Jon Wynne-tyson
Founder of Centaur Press who championed lost masterpieces and works on eccentric subjects
JON WYNNE-TYSON, who has died aged 95, was an author, a leading campaigner for animal rights, a lifelong friend of Noël Coward, and the reluctant “King” of an uninhabited Caribbean island; but the focus of his life was the Centaur Press, the publishing company he ran single-handed for more than 40 years.
He founded Centaur in 1954, initially running it from his flat in Highgate, where his young daughter shared her bedroom with the stock. Family and business were later rehoused in a bungalow at Fontwell, West Sussex.
Although the seven-day working weeks took their toll on his health, he never took on any permanent staff; his “marketing department” consisted of a converted pram in which he wheeled Centaur catalogues to the post office. With no shareholders to appease, he was free to publish works that no commercially-minded outfit would touch with a barge pole.
AN Wilson, reviewing Wynnetyson’s memoir Finding the Words: A Publishing Life (2004) in The Daily Telegraph, gloried in his eccentric
titles: “The Letter-box: A History of Post Office Pillar and Wall-boxes is one I especially like. When I read that Wynne-tyson had published a study of Chimney-pots and Stacks by the Rev Valentine Fletcher, I cheered.”
He had a tendency to turn down books that became bestsellers, notably JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, and often found that authors to whom he suggested projects would take his ideas to more lucrative publishers. He asked one of his mother’s oldest friends, Dodie Smith, if she would write a book about her beloved Dalmatians; she replied that she “could no more write a little book on dogs than an epic poem”, but within two years One Hundred and One Dalmatians was published by Heinemann.
Nevertheless, Centaur remained solvent, as its books usually sold out their print runs, even if it took some years. Wynne-tyson found it absurd that the big publishers remaindered their backlists so quickly, on the grounds that storing the books was too expensive; he kept his backlist titles in a boat shed he built on the coast.
His crowning achievement was the Centaur Classics list, which reprinted such otherwise unobtainable texts as the 16th-century antiquarian John
Leland’s Itinerary in England and
Wales, and the diaries of the celebritystalking Irish poet William Allingham.
Later on in his career he became a prominent figure in the animal rights movement and instituted the Kinship Library, a Centaur imprint devoted to reprints of classic works on animal welfare. A Quaker from boyhood, he resigned from the Society of Friends in the 1970s because he thought they did not take animal rights seriously enough.
In 1972 he wrote and published The
Civilised Alternative, which he intended as a guide for young people on how to shape a new society based on pacifism and vegetarianism. He followed it with Food for a Future: The Ecological Priority of a Humane Diet
(1975), which was admired more for its moral clarity than its scientific soundness, and The Extended Circle
(1985), an anthology of quotations in support of animal rights that ranged from Dostoevsky to Doris Day.
Wynne-tyson did not convert to veganism, however, admitting that the kitchen was his wife’s domain and she regarded it as a fad too far. Neither was there anything ascetic about him, despite his sage-like status in the animal welfare movement: he liked fast cars, squash and sailing; for many years he was part of a crew that raced on the Solent.
Jon Linden Wynne-tyson was born in Hampshire on July 6 1924. His father, Wing Commander Linden Tyson, left his mother for another woman when Jon was five, a scandal that precipitated his departure from the RAF for a successful business career.
Jon’s mother, Esmé Wynne, had been a well-known child actress but turned her back on the theatre in her twenties, becoming a novelist and religious philosopher after converting to Christian Science.
One of her fellow juvenile actors had been Noël Coward, who remained one of her closest friends, and responded to her doomed attempts to improve him spiritually and morally with sardonic good humour. Jon wrote a play about their relationship, Marvellous Party, which was broadcast on BBC Radio in
1994, with Stanley Baxter as Coward and Dorothy Tutin as Esmé.
An only child, Jon was brought up, as he recalled, in
“the sole care of a … highly emotional, possessive, intelligent, and busy mother”. Coward once said to him:
“Why you didn’t turn out as gay as a hussar, my dear boy, I have never understood.”
He loathed his time at Brighton College and was overjoyed when, aged 15, his formal education came to an end on the outbreak of war, as his father rejoined the RAF and was no longer able to afford the fees. Jon was registered as a conscientious objector by a tribunal in
Bristol, which dismayed his father, not least because he had proved to be a first-class marksman at school.
He went on to work as a market gardener with
Quakers and other pacifists.
After the war he took on a variety of jobs, including orderly and toilet cleaner at University College Hospital in London, while he gained a reputation as a book reviewer.
In 1951 his first book was published, a humorous guide to coping with life in shared digs called Accommodation Wanted, with illustrations by his first wife. A friendly publisher promised to invest some funds in a follow-up if Wynne-tyson published it himself, with the result that the Centaur Press was launched in 1954.
Wynne-tyson always admitted frankly that he would have preferred to earn his living as a writer than as a publisher, but it was the latter profession that enabled him to support his family. He did find time to produce occasional novels, which he published himself, including the pseudonymous Behind the Smiling Moon (1959), a spoof of the solipsistic Françoise Sagan school that was reviewed as a serious work by the critics, and So Say Banana Bird (1984), a satire on West Indian politics.
Wynne-tyson travelled a great deal in the Caribbean, often visiting Coward at his home in Jamaica, and in 1970 he became the latest in a line of literary men to be acknowledged as “King” of Redonda, a tiny “guano-spattered chunk of rock” lying between Nevis and Montserrat.
This particular “monarchy” had its origins in a shaggy dog story originated by the first, self-proclaimed “King”, the British writer MP Shiel (1865-1947). Wynne-tyson found himself bombarded with correspondence from cranks who claimed that he had usurped their rights to the kingdom, and in 1997 he gratefully abdicated in favour of the eminent Spanish novelist Javier Marías.
Wynne-tyson retired in 1998, selling Centaur to another small publisher, Open Gate Press. His memoirs revealed a man somewhat battle-scarred by nearly half a century of coping with treacherous distributors and flaky authors. And not just his own authors: he recalled how Muriel Spark would regularly harangue him by telephone (“You are a disreputable publisher!”) because he published an innocuous study of her work by her former lover Derek Stanford.
He could, however, survey his legacy with pride: “Books – for both authors and their publishers – make a more revealing memorial than a headstone, and don’t have to be read in the rain.”
Jon Wynne-tyson married Joan Stanton in 1950, with whom he had a daughter. After their divorce he married Jennifer Tyson (not a relation) in 1956; they had another daughter.
Jon Wynne-tyson, born July 6 1924, died March 26 2020