Everyone at Nick Hern Books was saddened to hear of the death of wonderful actor and NHB author Timothy West, who died on 12 November, aged 90. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.

Here, NHB's founder and Publisher Nick Hern offers a personal tribute to Tim and his books, which we are very proud to publish.

'Publishing, like most other activities, is subject to the laws of chance and unintended consequences. Which is how I came to publish Tim West’s first two books.

'I was about to re-publish a neglected classic, a book about comedic acting by Athene Seyler and to bring it out on her 100th birthday, for which she was still very much alive, but I needed a new foreword by someone already renowned for the comedy of her performances. Prunella Scales, it turned out, had known the book since childhood. Problem solved.

'Shortly afterwards, instead of the hoped-for book proposal from Pru, came a suggestion from her husband that the letters he had written home from a multitude of tours might make for amusing and instructive reading. They did, and I’m Here I Think, Where Are You? duly made its debut in 1994, Tim’s recording of it becoming a staple of BBC Sounds. It absolutely captures his slightly ironic – but also affectionate – view of his profession and his fellow actors.

'A few years later, he was ready to write a "proper" autobiography. A Moment Towards the End of the Play came out in 2001 and sold well especially on the back of personal appearances by Tim – he was much loved. As indeed was Pru Scales, largely thanks to her phenomenal ‘turn’ as Sybil Fawlty. So the idea of getting them to co-author a book on acting was a no-brainer, though coaxing it out of them was not so easy, involving as it did alternating paragraphs in which each of them disagreed with what the other had just written! The resulting book, So You Want To Be An Actor? (published in 2005), is still very much in print nearly twenty years later.

'Throughout this period Tim and I would meet regularly, if infrequently, for lunch, at which he would lament that he really wanted to write another "proper" book but was bereft of a subject. Neither of us was to know that the elevation of his hobby to a TV series would see the waterborne antics of him and Pru on the canals transform them both into National Treasures.

'Tim’s gain was my loss – no more books about theatre for me! – but of course I can’t begrudge him this phenomenal late flowering. It only went to show the rest of the country what a thoroughly nice chap he was. An unintended consequence, if ever there was one.'