Canon Tales: Promoting Creativity in Publishing

Wednesday 16th July saw the launch of Canon Tales – an innovative event created by Doug Wallace and Jon Slack, 2007 and 2008 chairs of the SYP. Twelve figures from the publishing industry spoke to a captive audience at the Cochrane Theatre, conveying their own personal take on creativity in publishing.

 

Canon Tales was conceived two years ago, when Doug Wallace heard about a similar event for creative professionals in architecture that proved to be a huge success. Jon shares Doug’s belief that publishing is overlooked as a creative industry, and Canon Tales seeks to redress this.

 

Each speaker told their canon tale to the backdrop of visual images – 20 images, each lasting for 21 seconds, thus totalling a seven-minute presentation. Some were personal stories, some were focused on the speakers’ own output.

 

First to take the stage was Rob Williams, Creative Director of Penguin. He chose to speak about the launch of the new James Bond book, Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks. His slides showed us figures and pictures from the marketing campaign for this book, whilst Rob gave the audience some maxims that he has discovered during his publishing career, including ‘Make a story at every stage’, ‘Engage in creative collaboration’, ‘Limit access to the product and create theatre around its launch’, and ‘If nobody wants to talk about it, it doesn’t work.’

 

Alan Gilliland, Illustrator and Publisher at Raven’s Quill, took a more personal approach to his canon tale. His slides showed examples of his own work, as he told us about his career, which started in photography for newspapers. He was then offered the first graphics job on a regional newspaper, before moving to the Telegraph, where he worked on complex graphic representations of disaster stories, which often had to be completed in a day. Other projects we saw include archaeological work for English Heritage and Time Team, his book on war machines and a new disaster series. Finally, we were shown his real love – highly illustrated books for children that also work on adult levels – ‘this is what,’ Alan told us, ‘I left the Telegraph for!’

 

Erica Jarnes, Editor at Bloomsbury, was next to speak. Her varied slides were tied together by a theme of the things that inspire her in publishing, including the comma, paper, Japanese colour printing, typefaces, Pale Fire, mushroom hunting, the Harry Potter 7 launch, and strange submissions (such as the story of the holocaust from an otter’s perspective). She loves publishing, she told us, because it brings together ‘ideas, talents, budgets and egos!’

 

Richard Bucht, Art/Design Buyer at Waterstone’s, showed us a selection of inventive covers that he felt worked particularly well, one particularly memorable example being for a book entitled Designers are Wankers.

 

Phil Baines, Designer, Author and Professor of Typography at Central St Martins, has freelanced for the last twelve years, mainly for small arts publishers, as well as some of the larger ones. He spoke of the interesting people, interesting material, and interested people that he has encountered in his career in book design, which includes the covers for the Great Ideas series from Penguin. He also spoke about his association with Matt’s Galley in east London, showing us slides from a particularly unusually designed book he produced – a book within a book, bound in eight page sections with perforated edges.

 

The final speaker in the first half of the event was Alessandro Gallenzi, Publisher at Alma Books and Oneworld Classics Ltd. He began by showing us historical timelines, and his own place in the world put into perspective by events, including the release of Harry Potter! We saw his progression from literature-loving school boy in Italy, through National Service to a student of English Language and Literature with Russian. Though offered a PhD at Leeds University, he chose to pursue a career in publishing, launching Hesperus Press with his wife. Hesperus turned out to be a huge success, publishing mostly translations and forgotten classics, and focusing on high-quality marketing. In 2005, Alessandro and his wife moved on to a new challenge – Alma Books, concentrating on English and international literary fiction. 2007 saw the launch of their next project – Oneworld Classics. Alessandro will publish around 100 titles this year over three imprints, but his final slide – a picture of his two small children – reminded us that this is the future of publishing.

 

After a chance to refresh ourselves and mingle at the bar during the interval, the second half of Canon Tales was opened by Richard Charkin, Executive Director at Bloomsbury. His was another personal story, beginning with his entry into publishing at Harrap’s in High Holborn, in the times before computers and sales figures, then moving to Pergamon Press and Oxford University Press. He showed us the cover of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine – still in print, despite his exaggeration of the truth in order to be allowed to commission it. He then moved to the Octopus publishing group, had a brief stint studying at Harvard Business School, and was then asked to move to Macmillan as CEO, where he wrote the Charkin blog, which had 4000 visitors a day. He then met Nigel Newton, and moved to Bloomsbury. ‘We won’t find another Harry Potter,’ he said, ‘but we will do our best for every reader, everywhere.’ He finished by saying that although all of the key figures in his career that he had shown in his slides were men, the future of publishing is obviously much broader than this, showing us a slide of his wife with his two granddaughters.

 

Next was Ellie Kilburn, a freelance designer. Ellie began a Master’s in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, specialising in print and editorial design. She showed us a range of work from her peers of the course, as well as her own, from a project re-configuring text as notation, almost like music, to an exploration of the book as a physical object in the environment.

 

Ashley Lodge, Corporate Responsibility Manager at HarperCollins, showed us some highlights from his time in this particular role. As HarperCollins is such a large and diverse publisher, obviously some of its list focuses on the environment, of which we were shown a selection. We also saw the FSC logo that HarperCollins developed with the Forest Stewardship Council, with the aim of educating the reader as to what FSC approved paper really is. We also saw one of HCUK’s forthcoming titles, ACME Climate Change. Designed to be pulled apart and used for environmental projects, printed in the UK using vegetable inks and FSC paper. Ashley then showed us some of he human side of HCUK’s contribution – bringing books to people in Ghana and following up the donation of resources such as computers with training.

 

Angharad Lewis is Deputy Editor of GRAFIK magazine who spoke about the book as a physical object, with a physical life – kinetic objects that don’t just have an internal existence. We saw images of books that had physical acts such as bookmarks and dog-eared pages incorporated as design features.

 

Tom Chivers, Artistic Director of Penned in the Margins, was next, with an engaging, poetic piece called How to Build a City, perfectly timing his tale of East London to the eye-catching slides.

 

The evening concluded with Andrzej Klimowski, Graphic Novelist and Professor of Illustration at RCA. He spoke of his wonder at how stories start, showing us his own illustrations of an encounter with an insect-like woman he followed to a school of entomology, and his imaginings of how the story would have developed had he continued to follow her. We were treated to a viewing of work from his new book – a graphic realisation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, published by SelfMadeHero. He also showed us a selection of his book cover designs for Faber, including some of the 60 P.G. Wodehouse covers he has designed – though there are still 23 left!

 

Doug Wallace and Jon Slack closed the evening by thanking the vast number of people who had made the evening possible, and the satisfied audience exited for more mingling and networking to round up a stimulating and unique evening.