Publisher and former musician with the BBC Scottish Orchestra

Born: May 25, 1920;

Died: March 29, 2018

LIVIA Gollancz, who has died aged 97, was a gifted French horn, viola and violin musician, including for what was then the Scottish Orchestra (now the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) and the old BBC Scottish Orchestra (now the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra). She would go on to become the first female principal horn in a British orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester, and she played under the world's leading conductors including John Barbirolli, Thomas Beecham and Adrian Boult.

Aged 33, and suffering dental problems, however, she reluctantly sacrificed her music career to join the family's prestigious publishing company, Victor Gollancz Ltd, in 1953. Taking it over from her father, Victor, after his death in 1967, she was one of the first women to run a publishing house in the UK and handled authors including Daphne du Maurier, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell and the spy writer Bernard Newman.

Also a passionate mountaineer and a member of the London-based Alpine Club, she climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland and all the Munros in Scotland where she loved to ramble for hours during her holidays. It was while climbing that she met the mountaineer Chris Bonington and went on to publish his first book I Chose to Climb in 1969.

Livia Ruth Gollancz was born in Ladbroke Grove, west London, on March 25, 1920, the eldest of five children of a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. Her father Victor, she recalled, was "the centre of the literary world in London," who read Sherlock Holmes adventures on Saturdays and the Bible on Sundays, while her mother Ruth (Lowy) was a fine painter and architect whose own mother had been a suffragette and a friend of the movement's leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Livia, nicknamed Pooh by her family, grew up to tales of how her granny Henrietta had helped Ms Pankhurst evade police and had herself spent time in prison.

Livia was taught to play piano from the age of six, something she enjoyed more than attending St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith or Notting Hill and Ealing High School for Girls. She was only 16 when she went to the Royal College of Music in South Kensington, London, to study viola but soon fell in love with the French horn, unusual for a woman at the time. Like her parents, she was intensely political as a young woman and a member of the Young Communist League but the war turned her off politics and politicians for the rest of her life.

At the start of the war, aged only 20, she first deputised with the London Symphony Orchestra before joining John Barbirolli as first horn for the Hallé Orchestra in 1943 for £2 a week. With Sir John, she played memorable solo horn during performances and recordings of Arnold Bax's Symphony No. 3, written by Bax in what was then the Station Hotel (now the Morar Hotel) near Mallaig.

Later in 1943, she was called upon by the Scottish Orchestra, where she spent the last two years of the war broadcasting music not only to a domestic audience but to troops in Europe. She also played "live" to the troops in Belgium, including in a venue that had been bombed by the Nazis the night before. At the end of the war, she joined the BBC Scottish Orchestra where she played from 1945-46.

Back in London, Ms Gollancz experienced considerable chauvinism from male musicians, including at Covent Garden where some males refused to play with her. For her part, she said she became disgusted by the smell of alcohol on the breath of some male colleagues in the pit.

Ms Gollancz ran Victor Gollancz Ltd until her retirement in 1990, aged 70, later admitting that music was her first love and that "I must have absolutely hated it (publishing) really." Like her father, she was an old school publisher, working from almost-Dickensian offices in Covent Garden, maintaining personal contact with her authors and foregoing computers until it was no longer possible. She designed the publishing house's famous magenta and yellow book sleeves. "Eccentric" was one of the adjectives most used to describe her. She had a tendency to show up in her office in a summer frock and climbing boots, occasionally chomping on a batch of fresh spring onions from her allotment.

On her retirement, there was no other family member to take over the publishing house and it was sold first to Houghton Mifflin, later on to Cassell and eventually to Orion where Gollancz still retains an imprint for the publication of science-fiction works.

Livia Gollancz spent her later years alone in Highgate, London, tending her vegetable allotment daily but still playing viola and violin, as well as singing solo, in choirs and local opera groups.

She never married. She is survived by six nephews and several great-nephews and great-nieces. Her younger sister Vita Gollancz, who died in 2009, was a renowned painter, printmaker illustrator and draughtswoman.

PHIL DAVISON