His name is well-known to British science fiction and fantasy publishers. It should be, since Paul Barnett has enjoyed a thirty-year career in just about every area of editing and writing genre books in the UK. Most of his work has been as a free lance, although he has held posts as Commissioning Editor ("Editor-in-Chief in US parlance...") and Editorial Director for various UK publishing houses.

But it is Barnett's other name that is well-known to fandom on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing almost always as John Grant, Barnett has had over fifty books published, both fiction and non-fiction, including the Hugo and World Fantasy award-winning (1998) Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which he co-authored with noted fellow-scholar and critic John Clute. From 1989 through 1994, he spun Joe Deverís Lone Wolf role-playing game into a series of twelve tie-in novels, The Legends of Lone Wolf, and it is from here that one of his most famous character creations, the comical Thog the Mighty, comes. (Indeed, Thogís cult following was at one time so large that the character was a "Virtual Guest of Honor" at a British SF convention. It is Thog who gave his name to the perennially popular "Thog's Masterclass" column, originally cooked up by Dave Langford and Barnett for a convention newsletter, in Langfordís fanzine Ansible.) Other fiction written during this period includes the otherworldly Albion (1991) followed by The World (1992), his most ambitious novel to date. The imminently to be re-released The Hundredfold Problem features futuristic law enforcer Judge Dredd in a humorous sci-fantasy. Much of his fiction has ranged from spoof to satire, as can be seen in the latter volume and other works such as The Truth About the Flaming Ghoulies (1983), Sex Secrets of Atlantis (1984), and two collaborations with David Langford, Earthdoom! (1987) and Guts (2002).

However, Barnett (as Grant) has been equally prolific as a non-fiction author. His Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters received high marks from critics upon its initial release in 1987, and established him as a highly respected animation authority. Before this, he was known for having written The Book of Time (1980, with Colin Wilson); The Directory of Possibilities (1981, also with Wilson); and A Directory of Discarded Ideas (1981), among others. He also earned praise as Technical (i.e., Managing) Editor of the second edition (1993) of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

In 1997, Barnett experienced a slight career shift when he accepted the position of Commissioning Editor for the worldís leading publisher of science fiction and fantasy art books, Paper Tiger. (Recently, they were acquired by Chrysalis Group plc.) Since then, he has also written the accompanying text for several artistsí books, including Anne Sudworth. This after he wrote The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Science Fiction Art Techniques with noted illustrator and writer Ron Tiner in 1996.

Recently, Barnett (as Grant) revisited the animation genre. His Masters of Animation, released this past fall, is a critical history of the medium written in a crisp biographical format. Thirty-seven of the most influential animators, partnerships and teams are profiled in this handsome volume, liberally supported with some of the finest animation cel reproductions seen in a work of this nature to date. This April, Paper Tiger will release Perceptualistics: The Art of Jael, with text written by. . . John Grant. Also this spring: a compilation of Barnettís interviews with twenty-five prominent science fiction and fantasy artists that originally appeared in Paper Tiger's e-zine, The Paper Snarl, the Internet publication Barnett created for the imprint as an indirect marketing tool in 1999. He is currently at work with Bob Eggleton on Dragonhenge, a fictional "reconstruction" of the legends and mythology in which the long-extinct dragon civilization believed. The two have been exchanging text and illustrations as the creative impetus for the book. It is scheduled for release later this year. Barnett also squeezes duties as Reviews Editor for InfinityPlus, a British literary genre webzine highly regarded within the industry, into his busy schedule. (In case youíre wondering, his workweek typically runs seventy to eighty hours.)

So I was delighted when I received Paul's email early last November in which he agreed to allow me to interview him for Italics. This would be, I thought, an appropriate offering to E. Catherine Tobler for her new web site - sort of an Internet housewarming gift. I figured that a few anecdotes from Paul on his extensive career would be most entertaining and insightful to the writers who stop by here. And after contributing bits of reportage to Paul for The Paper Snarl and book reviews for InfinityPlus, I felt I was entitled to cash in a favor chip or two.

Preferring a face-to-face grilling as opposed to the "e" variety (". . .for hours on end, you'll have to listen respectfully to what I'm saying rather than interrupt me with idiotic and totally misguided contradictions the whole bloody time"), he suggested that my wife Barbara and I visit him and his wife, Pamela D. Scoville, the respected animation art appraiser and founder of the Animation Art Guild, at their northern New Jersey home the night of the Leonid meteor shower. ("The seeing conditions here aren't all that bad.") The invitation was not totally unexpected. We live less than an hour from each other, and the four of us had enjoyed our share of book and antique shop treasure hunting and exotic dining together mixed in with a slight bit of carousing over the past year.

