In the space of just a few weeks this spring, the world of
readers lost three of the great ones—Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, and Peter Mayer, a
publisher unlike any other who passed away earlier this month at the age of 82. Peter's passing has left me feeling bereft. I had always considered him one of The Immortals.
If Peter’s name is unfamiliar, here’s my favorite way to
introduce him: the first time I met Peter, I served him a slew of
eighteenth-century insults…and he loved them.
At the time I had recently and somewhat improbably licensed
an (abridged) edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary to George Gibson,
then the owner of Walker Publishing. You
need to meet Peter Mayer, George advised. He will have ideas for you.
I needed some. I was the editor of a small
specialty-publishing imprint that was a sideline business to a larger company
in Florida. I was tasked with publishing books that would not be sold anywhere else but would still sell.
Put another way: I was nobody in particular in the
publishing world, and I was going to meet someone who was legendary.
At that point Peter was in the last chapter of his
extraordinary publishing career, after his time as CEO of Penguin in Britain,
and after he had published Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses despite the death threats. Peter was by then running Overlook Press
out of his very-downtown Manhattan office, whose squeaky wood floors and lively
hum signaled to visitors that this was no corporate bland land of publishing.
Peter's preposterous idea
Peter and I met at the London Book Fair, in 2003. I wanted
to take him something for our first meeting, but what? A book was superfluous.
As a line extension to the Johnson dictionary, we had created a set of magnets that
each sported one of the more colorful insults from the book—slubberdegullion, fopdoodle, and the
like. So I took Peter a tin of Samuel Johnson’s insults.
And that was how our friendship began. The consummately
shrewd Peter immediately grasped what I was trying to do with this small
imprint and, just as George promised, had an idea. He would reprise some of the
more expensive, out-of-print books he had published in years past, and we would
publish new versions of them as high-end, limited-edition books.
The only way I could successfully sell them, though, was if
I sold them exclusively, not jointly with Overlook. For anyone else, this would
have been a deal breaker. For Peter, it was barely a shrug. He would wait until I’d sold through my stock and then bring
out a slightly different version for Overlook.
The word bubbling up in the head of any publisher reading
this is most likely: preposterous.
Who does this? Who sits on inventory until somebody else sells through their
stock?
The word is generosity
I never did fully understand why Peter was so uncommonly
generous to me. He was a savvy businessperson, evident in his commanding
presence. He punctuated it with a voice that was unmistakable—a
Cary-Grant-on-steroids voice, but with more of a New York accent, his home for
most of his life (although he was born in England). It was a voice that spoke
of keen intelligence, to say nothing of experience.
Most of all, Peter really didn’t need this idea of his for
his own imprint.
But he was of his own era and mind, a book man who believed
in the near-alchemistic powers of books. Even more—and more simply—Peter was
kind.
He and I published some stunning books together: Jerusalem, The Saga of the Holy City; The Grimani
Breviary; The Sarajevo Haggadah. I confess that when Peter proposed the
last one to me, I didn’t know what a Haggadah was. Aren’t you Jewish? he said incredulously. Half-Lebanese, I assured him.
It was only the second time I knew Peter to be (momentarily)
nonplussed. The first was when I told him, between tears, that I could never
repay him for what he’d done for me.
The last book we published together was a collection of
Redouté’s famous flower paintings. We produced it as an “unbound book,” an idea
that I suggested and Peter enthusiastically endorsed. If anyone actually beams
with pride anymore, I did when Peter said he liked the idea.
There was another, bigger project afterwards that we planned
to collaborate on. But then the sideline-business imprint got sidelined. I wrote Peter to let him know. He immediately wrote me back, distraught. When
he called me shortly after that, I could hear the concern in his voice. I was
to come see him anyway, when I came to New York.
I never got that chance. But Peter had given me a much
larger chance—the opportunity to do, at least for a short time, the work I
loved best.
I was a small, insignificant speck in a world where he was a
giant. There was really no reason for him to help me the way he did. But that
was the way Peter Mayer lived.
