Peter Owen
Publisher who specialised in the neglected, foreign and obscure, but preferred Austen and Trollope
PETER OWEN, who has died aged 89, founded his own publishing house in 1951 and became a champion of the obscure, the neglected, the modern, the foreign, the difficult and the downright unpopular; yet he somehow managed to keep his head above water and maintain his independence when all about him were losing theirs.
In a country notorious for its conservative tastes, Owen championed the global avant-garde, introduced British readers to voices from Japan to Mexico, held the torch for fading reputations (Colette, Apollinaire, Gide), and broke the record for the number of Nobel prizewinners (there were 10, including Shusaku Endo, Octavio Paz and Cesare Pavese) on his list. Of the 80 Peter Owen books in print in the 1990s, 50 were translations – from the Norwegian, Bulgarian, Japanese, Latvian and Maghrebi, as well as French and German.
Owen was bewilderingly eclectic. He published everyone from Anaïs Nin, Paul Bowles and Muriel Spark in the Fifties (she was his first editor and drew a charming picture of the publishing house’s early days in A Far Cry From Kensington) to Fiona PittKethley in the Nineties, with Marcel Marceau, Salvador Dali and Shere Hite in between. His list included Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace, the Hungarian Jozsef Lengyel’s From Beginning to End, the Italian Cesare Pavese’s A Mania for Solitude, a Romanian epic called The Uprising by Liviu Rebreanu, and Hebdomenos, the only novel by the artist Giorgio de Chirico, who was born in Greece of Italian parents and wrote the novel in French. Even more obscurely, Owen also published Cla Biert’s Only a Game, translated from its original Ladin, a language spoken by only a few thousand people in the Swiss canton of Grisons.
In the 1960s he was the first to buy up counter-culture books, including George Andrews’s The Book of Grass, long before it occurred to anyone that the counter would require any culture at all. His business technique was long hoardings and patient dozes, punctuated by the odd pounce. He never put a book out of print, just waited for its time to come. “I have often found that a really good writer will eventually become profitable,” he once said. “Often”, though, was an important qualification, for many failed to make the grade.
Owen acquired a reputation for meanness, but that was unfair. He paid his staff well, drew only a small salary himself and resisted the moneyspinning bonk-buster; and he was said never to push a book, no matter how potentially saleable it was.
Yet he loved discussing sales figures and print runs and watched his costs carefully, paying tiny advances, wangling subsidies for translations and pricing his books at a pound higher than the norm. He had no marketing department, no financial controllers and typed out his authors’ royalty statements himself with two fingers on an old portable typewriter. He opened his own mail, famously saving any unfranked stamps, and kept in print, in a ramshackle warehouse, books from his first list in the 1950s. His launch parties were paid for by unsuspecting cultural attachés, only too eager to celebrate the publication in Britain of one of their country’s greatest writers.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a sea change in his fortunes. Suddenly, translated fiction became fashionable and paperback companies vied to buy up the publishing rights. One editor was said to have bought up South American fiction “by the yard”. Huge advances were suddenly being paid for Owen’s stock in trade. Paul Bowles and Anaïs Nin acquired cult status, as did the Japanese author Shusaku Endo, the film rights to whose book, Silence, were bought by Martin Scorsese. Owen had championed Endo for years, with little effect.
Yet the strange thing was that Owen did not enjoy reading his own book list. Indeed, his literary tastes (Austen, Gaskell, Trollope and Thackeray) were so at variance with his preferences as a publisher, it was hard to credit their coming from the same man. The classical authors of the 19th century, he once opined, “are much better than what you get now”. As for foreign writers, especially the French and Germans, he found them “pretentious”.
Peter Owen was born in Germany on February 24 1927, the son of a German father and an English mother. He grew up in Nuremberg, where his parents owned a leather factory, but was sent at the age of five to live with his grandmother in England. There, he was eventually joined by his parents who, though Jewish, were reluctant to leave Germany.
