Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / Ep 4: John Mitchinson - Unbound

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Ep 4: John Mitchinson - Unbound · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

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  Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Live Free Ride Free, where we talk to people who
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  have lived self-actualized lives on their own terms, and find out how they
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  got there, what they do, how we can get there, what we can learn from them.
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  How to live our best lives, find our own definition of success,
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  and most importantly, find joy.
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  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson.
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  New York Times bestselling author of the Horse Boy.
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  Founder of New Trails Learning Systems and long ride home.com.
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  You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com.
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  Welcome back to Live Free Ride Free, where we talk to people who lead lives
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  of self-determination and fulfillment, and we find out how they got there.
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  and as you know, the way in which we define this fulfillment, this live
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  free, ride free can be many things.
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  It can be money, it can be art, it can be simply doing what you love.
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  It can be all of the above.
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  It can simply also be life as an art form in itself.
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  What is fulfillment?
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  What is the nature of living life on your own terms with this
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  degree of self-determination that we all have as our ideal?
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  So today I've got the amazing John Mitchinson, John Mitchinson.
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  It might be someone who's known to you without you knowing that he's known to
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  you because he's one of these shadowy behind the scenes sort of chaps,
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  unless you happen to meet him in a bar.
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  And then, he's, not behind the scenes at all.
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  he'll be, very jolly and probably buying you lots of drinks.
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  John I first met in the early nineties, when he was my publisher,
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  and we became great friends.
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  And he was then working for a small boutique publisher in London called
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  Harville, which produced really, really good, additions of books that sort
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  of other people didn't really publish.
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  And, I would say that most of the books that I consider, the best books
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  I've read since I became an adult were recommended to me by John Mitchinson.
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  So we're gonna go into this a little bit today.
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  And he then became publisher in larger companies.
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  Larger companies, larger companies.
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  And then he did something rather unusual.
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  Which he's gonna tell us about.
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  He took a side step and began to pursue his interests.
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  And one of those interests.
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  Many of you may know the TV show on both sides of the Atlantic called Qi.
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  Quite interesting, presented by Stephen Fry.
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  Well, that's a, a John Mitchinson idea.
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  And, there's other things as well, including his, his current, mo in the
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  publishing world, which is Unbound, a return to subscription publishing,
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  which has been wildly successful.
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  John, however, is not an ostentatious guy who walks around saying, look at me.
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  I'm so successful.
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  If you were to meet him in his home village in the pub at Great two in
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  Oxfordshire, you would simply be overwhelmed by his warmth, charm,
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  and just all round sweetness.
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  Yet he's one of the most effective human beings I have ever met.
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  Not to mention one of the kindest and most intelligent.
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  So that's the intro, John.
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  You've gotta live up to it now.
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  I
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  John Mitchinson: was gonna say, it's gonna be downhill from here
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  for your listeners, I'm afraid.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Well, you know, at least we're not in the pub.
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  John Mitchinson: Very, very, very nice, very kind of you to, to introduce me.
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  So,
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  Rupert Isaacson: well, it's only the truth, John.
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  so I want you to tell us who you are, where you came from.
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  Where were you born and how did you get on the road to where you are now?
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  John Mitchinson: Ah, okay.
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  Well, I think most people, I dunno.
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  I, I guess there are people who have a life plan and kind of, latch onto
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  something very early and, and end up doing, end up doing the thing that they
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  feel that they were destined to do.
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  I'm not sure my life's ever been quite like that.
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  In fact, there's only one thing that I would say that's really been a, a,
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  a kind of a a through line through all the activity, that I've, engaged
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  in and what we have to now as I about, I'm about to turn 60, you kind
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  of have to call it your life now.
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  You know, it's beginning to have it, it, it certainly had a beginning
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  and it certainly had a medal.
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  And at some point, increasingly, one gets the sense that it will have an end.
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  So, so the, the through line for me has always been, I guess primarily
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  reading and as a consequence of reading.
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  Then books that kind of a, a a from a very early age.
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  I grew up born, well, it's an, here's an interesting story.
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  My, I suppose that my origins are slightly complicated in that my, my
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  parents had been teaching in India.
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  And came back into, my dad was worried.
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  My mom f fell pregnant.
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  They'd had an amazing 18 months out there.
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  But my dad, who is now 87, told me just a few weeks ago, he's, he's, he's kind
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  of, he is definitely very close to the end of his life and is, I think, suffering
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  from, he's suffering from dementia.
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  So his short-term memory is, is, is, is pretty poor, but his, it means he
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  spends more time talking about the past.
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  And he told me that that 18 months with my mother in India had been
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  the central event of his life.
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  And, but he, my dad's got a very, has a long record of sometimes of making
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  perhaps on one level brave, but sometimes perhaps other people would
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  think strange or even foolish decisions because he gets, he was such a stress,
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  stressful person, very anxious person.
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  and again, in his own way, very inspiring and, and, and, and interesting
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  man, but he decided he couldn't have my mom having a baby in India.
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  So they came back.
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  so that the first thing was that they came back into really grim winter.
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  Then the winter of 19 63, 0, 62, 63 was Oh, the historic one?
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  Yeah.
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  Was it historically poor winter?
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  They were living in a very.
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  In a very kind of rundown little, house in Chingford teaching.
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  And I think you get, get the sense that the, the dream that they had shared in
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  India, living in this extraordinary hill station teaching, this teaching in this
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  wonderful school, suddenly they were back.
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  Kind of the reality principal had kicked in
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  , it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very interesting thing to go back to your,
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  your origins like that cuz it, I realized that my, my life began at a very low
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  moment in, for, for my parents and my, the story goes, which I haven't, I, I can't
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  really now test out, I suppose I can ask my mother, which would be interesting.
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  So my, my grandparents came and rescued them and invited them up to come and live
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  in their tiny little council house in Sunland, which they did for almost a year.
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  And the reason I give you that this origin story is I, I think it is
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  always interesting the emotional, the emotional kind of, sort of tom
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  of the life that you are born into.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  Which I think for my parents was, was, as I say, was, was not massively happy.
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  The good thing for me was when I as basically yeah, anxiety
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  and then when and, and financial anxiety and professional anxiety.
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  And I'm, in many ways, I'm not sure their marriage.
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  They, they separated 30 years later, but I'm not sure their marriage entirely
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  recovered from it, from this incredible hal kind of golden period in India.
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  And my dad's been back several times to India.
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  My mom hasn't.
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  But, two things.
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  It left me with a, with a, with a fascination, which I've, one of my
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  major fascinations, which I've still never managed to fulfill, which
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  is to go back to, to find a place.
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  I was always, you know, I was that kind of precocious kid who used to
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  tell all my, all ge visitors to the house that I'd been conceived in the
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  Foote foothills of the Himalayas.
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  True.
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  But I've, I've never been to actually see, as it were, the
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  Rupert Isaacson: place, there are many things you have in co
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  in, in common with the Buddha as, as the lessons are gonna find.
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  So it, it's no surprise I didn't know this, that you
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  and Prince, CDATA had a fact
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  been born in the, the qma.
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  Yeah.
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  Perfect.
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  Well, there you go.
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  John Mitchinson: I think, I'm not sure where, where, where, where
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  the, whether the comparisons hold much further into my life.
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  But the thing that living with my grandparents gave to me was, my
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  grandfather who'd, who I think was just at that moment in his fifties
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  when he was, I was just a, a, you know, he became fascinated and, and
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  re formed a bond, which I maintained throughout his life until he died,
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  sort of about 20, 23 years ago.
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  But he was the, he was my sort of mentor, my, I think for.
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  What did he do?
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  Well, he, he was a, he was a, it's an, again, an interesting story.
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  I'm, I'm, he was a highly intelligent, now would've gone to university
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  and probably studied maths.
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  He, he taught me, he taught me sort of, he showed me logarithmic tables
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  when I was in about six years old.
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  And he was a motor mechanic, but his, you know, a working class
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  family, northeastern family.
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  But he, his, his family had had a little bit more money than my
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  grandmothers who were very poor.
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  And my great-grandmother was Irish, and my great-grandfather was one of
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  22 children, which is extraordinary.
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  And the nice thing about it is, I, I, there is now a, a Goodrich, he
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  was a, his nose was Charlie Goodrich.
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  And there's, there are now regular family reunions up there.
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  So I've met a whole load of people I might otherwise not have met.
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  Anyway, he, we now are pretty sure got my grandmother pregnant
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  when she was a teenager.
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  And they ha because they never celebrated their wedding anniversary.
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  my grandmother always, always was extremely negative about the Virgin
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  Mary, which for people who were quite religious, I mean, they were, they were,
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  they were stalwarts of their local church.
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  Although in Starwars, in a very, In a very kind of independent way.
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  They were very, they, they, they, they were not, they weren't
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  sort of lovey dovey Christians.
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  My grandfather was, was, was pretty critical of, of, of most of the,
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  the Vickers that came and weirdly into this in my, my dad had left
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  home at 16 to become a monk.
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  He'd gone, joined a, a religious order.
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  So there's all of that going.
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  Anyway, I bond, I bonded with my father and my grandfather, and that was, and
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  he was, , as I say, he was a, he was a source of calmness and, validation for me
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  during really right through my, my kind of early childhood and into my teams in a way
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  that I suppose my father never had been.
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  Really, my dad was, was my dad was always out and doing stuff.
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  And also my dad was a vicker, became weirdly a vicker and he was standing up
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  being, you know, telling people how they live to live their lives when, let's
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  be honest, probably his own personal life was, was, was, was in a, was in a.
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  Terrible mess.
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  I mean, I said a terrible mess.
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  He was serially unfaithful to my mother, which is not generally considered
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  the, the, the, the, the path for a, for a, for a man of the cloth.
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  So, so the northeast, that culture, working class northeast was where that's,
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  if people say to you, where are you from?
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  That's where I always think that's, that's where I was formed.
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  and there was much about that, that I loved.
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  The Town of Sunland is a, was a, you know, a former ship building and mining town.
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  I mean, the ship building, it produced more tonnage than any other British port.
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  Not, and didn't build the big ships, but a lot of the
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  merchant ships were built there.
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  And that really, I watched that from the sixties, from my being
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  born in early sixties through the seventies, watched all that disappear.
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  ended up, of course becoming a fan of their, their, football team.
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  But that, that's the, that was the crucible into which I was born.
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  And then when I was eight years old, something happened, which I think has
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  probably been the most, the thing that's probably most influenced me, which was
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  we moved down to Banbury, and by that stage I, I was already reading my.
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  Reading, kind of, you know, sort of ferociously going to the library.
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  I remember early reading, reading all of Arthur Ransom and desperately
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  wanting to be in the late district sailing a dinghy or bird watching
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  became the thing I was obsessed with.
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  I was glad used to go off now, I mean, where we were living in the
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  Northeast as a, as a little place called he Earth, which is near felling.
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  It was not massively, you know, it was, it was pretty built up and it was late
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  sixties, so it's pretty depressed still.
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  Lots of, that area was Bob fairly heavily bombed in the war, but there
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  were these scrubby bits of waste ground.
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  And I remember one amazing winter, there was an invasion
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  of wax swings from Scandinavia.
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  And I, I still have the little project.
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  My mom was very much, you know, go out and thought, make a nature table.
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  My mom was a very good teacher and, remains a very, a very
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  important person in my life.
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  But, she was traumatized, I think by how the, the, the how poor and
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  difficult and depressed the, the, the area that we were living in was.
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  And the school was.
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  But she made, she made all the other stuff fun.
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  So I, I kind of grew up reading and fascinated by
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  nature, particularly by birds.
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  and, and then you moved down to Rural Ox Oxfordshire.
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  Yeah.
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  So then we moved down to Ox Oxfordshire.
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  Well, bamb Bamb was definitely.
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  Banbury was definitely, we weren't, we weren't, well, it was more
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  rural than North, the Northeast.
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  And every weekend we would go off and dis discover new villages.
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  And as my brother and I got older, we would go off and explore and on our
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  bikes and, and it was definitely deep it, but from there I felt it was deep
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  immersion in the English countryside.
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  And I, I, I formed a, a strange obsession with a village called
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  Great J, which I visited for the first time, I think in about 1972,
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  so whatever that is, 50 years ago.
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  Right.
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  Which is pretty remarkable of itself.
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  the reason I formed a, a, i, I guess two reasons why it was so important to me.
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  One, I'd been reading, talking, and, and then I discovered what I
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  really wanted to do was to live.
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  I felt that I really ought to have been born in the 12th century and.
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  You wanted to live in the
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  Rupert Isaacson: Shire, basically.
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  Yeah.
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  John Mitchinson: Yeah.
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  And then I suddenly found myself in the Shire.
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  I mean, great chew, you can attest to this is yeah.
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  A remarkable place.
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  And it was even more, in some ways remarkable.
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  It's always been remarkable, but in the early seventies, it was
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  pretty, it was semi derelict.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  There is no welcome to great chew sign on the road.
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  There are no road markings, there are no street lights.
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  It's, it's thatched.
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  In the early seventies, the, that was all kind of falling apart.
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  It felt like a, a village that was sinking back into the earth.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  and I remember going there and indeed going there with my grandfather, who
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  came to visit once and sitting in the church there next to him and being
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  amazed that the, the, the church is an incredibly beautiful building.
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  Amazing, 12th century wall painting and a, and surrounded
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  by trees surrounded by greenery.
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  So the idea of a sort of green church, kind of seemed to me to be that pagan,
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  to bring together, to bring together everything that I was interested in.
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  A kind of sense of history, closeness to nature.
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  I l I mean, we l later discovered, obviously the church was a, a much
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  older site than a Christian site.
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  It's a, it's a dedicated Saint Michael, which usually means there
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  was a, a kind of a, a some form of Saxon or earlier, holy place there.
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  So, that sort of deep connection with a kind of English.
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  Landscape and countryside was, was forged there.
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  And I, I think, you know, that when one remembers one's childhood, those years
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  between eight and 12 for me were, those were the kind of the magic years and,
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  and again, fired by my reading, but fired also by exploring the countryside.
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  I got given an ordinance survey map, which was, I, I still remember
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  and may even still have it, it was one of the old pink ones.
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  So, for banbury in the area, just the obsessive detail I'd go through
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  every trying to work out and find on the map every little bit of, yeah.
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  You know, every, every old tubuli or disused bit of railway line or that, that
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  idea that there was some order that you could find as a kind of a way through
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  this that was, that was a massively important, the patterns of the story.
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  The patterns of the past.
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  Yeah.
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  So then my dad, , made one of his, you know, the decisions that I've, I've,
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  I've referred to earlier, I think.
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  Try always.
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  I think he's been trying to escape from things, and this
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  was the biggest one of all.
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  He decided, he announced that we were going to move to New Zealand.
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  He'd got been offered a job, in New Zealand working, with a, a,
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  a, a couple of priests in a team ministry in Rour, friends of his who.
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  And suddenly at the age of 12, I found myself translated to the
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  other side of the world, completely different, completely different place.
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  and I have to say very, at first I found very difficult, but gradually, came
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  to, came to, I made my peace with it.
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  And it's after, I suppose rural Oxfordshire, the kind of New Zealand,
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  but feels like the other place that I, and, and the Northeast,
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  it's, feels like the other place would, that's, that's determined
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  all sorts of outcomes for my life.
