Bookworm on the Net

Courage

2007-11-20T09:07:00.000Z

Hello
My name is David and I am Anne's son.
Thank you for all of your kind comments - which Mum would have been touched by, but disapproved of!
She was ill for about six months and during this time was incredibly brave. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not to be uspet!
The last message was to not mope but to carry on, be happy and to remember the good things and times.
My father and I are trying hard to comply.
She would want you to as well!

Apology for absence

2007-09-13T19:46:00.000+01:00

I'm sorry I wasn't able to resume blogging on September 3rd as planned. Nor can I do so now.

The reason is that the on/off button on my Hewlett Packard laptop ceased to function. I assumed that it could be repaired at the local shop where I bought it less than a year ago. But apparently HP do not allow their agents to stock parts, so it had to be returned to the factory and when it will be returned is uncertain.

Meanwhile I have been thinking about buying another laptop but can't make up my mind which make to invest in. I've had two Dells. On the last one the screen died, but the works were still functioning when plugged in to an old desktop monitor. Unfortunately, after the HP catastrophe, this state of affairs lasted only a few days and now the Dell laptop also appears to be defunct.

I'm writing this on someone else's laptop. Some marvellous books arrived last month, but when I'll be able to praise them...who knows?

For someone who spends as much time online as I do normally, it's an interesting experience to be forced offline for a while.

The lunch guest who brought a book

2007-07-31T06:40:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

The private libraries of 40 bibliophiles
Last blog until September

I was introduced to artist and author Oliver Jeffers by my eldest grandson who was three earlier this month.

Arriving for lunch last Sunday, he took off his bright yellow wellies and then produced from his backpack a book called The Incredible Book Eating Boy, the latest addition to his already extensive library.

The author's website is interesting but requires a bit of patience as the pages don't load instantly.

At his publisher's website, I read -

"He has had a number of adventures that he has collected into his books for children; his debut picture book, 'How to Catch a Star', was inspired by a moment sitting on the end of a jetty in Sydney, looking at the stars. Not having an agent, Oliver sent his work unsolicited to HarperCollins Publishers. Its potential was immediately recognised, it was whisked off the slush pile and the publishing process began. In 2004, the book was published by HarperCollins Children's Books and was also short listed for the Booktrust Early Years Award for Best New Illustrator. In 2005, 'How to Catch a Star' won a Merit Award at the CBI/Bisto Book of Year Awards."

At Amazon UK someone has written – "My son aged 3 loves this book. It is by far the best book I have ever bought for him. The illustrations are fantastic. My son was amazed when he saw the picture of Henry with the books
inside his stomach and refuses to go to sleep until has seen the page of what happens to Henry when he has eaten too many books! At the back of the story book you will see the indents on the pages where Henry has
literally taken a huge chunk out of the back of this book. You must buy this book."

And at Foyles there's a page about the book including this -

"The mouth-watering new book from acclaimed author illustrator, Oliver Jeffers. Henry loves books...but not like you and I. He loves to EAT books! This exciting new story follows the trials and tribulations of a boy with a voracious appetite for books. Henry discovers his unusual taste by mistake one day, and is soon swept up in his new-found passion -- gorging on every delicious book in sight! And better still, he realises that the more books he eats, the smarter he gets. Henry dreams of becoming the Incredible Book Eating Boy; the smartest boy in the world! But a book-eating diet isn't the healthiest of habits, as Henry soon finds out... "

The private libraries of 40 bibliophiles

Yesterday, sorting out clutter, I came across a page from the Weekend Telegraph dated November 18, 1995. It was headed "Every library tells its owner's story – You may not be able to judge a book by its cover but you can judge people by their bookshelves, says Lesley Gillilan."

Further down the page, I read, "Living With Books (published on Monday by Thames & Hudson at £29.95) looks at the book-lined homes of 40 bibliophiles whose private libraries reflect their inner passions and peculiarities of taste. In essence, American authors Estelle Ellis and Caroline Seebohm have compiled a practical guide to collecting and caring for books but the focus of their lavishly illustrated work (photographs by Christopher Simon Sykes) is a study of the bookshelf as art and of books as furniture and ornament."

This sent me to Amazon UK where I found the book has been re-titled At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries, and a new edition was published in April 2006. The Amazon synopsis reads –

"… takes the reader into the houses of forty booklovers to view their very personal libraries and reading spaces. Not only is it a visual delight, but it also includes professional advice on editing and categorizing your library; caring for your books; preserving, restoring and storing rare books; finding out-of-print books; and choosing furniture, lighting and shelving. This indispensable resource, newly available in paperback, will be an inspiration for every bibliophile with a growing home library."

A reviewer writes, "The moment I saw AT HOME WITH BOOKS, I put my bag full of books down, sat on the floor at Blackwell's in Oxford, and drooled at the luxury of others. I'm not a materialist person. And yet I envied EACH and EVERY person in this book, envied them their remarkable libraries. There are so many of us who live with our noses in books. Here are people who do it in grand style! Buy this book for a book lover!"

For those who, like me, think twice about spending £30, Amazon gives a link to 38 used & new copies from £11.00.

Last blog until September

I'm taking August off to concentrate on a project needing undivided attention. So this will be the last Bookworm on the Net blog until Monday, 3 September. Meanwhile good reading and my thanks to everyone who has posted comments.

New novel for adults by Adele Geras

2007-07-30T07:33:00.000+01:00

When Bookworm on the Net was a quarterly column in The Bookseller, each time I used to give links to around 25 publishing world websites and pick out one as Bookworm's Choice. In February 2003, the Choice section read –

"When the first novel for adults by children's author Adèle Geras Facing the Light (Orion, £12.99, 0752851543), is published in late March, readers will enjoy visiting her recently launched site. Ms Geras has provided interesting content, and site designer Wendy Wootton of Artemis Website Design has done another good job with the design. Artemis now has a waiting list of authors who want fast, easily navigable sites."

Adèle Geras has written more than 80 books for children. Her fourth novel for adult readers, A Hidden Life, comes out on August 8th. Orion have sent me a copy but, as I shall be on holiday next month, I'm writing about it today.

I have not met this author but we have exchanged emails from time to time and she comes across as a delightful person. Which makes me feel uncomfortable about criticising the novel. However any publicity is said to be better than none, and my comments about A Hidden Life tie in with what I wrote about John Sutherland's book last week i.e. the possibility that authors are being encouraged to use certain themes which are known to bestsell.

Here's an extract from a long Q&A between Mark Thwaite and Adèle.

"MT: Do you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Do you write specifically for them?

AG: No, not at all. Not even when I’m writing for young children. I write entirely for myself. I have to fall in love with the hero, cry when it’s sad, laugh when it’s funny, be spooked when it’s scary and then there’s a chance that you might be too….or someone might be. Once you start considering the readers, you’ve had it, I reckon. But I do try to ensure that as many people as possible might like my novels by deliberately including protagonists of all ages in my adult novels….see the ‘old ladies’ referred to in question 1. These ladies have daughters and granddaughters and I try to appeal to several generations in my books."

The main character in A Hidden Life is Lou, full name Louise Barrington. We meet Lou on page 3 when she is about to attend the reading of the will of her disagreeable grandmother who, we have already learned, intended it to upset her heirs and successors.

Although Lou is short of cash when the novel opens, this is a prosperous upper middle class milieu and the late Mrs Constance Barrington has left a large house and a substantial estate. But to Lou she has left only the copyrights of her grandfather's books which were never bestsellers and now are long forgotten.

So far so good. But then the reader learns that while Lou was starting her second year at York University she met a man called Ray, not an undergraduate. He looked "like a male model for a particularly butch brand of aftershave."

On their third date, she went to bed with him, and when Ray suggested she should drop her course and live with him in London, she didn't hesitate. They had been together for a month when he behaved in a way – including hurting her physically – which would have made any sensible girl ditch him on the spot. But Lou stayed until, when she was six months pregnant, he threw her out.

It stretches my credulity, but I can just about swallow the idea of a girl opting out of uni if she thinks she has met Mr Right. However when his brutality proves he's a thug, and she not only tolerates that but, without any sign that he wants to marry her, starts a baby, my sympathy evaporates.

The novel runs to 343 pages and we have to wait until p 264 - by which time Lou has had another abortive relationship - for Mr Right to appear.

The only thread in this novel I enjoyed was that of Lou's grandfather's life. He had spent part of his childhood in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and written about it in his unsuccessful book Blind Moon from which there are extracts.

It may be that the various other threads involving unsatisfactory marriages and a love affair between two women will appeal to other readers. But the novel was a disappointment to me.

However, of Mrs Geras's last novel, Made In Heaven, an Australian reader posted the following at Amazon UK.

"I've enjoyed all Adele Geras' adult novels(the other two are Facing the Light and Hester's Story) but this is my top favourite. It's a story that enthrals from the very first chapter, when we're led into the lives of the (about to be combined) Gratrix and Whittaker/Ashton families. They're about to be combined because of the impending wedding of Zannah Ford (nee gratrix) and Adrian Whittaker--but actually there's a lot more that links them than that. There's a secret which is about to be revealed and which ticks away like an unexploded bomb under the increasingly elaborate and frenzied preparations for the 'big wedding.' And there are unresolved things from the past which loom larger and larger even in the unclouded horizon that is Zannah's dream for her big day..Will there be a catastrophe? is there any hope to be salvaged? will it all end happily?
There are many pleasures in this wonderfully warm and entertaining novel--the subtle, deep exploration of character, a story superlatively well told, and the rich, fun details of planning that big wedding. Minor as well as major characters are really well depicted; you get a real sense of family and how weddings brings often very disparate people together--not necessarily in mutual understanding.
It's a totally involving, gripping, and vivid read and is very highly recommended."

So, despite my own reservations, it wouldn't surprise me to see A Hidden Life climbing the bestseller charts next month.

The Book Depository and ReadySteadyBook

2007-07-27T07:18:00.000+01:00

Did you read Mark Thwaite's comment on Wednesday's blog about The Boy Who Loved Books? If you didn't, he wrote -

"I'm not a fan of Sutherland but, still, I'm disappointed that this isn't wholly about the "books he read from early childhood to his late teens." Surely, we don't need another misery memoir? And, surely, a book by a literary critic about the books that shaped him as a young man would appeal much more to what you would gather was Sutherland's target audience."

Clicking on Mark's name above his comment, I was taken to The Book Depository where, on the About Us page, I learned that the business was founded in 2004 "with the aim of making "All books available to All" through pioneering supply chain initiatives, republishing and digitizing of content. It is a continuing project, still in its infancy and one of the most ambitious ventures in the Book Industry."

"Currently The Book Depository is able to ship 1.3 million unique titles at keen prices from our fulfillment centre in Gloucester, United Kingdom (within 48 hours) and this figure grows and grows everyday. Apart from publishers, distributors and wholesalers we even list and supply books from other retailers! Amazingly we are also able to arrange the reprint of over 300,000 out of print titles which again we can dispatch from Gloucester within 48 hours."

Further down the page, I read – "Our Managing Director and Founder, Andrew Crawford was part of the start up team at Bookpages which in its time was the fastest growing online bookstore in Europe. When Amazon purchased Bookpages in 1998, he subsequently moved and helped to start up Amazon in Europe. Andrew looked at different ways of achieving his personal ambition of making as many books available as possible - and the result is The Book Depository!"

Mark Thwaite [see photo] is TBD's Managing Editor. A librarian by profession, he spent five years with Amazon UK before founding "the acclaimed literary website ReadySteadyBook.com. His writing has appeared in many journals including the TLS, Context and PN Review. If you have any interesting book-related news and/or you are a publisher wanting to suggest books for review, please email mark@bookdepository.co.uk."

Later I discovered that Mark has an online literary journal at ReadySteadyBook.

Both these sites are packed with interesting articles and interviews I haven't had time to explore fully yet.

Looking for a photo of Mark, I came across an interview with him at
Simon Owens' Bloggasm. Here's an extract -

"Simon Owens: You’ve said in a previous interview that you’re falling away from modern literary fiction. What is it about the genre that turns you off?

Mark Thwaite: Its lack of perspicacity, skill, wisdom, depth, relevance and artistry. I keep my eyes peeled for good, modern fiction (I’m always desperate to read a new, relevant voice), but, sad to say, there is very little new good stuff out there. Certainly, few British writers are up to much (there are some, of course: Tom McCarthy has started well; Gabriel Josipovici is a vital, ongoing presence; Dai Vaughan is vastly under-read), but mediocrity rules. I do see some fine modern works in translation, however. But British writers? Who are our most vaunted? Monica Ali and the war-apologist Ian McEwan? Please …"

If you're curious about the breed of Mark Thwaite's puppy - I thought she might be a very young husky - her name is Lola and she's a German Spitz (Mittel).

Antidote to all the depressing books around

2007-07-26T07:02:00.000+01:00

If you're interested in art, check your public library's catalogue to see if they have a copy of High Relief, the autobiography, illustrated with more than 60 photographs, of sculptor Sir Charles Wheeler.

