You can’t beat a face-to-face meeting for rediscovering the power of serendipity.

A recent day out in central London meeting prospective authors demonstrated this amply, and dispelled any idea that video calls were as good. It turns out that playing football beats watching Match of the Day.

On this day, serendipity took the form of a chance encounter with an author from years ago; new ideas (‘You should talk to … who could write a great book on …’); new introductions; and good old-fashioned gossip. None of this would have happened online or by email.

As a commissioning editor (and at the risk of sounding like an old git), my working life started before PCs, email and the internet. Video meetings were science fiction. Finding new ideas and authors meant going to places and talking to people. Going places was time-consuming, expensive and hard work. Sometimes it was wholly unproductive (or perhaps seemed so on the day). But even fruitless meetings were a learning opportunity – and sometimes, months or even years later, they could bear fruit.

Thanks then to Horace Walpole, who first coined the word ‘serendipity’ to describe the unplanned good fortune of the ‘Three Princes of Serendip’ – a Persian tale penned by the poet Amir Khusrai, around 1302.

And talking of Horace Walpole, watch this space for news of LPP’s involvement in the relaunch of Strawberry Hill Press, through our Partnership with St Mary’s University Press. A bit of serendipity in itself..