Maxwell, The Outsider

by Tom Bower

  During the night, Beckwith and Clark, helped by Maxwell, loaded LMS's filing cabinets in Maxwell's Humber, shuttling to and from Fitzroy Square. Simultaneously, Lassen moved Low-Bell's files to the new headquarters. Gunther Heyden remembers the 'frantic activity to disentangle the companies and get our assets out of Simpkin Marshall's premises before it collapsed'. During the controlled panic, a fire broke out in the basement, but it was quickly extinguished. The following day, the receiver arrived and Heyden and others would spend hours arguing that furniture and stock did not belong to Simpkins. In the confusion, it was not easy for the receiver to disprove the counter-claims of LMS, EPPAC, Robert Maxwell and Co., Pergamon, International Encyclopaedias, Low-Bell and a host of smaller trading companies all registered at the same address. Even the accountants had not always been certain which of the companies was responsible for which payment.

  For Maxwell, based the following day in Fitzroy Square, it was practically business as usual. Once again ensconced in a huge room with a large oil portrait of an English gentleman behind him ('That's my august uncle, Moshe Schlemiel,' he would joke), he seemed to those around him supremely confident. While Lassen fixed the central heating, Heyden was still selling Springer's stock, and in a small office Paul Rosbaud was unobtrusively planning Pergamon's new journals. There seemed sufficient opportunities for the future - despite the excitement, Maxwell had even squeezed in a trip to China. Probably only Anne Dove appreciated Maxwell's real concerns. Resting in the Himalayas on account of a 'blood disorder', she received an endless stream of letters and telegrams from Maxwell about his plight. 'He was really quite worried,' she says. But to others it seemed that Maxwell was unconcerned when the time came for Simpkins to be accorded a proper funeral at a formal meeting of creditors for the bankrupt company.

  On 15 June, nearly two hundred publishers, their representatives and lawyers crowded into Winchester House, Old Broad Street to hear the official receiver's report. Every account agrees that there was considerable antagonism towards Maxwell, who was sitting on the platform next to the receiver. 'He was very shocked by the atmosphere,' recalls his former sales manager. 'It was a bruising experience for him,' says another, who vividly recalls how the atmosphere soured and Maxwell's demeanour changed as he was confronted publicly with the consequences of his business management.

  To protect themselves from the possibility of Simpkins' bankruptcy, the majority of publishers had agreed to give Simpkins their books on sale or return in the belief that they remained the owners until the books were sold. Maxwell, they felt, had personally assured them that they were safe. But according to the legal advice obtained by the receiver, the stock was in fact owned by Simpkins. The publishers, accordingly, had lost their money. Simpkins owed £656,388 and had just £70,000 in assets to repay its creditors. The receiver announced that he had found one puzzling debt owed to Simpkins, namely £113,000 from the Book Center in New York which he believed was one cause of Simpkins' collapse. 'Captain Maxwell', the receiver told his restless audience, 'has informed the official receiver that the debt is not recoverable beyond about £10,000 ... As Captain Maxwell was aware of the financial difficulties of both the British Book Center Inc. and Simpkins when Simpkins was supplying the books and the debt was mounting, [that deal would] require close investigation.' The only reassurance for the creditors was that Maxwell had assured the receiver that he was trying to sell the Book Center and intended to hand over the proceeds rather than cover his own losses. 'It appears doubtful', said the receiver, 'whether the company was at any time solvent. The directors concerned were at fault in acquiring the Marylebone premises and financing British Book Center Inc. at a time when the company was insolvent without making satisfactory arrangements for the introduction of sufficient further capital.' Maxwell was criticised for not having 'considered and decided upon liquidation at a much earlier date'.

  Bill Keyes remembers Harold Macmillan, whose family firm was one of Simkins' creditors, leaving Winchester House outraged. 'We have lost a fortune,' confided the future Prime Minister, 'but my lawyers say we'll never get our money back.' Macmillan never forgot or forgave the circumstances of Simpkins' collapse. Nor did several members of the future Labour government. But Maxwell quickly recovered his composure. In a statement which would add notoriety to the existing dislike, he told the editor of the Bookseller, 'I've come down flat on my arse, but I'm going up again and this time I'm staying up.' The Bouncing Czech was born and many British publishers were reluctant to deal with him again.

