Hugh Andrew publishes the books others won�t touch. Why? Because he believes they contain dying voices that must be revived By Vicky Allan
ASKED to name a big cheese in Scottish publishing, only those involved in the book trade are likely to plump for Hugh Andrew. More often than not, the name suggested will be that of his former business partner Jamie Byng, the magazine-friendly, one-time funk-reggae DJ with the laid-back image, who is director of Canongate books.
Andrew runs Birlinn, Scotland's third-largest independent publisher, whose authors include global phenomenon Alexander McCall Smith. Byng runs Canongate, publisher of the Booker-prize winning Life Of Pi and Scotland's largest independent publisher, the second being Mainstream. Both are talented, ambitious men who are reinventing what it means to be a Scottish publisher. Yet only one of them is ever-present in the press, and it isn't Hugh Andrew.
After meeting Andrew at the Edinburgh home he shares with his business, it's obvious why. It is hard to imagine two men of a more different mould. Byng has been described in the press as someone who "does dude like he has read up on it in a body language manual: a near perpendicular slouch that leaves one fearing for his vertebrae". Andrew, by contrast, is so vertical you would be forgiven for imagining there was an orthopaedic back brace beneath his shirt. He is the Gordon Brown to Byng's Tony Blair. The chances of spending the interview discussing sex, drugs or rock and roll appear slim. Andrew, an unashamed "map person", has opened a page of William Roy's 18th century Great Map Of Scotland and is admiring its depth of colour and detail. After half an hour it is clear we are unlikely to get through more than a few minutes of conversation without some boffinish perambulation through history.
Andrew's publishing empire has slowly expanded over the past decade. The books, with the exception of a notable few, have not been high-profile big-hitters. Some - such as Calum's Road and Children Of The Blackhouse - have given voice to the disappearing communities of rural Scotland.
There is one notable exception. Perhaps simply by good luck, Andrew bought Polygon in 2001 at the point when one of its authors was sitting like "a pot bubbling nicely: selling well, but it could have gone either way". That author was Alexander McCall Smith, writer of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which Canongate had previously declined to publish - an omission some have likened to EMI's rejection of The Beatles.
"Very few books sell like Sandy's", says Andrew. "I don't think anyone could dream of what he has achieved. The last time that happened on this scale was probably Captain Corelli's Mandolin." It's as if Andrew views McCall Smith's success as a gift. And in many ways it is, since sales of his books provide the financial base from which Andrew can pursue his wider, more resolutely Scottish vision. "Deep down, what I hope we're doing is changing a whole set of attitudes", he says. "The whole ethos of the list is, in a sense, a crusade. It's about recovered memory and it's about pride. I don't mean arrogance. I mean a genuine pride in Scotland and its achievements and its people."
Andrew studied history at Oxford University at a time when "Scotland was one of only two European countries you couldn't study". This fact helped form his "strong consciousness" of his own country.
On return to Scotland he fell into publishing almost by accident, initially finding work in bookshops and later becoming a sales rep. In many ways he is still that roving salesman. He continues to sell Birlinn's books across Argyll and the Isles. "I can't let go of it because I love it. It's where you get space to think."
In 1994, two years after setting up Birlinn, he joined forces with Byng to try and rescue Canongate from receivership, putting his own and his father's money behind the venture. However, it was quickly apparent that team Byng-Andrew was not a harmonious one. Not only were their personalities very different, their interests were too. Byng wanted to push the company internationally; Andrew wanted to drive its more Scottish elements. The result was, according to Andrew, "two strong personalities in a business pulling in different directions. It was a recipe for happiness for neither party".
Andrew was joint managing director of the company for four years. Then the two men went their separate ways. "Paradoxically," says Andrew, "we get on very well now." It's an ironic twist in the tale that the jewel in his current crown, the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, was rejected by he and Byng during his time at Canongate. "We were wrong then," he says now, "and Sandy McCall Smith was right. But it was a very different type of book to that which Canongate were publishing at the time. Sandy made his own market by the quality, humour and warmth of his writing."
From an early age Andrew knew he wanted to set up a business. It was in his blood. His father, a rural vet, was also "a fearless businessman". "He ran a company in Paisley, which is about as fearless as you can get ... and he taught me, in a sense, that the best is never good enough."
For much of his childhood Andrew appeared destined to follow in his father's and grandfather's veterinary footsteps (at one point there were five vets in the family). He would often find himself in some barn "holding a block and tackle, straining at a calving. My dad would be calling, Go on Hugh. Pull! Pull!'" Yet Andrew was "terribly squeamish" and found his father's constant "guddling around inside some animal or other" off-putting. On one occasion, watching his father chatting away with his arm halfway up the back end of a cow, Andrew decided that this was not the life for him.
Within the urbane world of publishing, however, Andrew seems to carry much of his background with him. He is like the local vet of the literary set: big-boned and work-muscled, more interested, it seems, in getting out in the car and running across the country as a sales rep than sitting in an Edinburgh office. It's as if he wants to go out to the hills and rescue the voice of a dying sheep before it croaks, then haul it back to the city for mouth-to-page resuscitation. Many of Birlinn's voices are of the land, of lost communities and fading ways of life. Andrew has been driven by the idea of "publishing books that nobody else would publish".
