A Publisher's Tale

The Telegraph reviews the extraordinary contacts of Charles Pick, literary agent and publisher. An example:

Pick began his career in 1933 as an office boy for Victor Gollancz and moved into sales. In 1935, he went into a Hampstead bookshop and tried to sell copies of a "marvellous new book" called Burmese Days by a young writer named George Orwell. The man behind the counter said he knew the author well - it was Orwell himself, working as a part-time assistant under his real name of Eric Blair.