Ep 4: John Mitchinson - Unbound

You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com. Welcome back to Live Free Ride Free, where we talk to people who lead lives of self-determination and fulfillment, and we find out how they got there. and as you know, the way in which we define this fulfillment, this live free, ride free can be many things. It can be money, it can be art, it can be simply doing what you love. It can be all of the above. It can simply also be life as an art form in itself.

What is fulfillment? What is the nature of living life on your own terms with this degree of self-determination that we all have as our ideal? So today I've got the amazing John Mitchinson, John Mitchinson. It might be someone who's known to you without you knowing that he's known to you because he's one of these shadowy behind the scenes sort of chaps, unless you happen to meet him in a bar. And then, he's, not behind the scenes at all.

he'll be, very jolly and probably buying you lots of drinks. John I first met in the early nineties, when he was my publisher, and we became great friends. And he was then working for a small boutique publisher in London called Harville, which produced really, really good, additions of books that sort of other people didn't really publish. And, I would say that most of the books that I consider, the best books I've read since I became an adult were recommended to me by John Mitchinson.

So we're gonna go into this a little bit today. And he then became publisher in larger companies. Larger companies, larger companies. And then he did something rather unusual. Which he's gonna tell us about. He took a side step and began to pursue his interests. And one of those interests. Many of you may know the TV show on both sides of the Atlantic called Qi. Quite interesting, presented by Stephen Fry. Well, that's a, a John Mitchinson idea.

And, there's other things as well, including his, his current, mo in the publishing world, which is Unbound, a return to subscription publishing, which has been wildly successful. John, however, is not an ostentatious guy who walks around saying, look at me. I'm so successful. If you were to meet him in his home village in the pub at Great two in Oxfordshire, you would simply be overwhelmed by his warmth, charm, and just all round sweetness.

Yet he's one of the most effective human beings I have ever met. Not to mention one of the kindest and most intelligent. So that's the intro, John. You've gotta live up to it now. I

In fact, there's only one thing that I would say that's really been a, a, a kind of a a through line through all the activity, that I've, engaged in and what we have to now as I about, I'm about to turn 60, you kind of have to call it your life now. You know, it's beginning to have it, it, it certainly had a beginning and it certainly had a medal. And at some point, increasingly, one gets the sense that it will have an end.

So, so the, the through line for me has always been, I guess primarily reading and as a consequence of reading. Then books that kind of a, a a from a very early age. I grew up born, well, it's an, here's an interesting story. My, I suppose that my origins are slightly complicated in that my, my parents had been teaching in India. And came back into, my dad was worried. My mom f fell pregnant. They'd had an amazing 18 months out there.

But my dad, who is now 87, told me just a few weeks ago, he's, he's, he's kind of, he is definitely very close to the end of his life and is, I think, suffering from, he's suffering from dementia. So his short-term memory is, is, is, is pretty poor, but his, it means he spends more time talking about the past. And he told me that that 18 months with my mother in India had been the central event of his life.

And, but he, my dad's got a very, has a long record of sometimes of making perhaps on one level brave, but sometimes perhaps other people would think strange or even foolish decisions because he gets, he was such a stress, stressful person, very anxious person. and again, in his own way, very inspiring and, and, and, and interesting man, but he decided he couldn't have my mom having a baby in India. So they came back. so that the first thing was that they came back into really grim winter.

Then the winter of 19 63, 0, 62, 63 was Oh, the historic one? Yeah. Was it historically poor winter? They were living in a very. In a very kind of rundown little, house in Chingford teaching. And I think you get, get the sense that the, the dream that they had shared in India, living in this extraordinary hill station teaching, this teaching in this wonderful school, suddenly they were back.

Kind of the reality principal had kicked in , it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very interesting thing to go back to your, your origins like that cuz it, I realized that my, my life began at a very low moment in, for, for my parents and my, the story goes, which I haven't, I, I can't really now test out, I suppose I can ask my mother, which would be interesting.

So my, my grandparents came and rescued them and invited them up to come and live in their tiny little council house in Sunland, which they did for almost a year. And the reason I give you that this origin story is I, I think it is always interesting the emotional, the emotional kind of, sort of tom of the life that you are born into. Mm-hmm. Which I think for my parents was, was, as I say, was, was not massively happy.

The good thing for me was when I as basically yeah, anxiety and then when and, and financial anxiety and professional anxiety. And I'm, in many ways, I'm not sure their marriage. They, they separated 30 years later, but I'm not sure their marriage entirely recovered from it, from this incredible hal kind of golden period in India. And my dad's been back several times to India. My mom hasn't. But, two things.

It left me with a, with a, with a fascination, which I've, one of my major fascinations, which I've still never managed to fulfill, which is to go back to, to find a place. I was always, you know, I was that kind of precocious kid who used to tell all my, all ge visitors to the house that I'd been conceived in the Foote foothills of the Himalayas. True. But I've, I've never been to actually see, as it were, the

Well, he, he was a, he was a, it's an, again, an interesting story. I'm, I'm, he was a highly intelligent, now would've gone to university and probably studied maths. He, he taught me, he taught me sort of, he showed me logarithmic tables when I was in about six years old. And he was a motor mechanic, but his, you know, a working class family, northeastern family. But he, his, his family had had a little bit more money than my grandmothers who were very poor.

And my great-grandmother was Irish, and my great-grandfather was one of 22 children, which is extraordinary. And the nice thing about it is, I, I, there is now a, a Goodrich, he was a, his nose was Charlie Goodrich. And there's, there are now regular family reunions up there. So I've met a whole load of people I might otherwise not have met. Anyway, he, we now are pretty sure got my grandmother pregnant when she was a teenager.

And they ha because they never celebrated their wedding anniversary. my grandmother always, always was extremely negative about the Virgin Mary, which for people who were quite religious, I mean, they were, they were, they were stalwarts of their local church. Although in Starwars, in a very, In a very kind of independent way. They were very, they, they, they, they were not, they weren't sort of lovey dovey Christians.

My grandfather was, was, was pretty critical of, of, of most of the, the Vickers that came and weirdly into this in my, my dad had left home at 16 to become a monk. He'd gone, joined a, a religious order. So there's all of that going.

Anyway, I bond, I bonded with my father and my grandfather, and that was, and he was, , as I say, he was a, he was a source of calmness and, validation for me during really right through my, my kind of early childhood and into my teams in a way that I suppose my father never had been. Really, my dad was, was my dad was always out and doing stuff.

And also my dad was a vicker, became weirdly a vicker and he was standing up being, you know, telling people how they live to live their lives when, let's be honest, probably his own personal life was, was, was, was in a, was in a. Terrible mess. I mean, I said a terrible mess. He was serially unfaithful to my mother, which is not generally considered the, the, the, the, the path for a, for a, for a man of the cloth.

So, so the northeast, that culture, working class northeast was where that's, if people say to you, where are you from? That's where I always think that's, that's where I was formed. and there was much about that, that I loved. The Town of Sunland is a, was a, you know, a former ship building and mining town. I mean, the ship building, it produced more tonnage than any other British port. Not, and didn't build the big ships, but a lot of the merchant ships were built there.

And that really, I watched that from the sixties, from my being born in early sixties through the seventies, watched all that disappear. ended up, of course becoming a fan of their, their, football team. But that, that's the, that was the crucible into which I was born. And then when I was eight years old, something happened, which I think has probably been the most, the thing that's probably most influenced me, which was we moved down to Banbury, and by that stage I, I was already reading my.

