The Transylvanian Trilogy

"Well, as I’ve chosen perhaps the most famous novel in the world—everyone’s heard of War and Peace , although perhaps not everyone has read it—I feel one has to choose one book that readers will probably never have heard of, and certainly not read. Miklós Bánffy is a completely forgotten figure—an interesting, tragic figure, hugely cultured—and this book is brilliant. It was translated about 20 years ago, and swam into the consciousness of a few people. A couple of friends of mine read it and said it was simply wonderful. Sure enough, I bought it and fell in love with it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It has the sweep of War and Peace , within the very romantic forgotten world of Transylvania, which itself is a place we should all go to. I have been quite a lot. It’s like going to a pre-industrial Europe: there’s no barbed wire, no tractors. You wake up to horses clip clopping out. Crops are cut with scythes. This great trilogy is set just before the First World War. The First World War was of course a complete disaster for Hungary, losing a quarter of its territory, including Transylvania. At the end of the war, having already written this book, Banffy found himself, briefly, foreign minister for Hungary. He thought that the Treaty of Versailles was unnecessarily unfair on Hungary; they were just part of an empire that was involved, but weren’t one of the prime belligerents. And because he knew people like Lloyd George and Churchill , having met them before the war, he set off to London to try to argue his case. The Hungarian currency collapsed before he could arrive, and he—the foreign minister of a newly independent Hungary—had to earn his living for two or three months as a pavement artist in Holland, which he did quite successfully. Eventually he got enough money to continue his journey to London, where he completely failed in his quest. Then came the Second World War . He had been a prominent anti-Nazi all the way through the 1930s, and the retreating Nazi army burned his library—one of the greatest private libraries in Mittaleuropa—just out of spite. He died a couple of years later in the concierge’s room, all he could afford to live in, in the family house in communist Budapest. It’s an incredible story. He’s a very sympathetic figure. Yes, it does. Actually, Trollope is a better analogy than Tolstoy, although you could say there are elements of both. Well, I’m proud that it has worked. When I was very young I worked at Gallimard, as I said, and always admired the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . I couldn’t understand why the English language didn’t have a Pléiade—definitive editions of the classics, printed beautifully on bible paper, with very scholarly notes. If you’re a French student reading Mallarmé or Proust, you have to read the Pléiade edition. I had travelled and lived with paperbacks, but they do fall to pieces. So I thought, the English language ought to have something like the Pléiade. Then I remembered Everyman. I stalked and eventually bought it. It took me quite a long time to manage to buy it. And I revived it in the autumn of 1991, very much influenced by aspects of the Pléiade. About 15 years later, I was completely thrilled to discover that Jacques Schiffrin, the creator of the Pléiade in the early 1930s, had modelled himself on the 1906 Everyman. Publishers don’t reinvent the wheel. Like everyone, we’re inspired by what others have done before us. I had a simple idea: I wanted to publish books that would still be attractive to pick up and read a hundred years later. We print on acid-free wood paper that will not go yellow. The books are sewn with cloth bindings. Above all, I want to—inspired by what Gallimard do—have very brilliant, scholarly introductions with comparative literary, cultural chronologies. We’ve got an extraordinary body of scholarship in our nearly-400 introductions. When I started it in 1991, probably quite a few people thought: this is a nice, quixotic idea, but it probably won’t work . So it’s quite satisfying that not only has it worked, but I think we have sold something like 23 million books . I should, I think, mention the Millennium Library. In 1998, I heard on the Today programme that the newly constituted Millennium Commission was giving £40 million to bicycle paths. I bike to work and was delighted to hear this, but wondered what else they were supporting. I rang and asked if they were giving anything to schools, libraries or to celebrate the English language. The answer was no. So I created a small charity, the Millennium Library, which would donate 300 Everyman books to every state secondary school in the UK—4700 schools—and to 1700 schools and libraries in 77 countries in the developing world, 1.8m books. I had to raise £4.5m to match the funding I got from the Millennium Commission. This was a huge project for a small independent publisher, as I then was, before we were bought by Alfred A. Knopf, New York. It was the only one of its kind. We printed and delivered the books in batches of 50 titles every six months over 3 years. We got amazing letters from pupils and teachers, often from very remote places. There was apparently huge excitement as each batch arrived and pupils unpacked, felt the books and put them on their library shelves. I remember a head teacher writing that a 14-year-old in Golspie in Sutherland had already read most of Tolstoy. My intention was that if three or four pupils in every year had their minds opened by reading something outside the syllabus, the project was a success. In the event, it seems many more were and I now meet people in their twenties & thirties who tell me how enriching these books were for them. In Egypt , where the British Council had asked me to talk about the project, I was told that reading some of these titles might well provoke a revolution!"