Britain has an absurd, out-dated, elitist, imperial, patronising and hugely loved and revered honours system. Twice a year or so, the Queen publishes a list of the great and not so great who have been awarded what is technically known as a gong - a peerage, a knighthood and various forms of orders, medals and companions of the British Empire. The liberal establishment tends to sneer and there's probably a real element of honours in exchange for political favours delivered - and even sometimes the sniff of money playing a part. But nonetheless, the recipients - the real ones who deserve their recognition - by and large appreciate it.
The latest list contains some celebrity heroes - Salman Rushdie, Ian Botham, and the wonderful Barry Humphries aka Dame Edna Everage below. But the gongee who gets my vote for most deserving and most decent is less well-known outside the world of Shakespeare scholarship - Stanley Wells whose Shakespeare for all time we published - and who edited the magnificent Oxford Shakespeare which we are now challenging with the new RSC Shakespeare.
Yesterday was busy. The Mayor of Munich Christian Ude told our annual Georg von Holtzbrinck conference that Munich is the second largest publishing centre in the world after New York. Sounds like nonsense to me but I guess it depends how you define large - numbers of titles, sales, profits, review inches. My own similar but unprovable statistic is that Oxford is the single most profitable publishing centre in the world (ahead of New York etc) when you include Elsevier, Harcourt International, Blackwell Wiley, Oxford University Press, Informa, Macmillan Education and a host of smaller but highly successful businesses.
In the evening we were entertained at the headquarters of the Max Planck Society where the President, Professor Peter Gruss, argued strongly for the open access availability of scientific research.
In between we were treated to great presentations by our sister companies based in Munich - Droemer Knaur, Holtzbrinck Networks and eLab. Take a look here to get a feel for the investments we are making in the digital world. It's beginning to look impressive.