To Halt the Retreat

"A hundred years ago, trade followed the gunboat. Now it follows the text book and the teacher. Instead of realiz ing this, so many publishers go in for an orgy of putrid books."

Such scornful sentiments have helped to make shaggy, unorthodox Robert Maxwell, 43, Britain's most unpopular publisher -- among other publishers. By acting on his beliefs, Maxwell has not only become a multimillionaire, but also in 15 years has lifted his Pergamon Press Ltd. from obscurity to No. 1 rank as a publisher of scientific and technical books (600 last year) and trade journals (120, from The Archives of Oral Biology to Problems of Cybernetics).

A Threat of Piracy. Branching out in new directions, Maxwell this year bought Britain's largest typesetting firm, the famed London bookshop of John and Edward Bumpus, and a subscription-book subsidiary of Press Lord Cecil King's International Publishing Corp.

Having turned a formidable sounding Encyclopaedia Dictionary of Physics into a sort of bestseller (6,000 sets at $300 each), Maxwell last week brought out a new 15-volume edition of Brit ain's highly regarded Chamber's Encyclopaedia with which he confidently expects to capture some of the 99% of the world market held by U.S. publishers. Eighty percent of Pergamon's output is already sold abroad in 123 countries, including the U.S., which accounts for half of the company's exports. "If there were 50 other firms in Britain doing what we are," boasts Maxwell, "we wouldn't have a balance of payments problem or a wages freeze."

Son of a Czech farm hand (he was born Jan Ludwig Hoch), Maxwell left school at ten, left his family's one-room Carpathian mountain home at 16 to join the underground fighting Hitler. Later he made his way to Britain, joined the British army as a private, left as a captain. With the profits of some shrewd postwar trading in German scientific manuscripts, he bought Pergamon in 1951 for $36,400, cajoled experts from all over the world into writing scientific tomes for him. Fluent in nine languages including Russian, he won a virtual corner on rights to Soviet scientific works by face-to-face salesmanship with Nikita Khrushchev. In the process, he also persuaded the Soviet ruler to pay Western authors royalties for their works published in Russia (in nonexportable rubles). "I told him," recalls Maxwell, "that if he didn't agree I would pirate the works of Soviet authors."

In the Corner. Pergamon is nominally London-based, but Maxwell runs his flourishing empire ($2.3 million profit on $14 million worth of sales last year) from his 19th century manor house near Oxford, which serves as the office for 400 of his 2,500 staffers. Handsome if beefy (6 ft., 230 lbs.), Maxwell lives in "one small corner" of Headington Hill Hall with his French-born wife and eight children, devotes mornings to his business, afternoons and evenings to Parliament, to which he was elected as a Labor M.P. two years ago. Characteris tically, Maxwell was the first member to make his maiden speech. "I was glad he waited until the Queen finished," sniffed one critic. Maxwell shrugs off such gibes. His ambition now, he says, is "to halt the retreat of our country." As a start, he is flooding the market with texts, handbooks, tapes and films to help companies cope with Britain's massive new effort to retrain industrial workers. He expects to reap another fortune at it too.

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