Reading, kind of, you know, sort of ferociously going to the library. I remember early reading, reading all of Arthur Ransom and desperately wanting to be in the late district sailing a dinghy or bird watching became the thing I was obsessed with. I was glad used to go off now, I mean, where we were living in the Northeast as a, as a little place called he Earth, which is near felling.

It was not massively, you know, it was, it was pretty built up and it was late sixties, so it's pretty depressed still. Lots of, that area was Bob fairly heavily bombed in the war, but there were these scrubby bits of waste ground. And I remember one amazing winter, there was an invasion of wax swings from Scandinavia. And I, I still have the little project. My mom was very much, you know, go out and thought, make a nature table.

My mom was a very good teacher and, remains a very, a very important person in my life. But, she was traumatized, I think by how the, the, the how poor and difficult and depressed the, the, the area that we were living in was. And the school was. But she made, she made all the other stuff fun. So I, I kind of grew up reading and fascinated by nature, particularly by birds. and, and then you moved down to Rural Ox Oxfordshire. Yeah. So then we moved down to Ox Oxfordshire.

Well, bamb Bamb was definitely. Banbury was definitely, we weren't, we weren't, well, it was more rural than North, the Northeast. And every weekend we would go off and dis discover new villages. And as my brother and I got older, we would go off and explore and on our bikes and, and it was definitely deep it, but from there I felt it was deep immersion in the English countryside.

And I, I, I formed a, a strange obsession with a village called Great J, which I visited for the first time, I think in about 1972, so whatever that is, 50 years ago. Right. Which is pretty remarkable of itself. the reason I formed a, a, i, I guess two reasons why it was so important to me. One, I'd been reading, talking, and, and then I discovered what I really wanted to do was to live. I felt that I really ought to have been born in the 12th century and. You wanted to live in the

It felt like a, a village that was sinking back into the earth. Mm-hmm. and I remember going there and indeed going there with my grandfather, who came to visit once and sitting in the church there next to him and being amazed that the, the, the church is an incredibly beautiful building. Amazing, 12th century wall painting and a, and surrounded by trees surrounded by greenery.

So the idea of a sort of green church, kind of seemed to me to be that pagan, to bring together, to bring together everything that I was interested in. A kind of sense of history, closeness to nature. I l I mean, we l later discovered, obviously the church was a, a much older site than a Christian site. It's a, it's a dedicated Saint Michael, which usually means there was a, a kind of a, a some form of Saxon or earlier, holy place there. So, that sort of deep connection with a kind of English.

Landscape and countryside was, was forged there. And I, I think, you know, that when one remembers one's childhood, those years between eight and 12 for me were, those were the kind of the magic years and, and again, fired by my reading, but fired also by exploring the countryside. I got given an ordinance survey map, which was, I, I still remember and may even still have it, it was one of the old pink ones.

So, for banbury in the area, just the obsessive detail I'd go through every trying to work out and find on the map every little bit of, yeah. You know, every, every old tubuli or disused bit of railway line or that, that idea that there was some order that you could find as a kind of a way through this that was, that was a massively important, the patterns of the story. The patterns of the past.

Yeah. So then my dad, , made one of his, you know, the decisions that I've, I've, I've referred to earlier, I think. Try always. I think he's been trying to escape from things, and this was the biggest one of all. He decided, he announced that we were going to move to New Zealand. He'd got been offered a job, in New Zealand working, with a, a, a, a couple of priests in a team ministry in Rour, friends of his who.

And suddenly at the age of 12, I found myself translated to the other side of the world, completely different, completely different place. and I have to say very, at first I found very difficult, but gradually, came to, came to, I made my peace with it. And it's after, I suppose rural Oxfordshire, the kind of New Zealand, but feels like the other place that I, and, and the Northeast, it's, feels like the other place would, that's, that's determined all sorts of outcomes for my life.

My, I married, my first wife was a New Zealander. I went, did a year, did a year of university out there before I came back here. My brother lives there and my mother lives there, my daughter lives there, so it's, but when I arrived as a 12 year old, it was like everything was different. And some of that was exciting, but some of it was also so, It created in me a fairly profound nostalgia for what I'd left behind. And, great Chew in particular played a role in.

So, you know, that thing when I said people who, who have a plan for their lives, I've never had a professional plan for my life, but I'd always thought that at one point or other I would maybe live in Great Chew. And I've now lived there for 26 years. So sometimes

But what's ironic to me that leaps out is that there you were looking for the Shire, you find it of course in England, and then, yes, you get thrown to the place that years later Hollywood decides is the Shire. But it doesn't appear to you as the Shire at all when you go there. No. Gives you any nostalgic for your Shire? No. Maybe, maybe that's what we're all doing is looking for that shire. Yeah,

And I think we've both subsequently realized that ha, because we had, my daughter Stella was, was, was born in London, but my three boys were born in, in, in, well, they were born in the hospital Nazi, but they were all born into the village. There is that sense of, there, there is a, some, something fulfilling comes out of that sense of being in a place for the, for, for an extended period of time. And I would say that it's not necessarily always easy.

I think great chew is superficially the people who see only the, the picturesque really don't understand the history of what these small villages in England, have to offer. The, they're almost always the records of some sort of, of, of, of, of, of, of periods of massive investment, of people, particularly people who've made a lot of money elsewhere in the world, trying to, trying to realize their dreams for bero for worse.

I've always said that although two is tiny, you know, there's only 150 people on the electoral role. It's, it's had a small but important part of the, of the three great. What we might call the three great moments in British history, the Norman Conquest, the Civil War, or the Three War of The Three Nations, and the Industrial Revolution. It also, like all English villages, we begin to see has definitely got, you know, one of the people who owned the estate was a East India company, NAI Bob.

So there's the link with Empire Matthew Bolton obviously was, was, you know, the, the, the, the architect of the Industrial Revolution, like the, the Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk of his day. I don't think many Rupert Isaacson: listeners would know that. Talk, talk to us about that. So let me just give a little background here. So this Village of Great two that John lives in, which does indeed look like the Shire, is an estate village.

And one of the reasons it, it, it, it has this very picturesque look is that it's still owned by effectively a feudal estate, which limits the development, which keeps the look of the landscape and so forth. But this, great house that is there, what changed hands? The, the, the, the theen years of the estate had changed hands. And this chap Bolton, you say he was an architect of the industrial revolution, which of course is not the le look of that landscape at all. Tell us about this man.

And, and, and how so, so the worldview math, Matthew, Matthew Bolton, I mean, it was in fact his son who, who, who bought the estate, but they were, Matthew Bolton was James Watts's business partner, James Watt invented the, the, the, the steam engine, which was. The kind of the, the bit of technology that unlocked, massive profits of cotton, the massive pro profits of cotton.

As we now know, were also deeply implicated in the slave trade, so that the cotton that was being grown, the, the in, in, in the, the south of America was, was, was, was the product of slavery and that was being shipped back to, to the uk. But the, the, the, the technology that enabled the building of mills, in, in, in, in the north of England was, very largely because of the business prowess. James Wat was the Scottish engineer. Bolton was the businessman.

And the Soho Foundry in Birmingham, which was his home, was, is generally felt to be one of the, one of the key sites of the industrial revolution. Certainly the, the kind of the monetizing of the inventions, you know, there are lots of people get hung up about who was it, who invented what, when, but you know, it's a, it's a little bit like once the technology's there, who's the smart person who can turn it into, into a, into a, a business? And that was what Bolton did.