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  My, I married, my first wife was a New Zealander.
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  I went, did a year, did a year of university out there
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  before I came back here.
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  My brother lives there and my mother lives there, my daughter lives there,
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  so it's, but when I arrived as a 12 year old, it was like everything was different.
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  And some of that was exciting, but some of it was also so, It
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  created in me a fairly profound nostalgia for what I'd left behind.
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  And, great Chew in particular played a role in.
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  So, you know, that thing when I said people who, who have a plan for their
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  lives, I've never had a professional plan for my life, but I'd always
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  thought that at one point or other I would maybe live in Great Chew.
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  And I've now lived there for 26 years.
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  So sometimes
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  Rupert Isaacson: what's interesting to me that, that leaps out from that I can
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  indeed aest, to the listeners, if you're looking for the Shire, it is great chew.
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  It is that area of Oxfordshire.
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  It is that thatch village, which hasn't really changed much
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  outwardly since the 17th century.
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  And it has a real magic to it.
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  But what's ironic to me that leaps out is that there you were looking
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  for the Shire, you find it of course in England, and then, yes, you get
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  thrown to the place that years later Hollywood decides is the Shire.
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  But it doesn't appear to you as the Shire at all when you go there.
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  No.
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  Gives you any nostalgic for your Shire?
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  No.
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  Maybe, maybe that's what we're all doing is looking for that shire.
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  Yeah,
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  John Mitchinson: well I think there is a kind of, there is
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  the, the interest isn't there.
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  If we're all of us to try and find a mode of, a mode of living where
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  we feel, you know, that we, I, I remember once saying to Rachel, my wife,
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  that, you know, we'd put down roots.
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  In two because I'd never had any.
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  And she said, well, I'm not sure I want to have roots.
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  And I think we've both subsequently realized that ha, because we had, my
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  daughter Stella was, was, was born in London, but my three boys were
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  born in, in, in, well, they were born in the hospital Nazi, but they
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  were all born into the village.
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  There is that sense of, there, there is a, some, something fulfilling comes out
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  of that sense of being in a place for the, for, for an extended period of time.
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  And I would say that it's not necessarily always easy.
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  I think great chew is superficially the people who see only the, the
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  picturesque really don't understand the history of what these small
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  villages in England, have to offer.
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  The, they're almost always the records of some sort of, of, of, of, of, of,
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  of periods of massive investment, of people, particularly people who've
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  made a lot of money elsewhere in the world, trying to, trying to realize
• 21:01
  their dreams for bero for worse.
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  I've always said that although two is tiny, you know, there's only
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  150 people on the electoral role.
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  It's, it's had a small but important part of the, of the three great.
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  What we might call the three great moments in British history, the
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  Norman Conquest, the Civil War, or the Three War of The Three Nations,
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  and the Industrial Revolution.
• 21:22
  It also, like all English villages, we begin to see has definitely got, you
• 21:27
  know, one of the people who owned the estate was a East India company, NAI Bob.
• 21:32
  So there's the link with Empire Matthew Bolton obviously was, was, you know,
• 21:36
  the, the, the, the architect of the Industrial Revolution, like the, the
• 21:39
  Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk of his day.
• 21:42
  I don't think many
• 21:43
  Rupert Isaacson: listeners would know that.
• 21:44
  Talk, talk to us about that.
• 21:45
  So let me just give a little background here.
• 21:47
  So this Village of Great two that John lives in, which does indeed look
• 21:51
  like the Shire, is an estate village.
• 21:54
  And one of the reasons it, it, it, it has this very picturesque look is
• 21:57
  that it's still owned by effectively a feudal estate, which limits the
• 22:01
  development, which keeps the look of the landscape and so forth.
• 22:05
  But this, great house that is there, what changed hands?
• 22:10
  The, the, the, the theen years of the estate had changed hands.
• 22:13
  And this chap Bolton, you say he was an architect of the industrial
• 22:18
  revolution, which of course is not the le look of that landscape at all.
• 22:21
  Tell us about this man.
• 22:22
  And, and, and how so, so
• 22:24
  John Mitchinson: the worldview math, Matthew, Matthew Bolton, I mean, it was
• 22:27
  in fact his son who, who, who bought the estate, but they were, Matthew
• 22:32
  Bolton was James Watts's business partner, James Watt invented the,
• 22:36
  the, the, the steam engine, which was.
• 22:38
  The kind of the, the bit of technology that unlocked, massive profits of cotton,
• 22:44
  the massive pro profits of cotton.
• 22:47
  As we now know, were also deeply implicated in the slave trade, so
• 22:51
  that the cotton that was being grown, the, the in, in, in the, the south
• 22:56
  of America was, was, was, was the product of slavery and that was
• 23:01
  being shipped back to, to the uk.
• 23:02
  But the, the, the, the technology that enabled the building of mills, in, in,
• 23:09
  in, in the north of England was, very largely because of the business prowess.
• 23:16
  James Wat was the Scottish engineer.
• 23:18
  Bolton was the businessman.
• 23:20
  And the Soho Foundry in Birmingham, which was his home, was, is generally
• 23:25
  felt to be one of the, one of the key sites of the industrial revolution.
• 23:28
  Certainly the, the kind of the monetizing of the inventions, you know, there
• 23:34
  are lots of people get hung up about who was it, who invented what, when,
• 23:39
  but you know, it's a, it's a little bit like once the technology's there,
• 23:42
  who's the smart person who can turn it into, into a, into a, a business?
• 23:47
  And that was what Bolton did.
• 23:48
  And his son bought, bought Chu Park as it was then in the 1820s and turned
• 23:55
  it into a extremely, successful farm.
• 24:00
  and that passed down through his, through his.
• 24:03
  Two son and grandson.
• 24:05
  And then, and the line failed in the early 20th century.
• 24:09
  And there were two, there were two basically old Dows that Miss
• 24:13
  Robs who lived in the Bain house.
• 24:15
  And the, the, the chooses decline, the re when I found it in, you know, 70 years
• 24:20
  later, really began at the turn of the 20th century when it was administered
• 24:24
  by the public trustee on behalf of the Miss Boltons who lived in the big house.
• 24:29
  And at that point, lots of the tenant farmers, I think just started
• 24:32
  to say they were making no money, as is the want for tenant farmers.
• 24:36
  And there was little investment.
• 24:37
  And then in the 1950s, when the Miss Boltons died, a, a really extraordinary
• 24:42
  man called Major eus Rob, who was a member of the Bolton family and not
• 24:48
  direct descendant of, of Matthew.
• 24:50
  But, he took the estate on with very little capital.
• 24:54
  He, in fact, had been, he'd been in the Army, but before that he'd been one of the
• 24:59
  early producers for Log Bear at the, very early B b C, the, the turn, the, the, the,
• 25:07
  I mean, one, some of the very earliest TV programs ever made were produced by him.
• 25:11
  And then in, I guess in his sixties, he decided he wanted to sink into.
• 25:15
  Into sort of retirement.
• 25:17
  He'd always loved chew.
• 25:18
  He'd, he'd visited his, his aunts there when he was a child.
• 25:22
  he was gay, , although that probably wasn't, the word he
• 25:25
  would've, they would've used then.
• 25:27
  And he lived and sort of presided over.
• 25:30
  He didn't, he wanted to retain that quality of an estate village village.
• 25:34
  and then in the 1960s, he, there was the government decided they wanted to
• 25:39
  try some open cast iron ore mining on Cow Hill, which you'll know ru where
• 25:44
  we, we, we love to walk Cow Hill.
• 25:46
  It's one of the
• 25:47
  Rupert Isaacson: most beautiful hills in England.
• 25:49
  John Mitchinson: He, employed a London lawyer called James Johnston
• 25:51
  to come and help him fight the case.
• 25:53
  And they won.
• 25:54
  And then he invited James to stay on, to be the, to stop them from mining it.
• 25:59
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 26:00
  To stop 'em from mining.
• 26:01
  So they won and he invited James to stay on and be, help, help him run the estate.
• 26:05
  And from that moment, small bits of, of, of, development were made.
• 26:09
  There was a new sewage system put in, and some of the cottages were
• 26:13
  restored, but many of them had fallen into such bad disrepair that they
• 26:17
  were, they were sort of, compulsory, occupied rather than a estate owned.
• 26:23
  Although still, it's roughly about 75% owned by single estate.
• 26:27
  And the, that estate has been a single estate.
• 26:31
  It's not been broken up since.
• 26:33
  The time of the Doomsday book, the sort of Norman Conquest, which from Odo
• 26:38
  Bayer, that's a thousand years chap.
• 26:39
  Yeah.
• 26:40
  That, yeah.
• 26:41
  So Odo, Bayer, William, the con half brother, was given the estate
• 26:46
  of Great j back at the time of the, the, the big deal doling out.
• 26:51
  and as I say, it's had various owners since then, but remains now.
• 26:55
  The major left it to James Johnston.
• 26:58
  and it's now Nicholas Johnston, who is, who runs the estate
• 27:02
  incredibly successfully, and who was absolutely there on Saturday
• 27:07
  when we had our Coronation party.
• 27:09
  and I would say that what's if, if, if, if Chu has this strange
• 27:13
  kind of zeig like ability to, to appear at, at various moments of
• 27:19
  English history, having something interesting to say about those things.
• 27:22
  So, you know, as I said, civil War, when I should say in the Civil War that there
• 27:26
  was an amazing, group of intellectuals and artists who gathered around great
• 27:30
  ju and knows the great Jew circle.
• 27:32
  Lucius Carey, who was Charles, the first Secretary of State, kind of had
• 27:37
  an open house come sort of almost like a sort of open air university he ran.
• 27:41
  and a lot of the thinking.
• 27:44
  I mean, they didn't manage to, they, they weren't able to prevent civil war.
• 27:47
  But when the 1688 Constitution was, was, finally, in, in place with the,
• 27:55
  the, the restoration, the monarchy being restored, and then in 1688, we invited
• 28:00
  the Dutch to come over and run the show.
• 28:03
  the establishment of the parliamentary democracy that we
• 28:05
  know today happened really in 1688.
• 28:08
  And a lot of those ideas came from peop members of the two circle, like,
• 28:12
  Edward Hyde Law, Claredon, and so on.
• 28:14
  So, again, bizarre.
• 28:16
  And now, our small village seems to be the epicenter of what you
• 28:21
  might call celebrity culture.
• 28:24
  We have the Beckhams at one end, Claudia Winkelman down in the valley, and,
• 28:28
  up on the hill, Simon Cal, and Soho Farmhouse is, is in great two parish.
• 28:34
  which, so the Village now massively seems to be, I mean, it's, it still retains.
• 28:41
  Its, its kind of, it, its core character.
• 28:44
  But again, there are people who obviously you can imagine, loathe this.
• 28:49
  But I try and take the long view on these things and think,
• 28:52
  well, it's just chew doing.
• 28:53
  Whatchu does?
• 28:54
  It always seems to find a way to be relevant there.
• 28:57
  Indeed.
• 28:58
  Lots of, of really dull villages out there in England.
• 29:01
  And, you know, where people are just sort of wildling away their lives
• 29:05
  and, and, and, and, and not saying btu a goose chews never been like that.
• 29:09
  Yeah.
• 29:09
  And the
• 29:09
  Rupert Isaacson: England now is, there's, it's having this, Renaissance
• 29:13
  as, as a sort of a media hub.
• 29:15
  Yeah.
• 29:16
  And so, and, and, and so it seems to make sense that where you live in this
• 29:21
  village that looks like the sh but is in fact, as you say, has this relevant,
• 29:26
  the story of, of relevance who pops up now at this latest stage of, of what
• 29:32
  Britain is, is, is exporting, which is the story, which is its story.
• 29:36
  And you, you've told us this story of a little bit of
• 29:40
  yourself and the place you live.
• 29:42
  What stands out here is, is, is John.
• 29:45
  It's, it's, it's your love and ability to connect with and relate stories.
• 29:50
  Yes.
• 29:50
  And this of course is how you have made your way in the world.
• 29:56
  Tell us how you've been telling stories and enabling other people
• 30:01
  to tell stories in a way that has brought you to where you are now.
• 30:06
  John Mitchinson: That's, that's a good question.
• 30:08
  I think I am, I think I'm a, I, I, I think I've, I vacillate between.
• 30:15
  And continue to vacillate between being a storyteller and a story enabler.
• 30:21
  in that I am both a writer and a publisher.
• 30:26
  And while there are times when I have been more of a writer than I am a
• 30:30
  publisher and more of a publisher than I'm a writer, I don't think there's ever
• 30:34
  been a time when I haven't done either.
• 30:36
  I suppose there was a time when I was a, but when I started my very first
• 30:42
  job, I mean, very briefly, my very first job, I worked as a barman in a
• 30:48
  very busy, quite famous restaurant in Oxford, most of my undergraduate years
• 30:53
  when I was, I read English language and literature at Merton College
• 30:56
  and why did I go to Merton College?
• 30:58
  Because that was Tol Kings College and it was, it's whatever
• 31:02
  any of the other colleges say.
• 31:03
  It's the oldest, it's certainly the oldest has the oldest physical
• 31:06
  buildings in Oxford, I think.
• 31:09
  And, I loved that Mob Quad, which is the, the, the central Quad triangle was
• 31:14
  so old it didn't even have chimneys.
• 31:16
  So, I, that was my.
• 31:18
  That was where I went to college and I worked in a bar there,
• 31:21
  called Browns, a restaurant.
• 31:23
  Browns.
• 31:23
  So when I came out of there, I, my first job was working in a nightclub in Oxford
• 31:28
  called in, London, called Legends.
• 31:31
  and the plan had been, the plan had been to, to, to open a club.
• 31:36
  Were were you a male dancer or what were you doing?
• 31:38
  I wasn't, no, I was just working.
• 31:39
  I was head barman, so I was mixing.
• 31:41
  I've always liked, I've, I've always liked making drinks.
• 31:45
  I had noticed.
• 31:45
  yeah.
• 31:46
  So, and it was very, those days, I mean, guys, nothing like the kind of
• 31:50
  extraordinary baroque mixology you have today, but we were making, it was the
• 31:54
  eighties and we thought we were making great classic drinks, but nobody came.
• 31:59
  And the maitre d and I, a lovely man called men, Mel Palmer, had found
• 32:03
  a site in, in, beak Street in soho.
• 32:06
  And we thought we were gonna open a, something that would've been halfway
• 32:09
  between a nightclub, a English pub, and a, and a and a, and a kind of the
• 32:14
  kind of bar you find in Spain or Italy.
• 32:17
  And we'd even managed to raise money.
• 32:19
  And, but, this was 1987, which was the first of the several financial
• 32:25
  crises, which my life, life has, has.
• 32:28
  I never, the person who was gonna put money in got wiped out and
• 32:30
  said, sorry boys, I can't do it.
• 32:32
  So at that point, I had been, I just got a job, a friend of mine from
• 32:37
  college that said, Hey, you should come and work in this bookshop.
• 32:39
  It's great.
• 32:40
  It's called Waterstones and.
• 32:42
  You know, it's, it's really, it's really nice work.
• 32:44
  You know, you don't have to stay up till four in the morning.
