On foot of Canongate’s republishing of David Simon’s Homicide – A Year On The Killing Streets, we thought we’d share the full account of our meet with Canongate boss Jamie Byng last summer…

It’s about three in the afternoon when Canongate boss Jamie Byng, long-haired and casually dressed, totes a big bag of books into the foyer of Buswell’s hotel on Molesworth Street. Actually, it’s less a bag of books than a mobile portal to some Borgesian dimension composed entirely of Canongate’s summer catalogue – the imminent reprint of Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’; Kate Grenville’s ‘Lilian’s Story’; Scarlett Thomas’s ominously packaged ‘The End Of Mr Y’; Angus McCall Smith’s ‘Dream Angus’, the latest in the ongoing Myths series; and a selection of glossy prints from the forthcoming illustrated edition of Yann Martel’s ‘Life Of Pi’.

“Are you alright for shots?” I ask him, after Repforce Publicity director Peter McIntyre has made the introductions.

“Shots?” Byng says, eyebrow raised.

“Photographs.”

“Jesus, I thought you meant whiskey for a minute.”

Sparkling water it is then.

There are those who’ll tell you that until relatively recently, publishing was the last remaining gentleman’s business, but is increasingly becoming snarled in the same demographic-obsessed conglomerate double-think that plagues the film and music industries.

Byng is the flamboyant exception to the corporate rule, and something of a flashback to publishing visionaries like Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias. Eloquent in a drawly Keef kinda way, he comports himself like a boho-aristocratic scenester who might have hung out with Donald Cammell, Marianne, Mick and Anita circa 1967, but has established himself as a shrewd but intuitive publisher whose business savvy is matched by a natural rapport with writers, musicians and all manner of creative types.

His enthusiasm – evangelism even – often serves to compensate for the modest advance figures at Canongate’s disposal (he famously acquired ‘Life Of Pi’ by writing Yann Martel a love letter to the novel and matching Faber & Faber’s £15,000 advance). He’s in Dublin to introduce Peter Behrens at the launch of his novel ‘The Law Of Dreams’, in some respects an atypical Canongate title in that it’s almost an orthodox historical Irish famine tale – until the reader gets their teeth into the bone-hard and unsentimentally visceral nature of the prose.

The second son of the eighth earl of Strafford, James Edmund Byng grew up in Abbotsworthy, Hampshire. While attending Edinburgh University he ran a funk, reggae and rare groove club night named Chocolate City (after the Parliament classic) at The Venue with his first wife Whitney McVeigh. After graduating, he convinced Scottish publisher Stephanie Wolfe Murray to give him a job at Canongate, then a respected but still somewhat marginalised Scottish company founded in 1973 and most noted for championing Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’ (widely regarded as the Scottish ‘Ulysses’).

When Canongate was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1994, Byng, then in his mid-20s, instigated a buyout, aided by his business partner Hugh Andrew, his stepfather (former BBC chairman Sir Christopher Bland) and then father-in-law (co-chairman of the multinational investment bank Salomon Smith Barney). His first move in overhauling the company’s image was to establish the ultra hip Payback and Rebel Inc imprints, dedicated to championing cult authors such as Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Richard Brautigan, Nelson Algren, Jim Dodge, Barry Gifford, Alexander Trocchi, Joel Rose and Knut Hamsun, plus counterculture texts like Iceberg Slim’s ‘Pimp’, Charles Mingus’s ‘Beneath The Underdog’ and Robert Sabbag’s ‘Snowblind’.

‘The Pocket Canons’ (1998) was another brainwave: selected books from the Bible individually packaged with new introductions by the Dalai Lama, Will Self, Nick Cave, Bono and Louis de Berniéres among others. In the wake of the two-million selling, Booker-winning ‘Life Of Pi’, Canongate won Publisher Of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2003, reportedly posting pre-tax profits of more than £1 million for that year, and roughly half that the following year.

Critical and commercial successes like Michel Faber’s ‘The Crimson Petal And The White’ and James Meek’s ‘The People’s Act Of Love’ consolidated the company’s position, and having weathered the odd bout of turbulence – the departures of key personnel like financial brain David Graham and editorial director Judy Moir, a scrapped merger with Grove Atlantic – Canongate has become the publishing equivalent of Island Records in the 70s and 80s: an independent entity with commercial clout and a diverse but identifiable in-house aesthetic that encompasses everyone from Laura Hird to Louise Welsh, Helen Walsh to Anthony Bourdain.

Last year it became the first Scottish publisher to have two titles included on the Booker shortlist, Kate Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ and MJ Hyland’s ‘Carry Me Down’, and also won the contract to publish presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama’s ‘The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream’ on this side of the water.

