My friend and colleague Euan Henderson, who has died aged 71, was in turn a publisher, publishing educator and priest. His early career was at Oxford University Press, both in Oxford and as manager of OUP's Central African branch. Later he ran export sales at Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Born in Scotland, he grew up in Oxford, where he trained at Blackwell's bookshop from the age of 18. It was while representing OUP in Europe that he met Karin, a German bookseller, who moved to Britain when they married 50 years ago.
In 1986 he became international director at Book House Training Centre, London, where he initiated programmes in Africa and south-east Asia and developed a training network in western Europe. His breakthrough to a new dimension of training came in 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Publishing was identified as a force for change by the Foreign Office's Know How Fund project, established by Margaret Thatcher to bring the values of a civil society and the skills of a market economy to eastern and central Europe.
First in Poland, and subsequently throughout the region, Euan researched and implemented a series of influential training courses in almost every market from the Baltic states to Albania and Czechoslovakia to Belarus, often under extreme conditions from the rigours of the Siberian winter to potentially deadly riots in Romania. His audiences were, on the one hand, survivors of the old state system who did not understand the market economy, and on the other, newcomers with high aspirations but with little understanding of publishing. His courses helped to fill the gaps.
He attracted support from the World Bank, George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Hamlyn Foundation and the British Council, and later participated in EU-funded courses in Russia and Ukraine. His work made a huge difference to many individual publishers and whole publishing industries, due to his professionalism, his passion and his ability to energise and inspire people.
These personal strengths were also brought to bear in quite a different sphere. Euan was ordained into the Church of England in 1981. He pursued this vocation alongside his working life, until 2000. He then converted to Roman Catholicism and was received fully into the priesthood in 2005. He was devoted to his duties as a deanery priest and in particular to his role in the chaplaincy at Bullingdon prison, Oxfordshire.
Despite increasingly poor health, he continued to say mass at St Edmund Campion church in Watlington even in the last weeks of his life. Euan's humanity and indomitable spirit touched so many people in so many different circumstances.
Karin and their daughters, Diana and Claire, survive him.
