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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