And his son bought, bought Chu Park as it was then in the 1820s and turned it into a extremely, successful farm. and that passed down through his, through his. Two son and grandson. And then, and the line failed in the early 20th century. And there were two, there were two basically old Dows that Miss Robs who lived in the Bain house.

And the, the, the chooses decline, the re when I found it in, you know, 70 years later, really began at the turn of the 20th century when it was administered by the public trustee on behalf of the Miss Boltons who lived in the big house. And at that point, lots of the tenant farmers, I think just started to say they were making no money, as is the want for tenant farmers. And there was little investment.

And then in the 1950s, when the Miss Boltons died, a, a really extraordinary man called Major eus Rob, who was a member of the Bolton family and not direct descendant of, of Matthew. But, he took the estate on with very little capital. He, in fact, had been, he'd been in the Army, but before that he'd been one of the early producers for Log Bear at the, very early B b C, the, the turn, the, the, the, I mean, one, some of the very earliest TV programs ever made were produced by him.

And then in, I guess in his sixties, he decided he wanted to sink into. Into sort of retirement. He'd always loved chew. He'd, he'd visited his, his aunts there when he was a child. he was gay, , although that probably wasn't, the word he would've, they would've used then. And he lived and sort of presided over. He didn't, he wanted to retain that quality of an estate village village.

and then in the 1960s, he, there was the government decided they wanted to try some open cast iron ore mining on Cow Hill, which you'll know ru where we, we, we love to walk Cow Hill. It's one of the

There was a new sewage system put in, and some of the cottages were restored, but many of them had fallen into such bad disrepair that they were, they were sort of, compulsory, occupied rather than a estate owned. Although still, it's roughly about 75% owned by single estate. And the, that estate has been a single estate. It's not been broken up since. The time of the Doomsday book, the sort of Norman Conquest, which from Odo Bayer, that's a thousand years chap.

Yeah. That, yeah. So Odo, Bayer, William, the con half brother, was given the estate of Great j back at the time of the, the, the big deal doling out. and as I say, it's had various owners since then, but remains now. The major left it to James Johnston. and it's now Nicholas Johnston, who is, who runs the estate incredibly successfully, and who was absolutely there on Saturday when we had our Coronation party.

and I would say that what's if, if, if, if Chu has this strange kind of zeig like ability to, to appear at, at various moments of English history, having something interesting to say about those things. So, you know, as I said, civil War, when I should say in the Civil War that there was an amazing, group of intellectuals and artists who gathered around great ju and knows the great Jew circle.

Lucius Carey, who was Charles, the first Secretary of State, kind of had an open house come sort of almost like a sort of open air university he ran. and a lot of the thinking. I mean, they didn't manage to, they, they weren't able to prevent civil war. But when the 1688 Constitution was, was, finally, in, in place with the, the, the restoration, the monarchy being restored, and then in 1688, we invited the Dutch to come over and run the show.

the establishment of the parliamentary democracy that we know today happened really in 1688. And a lot of those ideas came from peop members of the two circle, like, Edward Hyde Law, Claredon, and so on. So, again, bizarre. And now, our small village seems to be the epicenter of what you might call celebrity culture. We have the Beckhams at one end, Claudia Winkelman down in the valley, and, up on the hill, Simon Cal, and Soho Farmhouse is, is in great two parish.

which, so the Village now massively seems to be, I mean, it's, it still retains. Its, its kind of, it, its core character. But again, there are people who obviously you can imagine, loathe this. But I try and take the long view on these things and think, well, it's just chew doing. Whatchu does? It always seems to find a way to be relevant there. Indeed. Lots of, of really dull villages out there in England.

And, you know, where people are just sort of wildling away their lives and, and, and, and, and not saying btu a goose chews never been like that. Yeah. And the

What stands out here is, is, is John. It's, it's, it's your love and ability to connect with and relate stories. Yes. And this of course is how you have made your way in the world. Tell us how you've been telling stories and enabling other people to tell stories in a way that has brought you to where you are now.

I suppose there was a time when I was a, but when I started my very first job, I mean, very briefly, my very first job, I worked as a barman in a very busy, quite famous restaurant in Oxford, most of my undergraduate years when I was, I read English language and literature at Merton College and why did I go to Merton College? Because that was Tol Kings College and it was, it's whatever any of the other colleges say.

It's the oldest, it's certainly the oldest has the oldest physical buildings in Oxford, I think. And, I loved that Mob Quad, which is the, the, the central Quad triangle was so old it didn't even have chimneys. So, I, that was my. That was where I went to college and I worked in a bar there, called Browns, a restaurant. Browns. So when I came out of there, I, my first job was working in a nightclub in Oxford called in, London, called Legends.

and the plan had been, the plan had been to, to, to open a club. Were were you a male dancer or what were you doing? I wasn't, no, I was just working. I was head barman, so I was mixing. I've always liked, I've, I've always liked making drinks. I had noticed. yeah. So, and it was very, those days, I mean, guys, nothing like the kind of extraordinary baroque mixology you have today, but we were making, it was the eighties and we thought we were making great classic drinks, but nobody came.

And the maitre d and I, a lovely man called men, Mel Palmer, had found a site in, in, beak Street in soho. And we thought we were gonna open a, something that would've been halfway between a nightclub, a English pub, and a, and a and a, and a kind of the kind of bar you find in Spain or Italy. And we'd even managed to raise money. And, but, this was 1987, which was the first of the several financial crises, which my life, life has, has.

I never, the person who was gonna put money in got wiped out and said, sorry boys, I can't do it. So at that point, I had been, I just got a job, a friend of mine from college that said, Hey, you should come and work in this bookshop. It's great. It's called Waterstones and. You know, it's, it's really, it's really nice work. You know, you don't have to stay up till four in the morning.

Nobody tries to pick fights with you or you don't have to, to, to, to try and haul them, haul them out of the toilets for, for taking drugs. So I started work on an insanely low salary. I mean, it was like under five grand a year working in a bookshop, and then suddenly I'd from, and was Waterstones

And getting proof copies. I remember the first proof. Copy was from the Gal Glance rep, and it was Mort by Terry ett, and I just was, I was so intrigued by this idea that you were get, you were getting to read a book before it was even published. I still remember it with a sort of blue cover and I read it and was incredibly enthusiastic.

I think he, I think the rep was rather touched that, that somebody was so excited to be given one, so he gave me loads and so I was, I was buying SCI for sci, the science fiction section in the fantasy section about which I knew. A bit, but not, not masses, but soon got to know. But you had more,

The, the Waterstone's way was to very much throw you in at the deep end, and you had to figure out what to buy and what not to buy and what to subs all the buy, you know, we did all our buying in the store and even someone as inexperienced as me within a few months was buying books. So the excitement of buying 10 copies of something and then selling them is that's, I think that's been part of my d n A as well. I, that's something I find still thrilling.

I, I love being in bookshops and I love selling, I love selling things to people. What now gets called hand hand selling, you know, it's just that thing of getting somebody enthused, saying, try and let me know and come back, and I've got plenty more where that came from. So it was a, about, that was a bit of a revelation. It was, as I say, appallingly paid. This is a bit of a theme of my life. Appallingly paid, but massively satisfying.

and then, and then I met someone in the street who I'd, I'd known from college, and she said, what are you doing? I said, I'm working at Waterstones. I said, oh my God, I'm just a head office at Waterstones and we are looking for somebody to edit our literary diary. Would you be interested? And I said, well, what does it involve? She said, well, I dunno, six weeks work. You have to go and sit in the British library and find out interesting literary facts.