Many of his publications, he points out, are sold to people who don't buy other books. He is not chasing the literary zeitgeist, but doing something that is more in touch with a steadily growing spirit of community reconnection. In that sense, he is peculiarly of the moment.
Andrew is a great admirer of John Francis Campbell, who preserved the oral tradition of the West Highlands by recording local voices towards the end of the 19th century at a time when they risked being lost. Books, Andrew believes, have a similar capacity to preserve, providing communities with "a sense of pride, identity and ownership of their history". Validation of what he does, he says, came during a visit to Mingulay after he had published a book on that island when a boatman turned to him and said: "You know, I never knew there was anything interesting to say about us until you published this book."
Andrew's recent acquisition of two bookshops, including Yeadons in Elgin, is about community, he says. It's about standing up to the endless monotony of "high street anywhere" franchises and outlets. "It's part of the tragedy of so many towns in Scotland. People are living there, but the town itself has lost its reason for existence. We have lost so much individuality in our high streets and towns. In a sense my books are the antithesis of that."
Yet he has no plans to rescue more of small town Scotland through bookshops. His involvement in retail has, he says, been a "painful and expensive business". Of late, he seems to feel Birlinn has over-committed itself. "In the last couple of years we've bought a publisher, opened two bookshops, restructured a company down south, merged another company. I think all the departments are thinking Hugh, stop. A bit of peace and quiet.'"
He takes me on a tour of the house. When he bought it, it was "virtually derelict", having been an Indian restaurant with a basement full of broken toilets. And for all the bustle in that part of the building - which now houses Birlinn's offices - the rest feels empty. Within it Andrew appears a lone figure, an eligible bachelor who blushes a little when I ask about marriage. "It's just one of those things that hasn't happened. Who knows what events will bring?"
Partly inspired by legendary publisher John Murray's London offices, the house seems more like a museum reconstruction than a home, waiting for guided tours to fill it with noise, not quite of its time, yearning for some other era. Indeed, Andrew himself seems a little that way. He seems an anachronism.
One of his colleagues describes him as "an honourable man". Does he recognise the description? "Well", he says, modestly, "we pay our bills, we pay our debts and I have always believed in trying to treat people in an above-board and straight way." There is something of that honourable nature in the way he looks after his mother, who is crippled with multiple sclerosis. He regularly visits her in Argyll, continuing to sales rep the area to weave that care into his working life. "I'm an only child so it's got to be done. It's just what you do. Your parents give you enormous love, care and support and this point in your life is when you have to pay it back."
It has been a tough few years. Just before his father's death three years ago Andrew dedicated a beautiful book on the uses of plants in Scottish culture, Flora Celtica, to him. It was, he says, typical of his father that he never quite expressed to his son how much this meant to him. Rather, Andrew found out by email when a friend who had visited Andrew senior listened to him talk of his son and passed on how moved and proud the old man had seemed.
Andrew acknowledges his likeness to his father. He writes letters to newspapers regularly, just as his father did. "My father wrote mainly about Caledonian McBrayne. He was also probably the only man in Scotland to write in support of the poll tax, which caused me great embarrassment at the time. If he thought something, he said it. He didn't give a damn."
Andrew does not give a damn either, and that quality has got him into a few spats: the most recent being his very public split from Publishing Scotland in protest at the increased £260,000 grant the body has received from the Scottish Arts Council. His complaint was that while on the one hand certain "block grants" were being removed from publishers, on the other hand this money is being given to a body that does not publish any books itself, but rather "supports" the publishing sector - what he now calls a "de facto quango", a description that Publishing Scotland itself rejects.
Andrew has, he says, received "anonymous hate mail and vituperative and anonymous blogs for raising these issues". One mysterious poster wrote on a newspaper website that Andrew has "only one thing in mind when he rants about public funding in this manner ... his own interests". The same blogger pointed out on another site that £300,000 funding from the Scottish Arts Council had gone to Birlinn over the years. In other words, hadn't he, a successful publisher, already had plenty of funding himself? Wasn't this greed?
Andrew is keen now to put this figure of £300,000 into context, pointing out that it was given over a period of 16 years, during which time Birlinn Ltd published around 150 books a year.
"Break this down and the sums per title are modest," he says.
He believes the system is faulty and that the public may be appalled by the fact that currently "of the far larger sums allocated to writers, over half result in projects that are never produced or published. This is not a system of funding the arts. It is a system of patronage. And it has failed utterly the writers it is meant to serve and the publishers it is meant to support."
There is an element of the player about Andrew. It's clear he has ambition, through his books, to have an impact on how Scotland understands itself. He describes himself as a "nationalist with a small n'", and appears keen to distance himself from any overt political agenda. Yet he also produces books which shape political discussion.
"I'm interested in any ideas, from the right, left, whatever. We bake ideas into a nice pie. And we do change things."
Does he enjoy that power? "Publishing is about having a little bit of influence," he says. "But what little influence we do have, I would like to think we use for the good."
