Penguin boss published The Satanic Verses and lived under ayatollah’s death sentence

Peter Mayer, who has died aged 82, was chief executive of Penguin publishers when it paid an astronomical US$850,000 to publish Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a decision that placed both Mayer and Rushdie under an Islamic death sentence.

Mayer had joined Penguin in 1978 for a record publishing salary of £100,000 at a time when the imprint was suffering heavy losses. He wasted no time in scrapping Penguin’s famous orange and green book covers, shocking traditionalists. He then set a trend in the industry by inaugurating an aggressive programme of acquisitions.

In 1983 he bought Frederick

Warne, the company that published Beatrix Potter, for £6 million. Two years later he bought Michael Joseph, Hamish Hamilton, Rainbird and Sphere for £11.5m, bringing hardback and paperback houses together under one roof. In 1986 he paid $46m for the New American Library.

Mayer took a ruthless approach to costcutting, sacking hundreds of staff and prompting some authors to threaten to leave, some accusing him of seeking to turn British publishing into a vulgar marketing exercise. Yet under his leadership, from 1978 to 1997, Penguin grew to become the largest consumer book publisher in Britain and No 4 in the US, with global sales of £369m and profits of £33.6m in 1995. It also established itself as a leading publisher of children’s books in the UK, using the Ladybird imprint.

Yet Mayer bit off almost more than he could chew in 1988 when Penguin’s Viking imprint bought The Satanic Verses. He later admitted he had not grasped the implications when he read the book for the first time on a flight from New Zealand to England, despite being warned by the head of Penguin India that there might be a backlash.

‘‘I didn’t understand all of it, because I don’t know a great deal about Islam,’’ he admitted later. ‘‘I didn’t know that Mahound [a name used to vilify the prophet Mohammed] was a dirty word.’’

Shortly after publication, Mayer was in New York on St Valentine’s Day 1989 when he received a call from Patrick Wright, the head of sales in London. ‘‘The Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie,’’ Wright told him. ‘‘What’s a fatwa?’’ asked Mayer.

He soon learnt when, the following day, armed police were to be seen patrolling the street outside Penguin’s offices. For, along with the author, who went into hiding, the Iranian leader had called for the deaths of his publishers.

Mayer himself was subjected to a vicious campaign of hatred: ‘‘I had letters delivered to me written in blood. I had telephone calls in the middle of the night, saying not just that they would kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall.’’ Parents at her school asked him to take her away lest an Islamist death squad arrive and shoot the wrong student.

Penguin refused to withdraw the book,

Mayer claiming that to have done so would have endangered ‘‘civil society as we knew it’’. Yet when the publisher opted not to bring out a paperback version, what began to some as a noble battle for free speech had become a grubby episode of corporate compromise. The decision to publish ‘‘that damned book’’, as some of Mayer’s colleagues called it, cost Penguin £2m in security each year. ‘‘I was astonished,’’ Mayer recalled. ‘‘I was just a publisher of a novel. I still did not see it as a world event.’’

Peter Michael Mayer was born in Hampstead, north London, the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. When he was 3, his family moved to Queens, New York, where his father set up a glove factory.

Mayer won a scholarship to Columbia University, spent a year at Oxford, and won a graduate fellowship at Indiana University, where he took a master’s degree in comparative literature. Finally he won a Fulbright scholarship to the Free University of Berlin.

His father was upset when he refused to join the glove business, but it was a wise decision as the company soon went bust. In 1971 Mayer would set up a small publishing company, Overlook Press, and give his father the job of running it.

After graduation, Mayer took a job at a small highbrow publisher, Orion Press. Then in 1962 he joined Avon Books, where in 14 years he rose to be editor-in-chief and then publisher. He had successes with Saul Bellow and Patrick White, though his real triumph was with Richard Bach’s cult classic Jonathan Livingstone

Seagull, which he bought for $600,000 and priced high so that he could tart up the cover and appeal to a more discerning readership. The book made $1m for Avon.

He would repeat the same trick at Penguin, introducing the large-format paperback so that he could break the £2 price barrier that limited profits on smaller books. Booksellers complained because they had to redesign their shelves, but Mayer was having none of it. ‘‘I’m damned if I’m going to design my books just so that they fit your shelves,’’ he told an Irish booksellers’ fair in 1979.

A rumpled-looking reformed smoker, who had most of one lung removed in the 1980s, Mayer lived hard and worked at a phenomenal pace. In 1988, he crashed his car in upstate New York, sustaining serious injuries. ‘‘He probably had a cigarette in his hand and one in his mouth at the time,’’ a friend observed. ‘‘He works 18 hours a day. He rings people up at 4am his time. He burns the candle at five ends . . . his family and friends have worried about his health for years.’’

After retiring from Penguin in 1997, Mayer returned to his small family-owned imprint Overlook Press, which had published Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, in the US. The firm was also responsible for the resurrection of the Freddy the Pig series of children’s books. Under Mayer’s leadership Overlook acquired Ardis Publishing, an imprint dedicated to Russian literature, in 2002, followed in 2003 by Duckworth, which had gone into receivership.

In 1980 Mayer married Mary Lou Hall. The marriage was dissolved. He is survived by his partner, Sophy Thompson, and by a daughter from his marriage. – Telegraph Group