I came across a forgotten copy on our sitting room bookshelves and have been re-reading it as an antidote to the gloom and doom, in both fiction and non-fiction, coming my way recently. High Relief was published at 45 shillings for Country Life Books by The Hamlyn Publishing Group in 1968. I think I must have spotted it in Bibliophile's catalogue about 20 years later.

Although there is nothing about him on the Academy's website, Sir Charles Wheeler was the eighteenth President of the Royal Academy and the first sculptor to hold that office. But, more importantly in my view, he fell in love with his wife while still in his teens, was engaged to her for five years because they were too hard up to marry, and loved her all his life.

He writes – "I met Muriel Bourne first when I was 16 and when we were art students together at Wolverhampton… She had artists as forbears, I had none that I knew of."

And, on the next page – "Muriel and I studied in the Antique and Life rooms and in the same modelling studio, often working back to back. Sometimes we would collide in stepping back to look at our models. This was the beginning of a life long devotion which has been undimmed and undivided from then until now... The £100 [prize money] was about all I possessed and she married me on that in St Peter's Church, under the torture of whose practising bells we had sat many examinations together in the adjacent Wolverhampton Art School, and in whose lovely interior we had together made many drawings, labouring to improve our art. With what care and calculation we had to order our affairs few couples in these more affluent days can conceive. However, with pinching and her courage and care we got through some very lean times."

A little further on, we read – "I was often tempted then to vacate my studio, save the rent and take a safe teaching job. I was well qualified for that, but when I spoke of it she would never listen. 'The last thing you do,' she would say, 'is to give up your studio.' And so I held on till after about two years of Spartan living there was a knock one morning at the door of my Justice Walk studio. When I opened it I saw a short man standing in morning dress and wearing a tall silk hat. My first thought was – here is someone selling encyclopaedias, and then he handed me his card. On looking I was so astounded that I handed it back to him. It read 'Rudyard Kipling'. I've ever since regretted my stupidity for his card would have been a thing to treasure as it brought relief, not before it was needed, and from that day to this I have never lacked commissions."

Not the memoir I was expecting

2007-07-25T07:08:00.000+01:00

I'm beginning to wonder if publishers are pressing authors – the literary ones as well as commercial writers – to include best-selling elements in their books.

The thought occurred to me because Professor John Sutherland's memoir, The Boy Who Loved Books, is so different from the book I was expecting. I thought it would be largely about the books he read from early childhood to his late teens, but in fact it is more of a fashionable misery memoir.

It isn't until page 38 that he mentions having Wind in the Willows (sic) read to him by an American admirer of his war-widowed mother.

On p 44, Sutherland writes, "I recall my mother in London spending six shillings she could ill afford (or was not keen on parting with) on a book for me at the Marylebone W.H.Smith's. I must have been around eleven at the time. It was They Died with their Boots Clean by Gerald Kersh. I was at the station to be sent off to some relatives in Nottingham and nagged her for the book. It was, as she would see it, a sacrifice – but I was being discarded. And, now I think of it, the subject of Kersh's docunovel – patriotic guardsman undergoing basic training and preparing to be posted abroad – had a certain significance. He was not otherwise a writer I was interested in."

John Sutherland was born in 1938. In 1942 his father was killed in a Royal Air Force flying accident in South Africa. You might think that a four-year-old would quickly get over the loss of a parent. But his mother, whom he adored, put her interests before his. He was sent to live with relations in Scotland, ostensibly because of doodlebug air raids, but actually so that he should not witness "her intimacy with a man to whom she was not married."

There's a lot about class in this memoir. From the author's perspective, working class people were admirable, upper class people were not. Of the Rt. Hon Alec Douglas-Home, he writes, "He probably passed a dozen historical replicas of his vacuous, overbred physiognomy when he ascended the stairs every night to his four-poster."

I have no political leanings but was put off by that contemptuous reference to a man I thought totally trustworthy, more than can be said of many people involved in politics.

So, on several counts, the book is a disappointment with, at least for this reader, too much about the author's time as an alcoholic and not nearly enough about the books he read.

However, as I said at the beginning, it may be that his editor at John Murray pressed the professor to concentrate on the aspects of his life which would appeal to those who enjoy misery memoirs, and to cut out a lot of the bookish stuff he had intended to include.

The Boy Who Loved Books

2007-07-24T07:07:00.000+01:00

Last Friday I showed the jacket of The Boy Who Loved Books by John Sutherland.

It seems unlikely that any bookish person will not have heard of him and enjoyed his books
Is Heathcliff a murderer?
Can Jane Eyre be happy?
Who betrays Elizabeth Bennet?

But in case you have not, read an article by him, published in The Guardian just over three years ago and headed -

"As John Sutherland prepares to leave the halls of academia, he reflects on the - good and bad - changes in higher education over the past 40 years"

When I read about his memoir The Boy Who Loved Books, my first thought was "Must buy that."

Second thought, on noticing the price was £16.99, was, "Chances are the G-A will have it so might as well wait for the paperback."

G-A is my mental shorthand for the Guille-Allès Public Library founded by Thomas Guille and Frederick Allès, two young Guernseymen who were apprentices in New York in the 1830s. Their experience of using the apprentices’ library in NY made them determined to provide something similar for Guernsey. In 1882 the two men realised their dream when they purchased the Assembly Rooms in Market Street in St Peter Port.

Checking the G-A's online catalogue showed that the book was in stock and borrowable. The blurb on the front jacket flap reads "This is the story of how books saved one man's life – twice" and, further down the flap, "…the story of one man's, often desperate, love affair with reading, with drink and with an adored, but absent, parent. Books in many ways changed John's life, propelling him to university, and sustaining him in the dark times that were to come. It is also a personal account of the shifting twentieth century and the profound changes that shook society, as well as what it was like to be a grammar-school boy, a national-service man and a redbrick graduate during this period."

My reaction to the book tomorrow.

Alfred Wainwright, Hunter Davies, Beatrix Potter

2007-07-23T07:00:00.000+01:00

On Friday evening we watched Wainwright : The Man Who Loved The Lakes, a profile of the fell walker Alfred Wainwright.

Afterwards, on the sitting room bookshelves, I spotted A Walk Around the Lakes by Hunter Davies, hardbacked in 1979 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson at £6.95 which now seems dirt cheap for a book with maps as endpapers and 12 pages of illustrations.

Hunter Davies [see photo] was in the TV film about Wainwright but, when I opened the book, my attention was caught by a photograph of Belle Isle, built in 1774 and said to be the only circular house in England.

I was also interested by a reference to The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter being turned down by seven publishers.

As I've probably mentioned before, the Beatrix Potter books were among the delights of my early childhood but somehow I haven't got around to reading any of the biographies of their creator. I was sorry to learn from A Walk Around The Lakes that she had difficult parents.

They disapproved of her first engagement to Norman Warne, the son of her publisher who had changed his mind about her book after she had published it herself. Norman died of leukaemia soon after they became engaged.

Her parents were also against her engagement to William Heelis, a Lakeland solicitor, but eventually, in 1913 when she was 47, she married him.

I'm looking forward to reading The Tale of Mrs.William Heelis: Beatrix Potter by John E Heelis. A second paperback edition was published by Sutton in 2003. The Amazon UK synopsis reads –

"Much has been written about the life of Beatrix Potter, the celebrated children's author. Yet one area of her life that has been relatively undocumented is her relationship with Willie Heelis, to whom she was happily married for nearly 30 years. In this account of the Heelis family, which draws on a wealth of anecdotes from family and friends, the author, Willie's great-nephew John Heelis, casts a welcome perspective on this relationship - as well as tackling such controversial questions as whether Beatrix really did like children. Among the strengths of this edition are first-hand reminiscences of family and Lake District friends of the couple, including extensive extracts from some previously unpublished letters. These with the correspondence between Beatrix and Miss Louie Choyce written in the 1920s and 1930s, add to the information about Willie's and Beatrix's life together in Sawrey."

The birth of bestsellers 3

2007-07-20T06:31:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
The Boy Who Loved Books

Continuing his chapter "Bestsellers – Born or Made?", George Greenfield writes
"Which brings us on to the third way in which a novel may become a bestseller – by 'hype'. In a later chapter 'The Crunch', I suggest that the British agent who felt he had a big bestseller in the making would probably take the script, or a detailed treatment and a few specimen chapters, to auction in New York before repeating the process in London. Arthur Hugh Clough was a prophet as well as a poet when he wrote, 'But westward look, the land is bright!'"

Greenfield continues, "The 'hypable' novel is usually by a newcomer (or an experienced author working under a pen-name). The reason is simple. Publishing nowadays deals in 'futures', rather like the Stock Exchange. The new is exciting; it has no track record to quantify hope. Publishers know from long and hard experience that it is virtually impossible to shift a novelist who has brought out six or more novels above the sales record he has established in the trade. However much advertising or publicity is devoted to his new book, the sharp edge of the battle is at the point where the representative goes into a bookshop soliciting orders. He may well say – and indeed believe – that 'this is X's best novel by far' but the seasoned bookseller will usually shrug and reply, 'I've heard that one before. Let's see, I took half a dozen of the last one – put me down for another six this time.' It is so much easier to wax lyrical when there are no previous results to measure the book against.' "

"The novel to be hyped often turns out to be aimed at women readers, who provide some 60 per cent of the general readership…It usually includes some esoteric (more than erotic) sex passages. Recent examples are Destiny by Sally Beauman and Shirley Conran's Lace."

"This third method of entry into bestsellerdom is the only one that supports Mr Sutherland's contention that bestsellers are 'made', not 'born'. Claud Cockburn, who in 1972 published a book with an almost identical title, Bestseller, took the opposite view. His book concentrated on novels published between the turn of the century and the outbreak of war in 1939."

The rest of the chapter, and indeed the whole book, is well worth reading if your public library has it, or you can find a second-hand copy.

The 'Mr Sutherland' referred to is now Professor John Sutherland whose memoir, The Boy Who Loved Books, was hardbacked by John Murray last month.

Details of his books about bestsellers are to be found at this page at Amazon UK.

There was a long comment on yesterday's blog by Kit Berry, creator of Stonewylde, but she didn't give a link to her website. Worth a look if you enjoy fantasy.

The birth of bestsellers 2

2007-07-19T06:53:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
An undiscovered [by me] Paul Scott novel

Here, extracted from George Greenfield's Scribblers for Bread [Hodder & Stoughton 1989], is the second part of his theory on how bestsellers happen.

"The second way is the gradual approach. The author in question usually starts more than moderately well and turns out to have a steady, sometimes prolific output where each succeeding novel fares that much better than its predecessors. Examples would include Paul Scott, Dick Francis, P D James, Ruth Rendell and Wilbur Smith. In each case it took perhaps ten to twenty novels, often published at yearly intervals, for the respective author to break into the charmed circle of top-selling novelists, although Heinemann did print and sell 20,000 copies of Wilbur Smith's very first novel. Both Dick Francis and P D James benefited through a latish breakthrough in the United States, which reflected back favourably on their British status. In all the popular arts – films, television, the novel – America since the war has had a far greater influence on European sales than we often care to admit. Unless the subject matter is highly arcane, a bestselling American novel will almost certainly hit the British bestseller lists, whereas many bestselling British novels will get nowhere in the States."

Can it really be almost 30 years since Paul Scott died? On his page at Wikipedia, I read "Scott published his first novel Johnny Sahib in 1952 (after seventeen rejections) to modest success. He continued to write and published a novel every year or so until deciding in 1960 to try to survive as a full time author."

It's interesting that even in the early Fifties, when publishing was still "an occupation for gentlemen" and publishers and literary agents were not inundated with book proposals to the extent they are today, he had so many rejections.

Looking for Johnny Sahib at Amazon UK, I came across a Scott novel I hadn't heard of, Six Days in Marapore paperbacked by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.

There's an interesting piece "Paul Scott as a Postimperial Author" by Jacqueline Banerjee, Ph.D here.

The birth of bestsellers 1

2007-07-18T06:50:00.000+01:00

In May this year I wrote "In 1989 Hodder & Stoughton published George Greenfield's Scribblers For Bread which I bought in hardback for £15.00 and last night started re-reading."

That blog ended "More about Scribblers later." But, as so often happens, other things intervened.

I've forgotten how much of Greenfield's excellent book I re-read then. Yesterday, before a solitary lunch – Mr Bookworm having decided to take advantage of the contrary-to-forecast blue sky and take a packed lunch on his coastal walk - I spotted it on our main bookshelves and, opening it at random, came across Greenfield's analysis of bestsellers. He believed they arose in one of three ways.

1. "There is the 'thunderclap' way – the book that makes a loud bang out of a clear blue sky. It is usually a first novel or a second or third novel by a virtually unknown author. Examples are The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Almost without exception, novelists who take the public fancy by storm in this way continue throughout their careers – or at least for a considerable time – to attract a large band of loyal readers."

It's interesting that all Greenfield's examples of thunderclap authors are men. Were there no thunderclap books by women during his long overview of the publishing scene? Surely there must have been? Yet no names spring to mind.

Tomorrow I'll write about the other two ways he felt bestsellers arose, and perhaps I'll have remembered some feminine thunderclap titles.

