Anthony Blond: 'GIVE ME half a bottle of wine and I will give you three good ideas," said Anthony Blond, the maverick publisher who has died at the age of 79.
His publishing company, Anthony Blond Ltd, which he founded in 1958, caused shockwaves in the English publishing world for discounting the moral standards of the time.
He selected his authors with panache and flair and was willing to bring out experimental books that more conservative publishers would not touch.
Among the 70 authors or so to whom he gave their first chance to go into print was Simon Raven with The Feathers of Death, a novel of a homosexual affair in the army and the well-known writer Isobel Colegate and David Benedictus.
Among his successes were Spike Milligan's first novel, Puckoon, an English edition of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge and the books of Patrick Campbell. He also commissioned one of the most iconic and influential books of the 20th century, EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful.
His methods of signing authors were sometimes unorthodox. He bought the English rights of Jean Genet by paying the surgeon's bills for setting the leg of a tightrope walker who was Genet's boyfriend.
He persuaded Simon Raven to leave the temptations of London for the more tranquil surroundings of Deal by paying his dentist, vintner and tailor's bills and also giving him a weekly wage.
He was first to see the talent of Jennifer Paterson of the Two Fat Ladies fame, who was a good friend.
Anthony Blond was the scion of two well-established Jewish families in Manchester. His father, who had founded the Royal Court Theatre, managed the family textile business that made underwear for Marks and Spencer.
His mother was the sister of Baron, the photographer, whose portraits of debutantes in pearls stood on every big house piano. After his parents' divorce, his stepmother was the millionaire daughter of the founder of Marks and Spencer.
Anthony Blond went to Eton where he was bullied and unhappy.
He was conscripted to do national service, but registered as a conscientious objector and then went on a history exhibition to Oxford, where he enjoyed himself so much his exhibition was taken from him.
He spent a short time with the family firm before he and the 19-year-old Isobel Colegate became partners in a literary agency. Isobel Colegate did the typing, kept the accounts and as she said "had such high standards, she wrote deeply disheartening reader's reports", while Anthony Blond networked for authors.
They had some successes such as Airey Neave's They have their Exits, but ended the company when Blond started his own publishing company, bringing out Isobel Colegate's The Blackmailer as one of his first books.
In the 1960s, after he had familiarised himself with the genre by spending six weeks teaching in a secondary school, he began a separate company that published school textbooks successfully and a series of Handbooks to the Modern World - until he sold the company to the US firm CBS.
Publishing was carried on in a house in Bloomsbury, where in the winter there were cheerful coal fires and sherry, while in the summer there were luncheon parties which perhaps were not so good for the finances of the company. In 1987, his publishing career came to an end.
He continued to contribute to various magazines and newspapersand wrote two books on publishing. He also wrote an amusing novel, Family Business, which some of his relations resented as it was too close to the history of Marks and Spencer. His memoir, A Jew made in England, was published in 2004.
He had tried to enter politics as Labour candidate in the local elections, but lost to his printer, a conservative, who took him out to lunch to make up for his defeat. He was a founder and inactive director of the satirical magazine Private Eye.
His faith was important to him and he continued to practise Judaism as a member of the Sephardic synagogue. Much of his time in his last years was spent in the houses he owned in Corfu, Sri Lanka and Limoges, where he lived with his second wife and adopted Sri Lankan son.
For in spite of the irresistible chapter heading in his Memoirs, "Blond prefers gentlemen", and various liaisons, he was married first to Charlotte Strachey and latterly to Laura Hesketh, who survives him with their adopted son. He also leaves a son by the author Cressida Lindsay.
Anthony Blond: born March 20th, 1928; died February 27th, 2008