06/10/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

Charles Skilton loved book people, he loved books and he loved . . .  the liaisons with women that the Fair so often afforded.

In the early years, he would place an advert ahead of the Fair in the Frankfurter Zeitung seeking help on the stand. Of course, he got lots of applications from pretty, young students and often one or two graced the stand. If it was a lucky year for him, one or more would become lovers.

The other ray of sunshine in my publishing firmament was a book entitled, Edinburgh Since 1900. It was actually the brainchild of a Mancunian publisher called Henry Hochland who was awfully good at stitching up deals with newspapers. He got me access to The Scotsman archives and I spent a couple of weeks trawling through old glass plates, zealously guarded by an initially intimidating chap called Bill Bradley, a towering former newspaper photographer who now rejoiced in the title, Picture Manager.

I soon discovered he had a heart of gold; that was a necessary quality because I had to ask him to make more than 200 black and white prints from the plates. The book took only a few weeks to put together on the cut and paste principle and over many editions (five, I think) it sold more than 75,000 copies in the then buoyant nostalgia market.

Unfortunately, poor Henry, who had stitched up one person too many, was put into liquidation by his creditors, but I managed to retrieve the printing film from the printers in Slovenia and they were happy to turn the presses back on again, for cash.

These mini-success stories were exceptions to the rule. Most books sell miserably. There are far too many of them published. Publishers issue books on the premise that it’s a bit like firing arrows at a target. Most may miss but a few will hit the bull's-eye. The trouble is knowing which ones.

A Glaswegian publisher and old Harrovian called Richard Drew, who was always a better salesman than publisher, once announced at a Scottish General Publishers Association meeting in the late 1970s: “I never read any of the books I publish. But I make sure they have a bloody good cover . . .” As self-supposed literary intellectuals, we were all deeply shocked at the time. But, upon reflection, there was more than a grain of truth in his pithy observation.

I wrote a modestly successful book about the wars in Slovenia and Croatia, Somebody Else’s War, illustrated with my own photographs. I did deals with a publisher in the UK, it was published in Slovenia and a firm of solicitors in London - Dibb, Lupton, Broomhead - who were seeking to get into Slovenia as business consultants, commissioned an edition through one of their partners, David Lee Sherman.

I had previously escaped from Croatia in the company of his charming, Croatian wife, Cherry, who I’d met in the lobby of the British Consul’s office in Zagreb as Serb tanks closed the airport). We had a delightful and exciting escape across Croatia by train, ending up in Belgrade. It was a successful exit strategy and we were both very pleased with ourselves.

So was Glasgow rare book dealer, Cooper Hay, because I hand carried his £100,000 elephant folio book of Charles Rennie Mackintosh prints through the war zones and restored it safely to him.

Somebody Else’s War sold a respectable 6000 copies. But there was a lot more mileage to be had out of my Bosnia material. An energetic woman spotted that. In early 1995, the Edinburgh publisher, Stephanie Wolfe Murray, approached me and suggested an illustrated book about my experiences in Bosnia.

To her credit, Stephanie wanted a book highlighting the pain that the country had been through. She was, and is, a sensitive person who commits herself to causes. In those days, her main cause was Canongate Publishing, which she had painstakingly built up over some 25 years, but she was soon to be replaced by an ambitious wealthy, young man called Jamie Byng, whose predecessor had famously been executed in 1759 on the quarterdeck of his flagship, pour encourager les autres, after failing to engage the enemy.

I first met Byng in Canongate’s Hanover Street offices in 1989. The company was just going bust, thanks to the failure of its parent, the Musterlin Group, and there was an amiable, bright young spark, sporting a mop of hair like a King Charles Spaniel, in the back office who seemed to have a plentiful stock of ideas. I did not imagine at that time that, in short order, Byng would take over Canongate and make a huge financial success of it. But, in my view, the day Stephanie left, Canongate lost its soul.

Anyway, Stephanie was still in charge when she commissioned Cry Bosnia which would be published in Autumn 1995 at precisely the right moment in time, as the war drew to a dramatic end with long-awaited armed NATO intervention against the Serbs.

The book was generally well reviewed although one reviewer snidely observed, referring to its large format and copious illustration: "This is probably the only coffee table book that will be published on the Bosnian war."

Canongate soon sold out their edition of 3000 copies. Byng opined that the market was probably satisfied. It was published the following year in the USA by the committed Palestinian publisher, Michel Moushabeck, and it would go on to be reprinted five times and sell 28,000 copies through a charity Stephanie and I set up, called Connect.

Connect was born over a pleasant lunch in Edinburgh. Stephanie wanted the book to achieve something worthwhile. Frankly, I was only interested in getting it published and, equally frankly, I didn’t think it would sell that well. So, over the second bottle of Chardonnay, I readily agreed to her suggestion that I donate my royalties, in their entirety, to the nascent charity. Within three years, Connect had restocked libraries all over Bosnia with books which Stephanie skilfully begged from English publishers, including substantial outfits like Oxford University Press; my royalties paid the carriage costs of getting them to Bosnia.

Cry Bosnia sold like hotcakes through a body called AFES who were the US equivalent of the NAAFI, supplying serving soldiers in the field. It hit the spot with the young soldiers who could see in the pictures a clear reflection of what they were experiencing themselves: for most of them Bosnia was a revelation, a catalogue of horrors.

The success was also down to Stephanie’s son, Rupert, who tirelessly negotiated his way around often remote Bosnian military encampments flogging the book by the carload. The car, by this time, was my own pensioned-off Skoda, which had seen more than 100,000 miles of the war zones of Yugoslavia.

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