“The decisions you make as a publisher are largely what define you,” Byng says, “so your taste is, if not everything, it’s a large chunk of what constitutes the identity of a publishing house. I think if you lose that, you venture onto dangerous ground – it’s one of the things that helps an independent house distinguish itself in what is an increasingly corporate business.”

Peter Murphy: Canongate’s diversity of titles evades any easy definition, but the common factor seems to be books with some sort of edge.

Jamie Byng: I think a writer like Michel Faber is a quintessential Canongate author. He happens to live in Scotland but he’s completely international in his outlook; he’s someone who in a way represents what I hope Canongate is: this diverse range of styles and themes being addressed in his work, but always doing it with originality, and, as you said, edge.
There’s a great reggae singer called Little Roy, he does this beautiful song: “No matter how they imitate/The thing that I originate…/Imitation won’t live long/Origination shall be strong, strong, strong.” Originality to me seems to me an absolutely key hallmark in a writer whose work is gonna last, a writer who’s gonna trouble you and make you think again about the way you see the world. I would like to think our writers are expanding the reader’s perspective on what it means to be human. The international side of it is a big part of that.

PM: One of the earliest indications that you were going to expand Canongate’s remit was the introduction of the Rebel Inc and Payback imprints. A lot of the more hard-boiled American writers you republished went onto form an alternative canon for young Irish and UK writers. You now see people like Selby, Fante, Algren and Brautigan namechecked all over unpublished writers’ forums.

JB: Even before Rebel Inc started, Payback Press was the first of the imprints, and that was a conscious decision by me to try and force people to think differently of Canongate. Not that I was embarassed by what it had been, but having come from the south of England, having gone to Edinburgh University in the late 80s/early 90s, I started to do all the publicity for Canongate and would run up against this brick wall where there was a really interesting novel we were publishing, and people down south would almost dismiss it because it was a Scottish writer and a Scottish publishing house. And that used to fucking get my goat so much. And also my interests were never going to be contained within what was going on in Scotland, even though Scottish writers formed a crucial backbone to a lot of our publishing. Starting Payback was a real finger in people’s faces, to say, “How can you dismiss Iceberg Slim or Chester Himes or Clarence Cooper Jr or Charles Mingus?”

PM: Did your interest in black urban writers come out of DJ culture?

JB: Yeah, definitely, ’cos I’d never heard of Iceberg Slim until I was doing my dissertation, it was called ‘A Development of the Black Oral Tradition In The Hip Hop Lyric’. I was writing that in the summer of ’91, graduated in ’92, and it was really tracing the links from a literary, musical and social point of view, the likes of Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets and Syl Johnson and James Brown to Millie Jackson through to Chuck D and Eric B & Rakim and Ice T. And I was reading an interview with Ice T and he suddenly namechecks this guy Iceberg Slim. I’d done 20th Century American Literature for my degree, and I’d never heard of Iceberg Slim. I’d never heard of Chester Himes until I started working at Canongate, and this amazing guy called Angus Calder, who must be in his late 70s now – he wrote quite a famous non-fiction book called ‘The People’s War’ about the experience of the Second World War in London – he was a Chester Himes nut. But Iceberg Slim never got onto any canon of 20th century American literature. (Nelson) Algren wasn’t there – no fucking chance!

PM: So how did you go about spreading the word?

JB: I went and got one of those Holloway House silver covered paperbacks of (Iceberg Slim’s) ‘Pimp’ and thought this was an extraordinary voice, I’d never heard anything like it before. And one of the first things I did when I took over Canongate was I got the rights for that. If you like something, you have to believe there are some other people out there who might like it too. And Irvine Welsh gave me this amazing quote when I first sent it to him – little did I know he’d been totally into his work for a while. Ice T introduced the book for us. That was probably the first example of us taking a text and setting our sights quite high and going to someone who could really help the book.

PM: Which you took to its logical conclusion by commissioning high profile introductions for ‘The Pocket Canons’ in 1998. The packaging of that series seemed targeted at people who still regard books as fetish objects. The first time I saw them, I thought they looked evil.

JB: (Laughs). There was something too tempting about them, they really were alluring things. That was an incredibly significant moment for Canongate, that piece of publishing. We were absolutely paranoid that if anyone else heard about the idea they would just do it. I remember we went around to about four different designers in London trying to give a brief for a series I couldn’t tell them anything about. I loved Nick’s introduction to Mark, I thought it was one of the very best. Louis de Berniéres’ Job was pretty hard hitting too – inadvertantly we’d been worshipping the devil! Will Self called Revelations a “sick text”.
It was only when those introductions started to come in that I fully realised what we’d set in motion. There’s that beautiful thing that Auden said: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” Books can help you realise things that you instinctively were moving towards, a writer can help you crystalise those ideas in your head, and I think those introductions did that in a very interesting way, and in a personal way too, it was a human response to the Bible, it wasn’t drawing in some external forces to try and validate these books, but it was interpreting them, and in the process validating them on a human rather than a cosmic level.

