The message of Robert McCrum’s entertaining miniseries Publishing Lives ­(30 September-4 October) seemed to be that great publishers were salesmen rather than aesthetes, sharp-eyed chancers rather than the gentlemen for whom that occupation was traditionally thought to be reserved. The original Macmillans were canny Scottish booksellers who migrated south to Cambridge, spotted a gap in the market and set up as vendors of academic textbooks. Allen Lane started working as an office boy for his uncle John Lane (sponsor of the Wilde-era Yellow Book) at a guinea a week. Lord Weidenfeld, interviewed in nonagenarian semi-retirement, had first arrived in London in 1938 with a single suitcase and a postal order for 16 shillings. As a former publisher himself, McCrum was clearly back in