Memoir: Tom Maschler was born in Berlin in 1933 and migrated with his parents to England from Vienna after the Anschluss.
He lost three grandparents in the camps, gaining a lifelong hatred of Germany, and became part of the great diaspora of European Jewry that formed the bedrock of British publishing in the latter half of the 20th century: Weidenfeld, Gollancz, Warburg, Blond, Hamlyn and Deutsch are some of these guardians of the word. Trading links with colleagues in New York represented the same cultural continuum.
As a newly assimilated Englishman, Maschler went to Leighton Park Quaker School, thrived as a sportsman and showed early evidence of a drive and insecurity - both endearing and rebarbative - that marked his subsequent career as publisher. His book of the name is a large canvas outlining the interesting and the famous: Edna O'Brien, Frederic Raphael, Patrick White, Bruce Chatwin, Salman Rushdie, John Fowles and John Lennon; a roster of North Americans, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller (his first "catch"), Saul Bellow (one that got away), Tom Pynchon and Wolfe (both interestingly fleshed out); the British "triumvirate" Amis, Barnes and McEwan; and Len Deighton, Desmond Morris, Roald Dahl, Doris Lessing, Arnold Wesker, Kenneth Tynan - a list encompassing most of the major names of mid-century writing in English.
Maschler pioneered, piloted and promoted these authors throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as he moved from MacGibbon & Kee to Penguin, until he found a house, or home, for 40 years with Jonathan Cape, which he made his own (until it was taken over by the US Random House publishing group in 1987, which in turn sold out to the German company Bertlesmann 10 years later - "a betrayal").
Here is Publisher at his best, antennae on full alert, harnessing energy that would yield, or enable, some of the canonical works of literature in English and in translation, from Voss to Midnight's Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude, founding the Booker Prize in 1969, brokering international deals and film rights, creating the climate by which he himself can be judged.
His authors-as-specimens, though, are laid out for inspection in a way that is at times cloying, at times amusing, unedifying here, penetratingly acute there; the reflection we see is mainly Maschler's, anxious to impress, boastful, Pooterish, while occasionally the glass clears to reveal the subjects beneath. The method he employs is relentlessly anecdotal, and his authors are assembled by name under subheadings that smack of the card index and the computer file, a portal of biotags, unmediated by irony or reflection, all scaffolding and no edifice.
Some of his vignettes are telling: visiting Yoko Ono on the death of John Lennon, "like entering the inner sanctum of a Mafia chief"; liking but not loving Russell Hoban, and thus losing him. Others are the stuff of Napoleon's manservant: staying with the Fowleses "in their beautiful home", Belmont House, where "baths were not to be taken between 5 and 7pm when the hot water was switched on" (good Protestant practice surely); the peccadilloes of Lauren Bacall on tour.
Memoir strays into autobiography in Publisher, exposing gaps and vulnerabilities, as the private man intersects with the professional; what's left unsaid, what hangs in the air, intrigues. His first wife and the mother of his children, Fay, a celebrated food-writer, is almost elided, his children, Hannah, Alice, and Ben, scarcely alluded to; his second wife Regina is frequently name-checked but unlimned. His clinical depression of 1988 is noted but unexamined, while supportive but anodyne letters from his favourite authors Dahl, Lessing and Vonnegut are reproduced.
The inner Maschler remains concealed, all sketch and no portrait, unlike classic works in the genre such as Diana Athill's Stet, or Alan Hill's In Pursuit of Publishing, which reveal the personality of the decision-maker.
In an incongruous yet potentially fascinating penultimate chapter, Maschler describes dropping acid at his cottage in Wales with Allen Ginsberg. He may as well have been taking afternoon tea.
He pays little attention to the book-as-object, although he commissioned Kit Williams's Masquerade (developing an imaginative treasure-hunt to publicise it) and signed up Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullin and Richard Avedon. Publisher, however, is charmingly illustrated with drawings by his friend, Quentin Blake, who he teamed with Roald Dahl on The Enormous Crocodile in 1978.
As a fellow "publisher", I salute Maschler's achievement. He describes the milieu with panache: the elemental midwifery, the hustling, the cajoling, the rag-and-bone shop nature of the business, the cussedness of authors, the endless bloody meals (crucibles of many a book: publisher as inadvertent gourmet), the excitement, the unexpectedness, the occasional glimpses of glory - the going there as much as the getting there. It's not a bad life, if you can stay the pace.
Antony Farrell is a publisher with The Lilliput Press in Dublin
Publisher by Tom Maschler. Picador, 304pp. £25