Paul, an expatriate Scot by marital agreement and employer request, and Pamela, American born and raised, moved to "the wilds of northern New Jersey" two years ago after living in Manhattan, ". . .about two hundred yards from Times Square." The two have adjusted quite well to their new environs, a rural multi-level house set on several wooded acres, though they still miss the Japanese and Indian restaurants down the street from their former address. Barb and I arrived early in the evening and the four of us caught up while devouring a delicious, home-baked pan of sausage lasagna. Then, as our wives disappeared into their own world of common interests, Paul and I retired to his office, popped open a couple of cans of Guinness (we have ways of making them talk), and turned on the tape recorder.

After several hours of repartee, Paul began his meteor watch. He bounced in and out of the house periodically, even though the newspapers advised that the greatest shower activity would occur at around four in the morning. After more conversation and late-night beverages, Pamela, Barb and I retired to our respective rooms at around one. Paul stayed up working.

At three-thirty sharp, Barb and I were awakened by a knock at our guestroom door. Yes, we did ask Paul to roust us just before the meteor shower's peak activity time, didn't we. We dressed and joined Pamela and Paul outside on their driveway for the show in the night sky. It turned out to be a marvelous sight, although not as spectacular as I'd imagined it would be, never having seen a meteor shower before. Then, as the sun took its place in the eastern sky, it was lots of coffee, quick good-byes and a weary but happy trip home.

Paul Barnett has never been one to hold back facts or truths, although there were points in our conversation where I could sense that he was acting very discreet in the wording of his responses to a few of my questions. He answered every one completely, yet with the conciseness he knew from his years as a savvy interviewer and researcher to be necessary in keeping the piece manageable. His responses to the questions that called upon his editorial and writing experience will be food for thought for young writers to feast on, since they contained the insight of a seasoned professional whoíd been there and done all of that. And the dry humor that crept out from most every anecdote kept me laughing for most of the evening. One cannot hear about The Life and Times of Paul Barnett and maintain a serious pose throughout.

Originally, I had envisioned this piece as a four-part "personality profile". However, when I played back the tape, I began to appreciate the freedom of Internet journalism; it became apparent early on that Paul had given me enough substantive conversation for a series at least twice as long as my original proposal. E. Catherine has generously allowed me to submit the entire interview for posting. So call this Part 1 of 8.

I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed listening to Paul, er, dictate it.

It says in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy that Paul (le Page) Barnett was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1949. This is entirely accurate of course, since the passage was written by the subject himself. The younger of two brothers, Paul's intellect came from both sides of the family. "My father was an agricultural biochemist," he began, revealing his middle-class upbringing, "and when I was born, my mother was a housewife, basically, although she graduated years earlier with a degree in geography, with psychology as an ancillary." At the age of six, Paul lost his father to a long bout with heart disease; and his mother, who had years earlier operated a meteorological substation in the remote Scottish Highlands, was forced to put her education to more profitable use, joining the University of Aberdeen Geography Department where she split time as a cartographer and a map archivist.

I discovered that Barnett's love of writing began at an early age when I asked him if he could remember when he wrote his first story. "Oh Jesus, yes," he chuckled, wincing. "I was seven. I can remember the title of it. It was called, 'The Ghost of Horror Mansion.' And I was onto chapter four of it, which meant that it was around page three - the chapters were very small and the handwriting was very big - and I can remember the last sentence of it I wrote almost exactly: "I suddenly realized that the mayor of the town was a dirty, rotten traitor." And I looked at this, and even at the age of seven I thought to myself, 'That's not very good, Paul.' And as I couldn't bear revising, that was the end of that. I didn't write another until I was about thirteen or fourteen, when I wrote several short stories for school homework assignments and the school magazine. I look back on them with embarrassment as well."

At this point, I couldn't help asking the stock author-interview question: "What did you read when you were growing up?" He gave the stock author-to-interviewer answer: "Everything!" Paul developed into a voracious reader early in his youth. He obtained a library card at his first chance, and before he reached the age of ten, he had "run through the contents of the children's library." His favorite reads were E. C. Eliott's Kemlo books, a series of children's sf novels that, according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ". . .had a powerful emotional impact on many of their youthful UK readers, shaping the thoughts towards sf of an entire generation of them." He also mentioned Rex Dixon's Pocomoto western series as being among his choices.

