Nick Robinson - Telegraph Academically a slow-burner, he liked to tell how he got into Cambridge to read Archaeology and Anthropology by memorising a learned essay on King John by his fellow Wykehamist Christopher Vajda (now a European Court judge). At Downing College, he changed to History of Art under David Watkin. The death of his mother when he was 21 left an all-male household at Moor Wood. After his father's death in 1985, a second home was Essex House at Little Badminton, where his great-uncle, the diarist James Lees-Milne, lived. "Nick is the best man in the world, and the human being I am now most fond of," Lees-Milne wrote in his journal. His very presence does me good. He arrived like a breath of fresh Scotch air. In a neatly-fitted tweed suit. Lees-Milne gave him intellectual guidance and stimulation, and introductions to the London publishing scene which were invaluable in the late 1970s. Through Lees-Milne's contacts, Robinson worked for Denys Sutton at the art magazine Apollo (1978-79) and for Norah Smallwood at Chatto & Windus (1979-82). He set up his own imprint after three years with the book packagers Breslich & Foss (1982-85). He founded Robinson Publishing in 1983, operating out of his one-bedroom flat in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. His formula was simple: to repackage and republish out-of-copyright classics, such as HE Bates's In the Heart of the Country, and to pan through the detritus of the big publishers. An early Robinson author was the neglected Boston crime-writer George V Higgins, who flew to London, keen to be shown Robinson's premises. Finally admitted into the Robinson bedsit, Higgins looked around, and seeing a rotting pheasant hanging outside the bathroom and two spaniels, said: "I need a drink." Robinson then invited him to the Flyfishers" Club for lunch . An important break came in 1989 when Robinson met Guy Parr, founder of Parragon , which distributed titles to Asda and Sainsbury. Parr had grown up on a Liverpool council estate and had to fight to get into the business: "Nick was the first person in the publishing establishment who was prepared to listen to me, and one of the first to see the potential of getting books into supermarkets." Through Parr, Robinson sold, in prodigious quantities, the cheapest complete works of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world (for £1.99), and the mini Oxford English Dictionary (for 99p), which sold 1.5 million copies. Another stroke of luck was Robinson's meeting in Frankfurt with the New York publisher Herman Graf, who agreed to take any Mammoth title in America. Together they published more than 90, of which The Mammoth Book of True Crime, compiled by Colin Wilson, was the most successful; it remains in print. One of the earliest British publishers into China in the 1990s, Robinson secured the UK rights to the novel Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui, which was banned in China. It sold more than 200,000 copies, and with the proceeds Robinson was able to secure the future of Britain's oldest independent publisher, Constable & Co, which he bought to create Constable & Robinson. Robinson was wary of fiction, partly because he saw how much could be wasted in large advances. He veered away from trophy authors, not least because he was bankrolling the company from his own pocket . A fundamentally modest and private man, the trophies he came to cherish were the Bookseller Industry Awards in 2012 for Independent Publisher of the Year and Digital Publisher of the Year. In 2009 Robinson was diagnosed with colon cancer, which he fought with courage and without self-pity. In 1990 Nick Robinson married (dissolved) Alice Webb, who survives him with their son and daughter. In 2010 he married Nova Jayne Heath, who becomes chair of the board. Nick Robinson, born February 18 1955, died August 30 2013