In honour of a love of books

How very accommodating of the newly gonged Geoff Walker, ONZM, to provide me with the questions for interviewing him. I'd Googled him, not entirely successfully, as it turned out, before going to see him, and found a list of discussion topics on ethics in publishing from a speech he'd once given.

I particularly liked this one: "Who the hell do you think you are in your flash offices with your flash salary, your expense account, making life and death decisions about books by writers earning less than the dole?"

Walker, whom I decided to call "a very powerful man in publishing" - also with limited success - got a gong in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to literature. So that, obviously, wasn't quite the first question.

That would have been rude - Walker has the immediate effect of making you sit up straight and behave - so the first question was about what the honour meant to him. "It's an honour, obviously, it's an honour," he says.

How very literal of him. He seems, actually, slightly embarrassed by it. This is the accepted New Zealand way of receiving accolades but in his case, he agrees, it does feel a bit as though he's got his honourable mention for doing his job. "I felt a little bit fraudulent," he says. "I don't write the books and most of the time I don't even come up with the ideas. What I am able to be is a sort of conduit between those who wrote the books and those who read them."

What a successful career as a conduit he's had. The evidence is on the bookshelves in his "flash" office: the Michael Kings, the Anne Salmonds, the Maurice Gees.

It is a nice enough office, I suppose, in a small, tidy, anonymous sort of way. It is in a barn of a place, out at Albany, in a street of warehouses and car parks - a reminder that publishing is a business and that Walker's title is publishing director of Penguin New Zealand.

He has done 20 years with Penguin, which is a lot of books, and his enthusiasm has never waned. It is only when he is talking about how much books are the joy of his life that he becomes really animated. He is a tidy, trim fellow. There is something spartan, or cautious, about both his appearance and his demeanour. He is not what you would call effusive, at least not when he is being interviewed by me, but perhaps I offended him. He certainly clammed up when I asked him what I thought was a perfectly innocuous question about why he was a vegetarian. "I just am," he said. Not for any particular reason? "No. Lots of reasons." He was not forthcoming on those reasons so I asked whether his vegetarianism was some private thing. He said, "yes, it's private".

An odd thing to be private about, but he was immovable. I managed to prise out of him that he was a studious sort of boy who grew up in a house with few books. He would sneak off to the library at lunchtime to read about dinosaurs. He went to Victoria University in the late 60s, then to the Evening Standard, before he "went to what was then known as broadcasting". He was on the telly, on a current affairs show called Gallery, for three years in the 70s before he "burnt out" and went gardening for a year. He can still prune a rose as well as he can edit a book. In the mid-70s he lived, along with Michael King, "in a community house in Karori with three families". He denies he was a hippy although concedes he might have played at it on the weekends. It might be because he was a journalist that he is so bad at being interviewed.

Or perhaps he's just quite a tough nut, although he also denies this. I know I wouldn't want to be a writer negotiating a contract with him, but he says he's very nice to his writers; no spats with them.

Instead, he is friends with many of them - great friends, of course, with the late Michael King - which looks, from the outside, to be a potentially fraught business. "In essence," he says, although not in the case of King because they were friends first, "it is a business relationship, but a degree of trust develops, which is an integral part of the relationship. The author trusts the publisher not to do anything that's fundamentally against their interest; the publisher trusts the author to come up with ideas that are going to work."

He has never published anything, he says, that he has disliked. "No, not fundamentally. I haven't agreed with everything I've published but I can't think of anything we have published that I haven't basically thought was okay, that has its own integrity."

So that hunting book Penguin published - "I was happy enough to publish because lots of people are into hunting. I'm not, personally." Obviously not, because he is, just privately, a vegetarian. There is a biography of Hayley Westenra, rather rudely reviewed (by me) when it came out. "No, I'm not personally into Hayley Westenra - though I had a very pleasant evening at her concert last year." And "I wouldn't personally vote for John Banks but we published a book on him. I wouldn't personally, probably, vote for Don Brash, but we published a biography of him ... "

Of course he doesn't have to agree with the content of every book: "I'm not the Secretary of the State Library Committee." He is mouth-puckeringly dry and, I suspect, a delight at a gossipy dinner party. Possibly. Because I ask if he knows who nominated him for the gong and he says he doesn't but that he is curious. So I say, "Oh well, you're bound to find out because the literary world's so gossipy, isn't it?" And he says, "I don't believe so." Now this really is utter tosh. All you need to do, I tell him, is go and hang out with, say, Kevin Ireland, for half an hour and you'll hear all sorts of delicious things: "As you well know. So, have you got any gossip?" "No."

Silly me. You don't get to be a very powerful man in publishing by going about gossiping to journalists about authors. I couldn't quite say "powerful man" without laughing and, in return, Walker said he couldn't answer a question about any such perception "without laughing either".

I'd wanted to gain a sense of what he did all day and he said there was no such thing as a typical day, but one might involve reading and assessing manuscripts, signing contracts, dozens of emails, and "I might be having lunch with an author; I might be having meetings with potential new authors ... and right at the very end I might go to a book launch".

Not often, though - launches have fallen from favour, because, he says, they're expensive. Goodness, are they? What's expensive about providing a glass of warm wine and a couple of bits of dry bread? "It depends how many people you want to multiply it by." And media don't go to book launches. "Well, of course they don't," I say, "there's never enough wine." He replies, crisp as a good riesling, "I'm very sorry to hear that. We'll increase the amount of wine available at book launches straight away."

It didn't sound very glam, being a leading light in the book business. Despite the quote he had so helpfully provided about fat cat publishers. Anyway, I said, authors have probably been here and seen that you haven't got a flash office at all. "Well," he said, pretending to be good and miffed, "I think this is very flash, don't you?"

So that went well. So did my question about whether he'd ever consider writing a book. He has written one. "It was called 51 Days and it was the story of the anti-Springbok movement in Wellington. A very fine book it was too." And sold terrifically well? "It sold terrifically well to its target audience."

He should know.