Obituary: John Blackwell

John Blackwell, publisher: born Coventry 23 October 1937; married; died London 5 November 1997.

John Blackwell was a publisher of a kind rapidly becoming extinct, a senior editor who devoted himself to editing, including the time-consuming business of copy-editing, rather than seeking advancement in a corporate career.

He did not usually act as a "creative" editor, collaborating with an author in the development of a book. He preferred to work, by patient questioning and tactful suggestion, on a completed manuscript, tuning it and refining it, removing wrinkles and blemishes, and ensuring that nothing in the physical appearance of the printed text would interfere with the communication of the author's vision to the reader.

He had a remarkable mental database of knowledge - technical, linguistic, literary - which saved many an author from embarrassing error. He was a perfectionist; and, since most writers are too, his expertise was highly valued by those fortunate enough to be edited by him. These included, at various times, Angus Wilson, Andre Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Moorcock, George V. Higgins, Tom McGuane, Tom Sharpe, Malcolm Bradbury, Louis de Bernieres and Tim Parks. He was my own editor for an unbroken 25 years.

John Blackwood was born in Coventry, and attended the King Henry VIII Grammar School in that city. He did his National Service in the Royal Navy, a three-year stint during which he was trained in intelligence, learned Russian, and perhaps acquired from the climate of espionage a habit of reticence about his personal life. Several intriguing stories of Blackwell's surveillance exploits at this time are in circulation, none of them entirely reliable, but none probably without some basis in fact.

In 1958 he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read English, and there met his wife, Pamela, whom he married in 1966. After holding a variety of short-term jobs, he edited the journal of the Iron and Steel Institute (acquiring a knowledge of heavy engineering with which he would later impress some of his authors) and then joined Secker & Warburg when it was an independent firm headed by Frederic Warburg, succeeded shortly afterwards by Tom Rosenthal. As the imprint was bought and sold in the era of corporate takeovers, as Tom Rosenthal's successors - David Godwin, Dan Franklin, Max Ellenberg - came and went, John Blackwell remained, a valued custodian of the Secker tradition. That Secker continued to publish a list of distinctive literary merit through these turbulent times was due in no small measure to his continuing presence.

Blackwell himself was happiest in the days when the firm occupied a tall, narrow, rambling house in Poland Street, Soho. His office was an attic room at the top of a twisting, precipitous staircase, crammed to the eaves with an organised chaos of books, proofs, and manuscripts. There was always a bottle of white wine in the fridge, and the aroma of Gauloises in the air. If your meeting was well timed, there would be an adjournment to a nearby pub. He kept himself fit by cycling to work and regular skiing holidays - and continued to do so till his death.

But when the firm was acquired by Reed and moved to an open-plan office in Michelin House, he seemed less at ease. There was no room for organised chaos in his little cubicle. His favoured dress of jeans and denim shirt looked out of place among the wide-shouldered suits and sleek plastic surfaces.

The clumsily managed sale of Secker, along with other Reed imprints, to Random House earlier this year saddened and angered him, and he became a freelance, editing his loyal authors from home. Reed-Elsevier, he commented, "are to be congratulated on a medical triumph: they have cloned the pig's ear." (The test-tube ewe, Daisy, was in the news at the time.)

One of the bonuses of being edited by Blackwell was being on the receiving end of witticisms like that. Even the briefest business communication was crafted and polished to give pleasure and entertainment to the addressee. He was also a brilliant blurb-writer. It is a matter for regret that he never made the step of writing a book himself. But innumerable books by others were improved and enhanced by his meticulous editing. He is survived by his wife and by a number of authors for whom the task of writing will seem lonelier than ever.