Caroline Wilkinson-Schmidt
Features Writer
Uk
There was little we did not know in 1973. The Vietnam War had not ended; OPEC was already planning to ratchet up the price of crude oil; the British Three-Day Week lurked just around the corner; inflation was a roaring lion; strikes were so common they barely made the newspapers; the Beatles had disbanded; the hippy dream was dead. We were all very worldly wise in 1973. ‘We’ being the first wave of baby-boomers, the first generation not to have known conscription since our great-great-grandfathers’ time. We had had our summer of love, we had lived in squats and communes, we had rolled around in festival mud wallowing to live sets from Hendrix and Dylan... now it was time to make some money!
Our salvation came in the form of a Chinese martial arts athlete called Bruce Lee. Kung-Fu Monthly was born in 1974, and within six months there was £60,000 in the bank. We were rich beyond our wildest dreams. Every day, sackfuls of postal orders from Bruce Lee fans would arrive in locked post-office bags, deposited in our Goodge Street hallway by a postman who refused to lug them up the rickety stairs. Then came the foreign editions of Kung-Fu Monthly. At its height, KFM was being published in 14 countries and 11 languages. My proudest moment was signing the deal for a Cantonese language edition of Kung-Fu Monthly – coals to Newcastle didn’t come into it!
But, of course, we knew KFM couldn’t last – it was a craze, after all. We had to find ourselves a ‘real’ magazine, or maybe even two. Some we bought (Hi-Fi Choice); some we launched (Which Bike? – which, for a time, overtook Bike as the UK’s best-selling motorcycle monthly) and some just seemed to appear out of thin air (Crossroads Monthly, TV Sci-Fi Monthly, Skateboard! Magazine).
We moved offices up the road to Rathbone Place, holding onto the Goodge Street lease. A great many talented and brilliant boys and girls floated in and out of the company. There wasn’t a person over 30 on the books. Er, actually, we weren’t keeping any books. No time. Salaries were mostly paid in cash on a Friday afternoon, providing I had remembered to go to the bank. The whole thing was a glorious shambles, held together by faith, hope, blind luck and mind-numbing workloads.
Then two things happened. Bruce Sawford and Dick Pountain persuaded me we had to launch or acquire a ‘personal computer’ magazine. And the accountants moved in. Both were crucial decisions. The first because it led the company to carve a place for itself as the UK’s undisputed champion of IT publishing. The second because it kept the directors out of jail and brought some semblance of financial order to the proceedings.
But perhaps the key decision relating to the survival of what became Dennis Publishing (and survival was the name of the game in those early days) was our ‘American connection’. My old mate Tony Elliott, the founder and owner of Time Out in London, had given me the name of an ex-pat Brit in New York who was in the market for publishing opportunities. I looked him up on my next trip to the USA, not long after the launch of KFM. His name was Peter Godfrey, and we first met in his tiny Midtown Manhattan office, where he introduced me to an American associate, Robert Bartner. The net result was that Peter Godfrey and Robert Bartner have been our American partners for more than a quarter of a century.
That vital American partnership, when the idea of a British publisher operating in North America was considered lunatic fantasy, added a dimension to Dennis Publishing that set us apart then and continues to do so today. Many top British publishing companies have come to the US. Nearly all have been sent packing with their tail between their legs. In that sense, we virtually stand alone. Whatever the future holds for us, I suspect that the international arena, and America in particular, will play a big part in it. Not in the sense of “we are a global media superpower” but because, above all, Dennis Publishing is a high-quality, reader-driven publishing company. And with every year that passes, the differences between readers around the world diminish. Herein lies our opportunity. But then, the majority of you reading this are only youngsters – so you already knew that! The young, after all, know everything!
Felix Dennis, 2002
In his best-selling book, How to Get Rich, Felix Dennis explains exactly how he went about amassing his fortune. You can find details of this and other books by Felix Dennis at www.felixdennis.com
Languages: English
