Prenúncios

"In 1970, Allen Lane sold Penguin to Pearson, one of the major British conglomerates, and the owners of properties ranging from the Financial Times to the Buenos Aires Water Company. When Lane was on his deathbed, Charles Clark and his fellow editors tried to persuade him to turn Penguin into a public trust, as David Astor had done with the British Sunday paper the Observer, thereby continuing its independent existence as a nonprofit. Had Lane agreed to this proposal, the future of British publishing might have been very different. Penguin would have continued to set high standards for paperback publishing and, by being able to buy books from other publishers, would have encouraged the rest of the trade to do the same. It was perhaps too much to expect of Lane, who had always been a dedicated businessman, and the sale went through. For a brief period, Pearson turned to a brilliant publisher and author, Peter Calvocoressi, to be their chief executive. Harper's was to do the same in the United States, promoting Mel Arnold, the inventor of their highbrow paperbacks, to president. Both men had come from highly distinguished small independent firms, Calvocoressi from Chatto & Windus, Arnold from Beacon Press. I watched their careers with fascination and sadly saw that neither survived the new kind of profit demands resulting from corporate takeovers."
(André Schiffrin, The business of books, p. 47, Verso, New York, 2000)