Wanted: new owner for 'Granta', must be rich and benevolent
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Your support makes all the difference.Rea Hederman, who also owns the New York Review of Books, has talked with potential buyers for Granta magazine and Granta Books in recent months as his thoughts turn to retirement.
"We hope he'll find someone sympathetic with what we do," said Gail Lynch, publisher of Granta Books.
"What would be ideal would be someone like Rea, who's benevolent, philanthropic and wealthy and who wants to be associated with a brand like Granta and let it carry on the way it is at the moment," she added.
Granta has become well known among literati for its best-of lists that single out up-and-coming writers in Britain and the US.
The trade journal Publishing News said he has spoken to larger publishers including Bloomsbury and Macmillan.
"He's not desperate to sell," Ms Lynch said. "If he doesn't get the buyer he wants, he'll carry on with it for the time being."
Granta, now published in London and New York, was founded by Cambridge students to create a journal filled with political discourse and literary criticism.
It went on to publish the early work of such writers as the Winnie the Pooh creator A A Milne, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn and the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Later contributors have included such literary heavyweights as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford and Paul Theroux.
On the Granta website, the editor Ian Jack has written about the magazine's re-launch in 1979.
"During the 1970s, it ran into trouble - dwindling money, mounting apathy - from which it was rescued by a small group of postgraduates who successfully relaunched it as a magazine of new writing, with writers and their audience drawn from the world beyond Cambridge," he says.
Granta magazine is published four times a year with every issue containing at least 256 pages in paperback book format. Special issues, such as those on India, London and (most recently) Australia, can be up to 100 pages more.
Since 1979 Granta has published many of the world's finest writers tackling some of the world's most important subjects, from intimate human experiences to public and political events as diverse as the fall of Saigon and the mythology of the Titanic.
Its contributors have included Martin Amis, Martha Gellhorn and George Steiner. In the pages of Granta, readers first met the narrative prose of writers such as Bill Bryson, Romesh Gunesekera, Blake Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith.
Last year, Granta made a profit of £168,000 from £ 3m sales. In 2003 it made a £129,000 loss from £2.3m sales. The latest of the thematic, numbered magazine issues, is Granta 90: Country Life. Every issue since 1979 is still in print.
Hederman, who first invested in Granta in 1986 and then bought it in 1995, was not available for comment at his New York office.
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