• 32:47
  Nobody tries to pick fights with you or you don't have to, to, to, to
• 32:50
  try and haul them, haul them out of the toilets for, for taking drugs.
• 32:54
  So I started work on an insanely low salary.
• 32:58
  I mean, it was like under five grand a year working in a bookshop, and then
• 33:01
  suddenly I'd from, and was Waterstones
• 33:03
  Rupert Isaacson: Waterstones, by the way, for those listeners who don't know,
• 33:05
  is, is a major, major chain of books, book sellers in the UK at this stage.
• 33:10
  John, was it just one store?
• 33:11
  John Mitchinson: No, there were, there were, I think by that
• 33:13
  stage there were 10 stores.
• 33:14
  Okay.
• 33:15
  So this was in 1987 and they started in 82.
• 33:21
  And then extraordinary series of coincidences really.
• 33:25
  I, I was working and I have to say, although it was terrible pay and
• 33:29
  I was living in a, a very small studio, flat in, in, with my now
• 33:34
  wife, Simone, in, in, Finsbury Park.
• 33:38
  I absolutely loved the work and, and I, things that I loved about it were that
• 33:42
  you could more or less take any book you wanted to read home, which I did.
• 33:46
  And getting proof copies.
• 33:48
  I remember the first proof.
• 33:50
  Copy was from the Gal Glance rep, and it was Mort by Terry ett, and I just was,
• 33:56
  I was so intrigued by this idea that you were get, you were getting to read
• 34:00
  a book before it was even published.
• 34:02
  I still remember it with a sort of blue cover and I read it and
• 34:06
  was incredibly enthusiastic.
• 34:08
  I think he, I think the rep was rather touched that, that somebody was so
• 34:11
  excited to be given one, so he gave me loads and so I was, I was buying SCI
• 34:15
  for sci, the science fiction section in the fantasy section about which I knew.
• 34:21
  A bit, but not, not masses, but soon got to know.
• 34:24
  But you had more,
• 34:25
  Rupert Isaacson: been an early, an early token reader.
• 34:27
  You did have a
• 34:28
  John Mitchinson: Oh yeah.
• 34:28
  And, and also I just, I remember there was some exciting Clive Barkers Hell
• 34:33
  Raiser came out at that that time.
• 34:35
  And I remember there was a, there was a, there's a guy called Piers Antony
• 34:39
  who wrote these space opera books.
• 34:42
  And I think maybe even, yeah, I, it was, it was fun and perhaps it was beginning
• 34:46
  to become really, really successful.
• 34:48
  but it was, it, like all these things, it was just fascinating.
• 34:51
  The, the Waterstone's way was to very much throw you in at the deep end, and you had
• 34:55
  to figure out what to buy and what not to buy and what to subs all the buy, you
• 34:59
  know, we did all our buying in the store and even someone as inexperienced as me
• 35:04
  within a few months was buying books.
• 35:05
  So the excitement of buying 10 copies of something and then selling
• 35:09
  them is that's, I think that's been part of my d n A as well.
• 35:14
  I, that's something I find still thrilling.
• 35:18
  I, I love being in bookshops and I love selling, I love selling things to people.
• 35:22
  What now gets called hand hand selling, you know, it's just that thing of
• 35:26
  getting somebody enthused, saying, try and let me know and come back, and I've
• 35:30
  got plenty more where that came from.
• 35:32
  So it was a, about, that was a bit of a revelation.
• 35:34
  It was, as I say, appallingly paid.
• 35:37
  This is a bit of a theme of my life.
• 35:38
  Appallingly paid, but massively satisfying.
• 35:42
  and then, and then I met someone in the street who I'd, I'd known from college,
• 35:46
  and she said, what are you doing?
• 35:47
  I said, I'm working at Waterstones.
• 35:48
  I said, oh my God, I'm just a head office at Waterstones and we are looking for
• 35:52
  somebody to edit our literary diary.
• 35:54
  Would you be interested?
• 35:55
  And I said, well, what does it involve?
• 35:56
  She said, well, I dunno, six weeks work.
• 35:58
  You have to go and sit in the British library and find out
• 36:00
  interesting literary facts.
• 36:02
  So I like to think that that moment, which of course I said yes, and I was paid a, I
• 36:08
  remember a one-off bonus of 1500 pounds, which just like, that just seemed like
• 36:13
  the most staggering amount of money at the time you could actually afford to eat.
• 36:17
  Incredible.
• 36:18
  And then, and then, yeah, week and then it got to, to sit in the British
• 36:21
  Library every day in that amazing reading room, that where Marks had worked, and,
• 36:27
  and, and ordered up amazing old books and found, lit out literary facts.
• 36:32
  And, and it was commissioned essays.
• 36:36
  It was, it was really, it was commissioned some poetry for, from people that was,
• 36:41
  you know, it was quite a, there was a desk diary and then a little pocket diary.
• 36:44
  So, and what happened was I then got kind of sucked into, a thing called
• 36:49
  the Waterstones Guide to Books.
• 36:50
  We were trying to do what I once described as a paper Amazon, which
• 36:55
  was 60,000 annotation, annotated blurbs to 60,000 books in print.
• 37:00
  And that was, That was really my first, kind of exposure to
• 37:04
  the world of books and authors.
• 37:07
  And, and we, although we, we made a, we made an astonishing 1500 page
• 37:13
  book that was significantly too large as a mail order catalog to
• 37:17
  go through anybody's letter box.
• 37:18
  So it ended up being a bit of a white elephant, a sort of
• 37:22
  magnificent white elephant.
• 37:24
  And at the end of the, that year, I was asked to take over running
• 37:31
  the public, what was then the, the, the publications department.
• 37:35
  and then a year after that, Waterstones did a deal with WX Smith.
• 37:40
  And by that stage I'd become quite good friends with Tim Waterstone, the owner.
• 37:43
  And he asked me to be his marketing director at the age of, of 26.
• 37:49
  and I still remember he sent, he, he wrote, he, he, he, Tim was a very early
• 37:53
  adopter of the post-it note, and he always wrote in pencil and he sent me,
• 37:57
  said that, that's what I'm gonna pay you.
• 37:59
  And he'd written 30 pounds on a, on a, and I remember looking
• 38:03
  puzzled and he that got a problem.
• 38:06
  I said, is it, well, just one off or, and he'd looked it back and
• 38:09
  then put a K on the end of it.
• 38:10
  So in 19, What, what year would it have been?
• 38:16
  My god.
• 38:17
  Yeah.
• 38:18
  I mean, it was, it was 19 87, 88, 89, 19 89.
• 38:24
  To suddenly being be, I mean, 30,000 pounds a year was a
• 38:27
  lot of money in those days.
• 38:28
  It was back then.
• 38:29
  Yeah.
• 38:30
  And that was, that was my entry, I suppose, into pretty extraordinary period.
• 38:36
  I did, I was marketing director until, for five years, nearly six years.
• 38:42
  And, Wolf Stones expanded massively.
• 38:46
  I mean, they had already been jammed together.
• 38:48
  We went from, we opened 14 shops in 1988, and then in 1989 we
• 38:53
  merged with the Shean Hughes.
• 38:55
  They all became Waterstones.
• 38:57
  So suddenly Waterstones had, you know, 80 bookstores, and, and
• 39:02
  became the biggest, the biggest book specialist book retailer in the uk.
• 39:07
  And I was in charge of their marketing, knowing nothing about marketing.
• 39:11
  So, but that was, yeah.
• 39:15
  As say you kind of, you kind of learn on the job and, and
• 39:17
  Rupert Isaacson: I guess what is marketing, but telling stories
• 39:19
  and what had you been doing since
• 39:21
  John Mitchinson: you were Well, discovery story?
• 39:23
  Well, I, yeah, you're completely right.
• 39:24
  And what I'd been doing was helping Tim write speeches.
• 39:27
  We basically, Tim and I sort of invent, invented, a, a way of
• 39:32
  describing the Waterstones brand.
• 39:35
  Which you had to do because we had to tell a lot of people who were being
• 39:39
  told that their shots were being turned into Waterstones, what that meant, and
• 39:44
  right where, whereas Tim had sort of had the idea of these large stockholding,
• 39:49
  but he'd owned, been to America and been to the Strand bookstore, and he,
• 39:52
  what he basically wanted was, could you take a big American bookshop of
• 39:56
  Barnes and Noble and a and, and a and a brilliant bookshop like John Sando
• 40:00
  and Chelsea, and turn it into a chain.
• 40:03
  And he'd been a, his, his background was w h Smith.
• 40:06
  and I think they'd fired him, which was why he, when he finally sold the
• 40:09
  business back to them for a huge amount of money, it was particularly satisfying.
• 40:14
  that was his story.
• 40:15
  So we were absolute Marketing is absolutely storytelling.
• 40:19
  And it's storytelling.
• 40:20
  What I like about it is it's storytelling that can often have a measurable result.
• 40:25
  , of, you know, rapture applause.
• 40:28
  A live gig or just, you know, your kid saying, can you read it to me again?
• 40:34
  I love that.
• 40:34
  Can you read it to me again?
• 40:35
  Which, so, That was.
• 40:39
  And then from there, I suppose the next move was to go into publishing
• 40:44
  where I went, ended up at Harville, I'd fallen in love with the Harville list.
• 40:49
  Now that's a question
• 40:50
  Rupert Isaacson: because, so you went from something majorly commercial?
• 40:54
  Waterstones.
• 40:54
  Okay.
• 40:54
  Admittedly, relatively high highbrow, but, Harville, which published
• 41:01
  me back in the day as well a bit, was anything but commercial.
• 41:05
  It was, so what, why, yeah, and how, tell us that.
• 41:10
  Well,
• 41:11
  John Mitchinson: I suppose we thought it, I suppose it's part of me that
• 41:14
  is, you know, maybe my life is a is, is, is thinking about drawing themes.
• 41:23
  I've always believed in quality, that ultimately what lasts is, is, is
• 41:28
  something that the, the, the higher, the richer, the more complex, the more,
• 41:34
  the more, challenging something is the, the, the, the, the more likely it
• 41:39
  is to last to stand the test of time.
• 41:42
  And I think what I could see with the har list was something that had been,
• 41:47
  we would now u say curated, but we were probably in back in the nineties, just
• 41:53
  have said, you know, kind of built or chosen with such care and intelligence
• 41:59
  that, that actually the people who.
• 42:03
  Who, you know, love reading and love literature and love the, the, the, the,
• 42:09
  the, the transforming effect that, that reading something can make in your life.
• 42:15
  I think for, for those people that those kind of lists were, were and
• 42:21
  are incredibly important, the case.
• 42:23
  Did
• 42:23
  Rupert Isaacson: you know this about Harville before you went to work for them?
• 42:26
  Or did you discover this?
• 42:27
  John Mitchinson: Yeah, no, I, I did, I, what I loved about them was they
• 42:29
  had a, they had a famous list of trade paperbacks with the, with the
• 42:33
  Collins Harville leopard on them.
• 42:36
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:36
  And they were, they were kind of, they were always really beautifully type set,
• 42:41
  and they were kind of, they were, they were bigger than the average paperback
• 42:45
  and they were often in spinners.
• 42:47
  And at the beginning, what.
• 42:50
  Spinner is a, is a sort of big plastic thing, which, which
• 42:53
  sit stands in bookshops and por often used to come in spinners.
• 42:57
  Ah, right.
• 42:58
  They're much, they're much, they're much sort of standard.
• 43:00
  They're not, not really welcoming bookshops anymore, but they were,
• 43:04
  they were a good way of branding.
• 43:06
  Cuz you know, here's a publisher I like and Collins Har was
• 43:08
  definitely a strong brand.
• 43:10
  I think that's the thing for me, really.
• 43:13
  I realize that, you know, having spent so much time trying to define
• 43:16
  what made Waterstone special, that idea of a strong brand is still
• 43:20
  the thing that I, I go back to.
• 43:22
  That's as far as my marketing expertise goes.
• 43:26
  It's being able to articulate and communicate some what makes a
• 43:30
  particular brand special and important and, and worthy of attention.
• 43:36
  Rupert Isaacson: So it's interesting too, just for the, for the, for the
• 43:39
  listeners, I would say that two of the most, the best books I've ever read,
• 43:43
  which is the Master Margarita Bov, and by Night Under the Stone Bridge by
• 43:50
  Leo Pertz, were both harville, books.
• 43:54
  So yes, when you talk about this quality, I, I remember just those two
• 44:00
  books alone were life changes for me.
• 44:03
  So I Was that what you saw?
• 44:06
  John Mitchinson: yeah, and it, I mean, just a bit of the history it
• 44:09
  was, it was Harville, was, was, Was the invention of two extraordinary
• 44:14
  women, after the war, mana Harari and Marjorie Villa, which is Hart and Vil.
• 44:20
  And they were determined, I suppose, to that literature could prevent war.
• 44:27
  You know, it was a kind of, it was a classic sort of war 19, late 1940s.
• 44:33
  And they were responsible for publishing the first English
• 44:36
  language version of Paac.
• 44:39
  Feltrinelli had published it in Italy, and they got the English translation done.
• 44:42
  So it started with this idea that, we, you know, if we read the
• 44:47
  literature of other countries, were less likely to end up invading them.
• 44:51
  I mean, I, and it's very crude.
• 44:53
  So that, and that had been developed through the, the, the sixties and into the
• 44:58
  seventies when really, truly remarkable.
• 45:01
  Publisher called.
• 45:03
  Christopher Mcz had had taken it over as, and he'd added other writers, George,
• 45:09
  McDonald Fraser, great storyteller.
• 45:11
  And some of them were quite commercial writers like Gerald Seymour, but
• 45:14
  also Richard Ford, the great American novelist, Raymond Carver, great
• 45:18
  short story writer, Peter Matheson.
• 45:21
  So, there was an amazing combination of both English language writers and
• 45:24
  writers, and, I mean, and it is, it, I think until relatively recently,
• 45:29
  it was the absolute best list of, of great writing and translation and
• 45:34
  as well as Pastor Na and Bob Garko.
• 45:36
  It also had vastly Grossman's life and fate.
• 45:39
  P probably, I would say the great novel of the of, of the, of the Second
• 45:43
  World War, one of the great novels.
• 45:44
  Tell us, tell us again what
• 45:44
  Rupert Isaacson: that is for those
• 45:45
  John Mitchinson: of us who want to write, that's Vly.
• 45:46
  Grossman's, life and Fate,
• 45:49
  Rupert Isaacson: VLY Grossman's Life and Fate.
• 45:50
  This is one we should all read.
• 45:51
  John Mitchinson: Ab Yeah.
• 45:53
  and interesting more recently that a, a new, a new book called Stalingrad,
• 45:56
  his book on Stalin, his novel on Stalingrad has finally been translated.
• 46:00
  But life and Fate is, is I think generally considered to be pa perhaps
• 46:05
  the greatest novel of the, of, of, of the, of the Second World War.
• 46:10
  and Soja Nisson was also on the Harvard list.
• 46:13
  It's an amazing list of writers.
• 46:15
  And, you know, more recently Christopher had discovered Peter,
• 46:19
  her, who Miss Miller's feeling for Snow, pretty much started the, what
• 46:24
  you might call the Nordic Noir, genre of, of Scandinavian crime fiction.
