PAUL HAMLYN ‘There Must Be Another Way

■ This article originally appeared in Logos 14/3, 2003, 120–129.

PAUL HAMLYN ‘There must be another way . . .’

Philip Jarvis and Sue Thomson

Paul Hamlyn’s father, a distinguished German Jewish paediatrician, emigrated with his wife and four children from Berlin via Edinburgh to London in 1933. The family name was Hamburger. Paul, at six, was the youngest and spoke no English. They settled in St John’s Wood and tried to create a home and social environment similar to those to which they had been accustomed in Berlin. Paul was packed off to a Quaker boarding school, which was a shock both to him and the school. Even at that early age, his sense of fun and irreverence towards orthodoxy and conformity were well developed. He emerged from school, unburdened by any great academic honours, when he was sixteen or seventeen. In the mean time, his father had died but, though he loved his mother dearly, Paul had no intention of returning to the family environment. His next few fairly carefree years included a spell as one of the ‘Bevin Boys’ (adolescents conscripted to work in the mines while the miners were at war); as an office boy on Country Life magazine (where he claimed to have written both sides of the letters page when there was a shortage of

In 1952, Philip Jarvis was appointed Central Book Buyer for the 140 book departments in Boots the Chemists. Seven years later, Paul Hamlyn invited him to be a partner and Managing Director of the new Paul Hamlyn Ltd, formed from Books for Pleasure. When the Hamlyn Publishing Group became part of the International Publishing Corporation, Jarvis continued as Managing Director until 1970, when he left to become Vice President, International of Western Publishing Co USA. He controlled their worldwide licensing and export business and was Chairman of their subsidiary companies in Canada, France, Australia, Japan, and the UK. He retired in 1985. He and Paul Hamlyn were close friends for more than fifty years. After starting her career the hard way at Foyles bookshop in 1956, Sue Thomson sam- pled book and magazine publishing at Thames & Hudson and Condé Nast. She joined The Hamlyn Group in 1966, which led to starting Octopus Books with Paul Hamlyn in 1971. In 1986, she became consultant to publishers and others and an advisor to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. She was Chairman of the Foundation for a two-year transition period follow- ing Paul’s death in 2001.

correspondents); briefly as a trader among the Charing Cross Road book- shops; and even more briefly, as a writer of innocent paperback romances. Mindful of the mockery his name had invited while he was at school, Paul took the earliest opportunity, after a quick glance at a phone book, to change it. To understand his subsequent impact on the book trade, it is essential to try to understand the complex nature of his personality and the motives that drove him to make changes wherever he found an inconvenient or prejudiced restriction. He showed an early predilection for the good life available to a fancy- free young man during the first few post-war years in London and the Côte d’Azur. He would happily spend his last few shillings or francs on delicious food and/or wine and regard his indulgence as an appropriate incentive to earn more in order to spend more. His experiences in the secondhand book world of Charing Cross Road led him to the remainder market, in which it was possible, with the minimum of boring administration, to turn over one’s money quickly and advantageously. He developed a taste for natty dressing and fast cars. His sporty white Jaguar saloon turned heads (as it was intended to) at Booksellers Association Conferences. He was a ready spender on his own creature comforts but was also unselfcon- sciously generous to others—sometimes to total strangers. His personality drove his business life. His mischievous sense of fun was infectious and could defuse many a tricky moment. His emotional make- up was an unusual blend of sentimentality and toughness, an almost bla- tant desire to be loved counterbalanced by an ability to cut out of his life anyone whom he suspected of disloyalty or negativism, which to him were synonymous. His rejection of his German Jewish cultural and racial legacy was an early indication that he would resist any attempt to be type- cast. All his life he was able to surprise, even shock, those who thought they knew him well, a faculty which aided his multifaceted attack on the established way of doing things in the book trade. Other refugees from Nazism who made their marks in the British book scene did so by ‘join- ing the club’. Not so Paul. While his brother, Michael Hamburger, became a renowned translator and poet, and one of his sisters, Dr Eva Seligman, a distinguished psychoanalyst, Paul seemed determined to confirm the role of ‘black sheep’ of the family that had been allocated to him by his German nanny and, reputedly, by his father. His first marriage was to an effervescent, intelligent and sensitive Irish Catholic girl, known and loved by everyone as Bobbie. She was to be an invaluable supporter of his early forays against the barriers of the