The best of times...

The best thing about being a publisher? You get to give people the greatest day of their life. Tell someone that you are going to publish their book and you know this is the best day they’ve ever had. Better than sex. Better than the day they got married. Better than kids or winning the lottery or discovering your birth certificate is wrong and you’re actually a year younger. It’s the happiest day of their life and you got to give it to them, like a fairy godmother minus all the hassle with pumpkins and singing rodents in possession of unfeasible tailoring skills.

On the rare occasions when I get to have lunch with an author, they inevitably drag me up to introduce me to someone as their publisher. The someone doesn’t matter. I have been introduced to family members, colleagues, waiters, the doorman and even a Big Issue seller. During the introduction I glow modestly in the background while my author shines like an over-excited supernova. I am happy for them. It makes everything worthwhile.

And so we begin...

There is a graveyard in Inverness where impressive marble and granite graves jostle for prominence beneath evergreen conifers and stately oaks. The dead are carefully labelled here: blacksmiths, plumbers, merchants—lives chiselled into stone and set in orderly rows. At one end rises a wooded drumlin, Tomnahurich, the Hill of the Yew Trees, a place steeped in stories of fairies and seers and where there was talk of filming The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes. Climb it and the city opens out below you, crowned by a tall war memorial to the soldiers and sailors lost in the First World War.

What you are unlikely to notice, though, tucked away among the elaborate obelisks and sad-faced angels, is a pair of sticks lashed together to form a crude cross. It marks the resting place of Alexander MacKenzie, the Inverness publisher. I came across this rather disappointing tribute to publishing many years ago.

I should have been warned.