• 46:30
  Henning Mankell was on the Harvard list, another great scan, Scandinavian crime.
• 46:34
  so great joyous.
• 46:37
  and when I was there, I got to publish, I would say certainly three, four writers
• 46:43
  that have remained important to me.
• 46:45
  One was Haruki Murakami, who is now, we, we, we published, he'd been
• 46:51
  published once before in the uk, but we published the Windup Bird Chronicle,
• 46:56
  which was the breakout novel for him.
• 46:58
  And then give us the name again.
• 46:59
  The Windup Bird Chronicle the Wind Up by Mira.
• 47:03
  Often he's, you know, generally considered one of.
• 47:07
  Perhaps Japan's greatest modern novelist.
• 47:10
  And that book, again, is another, another World War II book in lots
• 47:14
  of ways, although it's, it's like a mashup between a, a kind of, world
• 47:19
  War II movie and a studio Ghibli film.
• 47:24
  He's the most, he is.
• 47:25
  If you've not read Burak, you should, you should read, and that's, and I would
• 47:28
  say, what's, what's a Studio Ghibli film?
• 47:30
  So Studio Ghibli is, spirited away, the great, Miyazaki Hi Zaki, who makes
• 47:38
  the most extraordinary, animated films, ah, of which, spirited it away.
• 47:42
  Hows, hows Moving Castle?
• 47:45
  my neighbor Totoro.
• 47:47
  Yes.
• 47:47
  they are most fabulous, imaginative, kind of, and.
• 47:53
  Also seemed somehow to be universal in a way, while also being extremely
• 47:58
  Japanese, certainly spirited away.
• 48:00
  So you got to publish this guy.
• 48:01
  And so Mukai has, has, has, has that kind of energy.
• 48:06
  But also he's also a gr a, I think, a great storyteller
• 48:09
  and, and, and loves jazz.
• 48:11
  He's very, so I published him and I published, what subsequently become
• 48:16
  one of my gr probably my, one of my great literary heroes, which is William
• 48:20
  Maxwell, who was fiction editor at the, at the New Yorker for 40 years.
• 48:25
  So maybe I respond to Maxwell because he was a, he was an enabler
• 48:29
  of stories as well as writer of, of incredibly beautiful stories.
• 48:34
  What, what book by Maxwell should we read?
• 48:37
  You should read, you should read, so Long C Tomorrow, which was his late,
• 48:41
  it's his last novel published in 1980.
• 48:44
  and was, it didn't get in amazingly.
• 48:47
  Wasn't published in English until we did it in 1996.
• 48:52
  But Maxwell also wrote, the beginning of his life, a book called, they Came
• 48:58
  like swallows, which is one of the very small number of, of books that deals with
• 49:04
  the impact in his case, direct impact.
• 49:08
  His mother died in the 1918 flu epidemic.
• 49:12
  But I got to meet Maxwell in New York in.
• 49:16
  96 the year before he died, and that was one of my great moments.
• 49:22
  But Maxwell was, it was Maxwell's porch in Connecticut that Salinger,
• 49:28
  JD Salinger drove out to and read in one sitting the whole of, the story
• 49:35
  that became Catcher and the Rye.
• 49:37
  So Maxwell had published, you know, the great heroic period, Updyke Chi, Frank
• 49:44
  O'Connor of New Yorker fiction writers, and then was a writer to himself.
• 49:49
  So it was just a extraordinary quirk of fate that for some reason
• 49:53
  he'd never really been published properly in the UK before.
• 49:56
  So you, you and
• 49:57
  Rupert Isaacson: then, and you were a story enabler and you, you talk about
• 50:00
  this joy, this great joy, joyous time publishing these ex extraordinary people.
• 50:08
  John Mitchinson: Yeah.
• 50:09
  I mean, why don't you stay there forever?
• 50:11
  Okay.
• 50:14
  Yeah.
• 50:15
  That's a good question.
• 50:16
  Why don't we stay there forever?
• 50:18
  I think I had got, Christopher and I had a very good working relationship,
• 50:24
  but I think I was beginning to feel that, that the business wouldn't
• 50:31
  work as a business if, if we didn't do some things differently.
• 50:35
  I'd launched a paperback list.
• 50:38
  Christopher was very much the publisher.
• 50:40
  It is very much his, his, It was very much his baby.
• 50:44
  And he'd employed me and then, Rachel to, to help him.
• 50:47
  And, and I think we did.
• 50:48
  We, we, we made, we took it, we bought it out of Harper Collins.
• 50:51
  We made it successful and independent.
• 50:54
  I know, I think I was just at that point, I was at my, in my early
• 50:57
  thirties and he was in his late fifties.
• 50:59
  I can see now that's that, that, that what you want from life is slightly different.
• 51:05
  and we were not able to buy, you know, Christopher was very un unhappy about
• 51:12
  dealing with literary agents, which again, I completely now understand and see why.
• 51:18
  so I just, yeah, I think it was just, I started to get frustrated and I, I was,
• 51:23
  made an offer that I couldn't refuse.
• 51:26
  And, to go and be marketing director and deputy group publisher at the Orion Group,
• 51:32
  which is about that stage, about the fifth or sixth largest publisher in the uk.
• 51:37
  it was a, at a time, you know, we had young children.
• 51:40
  It was quite a big hike in salary.
• 51:43
  We just moved, we moved to the country in 1997 and I Great.
• 51:48
  So by the end of 1998, it seemed like a really perfect moment for, for me to, to
• 51:53
  do something new and then, That's what I, I did, we went and I went and did
• 52:00
  a year as marketing director, and then I realized that I really, I, I didn't
• 52:04
  really want to be marketing directors despite I was doing you, I was doing
• 52:09
  campaigns for very commercial stuff like May Bin and Penny Chene and David Seaman.
• 52:15
  you know, he was the England goalkeeper.
• 52:17
  And apart from, apart from sort of refining my, I, I learned a lot of stuff.
• 52:22
  I suppose I learned how big branded published authors were,
• 52:27
  were kind of how they worked.
• 52:29
  But the first possibility to run something directly myself came up and
• 52:33
  they, Orion bought a company called Castle, which were a large baggy,
• 52:39
  company that did lots of illustrated books, practical illustrated books.
• 52:42
  Rachel used to say they appear to publish five different books on corn dollies.
• 52:47
  And I said, yeah, that's true.
• 52:48
  A huge back list.
• 52:49
  Most of it, not very good.
• 52:51
  They had a reference company, but most of the language dictionaries had
• 52:54
  been in the deal had been taken off to another bit, part, part of the business.
• 52:59
  So I was left with some strange reference books, including the
• 53:02
  amazing, brewers phrase and Fable.
• 53:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Oh, that's for the, again, for those listeners who do not
• 53:08
  know this, go out now and order a copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
• 53:15
  All the stuff you've ever wondered where it comes from.
• 53:18
  It's in there.
• 53:19
  Sorry,
• 53:19
  John Mitchinson: go ahead.
• 53:20
  Written by an extraordinary, retired clergyman, like many of the, the
• 53:25
  reference books of the 19th century were called Ebenezer Carbon Brewer.
• 53:29
  And it is, it's a, it's an absolute treasure tro It is so,
• 53:33
  and a military history list.
• 53:35
  And I was sort of basically given the job of trying to make sense of all this,
• 53:41
  which was, so I, I, I, I, again, that was, we did a complete look at the brand
• 53:48
  and what it represented, and I got very excited in the history of, of Castle.
• 53:52
  Castle had been, John Castle had been a temperance campaigner from Manchester.
• 53:58
  And he'd started with, he'd started with, tea and coffee.
• 54:02
  So the idea I think was let's keep the, let's keep the working man's
• 54:07
  hands full of anything other than beer.
• 54:10
  and then he'd gone into newspapers and magazines, and then he gone
• 54:13
  into book publishing and in fact, the castle's, library was.
• 54:17
  Early prototype for what became, would've become Penguin.
• 54:20
  You know, the idea of doing classics cheaply for working people.
• 54:26
  And, and, and so I got quite interested in this, the, the deeper story of Castle,
• 54:31
  which had been lost over the years.
• 54:32
  And within Castle they had Mrs.
• 54:35
  Beaton and they had Ward Lock, they had other old publishing companies that,
• 54:39
  so it again, that kind of historical digging deep into history to find
• 54:44
  stories that illuminate the present.
• 54:46
  It was a very exciting time.
• 54:48
  And we, I was fortunate in that I, the Weinfeld and Nicholson,
• 54:53
  another distinguished English Publisher's illustrated list,
• 54:56
  had been thrown in with mine.
• 54:58
  So we, in, I inherited a, a, some great editors and a couple of amazing projects.
• 55:05
  we had, I think acquired two books by Triny and Susanna, who were, doing
• 55:12
  a column call about telling people, telling women what to wear, basically.
• 55:16
  Very kind of a, and despite the skepticism about that, I remember them.
• 55:20
  Yeah, there were some, when I, when I, when I met them, I thought, one day
• 55:23
  you'll make television and you'll make, you're gonna be, you are gonna be huge.
• 55:26
  Which is more or less what happened.
• 55:28
  Yeah.
• 55:28
  And then also we had the lovely Michael Palin, and he had come to
• 55:33
  us from the b BBC because we had undertaken to do his book on Hemingway.
• 55:38
  Which he really was a passion project for him, and he had
• 55:42
  enjoyed that experience so much.
• 55:44
  We got to do the next, the next two big books with him, which were,
• 55:49
  Sahara and Himalaya and Sahara.
• 55:52
  I'd, I'd left Castle by the time, Himalaya came out.
• 55:55
  But Sahara was the only time I've ever paid a million pounds for a, for a,
• 56:01
  but it was, I think they earned it.
• 56:02
  I mean, it was earned back almost immediately.
• 56:04
  But also that my other, my kind of, in terms of ones publishing excitement,
• 56:10
  that was the first Frankfurt I went to.
• 56:14
  Castle, I should say, was losing quite a lot of money.
• 56:17
  Frank Festival.
• 56:17
  Yeah.
• 56:17
  So Frankfurt is a, is, is a, is a book fair where you, we
• 56:20
  go to buy and sell rights.
• 56:22
  Really, it's not a place for the, it's not a place for the uninitiated.
• 56:26
  It's not a place for readers or for writers to be honest.
• 56:29
  It's where publishers go and try and do business and is amazing.
• 56:32
  And we're set up by George Weidenfeld again in that after war period thinking,
• 56:37
  you know, we need, we books are what we need to bring the world together.
• 56:40
  And some part of that spirit still remained.
• 56:42
  But I knew that we had lost a lot of castles, losing a lot of money.
• 56:46
  I'd had to, I'd had to restructure, I'd had to make, to make quite a few
• 56:49
  redundancies, but I knew that we needed a big book and that was when I was.
• 56:54
  Just by happenstance.
• 56:55
  founder, an American publisher called Chronicle, who had been given the rights
• 57:01
  to publish the Beatles anthology, and were looking for a British partner.
• 57:05
  and I had assumed that they would much more likely go to, to a, a
• 57:10
  much bigger house than than we were.
• 57:13
  but in fact, I think such was my passion for the book and possibly my desperation.
• 57:21
  but, that was, we did offer quite a bit of, we offered up 300,000 pounds,
• 57:25
  but it was, you know, people forget it was a 35 pound book back in 2000,
• 57:30
  and it was, it went to number one and we sold half a million copies.
• 57:34
  Pretty extraordinary.
• 57:36
  and that, that was, that gave us, that bought us a bit of time to do
• 57:41
  other things and to it, you know, to bring the, the, the Michael Palins on.
• 57:45
  And, we, we started an amazing, under the mentorship of Antony Cheatham,
• 57:50
  who with Christopher is an, these, these are two extraordinary publishers
• 57:55
  that I've learned massively from.
• 57:57
  But we reinvented the reference list.
• 58:01
  I mean, the idea was to do reference, I would now call it alt reference.
• 58:05
  It's the idea of reference list that's sort of written by human
• 58:08
  beings rather than by faceless panels of academics, which is where
• 58:12
  reference publishing had come.
• 58:13
  So there was.
• 58:15
  The amazing dolling, kindly visual thing.
• 58:18
  But I was trying to find people.
• 58:20
  So I got, you know, we, we were, we did Bri, we did a,
• 58:25
  we'd expanded the Brewers Range.
• 58:27
  We did Brewers Place names, we did Brewers, which was sort of Bri,
• 58:31
  British and Irish Place names.
• 58:33
  And we did books of reference, books of adventures.
• 58:37
  We did, amazing kind of, people's, places, nations, you know, the idea
• 58:42
  of nobody knows which tribes live where, you know, who, who are all these
• 58:47
  people being mentioned in the Bible.
• 58:49
  And we commissioned quite a lot of very, very good people.
• 58:51
  We did amazing timelines of British history with, with, with a lot of
• 58:54
  very, very good, great editorial team.
• 58:58
  And that was, yeah, that was a, I also did, I published,
• 59:04
  Jonathan Green, the Great Slang Lexicographer we had inherited.
• 59:08
  And we did a book called The Big, the Big Book of Filth, which was, you know,
• 59:13
  you'd Love, which is just massive.
• 59:15
  All the synonyms for various parts of the human body.
• 59:20
  Rupert Isaacson: Do you have a favorite?
• 59:21
  John Mitchinson: That's too, yeah, that's too, I mean, I think.
• 59:27
  You say what you like.
• 59:28
  Yeah, no, I think, I think it was, there's something, I think the, the,
• 59:32
  the, the idea of kidney brush for penis was, was particularly kidney brush.
• 59:39
  Exactly.
• 59:40
  It's that moment of incomprehension before.
• 59:42
  Yeah.
• 59:43
  Then the penny horribly drops.
• 59:45
  Yeah.
• 59:46
  It was, it what was as fascinating as we discovered there were as many, oh,
• 59:49
  you came up with that one as genius.
• 59:51
  I mean, it was just, it was historical.
• 59:52
  That's the thing that, and the, so the idea was it was taking, it was
• 59:55
  taking all the rude bits of, of this extraordinary amazing work of reference.
• 1:00:00
  I mean, one of the great reference works of the 20th century.
• 1:00:03
  If, if I was, if anybody was gonna say, you know, surely one non person
• 1:00:07
  now can't, can't actually run a, run a, a serious, academic reference, but
• 1:00:13
  then green's dictionary of, of slang.
• 1:00:15
  It is one of the, it's one of the great works and it's still available and I
• 1:00:20
  think you can, you, you know, it's now a huge three volume set, but I think
• 1:00:24
  you can still get that maybe the, a version of the Castle Slim Down version.
• 1:00:28
  I don't think the big book of filth lasted.
• 1:00:31
  I think we're not gonna run out and get it.
• 1:00:32
  Well, we sold, I think we sold, we sold, I made Jonathan Money, which his,
• 1:00:37
  his actual academic stuff never did.
• 1:00:39
  He made quite a bit of money in that.
• 1:00:41
  So, We had a lot of fun.
• 1:00:43
  And then you're gonna ask, why did I stop doing that?
• 1:00:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, you could have played among the kidney brushes forever.
• 1:00:49
  Yes.
• 1:00:49
  What, why not?
