W hat is in a name? Quite a lot if, like veteran publisher Richard Charkin, you set up an independent publishing firm and call it Mensch Publishing. It was the only name he considered five years ago and it reflects values that were inculcated in him early in life.
During a lively Zoom chat, the former Bloomsbury board member recalls that when his father created a property management business, which is still operating, he eschewed the vile discriminatory practices of many landlords of the time, and said: “We like blacks, Irish and dogs.”
“My dad used to say things like, ‘We are very lucky we live in a country that doesn’t, by and large, stick us in jail or send us to Auschwitz. We are allowed to grow and we’re allowed to have businesses, and we’re blessed.’”
He felt an obligation to help others. And this has passed down the generations. During the Covid lockdowns, the company did “all sorts of menschlich-type things” to help struggling tenants, says Charkin, who acts as a director.
“So the menschlichkeit concept has been with me for ages. I have definitely inherited [it], not in DNA but socially, in the way you behave to people.”
What makes someone a mensch? Charkin thinks the Oxford English Dictionary definition includes descriptors such as “upstanding and decent”, but suggests that an element is missing: imperfection.
Delia Smith's book You Matter is a Mensch publication
“If you were perfect, you’d be disgusting. Absolutely ghastly. So, we do our best to be upstanding, but we don’t always succeed.”
The lawyer in the United States from whom he tried to buy the URL mensch.com does not appear to have even tried to live up to the word. “I wrote to him saying, ‘Would you sell it to me?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, for a million dollars.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not very menschlich. You don’t deserve it.’” He laughs. “Which is why we’re menschpublishing.com.”
Charkin could have used his own name, of course, but considered that “too self-serving” in the context of a publishing company. “Also, when eventually you sell it on, what does your name mean? It means nothing.”
However, since its inception, Mensch Publishing been more or less a one-man operation.
This means Charkin has closer relationships with his authors than he had in posts at Bloomsbury and Oxford University Press, for example, and is always at the end of the phone when needed. “Because there isn’t anyone else to talk to,” he says, laughing. “Which is why I restrict the number of titles that I publish. So, I have a one-on-one relationship with every author.”
Their books are representative of a “perfectly respectable middle ground” between “bestsellers and worse sellers”, which today, for a number of reasons, says Charkin, is being neglected by the big publishers, creating a “chasm”.
“A typical trade book publishing house will make a large amount of money on their bestsellers, and lose a lot of money on the rest.
"So they don’t want the rest. But, nonetheless, a huge number of extremely good books are being written by extremely good people, desperate to see the light of day.”
Mensch was his attempt to find a model that would allow the “rest” to reach their market, “in the hope that one or two might actually become bestsellers”.
“I can’t claim to have proved definitively that you can do it. But we’re still in business. And there’s slightly more cash in the bank than when we started.”
Being a mensch has also meant that all of his authors (now “sort of friends”) have come back again after their first books, though not always with ideas that he has accepted.
“It’s not so much that they’re lousy but I really try to limit the amount of fiction I publish,” he explains. “It’s really difficult and I think, sometimes, the big guys do a better job. So, I tend to push back on that.”
The handsome hardbacks he holds up at various points cover a gamut of subjects, including the Second World War, the real-life experiences of a cardiothoracic surgeon, an investigation into the alleged dark side of MCC, and a memoir of a chaotic former Etonian that has been optioned for TV. The most immediately familiar name is Delia Smith, whose book You Matter landed at Mensch after being rejected by six other publishers.
Authors can meet resistance when they go off piste as Smith did with a personal tome about “the phenomenon of existence”. rather than yet another book of reliable recipes.
I ask Charkin if he agrees with the publisher Stephen Rubin, who recently decried “an almost knee-jerk response to diversity and inclusion”, claiming that the next John Grisham or Dan Brown could be lost.
“Absolutely,” he says emphatically. “I think it is really dangerous.” There could have been “a little bit of that” in the Smith book saga, he says.
“There’s also quite a lot of that undiscovered because it’s not high enough profile . . . I saw a rejection letter, of a really good writer, a novelist, just last week, which said, ‘We find that books by white men of a certain age are difficult to sell.’ That’s not true. But it is a default reaction.”
While loath to “badmouth” an old employer, he says Pan Macmillan “behaved terribly badly” when they bowed to online complaints and “disowned their own author” Kate Clanchy, over her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me and her response to criticism of it. “It is mensch to stick to your authors,” he says.
Are there any books Charkin has worked on that he thinks might struggle in the current climate?
“I once published a book called The Genetics of the Jews, which was a very powerful scientific thing saying, ‘Actually, Jews aren’t that genetically different.’
"But I think probably everyone would have gulped today at just that title. It probably would have got through anyway, but maybe by the skin of its teeth. I’m sure there are other ones that we would think twice or three times or 20 times before doing.”
Today, the only whims he’s beholden to are his own.
‘My Back Pages: An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing 1972 to 2022’ by Richard Charkin with Tom Campbell is published by Marble Hill Publishing on April 17