PM: How did you begin enlisting possible contributors?

JB: The first author I ever mentioned it to was Roddy Doyle, we were at this music and literary festival in Holland called Crossing Border, it’s a brilliant festival which I DJ’d at a number of times. And it was midnight in some bar, and I remember saying to him, “Can I sound you out on an idea just to see what you think?” And I told him about it and he said, “You want me to do something on a book from the Bible? No fucking way, I had that rammed down my throat, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it!”

PM: So he swapped the the Bible for Bukowski.

JB: He did, he wrote a beautiful intro for ‘Ham On Rye’, I think we took Bukowski to an audience in part he would never have reached. And we’ve become good friends since then, he did a lovely thing with Peter Guralnick, he launched ‘Sweet Soul Music’ and ‘Lost Highway’, he basically presented Peter Guralnick at the end of a book festival. There would’ve been a good crowd there anyway because of Guralnick’s reputation just on the Presley books alone, but Roddy was very generous in his support.

PM: The ongoing Myths series expands on The Pocket Canons template, with Canongate commissioning novella length reworkings of classical stories.

JB: Yeah, I’ve still got the document on my computer, it was called ‘Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction’ and I started writing it in November ’99, just after we published the second series of Bible books. I remember I felt a bit like we were flogging a dead horse with the second series because although we got some great introductions, not least Bono’s introduction to Psalms, and Alasdair Gray on Jonah, I remember thinking we were almost scraping the barrel in terms of, “We’re not going to go onto Leviticus and we’re not going to keep rolling them out for 60 books” or however many bloody books there are in the Bible.
And the other slight frustration I felt with the Bible series was, some of the introductions were just scratching the surface of what they had to say. We only asked them to write 2000 words and sometimes you could feel the authors just getting going. I was quite interested in the Bible as a kid, but I was much more taken by the Greek myths, I used to read and re-read them. And I thought it would be interesting to approach a writer with a much broader brief and say, “Take any myth of your choice and retell it over 25 to 30,000 words.” So Ali Smith’s just about to deliver her retelling of the myth of Iphis (‘Girl Meets Boy’), which is this amazing cross-gender myth which I’ve never come across before. Salley Vickers has just delivered this book on Oedipus called ‘Where Three Roads Meet’, which I think is possibly the best book anyone’s written in the series to date.

PM: Is it true Donna Tartt is going to cough up too?

JB: Well, I hope so. She and Jeannette Winterson were the first two to go under contract, and Jeannette’s delivered her retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles (‘Weight’) and Donna’s meant to be doing Daedalus and Icarus.

PM: We all know what her gestation cycle is like…

JB: Exactly. The thing is, you just gotta be patient. In fact, the last thing I wrote in that three-page working document, as much for myself, was “Ripeness is all”, one of my favourite quotes from ‘King Lear’. One of the things I’ve learned in life generally, but also as a publisher, is you’ve just gotta be patient. It’s the cliché of the Guinness ad, but if something’s worth waiting for, then wait for it. You’ve gotta seize the moment occasionally when something is timely and needs to be done and you can make things happen, but if you try and force it, therein lies half done things.

PM: Yann Martel’s ‘Life Of Pi’ was obviously a landmark book in Canongate’s history. As well as winning the Booker, it sold by the truckload. More importantly, it had an almost religious effect on people.

JB: As Yann wrote at the beginning, “This is a story that will make you believe in God.” Whether it does or not is up for debate, but it’s certainly a book that makes you think about the connections between imagination and faith. Faith is the most supreme act of the imagination in a way. Y’know, my brother’s a born again Christian, so I always have very interesting conversations with him. I wouldn’t say his faith is unassailable, but it seems pretty unassailable to me. He believes in a Christian God in a way that I could never subscribe to. But to me the beauty of Pi is that it challenges and explores without condemning that very idea, because Pi himself has these three teachers, each of whom illustrates a different way how to live your life and find faith, but ultimately the faith he needs to find is the faith to survive, a human based faith. There was one comment Yann made when he won the Booker, he said, “I want to thank my readers for meeting me somewhere in the middle.” I loved that recognition of the role the reader plays in transforming a story into a reality. Yann’s about to deliver a new book too, it’ll be interesting to see how he follows up ‘Life Of Pi’.

