Publishing: As he retires after 45 years in publishing, Michael Gill, of Gill & Macmillan, writes of the changes he has seen.
Book publishing in Ireland in 1962 inhabited a bleak landscape. There was a handful of companies in Dublin; the Talbot Press, Browne & Nolan, Clonmore & Reynolds, The Dolmen Press. The Mercier Press soldiered on in Cork. The Educational Company, CJ Fallon and an emerging Folens published school books exclusively. And then there was Gill's in O'Connell Street, publishing, bookselling, printing and book binding as they had done from the same premises since 1856.
The cultural climate was not conducive to publishing. The Censorship of Publications act was yet to be repealed. In addition there was the auto-censorship imposed by librarians and most booksellers. Ulysses, while never banned, was available from Hodges Figgis but only by personal application to the manager, Mr Murray, who handed it over, already wrapped in brown paper. (I still treasure that copy!)
Schoolbooks had been much the same for perhaps 30 years. The English poetry syllabus had one early poem by Yeats and nothing later. The Irish history syllabus ended at 1900; the European at 1914. The science syllabus excluded biology.
The lists of general publishers, in the main, reflected religious devotion and national fervour.
It was challenging to return to such a restrictive context after a year's publishing apprenticeship in New York and earlier experience in Paris and London. But four previous generations of printers and publishers must have left some genetic imprint; there was ink in the veins.
And then in December 1962, three months after I returned to Dublin, the second Vatican Council was opened.
Already a ferment of discussion had built among theologians. Publishers responded by issuing books by authors keen to earn positions of influence in the new climate of questioning and freedom. Writers like Hans Kung from Germany, Edward Schillebeeckx from the Netherlands, Herbert McCabe and Charles Davis from England, were in popular demand, their books being widely translated and published in accessible paperback. It was an opportunity to be grasped, so with the assistance of Patrick Masterson who had recently returned from Louvain to lecture in UCD, Gill's launched Logos Books, a paperback series which included books on philosophy, theology, sociology and current affairs. About one third of the authors were Irish; writers such as Enda McDonagh, James Mackey, Louis McRedmond; the remainder were either translations or by American authors.
Soon the educational glacier began to melt. A new English syllabus introduced the short story. Contemporary poetry and prose were also recognised for the first time. While on holidays in Tipperary, I had met Augustine Martin who was teaching English at Mount St Joseph's in Roscrea. Together we devised a series of textbooks to be known as Exploring English. We had no idea that they would still be in use 35 years later.
In 1967, an approach from Macmillan in London, which was seeking to develop its schoolbook sales in Ireland, led to the formation of a new jointly owned company. The first book under the new imprint of Gill & Macmillan was the concluding volume of Frank O'Connor's classic autobiography, My Father's Son, which was published simultaneously in London and New York. It was a clear statement by the new company: publish in Ireland and, when appropriate, for the world.
The partnership with Macmillan has now flourished for almost 40 years; its most tangible benefits being the immediate and collegial access to a body of publishing knowledge and expertise which has been honed in more than 30 countries world wide.
Throughout the 1970s Irish publishing expanded and matured. The O'Brien Press, Wolfhound Press, The Blackstaff Press, Irish Academic Press and Poolbeg were all founded within five years of one another. A trade association, CLE, had been established. But the early 1980s saw tougher times. After the break with sterling in 1979, the value of the Irish pound declined to 72 pence sterling in 1981 with a consequently dramatic increase in the price of British books in Ireland. In addition VAT at 10 per cent was widely signalled to increase to 15 per cent in the budget of 1982. But the minister for finance, Ray MacSharry, astonished all by announcing that books were to be zero rated for tax. It was a welcome development.
At Gill & Macmillan we had chosen history and current affairs to be among our areas of specialisation. Series such as the Gill History of Ireland and later Gill's Irish Lives led to the publication of political autobiographies and memoirs such as the extraordinary Against the Tide, by Noël Browne, the first (and so far only) autobiography of a taoiseach, All in a Life, by Garret FitzGerald, Gemma Hussey's cabinet diaries, At the Cutting Edge; Gay Byrne's inevitably popular The Time of My Life.
In 1985 we published Frank McDonald's Destruction of Dublin and Smack by Pádraig Yeates and Seán Flynn. Despite meticulous editorial care and legal opinion, there was a multitude of libel actions; the eventual costs of settlement and legal fees far surpassed any financial surplus on the books themselves. It was a stern lesson that censorship took more than one form (and the unreformed defamation laws still remain a sinister threat to all publishing in Ireland).
At the end of the 1980s further updating of schools syllabuses began. The intense competition between educational publishers resulted in textbooks which in editorial, design and production quality were to the highest international standards and have maintained that level since. Within Gill & Macmillan it was the accumulation of expertise garnered from educational publishing that enabled us to edit, design and produce The Encyclopaedia of Ireland two years ago
In Ireland, as elsewhere throughout Europe and further beyond, educational publishing has consistently provided the financial bedrock upon which the industry has stood firm. While individual bestsellers may jostle for a couple of weeks in the sun and the reported earnings of celebrity authors are headlined, far less glamorous books are paying the publisher's bills (and remunerating their authors) day in day out.
If publishing in Ireland inhabited a quiet backwater in 1962, today it encounters all the forces of the global market place. While the arrival of Irish branches of Penguin and Hodder Headline may be evidence of this, there are more subtle, and indeed, far more threatening factors at work. The continuing consolidation of retailing, for example, will inevitably lead to a reduction of choice for the visitor to bookshops. The proposed takeover by Waterstone's of Ottakers in the UK is an example of this consolidation. But new and effective ways of marketing books outside traditional channels are beginning to emerge.
And surveys in Europe are beginning to show worrying - and widespread - declines in youth literacy.
But far more challenging is the rapid penetration of the internet and digital media generally into every corner of our lives. Whereas books were once the sole repository of information, now think Google or Wikipedia. Where the printed page dominated for five centuries, the LCD screen has made astonishing inroads in less than two decades.
The end of the book? Certainly not. Books will remain central to the enterprise of writing and reading, teaching, informing and entertaining. But the successful publisher of the future will require a far more flexible repertoire of intellectual, technical and commercial expertise than has served in the past.
Michael Gill retired recently as managing director of Gill & Macmillan after a publishing career of almost 45 years