• 1:00:50
  What,
• 1:00:50
  John Mitchinson: what happened was, as is the want in publishing is Castle
• 1:00:55
  and Orion were bought by Hash Hash, this extraordinarily large business
• 1:01:01
  owned by, which owns as well as publishing, I think Laga own Hash
• 1:01:08
  and own l and also make exo missiles.
• 1:01:11
  It's the only, the French could come up with this insane combination.
• 1:01:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Hash actually published me as well, that the
• 1:01:18
  Horse Boys published by Hasher.
• 1:01:19
  So one of their many subsidiaries.
• 1:01:21
  John Mitchinson: Yeah.
• 1:01:22
  So we had, castle was, , not yet quite outta the woods, although
• 1:01:29
  it would become very much outta the woods the year after I left.
• 1:01:32
  But it was on its way there and they decided that they were acquiring as part
• 1:01:38
  of, the, they were gonna quite octopus publishing, which were a specialist.
• 1:01:42
  Very, very good.
• 1:01:44
  illustrated reference publisher, Mitchell Beasley and various bits and pieces that,
• 1:01:50
  so there was a bit of a clash there.
• 1:01:51
  And they decided that what they were going to do was, merge Octopus and Castle.
• 1:01:57
  So Castle would become a kind of an imprint of octopus and
• 1:02:02
  the denfeld bits of the castle.
• 1:02:04
  Were gonna go back to Weidenfeld Thelist, which was, I mean, I, it was three, I
• 1:02:10
  felt it was three years of work that was now being brutally torn apart.
• 1:02:15
  And I went and had lunch.
• 1:02:18
  Anton and I used to have lunch at a marvelous restaurant called Luigi's.
• 1:02:21
  We'd have the same on a Thursday and we'd have Ossa Buco, which was
• 1:02:26
  very good, and a bottle of Hannah now, which is a Sardinian wine.
• 1:02:31
  And then we would go through all the week's business together.
• 1:02:34
  So we had one of these lunches and he's, I said, this is, he said, well, look, you
• 1:02:38
  can go and run Castle down in Heron Keys.
• 1:02:42
  Which was like really long way down the can, sort of Canary Wharf
• 1:02:47
  down in the London and doesn't know I live, I live in great shoe.
• 1:02:50
  Yeah.
• 1:02:51
  Rupert Isaacson: Which would've been, adopt three hour,
• 1:02:54
  three hour commute or so.
• 1:02:56
  John Mitchinson: So, or he said, you can go and be deputy
• 1:02:58
  publisher of, of, of Denfeld.
• 1:03:02
  Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  So I said, well, deputy publisher of anything sounds like a terrible
• 1:03:06
  idea because you, if you remember Anthony, you made me deputy group
• 1:03:09
  publisher of the Orion group, but then failed to tell any of my colleagues
• 1:03:13
  is that, that that's what the job you'd given me was so classic Chitum.
• 1:03:18
  So we laughed and I decided no.
• 1:03:20
  I said, what would I, what, what if I left?
• 1:03:22
  What, what could you get me?
• 1:03:23
  I said, well, I could probably get you a, I make you redundant,
• 1:03:25
  give you a year's salary.
• 1:03:27
  So I suddenly thought, you know what?
• 1:03:32
  That doesn't sound like a bad idea.
• 1:03:34
  I thought, I'm sure I'd get a job very quickly.
• 1:03:38
  And indeed, I was offered very, very quickly.
• 1:03:40
  I, I told the, the, the, the Uber agent, ed Victor, that I was leaving,
• 1:03:46
  and he just said Ed had done a, he was very impressed with a couple of
• 1:03:49
  the books that we were publishing.
• 1:03:51
  We did a big, beautiful science, it was called the Science Book.
• 1:03:55
  And it was a timeline of the most important things that had
• 1:03:59
  happened in science with a really big, beautiful illustrations.
• 1:04:01
  And we, we were sort of, you know, selling that for 25, 30 quid, I think.
• 1:04:07
  And he'd loved this.
• 1:04:09
  so he rang Victoria Barnsley, who was then head of Harper Collins, and
• 1:04:15
  I got called in for, an interview and it, that turned out that they,
• 1:04:21
  they offered me a, a big job.
• 1:04:23
  What was the job they offered you?
• 1:04:25
  They offered me the job of, they were gonna start a new literary
• 1:04:27
  division called Harper Press.
• 1:04:30
  and they asked me if they, if, if I wanted to do it.
• 1:04:33
  Rupert Isaacson: And you said,
• 1:04:35
  John Mitchinson: and I, I said, yeah, sounds great.
• 1:04:38
  And then, What happened was, I, by this stage was, was obviously living in great
• 1:04:45
  chew and enjoying the joys of that.
• 1:04:47
  And, and this legendary character who had lived in Great Chew, got married in
• 1:04:51
  great ch and had not, but had not lived there for a while, had suddenly moved
• 1:04:54
  back into the village as man called John Lloyd, who was famous as the early
• 1:04:59
  collaborator with Douglas Adams, the man who'd produced, not the nine o'clock
• 1:05:03
  News and, black Adda and written one of my favorite little books, which is
• 1:05:08
  the meaning of Lift Lift Douglas Adams.
• 1:05:10
  Rupert Isaacson: I just wanna pause there for a second.
• 1:05:12
  For anyone who's listening in the usa a lot of you might know Black adda.
• 1:05:16
  but if you don't know blackout, you should go watch Black adda.
• 1:05:19
  It's a TV series, but if you never knew, not the nine o'clock News, which was
• 1:05:23
  a classic British comedy inheritor of Monty Python, from the eighties, go
• 1:05:30
  look at that on YouTube too, because it, it is a work of genius and only
• 1:05:34
  Brits of a certain, generation now.
• 1:05:36
  All right, back to you, John.
• 1:05:37
  So you meet John Lloyd in the pub, probably in, great two.
• 1:05:41
  John Mitchinson: Yeah, well, John and I got on very well, and that was,
• 1:05:45
  and he kept telling me that he had had this extraordinary idea, and
• 1:05:51
  then wouldn't tell me what the idea was, but said it was life changing.
• 1:05:55
  and then we, I told him that I was leaving Castle and that I was
• 1:06:01
  gonna go to Harper Collins and he said, I'm about to go skiing.
• 1:06:05
  Please don't accept the job until I get back.
• 1:06:07
  Cause I think he said I might have got money to do this thing that I'm doing.
• 1:06:11
  So I said, well, okay, when are you about two away for a week.
• 1:06:14
  Anyway, we, when he got back, we went and we did have a, in, in fact
• 1:06:17
  a very, very long session in the pub.
• 1:06:20
  And that was when he told me he wanted to set, start a company that was dedicated
• 1:06:25
  to Interestingness in all its forms.
• 1:06:27
  So I said, okay, but define Interestingness.
• 1:06:31
  So he told me three stories, one of which I'm sure, I'm sure I've told you
• 1:06:36
  all of them in the one of which was that when his son Harry was born, he
• 1:06:40
  decided he was gonna read the whole of Encyclopedia Botanica so that
• 1:06:43
  he would be the best informed dad.
• 1:06:46
  And he said it was so boring, so tedious.
• 1:06:50
  He got to the fairly early on to the, the thing on basketball.
• 1:06:55
  And he said it was like, it was, it was almost like the article
• 1:06:59
  on basketball was constructed to not make you want to read it.
• 1:07:03
  And he said right in the middle of all these, you know,
• 1:07:06
  court dimensions and rules.
• 1:07:08
  And there was this extraordinary story, which was that, it had been invented
• 1:07:13
  by a Canadian and called I think James Naysmith, who was entering a competition
• 1:07:19
  for a new sport for American high schools.
• 1:07:22
  And he had, you know, been sketching things out, ideas and was.
• 1:07:27
  Scratching up bits of paper and throwing them and, and, and, and,
• 1:07:31
  you know, one of them went into the basket and he suddenly had the eureka
• 1:07:34
  moment, went out and nailed a couple of peach baskets into the gymnasium.
• 1:07:39
  And, basketball was born.
• 1:07:42
  But that isn't the, that isn't the qi bit of the story.
• 1:07:45
  The qi bit of the story is that for the first 21 years of basket's, woo's
• 1:07:49
  existence, it never occurred to anybody to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket.
• 1:07:53
  So every time a basket was scored, you had to get on a step
• 1:07:56
  ladder and get the ball out.
• 1:08:00
  So that
• 1:08:01
  also as a stately
• 1:08:02
  game, a stately program.
• 1:08:04
  That was one story.
• 1:08:05
  The other, other was, ok, who have did the,
• 1:08:08
  Rupert Isaacson: did the, did the players have to carry ladders over
• 1:08:11
  their shoulders as they dribbled?
• 1:08:12
  Is that
• 1:08:13
  John Mitchinson: what you dribble?
• 1:08:14
  Okay, go ahead.
• 1:08:14
  Sorry.
• 1:08:16
  It's a kangaroo halve.
• 1:08:17
  So I said, I don't know one.
• 1:08:18
  No, it's three.
• 1:08:20
  And he said, you know, how many, how many David Attenborough documentaries, how
• 1:08:23
  many natural world documentaries have you watched where this extraordinary
• 1:08:27
  fact is never even mentioned?
• 1:08:29
  and it, it does turn out to be true.
• 1:08:31
  And then the third one was, he said, do you know what a tardigrade is?
• 1:08:34
  And tardigrades are now big on the internet, but back in 2000 and one, the,
• 1:08:40
  the idea of these tiny little, water bears, moss, bears these little six legged
• 1:08:45
  creatures that are somewhere between ana lids and insects that live on every
• 1:08:50
  environment on earth and are able, the extraordinary thing about them is that
• 1:08:53
  they, if you dehydrate a tardigrade, it can live in a state of suspended animation
• 1:08:59
  for as long as a century and come back to life with a single drop of water.
• 1:09:03
  So they are, so anyway, I was kind of, you can sort of see that this was already
• 1:09:09
  chiming with the kind of reference books that I was trying to do reference, you
• 1:09:14
  know, the idea that that good, but good communication, good storytelling is about
• 1:09:19
  getting people's attention and telling them things that they didn't know and
• 1:09:23
  making the world feel, you know, like a more interesting and wonderful place
• 1:09:28
  because it is, if you look at anything however dull, so one of the early, I
• 1:09:33
  remember one of the early QI challenges we used to get was, give me a name of
• 1:09:37
  Your town, if you think it's the most boring town in England, and we'll come
• 1:09:40
  back with interesting things about it.
• 1:09:42
  And I think somebody sent us Chelmsford and we ended up doing,
• 1:09:47
  you know, 20 pages of deep research into Chelmsford, which made it sound
• 1:09:50
  like, you know, frankly Venice.
• 1:09:52
  So, yeah, that was, that was, and I'm afraid, I remember going home and telling
• 1:09:57
  Rachel, my wife, that I was going to.
• 1:10:00
  I was gonna start a new business with John Lloyd, and she said, but
• 1:10:03
  how will you get anything done?
• 1:10:05
  You'll just spend all day talking.
• 1:10:07
  And I thought, yeah, I don't know.
• 1:10:09
  But we, anyway, we did, and I think there, the Qi TV show now is on,
• 1:10:18
  it's somewhere past p it's on its way to, to, to ending the alphabet.
• 1:10:23
  And we did, I wrote and co-wrote 10, 10 qi books with John.
• 1:10:29
  The first one.
• 1:10:31
  The first one was sold over 2 million copies, was number one
• 1:10:35
  on Amazon for six weeks and sold in 30 languages across the world.
• 1:10:40
  so yeah, so I then, that was my stint as a, as a, as a brighter, and then,
• 1:10:45
  well, hold on, hold on, hold on.
• 1:10:46
  No, no.
• 1:10:46
  Director of research.
• 1:10:48
  Rupert Isaacson: So you, you, you're about to take the big
• 1:10:50
  paying job that's going to Yeah.
• 1:10:53
  Also, you know, pay for your kids education and feed them.
• 1:10:55
  Then you go home and tell your wife, sorry, I'm not gonna do that.
• 1:10:59
  gonna, sit in the pub and talk to this friend of mine who admittedly does do
• 1:11:04
  interesting TV shows about interesting stuff and hope to publish and make
• 1:11:09
  TV shows about interesting stuff.
• 1:11:10
  can you show us, I can see you on Zoom, but our listeners can't,
• 1:11:15
  but I can't see the dent in your head where the frying pan.
• 1:11:18
  Must have landed.
• 1:11:19
  is it, have you, is it discreetly on the back of your edit?
• 1:11:22
  You still, you
• 1:11:22
  John Mitchinson: still had, you still had fax machines back in those days?
• 1:11:26
  And I know, Rachel did actually cry actual tears when that fact I
• 1:11:31
  sent that fax through to Victoria Parsley, and it is, it is sort of
• 1:11:35
  true that I would've been earning back in 2001 more than I'm still,
• 1:11:40
  than I'm still managing to earn today.
• 1:11:42
  So, but hey, we did, we made a, we did make a bit, we made a bit of, we
• 1:11:46
  had a nice, there was a nice period where the book royalties more than
• 1:11:50
  made up for my, that that was that.
• 1:11:53
  And that did coincide with a period when we were having, it was nice.
• 1:11:56
  We were able to go three times with the boys to New Zealand when they
• 1:12:00
  were young enough to really enjoy it.
• 1:12:02
  but yeah, I mean, I would broadly say that for any of your listeners who are
• 1:12:06
  thinking about a career in, in books and publishing, i, I, if, if money
• 1:12:09
  is your number one priority, it's probably not the right industry for you.
• 1:12:13
  So let me
• 1:12:13
  Rupert Isaacson: ask you a question here, because people will be listening to it
• 1:12:16
  and, when you say things work well.
• 1:12:18
  Well, I paid this million pound, price for Michael Palin's book
• 1:12:23
  back in the days when a million was worth a lot more than it is now.
• 1:12:27
  And there you are making a TV show, called qi, which is still
• 1:12:32
  running, hosted by Steven Fry.
• 1:12:34
  It's a big machine internationally.
• 1:12:38
  Everybody knows that television is well paid.
• 1:12:40
  Everyone thinks about royalties and so on.
• 1:12:42
  So, Now you're gonna burst our bubble.
• 1:12:46
  If you are, if you are, paying these million pound, book advances and
• 1:12:51
  you are helping to get a amazing TV machine and publishing machine like Qi
• 1:12:58
  going and, you are not sitting there now as a privately wealthy English
• 1:13:04
  Square multimillionaire from, why not?
• 1:13:08
  Why the fuck not?
• 1:13:09
  What happened?
• 1:13:09
  Why, why it This is, this is cuz we want to live free, ride free.
• 1:13:14
  So Sure.
• 1:13:15
  Why does that money not go to you?
• 1:13:17
  John Mitchinson: well some, so what bits of it?
• 1:13:19
  But yeah, some of it does.
• 1:13:21
  I possibly, I mean, I think there was a, I mean there were specific reasons.
• 1:13:26
  I think this, I think with Qi, I had come to the, I mean, I still, you know,
• 1:13:31
  John and I still very good friends and, the books, as I say, still make
• 1:13:35
  small amounts of royalty for the books.
• 1:13:36
  But I think there must be, there must be something in me that
• 1:13:40
  requires a degree of freedom.
