Jonathan Cape

Right, Life Out of Order.

Yes, Life Out of Order, which comes out through Jonathan Cape tomorrow, October 13th.

Very exciting.

So our mission for this deep dive is to explore this bizarre phenomenon of art mirroring reality in real time.

We ended up at Hanover Square with Grace Towery.

In the UK, my editor, Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, had retired.

And so now I have Hannah Westland.

Also in Canada, my editor had ascended to a more elevated job.

It must have been out of revenge for, for going with you." So hello, everybody.

A chilling moment there from Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, his seventh James Bond book, published by Jonathan Cape in March 1959.

And there we have the dashing and athletic James Bond, played by the person who I hear is one of the front runners for the role in the forthcoming movie, Dominic Sandbrook.

Hi, everybody.

Yeah.

And I think that's the attitude you probably have to bring to your reading of Bond novels as well.

Anyway, Casino Royale is published in April 1953 by Jonathan Cape.

It's not a massive hit.

His debut novel was called The Great Coast, which was published in 1926, which was why we used this as a springboard for relaunching the North House Press List and his programme.

And it was first published, and this is a story that we haven't entirely got to the bottom of, but it was first published by Jonathan Cape.

arguably the most successful and prestigious literary publisher in Britain today.

And it was published alongside Ernest Hemingway's debut in 1926.

So there's two great writers launched by Jonathan Cape in the same year.

And The Great Coast references the coast of Caithness and is peopled by the people up there, and they speak a language that is inflected by... dialect of the Caithness coast, and yet it somehow travelled from Dunbeath all the way down to 14 Garrow Street in Bloomsbury in London, and landed on an editor's desk, and that editor thought, this is a book that we should publish.

And it's both testament to the literary acumen of the editors, which carries on 100 years later in Jonathan Cape's 10 Booker Prize winners, twice as many as any other publisher in the UK.

But also to the Testament of Neil Gunn, who we were, one of the reviews we got for our republishing of his was David Profumo in The Spectator, who provided a quote that I couldn't have written better myself, which I should know of by heart, but pretty much said, you know, if Gunn occasionally is accused of provincialism, Well, if he's provincial, he's provincial in the way that Haldar Laxness and Thomas Hardy are provincial.

Who published them.

Now it's nearly always Jonathan Cape.

Shocker.

Uh, and the, our readers can hear some ASMR now at the moment as I run my fingers across this page.

We ended up at Hanover Square with Grace Towery.

In the UK, my editor, Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, had retired.

And so now I have Hannah Westland.

Also in Canada, my editor had ascended to a more elevated job, and so I had a new editor there as well.