PM: Presumably Pi had a pretty dramatic impact on Canongate’s financial stability.

JB: The effect it had on a house our size is kind of hard to overestimate. Even if it hadn’t won the Booker it probably still would have sold 100,000 paperbacks minimum, maybe more, but it ended up being this enormous success and allowed us to, I suppose, become truly financially independent. We still have an overdraft facility which we occasionally use at certain times of the year, but it gave us a stability that we never had previously, and suddenly things weren’t quite as hand-to-mouth. Not that we can be complacent, we still hustle, but it enabled us to invest a lot of money in new writers.

PM: On that subject, you’ve published a large number of radically different books in the last six months alone, including Laura Hird’s collection of short stories ‘Hope’, and a compendium of her late mother June’s letters ‘Dear Laura’, which is quite an extraordinary snapshot of the late 80s/early 90s. It also works as an interesting companion to her books ‘Born Free’ and ‘Nail’ in that it illustrates the reality she sought to escape from in her fiction.

JB: Absolutely, I think that’s a spot-on observation about it. It’s a very raw book in that way, a book I think she had to write. I never met June Hird, but I feel like I’ve met her because of the book’s capturing of someone’s literal presence. I think it’s a very rare book in the way that it deals with and explores family, particularly the mother-daughter relationship, and the fact that you and I as men were equally affected by it means it’s not just about mother-daughter relationships; it’s an honest and moving book about the parent-child relation. She’s one of the writers I hope we publish for a long time, ’cos I don’t think she’s had the recognition she deserves.

PM: A lot of Canongate books seem to approach the historical novel from an angle. My favourite is probably Joel Rose’s ‘The Blackest Bird’, which mixes ‘Gangs Of New York’ style period detail with arcane police procedurals and a cameo from Edgar Allan Poe.

JB: ‘The Blackest Bird’ is definitely doing something quite different with the historical novel. I like writers who are playful, the inherent play that goes on in writing down a story, the inherent falseness of a voice but at the same time, if a voice is pulled off with real skill, it’s as true as anything you’ll ever hear. I love those paradoxes that seem to run through all great books.

PM: Almost exactly a year ago, MJ Hyland sat where you are now and spoke about ‘Carry Me Down’, and how a book’s credibility is essentially down to the quality of lying.

JB: For a book that is engaged with the very idea of duplicity and lies and that passage from innocence to… I don’t know if experience is even the right word, but certainly from innocence to lack of innocence, that moment that John Egan suddenly realises the complete tissue of lies that everything is based on… I’m very glad I’m here in Dublin tonight, but I’m also sad because it means I’m going to miss Maria winning the Encore prize for the best second novel tonight. It’s extremely exciting when you play that role from the first book onwards.

PM: One of the most original debut novels I’ve read in recent years is Steven Hall’s ‘The Raw Shark Texts’. It takes the sort of vaulting imaginative leaps more commonly associated with graphic novelists or filmmakers – somewhere between Kafka, Borges, ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Memento’.

JB: It’s a debut that came at a brilliant moment for us in terms of what’s happening with new technologies – it enabled you to indulge all sorts of possibilities in the way a book can be published, and in terms of the whole viral marketing that’s been done on it. And the book has enabled us to do other stuff as well, I’ve just produced my first short film with Tilda Swinton in it, it’s a five minute Raw Shark film taking this short passage from the novel: “Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake”.It’s a very key moment within the book and in fact I only realised afterwards that this was the first thing Steven ever wrote for the novel, it’s literally the seed, all the conceptual ideas of the novel contained in this one passage. We’ll probably release it in about three weeks time, it’ll be a purely online experience, but we’re gonna do a whole cinema tour in various arthouse cinemas in the autumn when the paperback of Shark comes out, with Steven doing Q&As.

PM: Given your obvious passion for books, how come you ended up being a publisher instead of a writer?

JB: They’re two very, very different things. I suppose I could draw an equal analogy to music, which is also an enormously important thing in my life, but the only way I could possibly call myself as a musician – and I do think of it as playing music – is as a DJ, which is a very creative thing itself, but I would love more than anything to play the piano or guitar even a fraction as well as my heroes.
I think it’s just a recognition that maybe a better use of my time, and something that gives me enormous pleasure, is in that catalyst role as a publisher, helping writers find an audience. I’m kind of evangelical about that role. What I care about is the message in a way, whether it’s a writer’s or a musician’s. Which is why, to be honest, I spend a lot of time championing books that I’ve got nothing to do with, like Richard Yates’s ‘Revolutionary Road’. Ultimately it really doesn’t matter who publishes the book, what’s important is that the book is getting championed one way or another. If you really care about books, that’s all you care about.