• 1:13:43
  I mean, I'm, I now, I mean, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, started Unbound on
• 1:13:48
  the, I I hadn't really wanted to start it, but two friends of mine had said
• 1:13:52
  something has to happen about publishing.
• 1:13:54
  And I'd said, you're right.
• 1:13:55
  I, I left publishing actually by this, the time I left publishing, I was, I,
• 1:13:59
  I was fed up with it, fed up with all the, The, the, the the, as I think I,
• 1:14:04
  I once said, it sort of has bad karma publishing a lot of people saying no to
• 1:14:08
  each other all the time about everything.
• 1:14:10
  but so the idea of using, I'd become aware in that period, which was I
• 1:14:15
  suppose 2008, 2007, 2008, it'd been hanging around with a lot of the
• 1:14:21
  Web two zero people in, in London.
• 1:14:24
  And I've become just aware of the launch of a thing called Kickstarter, which was
• 1:14:28
  seemed to me quite interesting, which was to get, go directly to, to people
• 1:14:32
  to fund interesting creative projects.
• 1:14:35
  And it seemed to me, I knew somebody who'd got a book, a terrible book
• 1:14:40
  by the way, funded on Kickstarter.
• 1:14:42
  And he was ringing me up saying, can you tell me where I could get it printed?
• 1:14:45
  Cuz obviously the thing with Kickstarter is you have to do
• 1:14:47
  all the fulfillment yourself.
• 1:14:48
  I thought this is stupid.
• 1:14:49
  What, what we really need is you, you want to, you know, you want
• 1:14:53
  to set up a publishing house that uses crowdfunding, but that also
• 1:14:56
  offers all the other services.
• 1:14:58
  You know, editorial marketing, sales gets books into bookshops cuz that's
• 1:15:02
  in the end where they will sell.
• 1:15:04
  So that's how Unbound started.
• 1:15:06
  And I, as I said, I was slightly reluctant to, you know, I was at that
• 1:15:09
  stage, QI was ticking along quite nicely.
• 1:15:12
  I was writing on the shows, the books were still, I still working on the
• 1:15:16
  books, but suddenly this new idea presented itself and it was obvious
• 1:15:23
  to me that my experience was pretty essential if it was gonna work.
• 1:15:27
  So, Spent two years not getting really paid.
• 1:15:31
  And then at a certain point I was able to pay myself a small salary and I've
• 1:15:37
  been mostly doing Unbound ever since.
• 1:15:40
  Rupert Isaacson: And now on.
• 1:15:41
  Okay, so This's, you didn't answer our question earlier.
• 1:15:45
  No, I'm coming back.
• 1:15:46
  Why you, okay.
• 1:15:47
  So why, why are you, are you, why are you not the you is the, is the wider
• 1:15:52
  people within the publishing world?
• 1:15:54
  Well, I mean, why the publishers and the people working in publishing, not
• 1:15:57
  making the sort of money that you would expect them to if they're paying million
• 1:16:01
  pound book advances here and there.
• 1:16:03
  Oh, I
• 1:16:03
  John Mitchinson: think, I think I would be making a lot, if I'd
• 1:16:05
  stayed in tradi in, in traditional publishing, I'd be making a, I'd be on
• 1:16:09
  a, but you know, I'd be on a salary.
• 1:16:11
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:16:12
  I'd be on a good salary.
• 1:16:13
  I'd be on a big bonus probably, but I would've ultimately not be free.
• 1:16:17
  I would be having to publish the kind of books that, and I, I think I'd
• 1:16:23
  already demonstrated that I didn't really, I wasn't very good at that.
• 1:16:26
  I was always interested in trying to, to find stuff.
• 1:16:30
  I was always really, I cared more about literary quality
• 1:16:34
  than, than commercial success.
• 1:16:36
  Sometimes when I, when I, you know, when I, when I, you know, like The
• 1:16:40
  Beatles or with, with some of the other, or with the, well, like, well,
• 1:16:44
  my own book, you know, with the, with a book of general ignorance.
• 1:16:47
  I think I've got, it's not that I don't think I have good commercial instincts.
• 1:16:51
  I just think I have a very, very low boredom threshold.
• 1:16:54
  So I want the books to be both.
• 1:16:57
  Good and commercially successful.
• 1:17:00
  And if they're good and not commercially successful, I can live with that
• 1:17:04
  more easily than just working in a sausage factory churning out big name
• 1:17:09
  thriller after big name thriller.
• 1:17:11
  So it's my own particular reasons for why I'm not more in independently wealthy
• 1:17:19
  are probably to do with, that's probably more, that's probably a longer show to
• 1:17:23
  do with who I am and where I come from and how I never really grew up with
• 1:17:28
  anybody who had ever had any money.
• 1:17:30
  So I've never really indeed, but
• 1:17:31
  Rupert Isaacson: I But it's not just you.
• 1:17:32
  I mean, I think, I think No, as you said, people in general in publishing
• 1:17:36
  don't, do not get paid that well, despite the fact that it's an industry
• 1:17:39
  that generates a lot of money.
• 1:17:41
  John Mitchinson: The senior people, the people of my generation who
• 1:17:44
  stayed in big jobs in pub, if I'd stayed in Harper Collins and assumed,
• 1:17:48
  let's assume I hadn't gone mad.
• 1:17:52
  If I, I, I would be now earning, I'd be earning a, you know, perfectly comfortable
• 1:17:57
  salary to, to me know, I would own my own house and I would be, I'd be living a,
• 1:18:03
  I'd probably be contemplating retirement.
• 1:18:06
  but I'm not, and I, you know, I think that, I think independent publishers,
• 1:18:14
  it's much more of a struggle.
• 1:18:15
  It is just much more of a struggle cuz you're trying to, you know,
• 1:18:18
  you're, by definition, unless you get an amazing hit, which, you know,
• 1:18:22
  luckily with Unbound, I've had enough amazing hits over the last 12 years to
• 1:18:27
  mean that we not only have survived, but thrive and now make a profit.
• 1:18:30
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:18:31
  So, and I still, you may contemplate retirement.
• 1:18:34
  Sorry.
• 1:18:35
  You may yet contemplate retirement.
• 1:18:38
  John Mitchinson: Well, the only, if I, if you're gonna ask me, do I, you
• 1:18:41
  know, which you haven't, but let's assume that you would what for us?
• 1:18:45
  What, what is the, what other things that you feel that you haven't done?
• 1:18:49
  I mean, the, the only thing I think now, which I said to you in the pub the
• 1:18:53
  other day, which I feel I have got to, it's the one thing I need to fulfill.
• 1:18:58
  Um, and I can, I can rest easy is I've never, I've never published a
• 1:19:03
  book of my own under my own names and I'm a good, I know, I think that
• 1:19:09
  is because I am good collaborator.
• 1:19:11
  I mean, I enjoy, you know, I love the, the other thing that I've done in the
• 1:19:15
  last six, seven years is to, is to launch a, the back listed podcast, which is,
• 1:19:20
  it brought me a huge amount of joy.
• 1:19:23
  So
• 1:19:23
  Rupert Isaacson: please tell us about that because, so you've done the
• 1:19:25
  last 10 years of this unbound Yeah.
• 1:19:28
  Uh, crowd.
• 1:19:29
  John Mitchinson: I've published some amazing
• 1:19:29
  Rupert Isaacson: books and we've watched some of the books that you've
• 1:19:32
  done and they're extraordinary.
• 1:19:33
  For the listeners, go and check out Unbound Publishing.
• 1:19:36
  It's.
• 1:19:37
  Full of phenomenal stuff that wouldn't have gotten published anywhere else.
• 1:19:41
  John has published these books and then absolutely caucus, but okay,
• 1:19:45
  so, but then you, you've started this podcast called Backlist, which
• 1:19:50
  has taken life of his back listed
• 1:19:52
  John Mitchinson: is, is, an idea I had with a, an old waterstones friend,
• 1:19:55
  Andy Miller, who had written, I'd seen him do a sh a a great, he has a book
• 1:19:59
  called The Year of Reading Dangerously where he, he set himself a, a task of
• 1:20:04
  reading 50 great novels in a year, as he says, 50 great novels and two bad ones.
• 1:20:09
  One of the bad ones was Dan Browns Ta Vinci Coat.
• 1:20:13
  But, it's very, very funny, but also very clever.
• 1:20:17
  Very, and I had, I had had independently the idea that why
• 1:20:24
  was the no John Peel for books?
• 1:20:26
  Why was the nobody
• 1:20:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Tell us again, not everyone knows John Peel
• 1:20:30
  John Mitchinson: because John was, John Peel was legend, legendary English dj.
• 1:20:34
  He used to play late night, kind of two hours late night most nights
• 1:20:38
  and many of the most interesting bands of the last 30, 40 years Yeah.
• 1:20:44
  Were 50 years even were discovered on his show.
• 1:20:48
  So he was a kind of, taste maker and it seemed to me that, that most of what was.
• 1:20:56
  Wrong with publishing was that there were very few places that you could
• 1:20:59
  go cuz literary, literary reviews were getting smaller in newspapers.
• 1:21:04
  And it just seemed to me that there was scope to do something where you had really
• 1:21:10
  intelligent conversation about books.
• 1:21:12
  But that the trick would be not cuz nobody is really, really, yeah.
• 1:21:17
  People like, sort of, people do like to talk about what I've discovered
• 1:21:22
  interviewing authors over the years is if you talk to an author about their own
• 1:21:26
  work, they're often quite re reticent or sometimes just not very interesting.
• 1:21:31
  If you talk to them about other people, other contemporaries work, they're
• 1:21:35
  usually not very forthcoming because they either haven't read it or don't want
• 1:21:41
  to, don't even want to contemplate it.
• 1:21:43
  But you ask them to talk about a book that meant something to them when they were,
• 1:21:47
  when they were growing up, or that they were, that that's, that that's been a
• 1:21:51
  load stone for them in their own writing.
• 1:21:54
  And you get an extra, you know, you barely have to do anything.
• 1:21:57
  You just get an extraordinary hour of, of the kind of intense, engaged,
• 1:22:03
  intelligent conversation, which I think we all enjoy having late night over
• 1:22:09
  a bottle of whiskey or you know, when we're, when we're meeting old friends
• 1:22:13
  again who haven't seen for ages.
• 1:22:15
  So that was the idea and seeing Andy doing his little talk, which
• 1:22:19
  was called Read Yourself Fitter.
• 1:22:21
  I said, do you fancy doing a pilot for a podcast?
• 1:22:24
  I've had this idea and we, so we did it.
• 1:22:26
  And then again with the first book we did was a beautiful book by JL Car called A
• 1:22:32
  Month in the Country, which is as close to perfection, I think as a small novel gets,
• 1:22:37
  and we had more or less the formula from day one and we've now done 188 episodes.
• 1:22:45
  and , we've been on sabbatical since Christmas, so the new bat listed episode
• 1:22:48
  on Graham Green, there are no guests.
• 1:22:51
  We normally invite guests and we get guests to choose the books, but
• 1:22:55
  we have had over nearly seven years of doing the podcast, Graham Green
• 1:23:00
  has probably been the writer that's been most requested by listeners.
• 1:23:04
  and we are both Graham Green fans, Andy in particular.
• 1:23:08
  So we decided, we just did it with our producer, Nikki.
• 1:23:11
  but that's the first of a new series and we, they come out fortnightly and we ask,
• 1:23:15
  as I say, we get interesting guests on to choose a book that they love, and.
• 1:23:22
  It's, it's, it's, it's that simple.
• 1:23:24
  But it's, it's, yeah, we get, we get big audience now.
• 1:23:27
  We have a Patreon, which actually is starting to make
• 1:23:30
  us quite nice money each month.
• 1:23:32
  So it's also, you know what podcasting's like, it's, it's just fun to do.
• 1:23:36
  Fun to do and easy to do.
• 1:23:38
  it's a lot of preparation doing, cuz we have to do a lot of reading.
• 1:23:41
  I mean, we thought blithely when we started it.
• 1:23:43
  Hey, we are well-read.
• 1:23:45
  Most of the books will have read already.
• 1:23:47
  I would say about one in seven we've read already.
• 1:23:51
  I mean the, what people choose.
• 1:23:52
  But it just means that we've been in the most incredible reading journal.
• 1:23:55
  I've read all sorts of things I would never have read.
• 1:23:58
  and it what stands out?
• 1:24:00
  Rupert Isaacson: What stands out as one that you would
• 1:24:01
  never have read that has been
• 1:24:03
  John Mitchinson: Revelator?
• 1:24:04
  Okay.
• 1:24:04
  There's, ones that I would never have read.
• 1:24:07
  I pr I'm, I'm not sure I would've, I would've read the English novelist
• 1:24:12
  Elizabeth Taylor, published by Vago or the Elizabeth Jenkins, the Tortoise
• 1:24:16
  in the Hair that Carmen Khalil, the great founder of vgo, came on
• 1:24:20
  as our guest to talk to me about.
• 1:24:22
  And the, the, the, the Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor and the, the Tortoise
• 1:24:27
  in the Hair by Elizabeth Jenkins, both novels of the 1950s written by
• 1:24:31
  women because of the ridiculous way in which literature is taught, those are
• 1:24:37
  books that men of my generation might easily not have, not not have read.
• 1:24:42
  and there indeed there are a lot we do have done a lot of.
• 1:24:45
  Are these, are these books we should, we should all have read?
• 1:24:47
  Yeah.
• 1:24:48
  I mean if you're, if you interested, ask quickly about those two.
• 1:24:51
  I mean, they're both, they're both, they're both basically, portrait,
• 1:24:55
  it may sound like both one of them are set in a small town.
• 1:24:59
  Elizabeth Taylor, one set in, in, in a, in a village, outside London.
• 1:25:04
  And, and both set in the 1950s, both with, complicated emotional
• 1:25:10
  relationships at their heart.
• 1:25:14
  And they are just immaculately beautifully written.
• 1:25:19
  It's the, the small detail.
• 1:25:22
  It's the, the, the, the surprising kind of character interactions.
• 1:25:27
  I reme.
• 1:25:27
  Yeah.
• 1:25:27
  There's, there are other writers.
• 1:25:29
  Barbara Cummins, amazing writer, the vet's daughter, lolly Willows by Sylvia Warner.
• 1:25:35
  A lot of the, I I now see 20th century literature as being very different cuz
• 1:25:41
  I've ended up reading Muriel Spark.
• 1:25:43
  I, I, in fact, I had to slow down on Muriel Spark cuz her books are so good.
• 1:25:47
  I don't want to run outta them.
• 1:25:48
  Anita Brook.
• 1:25:49
  Now another amazing that.
• 1:25:51
  So at the same time doing Alan Garner and Susan Cooper and doing, Both of whom
• 1:25:58
  Rupert Isaacson: are, are, are sort of
• 1:25:59
  John Mitchinson: classic, yeah.
• 1:26:00
  I mean, fantasy English, fantasy English
• 1:26:02
  Rupert Isaacson: mythology
• 1:26:03
  John Mitchinson: writers for children.
• 1:26:04
  Yeah.
• 1:26:04
  I mean, as, as the stuff which I would feel as, and, and, and obviously I've
• 1:26:08
  mentioned before, will the work of William Maxwell doing those books, all
• 1:26:11
  of those books that you would, I would naturally have seen as, as, as part of
• 1:26:16
  the, the stuff that I read and enjoy.
