Entertainment news, gossip & music, movie & book reviews on Stuff.co.nz: Bada Byng, bada boom
09 July 2006
Iain Sharp meets hotshot independent publisher Jamie Byng, squelches some salacious rumours, confirms others, discusses the next big thing in the book world and asks for tips on how to become a global player.
Hailed as the most influential figure in English-language publishing under the age of 40, Jamie Byng, head honcho of Canongate Press, has an intriguing double reputation as a workaholic and a hedonist.
His working day is said to stretch from 8am to 10pm. Yet he is also rumoured to be quite a party animal, cavorting and talking 19 to the dozen all night long. How does he manage without sleep, I wonder, feeling a little drowsy myself as I wait to meet him in the early evening at Auckland's Heritage Hotel.
I expect him to look as ravaged as that other famous English non-sleeper, Keith Richards. Instead, Byng is fresh-faced and spry. With his long sandy-hued tresses (he has been dubbed Canongate's "mane man") and funky little granny specs, the old rocker he resembles is not Richards but the late Noel Redding, bassist with the Jimi Hendrix Experience - a band that broke up the same month Byng was born: June, 1969.
But hair excepted, he has none of the Hendrix Experience's psychedelic trappings. He goes for a low-key casual jacket-and-jeans look. His manner is low-key and friendly too. Though he speaks with enthusiasm about the books he publishes, he is not the unstoppable motormouth I had been led to believe. He knows how to listen and pick up information as well as impart it. Successful publishers need this skill as much as successful football scouts do.
With a tinge of disappointment, I must also report that Byng was not coked up to the eyeballs either. He was under the influence of nothing stronger than the modest glass of chardonnay from which he occasionally sipped. Stories have circulated in recent years that Canongate's director is a powder fiend to rival Tony Montana, the bug-eyed maniac with the insatiable nasal cavity played by Al Pacino in the over-the-top gangster movie Scarface. Not so.
The gossip began in 1999 after Byng's decision to issue a de luxe limited edition of Robert Sabbag's classic chronicle of the drug-smuggling trade, Snowblind. Designed by bad boy English artist Damien Hirst, it was bound in mirrored glass and included such druggy paraphernalia as a mock credit card (for cutting lines of cocaine) on a chain as a bookmark and a rolled-up $US100 note (for snorting). Byng personally presented a copy to the Queen at a reception at Buckingham Palace. He received a letter from her private secretary thanking him for the gift. Perhaps Her Majesty imagined from a quick glance at the title that it was a thrilling tale of mountaineering perils overcome, akin to Sir Edmund Hillary's Nothing Venture, Nothing Win or Geoffrey Tabin's Blind Corners: Adventures on Seven Continents.
Advertisement
Advertisement
When Byng started working at Canongate Press as an unpaid assistant in the early 1990s, the boutique Edinburgh firm had none of its current sex and drugs and rock'n'roll associations. Its image was staid and tartan-clad. Struggling to survive, it specialised in Scottish subjects for a local audience. Mairi Hedderwick's An Eye on the Hebrides, Robbie Shepherd's Let's Have a Ceilidh: The Essential Guide to Scottish Dancing and Sorley Maclean's Reothairt Is Contraigh (poems in Gaelic) were typical titles.
"There were some interesting authors, such as Alasdair Gray, on the list," says Byng, "and Stephanie Wolfe Murray, who was Canongate's director back then, was a really good editor, but print runs seldom went over 5000 and the business was at least 80% focused on the Scottish market. I'd come to Edinburgh when I was 19 and fallen in love with the place. There are Scottish writers whose work I feel passionate about. But I didn't see why Canongate should limit itself to a Scottish scope. I wanted an international reach."
A member of the English aristocracy - the youngest child of the Earl of Strafford - Byng spent his childhood on a rambling, rather run-down estate in Hampshire. His father, he says, is the most un-earl-like man, preferring to be known as Tom and trying to make ends meet by working as a gardener in the local nursery.
When Byng was 12, his parents divorced and he came under the care of his mother's second husband, Sir Christopher Bland, who was then chairman of London Weekend Television and subsequently became chair of the BBC. Bland helped pay for Byng's takeover of Canongate in 1994.
While studying at Edinburgh University, Byng met and became romantically involved with New York-born painter Whitney McVeigh. They married about a month before the Canongate management buyout. Whitney's father, Charles McVeigh, well-heeled co-chairman of multinational investment bank Salomon Smith Barney, was one of Byng's other financial backers.
