For Martin McLaughlin
Our old friend Martin McLaughlin died peacefully on 24 January. He served as Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford, as Trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association, and as a leading figure in the Society for Italian Studies. He was a literary translator as well as a scholar. A gregarious and inspirational figure, he knew everybody in Italian letters. But to us, and for us, he was an editor. He served on editorial committees for Legenda from its foundation right up to last July, with a long spell as its chair. So, rather than giving a formal obituary here, we would like instead to reproduce the tribute to Martin which appeared as an endnote to his capacious retirement Festschrift.
Martin's last editorial email for us, after twenty-nine years of volunteer service, ended with the simple word Abbracci: not farewell, but hugs all round.
When the history of Legenda is written, Martin McLaughlin will be one of its heroes. His sense, good cheer, honest reputation, and unfailing capacity to get along with people have carried the press through many scrapes. Though he is a master of the raised-eyebrows, whites-of-his-eyes look of astonishment, Martin has the great gift of never over-reacting. I have only once seen words fail him, when an absurdly unlucky seating plan at a conference dinner placed two highly combustible colleagues right next to each other in front of people we needed to impress with our smooth running. The event passed off happily, of course. In the life of a publishing house, all crises come to nothing except the last. Martin saw to it that we never came to our last.
The many times we frowned over memos or balance sheets in Martin’s sunny office in Wellington Square merge into one in my memory. A wine fridge and a high-end bicycle would be concealed among the bookcases, in so far as you can conceal a bicycle. Proofs would cover the central table, proving not least that our wrangling was getting us somewhere. On screen, browser pages of Scottish League transfer news would be not quite hidden by spreadsheets and Calvino essays. (Martin could never have been happy as a Renaissance man: Alberti may have been in his prime, but the Football Act 1424 had prohibited the game in Scotland.) Once in a while, Martin would offer wicked, though always affectionate, impressions of our colleagues. Mrs Higden in Our Mutual Friend says of one of her boys that, when reading newspapers out loud, ‘he do the Police in different voices’. When reading emails out loud, Martin do the Professors in different voices.
In its earliest years Legenda was a team project of working academics buying in support services as needed. Malcolm Bowie, our charismatic founder, had gathered a group of both senior colleagues and young Turks: Martin, along with Diego Zancani, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, took care of the nascent Italian list. Organisation was informal, and the nameless post of sorter-out-of-Legenda (Legenda Muggins might have been a fitting title) rotated. Alison Finch, Kevin Hilliard, Helen Watanabe, Nicola Luckhurst and others all did turns. Tales of those young days, of the formative moments in that far smaller-scale operation, are already as much legend as history, like Book I of Livy.
It was Martin who succeeded Malcolm to be the next prime mover behind Legenda, chairing both the European Humanities Research Centre, the Oxford unit which then operated us, and also the Editorial Board. After the fruitful RAE-census years of 1999–2000, in which Legenda published an unprecedented 20 titles, Legenda was developing into an appreciable business. Martin was to steer it for nearly a decade, with Ritchie Robertson as his close colleague and de facto deputy, Ritchie taking the chair himself for two of those years. The post was then taken up by Colin Davis of Royal Holloway, who in turn gave many years to the enterprise, and led the press until 2016.
But it was Martin, more than anyone else, who oversaw the crucial 2004 transition. ‘2004’ is the ‘1066’ of Legenda, the one memorable date in its history. This was the year in which it was put on a proper commercial footing for the first time, and new investment came from a partnership between Maney Publishing, a commercial journal publisher, and the Modern Humanities Research Association, a learned society. Where once Legenda had put on surges of activity, now there was a continuous flow of publishing. Two hundred and fifty-one books were to appear under this partnership, ranging across every European language. A particular pleasure for Martin was the appearance of his daughter Mairi’s volume on the sociolinguistics of French news coverage, in a series edited and selected by the Society for French Studies. Mairi took after her father in all respects except one: she handed in the manuscript on time. Martin has to date edited or co-edited no fewer than six collective Legenda volumes but, as with one of NASA’s more ambitious manifests, each launch in turn occurred two years later than originally scheduled. These were nevertheless fine books, and were a testament to a belief which has run through Martin’s whole career: the conviction that the Humanities are not one thing but many, that they are a collective undertaking, and that the well-spring of the Humanities is the willingness to participate.
— Graham Nelson, 2017
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