A great deal has been written recently about the frustrations of publishing a book with Julian Assange, mainly in a widely discussed, marathon article for the London Review of Books by Andrew O’Hagan. O’Hagan relates his experiences when working as a ghostwriter on an autobiography of the WikiLeaks leader that ended up being published in opposition to its subject’s wishes. I’m the co-publisher of Assange’s most recent book (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet) and I, too, have found the experience frequently exasperating. Let me give an illustration. It’s June of last year and I’m at a party in New York when a friendly, youngish man with a beard and a beer engages me in conversation. He tells me he is a journalist on one of the city’s listings magazines and asks what I do for a job. I reply that I’m a publisher and he asks whose books I’m working on. I pick the one writer of whom I’m pretty certain he will have heard. “Well,” I say, shouting to make myself heard above the music, “I’ve just published Julian Assange.” The young man’s demeanour changes abruptly and he fixes me with a sneer. “Assange,” he echoes, “he’s a bit of a cunt isn’t he?”

I’ve become wearily accustomed to this over my time working with Assange: the vituperation heaped on my author, the scorn directed at me for giving him a platform. I know the general script that will follow. And, sure enough, here it so often comes, as if read from the page: “I mean, he’s a weirdo isn’t he? That massive ego. And the sex offences in Sweden.”

Read the full piece in the Guardian.