Martin Secker Ltd.

Artist Info

Martin Secker Ltd.active London, 1917 - 1936

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no2009044785

found: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography WWW site, viewed Mar. 23, 2009 (In 1916 the novelist Rafael Sabatini became a partner in [Secker's publishing] business, which was known as Martin Secker Ltd from 1917. In 1936 his company was bought for £3100 by Frederic Warburg and Roger Senhouse; the new company took the name Secker and Warburg)

Oxford DNB, accessed 8/29/2017

Secker, Martin [formerly Percy Martin Secker Klingender] (1882–1978), publisher, was born on 6 April 1882 at 24 Holland Road, Kensington, London, the only son of Edward Henry Klingender (b. 1853) and Julia Clark (1856–1906). A legacy of £1000 enabled him to enter publishing under James Eveleigh Nash in 1908. Nash employed him as a reader until 1910, when Klingender established himself as a publisher in the Adelphi, London. On 12 July 1910 he changed his name to Martin Secker by deed poll. He limited himself to non-fiction in his first year of business; the first novel he published, The Passionate Elopement (1911), was also the first by its author, Compton Mackenzie. It had been refused by Nash and others, but went on to sell over 9000 copies in eight years, and Mackenzie later enjoyed further success through Secker with Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913–14). In his Notes on Novelists (1914) Henry James singled out Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, and Gilbert Cannan as the most promising of the younger practitioners, and Secker published all of them. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis said he had ‘fine taste in book design’ and that the improvement in the design of general books had its origin with Secker before the First World War. In 1916 the novelist Rafael Sabatini became a partner in the business, which was known as Martin Secker Ltd from 1917. After the First World War Sabatini was replaced by Percival Presland Howe, who remained with Secker until the end.

By the end of his first decade Secker had also published novels by Oliver Onions (who had previously been published by Nash), Viola Meynell, Francis Brett Young, Norman Douglas, Frank Swinnerton, Arthur Machen, and Rafael Sabatini, and poetry by D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), Emily Dickinson, James Elroy Flecker, T. W. H. Crosland, and Maurice Baring. The first titles to appear in Secker's Critical Studies series were Arthur Ransome's Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. Shortly afterwards Ransome transferred his rights in his published books to Charles Granville, and the next day Lord Alfred Douglas caused writs to be issued in respect of Wilde on Ransome and Secker; he later withdrew the writ against Secker, and the two remained friends. Some time in 1911 or 1912 Secker paid two advances to Douglas for a book to be called ‘The Wilde myth’: the text was set up in type, but the book was never published.

After Secker had read D. H. Lawrence's The White Peacock in 1911 he approached Lawrence for a collection of short stories. He became his British publisher in 1918 with New Poems (a ‘decidedly false title’ according to Lawrence), and he took on The Rainbow, which Methuen had had to suppress in 1915. Secker continued as Lawrence's publisher until Lawrence's death in 1930. Despite Lawrence's occasional exasperation at Secker's timidity (over, for example, Lady Chatterley's Lover), the relationship was friendly enough, extending to shared holidays in Italy, but never close. Secker may have sensed the distrust which Lawrence expressed in letters to his friends, but not, it has to be hoped, the opinion revealed in such epithets as ‘scurvy little swine’, ‘of course ... another Jew’, and ‘a shifty dog, as they [publishers] all are’.

After Viola Meynell broke off their engagement in 1919, Secker married Caterina Maria Capellero (1896–1968) on 30 August 1921; they had one son, Adrian, born in 1924. By the mid-1920s Secker was the pre-eminent British publisher of European work in translation of his time, with novels by Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks), Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf), Arnold Zweig (Sergeant Grischa), Franz Kafka (The Castle), and Leon Feuchtwanger's Jew Süss, Secker's greatest financial success, published against Lawrence's advice. Although there were many successes, Secker's credit was overstretched by 1935 and he filed for bankruptcy. In 1936 his company was bought for £3100 by Fredric Warburg and Roger Senhouse; the new company took the name Secker and Warburg, and Secker stayed on for two years in charge of production. Ironically, Secker had signed up the new firm's success, Gabriel Chevallier's Clochemerle, before the take-over, and if he could have survived for another six months it would have saved him. Secker then created the Unicorn Press, which published Arthur Symons's book on Aubrey Beardsley, Robert Hichens's The Green Carnation, and a collected edition of Oscar Wilde. He bought the Richards Press in 1937, formerly run by Grant Richards, his only close friend in British publishing; among his publications for this press were works by Richard Le Gallienne, James Elroy Flecker, A. E. Housman, and (rather surprisingly) Enid Blyton's Noddy series (jointly with Sampson, Low, Marston). He continued to publish until 1962, when he sold the business to John Baker.

Secker's first marriage was dissolved in 1938 and on 17 February 1955 he married Sylvia Hope Broadbent (née Gibsone) (1916–1999), a writer. Secker was short, dark, quiet, and invariably cheerful (despite the onset of total blindness in 1971). He died on 6 April 1978 at Bridgefoot, Iver, Buckinghamshire, which had been his home since 1912; his ashes were scattered at Bridgefoot.

John Trevitt

Sources

D. W. Collins, ‘Martin Secker’, British literary publishing houses, 1881–1965, ed. J. Rose and P. J. Anderson, DLitB, 112 (1991) · private information (2004) · WWW, 1971–80 · The letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. J. T. Boulton and others, vols. 1–7 (1979–93) · M. Horder, ‘Conversations with Martin Secker’, TLS (10 Dec 1976), 1565–6 · M. Horder, ‘More conversations with Martin Secker’, London Magazine (Dec 1978–Jan 1979), 93–104 · M. Horder, ‘Martin Secker’, Blackwood, 325 (1979), 126–31 · M. Secker, ‘Publisher's progress’, Cornhill Magazine (summer 1973), 20–32; (spring 1974), 256–63 · F. Warburg, An occupation for gentlemen (1959)