Paul Scherer

Born: December 28, 1933; Died: October 28, 2013.

Paul Scherer, who has died aged 79 after a major stroke, was born in Glasgow, first educated in Perth and went on to become one of the UK's most successful and influential publishers at the head of Transworld Publishers. That put him in charge first of Corgi Books and later of Black Swan, Bantam Press and Doubleday and turned him into something of a mentor to his "boys and girls" - authors who included Frederick Forsyth, Joanna Trollope, Jilly Cooper, Danielle Steele and Catherine Cookson, whom he helped become household names.

Under Mr Scherer's leadership, Transworld become the biggest publisher of fiction in the UK. The key to his success, according to his publishing peers and his authors, was in recognising the value of sales and marketing as much as editorial content: he was, after all, running a business. He left the editing to his editors and yet his authors - to a man and a woman - were unanimous in saying he not only attracted them to his firm but that they stayed loyal to him because of his hands-on support.

Paul Joseph Scherer was born at 186 Crofthill Road in Glasgow's south-eastern Croftfoot district, to Franz Joseph Scherer, immigrant son of a Swiss farmer, and Florrie Haywood, a cockney lass he had met in London. Franz Joseph had started as a porter and valet in Brighton and worked his way up through the hotel industry. Having worked as a waiter for Arthur Towle, controller of hotel services for London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), the young immigrant, still only 26, was sent north in 1924 as head waiter at the new, LMS flagship Gleneagles Hotel outside Auchterarder in the summer and at Glasgow's Central Hotel in the winter. Hence his first son, Paul, was born in Glasgow.

However, young Paul spent much of his childhood in Perthshire wandering around the corridors of the Royal British Hotel, which his father had bought in 1936 for £14,000 with a loan from Deuchars brewery. The family lived in a bungalow they named Lueg-is-Land (Swiss-German for Looking at the Land) and young Paul attended what, in his memoirs, he described as a local "rough, tough elementary school" but did not name.

He'd been sent south in 1943 for further education by the Jesuits by the time his father sold the Royal British for £26,000 and bought the Loch Rannoch Hotel, also in Perthshire, for £18,000 in 1944. The work-rate became a strain on Florrie and his parents sold up and moved south in 1947, settling in Folkestone. By that time, young Paul was at the historic Stonyhurst (Jesuit) College in Lancashire, where, he later recalled, "the Jays (Jesuit priests) thought they'd better teach me to speak English" and rid him of his strong Scottish accent. (It worked, but Paul would delight for the rest of his life in regurgitating that Scottish accent on social occasions).

At Stonyhurst, he excelled at boxing and rugby but most remembered throughout his life what "the Jays" had instilled in him: "the Catholic view of history, of the meaning of life. It was all so simple and straightforward: this is really the way things are and should be; difficulties became 'mysteries' which we'll never understand so stop worrying about them." He remained a devout Catholic throughout his life.

During his national service from 1952-54, he qualified - at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, country house of the Duke of Westminster -- as an officer in "the Buffs" - the Royal East Kent Regiment, despite once shooting himself in the foot. His rifle was loaded only with blanks but, propped on his boot, it was enough to blow a hole in his foot which landed him in hospital. He recalled being in uniform with a walking stick and getting much sympathy from passers-by who assumed he was a war hero just back from Korea. In 1959, he married Mary Fieldus in Rottingdean, outside Brighton.

He started in publishing by typing orders, worked his way up to be a salesman and then sales director in various firms and eventually managing director of Mills & Boon, where he became something of an unwitting voyeur of bodice-ripping fictional romances. In 1982, he was head-hunted by Transworld, which had been founded in 1950 as a UK subsidiary of the US publishers Bantam. Transworld was publishing only paperbacks, notably as Corgi Books, and it was Paul Scherer who realised that the company needed to include hardback imprints to avoid expensive reliance on other publishers. Thus did authors such as Freddy Forsyth sign up with Transworld.

Mr Scherer recalled asking one of his American predecessors why the firm had been named Transworld. "'Cos I couldn't think of anything else as I was flying in to London on Trans World Airlines." And why did the American team name their first publishing list Corgi Books? "'Cos we wanted something very English and the then King, and future Queen, had corgis." Once asked why he had managed to move through the publishing ranks so swiftly and so young, Mr Scherer responded: "They thought I was old because I was bald."

After his formal retirement in 1995, Mr Scherer's expertise and reputation saw him appointed as chairman of the publishers Curtis Brown and later as a non-executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing, headed by Nigel Newton, the man who - or rather his then eight-year-old daughter Alice - "discovered" J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Over typical publishers' lunches at the Cibo restaurant in London's Russell Square or at the Athenaeum club on Pall Mall, Nigel Newton persuaded Mr Scherer that his experience would be of great benefit to the relatively-fledgling Bloomsbury.

To those who knew him, Paul Scherer is perhaps most remembered for his Catholic faith. He kept most of his religious and charitable work quiet but in 1970 he founded the highly-regarded Unicorn school opposite Kew Gardens near Richmond-upon Thames and was a trustee of the London-based Whizz-Kidz organisation which gives encouragement to disabled children. He was also a past president of the UK publishers' association, where he became a popular figure at its offices on Montague Street in London's Bloomsbury district.

Having suffered from Parkinson's and latterly a major stroke, he died in London's Charing Cross Hospital on 28 October, the day his wife Mary turned 80. He is survived by her, by their children Jonathan, Clare, Joanna and Lucy, and by four grandchildren.