The digital revolution has been a huge commercial success and made small imprints widely available, but it has made us shallow, irritable and depressed, argues a leading publisher

The digital revolution has been a huge commercial success and made small imprints widely available, but it has made us shallow, irritable and depressed, argues a leading publisher

I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettiness, without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature.
George Bernard Shaw

I started my first job in book publishing on 16 September 1968. My father told me I should not accept a salary of less than £900 (yes, nine hundred) a year and that was precisely what I was offered. I accepted. The publishing house I joined had just been founded and was called Darton, Longman & Todd (DLT). Its main mission was to publish religious books – in the traditional areas of theology, liturgical books, patristics and Bibles, but it had also discovered that there was a popular appetite for a relatively new category: “spirituality”.

In a Church Times survey of religious publishing in 1972 I was described as Robin “Spirituality” Baird-Smith. I launched writers such as the Russian Orthodox Anthony Bloom, Rabbi Lionel Blue, Carlo Carretto and Rowan Williams. I felt I was closely in touch with our readers, and that there was a direct correlation between the quality of a manuscript and how successful the book would be. Book publishing has undergone a revolution since then.

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