How said to hear, via Derek Gregory at Geographical Imaginations, of the death of John Davey, long-time editor of a whole series of agenda-setting books, texts, and series in Geography going back more than four decades. I first met John when I was a graduate student, when he could sometimes be found immersed in intense rivalry with David Harvey over the Bar Billiards table in the Bookbinders Arms in Jericho. I remember learning from John just how peculiar, tenuous, but also central commercial publishing was to the growth of new academic fields. Twenty years or so ago, I sent him a proposal for an edited collection on the links between media theory, spatial theory, and theories of democracy – he suggested that it would be better if I wrote it myself, which was a tremendously important confidence booster for me at the time, so I did, coaxed along by him. He had moved to Edinburgh University Press at this stage, where he cultivated for a short time a remarkably strong Geography list, including titles by Harvey, David Smith and Marcus Doel. Another figure from a pivotal geographical generation who is done too soon.