Livia Gollancz
Determined and imaginative publisher who earlier played French horn with the Hallé Orchestra
LIVIA GOLLANCZ, who has died aged 97, was a French horn player who retired from orchestral life in her thirties to devote her life to the publishing house set up by her father, Victor.
Her main preoccupations were music and literature, which she pursued with relish and zeal. Perhaps her most signal achievement in publishing was to marry the past with the present, incorporating the feeling – instilled by her father – of an old-school family publishing firm that succeeded in keeping up with the changing needs of the modern world.
After Victor’s death in 1967, Livia Gollancz took control of the firm, proving herself to be determined and imaginative. She helped to steer its fortunes through the 1970s and 1980s, discovering some new authors and losing some of the older ones, but retaining most of the “star” writers.
AJ Cronin (author of The Citadel, published by Gollancz in 1937) and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca, 1938) were counted among the writers who remained loyal during the changeover period. Others on the Gollancz list included Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1953), EP Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963) and Anthony Price (The Labyrinth Makers, 1970).
Victor had commissioned George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a bleak account of life in working-class northern Britain, but they had parted company after he declined Homage to Catalonia, the author’s observations of the Spanish Civil War.
As managing director, Livia Gollancz developed a great confidence in the business. Yet one of her principal interests was a study of the apparatus of management, to the bemusement of some clients. “A veritable portrait of the artist as a manager,” sighed one waggish author.
Livia Ruth Gollancz was born in Notting Hill, West London, on May 25 1920, the eldest of five daughters of Victor, who had been thrown out of Repton for teaching pacifism. Her mother Ruth (née Lowry) was a painter, while her maternal grandmother, Henrietta, had looked like Emmeline Pankhurst and would sometimes switch clothes to help the Suffragette leader escape from the authorities.
Victor, who only attended synagogue on Yom Kippur, would read Sherlock Holmes to the family after lunch on Saturdays and extracts from the New Testament on Sundays. Although a Hebrew grace was said at dinner, by the age of 14 Livia had stopped going to synagogue. In an interview for the British Library, she recalled her young self as “fiercely independent, with a mass of hair”.
She was seven when her father set up his publishing house, but the lure of books was not yet strong. “For me, from the age of eight onwards, music was the only thing,” she wrote.
Her formal education was at St Paul’s Girls’ School, where she joined the Young Communists. Her first instrument was the violin, but she played viola in the school orchestra and it was with this that she entered the Royal College of Music.
She learnt the horn in her own in time and by the age of 20 was playing with the wartime London Symphony Orchestra. She recalled being in Leicester at the time of her 21st birthday when the pianist Benno Moiseivitch invited some of the orchestra to go drinking; she managed to stay sober enough to get them back to their digs.
The Hallé followed and she was playing principal horn in the Manchester orchestra by the age of 23, although John Barbirolli dropped her after she expressed reservations about his conducting style.
Livia Gollancz was playing with orchestras in Scotland when a friend introduced her to hill walking on Ben Lomond. She lasted only ten minutes, but later got into rambling on Kinder Scout.
Back in London she joined the Covent Garden orchestra, which turned out to be a mistake because she lacked pit experience and Karl Rankl, the music director, did not approve of orchestral women. She then freelanced while studying physics, chemistry and biology at Regent Street Polytechnic with a view to retraining in medicine.
Despite writing to a friend in the early 1950s that she “got bouquets for the sounds made”, Livia Gollancz retired from orchestral life in 1953. She continued to play as an amateur, notably with Chelsea Opera, which the opera-loving Victor once rescued after an ill-attended performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz.
Instead of medicine, she was coaxed to the family publishing company by her father. She started by sticking labels on to envelopes, but was quickly promoted to typographer – not because she was her father’s daughter, but because she had inherited her mother’s talent for visual space. Victor taught her the whole business, although she recalled that the hardest thing after years of orchestral playing was working more sociable hours.
Livia Gollancz was in America when her father’s death was announced. She now had to learn to read people as well as manuscripts. Despite some early failures of communication, when she attempted to emulate Victor’s more autocratic style, she soon grasped the hard facts of merchandising, which she disliked calling “marketing”, and the more sophisticated essentials of being head of a publishing company.
The business was sold in 1989 and, after various ownerships, is now the science fiction imprint of Orion.
Livia Gollancz, who was unmarried, now returned to playing the viola and began exploring the Himalayas. Although she would speak with self-deprecation of her publishing achievements, her eyes would brighten at the mention of music. It was dominant in her life – whether playing professionally, as an amateur in middle age, or while listening in her later years – and remained so until the end.
Livia Gollancz, born May 25 1920, died March 29 2018