MERVYN HORDER .sx Grant Richards .sx PORTENT & LEGEND So , too , his real instinct for friendship , his unruffled amiability , his handsome attire and monocle concealed a recurrent lack of scruple which startled many of his best friends in literary and other circles , and would have permanently alienated them but for his genius in conciliation and cajolery .sx .sx I noted this sentence down in my commonplace book many years ago as an example of the kind of beautifully convoluted prose to which the English language lends itself so well .sx It is taken from The Times of 25 February 1948 , the obituary notice of Grant Richards contributed by his solicitor , E. S. P. Haynes , who knew him well and had helped him through many of the crises of his career .sx What sort of man was 'Grantie' ?sx - as he came to be known to his friends from an early age .sx Born in October 1872 the son of an Oxford classics don and claiming Keats somewhere among his remote ancestors , Franklin Taylor Grant Richards manifested at an early age that passion for books which animated him all his life .sx While still at the City of London he started a circulating library among his fellows at 1d a loan , but soon failed through under-capitalization , the cheapest novels then costing 6d each .sx In spite of his father he had no university education , but in 1888 entered the book-wholesalers Hamilton Adams in Paternoster Row at pounds20 a year .sx While on holiday in Cornwall he experimented with expendable books , the pages of which could be thrown away after reading ; but found that with novels he too often wanted to refer back to something blown away forever on the wind .sx Most of the 1890s he spent as book factotum on the staff of the Review of Reviews , whose rather formidable editor W. T. Stead was the first to coin for him the affectionate nickname 'Grantie' .sx He long remembered the thrill of opening in Stead's office a single parcel of three new review copies :sx Hardy's Tess and Wilde's Dorian Gray and Intentions .sx He at first toyed with the idea of being a dramatic critic , but his whole life began to centre itself on the London book scene .sx On 1 January 1898 , having collected from his father and others pounds1,450 of capital he started out formally as a book publisher at No 9 Henrietta Street , the first of six or seven different business addresses across the years .sx E. V. Lucas was his first reader , his graceful colophon was the work of Will Rothenstein ; and a retentive memory helped him to pick up enough of the rudiments of book production .sx There was , however , no nonsense about waiting 50 or 100 years for his firm's first celebration :sx a piano was hired and they danced all night in the office before opening for business the next morning .sx Some will find this light-hearted approach to business endearing , others the reverse ; for better or worse , it was how Richards did things .sx " His great struggle is to avoid the dingy and the dull , and to escape the penalties of encroaching age " ; thus his American friend Theodore Dreiser , and again :sx " He had a delicious vivacity which acted on me like wine .sx " .sx In two departments of life , however - the sartorial and the gastronomic - his preoccupations were always serious .sx The monocle in his right eye by which he is often remembered was worn in adulthood without any string attached , and at the end of his life in bed at night as well .sx He was capable of agonizing doubt whether it was correct to wear a butterfly collar with a tweed suit ; and when in 1892 he paid the first of many annual visits to Paris , he went in grey tail-coat and top hat and was not at all pleased by the merriment this caused .sx Not yet 20 , he had still something of the prig about him .sx In Paris and later on the Riviera he acquired expert knowledge of French food and wine , again taken very seriously as gourmet rather than gourmand :sx it was wrong to squeeze lemon on the best caviare , or to use mint sauce with agneau de lait .sx His nephew remembers today the zest with which his uncle explained to him at the age of nine the difference in shape between a claret and a burgundy bottle - the uncle being a burgundy man himself .sx It was surprising that in spite of regular visits neither Grantie nor his friend Housman , in whose company he so often travelled , ever learned to speak more than middling good French .sx Richards never forgot a friend , and accordingly had many .sx At a dinner he gave in the Caf e Royal to speed the painter C. R. W. Nevinson on his first trip to America in 1919 the hundred guests included Sickert in the chair , Harold Monro , Firbank , Laurence Housman , J. L. Garvin , C. E. Montague , Campbell Dodgson and Alberto Guevara .sx The menu was chosen with all the gastronomic flair at the command of the host , who made all the journalists present pay for their meals ; Sickert chose to make his speech in Greek , Firbank succumbed to a fit of schoolgirl giggles , and a lot of clean Bohemian fun was had by all .sx The longest-standing of all his friends - " very definitely my chief publishing interest " as Richards himself wrote - was A. E. Housman .sx The story of how Richards , at the prompting of Richard le Gallienne took over A Shropshire Lad from Kegan Paul - who had remaindered their first 1896 edition , published at Housman's own expense - and reissued it is a fairly familiar one .sx Housman had a curiously puritanical attitude to business , seeing the acceptance of royalties as some kind of encroachment on his copyright liberty ; he therefore used to return uncashed all cheques from American publishers to whom he did not want to be hidden .sx With Richards the arrangement was that any sums earned in royalty should be ploughed back to help keep the published price down :sx A Shropshire Lad was still being sold at 1s .sx 6d in 1926 .sx Last Poems in 1922 was issued on an orthodox 15 per cent royalty basis .sx Housman suggested printing 10,000 , but the trade subscription was so poor