Stephen Johnson’s earliest memory of reading is being taken to the Observatory library in Cape Town and being given his own lender’s card. He was five. The book was Dick Whittington and His Cat, about a poor boy who travels to London and eventually becomes lord mayor through the rat-catching abilities – and brass neck – of his cat.
When Johnson was 24 andvisited London for the first time, he went straight to Tower Bridge, within earshot of the Bow Bells. And he wept.
This is what books do, they unlock the power of the imagination, transport us to worlds we would never have known. But those very same books are under threat like never before.
Johnson knows all about both. He’s dedicated his entire adult life to books, first as managing director of Exclusive Books. Then for the past 19 years he ran the South African division of publishing giant Random House, and oversaw its merger with well-known South African publishing house Struik to form Random House Struik.
Despite the inherent challenges of marrying two disparate publishing houses with different publishing cultures, the end result has been a success, boasting some of the country’s biggest book milestones.
There’s been the record-smashing Jake White autobiography published within weeks of the Springboks’ rugby World Cup victory in France in 2007; Jeremy and Jacqui Mansfield’s first cookery book Zhoosh; and Herschelle Gibbs’s eye-wateringly frank biography, to name just three.
And then there is their stable of authors, across Struik’s three imprints and RH’s Umuzi and Zebra Press. Among them are Antjie Krog, Peter Harris, Charles van Onselen, Hugh Lewin, Andre P Brink, JM Coetzee, Albie Sachs, Pamela Jooste, Jassy Mackenzie and Mike Nicol – all leaders in their fields.
Struik celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It was established the same year apartheid South Africa left the Commonwealth, the first call for sanctions was issued and the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto weSizwe was formed.
Cornelius and Johanna Struik came to South Africa to create book-selling business Hollandsch-Afrikaansche Uitgeversmaatschappij in Stellenbosch. But it soon fell under the thrall of publishing religious dogma to the exclusion of all else. The husband-and-wife team set up their own company which would specialise in illustrated books – particularly lifestyle, travel, heritage and nature – over the next four and a half decades. The books range from high-quality glossy coffee-table books to a natural-history list. Johnson boasts without blushing that it is the best in the world and includes from school primers to textbooks.
Johnson says the merger provided the South African reading public with the best of both worlds – a proven local publisher and a heavy-hitting international publisher, “creating a truly unique company”.
It was created just before the economic crash at the end of 2008.
“It wasn’t a very propitious time to start a company,” Johnson admits. The publishing market, too, is dramatically different from 1961.
“You’re dealing with a market that has had the stuffing knocked out of it. It’s worse now than at any time I’ve seen in the past 25 years, simply because consumers and our clients (the bookshops) are struggling. And that’s against the turgid background of no reading culture in this country – a legacy of Bantu education.”
There is also the digital revolution’s all-pervasive spectre, something that morbidly fascinates Johnson as much as it causes him to despair.
Key among those fears is the prospect of young readers leapfrogging traditional books, as they are lured by instant internet gratification and, the particular bane of Johnson’s life, “the wretchedly shallow thing called Wikipedia that passes for knowledge today”.
“I’m not suggesting a return to the 19th-century phenomenon of amateur experts, where people sought knowledge for knowledge’s sake. But the reality today is substance (or the lack thereof) is a global issue – we’re living in a cultural puddle.
“We have the most breathtakingly creative talent in this country due to our monstrously rich world of experience. Over the past 12 to 15 years there has been a flood of creative excellence – hugely exciting – which we publishers have put out to a market that cares very little.”
And it’s getting worse.
“My constant refrain about making books and reading for pleasure part of the national psyche appears nowhere in this democracy, yet we have a bigger range of educated people in our government and wider society than ever before.
“But budget spending on libraries has become emaciated, worse than at any time in the past 300 years. I can’t understand it.”
Another bugbear is the government’s intransigence on a zero VAT rating for books.
“It’s not privileging the middle classes, as some people complain, it’s liberating the masses – we’d drop our prices by 14 percent overnight.
“The precedent is there in both the developed and developing worlds. It’s vitally important, because a critical and informed society is one that will develop and encourage people to engage with that society. Instead, we have Jub Jub and houses and material crap. I don’t get it. There are clever people in Parliament, why don’t they care about reading and books?”
But Johnson doesn’t lay all the blame at the government’s door – he believes publishers have a huge role to play, too.
“We need to make books more sexy, interesting, alluring – to spark that curiosity lacking in our society about needing to know more.”
A perfect example is Mike Nicol’s crime novels, a trilogy that has now been picked up overseas.
“Mike is a hugely entertaining, fabulous crime writer, but still able to provide a scary insight into the South African crime scene. You can read it on the plane or beach, but it has a wonderfully existential feel.”
Another issue close to his heart is the need to make authors come alive in readers’ minds.
“We need state TV to beam them into TV rooms. We need government funding for book festivals, reading programmes in primary schools, well-equipped libraries in schools and municipalities – it’s a developmental imperative.
All of which is why the zero VAT rating is so critical – Johnson believes it could fund so many of the initiatives he can only dream about.
But he is not without hope and nor is he a luddite – afraid of new technology.
“I own a laptop, an iPad, an iPhone. I’m an insomniac, so I’m addicted to the iPad. I can send e-mails off in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed or wake the whole house.”
He’s also aware of e-books’ power and how the technological tsunami has swamped some companies, never to reappear, and how others, like Barnes and Noble, have embraced the change and harnessed it for their continued growth and success.
“I honestly see the whole digital development, and the paths opening to take books to new readers and old books to existing readers, as an exciting prospect.”
But books, in their printed form, will survive and even co-exist with e-readers, because the publishing dynamic in both is the same, only the platform on which they appear differs, he says.
Despite the current buzz that publishing directly to the Web will dispense with traditional publishing and ignore great book editors’ role to improve and craft authors’ manuscripts, Johnson believes books, book editors and book publishers have never been more needed than now – especially in the uncharted sea of unsolicited and unedited manuscripts dumped in cyberspace in the name of vanity publishing.
Another fad that causes him despair issome publishing houses’ over-reliance on focus groups.
“There are clever business people out there who will say the business is in the doldrums because it is too publisher-driven and not-market driven.
“So you sit with focus groups. But how how do you take 1 500 people and ask: ‘What do you want to read?’ You’ll end up with 1 060 opinions.”
Johnson believes there’s a place for market research, but there’s no substitute for instinct forged in the cauldron of experience.
“The Germans have a saying, Fingerspitzengefühl (a feeling in your fingertips). Publishing is a gamble, a lottery.
“Take Jake White’s autobiography. It was a combination of timing, context and a good tailwind. We smashed all known publishing records, doing more than 220 000 books since its launch.
“I think there are South African men who received 10 books each for Christmas,” he says with a grin.
“And some are still getting books – for birthdays or Father’s Day.”
If the Boks do well in New Zealand later this year, pin your ears back for another RHS whirlwind – Bok lock Victor Matfield’s memoirs is due out within days of the team flying home.
Johnson lifts his hands in the air. “But what if the team doesn’t do as well as we hope? How will the book do then?”
We won’t have long to find out on either score. - Weekend Argus