Just for the record: Why Jamie Byng has set up a 'living archive' of Canongate

Published on Friday 18 June 2010 20:20

IMAGINE your work e-mails, texts and letters connected with your job, being pored over by posterity. That's what's going to happen at ever-innovative Edinburgh publisher Canongate, which has signed a deal to create a "living archive" of its records to be kept at Dundee University.

Canongate publisher Jamie Byng, who has the best-selling Man Booker winner in history on his list as well as the autobiographies of a certain Barack Obama, promises that the archive will be a warts and all record of the company, revealing how it made mistakes in turning down some books as well as its success in picking out and promoting others.

As an example of the former, Byng picks out Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which he turned down, only to see it picked up by Polygon and become a worldwide bestseller. "Somewhere in the archives will be the editorial reasons on which we passed on that book," says Byng. "I found Mma Ramotswe a charming creation but I felt the book needed a bit more grit and was a little bit rose-tinted. I'd still stand by that view.

"The history of Canongate is littered with mistakes, with things we've turned down or handled badly. But I've always subscribed to that Samuel Beckett maxim "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That's hardwired into all the staff at Canongate – that we should only accept failing provided the next time we fail better. Because you're bound to fail."

That said, Canongate's track record since Byng took over the helm in 1994 – twice voted Britain's publisher of the year and still the only Scottish publisher ever to have won the Man Booker Prize – shows far more success than failure. "That's why we're so excited about this collection," says Patricia Whatley, head archivist at Dundee University. "It's a massively important literary collection from a publisher that has put Scotland on the publishing map and developed a reputation for works of quality and individuality such as Yann Martel's Life of Pi. The potential for research is enormous."

For Byng, the attraction of the project is that it will be rooted in the present as much as the past. While Canongate promises to respect the privacy of those with whom it is in contact, the overall dream is to create an archive "that will show the company as a living, organic thing. I hope it won't just give people insights into one publishing house but publishing in general. Or even how – because I want to give access to all the financial stuff – how an independent business can grow. This business is constantly evolving, never sitting still: every day there's a huge amount going on not just within Canongate but with all the writers we're dealing with."

Text messages and e-mails are an integral part of this, says Byng. Nick Cave's spur-of-the-moment texts, Michel Faber's ultra-thoughtful e-mails, Philip Pullman outlining his aims for The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ (which in April became Canongate's first hardback No1 fiction bestseller) – all could be part of the Dundee archive.

"The collection has such high-profile authors that it will attract attention from an international audience," says Mrs Whatley, "and it will be used as an inspiration for teaching as well as research." The Canongate archive, she adds, will also be backed up by an oral history of the company, involving such central figures as Angus Wolfe Murray, who founded it in 1973, or Stephanie Wolfe Murray, who ran it for two decades until Byng took over in 1995.

No sooner was Byng in charge than Canongate found itself kicked out of its Frederick Street offices and looking for a new home in Edinburgh. The List publisher Robin Hodge came up with the offer of rented premises on Tweeddale Court that had once belonged to publisher Oliver & Boyd. From there Canongate began to make a name for itself as an edgy, decidedly non-parochial, publisher. Setting up Payback Press (Gil Scott-Heron, Iceberg Slim) helped. So too did Byng's brainwave of publishing 18 books of the Bible as Pocket Canons, with introductions by the likes of Bob Dylan, the Dalai Lama and Bono.

"Those were significant for us on so many levels. They changed the way we thought about publishing and allowed us to work with a number of writers who have gone on to be very important for us – Richard Holloway, for example, we've published him ever since. Or Nick Cave – I first met him through that project and we published his first novel 11 years later."

But while the story the Canongate archives tell is indeed one of organic growth – last year's purchase of its Edinburgh premises is, as Byng says, significantly symbolic in this regard – publishing remains hugely dependent on luck. Who's to say that Canongate's will hold?

"Certainly it's not a science and things never go according to plan. But you have to follow your instincts with books that you feel passionate about. But there's a saying, "Luck is the residue of opportunity and design", and there's some truth in that too.

"We've had some incredible pieces of luck – until June 2008 the idea that Barack Obama could have beaten Hillary Clinton was a crazy idea, and when we bought those books some time before, we had no idea that was going to happen. So I'll be the first to admit that luck is important – but we bought that book so in a sense we did make our own luck."

So what's in the Byng in-tray now that students using the Dundee archive will one day read about? "One thing could be our whole partnership with Walker Books (the two publishers are joining forces to create Walker Canongate, a new joint young adult imprint]. But there are tectonic shifts going on in retail and digital publishing at the moment, and we've done deals with Apple, Google and Amazon that I can't go into detail about right now. And it's probably too early to mention this but we are also in the process of acquiring another business at the moment – and it's going to be very interesting when that happens. All of that's going through at the moment."

A new business? Remember that, Dundee archive-users of the future. Saturday, 19 June, 2010 was its first mention. You'll know how it all worked out. I don't. Look it up.

• Creating History – the story of Canongate Publishing, with Stephanie Wolfe Murray, Jamie Byng, Alasdair Gray, Louise Welsh and Michel Faber is a free event at the Dundee Literary Festival at the Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee, 10am to noon on Friday, 25 June.