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| John Hale | |
John Hale, publisher of the independent Robert Hale publishing house in London for more than 50 years, has died, the Bookseller reported. He was 92. Hale was in his 20s when he took over the company in 1956, after the sudden death of his father, Robert Hale, who had founded the firm in 1936. John Hale subsequently expanded the list, adding genre fiction alongside nonfiction and general fiction.
At its height, the company was publishing many hundreds of genre titles a year. Authors on the fiction list include Jean Plaidy, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, James Hadley Chase, Robert Bloch and Harold Robbins. Hale was the first to publish Robert Goddard and C.J. Box in the U.K. He later acquired equestrian publisher J.A. Allen and NAG Press, which published gemological and horological titles.
Noting that Hale was always interested in niche areas, Gill Jackson, former managing director at the publisher, said Hale maintained there was no subject he hadn't touched and "if there's a gap, that's what I'm interested in."
Hale retired from active publishing in 2010 but remained "a benign presence as chairman" until the company was closed in 2015 and the list was transferred to the Crowood Press.
Jackson said: "I worked for John on and off for 45 years and during that time we never had a cross word. He was the ultimate gentleman: kind, patient but demanding of one's best at all times.... He relied to a very large extent on his own judgement, maintaining a policy that every letter received should be answered that day, submissions answered within a fortnight or three weeks at the most."
Lesley Gower, publisher at J.A. Allen, added: "I remember Mr. Hale, never referred to by staff as John, as a particularly shrewd London publisher and respected businessman. His eclectic list included a plethora of fascinating authors and titles. He always kept a close eye on the balance sheet and still drove to his Clerkenwell office in his eighties. On a personal note, while I was managing his equestrian imprint, J.A. Allen, Mr. Hale would often ask me if certain horse-related details were correct in some of the Westerns that he still, in his later years, loved to read himself. This was something that amused us both."