So I like to think that that moment, which of course I said yes, and I was paid a, I remember a one-off bonus of 1500 pounds, which just like, that just seemed like the most staggering amount of money at the time you could actually afford to eat. Incredible. And then, and then, yeah, week and then it got to, to sit in the British Library every day in that amazing reading room, that where Marks had worked, and, and, and ordered up amazing old books and found, lit out literary facts.

And, and it was commissioned essays. It was, it was really, it was commissioned some poetry for, from people that was, you know, it was quite a, there was a desk diary and then a little pocket diary. So, and what happened was I then got kind of sucked into, a thing called the Waterstones Guide to Books. We were trying to do what I once described as a paper Amazon, which was 60,000 annotation, annotated blurbs to 60,000 books in print.

And that was, That was really my first, kind of exposure to the world of books and authors. And, and we, although we, we made a, we made an astonishing 1500 page book that was significantly too large as a mail order catalog to go through anybody's letter box. So it ended up being a bit of a white elephant, a sort of magnificent white elephant. And at the end of the, that year, I was asked to take over running the public, what was then the, the, the publications department.

and then a year after that, Waterstones did a deal with WX Smith. And by that stage I'd become quite good friends with Tim Waterstone, the owner. And he asked me to be his marketing director at the age of, of 26. and I still remember he sent, he, he wrote, he, he, he, Tim was a very early adopter of the post-it note, and he always wrote in pencil and he sent me, said that, that's what I'm gonna pay you.

And he'd written 30 pounds on a, on a, and I remember looking puzzled and he that got a problem. I said, is it, well, just one off or, and he'd looked it back and then put a K on the end of it. So in 19, What, what year would it have been? My god. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was 19 87, 88, 89, 19 89. To suddenly being be, I mean, 30,000 pounds a year was a lot of money in those days. It was back then. Yeah. And that was, that was my entry, I suppose, into pretty extraordinary period.

I did, I was marketing director until, for five years, nearly six years. And, Wolf Stones expanded massively. I mean, they had already been jammed together. We went from, we opened 14 shops in 1988, and then in 1989 we merged with the Shean Hughes. They all became Waterstones. So suddenly Waterstones had, you know, 80 bookstores, and, and became the biggest, the biggest book specialist book retailer in the uk. And I was in charge of their marketing, knowing nothing about marketing.

So, but that was, yeah. As say you kind of, you kind of learn on the job and, and

Which you had to do because we had to tell a lot of people who were being told that their shots were being turned into Waterstones, what that meant, and right where, whereas Tim had sort of had the idea of these large stockholding, but he'd owned, been to America and been to the Strand bookstore, and he, what he basically wanted was, could you take a big American bookshop of Barnes and Noble and a and, and a and a brilliant bookshop like John Sando and Chelsea, and turn it into a chain.

And he'd been a, his, his background was w h Smith. and I think they'd fired him, which was why he, when he finally sold the business back to them for a huge amount of money, it was particularly satisfying. that was his story. So we were absolute Marketing is absolutely storytelling. And it's storytelling. What I like about it is it's storytelling that can often have a measurable result. , of, you know, rapture applause. A live gig or just, you know, your kid saying, can you read it to me again?

I love that. Can you read it to me again? Which, so, That was. And then from there, I suppose the next move was to go into publishing where I went, ended up at Harville, I'd fallen in love with the Harville list. Now that's a question

And I think what I could see with the har list was something that had been, we would now u say curated, but we were probably in back in the nineties, just have said, you know, kind of built or chosen with such care and intelligence that, that actually the people who. Who, you know, love reading and love literature and love the, the, the, the, the, the transforming effect that, that reading something can make in your life.

I think for, for those people that those kind of lists were, were and are incredibly important, the case. Did

Spinner is a, is a sort of big plastic thing, which, which sit stands in bookshops and por often used to come in spinners. Ah, right. They're much, they're much, they're much sort of standard. They're not, not really welcoming bookshops anymore, but they were, they were a good way of branding. Cuz you know, here's a publisher I like and Collins Har was definitely a strong brand. I think that's the thing for me, really.

I realize that, you know, having spent so much time trying to define what made Waterstone special, that idea of a strong brand is still the thing that I, I go back to. That's as far as my marketing expertise goes. It's being able to articulate and communicate some what makes a particular brand special and important and, and worthy of attention.

Feltrinelli had published it in Italy, and they got the English translation done. So it started with this idea that, we, you know, if we read the literature of other countries, were less likely to end up invading them. I mean, I, and it's very crude. So that, and that had been developed through the, the, the sixties and into the seventies when really, truly remarkable. Publisher called.

Christopher Mcz had had taken it over as, and he'd added other writers, George, McDonald Fraser, great storyteller. And some of them were quite commercial writers like Gerald Seymour, but also Richard Ford, the great American novelist, Raymond Carver, great short story writer, Peter Matheson.

So, there was an amazing combination of both English language writers and writers, and, I mean, and it is, it, I think until relatively recently, it was the absolute best list of, of great writing and translation and as well as Pastor Na and Bob Garko. It also had vastly Grossman's life and fate. P probably, I would say the great novel of the of, of the, of the Second World War, one of the great novels. Tell us, tell us again what

And, you know, more recently Christopher had discovered Peter, her, who Miss Miller's feeling for Snow, pretty much started the, what you might call the Nordic Noir, genre of, of Scandinavian crime fiction. Henning Mankell was on the Harvard list, another great scan, Scandinavian crime. so great joyous. and when I was there, I got to publish, I would say certainly three, four writers that have remained important to me.

One was Haruki Murakami, who is now, we, we, we published, he'd been published once before in the uk, but we published the Windup Bird Chronicle, which was the breakout novel for him. And then give us the name again. The Windup Bird Chronicle the Wind Up by Mira. Often he's, you know, generally considered one of. Perhaps Japan's greatest modern novelist.

And that book, again, is another, another World War II book in lots of ways, although it's, it's like a mashup between a, a kind of, world War II movie and a studio Ghibli film. He's the most, he is. If you've not read Burak, you should, you should read, and that's, and I would say, what's, what's a Studio Ghibli film? So Studio Ghibli is, spirited away, the great, Miyazaki Hi Zaki, who makes the most extraordinary, animated films, ah, of which, spirited it away. Hows, hows Moving Castle?

my neighbor Totoro. Yes. they are most fabulous, imaginative, kind of, and. Also seemed somehow to be universal in a way, while also being extremely Japanese, certainly spirited away. So you got to publish this guy. And so Mukai has, has, has, has that kind of energy. But also he's also a gr a, I think, a great storyteller and, and, and loves jazz.

He's very, so I published him and I published, what subsequently become one of my gr probably my, one of my great literary heroes, which is William Maxwell, who was fiction editor at the, at the New Yorker for 40 years. So maybe I respond to Maxwell because he was a, he was an enabler of stories as well as writer of, of incredibly beautiful stories. What, what book by Maxwell should we read?

