Paul Harris was a founder member of the SGPA with his eponymous publishing company, and when his company Waterfront Communications closed, he worked as a writer, packager and later as a print consultant (between several stints as war correspondent in Bosnia). He moved to edit a periodical in Sri Lanka, and has recently travelled onward to settle in Shanghai, where he wrote this memoir.

Birth of the Scottish General Publishers' Association (SGPA)

I am writing this from Shanghai, China, and am separated from my archives in Scotland so this is written from personal recollection rather than written records. However, my recollections of thirty years ago are rather more reliable, I find, than those of what happened last week!

I was in my office in Guild Street, Aberdeen, early in 1973 when I took a call from Angus Wolfe Murray. I had never met Angus: I was running Impulse Publications in Aberdeen, a company I had started in 1968 to publish, initially, my own books, When Pirates Ruled the Waves and The Garvie Trial.

Angus had, of course, started Canongate in Edinburgh and we were both, in our separate ways, struggling along in an essentially hostile publishing environment. Most of the famous names of Scottish publishing had been taken over or had removed their activities outside Scotland. Bookselling was dominated by a handful of operations, with Thins and John Smiths the major players. Waterstone's was not even a gleam in Tim's eye. There were no distribution operations in existence. Angus and I found common ground: we both felt weighed down by the physical tasks of publishing. Calling on bookshops was time consuming for very small publishers and joint representation seemed sensible. Packing parcels until the early hours of the morning was a universal feature of those early days of publishing.

Paul Harris at Frankfurt

We decided to call a meeting of some other publishers in a bid to find common ground and advantage. The first meeting of what was to become the SGPA took place in a late afternoon in, I think, 1973 in the offices of Canongate in Jeffrey Street. I think there were half a dozen or so of us at that meeting and it included Trevor Royle who was then Literature Director at The Scottish Arts Council. I had never met any of the attendees before but I remember first encounters with Bill MacLellan and Robin Lorimer. We repaired afterwards to The Royal Archer.

It was decided that, with the assistance of the SAC, we should call a major gathering of all small publishers working in Scotland with a view to starting a formal association. Some time later, an extraordinary kenspeckle gathering of some fifty characters took place in the conference room in Charlotte Square. Anybody and everybody of significance in publishing was there.

There was much swapping of anecdotes about the difficulties of publishing. Charles Skilton talked of being prosecuted in Edinburgh for selling Fanny Hill. Forbes Macgregor, an elderly self-publisher, told a hilarious story. He had visited the matron in charge of John Knox's Bookshop in a bid to sell some of his books. 'We're not buying today,' she sternly advised him. Forbes looked around and could see no one else. He responded, 'Is that the royal 'we' or have you got mice up your arse?' This anecdote brought the house down.

The main movers in those early days were Norman Wilson (Ramsay Head Press), who had retired from John Menzies and became an early Chairman; Robin Lorimer; Gordon Wright; Bill MacLellan; John Bruce (John Donald) and myself. Curiously, Angus, who had done so much to kick the Association off, took no further part: he had tired of publishing and Stephanie took over his role in Canongate, which was represented in the Association by the gregarious, toothless Dave Morgan who possessed an enormous capacity for pints of Belhaven and roll-up cigarettes. A committee was formed, a constitution approved and, after much debate, the cumbersome name of The Scottish General Publishers' Association decided upon. In those early days we wanted to actually exclude some categories of publishers – like educational publishers – lest we become dominated at an early stage by the big people we felt had let the Scottish side down, so to speak.

The first book fair we attended was the Montreal Book Fair. I think this was in 1975. Possibly '76. At Frankfurt I had met up with an amiable Canadian publisher called Ed Matheson who had taken on the marketing of a new book fair in Montreal. In those days there was much interest in the real – or imagined – social and cultural links between Canada and Scotland. We saw vast, untapped markets in the rolling wastelands of Canada; riches on the scale of the Gold Rush. They were, of course, never realised…

Early Days

Ed came to Scotland and met with us and with Trevor Royle, and we attended Montreal. Some of us went on to New York and tramped the streets of the city meeting US publishers. I went there with Gordon Wright. Stephanie Wolfe Murray arrived at Montreal – a couple of days late, with no money and, curiously, no clothes except the ones she stood up in. At the time, I was amazed. As I got to know Stephanie, I came to realise that was simply her own very individual and stylish way of doing things. We stayed in a hotel that was connected to the exhibition hall by subway so we saw little of the city. I remember that one of us (not me) sublet his room during the day to Charles Skilton (Albyn Press) who engaged in extramural activities with a black maid at the hotel.

That first trip to New York led some of us into relationships with publishers like St Martin's Press, Rowman & Littlefield, Crown, Humanities Press and Taplinger. Scottish publishing was up and running…