Dolby joins Toby Mundy Associates

Trevor Dolby has joined creative management agency Toby Mundy Associates (TMA) following his retirement as publisher at Penguin Random House imprint Preface last year.

Founder of TMA, Toby Mundy, told The Bookseller that Dolby was “fizzing with ideas and energy” and had joined the agency last month. Dolby www.thebookseller.com/news/preface-founder-trevor-dolby-announces-retirement-490801">retired from Preface in autumn 2017, a decade after founding the division.

Dolby will focus "almost exclusively" in non-fiction. Clients include advertising executive Peter Mead, who is writing his first business book, and National Geographic photographer, film-maker and writer Charlie Hamilton James who is writing a memoir.

Mundy said: “He has been working away quietly in the background since the beginning of the year and is now read to step into the light. Officially it will be a part-time role but he is certainly very committed to it.”

“I have known him for years and we have always talked about books and book ideas and what could be published and when he retired he found he was still fizzing with energy and ideas and I said, ‘why don’t you come and work with me?'"

Dolby said he was “really looking forward to working with some extraordinarily talented authors".

Since retiring from mainstream publishing Dolby has also become non-executive director of the Chalke Valley History Festival, Britain's largest history festival in Britain.

He spent 35 years in UK non-fiction publishing working for the largest publishing houses after beginning his career at a small book packagers in Camden Town in the 1980s. He moved on to John Murray then Paul Hamlyn before joining Pavilion in the mid 90’s and then became Orion’s publishing director for non-fiction and audio.

Dolby set up Preface with Rosie de Courcy as an imprint of Random House under Gail Rebuck and Richard Cable in 2007, following a stint as m.d. and publisher of HarperEntertainment from 2003 to 2006.

Mundy formed TMA in 2014 and the company, based in central London, represents authors and speakers and helps brands to publish.