You should read, you should read, so Long C Tomorrow, which was his late, it's his last novel published in 1980. and was, it didn't get in amazingly. Wasn't published in English until we did it in 1996. But Maxwell also wrote, the beginning of his life, a book called, they Came like swallows, which is one of the very small number of, of books that deals with the impact in his case, direct impact. His mother died in the 1918 flu epidemic.

But I got to meet Maxwell in New York in. 96 the year before he died, and that was one of my great moments. But Maxwell was, it was Maxwell's porch in Connecticut that Salinger, JD Salinger drove out to and read in one sitting the whole of, the story that became Catcher and the Rye. So Maxwell had published, you know, the great heroic period, Updyke Chi, Frank O'Connor of New Yorker fiction writers, and then was a writer to himself.

So it was just a extraordinary quirk of fate that for some reason he'd never really been published properly in the UK before. So you, you and

And he'd employed me and then, Rachel to, to help him. And, and I think we did. We, we, we made, we took it, we bought it out of Harper Collins. We made it successful and independent. I know, I think I was just at that point, I was at my, in my early thirties and he was in his late fifties. I can see now that's that, that, that what you want from life is slightly different.

and we were not able to buy, you know, Christopher was very un unhappy about dealing with literary agents, which again, I completely now understand and see why. so I just, yeah, I think it was just, I started to get frustrated and I, I was, made an offer that I couldn't refuse. And, to go and be marketing director and deputy group publisher at the Orion Group, which is about that stage, about the fifth or sixth largest publisher in the uk. it was a, at a time, you know, we had young children.

It was quite a big hike in salary. We just moved, we moved to the country in 1997 and I Great. So by the end of 1998, it seemed like a really perfect moment for, for me to, to do something new and then, That's what I, I did, we went and I went and did a year as marketing director, and then I realized that I really, I, I didn't really want to be marketing directors despite I was doing you, I was doing campaigns for very commercial stuff like May Bin and Penny Chene and David Seaman.

you know, he was the England goalkeeper. And apart from, apart from sort of refining my, I, I learned a lot of stuff. I suppose I learned how big branded published authors were, were kind of how they worked. But the first possibility to run something directly myself came up and they, Orion bought a company called Castle, which were a large baggy, company that did lots of illustrated books, practical illustrated books.

Rachel used to say they appear to publish five different books on corn dollies. And I said, yeah, that's true. A huge back list. Most of it, not very good. They had a reference company, but most of the language dictionaries had been in the deal had been taken off to another bit, part, part of the business. So I was left with some strange reference books, including the amazing, brewers phrase and Fable.

Castle had been, John Castle had been a temperance campaigner from Manchester. And he'd started with, he'd started with, tea and coffee. So the idea I think was let's keep the, let's keep the working man's hands full of anything other than beer. and then he'd gone into newspapers and magazines, and then he gone into book publishing and in fact, the castle's, library was. Early prototype for what became, would've become Penguin. You know, the idea of doing classics cheaply for working people.

And, and, and so I got quite interested in this, the, the deeper story of Castle, which had been lost over the years. And within Castle they had Mrs. Beaton and they had Ward Lock, they had other old publishing companies that, so it again, that kind of historical digging deep into history to find stories that illuminate the present. It was a very exciting time.

And we, I was fortunate in that I, the Weinfeld and Nicholson, another distinguished English Publisher's illustrated list, had been thrown in with mine. So we, in, I inherited a, a, some great editors and a couple of amazing projects. we had, I think acquired two books by Triny and Susanna, who were, doing a column call about telling people, telling women what to wear, basically. Very kind of a, and despite the skepticism about that, I remember them.

Yeah, there were some, when I, when I, when I met them, I thought, one day you'll make television and you'll make, you're gonna be, you are gonna be huge. Which is more or less what happened. Yeah. And then also we had the lovely Michael Palin, and he had come to us from the b BBC because we had undertaken to do his book on Hemingway. Which he really was a passion project for him, and he had enjoyed that experience so much.

We got to do the next, the next two big books with him, which were, Sahara and Himalaya and Sahara. I'd, I'd left Castle by the time, Himalaya came out. But Sahara was the only time I've ever paid a million pounds for a, for a, but it was, I think they earned it. I mean, it was earned back almost immediately. But also that my other, my kind of, in terms of ones publishing excitement, that was the first Frankfurt I went to. Castle, I should say, was losing quite a lot of money. Frank Festival.

Yeah. So Frankfurt is a, is, is a, is a book fair where you, we go to buy and sell rights. Really, it's not a place for the, it's not a place for the uninitiated. It's not a place for readers or for writers to be honest. It's where publishers go and try and do business and is amazing. And we're set up by George Weidenfeld again in that after war period thinking, you know, we need, we books are what we need to bring the world together. And some part of that spirit still remained.

But I knew that we had lost a lot of castles, losing a lot of money. I'd had to, I'd had to restructure, I'd had to make, to make quite a few redundancies, but I knew that we needed a big book and that was when I was. Just by happenstance. founder, an American publisher called Chronicle, who had been given the rights to publish the Beatles anthology, and were looking for a British partner. and I had assumed that they would much more likely go to, to a, a much bigger house than than we were.

but in fact, I think such was my passion for the book and possibly my desperation. but, that was, we did offer quite a bit of, we offered up 300,000 pounds, but it was, you know, people forget it was a 35 pound book back in 2000, and it was, it went to number one and we sold half a million copies. Pretty extraordinary. and that, that was, that gave us, that bought us a bit of time to do other things and to it, you know, to bring the, the, the Michael Palins on.

And, we, we started an amazing, under the mentorship of Antony Cheatham, who with Christopher is an, these, these are two extraordinary publishers that I've learned massively from. But we reinvented the reference list. I mean, the idea was to do reference, I would now call it alt reference. It's the idea of reference list that's sort of written by human beings rather than by faceless panels of academics, which is where reference publishing had come. So there was.

The amazing dolling, kindly visual thing. But I was trying to find people. So I got, you know, we, we were, we did Bri, we did a, we'd expanded the Brewers Range. We did Brewers Place names, we did Brewers, which was sort of Bri, British and Irish Place names. And we did books of reference, books of adventures. We did, amazing kind of, people's, places, nations, you know, the idea of nobody knows which tribes live where, you know, who, who are all these people being mentioned in the Bible.

And we commissioned quite a lot of very, very good people. We did amazing timelines of British history with, with, with a lot of very, very good, great editorial team. And that was, yeah, that was a, I also did, I published, Jonathan Green, the Great Slang Lexicographer we had inherited. And we did a book called The Big, the Big Book of Filth, which was, you know, you'd Love, which is just massive. All the synonyms for various parts of the human body.

That's the thing that, and the, so the idea was it was taking, it was taking all the rude bits of, of this extraordinary amazing work of reference. I mean, one of the great reference works of the 20th century. If, if I was, if anybody was gonna say, you know, surely one non person now can't, can't actually run a, run a, a serious, academic reference, but then green's dictionary of, of slang.

It is one of the, it's one of the great works and it's still available and I think you can, you, you know, it's now a huge three volume set, but I think you can still get that maybe the, a version of the Castle Slim Down version. I don't think the big book of filth lasted. I think we're not gonna run out and get it. Well, we sold, I think we sold, we sold, I made Jonathan Money, which his, his actual academic stuff never did. He made quite a bit of money in that. So, We had a lot of fun.

And then you're gonna ask, why did I stop doing that?

