The Publishing Training Centre celebrates 30 years

“30 year old training charity seeks adventurous, ambitious trainees for mutually rewarding relationship. Who knows where it could lead!”

The Publishing Training Centre is 30 this year, and we are rolling back the mists of time to reveal a little of the historical underskirts of this icon of the publishing world.

The year, 1974, the place, The Oxford Motel, the event, Editing 2. Great things were stirring! Seated in the room were a group of young delegates making their mark in book publishing. Out front as course director was Tim Rix, who would go on to become a tour de force in educational publishing and president of the Publishers Association. In front of him was a remarkable group of future luminaries. There was David Kewley, who would go on to head up Scholastic and BookPoint. Indeed David met his wife to be on that very course. Our records of the event are long gone but memories better than ours suggest that Richard Charkin (Macmillan and Bloomsbury), Simon Master (Random House), Rupert Jones-Parry (Longman and Macmillan), Peter Murby (Macmillan Education), Diane Spivey (Little Brown) and Tim Hely Hutchinson (Hachette UK) also attended – quite a roll call.

Events such as these were in many ways the genesis of today’s Publishing Training Centre. This one was run as a PA course and Mary Perry was in charge of operations. But change was already in the air. Sir Stanley Unwin’s charitable trust had long identified the need for quality, professional education and training across the worlds of book and journal publishing. His son, Rayner Unwin, took up the challenge. With his friend and fellow trustee Ainsley Thin, he set off on an intrepid journey into the wild lands South of the River Thames. “Good Lord, there is life over here,” were the words he was reported to have uttered, on crossing Wandsworth Bridge. Ainsley drove him round the corner and introduced him to a remarkable old building, the former Municipal Works offices of Wandsworth, shortly to be renamed “Book House”. The building was duly acquired by the Unwin Charitable Trust and a range of Book-related charities were installed. Thanks to the generosity and encouragement of three generations of the Unwin family, most of them are still there today. The National Book League was moved from its home in Albemarle Street and became Book Trust. The Poetry Book Society followed. Mary Perry moved the training operation away from The Publishers Association and into the Foundation, and in 1979 the Book House Training Centre was born.

In those early years there were three editorial courses named, imaginatively, Editing 1, Editing 2 and Editing 3. Today’s equivalent courses would be Copy Editing Skills, Commissioning and List Management and Managing Publishing Strategy. Flip forward twenty years and we find a very different operation, with ten full-time staff and three distinct divisions. By this stage the Short Courses division had a portfolio of around 60 titles, running over 200 events every year. These were deliberately designed to cover the full spectrum of publishing skills from editing and proofreading through financial management, design, marketing, copyright, rights and contracts, production, software and others. The in-house division took the content and concepts from these short courses and repurposed them, tailoring the programmes to the needs of specific clients. Typically around 100 events would be run every year. And a new division emerged, serving the needs of a burgeoning freelance community with courses offered at distance. At this stage of growth the administration of the distance learning division had been outsourced to West Herts College, though as volume grew it became more sensible to bring this in-house where quality of service could more easily be monitored and maintained.

By this time the original name had been replaced by the current brand, The Publishing Training Centre. However, because Book House is so much a part of our heritage we have not been able (or indeed felt it wise) to lose the Book House tag entirely, so you will still see it within our brand. Indeed, in some research we undertook back in 2002, we were surprised to find that with some clients Book House and PTC were viewed as competitor brands!

Success and growth during these years enabled PTC to extend the reach of its charitable activity. Throughout the 1990s it was closely engaged with the development of National Occupational Standards for Book Publishing. It even managed to launch a set of NVQs for the industry, though the uptake was sadly very low and the project was still-born. But today PTC sponsors bursaries for promising black and minority ethnic students to take Masters degrees in publishing, encouraging a wider ethnic mix of staff with UK publishing houses. It continues its close engagement with the government agenda for skills and training, working with Skillset, the Sector Skills Council, to translate policy into meaningful activity. It partners with Arts Council England to make training accessible to independent literary publishers who might otherwise not be able to afford it and it offers a wide range of discounts and incentives to make training in publishing accessible and affordable to all. It remains as a vibrant and important part of the training landscape in publishing, but today it is just a part of a flourishing training industry. Many other organisations now offer a wide range of training services, which goes to demonstrate how far-sighted Sir Stanley was all those years ago when he set up his trust.

Happy 30TH Birthday PTC!

See also: Birthday wishes from Tim Hely Hutchinson and Richard Charkin