Members of the book trade have paid tribute to publisher Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, who died in January aged 85.
Sinclair-Stevenson became an editor at Hamish Hamilton in 1961 before becoming managing director in 1974. In 1989, he founded his own publishing company, Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd, which was later subsumed by Random House Group in 1997.
Over his career, he worked with authors including Peter Ackroyd, Rose Tremain, Susan Hill, Isabel Colgate, Paul Theroux and William Boyd. Sinclair-Stevenson became Boyd’s publisher in 1970, with the Any Human Heart (Penguin) author telling The Bookseller “we last saw each other a couple of years ago before he fell ill”.
“It was a long and enduring friendship. We had regular lunches, year on year. He was a vitally important figure in my career, picking my book of short stories, On the Yankee Station (1981), out of the slush-pile and commissioning my first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981).”
Boyd recollected one story about Sinclair-Stevenson that “reflects his uniqueness as a publisher and as a wonderfully decent man”. “He gave me a kind of autonomy over my book jackets that was unheard of. For my fourth novel, The New Confessions (1987), I came up with this idea for a version of the famous Man Ray painting Observatory Time: The Lovers – a pair of disembodied red lips floating over a landscape. He even allowed me to choose the designer.
“Anyway,” Boyd continues, “the book was published with this cover and the Man Ray estate sued Hamish Hamilton for plagiarism. Christopher had to pay them £5,000 for permission to use the image. This was 1987 – approximately £18,000 today. And not a single word of rebuke for the impetuous and mortified author, though Christopher couldn’t have been best pleased. Perhaps the most expensive book-jacket ever? A true gentleman – and great fun. Our lunches were a gossip-fest.”
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