Innovative publisher who co-founded the pioneering company Dorling Kindersley
During the 1980s and 90s there can have been few homes in the UK without an illustrated Dorling Kindersley (DK) book. They taught us how to cook, garden and decorate; how to have sex, give birth and rear children; how to lose weight and stay healthy; and how to play tennis, do yoga, draw, paint and take better photographs. DK's Eyewitness guides have sold more than 50m copies in 40 languages. Christopher Davis, who has died aged 71 after a lengthy illness, was one of the founders of DK and played a pivotal role in the company from its start-up in 1974 until his retirement in 2005. He served as editorial director, publisher and deputy chairman.
Christopher's career in publishing began in 1968 at Paul Hamlyn, where he first met his wife, Linda, whom he married the following year. Together, they worked on many of the full-colour books that were part of the revolution in illustrated book publishing. In the early 1970s, he moved to Mitchell Beazley. There, he teamed up with Peter Kindersley and Christopher Dorling, and with them he left to form DK.
A passionate and talented publisher, Christopher was as committed to the editorial quality of the books as to their unique design. The authors with whom he worked included Penelope Leach, Sheila Kitzinger, Miriam Stoppard, Gerald Durrell, Geoff Hamilton, Kevin McCloud, Mary Berry and Sister Wendy Beckett. He was a creative driving force behind many of the landmark reference titles that DK published in association with the British Red Cross, the Royal Horticultural Society, the British Medical Association, the Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian and other leading institutions. He was particularly proud of his role in creating the DK travel guides, with 40m copies sold in 30 languages.
What made the books so successful? Partly, it was that they were so instantly recognisable with their distinctive page design, white backgrounds, cutout photographs and tightly integrated words and pictures. It's a look that is commonplace today but 30 years ago was fresh and new. The books also had an appeal that went far beyond the UK. Travelling the world tirelessly, Christopher charmed, befriended and signed up international publishing partners to translate DK books into foreign languages and join large, cost-effective co-edition print-runs.
Of course, success depended on generating the right ideas in the first place, on attracting the best authors, and on recruiting and nurturing talented editors and designers. This is where Christopher excelled. He was a constant source of ideas himself and a catalyst for those of others, and in what were sometimes heated creative debates his was the sane editorial voice that balanced Kindersley's visionary eye for design.
When I joined DK as a junior editor, Christopher was my boss. He was an inspirational mentor, a wise counsel and a friend. Always open, fair and generous, he defined the character of the company.
Christopher was also an author, and wrote books about cricket, football, the Olympics and the American west. In the late 1960s, while researching a travel guide to the Aegean, he was arrested by the Greek colonels and forced to flee the country. After he joined Hamlyn, he wrote many of the books that needed to be produced quickly inhouse.
His book North American Indian (1969), written in a few weeks as a television tie-in, was a passionate account of the plight of Native Americans. In 1975, an extract from the book was carved into the base of a 38ft concrete cross erected just outside Dodge City, Kansas. He was made an honorary marshal of Dodge City, and awarded a tin star, and then promptly got food poisoning at the inaugural Christopher Davis Picnic.
In 2005, his book Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley was published. It tells the story of the company's growth and success, its unfortunate Star Wars debacle (4m copies sold but – through no fault of Christopher's – 17m copies printed), and its acquisition in 2000 by Pearson, the parent company of Penguin.
Born in Guildford, Christopher was brought up by parents who were both teachers and who thought nothing of reciting Shakespeare at the breakfast table. He was educated at Bradfield college, Berkshire, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read English and developed a lasting love for cricket and theatre. He played for Berkshire and was a member of the MCC. After Oxford there were career possibilities in the theatre which he did not pursue. In recent years, he had joined the London committee of Human Rights Watch.
Christopher is survived by Linda, his son, Ben, and a grandson, Bo.
• Christopher John Dusser Davis, publisher and author, born 28 June 1941; died 2 December 2012
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