And they decided that what they were going to do was, merge Octopus and Castle. So Castle would become a kind of an imprint of octopus and the denfeld bits of the castle. Were gonna go back to Weidenfeld Thelist, which was, I mean, I, it was three, I felt it was three years of work that was now being brutally torn apart. And I went and had lunch. Anton and I used to have lunch at a marvelous restaurant called Luigi's.

We'd have the same on a Thursday and we'd have Ossa Buco, which was very good, and a bottle of Hannah now, which is a Sardinian wine. And then we would go through all the week's business together. So we had one of these lunches and he's, I said, this is, he said, well, look, you can go and run Castle down in Heron Keys. Which was like really long way down the can, sort of Canary Wharf down in the London and doesn't know I live, I live in great shoe. Yeah.

I said, well, I could probably get you a, I make you redundant, give you a year's salary. So I suddenly thought, you know what? That doesn't sound like a bad idea. I thought, I'm sure I'd get a job very quickly. And indeed, I was offered very, very quickly. I, I told the, the, the, the Uber agent, ed Victor, that I was leaving, and he just said Ed had done a, he was very impressed with a couple of the books that we were publishing.

We did a big, beautiful science, it was called the Science Book. And it was a timeline of the most important things that had happened in science with a really big, beautiful illustrations. And we, we were sort of, you know, selling that for 25, 30 quid, I think. And he'd loved this. so he rang Victoria Barnsley, who was then head of Harper Collins, and I got called in for, an interview and it, that turned out that they, they offered me a, a big job. What was the job they offered you?

They offered me the job of, they were gonna start a new literary division called Harper Press. and they asked me if they, if, if I wanted to do it.

And, and this legendary character who had lived in Great Chew, got married in great ch and had not, but had not lived there for a while, had suddenly moved back into the village as man called John Lloyd, who was famous as the early collaborator with Douglas Adams, the man who'd produced, not the nine o'clock News and, black Adda and written one of my favorite little books, which is the meaning of Lift Lift Douglas Adams.

All right, back to you, John. So you meet John Lloyd in the pub, probably in, great two.

So I said, well, okay, when are you about two away for a week. Anyway, we, when he got back, we went and we did have a, in, in fact a very, very long session in the pub. And that was when he told me he wanted to set, start a company that was dedicated to Interestingness in all its forms. So I said, okay, but define Interestingness.

So he told me three stories, one of which I'm sure, I'm sure I've told you all of them in the one of which was that when his son Harry was born, he decided he was gonna read the whole of Encyclopedia Botanica so that he would be the best informed dad. And he said it was so boring, so tedious. He got to the fairly early on to the, the thing on basketball. And he said it was like, it was, it was almost like the article on basketball was constructed to not make you want to read it.

And he said right in the middle of all these, you know, court dimensions and rules. And there was this extraordinary story, which was that, it had been invented by a Canadian and called I think James Naysmith, who was entering a competition for a new sport for American high schools. And he had, you know, been sketching things out, ideas and was.

Scratching up bits of paper and throwing them and, and, and, and, you know, one of them went into the basket and he suddenly had the eureka moment, went out and nailed a couple of peach baskets into the gymnasium. And, basketball was born. But that isn't the, that isn't the qi bit of the story. The qi bit of the story is that for the first 21 years of basket's, woo's existence, it never occurred to anybody to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket.

So every time a basket was scored, you had to get on a step ladder and get the ball out. So that also as a stately game, a stately program. That was one story. The other, other was, ok, who have did the,

And tardigrades are now big on the internet, but back in 2000 and one, the, the idea of these tiny little, water bears, moss, bears these little six legged creatures that are somewhere between ana lids and insects that live on every environment on earth and are able, the extraordinary thing about them is that they, if you dehydrate a tardigrade, it can live in a state of suspended animation for as long as a century and come back to life with a single drop of water.

So they are, so anyway, I was kind of, you can sort of see that this was already chiming with the kind of reference books that I was trying to do reference, you know, the idea that that good, but good communication, good storytelling is about getting people's attention and telling them things that they didn't know and making the world feel, you know, like a more interesting and wonderful place because it is, if you look at anything however dull, so one of the early, I

remember one of the early QI challenges we used to get was, give me a name of Your town, if you think it's the most boring town in England, and we'll come back with interesting things about it. And I think somebody sent us Chelmsford and we ended up doing, you know, 20 pages of deep research into Chelmsford, which made it sound like, you know, frankly Venice. So, yeah, that was, that was, and I'm afraid, I remember going home and telling Rachel, my wife, that I was going to.

I was gonna start a new business with John Lloyd, and she said, but how will you get anything done? You'll just spend all day talking. And I thought, yeah, I don't know. But we, anyway, we did, and I think there, the Qi TV show now is on, it's somewhere past p it's on its way to, to, to ending the alphabet. And we did, I wrote and co-wrote 10, 10 qi books with John. The first one.

The first one was sold over 2 million copies, was number one on Amazon for six weeks and sold in 30 languages across the world. so yeah, so I then, that was my stint as a, as a, as a brighter, and then, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. No, no. Director of research.

can you show us, I can see you on Zoom, but our listeners can't, but I can't see the dent in your head where the frying pan. Must have landed. is it, have you, is it discreetly on the back of your edit? You still, you

And that did coincide with a period when we were having, it was nice. We were able to go three times with the boys to New Zealand when they were young enough to really enjoy it. but yeah, I mean, I would broadly say that for any of your listeners who are thinking about a career in, in books and publishing, i, I, if, if money is your number one priority, it's probably not the right industry for you. So let me

If you are, if you are, paying these million pound, book advances and you are helping to get a amazing TV machine and publishing machine like Qi going and, you are not sitting there now as a privately wealthy English Square multimillionaire from, why not? Why the fuck not? What happened? Why, why it This is, this is cuz we want to live free, ride free. So Sure. Why does that money not go to you?

I mean, I'm, I now, I mean, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, started Unbound on the, I I hadn't really wanted to start it, but two friends of mine had said something has to happen about publishing. And I'd said, you're right. I, I left publishing actually by this, the time I left publishing, I was, I, I was fed up with it, fed up with all the, The, the, the the, as I think I, I once said, it sort of has bad karma publishing a lot of people saying no to each other all the time about everything.

but so the idea of using, I'd become aware in that period, which was I suppose 2008, 2007, 2008, it'd been hanging around with a lot of the Web two zero people in, in London. And I've become just aware of the launch of a thing called Kickstarter, which was seemed to me quite interesting, which was to get, go directly to, to people to fund interesting creative projects. And it seemed to me, I knew somebody who'd got a book, a terrible book by the way, funded on Kickstarter.

And he was ringing me up saying, can you tell me where I could get it printed? Cuz obviously the thing with Kickstarter is you have to do all the fulfillment yourself. I thought this is stupid. What, what we really need is you, you want to, you know, you want to set up a publishing house that uses crowdfunding, but that also offers all the other services. You know, editorial marketing, sales gets books into bookshops cuz that's in the end where they will sell. So that's how Unbound started.

And I, as I said, I was slightly reluctant to, you know, I was at that stage, QI was ticking along quite nicely. I was writing on the shows, the books were still, I still working on the books, but suddenly this new idea presented itself and it was obvious to me that my experience was pretty essential if it was gonna work. So, Spent two years not getting really paid. And then at a certain point I was able to pay myself a small salary and I've been mostly doing Unbound ever since.

