Tom Maschler, son of a distinguished Jewish publisher, was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to England with his parents in 1939. After Leighton Park School, having turned down a place at Oxford, he worked on a kibbutz and as a tour guide, hitch-hiked round America and did a brief stint of National Service before getting himself discharged on health grounds. He then worked for various publishers: André Deutsch, whom he left because André wouldn’t increase his wages of six pounds to eight pounds a week, MacGibbon and Kee, where he wasn’t allowed to publish Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Penguin. In 1960 he became Literary Director of Jonathan Cape only a month after Cape himself had died.
There he did what other gifted literary publishers have done. He used the invaluable backlist as a springboard to revitalise Cape’s slightly faded glory. Having inherited such distinguished authors as Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Malcolm Lowry, C. V. Wedgwood and the wildly profitable Ian Fleming, he added a stellar list of his own writers. He published Joseph Heller, whose Catch 22 had been turned down by Fred Warburg, and acquired several good authors who had started out with other British houses but had either failed to prosper in their original homes or had become disenchanted with their current publishers, including Philip Roth, Kingsley Amis, William Styron, Patrick White and Salman Rushdie. Among those for whom he was the first English publisher were Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Martin Amis and many more.
Since spotting literary merit is largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time, plus having a bit of luck, I think that Maschler’s special qualities as a publisher lay in his finding and brilliantly promoting a handful of illustrated books that managed to captivate both the adult and juvenile markets, such as the pop-up book The Human Body, Alan Aldridge’s The Butterfly Ball and The Grasshopper Feast and Kit Williams’ treasure hunt book Masquerade.
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