Robin Baird-Smith writes:
ELIZABETH Ann Cecilia Russell (universally known as Liz), long-serving Sales and Marketing Director of the publishers Darton, Longman & Todd, died on 27 February.
Born on 9 April 1921, she served as a Wren during the War, and subsequently found a job with the publishers Longman. She was related to the Longman family, and rapidly found her way into the long-established religious-book department run by her cousin Michael Longman. Longman had hired two editors — Tim Darton, a High Church Anglican who had been deeply influenced as a young man by the writings of Charles Williams, and John Todd, a liberal progressive recruit to Roman Catholicism. With the sale of Longman to Lord Cowdray of the Pearson family, there was little interest in religion from the new proprietors.
In 1962, Michael Longman took his colleagues, including Liz Russell, with him, and founded the new publishing house of Darton, Longman & Todd. The offices were at 29A Gloucester Road, above Karnac the bookseller, who specialised in books on Freudian psychoanalysis. Mr Karnac had the habit of patronising his new neighbours, which they did not like at all; he told them to keep clear of Christianity and read the works of Sigmund Freud instead
Darton and Todd were editors of the old type with little interest in how the books would be sold and marketed, and so it was that Liz Russell came into her own and became an essential part of this small, lively, and thoroughly independent publishing house. First, in 1966, came the publication of The Jerusalem Bible (JB), which Cardinal Heenan quickly adopted as the authorised version for liturgical use in the Roman Catholic Church. He was pleased as punch that it came out before the complete New English Bible. In planning its publication, Liz had arranged front-page coverage in the national press, but the Aberfan disaster happened on the eve of publication, and the JB was relegated to much-reduced space on the inside pages.
The JB gave the new firm a solid basis, and it became the springboard of a glorious period in the company’s history. At the close of the Second Vatican Council, there was a ferment of new theological writing in the RC Church, and DLT snapped up the rights in the works of Rahner, Congar, and Schillebeeckx. The thirst for this new theology was great, and Liz was spotted going round the German publishers’ stands at the Frankfurt Book Fair asking “Haben Sie eine kleine Rahner?”
But Longmans had published the first books by Michael Ramsey and Eric Mascall, and Liz and Tim Darton were anxious to build up the non-Roman Catholic part of DLT’s list. I joined the publishing house in 1968 and was keen to help in any way I could. We were proud to publish books, which are still in print 40 years later, by Alan Ecclestone, W. H. Vanstone, John Drury, John Austin Baker, Rowan Williams, and H. A. Williams. In those days, there were far more specifically religious bookshops, and Liz was matchless in knowing how to feed and exploit the market. Another successful line that grew was books on spirituality — much of it in translation — by authors including Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Carlo Carretto, René Voillaume, and John Dalrymple.
By 1979, DLT was flourishing and turning in respectable profits, and Liz Russell`s commitment and skill were an essential part of the success. She remained in post till 1986, when she retired.
In private, Liz Russell was a devout Anglo-Catholic, who worshipped all her life at St Mary’s, Bourne Street, in London. She had an inexhaustible sense of humour and, like Teresa of Ávila, combined this with great piety. She died at peace in St Wilfrid’s Convent, Tite Street, Chelsea, where she had lived, surrounded by a rosary, a crucifix with palms through it, and a complete set of Barbara Pym novels.
