Design Matters from the Archive: Ben Schott

On this episode Debbie talks with Ben Schott about the importance of failing early in one’s career, about how to take a politicians picture, and about writing and designing his own books. “I think that’s what differentiaes me. I’m not really a writer and I’m not really a designer. I’m a writer who uses design and a designer who uses words.”

Ben Schott was born in North London in 1974. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Social and Political Sciences. He graduated in 1996, taking a double First. After an astonishingly brief “career” at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, Ben spent most of his twenties as a freelance portrait photographer for a diverse range of editorial and commercial clients. As aphotographer, Ben worked with The Independent, The Times, The Sunday Times, Reader’s Digest, and Sunday Business, among many others, and has photographed a wealth of celebrities from Hugh Grant and Tony Blair, to Gordon Brown and Enoch Powell. In 2002, Ben turned a Christmas card into his first book—Schott’s Original Miscellany—which within weeks was a bestseller. He has subsequently published a series of Miscellanies and Almanacs which have sold some 2.5 million copies, and have been translated into twenty-one languages. As a journalist, Ben has worked with many of the great British titles; he now writes for the Times of London and the New York Times.