that Richards did only 4,000 .sx 21,000 were in print by the first Christmas .sx On his side Housman stuck through thick and thin to Richards and the convenience of having only one man who would handle all his business , though he acknowledged that the principal factor keeping him faithful was laziness , the vis inertiae .sx He continued to pay for all his classical texts himself - Juvenal , Lucan and the five volumes of Manilius - pricing all of them well below cost , the highly sophisticated typography by Robert Maclehose of Glasgow contrasting oddly with the ungainly cut-flush paper board bindings .sx ( The 400 copies of his Juvenal in 1905 , including binding half the edition , were invoiced at pounds67 .sx 5s. ) Bibliophiles have noted that all these books were imprinted " Apvd Grant Richards " except the fifth Manilius ( 1930 ) which had to be " Apvd Societatem The Richards Press " .sx They must have been a strangely assorted pair :sx Richards dressy , dandyish and talkative , Housman taciturn in the battered schoolboy's cricket cap he affected on holiday ; Richards' slapdash deficiency in editorial skills often maddening to the precise and scholarly Housman for whom every comma was a matter of life and death ; Housman an early patron of Imperial Airways , Richards always going by sea ; but the accounts given in Richards' 1942 book of their holiday jaunts by hired car round France together are as convincing as they are vivid .sx Grantie's family was an important part of his life .sx All his four children - a daughter and three sons - were by his first wife , an Italian , from whom he parted when the daughter was eight and the youngest son two .sx He suffered from the feeling that he had himself been rejected by his own aloof , academic father , and wanted to avoid that mistake with his own children .sx After the parting he bought Bigfrith , a house which still stands on the common at Cookham Dean , where the children largely brought themselves up in the charge of a superior parlourmaid .sx When at work in London he thought nothing of the daily two-mile walk to the station and back again in the evening .sx The family circle was a tight one , the discipline strict - none of the children were allowed to see their mother till they came of age .sx Nor was Grantie inclined to extend his hospitality outside the wide circle of his own invited friends .sx He coached the superior parlourmaid to deliver in ringing tones a standard rebuff to all unwanted local callers :sx " Mr Richards is not at the moment enlarging the circle of his acquaintance .sx " .sx A tragedy he felt very deeply was the accidental death of his eldest son Gerard , aged 14 , who on holiday in 1916 was buried by the sudden collapse of a sand dune in Cornwall .sx Not being a Christian - he considered that The Origin of Species had put paid to Christianity for ever - he sought in vain for a suitable epitaph for the boy's granite grave in Ruan Minor churchyard , and finally took this extract from Gerard's Eton housemaster's latest report :sx " He was a happy boy and a good one and made many others happy .sx " .sx One of the most regular visitors of Bigfrith was Pauline Hemmerde , tall , stiff and somewhat forbidding , but always popular with the children .sx This was the lady who in the early 1900s decided to take Grantie and his business under her wing and served him loyally thenceforward as secretary and personal assistant , often with her own salary in arrears , till the time came for him to give up in 1928 .sx At that point she had to remove no less than two tons of Richard's office archives to her own small flat , preparatory to their sale to an American university .sx She also took home the original manuscript of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists , which she had done much to get into print .sx This was a parting present to her from Richards 'against a rainy day' ; when that day came , quite soon , she is believed to have parted with it for only pounds10 .sx Solvency being a matter of temperament rather than income , it has to be acknowledged that Grantie was by nature weak to the point of irresponsibility on the financial side ; not for him the proper pride a publisher can take in being the prompt paymaster of everyone connected with a book .sx He had little shame in borrowing from a friend when he wanted a holiday , and borrowing from another friend on his return , to pay the first friend back .sx One of the chapters of Author Hunting ( 1934 ) makes play with what his ledgers reveal about the early years of the business ; one has the feeling that he had not consulted the ledger until 1934 , and that a closer attention to its disclosures at the time might have saved him from the over-trading which led to his first bankruptcy in 1904 .sx It seems probable that the principal strain on his resources came from launching the World's Classics on top of the rest of his distinguished but slow-selling list .sx Reprint series of this kind were very much in the air at the start of the century .sx Collins , Nelson , Routledge , Methuen and Newnes were all at it , and the 1913 reference catalogue lists eleven different editions of Boswell's Johnson ; but Richards' World Classics had a style all their own .sx Size five x three-and-a-half inches , their standard bulk one-and-a-half inches , stamped with a gilt spine decoration by Laurence Housman , they sold at no more than 1s cloth and 2s skiver leather .sx The series ranged through Emerson , Hazlitt , Gilbert White , Machiavelli , and Gibbon in seven volumes .sx The first volume , Jane Eyre , came out in 1901 , six years before the first Everyman in 1906 ; the last to appear with the Richards imprint was Lavengro in 1904 .sx The series was both a burden to him and a release , in that the sale of stock and rights in the first 66 titles to Henry Frowde of the Clarendon Press - which carried them on in the smaller format familiar to us today - enabled him to discharge his bankruptcy sooner than expected .sx