Abstract
John Davey was a unique and much-loved figure in geographical publishing. 1 He won a special citation from the Association of American Geographers in 1992 and followed this five years later with the Gill Memorial Award of the Royal Geographical Society. Both honours were for his huge contributions to geographical publication on both sides of the Atlantic. In April last year he finally lost his battle with cancer; he died in Oxford at the age of 72. With his passing, this piece recalls one of his earliest contributions to the discipline, viz. the critical role he played in turning a vague idea of a new geographical serial into the two lusty journals – Progress in Physical Geography (PPG) and Progress in Human Geography (PHG) – that are now both just beyond their 40th year. Although John’s hand remained on the tiller only for the very early years, he set a course which by-and-large has been followed by a succession of distinguished editors.
The initial idea of a scholarly review journal in the field had its origins in Cambridge in the 1960s. There, the university’s Extra-Mural Board at Madingley Hall hosted two parallel summer schools for high-school teachers on new developments in two changing sixth-form subjects, mathematics and geography. 2 Lectures on the first geographical courses given each late July from 1962 to 1967 were published by Methuen. The second volume, entitled Models in Geography, 3 sold so heavily that it was republished as three parallel paperback books. Like all books that reported new findings, it outdated readily and a second edition was pressing, but neither of its two editors (Richard Chorley and myself) had time to do this. We were by now heavily engaged elsewhere, including writing a new book on Networks Analysis in Geography for a small London publisher, Edward Arnold.
Edward Arnold had been founded in 1890. In the competitive post-war world, it was best known for its weighty medical texts and scholarly Shakespearean editions. It had only a small geography list in which CAM King’s masterly Beaches and Coasts (1959) stood out. It was to Arnold that John Davey, then 23 and newly graduated from Reading University in English Literature, applied for a job as an editorial assistant in 1968. On appointment, the partner who had overseen the geography list (Anthony Hamilton) gratefully passed this section over to John.
So, it was John to whom Richard Chorley and I brought our untidy Networks manuscript with its large bundle of illustrations. 4 Over a lunch-break in John’s galley-strewn basement office in Maddox Street conversation drifted on to other matters, including our worry not to let the Models book drift out of date. I cannot recall who brought up the idea of a hardback series with chapter-length reviews of changes occurring in different parts of the discipline. But I can remember chewing this idea over on the train back from King’s Cross and adjourning next day to ‘Snax’, the coffee house close to the geography department in Downing Place. We were joined by two friends and colleagues, the biogeographer and coral reef specialist, David Stoddart, and the cartographer, Christopher Board. They liked the idea in principle, but raised practical questions about how we were to ensure a regular flow of high quality papers. John’s eventual solution was threefold: (a) make the series irregular so that volumes would be published when enough good material had been assembled and not on a fixed yearly basis; (b) offer a small commission grant to authors to sweeten their task; and (c) invite leading international figures to form an advisory board and suggest potential authors. 5
As a gang of ‘four’, we were an unprepossessing crew; none of us held either college fellowships or permanent university posts at Cambridge, and two of us had yet to complete our doctorates. But we had energy and enthusiasm and we had John on-board. To our surprise, the Arnold directors not only accepted the proposal, but even allowed us £70 for each paper to help commission major reviews in areas which were hard to cover. (Today it sounds a small sum, but in the late sixties it was equivalent to £1,000. No fees for editors were ever proposed.)
Nine volumes of the hardback Progress in Geography (PIG) were published over the seven years 1969 to 1976. Attracting review essays became gradually easier (the fee helped), library orders were built up, and the account moved slowly out of the red. Thus, PIG might well be running today, but for a meeting in 1977 at which Anthony Hamilton, Arnold’s managing director, announced that the future of small publishers lay in specialist journals and that his editors should bring forward proposals.
John called us to ask for an urgent meeting to explore upgrading PIG to a regular quarterly journal. We found ourselves in a dilemma because, if regular journals had advantages over irregular hardbacks for the publisher’s balance sheet, it posed hard questions for the four of us. By then, two of the ‘gang’ had left Cambridge: Chris Board to the London School of Economics (LSE) and me to Bristol. David Stoddart, too, was increasingly to be found (or not found) on remote coral atolls in the Indian or Pacific Ocean and was now editing his own journal, Atoll Research Bulletin. A regular journal demanded deadlines and close editorial control, not a loose circle of friends who might or might not be available. And should there be one journal or two? Dick and I had argued in the Networks book for a monistic view of geography in which both physical and human parts shared a common core of concepts. But we were aware that this was a minority (even a heretic) view in the profession at large. We decided to take advice. John wrote to 250 geographers around the world. Of those 250, 180 replied with a clear majority for separate physical and human serials and for regular progress reports and book review essays. So, in terms of a letter from David from the Aldabra atoll, the ‘original PIG has spawned two piglets’. The die was cast.
John set up an editorial office in Bloomsbury Square with secretarial and editing resources. Two managing editors were appointed, both based in the University of London: Chris Board (at the LSE) for Progress in Human Geography and climatologist Bruce Atkinson (at QMC) for Progress in Physical Geography. Both were to serve for long periods, and they provided the stability on which growth could be based.
This proved particularly important as John was soon caught up in the waves of change swirling around British publishing. The new Arnold journals were taken over by Hodder in 1978, and later that year he joined Basil Blackwell at Oxford. John’s deeds, both there and in the Boston office, are parts of legends of geographical publishing with shelf after shelf of his ‘stable’ of authors writing discipline-changing books, dictionaries and atlases. He showed great loyalty and had a rare flair for taking the right risks and, poker-player that he was, making the right calls.
He leaves behind, in the words of two fellow publishers, an ‘extraordinary legacy of grateful authors, affectionate colleagues and remarkable titles’. 6 And to that we should add his first-love: two journals in which he took such interest and pride long after leaving London, It was natural that when the journals reached Volume 25, it was he who was asked to write a brief editorial. 7 He recalled the recurrent angst over the slippery concept of ‘progress’; once seeming so self-evident and later (in human geography) so contested. His own criterion was how a reader reacted when a new issue arrived. This could range from a weary groan, at one extreme, to an eager scan of its contents on the other. On this metric he scored both journals highly in his ‘…bloody good effort’ band.
Publisher, honorary geographer, flyfisherman and friend, he leaves a legacy in which all who have been connected to PPG and PHG over the years stand in debt.