Tom Hodges; Chief book buyer at WH Smith
Hyfler/Rosner
October 3, 2007
Tom Hodges
Chief book buyer at WH Smith with an eye for public tastes
at a time when his company dominated the British market
Tom Hodges was accurately described in The Bookseller, 15
years after his retirement from WH Smith, as "a legend as a
book buyer of uncommon shrewdness". On an uncommon scale,
too, for in his final years as book department manager he
bought about £20 million worth of books, a prodigious sum in
the early 1970s and then representing about 25 per cent of
all British book publishers' domestic sales, excluding text
and technical books.
Thomas William Hodges was born in Bermondsey, South London,
where his father had a fish stall - and was, Hodges always
insisted, a brilliant fish buyer. He may, therefore, have
enjoyed an innate buying gift, but this was about the sum of
his inheritance, for he was the eldest of ten children and
money was always short. However, he got a scholarship from
his council school to Addery and Stanhope Grammar School. He
matriculated at 16, a considerable achievement since he had
daily, between school and homework, to put in two or three
hours on the family fish stall.
He sought a job - it was 1929 - and was glad to take a
clerkship in the London headquarters of WH Smith. The work
was in reality a warehouseman's under a system seemingly
designed to achieve the maximum of lifting and handling.
Called up in 1940, Hodges became a warehouseman in the RAF.
He rose to sergeant, was mentioned in dispatches and always
maintained that Smith's, for all that they maximised
manhandling and stored books by sizes rather than by
publishers, was markedly less inefficient in the stores area
than the RAF.
WH Smith was for many decades controlled by three powerful
families, the Smiths, the Hornbys and the Aclands. Shrewd
and long-headed, they were, their stationery department
manager declared in the 1930s, "by reason of birth,
education and social background incapable of appreciating
the psychology of the lower and lower-middle classes who
made up the vast bulk of their customers and staff".
If the partners (after 1949, directors) were remote, the
four managers were autocratic towards their large staff.
(There were 350 people in the book department in 1947.)
Hodges was determined somehow to make an individual mark,
and on returning to his old job took, in his own time, a
three-year Booksellers Association diploma course. He passed
with honours and in 1950 was awarded the Bertha Barber
Memorial Prize. (Princess Marina presented it to him.) Thus
armed, he went to his manager saying that it was now 20
years since he had joined the firm and some promotion was
surely due.
After three prolonged interviews (at which he was never
invited to sit down) he gave notice - and was then given the
newly created post of sales promotion manager for books. The
title had a ring to it, but what he actually got was a
shared table in a cubbyhole without his own desk or
telephone.
Nevertheless, he managed to produce a stencil-copied weekly
sheet, Books to Note, sent to bookshop managers advising
them of the content and selling potential of about a dozen
new titles. It was unique in Smith's history and it came to
the attention of the chairman, the Hon David Smith.
Hodges was made. When the book buyer - the number two in the
books department - retired four years later, Hodges got his
chance. A year or two later he was in some trepidation when
he got a new boss, but the incoming manager, Reggie Last,
knew an unusually able and willing workhorse when he saw
one. He became Last's assistant and then his deputy, and
they worked together in remarkable harmony until 1965 when
Last retired and Hodges was appointed merchandise manager
and book buyer. He held this post until his retirement in
1974.
He continued to take a close interest in the buying side of
the department's work and for nearly 20 years he was
essentially responsible for all Smith's main book
purchasing. In his early days he dealt with this almost
single handed. As time passed and the annual value of his
buying increased fivefold, to almost £20 million, he took on
a few assistants - while 20 years after his retirement about
20 people were engaged on this task.
He was a courageous buyer, particularly in the light of the
very different costs and values of the time. When he became
book department manager, Smith's turnover from all its
widespread operations was about £100 million: 25 years later
it was about £2 billion. The turnover of a useful small
publisher could be less than £500,000. Hardback novels cost
about £1.50; paperbacks about 35p. Among his biggest
hardback orders were 150,000 Guinness Book of Records,
80,000 New English Bibles, 50,000 of volume three of
Churchill's war memoirs.
His opening orders for successive novels by Daphne du
Maurier, Nevil Shute and Ian Fleming were for nearly 20,000
a time. He had, of course, a few failures - he thought the
biography of Kathleen Ferrier was his biggest blip - but his
nose for a successful book was generally acute. And his
buying, on a scale never before envisaged by Smith, was not
only significant to large publishers but even critical to
the fortunes of smaller houses.
Hodges was certainly not an academic, nor even particularly
well-read - though he claimed to read, scan or look at about
15,000 books a year. This was, perhaps, his real strength,
for he had an instinct, natural, unsophisticated and shrewd,
for the book an ordinary reader would wish to open. He was
practical, too, demanding good (but not exorbitant) terms
from publishers, never placing an order until he had seen a
finished copy of the book.
Hodges, a cheerful, sociable, pragmatic man, had clear likes
and dislikes. But no matter how expensively he was lunched
and dined, how rich the hampers from grateful or hopeful
publishers piled up in his home at Christmas, he never
knowingly gave a fat order for a bad book.
He was for many years actively concerned with the
Booksellers Association: as its president, 1972-74, he
brought an unusual breadth of view and weight of authority
to that office.After retirement he was for several years an
active consultant to WHS Distributors, another Smith
operation which (headed by a youthful Tim Waterstone) then
began to turn in useful profits. He continued for many years
as a director of the Book Trade Benevolent Society.
He married, in 1938, Minnie Ball. She died in 1996. They had
one daughter.
Tom Hodges, book buyer, was born on July 8, 1912. He died on
September 29, 2007, aged 95