The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
John Rotheroe
Publisher of slim volumes on curiosities from Thimbles to Discovering Timber-Framed Buildings
JOHN ROTHEROE, who has died aged 88, was the publisher of more than 1,000 books covering an extraordinarily recherché range of specialist subjects. Rotheroe’s imprint, Shire Publications, was launched in 1962 with Discovering East
Suffolk, a hand-printed 24-page gazetteer funded by advertising and given away by coach operators and tourist information offices; after the first two printings lost money, a cover price was added to the third.
It was followed over more than 30 years by some 280 other Discovering guides to places, pastimes and curiosities: everything from topiary to “smoking antiques” and “old bicycles”. Discovering Brasses (1967) was a breakthrough success; Discovering TimberFramed Buildings (1993) sold more than 100,000 copies.
Other series of slim volumes embraced archaeology, Egyptology, garden history and old photographs – of wedding fashions, steam locomotives, hop-picking and much else – collected as History in Camera. “If the subject is sufficiently offbeat or obscure, we will consider it,” Rotheroe said in a rare interview in 1992.
He was genuinely interested and personally engaged in everything he published and a great encourager of first-time authors – among them the
Antiques Roadshow broadcaster John Bly, whose Discovering Hallmarks on English
Silver (1969) was much reprinted. If would-be writers with interests too esoteric even for Rotheroe had to be turned away, those who caught his eye were typically offered a £600 advance plus a five per cent royalty for a 5,000-word title which (unlike most mainstream publishers) Shire would keep in print for years.
As to sales, he cared naught for publicity – though “we did once achieve fame in a
Guardian fourth leader that enthused about a book on ancient hill figures” – preferring to take to the road to visit his customers, many of whom became personal friends. Long-standing Shire stockists included museums, stately homes and parish churches, St Bartholemew’s at Orford in Suffolk being his oldest account.
Low prices were also part of the strategy. Shire started selling books “at the price of a gin and tonic”; later, the benchmark was the price of a pint of beer. Rotheroe also offered booksellers an unusually generous returns policy, buying back stock at the original price because “it does nobody any good having old tatty unsold paperbacks hanging around.”
“We should probably be a lot more profitable if we restricted the number of titles,” Rotheroe acknowledged, “but that would have taken away a lot of the fun.”
Thimbles by Eleanor Johnson (1983), No 96
in the highly collectable Shire Album series, steadily sold more than 10,000 copies annually. But Rotheroe was equally proud of Betel-chewing Equipment of East New
Guinea by Harry Beran (1983) in his ethnography series (“To say they were loss-making would be a kind way of putting it”), which sold less than 100 a year.
John William Rotheroe was born in Hendon on August 24 1935 to James Rotheroe, a toolmaker, and his wife Kathleen, née Alford. Educated at Haberdashers’ Hampstead School, he went on to do National Service in the RAF and study medieval economic history at the LSE, where he also worked on the college newspaper, The Beaver.
After graduating he joined a London advertising agency. He and a colleague, John Hinton, founded Shire as a sideline and it was not until 1966 that he left the ad business to concentrate on publishing.
In 1974, the expanding venture moved to a twin-gabled 17th-century townhouse at Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire in which Oliver Cromwell was said to have stayed. The number of staff never exceeded seven, including Rotheroe and his wife Jacqueline, but nearly all the design work was done in-house, with printing subcontracted to a company in Wales.
Shire grew to sell some 750,000 books per year, the breadth of its range and enthusiasm of its customers providing some protection against the wider trade’s recessionary troughs. But its business model was so eccentric that larger publishers rarely showed interest in acquiring the firm.
“Our low figures keep the big boys away,” said Rotheroe. “But we manage to survive and enjoy ourselves with all the obscure topics we do. It would be flattering to be imitated, but no one would want to.”
He remained defiantly independent until 2007, when at 72 he retired and sold Shire to Osprey, an Oxford-based publisher of military history, now part of Bloomsbury.
John Rotheroe lived for 60 years in the same thatched house at Gubblecote, Hertfordshire, sang with the Tring Choral Society and Vale Gilbert & Sullivan Society, and was a keen birdwatcher and gardener. He published 30 Years of Shire Publications: A Bibliography for Collectors in 1991. He married, in 1963, Jacqueline Fearn, whose own works in the Shire catalogue included Discovering Heraldry, Domestic
Bygones (about obsolete domestic utensils) and Thatch and Thatching. They were divorced in the 1980s, and he is survived by their son Dominic and daughter Abigail.
John Rotheroe, born August 24 1935, died January 5 2024