Rupert Hart-Davis

Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis (28 August 1907 – 8 December 1999) was an English publisher and editor.

He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd.

As a child, Rupert Hart-Davis and his sister Deirdre Hart-Davis were drawn by Augustus John and painted by William Nicholson (1912).

Hart-Davis was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, though he found university life not to his taste and left after less than a year.

Hart-Davis decided to become an actor, and he studied at The Old Vic, where he came to realise that he was not a talented enough actor to succeed, and he turned instead to publishing in 1929, joining William Heinemann Ltd. as an office boy and assistant to the managing director Charley Evans.

He spent two years with Heinemann and a year as manager of the Book Society.

During this period, he built up good relationships with a number of authors and was able to negotiate a directorship for himself at Jonathan Cape Ltd.

In his seven years with Cape, Hart-Davis recruited a successful group of authors ranging from the poets William Plomer, Cecil Day-Lewis, Edmund Blunden and Robert Frost, to the humorist Beachcomber.

He was well placed to secure Duff Cooper's life of Talleyrand, as Cooper was his uncle.

As the junior partner at Cape, he had to handle their difficult authors including Robert Graves, Wyndham Lewis and Arthur Ransome, the last being seen as difficult because of his wife Genia, with her "distrustfulness, venom and guile".

Hart-Davis was a close friend of Ransome, sharing an enthusiasm for cricket and rugby.

Founding his publishing company in 1946, Hart-Davis was praised for the quality of the firm's publications and production; but he refused to cater to public tastes, and the firm eventually lost money.

After relinquishing control of the firm, Hart-Davis concentrated on writing and editing, producing collections of letters and other works which brought him the sobriquet "the king of editors".

Hart-Davis was born in Kensington, London.

He was legally the son of Richard Hart-Davis, a stockbroker, and his wife Sybil née Cooper, but by the time of his conception the couple were estranged, though still living together, and Sybil Hart-Davis had many lovers at that time.

Hart-Davis believed the most likely candidate for his natural father to be a Yorkshire banker called Gervase Beckett.

After the war, Hart-Davis was unable to obtain satisfactory terms from Jonathan Cape to return to the company, and in 1946 he struck out on his own, founding Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, in partnership with David Garnett and Teddy Young and with financial backing from Eric Linklater, Arthur Ransome, H. E. Bates, Geoffrey Keynes, and Celia and Peter Fleming.

His own literary tastes dictated which books were accepted and which were rejected.

Frequently he turned down commercial successes because he thought little of the works' literary merit.

He later said, "I usually found that the sales of the books I published were in inverse ratio to my opinion of them. That's why I established some sort of reputation without making any money."

In 1946 paper was still rationed; the firm used Garnett's ex-serviceman's ration, but as only one ex-serviceman's ration could be used per firm it could not use that of Hart-Davis.

However, the firm was given the allocation at cost of a Glasgow bookseller and occasional pre-war publisher, Alan Jackson.

The partners decided to start initially with reprints of dead authors, as if a new book became a best-seller the firm would not have paper for a reprint and the author might leave.

They made an exception for Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship which was a short book, collected every ream of paper they could buy and printed 25,000 copies.

Likewise 25,000 copies of Eric Linklater's Sealskin Trousers (five short stories) were printed.

The firm had best-sellers such as Gamesmanship and Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet, which sold more than 200,000 copies.

Also in the early years Hart-Davis secured Ray Bradbury for his firm, recognising the quality of a science fiction author who also wrote poetry.

Other good sellers were Peter Fleming, Eric Linklater and Gerald Durrell; but best-sellers were too few, and though the output of Rupert-Hart-Davis Ltd was regularly praised for the high quality of its printing and binding, that too was an expense that weighed the company down.

As a biographer, he is remembered for his Hugh Walpole (1952), as an editor, for his Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), and, as both editor and part-author, for the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters.

Working at a publishing firm before the Second World War, Hart-Davis began to forge literary relationships that would be important later in his career.

A further expense was added when G. M. Young's biography of Stanley Baldwin was published in 1952; both Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook threatened to sue if certain passages were not removed or amended.

With the help of the lawyer Arnold Goodman an agreement was reached to replace the offending sentences, but the firm had the "hideously expensive" job of removing and replacing seven leaves from 7,580 copies.

By the mid-fifties, Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd could no longer sustain an independent existence and in 1956 it was absorbed into the Heinemann group.

After Herbert Jonathan Cape's death in 1960 he commented to George Lyttelton that Cape had been "one of the tightest-fisted old bastards I've ever encountered".

The second partner, Wren Howard, was "even tighter" than Cape, and neither of them liked fraternising with authors, which they left to Hart-Davis.

In World War II Hart-Davis volunteered for military service as a private soldier, but was soon commissioned into the Coldstream Guards.

He did not see active service, never being stationed more than 25 miles from London.

Heinemann sold the imprint to the American firm Harcourt Brace in 1961, who sold it to the Granada Group in 1963, when Hart-Davis retired from publishing, though remaining as non-executive chairman until 1968.

Granada merged Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd with sister imprint MacGibbon & Kee in 1972 to form Hart-Davis, MacGibbon.

The Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd logo was a woodcut of a fox, with a background of oak leaves.