Before Byng decided on a career in publishing, he and Whitney ran reggae evenings at an Edinburgh nightclub called Chocolate City. As proof of their love of reggae, they named their first child (a daughter) Marley. Byng was smitten by black culture. Soon after taking control of Canongate, he started the Payback Press imprint which brought out new editions of such African-American underground classics as Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life, Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog and Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem.
Strange things, one might think, to come out of Edinburgh, home of haggis, kilts and bagpipes. But in the mid-1990s, perceptions of Scotland's capital were changing fast, thanks to the global success of Irvine Welsh's heroin-soaked saga Trainspotting. Suddenly, Edinburgh was hip.
Welsh was signed to another publisher (Secker & Warburg), but Byng snapped up other sassy young Scottish writers, such as James Landale, Laura Hird and Kevin Williamson (editor of Rebel Inc magazine, where Welsh's fiction had first appeared). He also cast his eye round the globe for similarly edgy material coming from other countries.
"By the end of 1997 we had successfully changed our profile and realigned our publishing list," says Byng. "But it was the Pocket Canons that really put Canongate on the map."
The idea was simplicity itself: reprint individual books from the Authorised King James version of the Bible, with celebrity introductions. The beauty was in the choice of celebrities: Will Self on Revelation, Nick Cave on the Gospel of Saint John, Louis de Bernieres on Job.
It was predictable that remarks in these introductions, such as English poet Blake Morrison (as guide to the Gospel of Saint John) describing Jesus as pushy and somewhat dislikeable, would upset fundamentalist Christians. But media interest in the series exceeded Byng's wildest expectations. Suddenly Canongate's name was in newspapers worldwide, he recalls. "Le Monde, El Pais, The Wall Street Journal - you name it."
Because the first set of Pocket Canons sold so well, Byng published a second series in 2000, with a similarly inventive lineup of introducers: Bono on the Psalms, PD James on the Acts of the Apostles, Peter Ackroyd on Isaiah. Total sales of the books now exceed a million copies.
But a third series seemed to be pushing the concept too far, even though Bob Dylan was reportedly keen to comment on Leviticus. Byng has moved on instead to a more ambitious project: a series in which classic myths are retold by some of the world's most esteemed authors. The first two instalments - The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (based on The Odyssey) and The Weight by Jeanette Winterson (based on the legends of Heracles and Atlas) - appeared late last year.
There are many more in the pipeline. Byng believes the myths idea has legs and will run for decades. He describes one upcoming volume, Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith, as the best thing "Sandy" (as friends call him) has written.
Byng's personal circumstances have changed recently. He split from Whitney in 2001 and married American literary agent Elizabeth Sheinkman a year ago. They now live in London, but Byng says he has no intention of shifting Canongate's headquarters from Edinburgh. He commutes. The firm is in excellent shape, partly thanks to the gamble Byng took on a novel by a little-known Canadian writer, Yann Martel's Life of Pi. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and went on to sell more than two million copies.
This prompts the crucial question. Has Byng's success been a matter of luck and the right connections? Or could a small New Zealand publishing house with similar drive and attitude likewise become a global player? Byng hesitates. The biggest hurdle would be changing the distribution system, whereby Australia and New Zealand are used by multinationals as dumping grounds for books. For a Kiwi publisher to succeed in the way Canongate has, it would need to acquire its own buying rights.
Byng has published a few New Zealanders. He picked up Aucklander Chad Taylor's noirish novel Shirker in 2000, but passed on Taylor's subsequent book, Electric, because he "just didn't feel passionate enough about it". Anne McKim, a Scot who lectures at Waikato University, translated for Canongate a 15th century epic about William Wallace. Mark Ealey in Christchurch is the translator of two novels by highly regarded Japanese writer Akira Yoshimura: Shipwrecks and One Man's Justice. Byng regrets that because his list was already full he could not compete in the international bidding war for Lloyd Jones' new novel, Mr Pip.
Asked to name the most exciting book forthcoming from Canongate, Byng does not hesitate before citing The Raw Shark Texts by young English writer Steven Hall. "It's the best debut I've read. I think it's going to be huge. After Nicole Kidman read the manuscript, she phoned Steven, begging him to change the lead character from Eric to Erica, so she could play the part in the movie."
»EMAIL A FRIEND
»PRINTABLE VERSION
»SUBSCRIBE TO FREE HEADLINES
»SUBSCRIBE TO ARCHIVESTUFF