Never too late to try something new

2007-07-17T07:20:00.000+01:00

A few days ago this dropped into my Inbox.

Elaine has left a new comment on your post "The Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris":

"I am a huge Trollope fan and the Palliser/Political novels are quite magnificent. Try The Way we Live Now to discover a truly Maxwellian figure alive and kicking all those years ago. Nothing changes, nothing new under the sun"

I clicked on the name Elaine which led me to a blog called Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover by "A commuting book and opera-aholic personal assistant living in the oldest recorded town in the UK, Colchester."

Almost immediately I realised I had been to this blog before, lured there by a book called The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower. But what I had not discovered on that first visit was that the owner of this blog has a remarkable mother.

This link should take you to a photograph of her, in a garden in Bath with Elaine's sister.

Elaine writes, "My mother has just celebrated her 95th birthday and is amazingly fit and well and going strong. I think the main reason for this is she keeps her mind alive and alert. She lives in a warden controlled block and though she is the oldest inhabitant there, she has twice as much get up and go as most of them and I really believe this is because she does not spend her entire day watching tv which an awful lot of residents seem to do. She will not switch it on until the evening and only then if there is something she wants to watch."

"Mum took up water colour painting at the age of 90 when the local council had a brilliant idea of taking on an instructor to visit care homes. She simply loves it and finds it very relaxing and spends hours with her paint brushes and paints. The initiative did not last of course, with the council cutting costs so this went by the board, but she still continues to paint on her own. She is also a great reader and dismisses most of the books that she calls 'old ladies books' as rubbish…"

Earlier this year, I had to visit a residential home for elderly people and was disturbed by fact that most of the residents were not watching TV, reading newspapers or books, or chatting. They were sitting in the public rooms in a state of inertia which seemed to confirm the rumours that the staff at some old folks' homes give their charges soporifics.

For the rest of that day I was troubled by what I had seen, and appalled by the thought that, one day in the future, I might find myself in a similar establishment. Then the demands of a busy working life pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind.

A unique correspondence coming in September

2007-07-16T06:56:00.000+01:00

On Friday I complained about the physical weight of the book I'd been reading in bed.

Over the weekend I switched to a 217-page Hamish Hamilton hardback bought for £12.50 in 1986 : A Talent to Annoy : Essays, Journalism and Reviews 1929-1968 by Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley. [The word Journalism on the dust jacket is replaced by Articles on the title page.]

The blurb begins –

" 'Hell would be a more suitable place for you than Ireland,' wrote an Irish correspondent when Nancy Mitford's article on that country appeared in the Sunday Times. Such violent reactions to her journalism were not uncommon; a piece describing a visit to Rome was solemnly burnt by an Italian countess in front of her friends and an article branding Marie-Antoinette as a traitor who richly deserved her fate led more than one Parisian to cut Nancy dead…[her] idiosyncratic point of view, her sense of the comic and her lack of pomposity make this collection of articles as fresh, funny and enjoyable as when they first appeared in print."

I agree, but many of the writers I encounter in online forums would not. Today political correctness is rife.

Six years ago, in the Telegraph, Oliver Poole wrote : "…the publishers Fourth Estate, are paying £200,000 for the right to print the 500 letters, which are kept at Chatsworth House, the home of the youngest Mitford sister, Deborah, who married the 11th Duke of Devonshire. The family was known as the "mad, mad Mitfords", taken from the headline of a 1930s newspaper story that recounted some of the sisters' exploits which scandalised society."

Gill Coleridge, the literary agent for the collection, said that 500 letters between the sisters would be issued in a one-volume edition. It had taken her five years to persuade the family to allow them to be made public. She said: "I think they realise that this is an important historic archive and that it is time it was opened up to a wider audience."

Finally coming out in September, the book's title is The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley, daughter-in-law of the third Mitford sister, Diana Mosley. In October there will be a reception and an illustrated hour-long lecture by Charlotte Mosley in the theatre at Chatsworth. How I should love to attend, but I don't think it will be possible. Tickets £10 per person, or £17.50 for two.

The book is described thus –

"The never-before published letters of the legendary Mitford sisters, alive with wit, affection, tragedy and gossip: a charismatic history of the century's signal events played out in the lives of a controversial and uniquely gifted family. Spanning the twentieth century, these magically vivid letters between the legendary Mitford sisters constitute not just a superb social and historical chronicle (what other family counted among its friends Hitler and the Queen, Cecil Beaton and President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and Givenchy?); they also give an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationship between six beautiful and gifted women who emerged from the same stock, incarnated the same indomitable spirit, yet carved out starkly different roles and identities for themselves. Nancy, the scalding wit who transferred her family life into bestselling novels; Pamela, who craved nothing more than a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist jailed with her husband, Oswald Mosley, during WWII; Unity, an attempted suicide, obsessed with Hitler; Jessica, the runaway communist and fighter for social change; and Deborah, the genial socialite who found herself Duchess of Devonshire. Writing to one another to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip, the sisters wrote above all to amuse. A correspondence of this scope is rare, for it to be penned by six such born storytellers makes it unique."

Trollope biog heavy reading in bed

2007-07-13T07:15:00.000+01:00

According to our bathroom scales, the hardback of Trollope by Victoria Glendinning [Hutchinson 1992] weighs 2 lbs or 0.91 kilos, a heavy weight on the tum when reading in bed.

The biography runs to 510 pages, plus Introduction, Notes and Sources and Index. Why wasn't it cut, or published in two vols?

Trollope lived in some delightful houses – I wonder who occupies 5 Seaview Terrace, Donnybrook, near Dublin today? But, according to the photographs of him in the biography, at "just over forty" he looked an elderly man, bald and bushy-bearded.

There being no photographs of him in his youth, on the dust jacket of the book there is an artist's impression of how he might have looked, before growing his beard, by Tom Phillips R A.

My picture of Victoria Glendinning is borrowed from the site of her literary agent, David Higham, and was taken by Susan Greenhill who specialises in photographing writers. Her site has an interesting gallery of them, "taken from the thousands of freelance assignments she has undertaken for publishers, authors, newspapers and other clients since 1980."

About 50 pages into the biography I started to skim-read, a habit learned in my newspaper reporting days when I sometimes had to "gut" long documents for the few newsworthy lines.

Page 197 made my skimming eye slow down. "Anthony Trollope is commonly credited with the introduction into Britain of pillar boxes for posting letters. It would be more truthful to say that it was his persistence and enthusiasm that resulted in their adoption. Rowland Hill among others considered the idea.

When he was reviewing postal services in the Channel Islands, three months into his new job, Anthony wrote a long official report to his immediate superior in the Western District which included a recommendation to try out in St Helier, Jersey…Within a month he had the authority to go ahead, and immediately pressed for pillar boxes in St Peter Port in Guernsey as well. The pillar boxes were established in the Channel Islands the next year, and the year after that (1853) they began to appear in mainland Britain."

Trollope's mother, Frances, was a successful writer of more than 40 books. The Literary Encyclopaedia has an interesting piece about her, but they don't allow visitors to copy and paste extracts.

The Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris

2007-07-12T07:29:00.000+01:00

In April 2006, in The Bookseller, I read this -

"At the heart of the city of Paris' 4th arrondissement, le Marais is steeped in literary pedigree. In previous years, it has played host to Victor Hugo and Madame de Sévigne; its narrow streets are now home to an idiosyncratic bookstore called The Red Wheelbarrow."

The shop opened in September 2001, a few months too late for me to visit it while celebrating a special wedding anniversary in the city where Mr Bookworm and I honeymooned. I clipped the article and put it in an enveloped marked Next Trip to Paris. Yesterday it surfaced during a tidy-up.

My favourite part of Paris is on the Left Bank. The Red Wheelbarrow is at 22 rue St Paul, north of the river. According to The Bookseller article, the name comes from a poem "So Much Depends Upon" by William Carlos Williams, an American poet of whom I had never heard.

The shop is run by Canadian Penelope Fletcher Le Masson and American Abigail Altman. According to Suresh Ariaratham who wrote the piece in The Bookseller, they have complementary characters : Penelope generating wild ideas and Abigail providing the attention to detail to make them happen. [Photo borrowed from Lit Minds blog.]

My main memories of the Marais are of the Pompidou Centre which we thought an abomination and of the Places des Vosges which was lovely.

Somewhere in my files, but I can't lay hands on it, is an article from House & Garden or The World of Interiors showing the interior of an apartment, in one of the old buildings surrounding the Place des Vosges, which has been rented or bought by Richard Rogers and furnished in a way that made me roll my eyes. I seem to remember huge yellow bean bags in place of the kind of furniture suited to such a building.

The Red Wheelbarrow has some interesting book reviews. It's years since I read Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, reviewed thus –

"… I need to tell any of you who are interested in democratic political systems and above all in parliamentary government, these books are a wonder and a delight. There has been a radio reading in Britain of The Prime Minister and the popular reaction seems to be to confuse this late nineteenth century prime minister with Tony Blair. The books are spookily prophetic. Lady Glencora has her clone in Cherie Blair, we find a politically correct suicide, leakings from the press and their consequence on the political developments, the questioning of the government's integrity—it reads as though you had already seen the movie in most of the details. Unlike the versions in our press, the author's humor is ever present. Plantagent Palliser is the prime minister's name. Isn't that enough to make you want to dip into the nineteenth century and discover the mirror replay in our times?"

Yes, it is.

DVD advertising for books

2007-07-11T07:35:00.000+01:00

The inside back cover of this week's issue of The Bookseller [link in sidebar] is an advertisement - "Ebury and BBC Books have joined forces to produce 2007's megasellers. From bald tops to how to shop, from Moyles to murder and Great Britain to the Ganges. Take a look at this year's biggest titles."

Attached to this page, with that useful transparent gluey stuff which I keep forgetting to ask my stationery shop about, came a DVD promoting four books from Ebury and four BBC books. I have no idea what this kind of advertising costs. But I'm sure we are going to see a lot more of it in future.

The promotional spiels on the disc are aimed at booksellers. I played the disc, read the info pages and watched the eight short films. My reactions, as a reader and private buyer, were as follows –

Laid Bare by Gail Porter. Had to go to Amazon UK to find out who Ms Porter is. In case you are also unsure, she "burst on to our TV screens in the late 90s presenting The Movie Chart Show, Alive and Kicking and Top of the Pops."

The Difficult Second Book by Chris Moyles. Another one I had never heard of. He's a Radio One dj, but I don't have time to listen to the radio.

The Nature of Britain by Alan Titchmarsh. Might reserve it from public library.

Murder Most Fab by Julian Clary. Another name new to me. Don't like the sound of his main male character who has been a prostitute. Might borrow it from the library, should I happen to spot it there.

India : An Epic Journey across the Subcontinent by Michael Wood.

Will certainly watch the TV series and possibly buy the book for someone I love who loves India.

How to Shop with Mary Portas, Queen of Shopping. Was put off the author when she used a four letter word. She was quoting fashion photographer David Bailey, but I think she should have censored his comment.

Rick Stein's Mediterranean. Watched Rick Stein's delightful French canal trip so will definitely watch this new series and probably buy the book if/when it comes out in a cheaper-than-£25 edition.

Don't You Know Who I Am? by Piers Morgan. He was editor of the Daily Mirror, a paper I don't read. I saw Mr Morgan being unpleasant about Cherie Blair during the Fiona Bruce TV interview. I'm not a Cherie fan, but I didn't think the point he was making – about her being paid for a few of the huge number of speeches she made while PM's wife – held water.

So only two out of eight of "this year's biggest titles" are appealing to this book enthusiast.

Elizabeth Oldfield realises ambition

2007-07-10T06:52:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was publication day for Elizabeth Oldfield's novel Vintage Babes, published by Accent Press.

I knew Elizabeth when we both wrote for Mills & Boon. When, last month, she asked if I would like to read her latest and very different book, I was keen to see what form her break-out had taken.

Here's our Question and Answer exchange.

Bookworm's first Question : As a reader (who has been happily married since I was 21), I find it difficult to empathise with characters in novels who have a string of unhappy relationships and/or a divorce behind them. Elizabeth, you and your husband are also happily married. Did you find it tricky to get inside the head of 55-year-old Carol, the central character in Vintage Babes, who thought she was happily married to a fellow journalist for more than 20 years until she found he was having an affaire?

Elizabeth Oldfield's Answer: Although I am happily married, I have several friends who are divorced and was able to tap into their experiences and recall their feelings. So empathising with Carol came easily.

Q : How much is Vintage Babes a reaction to writing 40 romances for Mills & Boon?

A: It is not a reaction, but a long-term ambition. Back in the Eighties my husband's job took us to live in Singapore - a great little island. I had articles published in magazines and newspapers in the U.K. and Singapore. Then I began to wonder whether, on our return to the U.K., I could make a living out of writing. I decided to write a book - mainstream women's fiction - but first I would practice on a small book. Simplistic, I know, but that's how it was. The small books which came to mind were M&B romances, which I had never read, so I bought a dozen, studied them and thought 'I can do that'. Amazingly, my first book was accepted. I had enjoyed writing it and so I continued.

Eighteen years and 40 novels later, I retired from romance. I wanted time to relax, go travelling with my husband, and, finally, to attempt my original ambition of writing a mainstream book. Vintage Babes is the result.

Q : When deciding to write a book very different from your backlist, did you consider other genres such as crime fiction, fantasy, literary fiction or even non-fiction?

A: I did attempt a 'cosy crime', which fell by the wayside, but fantasy, literary fiction or non-fiction held no appeal. My main interest - even in the crime novel - was women 'of a certain age.' Whilst a proliferation of chick-lit satisfies the younger female readers, there are few books targeted towards those of fifty-plus. Yet the majority of women readers are over fifty.

The age angle fascinated me. We all know we're destined to become old codgers one day, yet it is often a mental truth and not an emotional awareness. When the realisation dawns that you're close to being a senior citizen - or, heaven forbid, have hit sixty - we can feel shocked, cheated, traumatised. I was never meant to be OLD. How can I be when I don't feel any different to how I felt at forty, even thirty? But then look in the mirror, try running for a 'bus and listen to your conversation - there's the proof.

Q : As a former newspaper reporter, I was delighted to find the main character in Vintage Babes is a senior reporter on a small town newspaper. Your main male character is the new editor of her paper. On p 75 he says, "I've also taken a look at the wages bill…and it seems that you don't get paid overtime for the evenings nor for any weekend work." In my time on newspapers, there was no such thing as overtime. One of the pleasures of staff journalism was that it wasn't a 9-5 job. But times change and it may be that things are different now. Did you check your facts with a local reporter or editor?

A: No, I didn't research the overtime angle, I used author's prerogative. I reasoned that as the newspaper was owned by a disinterested and unaware proprietor and pretty homespun - and as Steve was allowed to do his own thing by a grateful Mr P-J - Carol getting paid overtime would be acceptable.

Q : Nowadays very few books are accepted on first submission. How many publishers did you approach before Vintage Babes found a home?

A: Umpteen.

Q : You don't have a website at present. Is there one on the drawing board?

A: No, but if Vintage Babes takes off I could be tempted.

Q: Can you reveal what the next book is about?

A: The highs and lows of women in their sixties.

Writing for women in their sixties

Readers aged 60-plus are a neglected segment of the market. I look forward to Elizabeth's next book.

Meanwhile, I wish her publishers, Accent Press, would re-design their site so that visitors aren't forced to download Adobe 8.

2007-07-09T07:31:00.000+01:00

The cost of a smart London lunch in 1931 and 2006

Mr Bookworm's current reading is Big Money by P G Wodehouse, re-published in hardback in May by Everyman's Library. His copy is a Spanish edition published by Plaza & Janes, Barcelona, in 1982 under the title Un Dineral.

Here's a summary of the story I picked up at Amazon UK.

"Lord Biskerton, son and heir of the sixth Earl of Hoddesdon, and known to his friends as Biscuit, had red hair, a preliminary scenario for a moustache and a noble determination to escape the disgrace of work. His friend Berry Conway, however, had succumbed to economic pressure and become the secretary to T. Paterson Frisby, a dyspeptic American who had twenty million and loved every cent of it. When Biscuit and Berry pooled ideas for their mutual betterment, and one idea concerned Ann Moon, Frisby's beautiful niece and heiress, they had to lean heavily on Aunt Vera, an old campaigner in the field of love. How Uncle Paterson was caught short and rushed to cover, while Aunt Vera hedged the market with a double play and salted down two money-making engagements for the House of Hoddesdon, is one of the most irresistible tales of the one and only P. G. Wodehouse."

A page Mr B thought would amuse me is about Biscuit borrowing some money from Aunt Vera to take a girl to lunch at London's Berkeley Hotel. His aunt said the meal would cost £8.10d a head, and if his guest wanted lemonade or mineral water that would be an extra two shillings. Coffee for two would be half a crown. Two shillings would be an acceptable table tip and the cloakroom tip would be sixpence. A total of twenty five shillings would be more than sufficient.

According to this bibliography, Big Money was first published in 1931 by Herbert Jenkins. [The photo of Wodehouse, courtesy of Wikipedia, is dated 1904.]

Measuring Worth tells me that 25 shillings in 1931 had risen to £58.37 by 2006.">"

Today lunch for two at the Berkeley's Petrus restaurant costs £120.

A rich grocer's Literary Ventures Fund

2007-07-06T06:05:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Richard Havers' comments

Two years ago, The Bookseller columnist William Boot wrote a piece headed "Hurrah for grocers". Boot had picked up a story from the Boston Globe about Jim Bildner, a former grocer who, having made his pile, was devoting himself to philanthropy, one of his targets being the publishing business.

"His Literary Ventures Fund will "apply venture capital rules to book publishing"," wrote Boot, adding, "So far, so dull; venture capitalists have been the bane of publishing for 20 years although Nigel Newton would disagree."

This made me curious to find out how the Literary Ventures Fund was faring two years on. It's a well-designed and interesting site with a list of the books they've helped to publish so far.

But although Boot wrote – "Instead of chucking all his money at unworthy chief executives, Mr Bildner is, in effect, chucking it at authors", the money is actually being chucked at small publishers, not at authors who deserve to be published but are not.

The publishers include Waveland Press, Illinois, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, and Archipelago Books, Brooklyn.

Looking at the book jackets page, my interest was caught by Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali by Kris Holloway, first paperbacked in 1980 and re-published last year. The book now has 44 reviews at Amazon US, 42 of them 5-star.

The Literary Ventures Fund mission statement page starts with this -

"Literature has a profound impact on our lives. Great books transport readers, illuminate their values, and bring meaning and context to their lives. They have the power to inspire, console, and provoke; they enlighten us and affect us long after we've put a book down. We believe that literature is at risk, as are the economic and support systems that traditionally have connected great writers to readers. In many cases these systems no longer exist, disrupted in part by consolidation and the intrinsic pressures on the remaining large publishing houses to give preference to books that sell to the mass market. LVF is built on the premise that, given a level playing field, great works of literature can thrive in the marketplace."

Is there a British equivalent of LVF? Not that I know of.

Richard Havers' comments

How many readers of this and other blogs miss interesting comments posted on earlier blogs. Richard Havers, whose blog is called Havering On, posted an amusing one-liner on my yesterday's blog.

He wrote – "Both publishers and prostitutes keep a keen eye on turnover and on profits."

But readers may have missed his comment on my June 19 blog headed – "Bookshop v supermarket customers". I might have missed it myself had I not arranged to have comments emailed to my Inbox.

He wrote – "Anne, I'm just back from holiday (a week on a boat off the west coast of Scotland - idyllic). On re-reading my post I feel I should have said "the [extra)ordinary people who get awards for doing what are really good and amazing things". Having had time to reflect on the former Mr. Rushdie's award, and having read the comment on my blog about standing up against Islamic fundamentalists as being 'in', I'm even more upset by his knighthood. I've never read one of his books, never even been tempted, but that is not my beef with this ludicrous giving of such an honour.

If indeed it is a gesture, it is both futile and silly. It's the national equivalent of thumbing a nose against many who follow Islam. I agree with you on his marriage stakes. One cannot help thinking there's a good deal more 'celebrity' surrounding the former Mr. Rushdie than is healthy. p.s. Misery memoirs will burn out, there's only so much of that stuff that people can read without over-dosing."

I hope he's right about miserylit, but I'm not sure, having just read a book about a dying teenager which is expected to have massive sales. More about that next week.

The Hippocratic Oath and Call Girl Lit

2007-07-05T08:42:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

A writer as well as a doctor?
The grit in the oyster : More re Monday's blog about Hurst v Headline
Danuta Kean on The Squalid Truth About Call Girl Lit

I'm sure I don't need to explain why Mr Bookworm and I were discussing the Hippocratic Oath yesterday. Later I looked it up.

"The Hippocratic Oath is an oath traditionally taken by physicians pertaining to the ehtical practice of medicine. It is widely believed that the oath was written by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, in the 4th century BC, or by one of his students … Although mostly of historical and traditional value, the oath is considered a rite of passage for practitioners of medicine, although it is not obligatory and no longer taken up by all physicians."

"Changed portions of the oath: Never to do deliberate harm to anyone for anyone else's interest. Physician organizations in the U.S. and most other countries have strongly denounced physician participation in legal executions. However, in a small number of nations, most notably the Netherlands, a doctor can perform euthanasia, by both his and the patient's consent.

Several parts of the oath have been removed or re-shaped over the years in various countrie, schools, and societies as the social, religious, and political importance of medicine has changed. Most schools administer some form of oath, but the great majority no longer use the ancient version, which praised Greek deities, advocated teaching of men, and forbade general practitioners from surgery, abortion, and euthanasia. Also missing from the ancient Oath and from many modern versions are the complex ethical issues that face the modern physician."

A writer as well as a doctor?

I wasn't sure if Hippocrates was a writer as well as a doctor. His name is used by Hippocrates Publishing and at Harvard University's site, I read "The works available in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Hippocrates are the following … Of the roughly 70 works in the 'Hippocratic Collection' many are not by Hippocrates; even the famous oath may not be his. But he was undeniably the 'Father of Medicine'."

The Loeb Classical Library is a registered trademark of the Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

The grit in the oyster : More re Monday's blog about Hurst v Headline

Essential reading for anyone interested in the publishing industry are two pieces about the late Christopher Hurst about whom I wrote on Monday. The following are short extracts. Do read them in full.

Under the heading The Grit in the Oyster, Giles de la Mare starts his tribute with –

"For Christopher Hurst, small was beautiful and that was a leitmotiv in his life as a successful publisher, C. Hurst & Co, over forty years. In the late 1970s he emerged as a champion of small publishers in general — and an inspiration to them — and a champion of democracy in the occasionally murky world of publishing politics. Which was where I first met him, when I was a director of Faber. We were soon to become friends. We were both on the University, College and Professional Publishers Council of the Publishers Association, and he was still on the Council when I became Chairman in the early 1980s. Subsequently, we were both elected to the Council of the PA. His passion, his analytical powers and his unshakable integrity were a potent mixture when it appeared to him, as it did quite frequently right into the new millennium, that Machiavellian deals were being done between the big conglomerates, or crucial book trade issues were being neglected. He was the necessary grit in the oyster of complacency and expediency that is sometimes found in the book world. I greatly valued his judgement and his polemical approach, even when I thought his arguments were over the top."

Julian Rea wrote an obituary for The Bookseller.

"Four years ago, Christopher was diagnosed with cancer. He was admitted to hospitals and hospices several times in the expectation of imminent death—only to reappear at his desk a few weeks later, brushing aside the concerns of his friends and colleagues. He had a strong sense of unfinished business—the house of Hurst.

Born into a distinguished medical family and educated at Eton and Oxford, Christopher’s passion was publishing books. In a trade world dominated at the top by the listed corporations and elsewhere by subject and market niche specialists, it was a major achievement to remain afloat as a publisher of general and academic interest for forty years. Hurst & Co. grew modestly. It never made large profits, or, indeed, large losses. Its purpose was not to make money but to provide a quality list of abiding, often specialist, interest."

In case you didn't read Monday's blog, I quoted a letter Christopher Hurst wrote to The Bookseller in July 2005. Here's part of that quote –

"The news that John Murray is being restructured by its new owners, Headline, to publish "high quality commercial fiction [a possible contradiction in terms here?], aimed primarily at the female market" should induce feelings of nausea combined with rage in any member of the publishing community with a sense of propriety, not to mention history. Why keep the illustrious John Murray name if they only want to prostitute it? This crime against the light is not unprecedented; those who acquired the also greatly honoured name of André Deutsch did the same."

I wonder how he would have reacted to the jacket of a book published by John Murray last month?

Danuta Kean on The Squalid Truth About Call Girl Lit

Arts journalist and publishing commentator Danuta Kean [link in sidebar] has written a strong piece about call girl lit on her blog.

Many people will feel that sleeping around a k a promiscuity is not a life-style that should be promoted by reputable publishers, especially by imprints once associated with all that is best in publishing.

Why change Rosamunde Pilcher's bestselling novel for the television/video version?

2007-07-04T07:52:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Review by US reader of The Shell Seekers
Evelyn Anthony's 79th birthday

Browsing our public library's video shelves, Mr Bookworm spotted The Shell Seekers and, knowing it was one of my favourite novels, borrowed it. We watched it last night after supper. Angela Lansbury plays the central character, Penelope Keeling, who is described on the video cover as "reaching her early seventies". In the film she remarks several times that she's 63, although at the end of the book she is 64.

This is a trifling detail compared with some of the major changes made by the film-makers. The book starts and ends with Penelope as a woman in late middle age, but the main emphasis is on her young life; how, as a Wren [which the author also was] she met her unsatisfactory husband, and how she met the great love of her life, Richard, a British soldier killed in action during WW2.

In the film, Richard is changed to an American serviceman and reappears as grey-haired San Wanamaker, but only briefly. The film-makers stopped short of inventing a happy ending for him and Penelope.

My "best" copy of The Shell Seekers is in Spain, but I have a book club edition here on the island, and I took it to read in bed instead of watching Joanna Lumley in Sensitive Skin on TV, 10-10.30 p.m. being rather late at night for an early riser.

Review by US reader of The Shell Seekers

For the benefit of those who haven't read the book, here's a review by an American reader, Antoinette Klein, whose comments are the first of 60 reviews at the Amazon US website.

She writes – "I doubt that anyone who reads "The Shell Seekers" will ever forget Penelope Keeling and her three children---Nancy, Olivia, and Noel. Nor will they be likely to forget Sophie, Lawrence, Danus, Antoinia, Richard, and the other characters that move through this spell-binding, heart-enriching novel."

"Mrs. Pilcher sets out to explore the disastrous effects that the prospect of an inheritance can have on a normal family. She also combines the lifestyle of upper-class Bohemians and the days before, during, and after World War II to tell a story that will be forever fresh."

"From the beautiful beaches of Cornwall to the idyllic setting of Ibiza to the bustling life in London, Rosamunde Pilcher transports readers to a world as satisfying as a cup of tea with a plate of warm scones. You will see Penelope grow up in the sheltering world of her artist father and young, French mother. You will share her first love with Ambrose, her true love with Richard, her most wonderful joys and her deepest heartbreaks. You will see her anguish with her three adult children as she struggles to give them independence and feels their venom. You will see her come to terms with her life and her beloved painting of "The Shell Seekers." "

"I first read this book several years ago and only yesterday finished a second reading of it. I found it even more warm and heartfelt than ever. I will make it a point to savor this most marvelous book every few years just for the pure joy it gives."

Evelyn Anthony's 79th birthday

The 79th birthday of another of my favourite authors was in "Today's birthday" list in The Times yesterday. Last month another distinguished author, military historian Correlli Barnett, whom I had the pleasure of knowing in the Sixties/Seventies, turned 80. More about him in a future blog.

How easy it is to miss a desirable book

2007-07-03T07:44:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
773 applicants for Susan Hill's writing course

Although I read the realworld issues of The Bookseller and Publishing News every week, plus book reviews in a wide range of online and printed papers and magazines, I still miss books I should like to add to our bookshelves.

An example is The 8.55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames. Yesterday, going through the 2 July 2004 issue of PN for articles to clip, I came upon this –

"In 1928, Agatha Christie travelled to Baghdad by Orient Express, a trip that was to change her life and lead to 30 more subsequent visits to Iraq and Syria on archaelogical digs. The journey, and the destination, today are very different prospects, as travel writer Andrew Eames discovered when he set out to follow her footsteps … He arrived at the Iraqi border at the same time as the UN weapons inspectors, and thus was one of the last tourists to experience the reality of Saddam Hussein's regime."

Andrew Eames doesn't seem to have a website and the only photograph of him I can find is the one shown.

The paperback of his book has been re-issued with the same jacket as the hardback. I prefer the jacket on the first pb edition [top]. Which do you prefer?

There are two national newspaper quotes and two reviews at Amazon UK.

Daily Mail, 2 July 2004
Eames can boast a lively, entertaining style. He has two great stories... and he tells them both very well.

The Independent, 9 July 2004
Eames' journey becomes absorbing in its own right... He gives vivid and atmospheric accounts.

"After her marriage broke up, Agatha Christie made a trip to Iraq to see some archeologist friends, taking the Orient Express most of the way. For a single woman to make that trip on her own in the 1920s was adventurous and fairly unusual. At the end of her journey she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archeologist. Almost 80 years later, Eames retraces her journey from England through Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East, staying--whenever he could--in the hotels she stayed in. When Christie travelled to Iraq, it was still a protectorate of the English. When Eames made his journey, the US was threatening to bomb Iraq and the Balkans had been through a vicious war. It's a fascinating travelogue, full of contrasts and links between the past and the present, which Eames weaves seamlessly together."

and

"Someone gave me this book, and I didnt expect to like it because i'm not a fan of Agatha christie. But actually there's a lot of great stuff in here and all the Christie bits are a bit of an excuse, really. I now understand the whole Yugoslavia disintegration - well I think I do. And Iraq in the last months before war sounds so different to what we hear about at the moment."

Wouldn't you think that if someone is bright enough to read this book, they would write "different from" rather than "different to" and also check their review and notice that "didn't" needs an apostrophe and the author's surname should be capped. I conclude the writer is a victim of the mess made by government interference in education.

There's an article by Andrew Eames about taking his small daughters to Vienna at Travel Intelligence, a site I haven't come across before.

773 applicants for Susan Hill's writing course

See link in sidebar. I have already expressed my dismay at publisher/author Susan Hill encouraging more people to clutter an already overcrowded market. Born writers don't need this kind of help. Hopeless hopefuls need active discouragement.

Yesterday I intended to continue the John Murray topic today. However it will have to wait until later in the week because I've already exceeded my 500 words allowance.

Small publisher castigates giant publisher

2007-07-02T07:53:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Response from Roland Philipps
21st century equivalent of Mary Renault?

In July 2005, an angry letter from a distinguished British publisher appeared in The Bookseller.

He wrote – "The news that John Murray is being restructured by its new owners, Headline, to publish "high quality commercial fiction [a possible contradiction in terms here?], aimed primarily at the female market" should induce feelings of nausea combined with rage in any member of the publishing community with a sense of propriety, not to mention history.

Why keep the illustrious John Murray name if they only want to prostitute it? This crime against the light is not unprecedented; those who acquired the also greatly honoured name of André Deutsch did the same. In its latter years Murray did not even publish fiction.

Hearken to the spectral voices of John Murray I-VI, if not also to the living voice of JM VII: respect what we stood for – don't use our name at all if you cannot do better than this."

The letter was signed Christopher Hurst, C Hurst & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3PL.

Had I had the pleasure of meeting him, I should have tried to convince Mr Hurst that "high quality commercial fiction" is not necessarily a contradiction in terms. But I shared his anxiety about the future of the John Murray list.

This week I was appalled to discover that a book called Sleeping Around : Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress has been published by the formerly illustrious imprint.

To my regret I shall never meet Christopher Hurst because he died in April and a memorial service followed by a reception is being held in London on July 17.

Response from Roland Phillips

In the following issue of The Bookseller, there was a letter from the MD of John Murray, Roland Philipps.

"I am frequently puzzled by Christopher Hurst's pronouncements on trade publishing, but never more so than by his letter of 15th July…As part of Hodder Headline's (sic) acquisition of the company, it was expressly stated that one of the benefits for the house would be investment in a fiction list that would be invigorated in the spirit of the great days of John Murray's past publishing.

For the publisher that has published authors who are the very definition of high-quality commercial fiction such as Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, the massively selling P C Wren, Kathleen Norris and A E W Mason and, more recently, the wonderfully readable and bestselling Mary Renault, Françoise Sagan and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (still writing at the top of her form), it is an absolutely logical progression that we should once again assert our ability to publish the 21st-century equivalents of these authors."

21st century equivalent of Mary Renault?

Is a book called Sleeping Around : Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress really the 21st century equivalent of The King Must Die by Mary Renault?

I have not – and have no desire to – read Sleeping Around, but its title and jacket do not suggest it's in the same league as Mary Renault's books. More on this subject tomorrow.

Who really wrote this collection of letters?

2007-06-29T07:27:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Peter Pan and Peter Davies, publisher

A friend, who belongs to the book group of which I'm a member during the winter months in Spain, tells me that the book they have to read before the next group lunch is Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman.

"Have you ever heard of it?" she emailed. "There are no reviews on Amazon which is a bit unusual, especially as both D and S [two other members of the group] have a copy of the book."

I replied that I felt sure Google would offer some interesting info. However of the 70 links they provide the majority are to second-hand booksellers' sites offering copies of the book.

Apparently it was first published in 1934 by Peter Davies Ltd. Another edition came out in 1978, and the book was re-published by Mandarin in 1992.

Here are two extracts from a long piece about the book at The British Empire.

"This book purports to be a series of beautiful and eloquently written letters passing to an 'unknown' English Gentlewoman from an Indian Judge. It charts a fascinating literal friendship that covers the late days of the Imperial Raj. The letters began after a single chance encounter between the pair at a party: The wife of an English Colonel and the young Indian judge started a correspondence that was to last a lifetime. The letters only travel in one direction, but for imperial historians, that direction is almost certainly the more interesting of the two. They manage to cast light on all sorts of interesting areas of Imperial India, Burma and Britain by a highly gifted and literate primary witness."

"The letters chart the rise of the career of an Indian in the imperial judicial system with all the pitfalls and advantages that his position bestows upon him. He is initially posted to Burma where, as a young man, he is exposed to both the opportunities that Imperialism could offer an educated man like himself, but also the limitations and expectation of his position in a strictly heirarchical society. He finds that he is only welcome at the European clubs when he is accompanied by his European boss. If he tries to enter by himself, he feels the prejudices and antipathy of the ruling elite. He also works under what he regards as the best and worst of Imperial Britons."

No doubt you noticed the word "purports" in the first paragraph. At a site called Obsidian Wings, I read -

"…we are perturbed when we discover, for example that Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman was in fact written by an Englishman."

I couldn't find the source of the Obsidian Wings discovery, so perhaps will email the team running the site.

Nearly forgot : there's another page at The British Empire some readers might find useful.

It deals with – "Explorers, bureaucrats, soldiers, artists, scientists, writers, rich, poor, advocates and adversaries all played their part in the history of the British Empire. This section seeks to give brief descriptions of the acts and deeds of as wide a variety of individuals as possible. You may also find information on individuals connected to particular colonies or units in the relevant Maproom or Armed Forces Section."

Peter Pan and Peter Davies, publisher

Peter Davies, the first publisher of Letters of an Indian Judge was, apparently, the model for J M Barrie's "boy who never grew up", Peter Pan.

"It’s April 5, 1960…the day of the death and suicide of the respected publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies, founder of Peter Davies Ltd., considered an “artist among editors.” "

That is an extract from a novel called Kensington Gardens
by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June last year.

Apparently Peter Davies hated being associated with Peter Pan and eventually threw himself in front of a London Underground train.

A book set in Venice

2007-06-28T07:12:00.000+01:00

Are your bookshelves in perfect order? All the books arranged by author or subject?

Our summer bookshelves were in order when first filled, but that's 21 years ago and they are less orderly now. Yesterday, for a reason I'll explain in a minute, I searched the shelves for books about Venice and found seven titles.

Venice & the Veneto by James Bentley [Aurum Press 1992 £14.95]
Venice : A Literary Companion by Ian Littlewood [John Murray 1991 £11.95]
Venice : Insight Pocket Guide [1992 APA Publications £3.99]
Venice by Eugenio Pucci [1974 Mercurio Series of Bonechi Guide 1200 lire]
Venice : The Rough Guide by Jonathan Buckley and Hilary Robinson [1993 £8.99]
Turner's Venice by Lindsay Stainton [1993 British Museum Press £14.95]
Visions of Venice : Watercolours and drawings from Turner to Procktor [1990 Bankside Gallery]

The last is a catalogue of a loan exhibition staged by the Royal Watercolour Society to celebrate the Bankside Gallery's tenth anniversary. It includes a wonderful painting called Santa Maria della Salute : moonlight by Sir Edward Poynter [1836-1919].

I'm debating buying a copy of it from AllPosters but can't quite bring myself to spend £43 on an unframed giclee print.

Last week the postman delivered a padded bag containing an addition to our collection of books about Venice. It was a present from the author of one of my favourite blogs. On the fly-leaf is written "To Anne Weale with best wishes from Michael Allen" which, as many of you will know, is the real world name of Grumpy Old Bookman.

Michael's book is called Mr Fenman's Farewell to His Readers and is published by his own imprint Kingsfield Publications.

As you can see, the front cover has a photograph of a gondolier. The back cover has another photograph of gondolas tied up near the Riva degli Schiavoni, a waterfront where I have watched the sun set while having a pre-dinner drink at a table outside my small but comfortable hotel.

[George Sand, Charles Dickens, Proust and Ruskin stayed at the Hotel Danieli, now very expensive. I stayed at the nearby but reasonably priced Hotel Paganelli.]

Above the photograph of the gondolas, we read : "Who is the mysterious Madame de Mentou? And what is her real name? These are the questions which the writer Thomas Fenman addresses in a brief memoir which was written a few months before his death. Fenman, who lived from 1761-1837, had a long and successful career as a novelist. But, although famous and widely read in his day, he was soon forgotten after his death. Now his puzzling memoir is made available in print for the first time. In a scholarly introduction, Michael Allen describes how he came to own the original manuscript of Thomas Fenman's Farewell, and gives an account of what is known of Fenman's life."

The book can be bought from Lulu.com for $8.78 [£4.40 GBP] plus the shipping cost which can be checked at the site before the prospective buyer enters their payment details.

Mysterious and thought-provoking, it would make an unusual and welcome present for anyone who loves Venice.

A librarian's blog and a castle in Spain

2007-06-27T07:21:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

A comment from Sacramento on horses

This is an extract from a blog I discovered yesterday.

"Have just finished Matthew Parris's Castle in Spain, the story of how he found and restored, with his family, a ruined house in northern Spain. I enjoyed the articles in the Times about this venture, and it was good to catch up with the finished product, so to speak. I've also just started Sebastian Faulks Human Traces, which is proving gripping. As husband and I are going to France later this week, I'm also hunting out books to take with me So far I've collected Wild Mary, a biography of Mary Wesley by Patrick Marnham, Alexander Masters Stuart, a life backwards, Sarah Dunant's In the company of the Courtesan( I loved her Birth of Venus) Jed Rubenfeld's Interpretation of Murder and Manette Ansay's Blue Water. I tend to take too many books and end up not reading one or two, but cannot imagine being without a book to read or worse , having read all I've taken with me , and not wanting to re-read any. Two of these, the Jed Rubenfeld and the Alexander Masters are for the two reading groups I belong to. Last time we went to France, I finished the couple of books I took before we came home, so I've probably gone for overkill this time."

The reason I found this blog is because the blogger wrote a comment on my piece about Katharine Whitehorn on Monday. The comment was – "I learnt quite a lot of my basic cooking skills from Katherine Whitehorn's "Cooking in a bedsitter" when I left home to go and study in Manchester and share a flat with fellow students."

It was signed jaycee and, when I clicked on the name, I was whisked to a blog called Omnireader.net written by a retired public librarian living in the south of England.

Like Omnireader, I read Matthew Parris's pieces about his property in Spain, but I hadn’t realised he had published a book about it.

The Amazon UK synopsis reads : "Walking in the Pyrenees, twenty years ago, Matthew Parris and his sister came upon a magnificent medieval house. It had crests and a date 1559 chiselled into the stone: its walls and foundations were intact but the ancient oak ridge timber supporting the roof had split and was ready to collapse into the rotten floors beneath. Renovation would be an epic undertaking a massive investment of time, money and emotion. And, the locals warned, nobody ever left L'Avenc with any money. A few years ago, Matthew (with his family's help) went back and bought the place. Astonishing and arguably idiot, his decision resulted in a phenomenal amount of hard work, and this hugely enjoyable book. Inspirational, instructional and utterly irresistible, this is the story of one man's dream to turn a forgotten ruin into his very own Castle in Spain."

A comment from Sacramento on horses

An American reader called Lorna very kindly posted the following comment.

"Anne, the reason that horses who break their leg have to be put down is because racing horses, in particular, are bred to run, not survive injuries. The Wikipedia entry on Barbaro has a really good explanation of what happens when a horse is injured, and the secondary injuries and infections they are subject to."

Dick Francis

2007-06-26T07:46:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure how many Dick Francis titles we have on our bookshelves. A lot. For years we bought his latest paperback soon after it came out.

Last week, among several second-hand paperbacks Mr Bookworm had bought from a roadside stall, I noticed a Francis thriller I didn't remember reading.

10-lb Penalty was published by Pan Books in 1998. The dedication reads – "With thanks to my grandson Matthew Frances, aged eighteen, and to Weatherbys and No 10 Downing Street."

At Amazon UK a reviewer writes – "Dick Francis has written many fine crime thrillers. He always sticks to his winning formula and usually produces a readable book. However, over recent years this formula has begun to look a little too familiar. 10lb Penalty is just one book too far. The characters are totally unbelievable, the plot weak and the outcome predictable. I have read ever Dick Francis book published so far but 10lb Penalty is definitely my last."

I disagree with this review. Before reading 10-lb Penalty I would not have believed that I could become so engaged with a central character who is 17 at the start of the story and only 22 at the end of it. But, despite his youth, Ben Juilard is immensely likeable, as is his father, George Juilard, who starts the story as a candidate in a by-election and ends it with a good chance of becoming the next Prime Minister.

Both the horsey and political aspects of the story are gripping, though I did wonder why, in an era when human beings can have hips and knees replaced, a much-loved horse with a broken leg still has to be put down.

As you would expect, there are masses of sites about Dick Francis and his books. There's a long page about him on the Alabama-based Josephson Family Home Page where 10-lb Penalty is described as –

"… a very understated novel that has little to do with racing of the equine variety. Instead, the emphasis is on election techniques at the basic level: door-to-door canvassing, town hall debates and rubber chicken dinners. The obligatory horse connections come via Ben's efforts as an amateur jockey but the central mystery centers on who is trying to kill Ben's father. The plot proceeds with a noticeable lack of urgency; things proceed at their own pace and no one ever appears too excited. Despite this dearth of energy, 10lb Penalty is a better than average effort by Francis."

I can see that the British political background wouldn't be of much interest to an American reader. In the light of real world events at Westminster, I found it most entertaining.

Hardback or paperback? Which to buy?

2007-06-25T07:23:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Xcite Books advertisement in PN

Two pages in this week's issue of Publishing News caught my attention.

One was written by journalist Katharine Whitehorn – a columnist for the Observer for 37 years – about her autobiography, Selective Memory, to be published by Virago in September at £18.99

[When will publishers drop these silly .99 prices? Do they really think buyers are gulled into thinking the book is a pound cheaper?]

Ms Whitehorn was married to thriller writer the late Gavin Lyall for 45 years. She is Agony Aunt for Saga magazine.

Shall I buy the hardback or wait for the paperback? Having shelled out £19 all but a penny for Wild Mary last year and been disappointed, with the Whitehorn memoir I'm inclined to wait for the pb, or borrow my public library's copy.

Xcite Books advertisement in PN

The second page in Publishing News was a full-page advertisement headed "Xcite Books offer female readers quality erotic fiction that's seriously sexy!"

Below the heading were 12 book jackets, including books titled "whip ME", "spank ME" and "tie ME UP".

I suppose Publishing News can't afford to turn away advertising, but I wouldn't mind betting that not all the PN staffers and freelancers are comfortable with an ad for what many people, including me, will regard as porn.

The publisher of Xcite books is Accent Press and distribution is by Macmillan (MDL). I wonder if Richard Charkin [see link in right hand sidebar] knows and approves?

At the Accent Press site I read – "Accent Press Ltd is a dynamic publishing company. Founded by Hazel Cushion [see photo] in 2003, the company has already celebrated some major achievements. In February 2007 she was invited to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace at a reception for 200 Women in Business. Hazel Cushion won the Pandora, Women in Publishing Award and Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004. She has recently been selected by The Daily Telegraph as "an inspiring woman"."

I wonder if Ms Cushion would have been invited to the Palace if the ad for Xcite Books had already appeared? It is not in the current issue of The Bookseller.

None of the 12 Xcite titles has the author's name on the cover. Instead we read "Edited by Cathryn Cooper" about whom, at the Lovereading site, we learn that as the "author of over 10 erotic titles she is the perfect person to select the very best stories for the Xcite anthologies."

And "It was being skint that turned Cathryn Cooper to sex. No job, lost house and business, then an opportunity came her way to write for Virgin’s Black Lace series. Having four novels for them under her belt as Georgina Brown, she appeared on their behalf on such programmes as Friday Night Live (HTV Wales) and Middle Ages, (HTV West).

Besides writing occasional features for a Bristol based newspaper, she also writes romantic sagas (under an entirely different name – she does not wish to give the library lenders a heart attack)."

Anyone who has read my Longwarden novels will know that I'm not a prude. But I don't believe that women being tied up and whipped is part of normal, loving sex, or that describing porn as erotica makes it acceptable.

As one of PN's subscribers, I'm put off by the Xcite Books advertisement and hope the magazine's management will think twice before accepting another ad of this type. Surely the publishers are deluding themselves if they believe there's a large female market for these books? My guess is that the majority of buyers will be the same people who buy the top shelf magazines in newsagents' shops.

Writers who declined honours

2007-06-22T09:03:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Cold Comfort Farm

I was interested to read at The Independent yesterday that a number of writers had declined honours.

Alan Bennett declined a CBE for services to literature in 1988 and a knighthood eight years later. He also turned down an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1998, because it had accepted funds from Rupert Murdoch.

Roald Dahl refused an OBE in 1986. Evelyn Waugh declined a CBE in 1959.

Earlier this month I mentioned borrowing my public library's copy of Fathers and Sons, The Autobiography of a Family by Alexander Waugh [Headline 2004 £20].

A reader's comment about the book at Amazon UK reads –

"Evelyn Waugh is of course the hook that will draw readers into this exceptional 'Autobiography of a Family'. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that his overtowering genius dwarves the rest of the book. Beginning with Evelyn's grandfather 'The Brute' (who crushed a wasp on his wife's forehead with his whip, and made his son Arthur kiss a guncase in an effort to kindle a passion for shooting), and finishing with a letter from the author to his own son Bron, this book is totally engrossing. Alexander Waugh is the son of another Bron, the great and good, who will long be remembered for his journalism. Alexander shows in this book the same light touch, disguising deep research, that was displayed in his biography of God and 'Time'. He too is a talent to be reckoned with. This book is funny, erudite, and oddly moving - this may be an extraordinary family in terms of literary output (Arthur Waugh's descendants have published a staggering 180 books between them) but it is above all a family. Alexander Waugh shows a deep affection for his eccentric family, without ever appearing adulatory or incapable of observing faults as well as virtues."

It wasn't Evelyn Waugh who made me borrow the book. Far from sharing Nancy Mitford's liking for him, I thought EW a pain but admired his son Auberon Waugh. If there's a reference to Evelyn's rejected CBE in his grandson's book, I must have skipped that page, and I can't find anything about in the index.

Cold Comfort Farm

I've been meaning to read Stella Gibbons' famous novel since I was in my teens. Watching a video of the film version has reactivated that intention.

The Literary Encylopaedia has a good piece about SG, but it isn't possible to copy and paste an extract without going through a time-consuming rigmarole which most bloggers don't have time for, so I'll leave you to hit the link if you're interested.

Why buy new books?

2007-06-21T09:44:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Re-reading P D James

The other day I looked at our crowded bookshelves and thought, 'What is the point of buying new books when there are so many excellent books here that I haven't read for five, ten, fifteen years or longer?"

At the moment I'm re-reading Original Sin by P D James, a trade paperback published at £8.99 in 1995 by Faber & Faber.

The jacket shown here was borrowed from Amazon UK, but the copy I'm reading has a much more beautiful cover by Andrew Davidson with whom I have something in common. We both attended Norwich School of Art.

"He keeps alive a tradition which owes nothing to transitory fashions or the latest gadgetry, but which is based on the irreplaceable disciplines of objective drawing, a strong sense of design and the tactile pleasures of craftsmanship."

Do hit the link above to see some of the beautiful book jackets by Mr Davidson, including a recent commission by Paul Buckley of Penguin USA for the re-jacketing of the entire John Steinbeck series, two of them shown here.

For Original Sins, Andrew Davidson did a marvellous, rather creepy black and white drawing of Innocent House, the Thames-side Venetian-style palace owned by The Peverell Press, a fictitious London publishing house which will remind many readers of the John Murray imprint.

Publishing crazy and doomed thinks Cheetham

2007-06-20T08:48:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Susan Hill's creative writing course
Louise Doughty's "c w" course

Actually "Crazy and Doomed" is the heading on Anthony Cheetham's opinion column in this week's issue of The Bookseller. Whether he headed his piece with those words, who knows? But they sum up the content of the column.

For anyone reading this blog who doesn't know who Anthony Cheetham is, he was formerly CEO of Random Century and Orion, and now is Chairman of Quercus and The Friday Project.

He writes : "So what is the problem? Perhaps it has to do with the idea that we operate in a mass market environment; that it makes sense to sell books in the same way as socks or sausages or cheap flights. This is an illusion which persists, although we know that only a fraction of 1% of all books published could be truly classified as mass market. The industry's big players are relentlessly focused on seeking out that 1%, piling them high, and discounting them as deeply as they dare."

And later he writes : "But it's still a crazy system. Crazy because it's not an effective or efficient way of serving readers who are not a homogenous mass market, but a complex series of layered and overlapping communities with different tastes and interests. And because it's crazy, it seems unlikely to last."

Susan Hill's "Creative Writing" course

My heart sank on reading that, in September, publisher/author Susan Hill is adding yet another "creative writing" course to the long list of those already in existence.

She writes, "But more than anything, my qualification is probably a passion for fiction and a desire to nurture and encourage real talent. I don`t want there to be more novelists I want there to be more better novelists and to foster originality - not to create Creative Writing Course Clones."

Good writers are born, not made, and they don't need the kind of help offered by these ridiculous CW classes which serve only to increase the number of second- and third- rate writers.

Today, even on published writers' forums, there are people who express themselves clumsily, can't spell and have problems writing more than one-liners.

Of her year-long writing course at the Daily Telegraph, Louise Doughty wrote -

"It was Sunday lunchtime when my partner wandered into the kitchen and said, "Take a look at your message board." No fewer than 162 writers had wriggled their way through the labyrinthine processes involved to post their "The day after my eighth birthday…" sentences. To put this into perspective, under normal circumstances, a dozen letters to a columnist is considered a deluge.
By the end of the following day, we were in the high hundreds, and by the time I had to set the next exercise the following week, 1,808 people had responded and two bags of post had arrived. As I write this, there are 3,174 responses on the message board to that exercise alone.
After the initial flurry of interest, the responses, counting post and online messages, settled down to anything between 300 and 1,000 per week. A hard-core of contributors soon formed, mostly posting their responses online, where they met to discuss each other's work and, occasionally, fall out in spectacular fashion."

Does Susan Hill really want to clutter her life with a crowd of wannabes who, if they had the necessary gumption, would write a book and get it published, even in today's "crazy and doomed" publishing climate, under their own steam?

Bookshop v supermarket customers

2007-06-19T09:05:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Bestseller charts groaning with misery-lit
Will publishers neglect the bookshop buyer?
Salman Rushdie's knighthood

Every Saturday morning I go to the Guardian newspaper site to read Joel Rickett's column, JR being Deputy Editor of The Bookseller. As well as the column for Guardian Review, he writes a for Screen international, and contributes regularly to BBC Radio 4 and 5 Live.

Last weekend, forgetting that he is away for much of this month, I found myself reading the following – So bad it's good

"The bestseller charts are groaning with real-life accounts of neglect, violence and sexual abuse. The worse your childhood, it seems, the more people want to read about it. Have we turned into a nation of ghouls? Esther Addley investigates the remarkable rise of 'misery lit'"

Extracts-
"Reproducing like bacteria, a new literary genre has wholly infected the bestseller charts. As much as 30% of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of accounts of similarly grinding childhood misery."

"Tonkinson [Carole Tonkinson, the publisher of Harper Non-Fiction] says that detailed research does not yet exist, but Harper Non-Fiction estimates that about 85% of misery-lit readers are women, with four-fifths of all sales going through supermarkets. "Supermarkets as a sales channel are very, very key to the rise of this genre," she says. "Nobody really seems to have picked up on the importance of this point. They say only one in six people ever goes into a bookshop. Through the traditional channels you are only ever reaching a tiny proportion of the populace. "

"These books are reaching a different reader, by and large. It's an additional market and I think that is what is really interesting for publishers - that, actually, we're growing the readership. It's a really exciting expansion."

Will publishers neglect the bookshop buyer?

What is worrying is that publishers may become so keen to appeal to the supermarket customers that they start to neglect the one-in-six buyer who would rather not read misery-lit.

With newspapers full of gloom and doom, I long for books to cheer me up and make me laugh.

Salman Rushie's knighthood

Scottish writer Richard Havers posted the following on his blog on Saturday –

"The Queen's birthday honours list has some very strange ones this year. It adds weight to the argument that these awards are being devalued, particularly when compared with some of the ordinary people who get them.

Joe Corre the founder of risque lingerie label Agent Provocateur and his partner Serena Rees have been made MBEs. Hairdresser to the stars Nicky Clarke becomes an OBE as does the singer Joe Cocker. Perhaps most bizarre of all is Salman Rushdie getting a knighthood."

The first comment is – "He is getting his knighthood to show that standing up to islamic fundamentalists is 'in'. He's seen as a lone fighter against al queda/the Taliban/ Saddam/Iran before the rest of us cottoned on to this 'axis of evil'."

Rushdie's book Midnight's Children has been on my library list for too long. I must get around to reading it. I confess to having reservations about men who marry glamorous women young enough to be their daughters. Rushdie is 60. His fourth wife Padma Laksmi is 37, almost a quarter of a century age-gap.

Tomorrow

Is publishing out of touch with reality? A leading publisher thinks it is.

Books about prime ministers' marriages

2007-06-18T09:03:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Shrewder than her ditsy manner suggested
Article in The Spectator
Mrs Blair's £895 bag

It was my husband who, long ago before we were married, sparked my interest in British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

At the time Mr Bookworm was serving in Combined Ops in Devon, spending his free time wildfowling and his evenings reading, while I was reporting for the Eastern Evening News in Norwich and longing for his next leave.

It was Disraeli the novelist, and his marriage to Mary Anne Evans, which interested me more than his political career.

"Before his entrance into parliament Disraeli was involved with several different women, most notably Lady Henrietta Sykes (the wife of Sir Francis Sykes, Bt), who served as the model for Henrietta Temple. His relationship with Henrietta would eventually cause him serious trouble beyond the usual problems associated with a torrid affair… As Lord Blake observed: "The true relationship between the three cannot be determined with certainty…there can be no doubt that the affair [figurative usage] damaged Disraeli and that it made its contribution, along with many other episodes, to the understandable aura of distrust which hung around his name for so many years."

Shrewder than her ditsy manner suggested

"Disraeli had thought Mary Anne silly when he first met her, but he came to understand that she was shrewder than her ditsy manner and non-sequiturs had led him to believe, and she was a great help to him in editing the books he wrote. He joked that he had married her for her money but would do it again for love, but the truth is that she was not really wealthy. She was some twelve years older than her husband, and he may not have known her true age, because she lied to him about it, but their romance continued until the day she died."

"Before and during his political career, Disraeli was well-known as a literary and social figure, although his novels are not generally regarded as belonging to the first rank of Victorian literature. He mainly wrote romances, of which Sybil and Vivian Grey are perhaps the best-known today. He was and is unusual among British Prime Ministers for having gained equal social and political renown."

A biography of another eminent Victorian politician, written by a politician of our day, was hardbacked by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £25 on June 14 and I'm looking forward to reading the copy ordered by my public library.

This is how the book is described at Amazon UK.

Book Description
Life of one of the greatest British Prime Ministers - by an author who knows the scene from his years as a senior Minister in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet.

Synopsis
Robert Peel, as much as any man in the nineteenth century, transformed Great Britain into a modern nation. He invented our police force, which became a model for the world. He steered through the Bill which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament. He reorganised the criminal justice system. He put Britain back on the gold standard; he invented the Conservative Party which we know today. He sent his constituents at Tamworth the first modern election manifesto. He settled Canada's border with the United States. Above all he tackled poverty by repealing the Corn Laws. Thanks to Peel the most powerful trading nation chose free trade and opened the door for our globalised world of today. Peel was not all politics. He built two great houses, filled them with famous pictures and was devoted to a beautiful wife. Yet he was a stiff, not easy to know. 'Such a cold odd man' wrote Queen Victoria - who later became a keen admirer - and Disraeli attacked him for dishonesty. Many followers never forgave him for splitting his Party. But when in 1850 he was carried home after a fall from his horse crowds gathered outside, mainly of working people, to read the medical bulletins. When he died a few days later, factories closed, flags flew at half mast and thousands contributed small sums to memorials in his honour. He was the man who provided cheap bread and sacrificed his career for the welfare of ordinary people. Douglas Hurd, like Peel, was Home Secretary and argued for Peel's One Nation philosophy. He too lived through a time of conflict in the Conservative Party and has watched its defeat and rebirth. In this biography, with one eye on the present, he charts Peel's life and work through the dramas of nineteenth-century politics.

Article in The Spectator

Douglas Hurd's promo piece for his book, published in The Spectator earlier this month, is well worth reading.

Extracts –

"The balance between style and substance varies sharply with each Prime Minister. In a few weeks, we will see yet another swing of the pendulum. But never has the contrast been greater than in Queen Victoria’s reign.
Disraeli was the man for style — an exception rather than a model, for his combination of gifts could not be copied. The sallow, expressionless face, matched with a substantial wit and a novelist’s imagination, enabled him to destroy Peel and keep Gladstone at bay. His fame stays evergreen. Each Conservative leader sends a research assistant bustling to the dictionary or internet to find some shining phrase of Disraeli to decorate his or her own speeches."

"When Peel fell from his horse in 1850 and died in agony four days later, the political establishment was amazed at the outpouring of public grief. Crowds gathered outside his house, factories closed, bells tolled, pennies and sixpences poured in for memorial statues and reading rooms. This stiff awkward man, never a demagogue or even a democrat, had without really knowing it reached out to ordinary people. There had been no need for a revolution in Britain when thrones tottered across Europe in 1848. Peel had shown, at great cost to himself, that change could be achieved here without violence.
Disraeli, the phrasemaker, had written of Britain as two nations; it was Peel who kept them as one. The task has to be renewed in each generation."

Oh dear, I have more than doubled my intended limit of 500 words a day. But it's hard not to share things which interest one. Peel's marriage sounds as interesting as Disraeli's.

Re PMs' wives, I was appalled to see Mrs Blair using a bag said to have cost £895. Surely no sensible woman would spend so much on a bag?

The pros and cons of Google

2007-06-15T09:18:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Shock on page 12 of A Passage to India
Comment problems

While in hospital in April, I was given a pot plant which last week put out five bright scarlet flowers; unexpected behaviour considering all the flowers so far have been pale pink and completely different in appearance from the new flowers.

On Sunday morning I typed what I thought was the plant's name into Google's search slot. At the bottom of the first page of links was a message – "Did you mean [plant's name spelt differently]?"

Clicking on the message brought up pictures of my pot plant. I was greatly impressed by Google's helpfulness.

However, returning to my home page, I found Google had installed its search facility in the left hand sidebar in place of the History/View/Search facility and I couldn't find a way to uninstall it. An agitated search of Google's help pages followed. No help there. Eventually I discovered that the cure for the problem was simple. All I had to do was hit the History button and the left hand side-bar was back to normal.

But I don't think Google should have done an installation without asking permission. That said they are a wonderful resource.

Shock on p 12 of A Passage to India

Re-reading, after a long interval, E M Forster's most famous novel, which I didn't enjoy the first time, I came upon this on p 12 of the Penguin paperback edition..

"The hookah had been packed too tight, as was usual in his friend's house, and bubbled sulkily. He coaxed it. Yielding at last, the tobacco jetted up into his lungs and nostrils, driving out the smoke of burning cow dung that had filled them as he rode through the bazaar. It was delicious. He lay in a trance, sensuous but healthy, through which the talk of the two others did not seem particularly sad – they were discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman. Mahmoud Ali argued that it was not, Hamidullah disageed, but with so many reservations that there was no friction between them."

It was "as to whether or not it is possible" which shocked me. Four unnecessary words. Surely a good writer, re-reading that paragraph would have deleted "as to" and "or not"?

At his page at Wikipedia, I read that Forster "spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. After returning from India he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), which became his most famous and widely-translated work."

Unless it picks up in the second half, I'm still baffled by why it has been reprinted so many times when a far better book, Peking Picnic, has not.

Comment problems

.
Richard Havers managed to get his interesting comment on yesterday's blog online, but Jenny Haddon, who has just finished a strenuous two-year term as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association, was unable to post her comment on Ann Bridge successfully, and although a copy of Adrian Weston's comment was in my Yahoo Inbox early yesterday, so far it has not appeared under Comments on the blog.

So I'm posting it here –

"Sadly, what I suspect it will take to resuscitate Ann Bridge is a glossy Fiennes studded film adaptation of Peking Picnic (which I have to say would make a fabulous film) - so whoever it is that her rights reside with. Get busy - put it in front of the Hollywood (and UK) scouts!

I'd say K. Scott Thomas as the central character... or in this ageist world is she too old?"

Thanks to Google and Wikipedia I've learnt that Kristin Scott Thomas is 47. Have seen a couple of her films, Four Weddings and The Horse Whisperer, but can't remember her clearly. Which is not to say she wouldn't be well cast.

There's an interesting piece about the book by a present-day foreign resident in China here.

Extract: "Thanks to the author’s detailed descriptions, Peking Picnic actually proved a worthy guidebook, illuminating the former life of the ancient courtyards and lending us insight on how they’ve changed over the past 70 years. As we strolled through thousand-year-old gardens we discovered a well-trodden path toward enlightenment … though thankfully, unlike the characters in the book, we returned from our wanderings unmolested by warlords."

PS the last link brings up a 403 Forbidden message. But if you hit the link in the message, the article will come up. I have emailed the site's webmaster.

The Hitchens brothers and Charlton Heston

2007-06-14T09:13:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Can you name the six countries bordering Iraq?
The Actor's Life
The Hestons' long marriage

The Hitchens brothers and Charlton Heston

"Christopher and Peter Hitchens are two of Britain's most famous scribes, but they appear to agree on nothing. After their latest public spat, James Macintyre, who has known both brothers for many years, dissects their very odd relationship."

This comes from a June 11 article, The Anatomy of a Row, in The Independent.

Another para I copied is -

"But Christopher soon moved to America to cultivate his status as the quintessential Englishman abroad, writing prolifically for a wide range of publications including left wing journal The Nation, and gradually beginning a side-career of controversial television appearances. As an opponent of the previous Gulf War, he shocked viewers by challenging right-wing actor Charlton Heston to name the countries surrounding Iraq (Heston could not) before telling him to "keep your toupee on"."

I wonder if Christopher Hitchens could name the six countries bordering Iraq, or if he looked them up before the interview?

I'm have to admit I could name only three, the Middle East not being a part of the world I've visited or, apart from reading Stark and Thesiger, ever taken much interest in.

