Christopher Davis - Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley: The Inside Story of a Publishing Phenomenon

A grisly Frankfurt dawn was battling through the threadbare curtains and seeking purchase on the grimy orange carpet. A barking dog had taken up residence inside my head; my tongue resembled its blanket. As another avalanche of empty bottles cascaded into the belly of the garbage truck in the street below, I was reminded that I had stayed for at least five Rieslings too many in the bar of the Park Hotel, one of the most populated late-night watering hotels during the annual book fair. Publishers, editors, agents, authors, illustrators, photographers, art directors, publicists, production heads, marketeers and sales directors, printers and packagers, patrician elders and arriviste wheeler-dealers, corporate accountants, captains of industry, conmen, cowboys, inveterate dreamers and perpetual no-hopers gathered here or in the slightly more traditional atmosphere of the Frankfurter Hof after their dinner engagements to bray and brag and laugh and leer and, through the misty excesses of their alcoholic intake, reaffirm, to themselves at least, that their place on the great wheel of publishing fortune was secure for another year. Frankfurt was the tipping point, the Oktoberfest of the book world, at which or so I was led to believe the future could be staked, won, lost, or merely held at bay. Concepts were pitched, synopses circulated, advances touted, deals bartered, co-editions contracted, promises airily made, and everywhere the cries of Ill get back to you rose to the rafters of the hangar-like halls on thermals of hype.

Alas, I was not waking in the cool Egyptian cotton of the Park Hotel. I was sweating in the skiddy nylon sheets of the Union Hotel, a starless establishment in the impoverished heart of the citys red light district. Across the road was Meier Gustls Cellar, a once favoured haunt of American GIs, which featured a brass band of portly gents in lederhosen and bogbrush hats whose repetitive oompah oompah boomed through the windows of the hotel until the early hours. If that were not enemy enough of sleep, the curtains were too skimpy to keep out the flashing neon sign of Dr Mullers Sex and Gags Shop, which even now was beaming its on-off technicolour greeting directly into the room. Sex and Gags was a 24-hour business.

I was not alone in the room. The budget of Dorling Kindersley, a newly hatched company, did not run to luxury of any kind. There were only four of us on this initial venture to the book fair in the autumn of 1975: the two founders, Christopher Dorling and Peter Kindersley; Caroline Oakes, who was Christophers partner and had responsibility for foreign rights; and myself. We had travelled from London in a VW camper van, meandering cross country through the battlefields of northern France, avoiding the autoroutes for as long as possible. We wanted to give ourselves time to recuperate from the midnight-oil madness of the previous weeks when the companys first titles had to be readied for press and a portfolio of future projects prepared for presentation at the fair.

By the time we hit the maelstrom of traffic hurtling down the autobahn into Frankfurt I was accustomed to having Peter Kindersley as my roommate, and to his idiosyncrasies of the night. In one of the puritanical fits of zeal to which he was prone, he had recently decided to forswear alcohol and tobacco, and as a consequence he tended to retire early to bed, at least early by my standards. He was a man with a purpose and a vision. Not for him the booze and loose-tongued banter of the late-night bar crowd; after a soothing herbal tea he enjoyed the untroubled sleep of the virtuous, and neither Meier Gustls thunderous brass nor Dr Mullers winking neon, nor even the clanking of the all-night trams or the sodden shouts of the citys derelicts, could penetrate his dreams of empire or ruffle the map of his imagined world on which the flag of Dorling Kindersley fluttered from every conquered territory. Total World Domination was his mantra, and though we, his colleagues, may have mocked him for its Fhrer-like associations, we didnt doubt how seriously he meant it.