Good Book Guide founder Bing Taylor pens memoir

Bing Taylor, co-founder of mail-order book business The Good Book Guide, is working on his autobiography.

Taylor, as well as working for the mail-order book club BCA, has held roles such as m.d. for Jonathan Cape, executive vice president of Scholastic and general manager for books and Europe at WH Smith. He was also president of the Booksellers Association during its centenary year. 

However, as Taylor remarks, his path was "not quite the typical publisher or bookseller's career" and his forthcoming "episodic biography" will cover everything from having a private lesson in horse training from the Queen to crawling stark naked across half the play stages in Europe.

Taylor has already written a spy thriller, Maquis. It is based on a true story about a pacifist who had a change of heart and became one of the most successful secret agents with Churchill's secret army, the Special Operations Executive.

The novel was self-published at the end of 2014 with packager Middle Farm Press, run by writer and editor Kate Taylor, after Taylor refused to self-publish the book via Amazon having "spent much of my career supporting [physical] bookstores".

Taylor spent 2015 in Italy, where he has been translating Italian plays and acting with a company based in Rome called Mixo.