Giles Woodforde talks to the city publisher about Philip Pullman, independence and e-books

The sober stone facades lining Beaumont Street have carried a multitude of brass plates since time immemorial.

Within, the plates announce, you can find some of Oxford’s leading dentists.

But No 31 is different: it also features the logo of publisher David Fickling Books, beautifully carved in stone.

“An old colleague of mine at OUP, Bernard Johnson, changed career and became a stone carver,” David explains, his voice brimming with enthusiasm.

“One day he was going to his dentist upstairs, and looked at the rather mean brass plate we had outside. He said ‘surely you can do better than that, David?’.”

David has bounded out to meet me. I am ushered into his book-lined office, and presented with a copy of Simon Mason’s Running Girl, a mystery novel that’s been nominated for the prestigious 2014 Costa Book Awards.

“This is a wonderful book, read it!” David commands. “Simon works here too. I want you to know about my authors, not me!”

It’s a typical reaction from a man who seems to have been born to be a children’s book editor and publisher.

His career began just around the corner in 1979, when he joined Oxford University Press (OUP) as a junior editor.

Whilst working there, David signed up The Ruby in the Smoke by the then unknown Oxford author Philip Pullman. It’s a relationship that has continued ever since.

What, I ask David, attracted him about this particular author?

“It’s very easy when you’re asked a question about someone who is now world famous like Philip Pullman because you have the benefit of hindsight.

“In came this typescript in 1982 or 83, and OUP gave me the freedom to just read it. I can tell you now what qualities it had, but at the time I simply read it straight through as a story.

“It was GRIPPING [David’s voice rises in excitement at this point]. It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?

“I am a bit of a potato-print kind of publisher: see it, read it, love it, publish it. See it, read it, don’t get it, don’t publish it — that doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just that I haven’t got it. I can’t serve that author.

“Philip simply flowed into my brain. I ran down the corridor at OUP and said ‘I’ve just read the most amazing book’. I was just thinking about the story, not about Philip, who I had never met.”

David’s company website biography states that he grew up “being teased by his five brothers, and even by his little sister, for day-dreaming and having his nose stuck in books”.

Presumably his nose was stuck in comics too, because I am also given a copy of The Phoenix, a weekly comic founded by David, and now produced by a team further down Beaumont Street.

“So true!” David confirms. “I absolutely adored comics, I loved getting them. I spent my pocket money on my own copies: with five brothers, that was very important.

“It’s shocking that there aren’t more comics now, because I think there’s a massive hole in literacy, and that’s due to the lack of comics.

“The French love them: two out of five books published in France are Bande dessinée comic strips.

“If I’ve learnt anything at all as a text editor, at least half of that comes from understanding the importance of story that comics gave me.”

David roars with laughter when I quote expressions like “arrgghh!”, “yawwwnn!”, and “zat devious skunk” from The Phoenix’s speech bubbles. It’s wonderful that all those expressions from my comics are still there.

“I don’t think there’s been any change in the appeal of comic strip,” David says.

“There are lots more things to occupy you now — games, television, film, in profusion. But the joy of kids, the love and feedback that comes back from the readers is wonderful.

“It’s really important that a comic comes out weekly — two weeks is too long, it’s an eternity in a child’s life.”

Launching the Horrible Histories series along the way, David first set up his own publishing imprint as part of Warwickshire and Witney-based Scholastic, then he came under the umbrella of mega-publisher Random House.

But last year David Fickling Books became an independent company.

How scary was that?

“Terrifying — and unavoidable. I was very well looked after by Random House, but how can I make a promise to an author if I might be thrown out in two years’ time?

“Here we can take an author on, and I might edit the first book, with my colleagues. The author will thus get to know DFB. I might become doolally at any moment, but the author will still be looked after by people he or she has met here.

“I want to publish an author for at least 10 years: I’m 61 now, who knows how useless I’ll be by the time I’m 71.”

The publishing industry has probably changed more in the last five years than at any time since OUP was founded in 1478.

With the rise of the e-book, and reading devices like the Kindle, is the traditional book, attractively designed and printed on paper, doomed to extinction?

David’s answer is unequivocal.

“I’ve probably been asked that question every week of my publishing life,” he says. “In about 1978, I gave a talk at what is now Oxford Brookes on the death of the book.

“I took along a paperback. I still think, at the moment, that the paperback represents the leading technology, even though you can load thousands of books on to a Kindle.

“But I’m not snobbish about it: if, one day, they invent an electronic machine that is as delightful and as lovely as a printed book, I will cheerfully use it.”

Doing a job he plainly loves, living near Port Meadow with his wife of 40 years, and with his three grown-up children working alongside him, David Fickling seems to live an idyllic life. Could anything be even better?

“I hope I understand how lucky I am to be making my living working with authors and stories. But there are real stresses in making a publishing company work, it’s not la-la land. We can’t just talk a good talk, we’ve got to sell the books.

“Similarly, I don’t think Oxford is perfect, yet it’s the most wonderful place to live.”