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Wednesday 16th May

Michael Legat

Posted at 2:33PM Monday 29 Aug 2011

By Frederick Nolan

One of Michael Legat's favourite stories was about the interview he had in 1941 with Mr. Bentley, the Careers Master at Whitgift, his school in Croydon. When Michael made it clear he did not want a job in banking or insurance, Mr. Bentley suggested he try publishing. And what, asked Michael, do they do in publishing? "They read books and go to cocktail parties," said Mr. Bentley, which sounded like just the sort of thing Michael had in mind. A telephone call later he was presenting himself to, and being offered a job as assistant publicity manager at, John Lane The Bodley Head.

With a starting salary of 15 shillings (75p) a week, he soon found he was less publicity manager and more office boy, and that cocktail parties were a rare thing indeed. A year or so in, however, he was taken under the wing of the firm's idiosyncratic manager C. J. Greenwood, who saw to it that young Michael learned something about production, design and typography, royalties, invoicing and accounts. By the time he received his call-up papers in 1943, his salary had gone up to £1.2s.6d (£1.12½p) and he had been given the opportunity of translating Les Jeux Inconnus, the first of several French novels he translated for the firm's list, an achievement of which he was always especially proud.

In 1946, after three years in the Royal Navy, he decided to become a teacher, only to find that by the time he was "demobbed" all the teacher training colleges were full of ex-servicemen like himself. An abortive attempt to get into theatre left him no option but to go back to the Bodley Head, where, to his surprise, he was installed as production manager and decided after all to buckle down and make a career in publishing.

By 1950 he had met and married Rosetta Clark, a secretary at British European Airways, whose pay at that time was more than his. A colleague, Richard Hough, told him there was a production manager's job going with a new firm being set up by the American paperback publisher, Bantam Books. When he was offered the job at a salary of £900 a year, his colleagues at The Bodley Head tried to talk him out of it—paperbacks were a long way below the salt in those days—but influenced not a little by the arithmetic (the salary on offer was three times what he was earning) he took the plunge and in November 1950 joined Transworld Publishers.

It had been Bantam's intention to use their own name for the English company but someone else had already registered it, so instead it was named after the airline on which its chief executive had travelled to London. And yes, the Corgi brand was inspired by the Queen's dogs. With a staff consisting of managing director Edward Marshall, Michael as production manager, accountant Allan Cheek and two secretaries, one of whose time was exclusively devoted to looking after Marshall's every—yes, every—need, the plan was to publish three books a month, but there was a snag. Because paper was still strictly rationed and allocated on the basis of a firm's pre-war usage, Corgi Books could not begin to publish until a source for paper was found. It turned out there were no such problems in France, providing the books were printed there, and the wheels began to turn.

Since Corgi Books were no more than Bantam hand-me-downs, the first three were hardly earthshaking : An Affair of State by Pat Frank, A Private Killing by James Benet, and Shane by Jack Schaefer. During production it was decided to up-price them from 1s/6d (7½p) to 2/- (10p); with two of the titles this was no problem, but the third had to be stickered, a job which fell to the production manager. And over the next few days Mike (he was always Mike in publishing circles, always Michael in private) personally licked and stuck a 2/- gummed label on every one of 30,000 covers.

Corgi Books got off to an indifferent start, and by the late summer of 1951 things were so parlous that Bantam's president Ian Ballantine flew to London to find out what was wrong. In short order the generously-overpaid managing director was fired along with a couple of other supernumeraries, and Allan Cheek became manager, Mike production manager and Anne Vaisey their secretary, with all three responsible for sales and publicity. After another year of near-serfdom —the books were publicised by means of releases and order forms hammered out on typewriters and printed on a hand-operated Roneo duplicating machine—Corgi was again losing money, and a contingent led by Bantam's President John O'Connor (Ballantine had left the company) and financial director Sidney B. Kramer flew in, clearly intent upon closing the whole thing down. Somehow the Americans were persuaded that the firm was viable, but to succeed—survive—they needed to retain any profits they made and to be able to acquire their own books for publication. To their surprise, Bantam went along with the proposition. New sales and production managers were brought in and Mike was appointed editor. And somehow, it worked.

By 1954, Corgi had moved to a new building with its own warehouse in Park Royal, riding high on a boom in the sales of war books, which made it possible to expand the list to include romances and Westerns. These latter, in particular, included not only novels, but also historical works of great interest to the English Westerners, an organization devoted to the history of the old West whose monthly magazine I edited. A correspondence sprang up between us, I writing to Michael suggesting books he might want to take on and he replying to explain when he could and why sometimes he couldn't (can you imagine striking up such a correspondence with a publisher today?).