  Right up until his death, Maxwell felt that the enormous antagonism which the collapse provoked was unfair. 'I took over an insolvent company,' he told the author in 1973, 'and I did the best possible.' He was, he felt, a misunderstood but well-intentioned reformer. But Frank Beckwith, who was Simpkins' company secretary, noticed a fatal flaw soon after the original purchase: 'Selling books is based on counting halfpennies and Maxwell's style was not suited to that sort of care about precise costs.' In the publishers' view, Maxwell's great sin was his cavalier interpretation of the director's role in a company. 'His problem', says one of his executives, 'was that he couldn't distinguish between his interests and the interests of others. He saw himself as autonomous and not as a trustee of shareholders' interests.' The fate of the Book Center is proof of that view. Eventually the receiver would be paid £14,829 by William Curtis, Maxwell's former manager at the Book Center, as settlement of the £113,000 debt, but the New York building itself remained the hub of Maxwell's future and fast-expanding American operations.

  4

  Until the collapse of Simpkin Marshall, Maxwell had shown barely any interest in Pergamon, an aloofness which was welcomed by Paul Rosbaud and his twenty-two-year-old assistant Maria Sachs. Rosbaud and Maxwell had nothing in common other than being refugees involved in scientific publishing. But even in that slender mutuality lay fierce differences. Rosbaud was a cultured, Austrian atomic scientist who, according to Sachs, was 'contemptuous of Maxwell whom he saw as an uneducated Hungarian', and their approaches to scientific publishing were sharply contrasting. While Rosbaud considered himself a true publisher who, in the old tradition, identified with the experiences of 'my authors', Maxwell's reading, Rosbaud alleged, was exclusively confined to books of accounts. 'Rosbaud believed in science,' says Sachs, 'while Maxwell believed in money.'

  Rosbaud had therefore been dejected when Butterworth-Springer had agreed in 1951 to Maxwell's purchase of their snares, but since his own efforts to buy the company had failed, he reluctantly accepted his fate. Ferdinand Springer had urged Rosbaud to leave Pergamon, but both were persuaded by Maxwell not to upset the arrangement to save Pergamon from collapse. On Ferdinand's insistence, Maxwell agreed to give Rosbaud a 20 per cent stake in Pergamon, but that does not seem to have been effected on account of Rosbaud's refusal. After the take-over, Rosbaud's fears dwindled. He had been given a small office in Studio Place, which he occupied with Maria Sachs and Eric Buckley, his production manager. Buckley thought Maxwell was an ideal employer. They had met a few years earlier when Maxwell had offered Butterworths the services of his book-binding subsidiary, Maxsons, and ever since they had shared a common interest in improving the technology of printing and had discussed plans for expansion. Even for Sachs, who was deeply devoted to Rosbaud, Maxwell was 'generous, good-natured, with a Balkan sense of humour'. Caught in the middle, she realised that the relationship between the two men was 'doomed from the outset'. But, until they moved into Marylebone Road, the three employees saw little of Maxwell and rather more of the actress Hermione Gingold standing on the doorstep of her nearby house in a dressing-gown.

  Rosbaud's asset was his reputation among those scientists who had fled Nazi Germany. He found no difficulty in attracting Otto Frisch, Laurence Wager and L.H. Ahrens (who were unknown to Ferdinand Springer) to his new publishing house in London. Simultaneously, he pinpointed the British scientists whose work was still relatively unpublicised and offered the formula which Springer had perfected. A
mong the early recruits were Sir Edward Appleton, Sir Harold Thompson, Rodney Hill, Peter Danckwerts and Kenneth Denbigh, who all envied the proliferation of scientific journals in Germany and were irritated by the monopoly of American scientists in English-speaking publications. They resented, as did many of the younger American academics, the exclusion of their work by the editors of the established journals who, they believed, did not understand their discoveries and were prejudiced against newcomers. The reaction of Denbigh, a pioneer in chemical engineering at Cambridge University, to Rosbaud was typical: 'He offered us something quite special.' He was impressed during Rosbaud's visit to his laboratories by the Austrian's grasp of the theoretical and experimental advances which the British scientists had accomplished. Rosbaud proposed, according to Denbigh, 'a journal which emphasised European achievements. He was the driving force to launch the Journal of Chemical Engineering Science and it has remained one of the most successful journals in the field.' Payment, of course, was never an issue. 'There was deep loyalty towards Rosbaud,' recalls Maria Sachs, 'but his commercial sense was zero.'