I was always really, I cared more about literary quality than, than commercial success. Sometimes when I, when I, you know, when I, when I, you know, like The Beatles or with, with some of the other, or with the, well, like, well, my own book, you know, with the, with a book of general ignorance. I think I've got, it's not that I don't think I have good commercial instincts. I just think I have a very, very low boredom threshold. So I want the books to be both. Good and commercially successful.

And if they're good and not commercially successful, I can live with that more easily than just working in a sausage factory churning out big name thriller after big name thriller. So it's my own particular reasons for why I'm not more in independently wealthy are probably to do with, that's probably more, that's probably a longer show to do with who I am and where I come from and how I never really grew up with anybody who had ever had any money. So I've never really indeed, but

It is just much more of a struggle cuz you're trying to, you know, you're, by definition, unless you get an amazing hit, which, you know, luckily with Unbound, I've had enough amazing hits over the last 12 years to mean that we not only have survived, but thrive and now make a profit.

Um, and I can, I can rest easy is I've never, I've never published a book of my own under my own names and I'm a good, I know, I think that is because I am good collaborator. I mean, I enjoy, you know, I love the, the other thing that I've done in the last six, seven years is to, is to launch a, the back listed podcast, which is, it brought me a huge amount of joy. So

Why was the nobody

And it just seemed to me that there was scope to do something where you had really intelligent conversation about books. But that the trick would be not cuz nobody is really, really, yeah. People like, sort of, people do like to talk about what I've discovered interviewing authors over the years is if you talk to an author about their own work, they're often quite re reticent or sometimes just not very interesting.

If you talk to them about other people, other contemporaries work, they're usually not very forthcoming because they either haven't read it or don't want to, don't even want to contemplate it. But you ask them to talk about a book that meant something to them when they were, when they were growing up, or that they were, that that's, that that's been a load stone for them in their own writing. And you get an extra, you know, you barely have to do anything.

You just get an extraordinary hour of, of the kind of intense, engaged, intelligent conversation, which I think we all enjoy having late night over a bottle of whiskey or you know, when we're, when we're meeting old friends again who haven't seen for ages. So that was the idea and seeing Andy doing his little talk, which was called Read Yourself Fitter. I said, do you fancy doing a pilot for a podcast? I've had this idea and we, so we did it.

And then again with the first book we did was a beautiful book by JL Car called A Month in the Country, which is as close to perfection, I think as a small novel gets, and we had more or less the formula from day one and we've now done 188 episodes. and , we've been on sabbatical since Christmas, so the new bat listed episode on Graham Green, there are no guests.

We normally invite guests and we get guests to choose the books, but we have had over nearly seven years of doing the podcast, Graham Green has probably been the writer that's been most requested by listeners. and we are both Graham Green fans, Andy in particular. So we decided, we just did it with our producer, Nikki. but that's the first of a new series and we, they come out fortnightly and we ask, as I say, we get interesting guests on to choose a book that they love, and.

It's, it's, it's, it's that simple. But it's, it's, yeah, we get, we get big audience now. We have a Patreon, which actually is starting to make us quite nice money each month. So it's also, you know what podcasting's like, it's, it's just fun to do. Fun to do and easy to do. it's a lot of preparation doing, cuz we have to do a lot of reading. I mean, we thought blithely when we started it. Hey, we are well-read. Most of the books will have read already.

I would say about one in seven we've read already. I mean the, what people choose. But it just means that we've been in the most incredible reading journal. I've read all sorts of things I would never have read. and it what stands out?

And the, the, the, the Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor and the, the Tortoise in the Hair by Elizabeth Jenkins, both novels of the 1950s written by women because of the ridiculous way in which literature is taught, those are books that men of my generation might easily not have, not not have read. and there indeed there are a lot we do have done a lot of. Are these, are these books we should, we should all have read? Yeah. I mean if you're, if you interested, ask quickly about those two.

I mean, they're both, they're both, they're both basically, portrait, it may sound like both one of them are set in a small town. Elizabeth Taylor, one set in, in, in a, in a village, outside London. And, and both set in the 1950s, both with, complicated emotional relationships at their heart. And they are just immaculately beautifully written. It's the, the small detail. It's the, the, the, the surprising kind of character interactions. I reme. Yeah. There's, there are other writers.

Barbara Cummins, amazing writer, the vet's daughter, lolly Willows by Sylvia Warner. A lot of the, I I now see 20th century literature as being very different cuz I've ended up reading Muriel Spark. I, I, in fact, I had to slow down on Muriel Spark cuz her books are so good. I don't want to run outta them. Anita Brook. Now another amazing that. So at the same time doing Alan Garner and Susan Cooper and doing, Both of whom

I've, I, there's a lot of other stuff that I've, I've encountered, that, that, that I, and I, I would say that the absolute moment for me with back listed that that is, it's not always obscure books or relatively obscure books. We did great expectations and one of the reasons I wanted to do that was because I'd, I'd read it last as a child, you know, as an 18, 19 year old for my degree. And I've, I'd always loved that book and been terrified by the film a David Lean film.

And then I read it in my early fifties and I suddenly realized, oh my God, this is a book about disappointment. the clues in the title, it's about your life not turning out how you expect it to. And no young person is gonna understand what Dickins was trying to do with that book. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's that.

That thing of how great books live with you and you, you know, you go back to them and re-read them and find more in them each time you go back to them, which is a sort of definition of what literature is for me. Mm. A book that's that you get more out of the fourth time you read it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I would say that about Lord of the Rings as well, by the way, just keeping my talking theme going. And the Shire

It's the thing that you sit down, you open it at random and it's gonna be really, really interesting. Are you gonna actually people

But it, I think that's probably the most ambitious of the Qi books that we did. The animal book is very good, but yeah, but I mean, the, the first, the first one always has a sort of, an affection, not least because it's so, it was so successful, but it's, it's, it's very, it's very amusing now when I interview people for jobs who are in their twenties or thirties and they kind of all grew up. It's like my own children, you know, they all grew up with Qi. Qi is now part of the culture.

It's part of the, it's part of the cultural furniture of a lot of, a lot of, younger people, which, you know, in the long run, if one's looking back on one's life, that's, that's a, that's a really exciting and happy thing to have been able to, to, to create. and it, you know, the, the, the, the little me that used to sit at in the Northeast reading children's Britanica kind of finding out interesting facts about birds, it's been wonderful to be able to turn that into something that's.

That's both been successful also, but I think culture we've made often people say to me, you made being a geek cool. You know, QI helped make, make people who were intelligent and interested in things, kind of, and not feel like they were weirdos. So that's, that's, that's a nice thing to think. So now you

And, that started a, a relationship that we both had with Alan and his wife Zelda, which has been, and now with his daughter Elizabeth. And that's been one of the most nourishing and happy, publishing stories. We, we published Alan's book, strand Lo, Oprah, and then Thurs Bitch. And he is, if you are, I mean, he's a very, very tough model because what he does is so remarkable.

And he's lived in the, literally in the same place for 60 odd years and cataloged every pot shirt, every kind of, every find, every, every, everything that's come out of the, the ground on that extraordinary site up in Cheshire for. And his way of distilling all that down into something that is beautiful and, and meaningful. And again, like I say, like a almost impossible to work out how so much has been compressed into so little, so few words.

His, his late latest book, by the way, Ru, you've Not Read Trickle Walker, which was, shortlisted for the Booker Prize loss. He's the oldest person at 88 to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but that might be, well, I think it is his masterpiece. Oh, trickle Walker, which is Alan Garner. Yeah. Okay. It's pretty, pretty extraordinary.

