Martin Green obituary

Martin Green, who has died aged 82, was a writer, poet and publisher. Among the many books he encouraged as an editor at MacGibbon and Kee in the 1960s was Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963). Bringing Patrick Kavanagh’s Collected Poems (1964) to publication helped establish his reputation, and he became friendly with many of MacGibbon and Kee’s other Irish writers; the public bar of the Plough in Museum Street, which became their unofficial office, was as literary a London pub as any of its counterparts in Dublin.

Green and Timothy O’Keeffe, the chief editor at MacGibbon and Kee, both disliked the new ways that publicity was used to sell books; they preferred to advertise writers by word of mouth. When MacGibbon and Kee was taken over by Granada and they were instructed to produce “12 bestsellers a year”, they left to found in 1971 their own firm, Martin, Brian and O’Keeffe (“Brian” was Brian Rooney, recruited from Faber), in small premises conveniently across the street from the Plough. But their combination of anti-commercialism and anti-intellectualism was disastrous. Both Green and Rooney departed and eventually the enterprise collapsed.