Interview: Peter Owen

In 1951, he founded Peter Owen Publishers with £900 and a typewriter. He started as he meant to carry on, writers on the wild side, like Henry Miller, Ezra Pound and a then unknown Russian writer, Boris Pasternak.

Then he hired his first editor, Muriel Spark (well before The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). Another smile. "She was extremely pleasant and efficient," but then "she became a grande dame and dumped all her old friends."

Did Spark have good judgment as an editor? "She tried to persuade me to take Beckett." Did he? "No. It was my biggest mistake."

And his biggest success? Without hesitation, he names Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. No one in England knew of Hesse when Owen bought this strange novel in 1954 but it became a cult hit in the 1960s when eastern mysticism was all the rage.

Owen recalls the '60s as the best of his six publishing decades. "Everything blossomed; there was plenty of money around." It was also a good time for a publisher who liked risky authors: Anaïs Nin, e e cummings, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mishima and Colette. Quite a few Jewish authors, too: Chagall's autobiography, Joseph Roth (then unknown), Bashevis Singer (also unknown), A B Yehoshua's first novel.

"I have to like them. If I don't like them, I won't do them." Owen sounds out of place in the pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap world of today's publishing. "It's all changed. It's much more difficult to sell books… a rat race. They're less concerned with quality." By contrast, Peter Owen has always been concerned with quality and it has brought him success - for 60 years.

David Herman is the JC's chief fiction reviewer