Discovered in a copy of Raymond Tong’s
Angry Decade, a slim volume brought out by the famous Fortune Press in August 1951, is that rarest of objects—a review slip inscribed in the handwriting of the actual
publisher, R. A. Caton—known to his friends (if he had any) as 'Reggie'. Nowadays a publisher’s slip like this would normally be filled in by some unpaid, starry-eyed intern with a B.A.(Hons) in Englit. But much as penny-pinching Reggie would have welcomed free help back in 1951, any new graduate would probably have walked out of his basement HQ in Belgrave Road, before a week had elapsed, so unpleasant, by all accounts, was this particular employer. One Fortune Press author, Margaret Crosland, told me that Caton looked like 'a second-rate accountant, wearing the traditional dirty raincoat, on his way to a sex shop.'
'The Fortune Press' , Philip Larkin complained in 1945, 'is only a yelping-ground for incompetents who can’t get a hearing elsewhere' . At the time Larkin had just posted his novel
Jill to Caton, who was also preparing to bring out his debut collection of poems
