There are two kinds of book publisher: one, a member of the corporate world, primarily a businessman; the other, an individualist interested in literature or some other field of study that can be disseminated through the printed word. Reg Davis-Poynter, who has died aged 80, was both. He was also one of the most affable and popular members of the publishing fraternity.
In 1957, he was put in charge of McGibbon and Kee by Howard Samuel, a fellow member of the Tribune group and an idealistic young leftwing millionaire, who, in the late 1950s, bought up publishing companies and, at one point, the New Statesman. After Samuel drowned in 1961, McGibbon and Kee became the cornerstone of a new publishing empire set up by Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television.
Among the imprints acquired under Samuel and Bernstein were Rupert Hart-Davis, Arco, Staples, Adelard-Coles and the mass-market paperback companies Panther and Mayflower. Beside running this mixture of very different publishing companies, Davis-Poynter started Paladin as a non-fiction rival to Penguin's Pelican series.
Granada Publishing was part of a conglomerate that included motorway service stations, and other enterprises far removed from the parent television company. Torn between his desire to develop products of artistic and intellectual quality, and the need to maximise profits, Bernstein increasingly listened to accountants with little interest in the former. Finding his position as publishing supremo ever less congenial, in 1970 Davis-Poynter left to start his own publishing company, taking Su Herbert with him as his assistant.
Lord Goodman, with his many connections in politics and the arts, helped him to start up under his own name, with help from British Lion Films. Many editors whom he had trained also moved on, in particular, Sonny Mehta to Penguin, and then to Knopf in New York, and William Miller and John Booth to start Quartet, the former eventually moving to Japan to create the biggest literacy agency there for English-language books.
For 13 years, Davis-Poynter continued to publish a left-of-centre list similar to the larger one that Bernstein had originally encouraged him to develop, in 1973, for instance, bringing out the second volume of Michael Foot's important biography of Aneurin Bevan; McGibbon and Kee had done the first in 1962, but had quickly let it go out of print.
It was typical of Reg that, after meeting a depressed and homesick young Indian in a pub, he commissioned from Praffula Mohompi a book about his native village that became a minor bestseller, especially in India. But in 1983, with the publishing climate becoming more difficult, he retired, becoming literary agent for a few friends such as Foot, and remaining active in local activities in Chichester, where his wife, Maureen, was involved with the Festival Theatre.
Born into a Roman Catholic family in London, Davis-Poynter went to school in Fulham, and then attended the Holy Cross Academy, Edinburgh. After working in London at the St Pancras library and for the medical booksellers HK Lewis, he was an editor for the publisher Max Reinhart, before Samuel made him a publisher in his own right.
Reg became a secular freethinker, who could enjoy his leisure, his garden and his friends. He was known for his liberal socialist outlook, his friendliness to everyone he met, and his sunny and outgoing personality. His only son, Paul, tragically predeceased him.
Su Herbert writes: Reg was a socialist who practised what he preached. At Christmas 1960, the production manager brought to my office several bottles of spirits. I was told it was not a present, but that all booze sent to the production department by the printers was, on Reg's instructions, to be divided among the staff - and that it was my job to organise fair shares for all. Any bottles left over were subsequently drunk at the first birthdays following Christmas, which happened to be mine and Reg's.
· Reginald Davis-Poynter, publisher, born February 6 1924; died June 4 2004