After a while, he asked me whether I would be interested in becoming a reader for Corgi, adding apologetically that he could only pay 15/- (75p) a book. I was astonished: you could get paid for reading? This led in 1960 to my becoming his editorial assistant, salary £6 a week. Happy as a clam, I was completely unaware that once again, Transworld was on the brink of disaster. Sales were poor and a new venture in children's paperbacks wasn't working. To make things worse, for the last couple of years managing director Allan Cheek had been seriously misinforming Bantam about sales, profits, competition, and the trade in general. Once again, Sidney Kramer came over, his brief to kill or cure. In short order Allan Cheek and several department heads were replaced, and Alan Earney joined the firm as senior editor. Next, Sidney went out looking for a new managing director. The man he chose for the job was Patrick D. Newman.

Very few, either inside the firm or outside it thought some hotshot from the greetings card industry could rescue Corgi, but they were wrong: in his first year, Newman took the company from a £100,000 loss to a £35,000 profit and would go on to make it ten times that within a decade. Alas, Mike never liked him. "I don't think he ever had any real interest in books," he said.

With just about every department sporting a new manager (I got Publicity) Transworld began to have the kind of success paperback publishers dream of, branching out into "literary" books, another children's series, even poetry, but always with its eye firmly upon the business of entertainment. Major signings Mike was particularly proud of were Catherine Cookson and Frederick Forsyth. When Transworld bought Forsyth's bestseller The Day of the Jackal for £45,000, everyone in the company wanted to take credit for it, and the joke was bandied around that the buying price had actually been £180,000 – Pat Newman paid £45,000 for it, Mike Legat paid £45,000 for it, Alan Earney paid 45,000 for it and sales director Philip Flamank paid £45,000 for it.

By the '70s. Corgi was no longer the poor relation among paperback publishers, but in the process Pat Newman had become a persistent thorn in Mike's side; he was tempted by an offer from André Deutsch and another from Lord Sidney Bernstein, but instead decided to ameliorate his unhappiness by becoming an author. His first book, Dear Author, published in 1972, became the first of a very long line of "how-to" books; his success would eventually lead him to launch out as a novelist. Just then his old friend Sidney Kramer, London managing director of the American group Crowell-Collier-Macmillan firm was looking for an editorial director to take the helm at Cassell. When Mike suggested himself, Kramer said yes at once, but added a rider. "These are rough guys," he said, "not like Bantam." As he himself discovered; unable to solve Cassell's financial problems, Kramer was replaced by the mercurial (read unpredictable) Jeremiah Kaplan, with whom Mike had practically nothing in common; it was only a matter of time before he decided to keep the promise he made to himself years before and become a full-time author. With some freelance work on the side, he began work on The Wine of San Cristoforo, a novel about the business of winemaking,. His publisher Ernest Hecht preferred the title suggested by Alan Earney (now editorial director at Corgi, who had bought the paperback rights) and it became Mario's Vineyard. Four more such family sagas would follow.

For the first time in his life, Mike had the freedom to do some of the things that interested him but he had never had time for. He served on the management committee of the Society of Authors, became a member of the South East Arts Literature Advisory Panel, an Associate vice-President of the Romantic Novelists Association, chairman of the Writers Summer School at Swanwick, and various other bodies, until a serious bout of ill-health slowed him down considerably. He spent his later years supplying regular columns for Writers News, occasional talks to Rotary and Probus clubs, playing bridge and what he called "geriatric tennis," and taking part – as he had done for most of his life – in local amateur drama.

The ups and downs of his professional life are wonderfully captured (with more than a few sly digs at some of the movers and shakers of his era) in a slim autobiography, They Read Books and Go To Cocktail Parties. One of the most popular, principled and influential figures in London publishing, Michael Legat was a kind, modest and likeable man, very much of the times and places in which his unashamedly old-fashioned editorial style flourished. And of course he was my hero.

Michael Ronald Legat, born London, 1923, married 1949 Rosetta Clark 1949 (died 2005) two sons, died August 15, 2011.

1946 Production Manager, Bodley Head; 1950 Production Manager, Transworld Publishers; 1952 Editorial Director, Transworld Publishers; 1973 Editorial Director, Cassell & Co.

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