BookBlast interview with Eric Lane, Dedalus Books founder and MD
Eric, are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
No, neither of my parents were great readers. My mother grew up on a farm in southern Italy, and my father in an orphanage in Surrey. They met at the end of World War Two when my teenaged mother accompanied a friend who went for a job at the RAF base in Naples. My father was doing the interviewing and offered the friend a job and also one to my mother, who refused. As they were leaving, my father said to his colleague, “I’m going to marry that one” — meaning my mother — which he did, in February 1946. My mother was nearly twenty, and my father twenty-five. My sister was born in November 1947, and I followed in September 1949. We lived in Finchley, which my mother loved. We used to go every few years to Italy. In the end, my mother used to speak to everyone in Italy in English with the odd word of Italian, whereas my father spoke to everyone in fluent Neapolitan. My parents were very happily married for twenty-five years until my father died of a heart attack in 1971. Growing up, I was a voracious reader but also loved sport, especially football. I was a very spontaneous child and often got in trouble at school for being ‘cheeky.’
I grew up on a council estate, which many would describe as not the best start in life, but I think I had a really good upbringing with two parents who loved me and made me feel important. At sixteen, I left school to write poetry and contemplate the world. After five months, I realized this was not the best career option and got my first job as a junior transport clerk, which I lost two months later for making too many jokes about the directors at the Christmas lunch. I was told that I was not suited to being a junior transport clerk. After a bewildering number of jobs, I ended up starting my own company at nineteen and retired from work at twenty-one. I did my A-levels, then studied foreign languages at Manchester University and spent most of my time going to the theatre and writing novels.
While still a student, I began taking Americans around Europe, which I did on and off for ten years while doing other things such as studying law. At the end of the 1970s, I took Italians to China as it was opening up to the outside world, although very much still a communist country in the Soviet manner. The most interesting trip I did working was in 1980 when I took fourteen people from Victoria Station to Hong Kong, a 10,000-mile train journey through Siberia, the Gobi Desert, and right through China. That certainly was travelling as a life-enhancing experience.
I had completed the Bar Finals, got called to the Bar at Middle Temple, and was doing an LL.M at the LSE when I decided I should be a publisher rather than a lawyer.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
When I was at university, I applied for a job at MacMillan and was offered a second interview, but the letter did not arrive, and when I rang up, it was too late. In hindsight, it was not the job for me, as it was in management and not as an editor. Faced with being a lawyer, I decided on becoming a publisher. I was not going to become Dostoevsky as a writer, but I could end up publishing Dostoevsky. Until I was in my thirties, I didn’t really want to do anything but read books, go to the theatre, and travel. I traveled a lot, both for work and for pleasure. In many ways, I was a typical child of the 1960s.
Has your vision from when you started Dedalus thirty-four years ago changed?
I’m not sure when I started Dedalus how long I intended to work as a publisher. Dedalus was so spectacularly unsuccessful at our beginning that we were nicknamed the DeadLoss Publishing Company. I even had a profile in The Guardian as the publisher of the DeadLoss Publishing Company, and I wrote a book about it, The Dante Alighieri Publishing Company, which I thought would be the last book I published. It was a matter of pride not to give up until Dedalus was a success, and this is why I’m still at it. In 1985, one of our unsaleable first novels, The Arabian Nightmare, was sold to Penguin for £21,000, which changed our fortunes. In addition to publishing first novels, we did translations, which I learned very speedily were even more difficult to sell than first novels. Basically, this is what we still do today.
How do you balance originality and profitability?
Our basic creed has always been about publishing books that are different, and most of the books we have published without us would have remained unpublished. If a small independent literary publisher can’t put originality first, who can? Dedalus Books survives by being successful in getting translation funding, support from ACE, and producing sufficient books that defy all the odds to become successes. When I bought New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, I thought it would sell 300 copies, but so far, it has sold 27,000 for us and is still selling.
Your views on writing? What books have had a lasting impact on you?
I like books that appeal to the mind and touch the heart and also books that are very different and very clever. Books that have had a lasting impact on me are Ulysses by James Joyce — Dedalus is named after James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. The novels of Anthony Burgess, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. I have read all of Dickens, who is the only author who can make me laugh and cry in the same book. Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend are my favorite Dickens novels.
What makes you decide to publish one writer and not another?
The first thing is the book must fit our list. If it is not our kind of book, we can’t publish it. When we get a book that is clearly a Dedalus book, we are most of the way there. We like the bizarre, the grotesque, the surreal, and the clever, preferably in the same book. We call this kind of book “distorted reality.”
Do you enjoy reading e-books? Will the physical book die away eventually?
I have never read an e-book. When I get the text of a book emailed, I always print it out. I spend most of my working day looking at a screen, so I don’t want to read books on a screen. The book as a printed object will not die and, like vinyl records, might end up becoming even more popular.
Your favourite qualities in a person?
A sense of humor, reliability, and intelligence.
Your greatest achievement?
Still to come, so watch this space.
Established in 1983, Dedalus Books is a truly unique publishing house, it is recognized for its quality and unorthodox taste in the esoteric, the erotic, and the European. Eric’s tenacity and vision have kept Dedalus going through the lean times and helped it to flourish during the good. Dedalus had two books on the Booker Prize longlist in 1995: Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin and Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen.
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