• 1:26:20
  I've, I, there's a lot of other stuff that I've, I've encountered, that,
• 1:26:25
  that, that I, and I, I would say that the absolute moment for me with back
• 1:26:30
  listed that that is, it's not always obscure books or relatively obscure books.
• 1:26:35
  We did great expectations and one of the reasons I wanted to do that was because
• 1:26:39
  I'd, I'd read it last as a child, you know, as an 18, 19 year old for my degree.
• 1:26:45
  And I've, I'd always loved that book and been terrified
• 1:26:48
  by the film a David Lean film.
• 1:26:52
  And then I read it in my early fifties and I suddenly realized, oh my God,
• 1:26:56
  this is a book about disappointment.
• 1:27:00
  the clues in the title, it's about your life not turning out how you expect it to.
• 1:27:05
  And no young person is gonna understand what Dickins was
• 1:27:08
  trying to do with that book.
• 1:27:10
  Yeah.
• 1:27:10
  So it's, it's, it's that.
• 1:27:12
  That thing of how great books live with you and you, you know, you go
• 1:27:15
  back to them and re-read them and find more in them each time you go
• 1:27:19
  back to them, which is a sort of definition of what literature is for me.
• 1:27:23
  Mm.
• 1:27:23
  A book that's that you get more out of the fourth time you read it.
• 1:27:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:27:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:27:28
  I would say that about Lord of the Rings as well, by the way, just
• 1:27:30
  keeping my talking theme going.
• 1:27:33
  And the Shire
• 1:27:34
  Rupert Isaacson: where you are now sitting telling us about these books.
• 1:27:36
  John Mitchinson: I'm not, I'm in Pembrokeshire.
• 1:27:38
  Oh, you
• 1:27:38
  Rupert Isaacson: are?
• 1:27:38
  Okay.
• 1:27:39
  Ah, you're, that's another version of the Shire that Sure.
• 1:27:42
  John Mitchinson: Yeah.
• 1:27:42
  It's, it's the Shire by the Sea.
• 1:27:44
  Exactly.
• 1:27:45
  Yeah.
• 1:27:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Shire on Sea.
• 1:27:47
  So with back listed, you've got really a coming together Yeah.
• 1:27:52
  Of this whole story where you, you've been gathering and enabling
• 1:27:57
  stories your whole life and including living in the place of story.
• 1:28:03
  And now here you are both enabling and creating story.
• 1:28:07
  You've done Qi the book of general ignorance, by the way, for everyone
• 1:28:12
  who's listening, you should go and, and read it should sit in
• 1:28:15
  everyone's toilet, sits in my toilet.
• 1:28:17
  It's the thing that you sit down, you open it at random and it's
• 1:28:21
  gonna be really, really interesting.
• 1:28:22
  Are you gonna actually people
• 1:28:24
  John Mitchinson: banging on the door?
• 1:28:25
  And also, can I say, if you, if the one of those books if you're reading
• 1:28:28
  the, the Book of the Dead, it's probably not the best title, but the,
• 1:28:31
  the, the, the Qi Book of the Dead, which is 69 lives thematically linked.
• 1:28:36
  There's a, there's a chapter in there about people who
• 1:28:38
  kept monkeys, for example.
• 1:28:40
  But you know, the first chapter is about, about people who had
• 1:28:44
  either absent or complicated relationships with their fathers.
• 1:28:47
  But it, I think that's probably the most ambitious of the Qi books that we did.
• 1:28:51
  The animal book is very good, but yeah, but I mean, the, the first, the first
• 1:28:55
  one always has a sort of, an affection, not least because it's so, it was so
• 1:28:59
  successful, but it's, it's, it's very, it's very amusing now when I interview
• 1:29:05
  people for jobs who are in their twenties or thirties and they kind of all grew up.
• 1:29:11
  It's like my own children, you know, they all grew up with Qi.
• 1:29:14
  Qi is now part of the culture.
• 1:29:15
  It's part of the, it's part of the cultural furniture of a lot of, a lot
• 1:29:19
  of, younger people, which, you know, in the long run, if one's looking back
• 1:29:24
  on one's life, that's, that's a, that's a really exciting and happy thing
• 1:29:27
  to have been able to, to, to create.
• 1:29:30
  and it, you know, the, the, the, the little me that used to sit at in the
• 1:29:35
  Northeast reading children's Britanica kind of finding out interesting facts
• 1:29:41
  about birds, it's been wonderful to be able to turn that into something that's.
• 1:29:46
  That's both been successful also, but I think culture we've made often people
• 1:29:51
  say to me, you made being a geek cool.
• 1:29:54
  You know, QI helped make, make people who were intelligent and
• 1:30:00
  interested in things, kind of, and not feel like they were weirdos.
• 1:30:05
  So that's, that's, that's a nice thing to think.
• 1:30:09
  So now you
• 1:30:10
  Rupert Isaacson: are, you are looking ahead.
• 1:30:12
  this is, this is, this is livery ripe, and, and you don't have the,
• 1:30:16
  either the personality type nor the luxury of saying, well, now I'm
• 1:30:21
  contemplating with my retirement.
• 1:30:23
  But also what would you do in your retirement other than
• 1:30:25
  do exactly what you're doing?
• 1:30:27
  I,
• 1:30:27
  John Mitchinson: I, and more, I have no, I have no use for the concept of retirement.
• 1:30:29
  I
• 1:30:30
  Rupert Isaacson: can't understand it myself.
• 1:30:31
  John Mitchinson: No more time, more time for, more time for reading.
• 1:30:34
  And I, I feel I've gathered together so much of, so many stories about
• 1:30:39
  the village, and I would love to try and weave all of that into
• 1:30:43
  something, that would be meaningful.
• 1:30:45
  So, I mean, I, I feel that's my, if people say what's, what's what, what,
• 1:30:50
  what unfinished business do you have?
• 1:30:52
  That's definitely, that definitely feels like unfinished business.
• 1:30:56
  And how, a bit more time John Mitchinson.
• 1:31:00
  Rupert Isaacson: I can see it, I can see the series, I can see
• 1:31:02
  the, the Downton Abbey, natural inheritance of, but over generations
• 1:31:07
  and generations in different eons.
• 1:31:09
  Perhaps starting Cree.
• 1:31:11
  No.
• 1:31:11
  This we have not touched on, by the way, is your, is your deep knowledge of
• 1:31:17
  the LA English landscape, its history and its mythology and its pre-history.
• 1:31:22
  John Mitchinson: Yeah, I think that's, that's the stuff that really, I, I,
• 1:31:27
  when we was talking about the authors that I published at Harville, Rachel
• 1:31:31
  and I were really thrilled one day we were kind of, an email came around
• 1:31:36
  saying, would you, would anybody in from this is in Christopher's voice?
• 1:31:40
  Would anybody be interested in reading the adult, an adult novel by Alan Garner?
• 1:31:44
  And I think Rachel's reply minor, right?
• 1:31:46
  Almost simultaneously with kind of like, yes.
• 1:31:49
  And, that started a, a relationship that we both had with Alan and his
• 1:31:54
  wife Zelda, which has been, and now with his daughter Elizabeth.
• 1:31:58
  And that's been one of the most nourishing and happy, publishing stories.
• 1:32:02
  We, we published Alan's book, strand Lo, Oprah, and then Thurs Bitch.
• 1:32:06
  And he is, if you are, I mean, he's a very, very tough model because
• 1:32:11
  what he does is so remarkable.
• 1:32:13
  And he's lived in the, literally in the same place for 60 odd years and cataloged
• 1:32:19
  every pot shirt, every kind of, every find, every, every, everything that's
• 1:32:25
  come out of the, the ground on that extraordinary site up in Cheshire for.
• 1:32:29
  And his way of distilling all that down into something that is
• 1:32:35
  beautiful and, and meaningful.
• 1:32:38
  And again, like I say, like a almost impossible to work out
• 1:32:45
  how so much has been compressed into so little, so few words.
• 1:32:49
  His, his late latest book, by the way, Ru, you've Not Read Trickle Walker, which was,
• 1:32:53
  shortlisted for the Booker Prize loss.
• 1:32:55
  He's the oldest person at 88 to be shortlisted for the Booker
• 1:32:58
  Prize, but that might be, well, I think it is his masterpiece.
• 1:33:03
  Oh, trickle Walker, which is Alan Garner.
• 1:33:05
  Yeah.
• 1:33:05
  Okay.
• 1:33:06
  It's pretty, pretty extraordinary.
• 1:33:07
  There is a whole bat listed on it if you want some background, but he, yeah,
• 1:33:13
  I mean, I think for Rocha and I, that was, that was, that remains one of the
• 1:33:16
  great, and it's, it was, he was very instrumental at the time we moved to
• 1:33:21
  Chew and in kind of, in kind of making that sea seem like the right thing for
• 1:33:27
  us to do, which it undoubtedly has been, I mean, as a, I think we've said it's
• 1:33:32
  living in one place f for a long time isn't, is, will always have, its, its.
• 1:33:37
  It's, it's issues, but it's, and you know, the village as well as anybody.
• 1:33:43
  It's not, it's not quite as relaxing and, and, and quaint
• 1:33:48
  and, as people might think.
• 1:33:50
  It's, it's, there's a ferocity about it as well.
• 1:33:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:33:53
  As a quick aside, for the, for those listeners, if you ever go
• 1:33:56
  to visit Great two in the uk, it is possibly the most picturesque.
• 1:34:02
  If it's not the most picturesque, it's up there in the top 10,
• 1:34:05
  however, and it has a legendary pub.
• 1:34:07
  And this pub is called the Falkland Arms, which hasn't really changed inside
• 1:34:12
  and that much since the 17th century.
• 1:34:14
  And you can still get a clay pipe stuffed with tobacco over the
• 1:34:18
  counter, and yet, yes, and it's full of bonami and good cheer.
• 1:34:23
  And as John says, it's, well, how would you, how would you
• 1:34:27
  describe as you said this
• 1:34:29
  John Mitchinson: ferocity?
• 1:34:30
  This?
• 1:34:32
  Yeah.
• 1:34:32
  I think it's, I don't know.
• 1:34:33
  I think I, I think some places, some places have a, the, the membrane
• 1:34:39
  is thin and chew is one of those places, and I think there is, there's
• 1:34:43
  something occult almost about it.
• 1:34:44
  There is, yeah.
• 1:34:45
  And you know, it's ha there's there the, the, that energy can, can, can draw
• 1:34:50
  people into addictive behavior and, and you know, there's, there are, there are,
• 1:34:55
  there are lots of, there are lots of bad two stories as well as good ones.
• 1:34:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:34:59
  and, and people who've come and who's who've, who've not
• 1:35:03
  been able to cope with it.
• 1:35:04
  And.
• 1:35:05
  But you know, it all, all of that makes only just make, for me at least, it
• 1:35:08
  makes it more interesting, I suppose.
• 1:35:10
  Yes.
• 1:35:10
  Human,
• 1:35:12
  Rupert Isaacson: human and yet sort of pre-human and superhuman.
• 1:35:15
  There's, there's a, there's a scan to your work, John, too, which is always at
• 1:35:20
  the supernatural, is floating around the edges and sometimes running through, a
• 1:35:25
  lot of the books you've recommended to me.
• 1:35:28
  a lot of the, you know, we talked about the Master of Margarita and mm-hmm.
• 1:35:32
  One of the greatest works of magical realism and obviously by night under the
• 1:35:36
  Stone Bridge, but some of my most treasure of memories are walking with you over the
• 1:35:45
  Oxfordshire landscape to the roll, right.
• 1:35:47
  Standing Stones and some of the other megaliths, and listening to you explain
• 1:35:54
  and recount the stories of those places in the myths of those places.
• 1:36:00
  I do feel that we would all be richer, if you would put together a book
• 1:36:11
  that takes us through that landscape.
• 1:36:14
  and yeah, because you have delved into it so deeply while remaining so involved
• 1:36:22
  in the, in the world in general, but.
• 1:36:24
  Always bring it back to this, this one landscape in this heart of England.
• 1:36:28
  when are you gonna do that?
• 1:36:29
  When
• 1:36:29
  John Mitchinson: do we get to read it?
• 1:36:32
  it's a good question.
• 1:36:32
  I mean, I mean I've, I've, I've, I've probably, I've probably got to, I've
• 1:36:37
  got to assign some, some time to it.
• 1:36:39
  I think the, the interesting thing for me is that you are, what you you're saying is
• 1:36:43
  right, that the, I'm fascinated by places.
• 1:36:47
  And two is one of the most fascinating that, that, like I say, they just seem
• 1:36:51
  to have that liminal quality where you feel that you are on a boundary
• 1:36:55
  between one thing and another thing.
• 1:36:56
  And that, that, as I say that, that that, that the membrane
• 1:37:00
  seems particularly thin there.
• 1:37:02
  and trying to, trying to capture that in words and trying to make sense
• 1:37:06
  of that, trying to make sense of the fact that, which again, a so brilliant
• 1:37:12
  called Walker that time is, is, I'm not saying it's exactly an illusion,
• 1:37:18
  but it isn't what we think it is.
• 1:37:20
  It isn't a, that, that, that the idea of the present past and and future are
• 1:37:25
  so intimately connected that the, you know, the, the past is, as Fama famously
• 1:37:33
  said, is not even past, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's still there.
• 1:37:39
  The stuff is still there.
• 1:37:42
  I mean, corporally and physically in the form that we are, we may not be able to.
• 1:37:46
  You know, it's not like we can shake hands with Lucy's Carey, but the, the
• 1:37:52
  extraordinary fact that the, the every spring, you know, we just in spring in
• 1:37:57
  England and it's, it's that feeling of how is it that this happens every year?
• 1:38:02
  This renewal happens every year and has happened every year for,
• 1:38:05
  for a, for a very, very long time.
• 1:38:08
  You know?
• 1:38:08
  it's, it's trying, trying to, trying to find a way of, of capturing that, I think.
• 1:38:14
  And as you say, preserving some of those stories.
• 1:38:16
  Cuz I think some of the stories, both, you know, the very old ones, but also
• 1:38:20
  the ones that have come, come up in the last 50 ye or a hundred years of
• 1:38:26
  people who lived and worked the land and gone mad or, you know, there's an
• 1:38:32
  extraordinary sequence of stories about her, about, a vicar and great shoe
• 1:38:38
  went insane, or they say went insane.
• 1:38:40
  I'm not, again, I think that's, those are always interesting when people
• 1:38:45
  have described as being in insane, it's probably not what we think of as, you
• 1:38:50
  know, being carted off in a straight jacket, it probably just massively
• 1:38:55
  eccentric or maybe in touch with something deeper or maybe in touch with something,
• 1:39:00
  you know, that was, was terrifying and made him, or maybe just depressed.
• 1:39:05
  maybe just, you know, very, very, very depressed.
• 1:39:08
  So all of those, it's interesting to me that, that, that, that, that.
• 1:39:13
  These places that appear insignificant if you just, or, or you know, that thing
• 1:39:19
  when you're, when you're traveling and you are, you are aware that a place has an
• 1:39:23
  atmosphere, but it's incredibly difficult to pin down what that is and why that is.
