Trevor Glover died last week. He worked for Penguin in Australia and the UK, he was President of the Publishers Association and then became Managing Director of the eminent music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. There will be formal obituaries in the trade press next week.

I got to know him best during the 'reversion wars of the early nineties when he had returned from Australia to run the London office of Penguin and was having to live with the Rushdie fatwa affair. I was responsible for building a paperback list to support the trade hardback houses then owned by Reed International, William Heinemann, Secker and Warburg and Methuen. One way to improve the list was to publish authors whose books had previously been licensed to third-party paperback publishers, frequently Penguin. (This is a normal part of life today but at the time was considered in some way evil, or at least underhand.) The licence on a very important, albeit not huge selling, author (whose identity you'll have to guess) came up for renewal and we told Penguin that we would revert unless they coughed up a very very large advance for an extension of the licence. Trevor called to ask if our absurd request was for real which it was. He quite rightly refused to pay the advance and we prepared to publish the books ourselves. A few weeks later he called again. He'd been thinking about what it would be like to be the head of Penguin responsible for losing this particular author. He realised that Penguin without that writer on its list just wouldn't be the same and he agreed to the ridiculous refresher advance. The book trade and the world without Trevor just won't be the same either.

Peter James, whose latest hardback Looking Good Dead is his best ever, sportingly contributed to my best seller competition of last Friday even though he doesn't have a book in the list (the latest one was too early, the next one too late to be included). However, he has sent me this picture which illustrates how well Russian publishers treat visiting British authors. Tasteful or what?

Incidentally, there is no charge for entering the competition. The prize has yet to be decided but it will, I'm certain, be worth winning. Nobody is excluded, so please go to here and enter your list as a comment, not forgetting to enter the anti-spam code underneath the comment box.

Because it's Sunday I think I'm allowed a 'use of English' moan. I received this from the Chelsea Arts Club: