IN another life, Bill Campbell and sidekick Peter Mackenzie might have been tabloid newspapermen, foot-in-the-door types with a nose for a saleable story and a gift for teasing out the line that would grab the front page headlines.
Celebrities, sportsmen, curious new age health quacks, hard men criminals and middle aged women with tearful tales of childhood hardship . . . Bill would be the tough one, urging them to reveal a little bit more; Peter a bit more reserved, with the chequebook at hand - strictly to cover expenses, of course.
Certainly the books crammed on the shelves in their boardroom scream tabloid headline-style titles. There's Jihad! and Mr Nasty; and there's Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, and Saved By My Face. For the sports fans, there's Toon Army side by side with Forever Everton, real life tales from Sir Alex Ferguson, Gavin Hastings, Shane Warne and dozens more.
But while they may talk the talk of the tabloids, it's the world of publishing, brimming with plummy accents and long lunches at The Ivy, which the straight-talking duo have brazenly shouldered their way into.
Two thousand-plus books on, the Edinburgh-based business they founded exactly 30 years ago on two GBP 1000 bank loans - "We said it was for home improvements," grins Bill - is thriving.
Today Mainstream Publishing has a generous back catalogue of titles brimming with tabloid-style tales, factual accounts of hardship, war-time Boys' Own epics and memoirs of sporting glories. It now occupies a three-storey block in Albany Street.
It's a long way from the days when Bill's Barony Street flat was its publishing HQ, when piles of books covered every spare bit of space, including beneath Bill's bed, and the likes of Lord James Douglas Hamilton could be found crouched on the floor wrapping up the books they had just lovingly written ready to be sent off to the bookshops.
Having been conceived against a background of social change and national pride courtesy of the ultimately doomed devolution debate, Mainstream went on to seize sport in the Eighties, self help in the Nineties, real life crime in the Noughties and, most recently, tear-jerking "misery memoirs".
Sniffing out a good story and then exploiting the niche in the market has been their forte . . . and no-one's more proud of that than the pair dubbed the "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" of Scottish publishing.
Today Bill sits in the boardroom, casual in a black sweater with a shiny black Rado watch gleaming on his wrist, books piled floor to ceiling across three walls. That he's been 30 years in the job surprises even him - it's passed by so quickly.
"Many people would give their eye teeth to do what we do, which is a job that brings enormous satisfaction and, if you get it right, can make you decent money," he reflects.
"But the beauty of it all is you end up making friends with some genuinely interesting people, each of them important in their own way, whether they are politicians, princes or paupers."
Peter nods in agreement. While Bill has the greater creative spark in their partnership, Peter has kept Mainstream afloat with a keen business mind that has tackled the legal issues, administrative tangles and deftly sorted out the accounts - even when they didn't amount to much.
For while Mainstream is now a GBP 4 million business, half of it nestling under the umbrella of London-based Random House, back in the days when the notion of launching a publishing house first crossed Bill's mind, the small matter of money was well down the list the priorities.
Bill, born in Glasgow and raised in Kilmarnock, came to the Capital in 1969 to study history at Edinburgh University. Peter arrived from Strathpeffer to wade through economics and accountancy. They might never have met had it not been for a joint interest in the student magazine and later Edinburgh University Student Publications Board.
The board branched into publishing books including Alternative Edinburgh - penned by Bill, current PM Gordon Brown and Barry Wright, who would go on to launch Regular Music. It was regarded as controversial for its student take on how to save precious pennies - including the suggestion that students avoid the pay-as-you-go toilets at Waverley Station and instead nip into the Balmoral Hotel via a services lift located on the railway station forecourt.
Not surprising then, that when Bill first mooted the idea of running a publishing house, Peter wasn't exactly biting his hand off.
"I was thinking 'What a stupid idea'," he laughs. "We had no idea of what it involved, never mind that we had no money. It was lunacy."
Still, Mainstream was launched from Bill's humble flat using those home improvement bank loans.
Their break came when a contact at Edinburgh publisher Canongate suggested they might be interested in a book it had rejected. Incredibly, it was previously unpublished diaries of Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through France - The Cevennes Journal became a Mainstream international hit.
Still, times were hard for the fledgling publishers. "We had to pack every book ourselves and carry armfuls of parcels to the post office and put the stamps on. We had to load up the car and drive around the whole of Britain to independent bookshops in the hope they'd take some books," recalls Peter. "We typed every invoice and every statement ourselves and then had to phone and harass people to pay us."
They went on to turn down Ian Rankin - his fictional cop stories didn't quite fit the factual niche Mainstream was carving - but there were scores of successes to come.
By the time the business had moved to an office at East Thistle Street Lane and then Albany Street, it was scoring on the back of a string of sports-themed factual books.
"It was 1986," recalls Bill, " a real eye-opener. Aberdeen had won the UEFA Cup and we did Light in the North with Alex Ferguson.
"There was a signing session in John Menzies in Aberdeen. They had to call in the mounted police for crowd control. We both thought 'oh, we're on to something in this' and we exploited it pretty ruthlessly."
But as football players' earnings soared and clubs curtailed their freedom to speak out in controversial autobiographies, Mainstream's attention turned to other areas.
There followed gritty real life tales of crime, war exploits and diplomatic incidents thanks to Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan whose biography sent letters of protest flying between the Foreign Office and Mainstream.
Most recently, however, it has been the niche market of tear-jerking tales inspired by the likes of Angela's Ashes that has kept the catalogue bubbling along.
"I call it guerrilla publishing," says Bill. "We see an area, move in and fill it as quickly as possible."
As for the moral questions over some of Mainstream's books - they have flirted with controversy with books about football hooligans and the story of Glasgow crime lord Paul Ferris - Bill is unfazed.
"We reflect society," he shrugs. "I don't have a moral dilemma with it."
But amid all the upwards trajectories on the bestsellers list and smiling book launches - Aussie cricket legend Shane Warne is in London as the pair speak, launching his Mainstream autobiography - Bill and Peter have also had their share of sticky moments too.
On the shelf behind Bill's desk is that copy of Jihad! - a Mainstream success story if you skim over the embarrassing chapter that involved the author being accused of having made up a key element of his own story.
Then there was the time in 1999 when they had to pay out around GBP 22,000 after one author was found guilty of a "spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism". James Mackay's biography of John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born founder of the United States navy, was withdrawn amid claims he had copied material from another book. Then there was the family furore surrounding Don't Ever Tell, a disturbing memoir involving sex abuse and neglect. Cue the author's family, and claims that the harrowing account was, in parts, fictional.
Bill's smile fades and he shakes his head. "I'd rather not go into that. There's a lot of family issues involved," he sighs. "We are strong in our investigations of these kinds of stories."
With that, they look forward to the future. What does it hold for Mainstream?
Next year come books from Tour de France hero Lance Armstrong, a real-life heartbreaking tale of a soldier burned while stationed in Afghanistan, a dissection of Kate Middleton, and Being British, a book penned by celebrity authors on what it means to be a Brit, with contributions from JK Rowling and their old university mate, Gordon Brown.
"The future is to go on, stronger than before," says Bill. "I suppose ultimately the hope is that long after Peter and I are gone, there will still be a Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh-based and still a forward-thinking company."
SELLING THEIR STORIES
AMONG the biggest successes for Mainstream Publishing, launched in 1978 by Bill Campbell and Peter Mackenzie, was its decision to publish the "true story" of William Wallace after Bill spotted a small news story about plans to release a movie starring Mel Gibson called Braveheart.
And among the tabloid-style crime stories and misery memoirs have been a string of more serious books. Scottish Art 1460-1990 cost the company GBP 100,000 to produce but paid off massively. Scotland's Shame, a book that detailed religious bigotry, opened a debate that has raged for years and still continues to fuel discussion.
Among the most controversial was The Big Breach by former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, which sparked a dispute with the Government over the proceeds.
But it's the human stories that have moved Mainstream's founders most. Among them is the story of Eugenie Fraser from Morningside - the daughter of a Dundee woman who married a Russian, she wrote about growing up during the Russian Revolution.
Another is Henry Allingham, a 112-year-old veteran of the Great War, whose memoirs have just been published.
"When you get that collision of creativity with genuine interest and commercial value, there's a huge buzz," says Bill.
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