  Throughout their stay in Marylebone Road, that weakness remained unimportant. During brief and irregular meetings, Maxwell cast a quick eye over Pergamon's uncomplicated balance sheet and, according to Sachs, showed 'no interest in the journals' content but only in the financial principles of scientific publishing'. Pergamon was just profitable but remained a very small publisher. During those three years, only two other journals were added to Pergamon's list: the Journal of Nuclear Physics and the Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Solids, and fourteen books. Like Denbigh, all the editors were personally attracted by Rosbaud and had no contact with Maxwell.

  After Simpkins' crash, Maxwell's attitude towards his fledgling company changed. Pergamon enjoyed a good but limited reputation, earning profits of £5,000 a year, which he decided to expand in direct competition to Springer. Sachs recalls that when Maxwell's serious interest in the business started, 'he was surprised by our success, especially because we were selling book rights to big publishers like McGraw-Hill in New York'. She remembers the McGraw-Hill deal in particular because Maxwell insisted on renegotiating the terms. Rosbaud argued that Maxwell's increased demands would destroy his relationships but, according to Sachs, 'Maxwell couldn't leave it alone and in the end McGraw pulled out.'

  Maxwell had long realised that it did not require scientific talent to establish a new journal. With a modicum of research, a heavy measure of flattery and plenty of organisational skill, anyone of acumen could identify a field of science which was enjoying particular attention but was not yet served by an established journal. It was then a matter of locating a collection of scientists whose work was the most respected and invite them to form an editorial board whose task would be to commission, select and edit papers for publication in their own journal. This was self-motivated, vanity publishing which depended upon Maxwell's talents to sell. With access to LMS's huge mailing list, the availability of Pergamon's new journals was widely advertised and, although each journal's sales in the early 1950s did not exceed more than a few hundred, the sales figures were less crucial since subscriptions were paid in advance. Financial management could be carefully controlled and there were the back issues as an investment for the future. The formula was well established when Rosbaud first tasted Maxwell's ambitions just a few weeks after the move to Fitzroy Square. A large villa, Maxwell announced, had been rented on Pergamon's behalf in Geneva.

  What ensued was the first Geneva conference on the peaceful use of atomic energy organised by the United Nations in 1955. Rosbaud's natural interest in the subject dictated that he should attend. In the wake of Hiroshima, the launching of the world's first nuclear submarine and the earliest construction programmes of atomic power stations for domestic electricity, the conference was a natural magnet for every atomic scientist in the world, if only to meet the American pioneers from Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. It was also a magnet for every other scientific publisher who, like Pergamon, hoped to capitalise on the sudden declassification of America's atomic secrets and commission books for a fast-growing market. To Rosbaud's irritation, Maxwell, whose knowledge of atomic science was limited to recognising the mushroom cloud of an explosion, also wanted to attend, not to listen to speeches but to test the commercial opportunities.

  Among the scientists invited to the conference was John Dunworth, the head of the reactor department at Britain's atomic research centre at Harwell who had been recruited by Rosbaud to be the editor-in-chief of Pergamon's Journal of Nuclear Energy. Shortly before leaving for Geneva, Maxwell and Dunworth met to agree on special arrangements for the conference. In Dunworth's name, Maxwell would stage a series of receptions in his rented villa to which every scientist attending the conference would be invited. Dunworth understood the purpose. Maxwell, he says, was 'an enormously engaging companion who was determined to make a lot of money'. At the parties, Maxwell systematically engaged each guest in conversation to establish a relationship and discover the potential for new publications. Geneva, in Dunworth's opinion, 'opened Maxwell's eyes very quickly to the commercial opportunities of scientific journals'. Buckley also could only look on in awe as Maxwell, having absorbed the jargon, held seemingly high-powered conversations with the fathers of atomic science. Maria Sachs watched Maxwell's technique: 'He was smart because he always knew what to offer to buy the person - fame or money.' Rosbaud, however, was inconsolably piqued, infuriated that a businessman should speak as an equal to a scientist and full of scorn for the 'so-called polyglot' who 'spoke a lot of languages, all equally badly'. If Maxwell was even aware of Rosbaud's mood, he brushed it aside because he was too preoccupied in scooping the commercial benefits for himself.

