FOR THE BRAVEST MAN IN publishing, Philip Gwyn Jones looks remarkably relaxed. Slouched in a huge leather chair, his mop of brown curls buffeted by the breeze from the window of his Notting Hill office, he is far happier than the last time I saw him, over lunch 18 months ago. Then he looked drawn. No wonder: he was about to lose his job when Flamingo, the imprint he headed, was closed down by his bosses at HarperCollins.

This month he launches his own publishing company, Portobello Books, backed by the Tetra Pak heiress Sigrid Rausing, and her husband Eric Abraham, of Portobello Pictures. The first book, The Outgoing Man by Glen Neath, sets the tone, it is a small, surreal and wickedly funny debut novel from a list Gwyn Jones says will unashamedly champion culture above commercialism and originality over the bland, safe bets piled high at the front of bookshops. Brave aims in a world where big brands — whether authors or publishers — are getting bigger while the small players are struggling as never before.

But Gwyn Jones has what it takes to pull it off, according to Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber. “Philip’s a great man,” he says, acknowledging the tough market into which Portobello launches. “For a small publisher to succeed now it needs three things: the cash to get up and running; to publish the kind of books no one else is; and to be able to persuade agents that it can distribute and market its books, all of which Portobello passes muster on.”

It also needs some high-profile fans, which Gwyn Jones has. The writer Douglas Coupland says in the launch publicity: “I’m pretty much expecting everything Portobello does to end up on my Must Read pile.” And Meera Syal adds: “Britain is changing as rapidly as the wider world around it changes. We need great books to help us keep up with and understand those changes (and that are fun to read too), and I really hope Philip Gwyn Jones and the team at Portobello are able to find some and get them out to a really broad readership.” Amy Tan, Naomi Klein and others speak generously.

Gwyn Jones is a one-off in a publishing world dominated by suits and bean counters. At Flamingo, under the noses of the management, he carved out a reputation as a corporate subversive, publishing books with a passion more normal for radical presses. He also showed that, done right, these books will fly. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things won the Booker, while Naomi Klein’s No Logo created a market for anti-globalisation literature that rivals raced to fill. But he could not rattle the corporate cage for long, and his departure was inevitable. “He is a maverick and it is hard for the conglomerates to manage mavericks,” says the literary agent (and former publisher) Clare Alexander.

It is increasingly hard to find a home for the kind of books Gwyn Jones publishes, so there was a collective sigh of relief from literary agents when he announced Portobello Books.

Gwyn Jones acknowledges he is taking a risk. “This is not money spinning publishing that anyone looking to make a quick buck would plough millions into,” he says. Rausing’s millions mean that his passion for culture over commerce can be indulged. “Having a bank as a principal backer would have been dangerous, because I would have to deliver a return that publishing is not equipped to deliver readily — not without an enormous slice of luck.”

Times are tough for all publishers, but Gwyn Jones is one of a growing band of new-style small publishers. Corporate refugees, such as Stephen Page at Faber, Andrew Franklin at Profile and Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books, are almost all under 40 and their commercial nous, hot-housed in some of the biggest brands in the business, is married to a passion for the printed word that is hard to indulge in large companies where sales and marketing, not editors, rule the roost.

That does not mean that Portobello will have an easy ride into the high street: bijou successes such as Profile, which doubled turnover to £6.67million with Eats Shoots & Leaves, and Canongate, whose sales rocketed by 70 per cent to £7 million thanks to Life of Pi, hide the stark fact that a mere ten companies account for 65 per cent of all books sold. These companies can pay the huge amounts demanded by bookshops and supermarkets to get books displayed — upwards of £10,000 on top of a hefty trade discount of 65 per cent.

Gwyn Jones is realistic about what it will take to get Portobello Books in store and he has strong allies to advise him — he is part of an alliance of some of the most innovative and successful publishers, led by Faber, with a collective turnover of £30 million that will give it more clout with the chains. Independent backing also means Gwyn Jones can ignore the obvious in favour of books that deserve a hearing and will be, he says, an antidote to genre publishing for readers bored with the same old, same old.

He is on a mission to challenge a bookselling culture based on “pile it high and sell it cheap” promotions that favour dead-cert sellers appealing to the lowest common denominator. It is a world, he says, in which the formulaic and repetitive is backed at the expense of the innovative and culturally significant.

This autumn Portobello will further defy the formulaic with Nasrin Alavi’s We are Iran, based on the blogs of Iranian journalists; Half Gone, Jeremy Leggett’s apocalyptic exposé of the oil shortage; and People I Wanted To Be, the second book of short stories by the acclaimed US author Gina Ochsner.

It is when he talks about the books that Gwyn Jones gets excited. He does not enthuse, he raves. Next year’s books include I, Wabenzi, a Shandy-esque odyssey by Rafi Zabor that “is just full of ridiculous digressions and hilarious anecdotal meanderings”, and Lorraine Adams’s award-winning novel Harbour, about Algerian Americans, which has been overlooked in the UK to Gwyn Jones’s utter amazement. “How good do you have to be now as an American writer to get published in this country?”

None is an obvious bestseller — Ochsner’s short stories are about people troubled by death and Leggett is issuing a warning that too few wish to hear — but it will take only one success to put Portobello Books on the map, a point not lost on the 39-year-old Welshman. “Who the f*** would have predicted that in any given year the most successful book would be a comic primer on grammar?” He throws his hands in the air. “It is illogical, but that is why we love the business. Where the corporates go wrong is less to do with individuals than the collective spirit that tends to gravitate towards the familiar and formulaic, but the big lesson publishing teaches us is that the books that make all our wages fly are completely surprising.”

www.portobellobooks.com

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