Publisher adept at balancing the demands of literature and commerce, and a notable writer on art
In his prime, with his coloured shirts, red braces, bright bow ties and macho cigars there were few more flamboyant London publishers than Tom Rosenthal, who has died aged 78. But the extravagant top dressing disguised a high intellect that ensured that during the 1970s and early 80s the publishing house of Secker and Warburg was very much premier league.
During his time at the helm, the firm profitably mixed literature and commerce. The list of authors, some inherited, some new, was mainly fiction-driven, its impressive phalanx of talent including, from the UK, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Melvyn Bragg; from South Africa, the future two times Man Booker winner JM Coetzee; from mainland Europe, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Günter Grass; and from the Americas, James Michener, George V Higgins, Carlos Fuentes and Saul Bellow.
Publishing was not his only professional talent. His lifelong enthusiasm for mid-20th-century art lead to a stint as art critic of the Listener and later the New Statesman. Among painters he admired were Jack B Yeats, John Piper, Ivon Hitchens, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Paula Rego and particularly LS Lowry, whom he championed when the art establishment dismissed him. In the 1960s, following an interview with Lowry for BBC Radio 3 he bought a small Lowry oil for £60. It was the start of a collection.
Rosenthal was born in London, the son of Erwin and Elisabeth Rosenthal, who had fled Germany when Hitler came to power. The Rosenthals lived first in a suburb of Manchester and later in Cambridge, where Erwin became a reader in oriental studies. Tom went to the Perse school in Cambridge, where he recalled seeing Peter Hall's sixth-form Hamlet. He was a talented student, and studied history and English at Pembroke College, where his father was a fellow.
He had become interested in art as a teenager and recalled cycling round Manchester, thus becoming imbued with Lowry's material. Art book publishing was a natural career and in 1959, after national service in the Royal Artillery, he joined Thames and Hudson, run by the emigre Neurath family and the top firm in the field. He quickly rose in the ranks, becoming managing director of Thames and Hudson International, but by 1970 was frustrated that only the Neuraths made commissioning decisions.
The firm of Secker and Warburg, run by Fred Warburg, was part of the Heinemann group of publishers, then owned by a conglomerate, Thomas Tilling. With Warburg in his early 70s, it needed fresh blood, having twice survived financial collapse. A Heinemann executive who knew Rosenthal took him to lunch at the Garrick Club, to see if he might suggest some possible successors to Warburg. Unexpectedly Rosenthal offered himself, "subject to one or two conditions".
Rosenthal had already gained a reputation for forthrightness as the high-profile, articulate and self-assured chairman of the Society of Young Publishers. Heinemann's historian pointed out that although his publishing experience was limited to art books, it was clear from his reviewing work that his reading ranged wide. To the owners, however, Rosenthal's conditions were initially a stumbling block.
He wished to become chairman as well as managing director of Seckers and to buy some of the firm's shares, which was contrary to Tilling's policy. It took months to resolve.
During Rosenthal's time, Secker's authors may not have earned huge advances, but they liked his publishing style. Lodge recalled: "He was the very image of the confident, energetic, cosmopolitan publisher, and it was reassuring to a young, or youngish, writer to have him on one's side. He talked up his authors, he took influential people out to lunch and pressed Secker's books upon them, and his enthusiasm was infectious."
He also responded to individual needs. Sharpe, a rising farceur, was put on a salary. Nicholas Mosley's difficult high-brow fiction was published on condition that he agreed also to write a life of his father, the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley.
A poetry list started under Anthony Thwaite quickly made its mark by discovering James Fenton, and later included George Szirtes, John Fuller and Peter Reading. It lost money, but Rosenthal considered this worthwhile in the same way he justified taking a gamble on Invisible Cities by the Italian critic Calvino. "I read it and thought you could not call yourself a proper publisher of serious literature if you read a book like that and didn't publish it. No matter what the past told you about [sales] figures, this was so original – it was like reading Borges for the first time."
In his first decade in charge, Rosenthal steered the firm's turnover from an annual £390,000 to close on to £2m. Not surprisingly, Tilling's asked him to take on a variety of other tasks within Heinemann. For a time he worked mornings at its Mayfair headquarters and afternoons at Seckers' Soho offices. He recalled, "I had only one brain and it worked just as well, or just as badly, no matter where I was sitting. In a big corporate set-up like Tilling's, if you refuse a promotion, you're finished." However in terms of his own psychology, "it proved a disaster. At the time I just did not realise how hostile and inimical to me was the whole concept of Big Business."
He soon came to undestand Tilling's were taken over in 1983 by an even bigger conglomerate, BTR, and within a year Rosenthal had resigned. Not yet 50, he linked up with André Deutsch, whose eponymous firm was like a smaller Secker's. But Rosenthal and Deutsch, a Hungarian emigre whose list included Norman Mailer, John Updike and Jean Rhys, found working together difficult, and Deutsch soon retired.
Publishing was changing. Deutsch was at a disadvantage in not having its own paperback imprint.
Rosenthal was, however, able to add Gore Vidal to the Deutsch list (the deal being all the sweeter in that Vidal's previous publisher was Heinemann). The firm also published Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, which won the Booker prize. But by the late 1990s Rosenthal had had enough and sold the firm.
In 1998 – and missing the fun of commissioning and publishing – he swiftly bounced back going into partnership with the antiquarian bookseller Rick Gekoski. Their Bridgewater Press specialised in signed books by major contemporary writers, nicely printed and bound, usually in editions of 138 copies. The first publication was William Boyd's Protobiography, and further volumes by John Banville, Lodge, Ian McEwan and others followed. Most of the editions sold out, covering their costs with enough left over for the proprietors to have a decent lunch. But the effort involved in producing the books was considerable, and the final Bridgewater volume – Sebastian Barry's A Tale with Two Joes in It – appeared in 2010.
Rosenthal also concentrated on being an author, reviewing widely and writing well-received studies of the artists Rego and Nolan. A month before his death he gave his extensive art library to Pembroke College.
In 1967 Rosenthal married Ann Warnford-Davis, at the time rights manager of William Collins, whom he had met at the Frankfurt book fair in 1964. She survives him, as do their two sons, Adam, a gynaecological cancer surgeon, and Daniel, author and journalist, and two grandsons, Bruno and Arne.
• Thomas Gabriel Rosenthal, publisher and writer, born 16 July 1935; died 3 January 2014