James MacGibbon

James MacGibbon left his Edinburgh school to work in publishing and continued to do so with two breaks (a brief frolic in advertising and the war years) until he retired in 1984.

Diary: Fashionable Radicals

James MacGibbon, 22 January 1987

Looking back over more than fifty years of publishing, I count myself lucky to have begun by working for Constant Huntington, chairman of Putnam, a Bostonian of soldierly appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met. I never quite found my way there, but when I met Harold Nicolson he seemed the epitome of what Constant wanted for me. At the same time, Constant was a publisher whose policy was truly radical and whose achievements were never fully recognised by his contemporaries. He delighted in flouting convention – an inclination that I am sure was fostered by his wife, the anonymous author of Madame Solario.’

Letter

Six-Letter Word

6 March 1986

SIR: In his review of Kiss of the Spider Woman Nicholas Spice (LRB, 6 March) makes an interesting point about the little boy’s difficulty in breaking ‘the taboo on tenderness’ when it came to uttering the word ‘breast’. This recalled a review by Brigid Brophy of Melanie Klein’s Our Adult World, many years ago in the New Statesman (7 March 1963). She opened her piece with a ribald reference...
Letter

Massturbation

7 June 1984

SIR: In her generous review of Jean MacGibbon’s memoir, I meant to marry him, Gabriele Annan (LRB, 7 June) quotes Philip Toynbee’s lewd send-up of the Horlicks slogan, ‘Masturbation, not night starvation,’ and adds (delightfully) that the Communist Party version was ‘Masturbation, not mass starvation.’ There never was such an official CP slogan. Only middle-class members in the Thirties...

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