• 1:39:29
  And I don't know, you know, I've come to the conclusion it doesn't really matter
• 1:39:32
  whether there is something imminent in the land, that sentient landscape
• 1:39:37
  idea, or whether it's your projections between the two, something is happening.
• 1:39:43
  and I guess that's one of the things as I get older, I feel, I feel it's, it's,
• 1:39:49
  it's realizing that they're not being explicit is almost as important as being
• 1:39:56
  able to try and define things precisely.
• 1:39:58
  That, that, yeah, the sort of end, endless potentiality of the human imagination.
• 1:40:01
  Great literature, the great literature doesn't contain a series of messages
• 1:40:05
  on how you should live your life.
• 1:40:07
  It just gives you a sense of the complexity.
• 1:40:10
  And I dunno, I think it, it's, it's that latent negative capability, as
• 1:40:16
  Keith used to call it, is so important.
• 1:40:18
  And that's, that's kind of what keeps us going back to things, the
• 1:40:22
  non-res resolved as aspects of it.
• 1:40:24
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:40:25
  I'm, I think I'm, I think as I get older, I'm, I'm less interested.
• 1:40:28
  I think there was a period where I was quite arrogant about, oh,
• 1:40:31
  I've, I've sorted my stuff out.
• 1:40:34
  and I think, yeah, well be careful.
• 1:40:36
  Be careful of boasting about that.
• 1:40:38
  Right?
• 1:40:38
  Sure.
• 1:40:40
  Yeah.
• 1:40:40
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:40:40
  Well, Presumably as long as we are breathing, there's always stuff,
• 1:40:45
  John Mitchinson: as the, as the, the proverb that I think is, I can't
• 1:40:48
  remember what it's maybe Persian proverb that we have as the, as the
• 1:40:52
  main proverb at the beginning of the Book of the Dead is he was not dead.
• 1:40:56
  Still has a chance.
• 1:40:59
  And I, I'm, I'm really happy to have that, have that as my,
• 1:41:04
  as above my door as it were.
• 1:41:07
  Rupert Isaacson: although maybe the dead will say actually no chaps,
• 1:41:09
  it's just much better over here.
• 1:41:10
  Yeah.
• 1:41:11
  You, you, that was alling up.
• 1:41:13
  John Mitchinson: Yeah, I think, I think, I think the other great thing
• 1:41:16
  that was always one of my favorites at Qi was, and this is from Neil's
• 1:41:21
  ball, the great Danish physicist.
• 1:41:24
  He said The opposite of a trivial truth is a falsehood.
• 1:41:29
  But he said the opposite of a great truth is also true.
• 1:41:34
  And I think that thing of that possibility of two true things, Sims
• 1:41:41
  happening simultaneously feels to me like how whatever the universe is spun
• 1:41:46
  out of, that's what it's spun out of.
• 1:41:48
  Paradox.
• 1:41:49
  It isn't spun out.
• 1:41:50
  It isn't spun out of digital zero one.
• 1:41:53
  No, true false.
• 1:41:54
  It's spun out of the coexistence of two, of two true things.
• 1:42:00
  It's very true.
• 1:42:01
  All, all not to exist in the same space, but do
• 1:42:04
  Rupert Isaacson: ambivalence.
• 1:42:05
  Everything is the, is the opposite of itself.
• 1:42:08
  John Mitchinson: Well, he used to say, I mean, he has, there's a story
• 1:42:10
  about him, but a boar is that he had a horseshoe on his, on his wall.
• 1:42:15
  And a student said, but professor bor as a, as a man of science,
• 1:42:21
  surely you, you don't believe in it.
• 1:42:23
  And he says, no, but I understand it brings you luck whether you do or not.
• 1:42:29
  That's kind of, that's, that's my kind of story.
• 1:42:32
  Ah, well,
• 1:42:33
  Rupert Isaacson: John, long may you continue to live free and ride free and
• 1:42:37
  long May the, rest of us benefit from it.
• 1:42:42
  for those of us who've ever bought a book at Waterstones, for those of us who've
• 1:42:47
  ever read one of those books that you published at Harvard, for any of us who
• 1:42:55
  looked at Michael Palin's stuff as he was traveling, or any of us who, enjoyed.
• 1:43:02
  Reading the Qi books, and watching the TV show for any of us now, , that
• 1:43:10
  are reading the books that you are publishing in Unbound, which are
• 1:43:14
  extraordinary to any of us that are listening to the back listed podcast.
• 1:43:23
  You are one of those people I feel, who, what is it?
• 1:43:29
  It's, you know, the Marcus Aurelius.
• 1:43:30
  I can never remember.
• 1:43:31
  It's Marcus Aurelius quote, or Epic Titus, either of those Great stokes
• 1:43:35
  you said you must be as the vine.
• 1:43:37
  You know, that you, you, you produce the fruit and the people
• 1:43:40
  and the animals pluck it off.
• 1:43:42
  And it doesn't matter whether they cut you or burn you or you
• 1:43:45
  thrive, you are as the vine.
• 1:43:46
  You just keep producing, what nourishes everybody.
• 1:43:49
  And that's
• 1:43:50
  John Mitchinson: you, John.
• 1:43:52
  Well, I, we, I dunno.
• 1:43:54
  I that's very, very nice of you to say that.
• 1:43:56
  I mean, I, I think the, I think the, if there is any kind of theme through these
• 1:44:04
  ramblings, it is in the end that I'm, I'm, again, another quote that I love
• 1:44:09
  is that EB White, the great, author of, Charlotte's Web and also wit one
• 1:44:17
  of the, sort of the Algonquin round table wits or said, he said, I wake
• 1:44:21
  up every day with two things in mind.
• 1:44:24
  He said, I wanna change the world and I want to have a hell of a good time.
• 1:44:27
  He said, sometimes that makes planning my day quite difficult.
• 1:44:32
  I think that, you know, the, as I said earlier, that maybe the low boredom
• 1:44:37
  threshold it might have that might have interfered at times with the, the,
• 1:44:42
  the getting and gathering of wealth, which is a very important thing.
• 1:44:45
  You know, it's important to be, it's important to be
• 1:44:48
  able to, to, to live without, without, without fear if you can.
• 1:44:53
  At the same time, you know, again, reaching for the, for the athe jar,
• 1:44:58
  you know, I don't think you achieve much within your comfort zone.
• 1:45:02
  I think generally when people are, are trying to push themselves and to do,
• 1:45:06
  to do different and challenging things, they, they, they do, you know, they
• 1:45:11
  do, they do achieve remarkable things.
• 1:45:14
  And I, the things I've done, I suppose I, part, part of the thing I like to,
• 1:45:19
  to do is to have, as you know, I like, like people around me to be happy.
• 1:45:24
  sometimes my, my behavior makes that less, less, less likely than
• 1:45:30
  it, it probably ought to, but in general, I think it's, it's, yeah.
• 1:45:35
  When you, when you go through the things that I suppose I've worked
• 1:45:37
  on, it does seem like a, yeah.
• 1:45:40
  I'm, I'm, I'm very proud of what I've managed to achieve, and I'm still restless
• 1:45:45
  and still want to do other things.
• 1:45:47
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:45:48
  There are still, I'm, I was saying, I think I was saying to you the other
• 1:45:50
  day, I'm still, I get those things that cities I've not visited who,
• 1:45:53
  which I was thought I would, and just when you get into the age that you're,
• 1:45:57
  I'm gonna have to make a plan and go to the foothills of the Himalayas.
• 1:46:01
  I'm gonna, I need to see ess before I die.
• 1:46:05
  well,
• 1:46:06
  Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
• 1:46:06
  What is, what is, what is the bucket list?
• 1:46:10
  S I
• 1:46:10
  John Mitchinson: mean, to be honest, I'm, I, you know what, I'm, I'm trying
• 1:46:13
  to, I, I feel baffled that I've never managed to go, as somebody who has
• 1:46:17
  always felt that when I was a kid, I used to stand at the end of Roe and
• 1:46:21
  look across and think of the fields.
• 1:46:23
  I'm amazed I've never been to Scandinavia.
• 1:46:26
  It turns out that there weren't fields at the other side of,
• 1:46:28
  of, of the, of the North Sea.
• 1:46:30
  They were just sort of Danish sandbank, but Yeah.
• 1:46:33
  Right on, on
• 1:46:34
  Rupert Isaacson: their,
• 1:46:34
  John Mitchinson: on your way to the fields.
• 1:46:35
  Yeah.
• 1:46:35
  Yeah.
• 1:46:36
  we've, Rachel and I have attempted to go to Venice at least three
• 1:46:38
  times, and we've always been foiled, so we ought to, ought to do that
• 1:46:41
  before we, the u the usual stuff.
• 1:46:44
  we often have that.
• 1:46:46
  Rachel often says if she went to sub-Saharan Africa, she'd never leave.
• 1:46:50
  she sort of terrifies her that she'd fall in love with it so much.
• 1:46:53
  She, she should never be able to leave it, but we'll see.
• 1:46:57
  We've, I've, you know, have spent an inordinate amount of time in
• 1:47:00
  New Zealand and by extension in the, in, we love going to Roton,
• 1:47:03
  the Cook Islands, as you know.
• 1:47:05
  So I've seen a lot of places, but the
• 1:47:08
  Rupert Isaacson: world, the listeners, John is the only man I know who's
• 1:47:10
  actually stood on a stone fish and, and did indeed almost die.
• 1:47:16
  And, only ajo.
• 1:47:17
  You guys also dunno, John physically John is a mountain, which makes
• 1:47:22
  him very difficult to keep up with when you're drinking with him.
• 1:47:24
  but he has an, a physical resilience, that I don't know if anyone
• 1:47:28
  else had stood on a stone fish.
• 1:47:30
  John, how long were you in hospital after that?
• 1:47:33
  John Mitchinson: It was, it was, to be honest, it wasn't.
• 1:47:35
  I was, it was only, half a day in, in the hospital.
• 1:47:37
  The problem was, it was the, the, the wound got infected and I had to, by the
• 1:47:42
  time we got back to New Zealand, I had to have a massive dose of antibiotics.
• 1:47:45
  But, yeah, were, they were talking about revenge, right?
• 1:47:49
  We, I took the boys, we, we, we were flying back from, from New Zealand.
• 1:47:54
  It was the stone fish was Roro Toma in the Cook Islands.
• 1:47:56
  And then we were flying back to, through Hong Kong and we found a restaurant
• 1:47:59
  that specialized in stone fish.
• 1:48:01
  So we had stone fish three ways, which the boys were, they just thought this
• 1:48:05
  was the best bit of revenge ever.
• 1:48:08
  So they
• 1:48:10
  Rupert Isaacson: sometimes when is mitigated
• 1:48:13
  John Mitchinson: or, yes.
• 1:48:14
  Well this has been very, thank you so much, Rupert, for this chance to, to.
• 1:48:18
  To meander through my life.
• 1:48:20
  Rupert Isaacson: it's, it's been an absolute delight.
• 1:48:23
  and what I want to come across from this is that really the listeners, if you,
• 1:48:29
  if you have a chance to touch any of these, touch any of these parts of John,
• 1:48:33
  if you, if you get a chance to, to touch charge on in these ways, check out this
• 1:48:40
  legacy that he has of Qi the books, the show currently with, Unbound and
• 1:48:48
  check out back listed the, the podcast.
• 1:48:52
  Because what all will happen is this, in the, is you will, you
• 1:48:55
  will, you'll just discover, treat after treat after treat after treat.
• 1:48:59
  fulfilling experience after fulfilling experience.
• 1:49:02
  Great.
• 1:49:02
  Read after Great.
• 1:49:03
  Read Belly laugh after belly laugh.
• 1:49:06
  pleasure upon pleasure.
• 1:49:08
  so John, , thank you so much.
• 1:49:10
  Is there any parting word that you would like to give or are there
• 1:49:15
  also links that we should know?
• 1:49:17
  , John Mitchinson: no, I think I would say, I would say that the do, I mean
• 1:49:21
  blacklisted in, in many ways has, has the best of me and there are
• 1:49:26
  many, many hours of, of, of that.
• 1:49:28
  , by means do subscribe to to bat listed cuz that I think probably has the best of
• 1:49:32
  me and lots and hundreds of hours of it.
• 1:49:36
  And also Pat on our patron, you can, if you subscribe, you get a two extra
• 1:49:42
  podcast a month, which we call lock listed cuz we started them to cheer ourselves
• 1:49:47
  up as in, in lockdown where we talk about books and films and music as well.
• 1:49:53
  Stuff that we've enjoyed in last year.
• 1:49:54
  It sets, me and Andy are my co-host and Nikki are producer.
• 1:49:58
  that's different.
• 1:49:58
  And we play, we get, because it's not, it's not public.
• 1:50:02
  We get to play.
• 1:50:03
  We get to choose music on there, which is fun.
• 1:50:06
  And how do they find
• 1:50:06
  Rupert Isaacson: lock listed?
• 1:50:07
  What
• 1:50:07
  John Mitchinson: do they need to do?
• 1:50:08
  Uh, you just go on ww.patron.com/back listed and you'll find Yeah you
• 1:50:16
  can subscribe at various levels.
• 1:50:18
  Do
• 1:50:19
  Rupert Isaacson: www.patreon.com/back
• 1:50:22
  John Mitchinson: listed?
• 1:50:23
  Yep.
• 1:50:24
  Okay.
• 1:50:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:50:26
  You heard it everybody.
• 1:50:27
  go enjoy yourselves cuz you have an enormous amount of fun waiting for you.
• 1:50:32
  and that seems to me to be the hope.
• 1:50:36
  Purpose really of the whole thing.
• 1:50:38
  I, I've always thought that fun is the great underestimated human virtue.
• 1:50:44
  John Mitchinson: That is Absolutely.
• 1:50:48
  you know, I think you are, I've, I, it's funny, I just, I just gr found
• 1:50:53
  that great, , mark, it's Marcus Aurelius b like a vine that produces grapes
• 1:50:58
  without looking for anything in return.
• 1:51:00
  And I was gonna say, that's my, if, if I had anything to live under,
• 1:51:04
  that's probably, that probably Is it actually ru It's just, yeah.
• 1:51:08
  Well that's, you keep, keep, keep making those grapes people.
• 1:51:12
  All right.
• 1:51:14
  Rupert Isaacson: I'm off to, I'm off to squish the VA with my
• 1:51:16
  bare feet and enjoy the process.
• 1:51:19
  Till next time, John.
• 1:51:20
  Okay.
• 1:51:20
  Can we have you on again?
• 1:51:21
  Yeah.
• 1:51:22
  Lets So things,
• 1:51:22
  John Mitchinson: we'd love to talk more.
• 1:51:23
  We can pick up other stuff.
• 1:51:24
  Yeah, for sure.
• 1:51:25
  Yeah.
• 1:51:25
  Books,
• 1:51:25
  Rupert Isaacson: mythology.
• 1:51:26
  Yeah.
• 1:51:27
  All of it.
• 1:51:27
  Alright then.
• 1:51:29
  Till next time, lots of love.
• 1:51:30
  And enjoy.
• 1:51:30
  John Mitchinson: Bye-bye.
• 1:51:31
  Bye bye.
• 1:51:32
  Rupert Isaacson: Thank you for joining us.
• 1:51:33
  We hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
• 1:51:35
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• 1:51:40
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• 1:52:13
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