would leave out far too much.
In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf founded the Hogarth Press. It began on a small, almost domestic scale, with the Woolfs learning to print themselves, and grew into one of the most culturally significant presses of the twentieth century.
Decades later, Carmen Callil looked at the publishing world and saw an enormous omission. Women made up more than half the population, yet women's writing and history had too often been neglected, forgotten or allowed to fall out of print.
Virago grew out of that frustration.
Its ambition was not simply to publish new writers but to recover writers the literary establishment had allowed to disappear. The green-spined Virago Modern Classics became instantly recognisable and helped change the canon by putting forgotten women writers back into readers' hands.
Then there is Margaret Busby.
Busby and Clive Allison founded Allison & Busby in 1967, when she was still in her early twenties. She became Britain's first Black woman publisher.
They had almost no money.
One of their early ideas was to publish poetry in inexpensive paperback editions rather than costly hardbacks. Busby has recalled that, faced with the problem of distribution, they resorted to a beautifully direct sales technique: stopping people in the street and asking them to buy a copy.
Strip away the decades of corporate language, algorithms, metadata, dashboards and sales forecasts and publishing can still come down to exactly that.
Someone has made a book. Now someone has to persuade another person to read it.
Busby went on to publish writers including Buchi Emecheta, C. L. R. James and Nuruddin Farah, while encountering people who simply assumed that a young Black woman in a publishing office could not possibly be the publisher.
These stories matter because they tell us not simply how books were made, but who was allowed to make them, and how the books available to us changed when different people finally got into the room.
And even then, publishers are only part of the story.
Books have to be physically made.
Clays has been printing books for more than two centuries. It began as a family-owned business in London and moved its printing operation to Bungay in Suffolk in the nineteenth century. In the 1930s it began printing mass-market paperbacks and today produces books on an extraordinary scale.
Printers rarely get the glory.
Yet every beautiful first edition we admire exists because somebody understood paper, ink, machinery, binding, production and scale.
And then there are the people whose names rarely appear prominently anywhere on the book at all, but whose work may be the first thing we remember.
The designers and illustrators.
Think of Ian Fleming.
The Bond novels were not simply books; their jackets helped create Bond's visual world.
Richard Chopping began designing Fleming's Jonathan Cape jackets with From Russia, with Love and went on to create some of the most recognisable covers in twentieth-century publishing. His images - guns, roses, skulls, playing cards, insects - are exquisitely precise and faintly sinister.
They made danger look beautiful.
Before Chopping, Fleming himself had been closely involved with the jackets of the earliest Bond novels. He understood something publishers and booksellers have always known: what a book looks like matters.
Agatha Christie provides an equally rich visual history.
The Collins Crime Club created a distinctive identity for crime fiction long before the word “branding” became unavoidable. Its jackets could be startling, playful, modernist and sinister.
Artists and designers, including J. Z. Atkinson and John Rose, produced memorable Christie jackets, while later Tom Adams transformed Christie's visual identity for Fontana.
Adams's covers are extraordinary. His first Christie commission was A Murder Is Announced in 1962, and more than ninety designs followed.
They are surreal, beautifully composed and sometimes unsettling: familiar objects arranged in ways that suggest violence, mystery or something slightly wrong beneath the surface.
They did more than package Agatha Christie. They helped reinvent her for another generation.
We do not always remember only the title or the author. We remember that jacket.
And when a great first edition has lost its dust jacket, it can feel as though part of its identity has disappeared too.
So the people who made books were also Richard Chopping, Tom Adams, J. Z. Atkinson, John Rose, Mervyn Peake and countless other artists, illustrators, typographers and designers.
They decided how a book would first appear in the world.
There are other names waiting here too: Edward Young, who helped establish Penguin's original visual identity; Jan Tschichold, whose design rules transformed Penguin; Berthold Wolpe, whose Albertus typeface became inseparable from Faber; and Romek Marber, whose grid system gave Penguin crime fiction one of the great graphic identities in publishing history.
And then there are the booksellers.
Christina Foyle, who turned a bookshop into a cultural institution.
Publishers who began behind counters.
Generations of booksellers whose enthusiasm put unfamiliar writers into readers' hands.
And the agents. A. P. Watt. Curtis Brown. Desmond Elliott. Ed Victor. The men and women who gradually turned literary representation into a profession of its own.
These are figures who seem almost designed for a series called The People Who Made Books.
Desmond Elliott, for example.
He lost his father when he was young, spent part of his childhood in an orphanage in Dublin and came to England at sixteen with £2 in his pocket, determined to get into publishing.
He worked his way through the trade before becoming an agent and publisher himself. His publishing life involved being hired, being fired, taking risks and constantly moving forward. And, by all accounts, he was a character.
Stories about Elliott involve champagne, Concorde, Fortnum & Mason and his insistence that travelling west of Marble Arch gave him a nosebleed. A man after my own heart.
He is also credited with introducing Tim Rice to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
How could you not want to know more about him?
And that, really, is where my accidental discovery of Mervyn Peake and the Pan logo has taken me.
I want to know the people.
Not simply which company was founded in which year. I want to know what these people were like. Where they came from. Who gave them their first chance. Where they found the money. Which writers they fought for. Which ones they missed. Which books saved their businesses. Which disasters nearly destroyed them. Who they argued with. Who they encouraged. Who designed the covers. Who printed the books. Who put them into readers' hands.
I want to understand how booksellers became publishers, how publishers became institutions and how small businesses became enormous international companies.
I want to know how printers changed what was economically possible, how paperback pioneers changed who could afford to read, and how women and others excluded by the traditional establishment created their own doors when the existing ones remained closed.
And I want to look beyond the famous names.
Because every first edition we treasure is the result of far more than an author sitting at a desk.
Someone believed in it. Someone edited it. Someone designed it. Someone illustrated it. Someone typeset it. Someone printed and bound it.
And a bookseller sold it.
Those people made books too.
So this is the beginning of a journey for the Goldsboro Journal and for me.
The People Who Made Books will explore the publishers, booksellers, printers, agents, editors, designers, illustrators and other extraordinary people whose ideas, obsessions and occasional eccentricities created the book world we inherited.
Some of their names remain famous. Others have almost disappeared.
Some wonderful stories are undoubtedly still waiting for us.
All because one morning I wondered why Pan Macmillan was called Pan.