Barnett's interest in fantasy was strengthened when he received a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End from his older brother. "Also, the complete works of H.G. Wells were in the house and I'd run through them as well." But perseverance and waif-like charm usually pay off in the end, as the youngster quickly learned. "A couple of the librarians took sympathy on me because we were not allowed to borrow the adult books until we were fourteen or so, and they allowed me, assuming no one was looking on, to borrow adult books as well. So then I ran through the science fiction section of the entire library."

Paul remembers being influenced by C. S. Lewis' sf novels, as well as a book of Chesley Bonestell art. "I came across it in the house one day and looked at the spine and saw it was an artwork book and I thought, 'Boring!' But I dragged it out anyway and opened it up and I was just stunned. I can remember that very vividly."

A very good student, Paul attended some of the finest schools in the UK. "I went to Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, which is a very famous Scottish school. And then I went to boarding school, 'public school' as we call them in Britain; Strathallan, where I spent the last four years of my schooling. Then I spent a year studying sciences -- math, physics and astronomy -- at Kings and University Colleges in London, attending both at the same time. I tried to re-apply to University to study English Literature. This took me two or three years to organize, and by the time I'd organized it, I'd already gotten a job in publishing. By that time, it seemed stupid to give up a career in order to go back to University."

Young writers should note that the doors to the publishing world did not open serendipitously to the young scholar. "I kind of groomed myself [for a career in publishing], really. I'd had a couple of holiday jobs from school, working in Fleet Street for a newspaper called the Daily Express as an errand boy. And also, I'd spent a year after leaving University working in one of Londonís major bookshops, Dillons. So at the end of that year, I just wrote to every publisher in sight, telling them I was a useful person, and there was one publisher who was in some decline or was stupid enough to say, 'okay.' Years later, I found my old application letter and it was filled with spelling and grammatical errors, and I thought, 'Jesus, I wouldnít have hired me on the basis of this.' They probably thought I'd work cheap."

"I never have more ideas than I could possibly write, but I always have more than I could possibly find publishers for."

Paul Barnett's first full-time job in book publishing was as "the dog's body" of the editorial department at Muller in London. "Basically the editorial staff was an Editorial Director, an Editor-in-Chief and me. I was the Editorial Assistant. I coped with rejecting manuscripts, with proofreading; eventually, I became trustworthy enough to do copy editing. I then took on the foreign rights duties, which was quite exciting. I was still, maybe, nineteen, and there I was, an editorial assistant with one hand and Foreign Rights Manager with the other. Then about a year later, the Editorial Director retired and the Editor-in-Chief took over both duties, and then he went to look for another job, and suddenly at the age of twenty, there I was, the Editor-in-Chief of a major publishing company - and still doing the foreign rights! A year later, after an extensive six-week business trip to the United States and Canada, I was promoted to Editorial Director."

But still, Barnett was not getting paid for his own writing, save for a French book on folk-rock music to which his publisher owned the rights. "I felt the only way to make financial sense of the damned thing was if I translated it in my spare time. I ended up both translating the book and enlarging it by about forty percent."

It wasn't long before Paul left Muller to pursue his fortune elsewhere. And it wasn't long after that when he acquired his other name, the one by which his readership knows him to this day. Paul told me how he came to write under the name "John Grant":

"It was because one of the first books I did was while I was still working in a publishing house, David & Charles. It was an anthology of science fiction stories. And the only way we could do it was for me to edit it in-house. So rather than doing something under my own name, I decided I ought to get a house name (so-called), so that if I left the company halfway through the project, they could get somebody else to pick it up and still do it under the house name. So myself and one of the other commissioning editors went out to the pub one lunchtime to pick a suitable nom de plume for me. And as I was buying him a beer, he stooped beside me at the bar and looked all through the whisky bottles along the back. He saw Johnny Walker, and he saw Grant's, and he said, 'That's. . . that's your nom de plume, Paul - John Grant.' And then a few years later, after I'd been working for various different publishing companies, I was suddenly made redundant - downsized out of a job, as you say here. And I realized that, as we lived 200 miles from London and I had a small child, I now had to be either a free-lance editor or a free-lance writer or both, which I ended up being. By that time, I'd had a couple of 'John Grant' books under my belt that I'd put together under this house name, and it seemed to make sense to write under the name that had a couple of books as opposed to writing under my own. Which, of course, is a decision Iíve regretted many times since, but I'm stuck with it now."