In England, his father started a publishing company, Vision Press, with his wife’s brother, who had been the general manager of Zwemmer’s bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. After Peter left school, his father got him some menial jobs in publishing, in the literary department of Zwemmer’s and at Bodley Head, where he spent most of the time in the post room reading the file copies of books that were stored there, and then at Allen and Unwin, where he learnt all about production and typesetting.
A stint in the RAF gave Owen a forces paper quota of six tons, with full Board of Trade permission for the production of 12 books. In 1951, with £850 capital, he decided to set up his own publishing house in the garage of his house in west London.
He began co-producing books with the American publisher, New Directions, whom he knew through his uncle. His first book was A Dark
Stranger by Julien Gracq and his initial list included Ezra Pound and an anthology of Russian stories. His American contacts suggested he publish Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, the famous erotic partnership. He published Miller’s Books in My Life and Anaïs Nin’s Children of the Albatross and her Journals.
Owen once gave Anaïs Nin lunch at the Savoy. “She said Henry was sexually inadequate. I think she meant the information to be used. It was only after her death that I realised what a bitch she was.”
It was Miller who, inadvertently, gave Owen his first break by suggesting he should publish Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist fantasy
Siddhartha. Hesse had won the Nobel prize for literature, but was unknown outside Germany. “I wrote to Frau Hesse, who was an old cow,” he recalled. “She said that they only dealt with established publishers. So we bought it in conjunction with Vision Press for £25.” In the 1960s Siddhartha became a cult book and Owen was wooed by publishers eager to buy the paperback rights.
Eventually, he secured from Pan the biggest royalty deal ever struck for a paperback. The novel did more than any other to prevent Owen’s firm from collapsing. Yet from 1952 to the Hippy boom, the book had been dead weight.
Also in the 1950s, Owen met the odd husband and wife team of Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangier and published both. Paul Bowles later became a hero for the Beat poets and the 1960s avant garde.
Owen was lucky to obtain the services of a brilliant series of copy editors, attracted by the challenging nature of his list, whom he subjected to an entrance test so fiendishly cryptic that its solution was said to be beyond the man who set it. He also had substantial back-up from a loyal team of advisers and translators including Margaret Crosland, who was mainly responsible for Owen’s publishing Cocteau, Pavese and Colette. Owen himself admitted to no other language than English. Though he could read German, he “preferred not to”.
Owen’s list of authors soon expanded to include Pasternak, Octavio Paz, Salvador Dali, Lawrence Durrell, Anna Kavan, Peter Vansittart and Yukio Mishima, but he sometimes enlivened his list with more immediately saleable fare such as The Connoisseur’s Handbook of Marijuana (1973), the relentlessly gynaecological How to get Pregnant (1981) and the
Duke of Bedford’s Book of Snobs (1980), all of which made it to near the top of the best seller lists. He also published Tariq Ali’s New Revolutionaries (1969), decorating the launch room with mock Molotov cocktails, and Yoko Ono’s vapid Grapefruit (1968). He recalled meeting the Japanese artist at the Apple shop in Soho, “sitting with a hat on indoors, spooning caviar from a Fortnum’s jar: expressionless, gorging, arrogant”.
A burly, shock-haired, Dickensian figure with a healthy appetite for puddings and cigars, Owen spent his lunch times and evenings in the Queen’s Elm in the Fulham Road or the French Pub in Soho. Denizens of these establishments – painters, writers, jobbing builders, petty crooks – would often be invited to swill down the Norwegians’ champagne or the Brazilians’ canapés at Owen’s book launches. Meanwhile hapless copy editors would sometimes be asked to have a go at turning dog-eared manuscripts submitted by “someone I met at the pub last night” into saleable books. He was appointed OBE in 2004. Peter Owen married first, in 1953, Wendy Demoulins, the novelist Wendy Owen. The marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in 1987, Jan Treacy (née Cunningham), a former actress. That marriage too was dissolved. He is survived by two daughters and a son.
Peter Owen, born February 24 1927, died May 31 2016