Peter Mayer obituary
Charismatic publisher who combined erudition with commercial savvy to turn Penguin Books into a global brand
In 1978 Peter Mayer, who has died aged 82, was drafted in from the US to rescue a moribund Penguin Books. He took the beloved but by then loss-making publisher and turned it into a global brand, along the way transforming the publishing industry as a whole. The greatest publisher of his generation, Mayer was also the most charismatic. Handsome, charming, witty and at times infuriating, he was also brave, defending to the hilt Salman Rushdie and his novel The Satanic Verses (published in 1988 by Viking Penguin) and refusing to go into hiding when a fatwa was issued against Rushdie, as he was advised.
Mayer was a great intellectual but what made him unique was the combination of erudition, an overarching vision and commercial savvy. Among his first acts at Penguin, where he arrived amid the winter of discontent, was to put a pair of bare legs on the cover of Susan Isaacs’s novel Compromising Positions and to pay a lot of money for MM Kaye’s Raj novel The Far Pavilions, publish it in a pricy new-fangled format called a trade paperback and pile it high in bookshops. It was a very slow burn. There was outrage at a brash American defiling a British institution and it took three years before Mayer’s work began to bear fruit, which it did, in abundance, as he reshaped the company, working with Peter Carson and Philippa Harrison, his joint editors-in-chief.