There is a whole bat listed on it if you want some background, but he, yeah, I mean, I think for Rocha and I, that was, that was, that remains one of the great, and it's, it was, he was very instrumental at the time we moved to Chew and in kind of, in kind of making that sea seem like the right thing for us to do, which it undoubtedly has been, I mean, as a, I think we've said it's living in one place f for a long time isn't, is, will always have, its, its.

It's, it's issues, but it's, and you know, the village as well as anybody. It's not, it's not quite as relaxing and, and, and quaint and, as people might think. It's, it's, there's a ferocity about it as well.

And as John says, it's, well, how would you, how would you describe as you said this

and, and people who've come and who's who've, who've not been able to cope with it. And. But you know, it all, all of that makes only just make, for me at least, it makes it more interesting, I suppose. Yes. Human,

One of the greatest works of magical realism and obviously by night under the Stone Bridge, but some of my most treasure of memories are walking with you over the Oxfordshire landscape to the roll, right. Standing Stones and some of the other megaliths, and listening to you explain and recount the stories of those places in the myths of those places. I do feel that we would all be richer, if you would put together a book that takes us through that landscape.

and yeah, because you have delved into it so deeply while remaining so involved in the, in the world in general, but. Always bring it back to this, this one landscape in this heart of England. when are you gonna do that? When

And that, that, as I say that, that that, that the membrane seems particularly thin there. and trying to, trying to capture that in words and trying to make sense of that, trying to make sense of the fact that, which again, a so brilliant called Walker that time is, is, I'm not saying it's exactly an illusion, but it isn't what we think it is.

It isn't a, that, that, that the idea of the present past and and future are so intimately connected that the, you know, the, the past is, as Fama famously said, is not even past, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's still there. The stuff is still there. I mean, corporally and physically in the form that we are, we may not be able to.

You know, it's not like we can shake hands with Lucy's Carey, but the, the extraordinary fact that the, the every spring, you know, we just in spring in England and it's, it's that feeling of how is it that this happens every year? This renewal happens every year and has happened every year for, for a, for a very, very long time. You know? it's, it's trying, trying to, trying to find a way of, of capturing that, I think. And as you say, preserving some of those stories.

Cuz I think some of the stories, both, you know, the very old ones, but also the ones that have come, come up in the last 50 ye or a hundred years of people who lived and worked the land and gone mad or, you know, there's an extraordinary sequence of stories about her, about, a vicar and great shoe went insane, or they say went insane.

I'm not, again, I think that's, those are always interesting when people have described as being in insane, it's probably not what we think of as, you know, being carted off in a straight jacket, it probably just massively eccentric or maybe in touch with something deeper or maybe in touch with something, you know, that was, was terrifying and made him, or maybe just depressed. maybe just, you know, very, very, very depressed. So all of those, it's interesting to me that, that, that, that, that.

These places that appear insignificant if you just, or, or you know, that thing when you're, when you're traveling and you are, you are aware that a place has an atmosphere, but it's incredibly difficult to pin down what that is and why that is. And I don't know, you know, I've come to the conclusion it doesn't really matter whether there is something imminent in the land, that sentient landscape idea, or whether it's your projections between the two, something is happening.

and I guess that's one of the things as I get older, I feel, I feel it's, it's, it's realizing that they're not being explicit is almost as important as being able to try and define things precisely. That, that, yeah, the sort of end, endless potentiality of the human imagination. Great literature, the great literature doesn't contain a series of messages on how you should live your life. It just gives you a sense of the complexity.

And I dunno, I think it, it's, it's that latent negative capability, as Keith used to call it, is so important. And that's, that's kind of what keeps us going back to things, the non-res resolved as aspects of it. Mm-hmm. I'm, I think I'm, I think as I get older, I'm, I'm less interested. I think there was a period where I was quite arrogant about, oh, I've, I've sorted my stuff out. and I think, yeah, well be careful. Be careful of boasting about that. Right? Sure. Yeah.

It isn't spun out of digital zero one. No, true false. It's spun out of the coexistence of two, of two true things. It's very true. All, all not to exist in the same space, but do

Reading the Qi books, and watching the TV show for any of us now, , that are reading the books that you are publishing in Unbound, which are extraordinary to any of us that are listening to the back listed podcast. You are one of those people I feel, who, what is it? It's, you know, the Marcus Aurelius. I can never remember. It's Marcus Aurelius quote, or Epic Titus, either of those Great stokes you said you must be as the vine.

You know, that you, you, you produce the fruit and the people and the animals pluck it off. And it doesn't matter whether they cut you or burn you or you thrive, you are as the vine. You just keep producing, what nourishes everybody. And that's

He said, sometimes that makes planning my day quite difficult. I think that, you know, the, as I said earlier, that maybe the low boredom threshold it might have that might have interfered at times with the, the, the getting and gathering of wealth, which is a very important thing. You know, it's important to be, it's important to be able to, to, to live without, without, without fear if you can.

At the same time, you know, again, reaching for the, for the athe jar, you know, I don't think you achieve much within your comfort zone. I think generally when people are, are trying to push themselves and to do, to do different and challenging things, they, they, they do, you know, they do, they do achieve remarkable things. And I, the things I've done, I suppose I, part, part of the thing I like to, to do is to have, as you know, I like, like people around me to be happy.

sometimes my, my behavior makes that less, less, less likely than it, it probably ought to, but in general, I think it's, it's, yeah. When you, when you go through the things that I suppose I've worked on, it does seem like a, yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm very proud of what I've managed to achieve, and I'm still restless and still want to do other things.

Mm-hmm. There are still, I'm, I was saying, I think I was saying to you the other day, I'm still, I get those things that cities I've not visited who, which I was thought I would, and just when you get into the age that you're, I'm gonna have to make a plan and go to the foothills of the Himalayas. I'm gonna, I need to see ess before I die. well,

We've, I've, you know, have spent an inordinate amount of time in New Zealand and by extension in the, in, we love going to Roton, the Cook Islands, as you know. So I've seen a lot of places, but the

And then we were flying back to, through Hong Kong and we found a restaurant that specialized in stone fish. So we had stone fish three ways, which the boys were, they just thought this was the best bit of revenge ever. So they

Because what all will happen is this, in the, is you will, you will, you'll just discover, treat after treat after treat after treat. fulfilling experience after fulfilling experience. Great. Read after Great. Read Belly laugh after belly laugh. pleasure upon pleasure. so John, , thank you so much. Is there any parting word that you would like to give or are there also links that we should know?

, John Mitchinson: no, I think I would say, I would say that the do, I mean blacklisted in, in many ways has, has the best of me and there are many, many hours of, of, of that. , by means do subscribe to to bat listed cuz that I think probably has the best of me and lots and hundreds of hours of it.

And also Pat on our patron, you can, if you subscribe, you get a two extra podcast a month, which we call lock listed cuz we started them to cheer ourselves up as in, in lockdown where we talk about books and films and music as well. Stuff that we've enjoyed in last year. It sets, me and Andy are my co-host and Nikki are producer. that's different. And we play, we get, because it's not, it's not public. We get to play. We get to choose music on there, which is fun.

And how do they find lock listed? What

These include easy to do online courses and tutorials that bring you and your horse joy. For an overview of all shows and programs, go to rupert isaacson.com. See you on the next show. And please remember to press, subscribe and share.