Barnett's first two non-fiction books were The Book of Time and The Directory of Possibilities, published in 1979 and 1980 respectively, with noted supernatural novelist and criminology writer Colin Wilson. TBOT was a collection of essays on man's relationship to time, as well as its nature; TDOP was a collection of ideas that couldn't be proven. Says Paul of the latter: "The published book ended up being less ambitious than Colin and I wanted it to be, but it ran the gamut from spiritualism to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, through black holes and the outer fringes of science, as they then were."

These books led directly to Paul's first solo non-fiction endeavor: A Directory of Discarded Ideas. Published in 1981, it was a collection of scientific theories "that had fallen by the wayside so to speak." I wondered if Paul had written ADODI in the spirit of creative inspiration or simply because it was a book he thought would sell. "It was a mixture of both, actually," he responded, analyzing on the fly. "The time was right for it, because it was during the period when The Book of Heroic Failures was very popular, as were the early trivia books. So as a commercial project, it had a tick mark against it right from the beginning. But the idea initially came to me because it was something I wanted to do."

When Barnett mentioned his idea for ADODI to Wilson, his former collaborator said he knew a publisher who would probably be interested in it. "And the next thing I knew, I was getting a phone call from this smallish publisher who said that Colin Wilson recommended this book, and would you kindly send me an outline. So I swiftly sent him one, and within a week I had sold the thing."

Paul's early editorial experience furnished him with an understanding of what editors look for in an outline and in sample chapters when considering a manuscript. This insight helped him in his younger days when he pitched his own projects to publishers.

"I don't know if it helps me these days, because I've become much more arrogant as both an editor and a writer; as an editor in the sense that I know what editors should be looking for - and I don't think most of them do - and arrogant as a writer in that, as I've felt since about the time my twenty-fifth or so book had been published, that, well, I ought to be able to put into outlines what I want to put in, rather than having to tailor them for somebody who, probably, has never written a book in his or her life. I don't know if this [attitude] is actually helpful to my career, but I maintain it nonetheless." I suggested that this arrogance might have come from a sort of personal integrity, but Paul felt it came from the respect he's garnered in the UK over the years as a freelance editor, and on his track record as a writer. "I also feel that I often know most people's job in the publishing industry better than they do."

Paul's first full-length work of fiction was the 1983 humorous fringe-sf novel, The Truth About the Flaming Ghoulies. But his next novel, published the following year, had the title that intrigued me the most: Sex Secrets of Ancient Atlantis. "Having done ADODI, I thought I was suitably qualified to write SSOAA, which is a fiction from beginning to end, but with various genuine nutty theories interspersed, sort of bolstering my own imagination for inventing others."

1987 saw the publication of Earthdoom!, a disaster spoof novel Barnett wrote with longtime friend David Langford. It also was the year of The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters, a book lauded by those within the animation industry as well as its fandom to this day.

What struck me about this work was the amount of research that had gone into producing it. Explains Paul: "This book took quite a long time. It was my main occupation for the best part of a year. And, fortunately, I had been paid enough where I could do that." I asked him how he acquired the contacts he needed to put the book together, Disney normally being tight-to-the-vest with outsiders. "Oh, that was weird. An editor for whom I had done some work called me up to London one day and said, 'You must come and have lunch.' So I met him at his offices. And then, as we went to the restaurant, he said, 'My girlfriend's joining us.' I thought, "What the hell's going on?" And his girlfriend arrived, and she proved to be the Editorial Director of a packaging company called the Justin Knowles Publishing Group. But I still couldn't work out what she was doing there. It seemed so odd bringing along an editor from another company, or a girlfriend - you know, either way I tried to work it out it was odd. (And, by the way, she has since become a very dear friend.) So about halfway through the main course, she said, 'How would you like to earn an extremely large sum of money and make at least one trip to the Disney lot for six weeks or so, all expenses paid?' And I gulped, because she'd named a good year's salary. And I said, "This all sounds good, but what is it about?" And she said it was about Disney animation, to which I responded, "Well I don't know much about animation; I watched all the movies when I was a kid, but I haven't watched many of their recent ones, so it'll be a question of starting cold." And she said, 'Nevertheless, (my boyfriend) said you'd be the ideal person to take it on, so would you?' And I said, 'Yeah, fine,' and that was when my career as an internationally recognized expert in animation began."