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