Colin Webb profiled in The Western Daily Press

One of the West's most successful publishers has acclaimed books about James Dean and Alistair Cooke under his belt. Dawn Gorman finds out more about his latest challenge, Buddy Holly.

5th December 2006, Life Time magazine

Colin Webb, one of the West's most original and go-getting publishers, is never a man to ignore a significant anniversary – or shy away from going for the most commercial possible means of marking it.

A little over two years' time – February 3, 2009, to be exact – marks 50 years since the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly – and he's already talking to the rock legend’s widow, Maria Elena, about a book.

"She's very excited about the possibility, but there's no archive material, since she had to sell it all a few years ago," he says. "We need to think of an angle. It's a bit like publishing archaeology – you have to be a bloodhound."

Maria Elena is very much apart of the Holly legend. Born Maria Elena Santiago in 1935 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she moved to New York as a child, soon after her parents died. Buddy met her in 1958 while she was working as a receptionist for a music publisher. After a couple of minutes’ chat he asked her out for a date – her first – and after only five hours that night, he asked her to marry him.

At the time, she was living with a strict aunt. Buddy had already had to ask the old lady for permission to take the girl out, and then, on the morning after the date, he was back again to ask her for her niece's hand in marriage.

He must have asked nicely, because just two weeks later they married in the singer's home town of Lubbock, Texas. That's the fairytale. The nightmare came seven months later, by which time Maria Elena was six months pregnant. The trauma of Holly's death caused her to miscarry his child.

Since then she has been devoted to keeping his memory alive and has become a courtroom battler, where necessary, in her defence of what she sees as his best interests. She remarried and had three children, but is now long divorced.

Now a grandmother, she travels the world promoting Buddy Holly's legacy. There is still quite a story to be told, and Colin is determined that his Palazzo company, based in Bath's Gay Street, just below the Circus, will be the one to tell it.

He's already got a good track record when it comes to American icons. His book on Humphrey Bogart, Bogie: A Celebration, is just out, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the actor's death, while his James Dean tribute broke exciting new ground.

"It began with a tentative letter to his surviving relatives," he recalls. "They are Quaker farmers in Indianapolis, and they got this letter from these people they'd never heard of in Bath, and didn't know what to make of us. But we went over to talk to them and they started to see we were serious and eventually they trusted us so much that they gave us previously unseen letters James Dean had written when he first went to New York. There's a lot been said about him and his lifestyle and sexual habits, but these were lovely, innocent, well-written letters conveying a sense of what it was like to be a young actor in that city then."

In this country, past work, including The Beatles Anthology in 2000 and two later books with Paul McCartney, opened the door to a surge of books on the rock aristocracy: Moonage Daydream, which explored David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona, Classic Queen which captured the band in the photographs of Mick Rock, and a book on Status Quo marked that group's 40th year on the road.

There has been yet another legend in Colin's life in the form of the journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke, and he is watched over by him in more ways than one. In a literal sense, you might spot a photograph of him on the wall of Colin's top-floor office, with the dedication reading: "For Pam and Colin with great respect and loads of affection." But it went beyond words. Cooke, best known for his long-running radio programme Letter from America and for his Stateside coverage in The Guardian, was a great supporter of Colin and his wife Pam.

Palazzo has four Alistair Cooke titles in its catalogue, including this year's hugely successful American Journey, a newly discovered, previously unpublished book about life on the American home front during World War II.

The link, says Colin, 59, goes back to his publishing roots. He has been in the business since he left school, and after a few years in London came to Bath in 1969, working for a small publisher, Adams and Dart.

He took time out to go to Norwich University as a mature student to study English literature, but afterwards went straight back to publishing in London, establishing Pavilion Books with Michael Parkinson and Tim Rice.

"We met through a mutual enthusiasm for cricket," Colin explains. "It was Michael who introduced me to Alistair, when they were doing one of those Parkinson one-man shows.
"Alistair would ring me every week from his apartment in New York. He was very interested in what I was up to, and wanted to be engaged in what was going on in the world.
"He knew exactly when he was going to die, and had everything organised. We saw him 10 days before.
"He had prepared typed instructions appointing me as his literary executor. He wanted me to edit and place a big collection, Letter from America.
"He was an incredible hoarder. Towards the end of his life he found a 200,000-word manuscript he'd written in 1944.
"The original publishers said the moment the bomb dropped (to hasten the end of the war) they wouldn't be interested, so it went in the cupboard."

Colin nursed the book, American Journey, to publication – and it received rave reviews.

But that is not the end of Cooke's legacy; since Palazzo is currently working on a book to mark what would have been the broadcaster's centenary in 2008.

"He filed more than 2,000 broadcasts, covering every key event in US post-war history;" says Colin.
"We've hardly begun to deal with it. We're putting together his words with key images taken at the time – and it's the first time it's been done."

Colin Webb built up Pavilion Books over 20 years, but sold up five years ago – it is now part of the Chrysalis empire – to return to having creative control with authors and artists.

He did a centenary edition of Peter Pan in conjunction with Great Ormond Street Hospital, and is planning a 2008 centenary edition of Wind in the Willows – but the fact that the Letter from America deal was put together for Penguin gives you a clue to how Palazzo works.

"We focus on the creative process – communication with artists, editing, design of the book," he says.
"Then we sell the books to a big publisher, who takes responsibility for all the investment and marketing.
"Bath is a hub of publishing now, because people are leaving London and the stresses and strains of city living.
"It's strange being here again, though. The first time I lived here it was in a council flat in The Paragon – £5 a week, including a garage.
"I used to work just around the corner from where we are now, and sometimes when I leave the office in the evening I'm sure I see my younger self walking up the road on the other side."