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How Bloomsbury bloomed

The `queen of publishing', Liz Calder, on what it took to merit such a tag

PHOTO: V.V. KRISHNAN

AN ACHIEVER Liz Calder, Publishing Director of Bloomsbury.

Liz Calder has been involved with so many things that merit chatting about, you ponder what to leave out in the half-hour you are allowed to speak to her on her visit to the British Council, New Delhi. (Calder was on a six-day visit to India with her husband and writer-editor, Louis Baum, as part of the Spread The Word series under The British Council's Creative Future programme.) So often addressed as `queen of publishing', Calder not only has to her credit the launching of star authors such as Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Anita Brookner, but has also won undying acclaim, as the Publishing Director of Bloomsbury, for discovering, among others, J. K. Rowling of the Harry Potter series fame, and of course, for bringing back to life yesteryear artist Frida Kahlo by publishing her biography which eventually became a famous movie.

Successful story

Calder begins with one of the most successful stories of the publishing world — the birth and rise of Bloomsbury. From a tiny little space above a Chinese eatery in South London with just four people in 1986, to a "decent office" in Bloomsbury Square with an employee strength of 15, to finally its present Soho Square address with 120 workers plus the staff of its new acquisition, ANC Black. "When one day Nigel Newton (Bloomsbury's Chairman) asked me out for lunch and showed me a meticulously made business plan for Bloomsbury, I was a little nervous. He had planned out each and every thing, how the company would look after five years. Being with a well-etched name like Jonathan Cape, it was not easy for me to roll over to a start-up," recalls Calder. But she did. By believing in that paperwork containing a dream "to have a mid-sized general publisher, less bureaucratic and more responsive to what's going on".

"We started with a lot of things that were new to the publishing world then. We allowed authors to have more say about the jacket cover, pasted a picture of them on the back flap, etc. We also had an author's trust and gave away a lot of one-time money to authors when we first went public," she states. Though Calder had hoped her Booker-winning discoveries such as Rushdie, Barnes (short-listed), Brookner and Margaret Atwood would join her at Bloomsbury, none did.

"I remember Barnes telling me, not I but you are leaving me," she recollects. Instead, she was joined by authors whom she had least expected like Nadine Godimer and John Irving. "Nigel had warned me against it," she adds, flashing a smile that tells of her charm as a successful fashion model years back in Brazil. Calder is now 68.

After some time though, Calder says, Atwood came around. "I was at a book fair and someone left a little note for me which read, `Margaret Atwood would like to be published by Bloomsbury'. I saw that and ran to find Nigel," she recalls.

"But the first book Bloomsbury published was Mary Flangers' `Trust'. What a name to start with! If you look at the titles we got then, it would make a story by just stringing their names together," she laughs.

Harry Potter

Narrating the sequence of events that led to the birth of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, Calder says, "Ten years after starting Bloomsbury, we thought of setting up a children's book list too, to make the publishing house fully-rounded. We hired a children's editor, an assistant and a marketing person." As the department was looking for new manuscripts, the assistant, Ross Delahigh, got to read a few pages of "Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire." Rowling had by then been rejected by many publishers.

"Ross became so impressed by it that she hurried her colleagues to a small round table and passed around pages of it to go through," says Calder. And it was by dint of a word-of-mouth campaign that the book was marketed, she points out.

Having spent her early days in Sao Paulo as her first husband was posted there, Brazil holds a special place in Calder's heart. She now spends three months a year at her villa in Parati, a small 17th Century fishing village on the Rio coast, which used to ship gold to Europe, and now the venue of her literary festival, Parati International Literature Festival (called FLIP in reverse), the first of its kind in entire South America.

"We once met a navigator called Ameya Klink who belongs to Parati. He told us to visit it and soon we fell in love with it. The idea of hosting the festival there dawned on me and Louis," she says. Louis says when they started three years back, to their disbelief, there were 6,000 people, and last year, it saw a congregation of 12,000. "Every bed in the little village was occupied," he adds.

Calder bagged the Merit of Order last year from the Brazilian Government for her services towards culture in that country.

SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY

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