Peter Mayer
Commercially-minded head of Penguin who first published Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
PETER MAYER, the publisher, who has died aged 82, was chief executive 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 publishing salary of £100,000 at a time 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.
In 1983 he bought Frederick Warne, the company that published Beatrix Potter, for £6 million. Two years later he bought Michael Joseph, Hamish Hamilton, Rainbird and Sphere for £11.5 million, bringing hardback and paperback houses together under one roof. In 1986 he paid $46 million for the New American Library.
Mayer took a ruthless approach to cost-cutting, sacking hundreds of staff and prompting some authors to threaten to leave, some accusing him of seeking to turn British publishing into a vulgar marketing exercise. Yet under his leadership, from 1978 to 1997, Penguin grew to become the largest consumer book publisher in Britain and number four in the US, with global sales of £369m and profits of £33.6m in 1995. It also established itself as a leading publisher of children’s books in the UK, using the Ladybird imprint.
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 for the first time 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 on St Valentine’s Day 1989 when he received a call from Patrick Wright, the 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 the street 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 himself 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.” Parents at her school asked him to take her away lest an Islamist death squad arrive and shoot the wrong student.
Penguin refused to withdraw the book, Mayer claiming that to have done so would have endangered “civil society as we knew it”. Yet when the publisher opted not to bring out a paperback version, to some what began as a noble battle for free speech had become a grubby episode of corporate compromise, epitomised by an obfuscatory letter in which Mayer sought to justify the decision: “Our most recent approach has been to signify a general intentionality to proceed with a carte blanche approach to walk away from any situation when it seems clear to us we should do so.” For some time the decision to publish “that damned book”, as some of Mayer’s colleagues called it, cost Penguin £2 million in security each year. “I was astonished,” Mayer recalled. “I was just a publisher of a novel. I still did not see it as a world event.”
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.
Mayer won a scholarship to Columbia University, spent a year reading PPE at Christ Church, Oxford, and won a year’s graduate fellowship at Indiana University, where he took a master’s degree in comparative literature. Finally he won a Fulbright scholarship to the Free University of Berlin.
His father was upset when he refused to join the family glove business, but it was a wise decision as the company soon went bust. In 1971 Mayer would set up a small publishing company, Overlook Press, and give his father the job of running it.
After graduation Mayer took a job at a small highbrow publisher, Orion Press. Then in 1962 he joined Avon Books, where in 14 years he rose to be editor in chief and then publisher. He had successes with Saul Bellow and Patrick White, though his real triumph was with Richard Bach’s cult classic Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, which he bought for $600,000 and priced high so that he could tart up the cover and appeal to a more discerning readership. The gamble paid off and the book made $1 million for Avon.
He would repeat the same trick at Penguin, introducing the large format paperback so that he could break the £2 price barrier which limited profits on smaller books. Booksellers complained because they had to redesign their shelves, but Mayer was having none of it. “I’m damned if I’m going to design my books just so that they fit your shelves,’’ he told an Irish booksellers’ fair in 1979.
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.
In 1988, driving his Jeep from his house in New York to his house in Woodstock, in the northern part of New York State, he cornered too sharply and flung himself into the road sustaining serious injuries. “He probably had a cigarette in his hand and one in his mouth at the time,” 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.”
The accident led him to give up smoking and he recovered from his injuries just in time for the Rushdie affair.
After retiring from Penguin in 1997, Mayer returned to his small familyowned imprint Overlook Press, which had published Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, in the US. The firm was also responsible for the resurrection of the Freddy the Pig series of children’s books and under Mayer’s leadership Overlook acquired Ardis Publishing, an imprint dedicated to Russian literature, in 2002, followed, in 2003, by Duckworth, which had gone into receivership.
In 1980 Mayer married Mary Lou Hall. The marriage was dissolved. He is survived by his partner, Sophy Thompson, and by a daughter from his marriage.
Peter Mayer, born March 28 1936, died May 11 2018