Remembering a colossus

Colossi are difficult to take in all at once. There is so much complexity, range, depth, and nuance to them that it requires many different views to get a proper measure of their greatness. Sonny Mehta, who died recently, was a colossus whose shadow stretched across the world of English language trade publishing for several decades. The outpouring of appreciation that marked his passing helped illuminate many aspects of his genius. Those who remembered him, showed, eloquently, how he was important to the world of books, ideas, and culture, and why his loss will be felt keenly. His unique attributes have been written about, his brilliance, his style, his eccentricities, his greatest hits, so in this tribute to him I will touch upon little of that. Instead, this will be a personal remembrance of a man and publishing professional I admired greatly.

I didn’t know him as well as did many of those who have written about him. I was not in touch with him at all in the last decade of his life, and only sparingly in the decade that preceded it. However, in my mid-twenties, and early thirties, when I was starting out, and gradually finding my feet in the world of publishing, I was grateful for the support and encouragement I received from him. Although I never worked for or with him, he always made the time to meet and listen to my publishing plans, and discuss the world of trade publishing in general. If I had to define our relationship at the time, I suppose it would be appropriate to call it a variant of the guru-shishya one (I’ll explain the caveat a little later), in which Sonny had been ‘hustled’ into the role of a guru; I was certainly not the first to put him on that sort of pedestal nor would I be the last. Yet he never seemed to feel put upon but appeared to be curious to know about what was going on in India and Indian publishing. At any given moment, his itinerary was packed, whether it was in exhausting publishing circuses like the Frankfurt Book Fair, or at his offices in London or New York, but I cannot recall a single instance when he did not agree to get together, whether at his favourite Vietnamese restaurant, Vong, near his old office in NYC, or at his book-lined apartment, or even once at one of the most impressive hotel suites I have ever seen, in a schloss on the outskirts of Frankfurt. The hallmarks of these meetings were cigarettes, booze, some publishing gossip, and always talk about books, books, books. It was thanks to him that I was often led to the literary sensations of the day on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention great crime fiction writers like Loren D. Estleman and Carl Hiaasen. Sonny had a reputation for being reticent but although he was never garrulous I don’t recall him being especially silent during our meetings, we seemed to have a fair bit to talk about. It was my habit to take him a small parcel of books I had recently published, and he would accept them with what I remember as enthusiasm. I don’t know if he read them, but I always left our meetings filled with a new sense of excitement about book publishing, the profession I’d chosen to devote my life to. Was he a mentor or a guru? Not in the strict sense of the term, for he didn't guide or instruct me in any formal way, but he did teach me an invaluable lesson. When you are starting out as a writer or publisher, given that most decisions you will take in these professions are subjective, you will often find yourself doubting yourself. Sonny, along with a couple of others, taught me to trust my judgment, not in an obvious way, but through his constant, undemonstrative encouragement during my formative years in trade publishing. When you are looking for reassurance, it helps that it comes from someone whose achievements as a publisher you are in awe of, whose depth and breadth of reading are peerless, and whose own judgment is one of the best in the business.

Publishing, without Sonny in it, will be a poorer place, and this will be especially so for all those of us who encountered him in ways big or small. The clearest memory I have of him is of an evening I spent with him in his apartment in New York many decades ago. It hadn’t been long since he had moved from the U.K. to the States, and he was still settling in, and there was a lot of gossip about how he was faring. We didn’t go into any of that but talked about R.K. Narayan’s latest book (he was a fan) and other Indian writers he admired – Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie…He then asked me to help myself to another drink, and got up to take a phone call (this was at a time when cell phones hadn't yet been invented). Before leaving he casually pointed to a stack of books on a windowsill (if memory serves me correctly), and said, “The new Vintage paperback line, it’s come out rather well”. In his absence I examined the books one by one. They were by the world’s greatest contemporary writers but that wasn’t the only thing that impressed me about the books – it was the covers that left me thunderstruck. Sonny had just made a name for himself in England by presiding over the Picador line of paperbacks, which were stunning in their use of text and images against a white or pale background. Here he had inverted the formula completely – every book I saw that day had images and text worked into a dark background and the effect was just as stunning. Whoa, I thought to myself, this is pure publishing genius. It is what I’ll remember Sonny by.