  In the normal course of events, the United Nations, as the conference organisers, would eventually publish all of the 1,100 papers prepared for the occasion in bound volumes - 'undigested and unedited'. Maxwell perceived that here was a natural and unexploited extension to the journal business. Pergamon would publish and sell the most important papers in 'critically revised' volumes under the general title 'Progress in Nuclear Energy'. Purposefully, he approached the most eminent of the scientists and invited them to create six editorial boards which would select and supervise the publication of those series. By the end of the conference, he had recruited the cream of American, British and French nuclear scientists. Among the editors of the series entitled the 'Economics of Nuclear Power' was Maxwell himself. He returned from Geneva euphoric, determined that the Pergamon series should appear before the official volumes. 'We worked fast and furious,' recalls Buckley, 'and came out long ahead.' Pergamon was dramatically transformed. 'Overnight we were involved in huge production schedules,' says Buckley. Maxwell also appreciated the lucrative possibilities of taking two bites of the cherry. While the Geneva conference was published under one title, the same papers but 'revised to include later developments' were also sold in another series entitled 'Physics and Mathematics'.

  By the end of 1955, in one year under Maxwell's direction, Pergamon was no longer a small publisher. Its output had grown to fifty journals and eighteen books. The production planned for the following year was nearly double. By the end of 1957, Pergamon was publishing over one hundred journals and books. Among its prestigious contributors whose past papers were collected and presented as Pergamon publications were the physicists Max Born and Niels Bohr. The range of topics was also impressive: electrolytic and chemical polishing of metals; the Aurorae and the Airglow; atmospheric pollution; irradiation colours and luminescence; psychosomatic research; neurochemistry and the chemistry of solids. In addition, Maxwell began to take over the business management of established but unexploited specialist journals from learned societies, such as the British Abstracts of Medical Sciences, and placed the Pergamon imprint on their cover. It was the prelude to a life of constantly flying around the world to scientific conferences on every conceivable subject to repeat his success at Geneva. Destinations from Stockh
olm to Santiago, Moscow to Montreal and Peking to Paris were regular stops in his itinerary to offer Pergamon's services to scientific conferences as the official publisher of their papers and proceedings and to present to the scientists the opportunity to create editorial boards to establish new journals. Gunther Heyden recalls his 'total exhaustion. We travelled nonstop and at night, because he didn't need any sleep, he would either talk or play practical jokes to prevent me sleeping. He just drove himself and all of us on and on and, if someone was no longer wanted, he would be fired.'

  Relentlessly, universities throughout the world were being offered an increasing range of journals which, because of the prestige of the editorial boards, their librarians were initially eager to buy. Selling depended upon image and Maxwell was a master of presentation. Pergamon was presented as an international company with offices at the British Book Center in New York, in Los Angeles and in Paris. The foreword to Pergamon's catalogue was a three-page description of the history of Pergamon's birthplace in ancient Greece culled from Encyclopaedia Britannica. There was even a motto. Amid great laughter, Maxwell directed Heyden to find the Latin for 'We shall find a way or we shall make one'. Invenimus viam aut faciemus was thereafter printed on Pergamon's catalogues. Once the initial subscription target had been met and the money taken, there was always the opportunity at the end of the year to fill out the last issue with a collection of papers from an obscure conference or from another Pergamon journal and keep the choicest papers for the new year and another subscription. Rosbaud's intimate business was transformed beyond recognition. In 1958, utterly isolated from the business itself, he left, full of resentment that he was not due a penny.