Peter Mayer: Penguin boss who earned a fatwa for publishing ‘Satanic Verses’ 1936-2018
● Peter Mayer, the publisher who has died at the age of 82, was CEO of Penguin when it paid an astronomical $850 000 to publish Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989), a decision which placed both him and the author under an Islamic death sentence.
Mayer had joined Penguin in 1978 for a record salary 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.
He was ruthless in cost-cutting, sacking hundreds of staff and prompting some authors to threaten to leave.
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.
Yet Mayer had bitten off almost more than he could chew in 1988 when Penguin’s Viking imprint bought The Satanic Verses. Mayer later admitted that he had not grasped the implications when he read the book 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 when he received a call from Patrick Wright, 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 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 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.”
Penguin refused to withdraw the book, Mayer claiming that to do so would endanger “civil society as we knew it”.
Peter Michael Mayer was born on March 28 1936 in Hampstead, north London, the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. When he was three, his family moved to Queens, New York, where his father set up a glove factory.
After graduation, Mayer took a job at a small highbrow publisher, Orion Press. In 1962 he joined Avon Books, where in 14 years he rose to be editor-in-chief and then publisher. His triumph was with Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.
In 1971 Mayer set up a small publishing company, Overlook Press.
At Penguin, he introduced the large format paperback so that he could break the £2 price barrier, which limited profits.
A rumpled-looking one-time smoker who had most of one lung removed in the 1980s, Mayer lived hard and worked at a phenomenal pace. 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.”
In 1997, Mayer returned to his Overlook Press, which had published Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, in the US.