[Although I have just read and was shocked by a column on Baghdad in today's The Times headed "Don’t you get it? It’s a jobs surge we need. Camilla Cavendish on an overlooked blunder in Iraq."

Camilla Cavendish has been a McKinsey management consultant, an aid worker, and CEO of a not-for-profit company. She is now a leader writer and columnist on The Times. After reading today's piece, I shall keep an eye out for her byline.]

An Actor's Life

I thought Hitchen's crack about Charlton Heston's toupee was rude.

In 1979 I spent £6.95 on a hefty hardback – more than 500 pages - The Actor's Life, Journals 1956-1976 by Charlton Heston.

It starts, "Early in 1956, I started keeping a work journal. Why just then, I have no idea. It would have made more sense in 1946, when I went to New York, or when I got my first Broadway part the next year, or my first leading role after that, or when live TV started to heat up for me, or when I came West to do my first film, in 1950."

In the front of the book I've pasted a clipping from The Bookseller 21 April 1979, a photograph of Heston at the Allen Lane launch party at the National Film Theatre. With him are his editor Paul Sidey, his UK publisher's chief non-fiction editor Peter Carson and the MD of Mowbray's bookshop John Garmonsway. Where are they now? I wonder.

The Hestons' long marriage

Charlton Heston was 20 when, in 1944, he married Lydia Maria Clarke who, 63 years on, is having to cope with her husband suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

In The Actor's Life he records how Lydia went through a prolonged spell of severe migraines, possibly caused by distress at his frequent departures on business trips. He spent as much time flying round the world as does Macmillan CEO Richard Charkin. [See link in sidebar].

When their two children were on vacation and Heston was on location for a film, his family accompanied him and Lydia enjoyed being abroad. By the end of the book her migraines seem to be over.

Overall, their relationship proves that young marriages are not necessarily reckless if the couple are a level-headed pair who marry for the right reasons.

Tomorrow : the major pros and minor cons of Google

Why has A Passage To India survived better than Peking Picnic?

2007-06-13T09:04:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Should blogs be long or short?

A comment by Adrian Weston sent me off to St Peter Port's public library online catalogue to check the presence of books by E M Forster and Ann Bridge.

In case you didn't read Adrian's [see photo] comment, it was –

"… Peking Picnic is probably a more successful novel than A Passage to India, because it has slightly less ambition (I don't mean that negatively). A Passage to India is a deeply flawed book, that fails/falls on several key points - but is also an enduring one. The points of similarity are quite simple - both Forster and Ann Bridge cast a central western woman in a role of quiet visionary, exemplifying the Forsterian mantra of 'only connect'. I think it is interesting in that I would hazard (and I have not read either book inside of a decade so I might be misremembering) that both have broadly humanist agendas. Also thinking back, I suspect I'd more readily re-read Bridge now than Forster...."

My public library may not be typical, though I suspect that it is, in having one copy of Peking Picnic and 26 entries for Forster, including videos.

At an online page of books recommended to anyone going to China, I read

"The best single-volume introduction to the people of China and their world is Jasper Becker's The Chinese (John Murray, 2000). Longtime resident of Beijing and former Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, Becker delivers an immensely readable account of how the Chinese got to be who they are today; their pre-occupations, thoughts, and fears; and the ludicrous posturings of their leaders."

Further down the page was – "Ann Bridge, the wife of a British diplomat in Beijing, wrote novels of life in the capital's Legation Quarter in the 1930s (cocktail parties, horse racing, problems with servants, love affairs -- spicy stuff in its day, and best-selling, if now largely forgotten).

This is an unfairly dismissive summary of Peking Picnic which studies the human condition of many nationalities, including the Chinese, in far greater depth than the reviewer suggests.

What infuriates me is that no biography of Bridge has been published. One was written some years ago but is now in limbo, partly, I conclude, because the writer's agent had suffered a personal tragedy at the time it was offered to him. The book did need first class editing by someone familiar with Bridge's novels and her own excellent Facts and Fictions.

Should blogs be long or short?

Some time ago a comment suggested my blogs were too long. I've been thinking that over and have realised that, with the exception of Grumpy Old Bookman [see link in sidebar] most of the blogs I read on a daily basis are short-ish.

In future I'm going to try to stick to a top limit of 500 words which is 2,500 words a week, quite a large output with much else to do in my writing life. [Today's blog is 542 words]

Tomorrow's blog will be mainly about the diaries of an internationally famous man I bought in hardback 28 years and have been re-reading this month with possibly more interest and enjoyment than when they first came out.

The frescoes that worried Mussolini

2007-06-12T09:18:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

The Cardinal's Mistress
Down with focus groups?

Yesterday I mentioned a story, in the January 1994 issue of The World of Interiors, about Rome. It was headed Hotel Ambasciatori, followed by -
"In 1927 the newly unveiled frescoes at the Hotel Ambasciatori made it the most fashionable place in Rome. Mussolini, however, feared that his intimacy with one figure portrayed would be exposed; within months the frescoes were covered up."

The artist who painted the frescoes was Guido Cadorin from Venice, "using members of the city's high-life as his subjects, dressing them up and showing them on the terrace of a grand villa as if at a ritzy party. Although the traditional composition is reminiscent of Veronese's famous frescoes at Villa Maser in the Veneto, the style is straight out of the roaring Twenties: women with bobbed hairstyles smoke cigarettes on long art-deco holders or flirt with men in dinner jackets. They might have walked out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel."

Today Cadorin's frescoes can be seen in Rome's Palace Hotel.

The person responsible for the finished frescoes being hidden was
Margherita Sarfatti, an art critic and Mussolini's mistress. She insisted on being included in the frescoes.

"Cadorin was flattered and irritated in equal measure," the writer of the story, Marella Caracciolo, tells us. "He could not forget that Mrs Sarfatti had always snubbed his art…Her wish, however, was an order he had to submit to."

It wasn't until after the war that Cadorin's frescoes were uncovered. "But by then the artist's moment had passed; he was now a disillusioned middle-aged professor at the Fine Arts Academy of Venice."

I wish I had remembered The World of Interiors story about Cardorin when I was in Venice with a painting group a few years ago . There was an exhibition of his work at the recent Biennale.

The Cardinal's Mistress

Did you know that Mussolini wrote a novel called The Cardinal's Mistress?

I found details about it in the Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin. It was translated by Hiram Motherwell and published by Albert & Charles Boni, New York, in 1928.

"Mussolini wrote this historical novel, set in sixteenth-century Trent, in 1909 when he was secretary of the Socialist trade union in that northern city, still part of the Austrian Empire. It was one of only two forays by Mussolini into the writing of fiction; the other was a short story written at about the same time, a morbid tale of suicide and betrayal."

"Born and raised in a family of modest means, his father a blacksmith, Mussolini received little formal schooling. A tattered Italian translation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables mysteriously appeared in Mussolini's village when he was twelve years old and is credited as being a profound influence in his young life. Its mark is reflected in The Cardinal's Mistress."

Down with focus groups?

Re Min Hogg's dislike to focus groups [see yesterday's blog], there's an interesting piece about them here.

Extract: "Graphic designer Chip Kidd was horrified by a news story last year that revealed that not only were focus groups involved in the design process, but that after "two years ... and more than 50 hours of focus group feedback", the publishers got it so horribly wrong."

The greatest love story of the age? I doubt it

2007-06-11T08:50:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Min Hogg : founding editor of The World of Interiors

The front and inside front cover of this week's issue of The Bookseller advertise a book described as "the greatest love story of the age."

"Living at the heart of the Sixties revolution of sex, drugs and rock and roll, Pattie's story is electric."

The Sixties were my thirties and, while I may have heard the name Pattie Boyd at the time, she didn't make a strong impression and I shall not be reading Wonderful Today, an autobiography written "with Penny Junor" [see photo] in which, so the ad tells us, Ms Boyd "finally breaks her 40-year self-imposed silence".

"What was the truth about the bizarre love triangle with George and Eric? And why did the greatest love story of the age end in tears?" The Bookseller advertisement asks.

No doubt Wonderful Today will climb high on the bestseller lists. If you're interested, last year the Daily Mail ran a story about Ms Boyd, Eric Clapton and George Harrison.

I agree with one of the comments on this story. "The majority of these celebrities are very messed up people. They sell their soul for fame. There are far better people to admire. Whatever happened to integrity?"

Min Hogg : founding editor of The World of Interiors

On the bottom shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our sitting room are 16 open-backed cardboard magazine files containing magazines to which, back in the Nineties, I used to subscribe – Gardens Illustrated, House & Garden, Vogue, Harpers and The World of Interiors.

Yesterday afternoon I spent half an hour in the garden with the January 1994 issue of The World of Interiors in which there is a marvellous story about Rome which I'll tell you about tomorrow.

Meanwhile you might like to read an interview with Min Hogg, the founding editor of TWofI and, by the sound of her, a fascinating character.

Extract : "Given her reputation and noted expertise, it came as a shock to the interior design world when Hogg announced last November that she was resigning as editor of the magazine that she launched from these very rooms in 1981. Although the upmarket publication sells a modest 65,000 each month, its influence is enormous and its ideas and concepts are much copied."

"A visionary editor of the old school, Hogg always refused to have anything to do with focus groups or marketing ideas and her abrupt voluntary departure seemed as unlikely as the Queen Mother suddenly announcing she didn't want to be royal any more. Despite protestations from her Conde Nast bosses Si Newhouse and Nicholas Coleridge, Hogg - who says that she is in excellent health - was still determined to leave."

Auctions and the buyer's premium

2007-06-08T09:20:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer
Comments

This section may be considered "off topic", but I'm hoping that some Bookworm readers share my enthusiasm for antique shops and auctions. Not that they are the happy hunting grounds they used to be back in the Eighties. In fact it's some years since I saw anything at a view which lured me to attend the sale.

Reading the online catalogue for a sale held yesterday, I was surprised and dismayed to see that my local auction house has increased the buyer's premium to 10%. According to receipts for things I bought in the mid-Eighties, no premium was charged, but by 1989 a b.p. of 5% was in place.

There's a good article on the subject of the buyer's premium by Stuart Maclaren, editor of Government Auction News, published monthly by
Wentworth Publishing Ltd, 17 Fleet Street, London.

He writes - "The buyer's premium is kept by the auction house and is not passed on to the vendor. This means that you are paying an additional fee to the auction house for the privilege of having bought from them: it's a bit like Tesco's charging you 30 pence for tin of baked beans, and then charging you an additional three pence fee for the pleasure of having shopped in their store."

After learning that "Christie's now charge an amazing 17.5%, and Sotheby's a truly astonishing 20%!" I then read, "So that's 'what it is' - but 'why it is' is a more difficult question. What do you get for the privilege of paying this money? Not catalogues, which you have to buy separately. Not a great service either, because the auction houses which charge the most are often the most chaotic. The truth is, you get nothing at all for your additional 10% (or whatever percentage it is). A buyer's premium is purely a tax on your spending, and auction houses charge it because they can, and because it makes them a lot of money."

Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer

A book which tempts me, even though it costs £20, is Roger Warner: Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer.

Who was Roger Warner. On an elegant page at the Regional Furniture Society's website, I read -

"Roger Warner was an antique dealer in the Oxfordshire town of Burford for over fifty years. During this period he traveled the United Kingdom visiting other dealers, buying stock and enjoying infinitely more encounters with furniture, both remarkable and unremarkable, than any curator or historian could hope to achieve in a lifetime. Starting business in 1936, he began by specialising in things that did not interest his fellow members of the trade. Beds, 'back stairs' furniture and obscure medieval items caught his early attention. Some objects were bought privately, but many of his prize finds came from the great country house auctions that occurred with such distressing frequency just before and after the Second World War. This was the great heyday of twentieth century collecting, an era in which almost every sale would turn up something of rarity and interest; items that are now certainly absent from the market, or their kind disappeared altogether."

Comments

Treva and Richard Havers posted interesting comments yesterday. I'll comment on Monday.

Treva, if you have time over the weekend, could you send me the list of Bridge titles you've bought to anneweale@yahoo.com?

Bestseller, The Good Reading Magazine

2007-06-07T08:45:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
"Glaring glitches" in crime novels?

As I mentioned yesterday, the other book magazine, of which I unearthed six copies, was Bestseller, The Good Reading Magazine, price £1.95. Publisher Nick Snow. Editor Peter Grose. Published by 21st Century Publishing Ltd of 531-533 King's Road, London SW10.

The Letter From the Editor in the June 1992 issue [Over 250 Books Previewed, we're told on the cover] begins –

"Until today, you've been part of a neglected majority. More than half the women of Britain, and almost half the men, have read a book in the last week. Yet until today you've had no easy way of keeping up with the latest books. There are magazines for satellite television watchers, opera buffs, gardeners and people who like to knit. Now Bestseller has arrived for half the population – including you – who like to read books."

On the cover of the launch issue is a still brown-haired Jilly Cooper and topping the Features listed is an article "Jilly Cooper on Rider's rude bits…a television mini-series is looming, based on Jilly Cooper's sex-in-the-saddle blockbuster Riders. But the script riders have been forced to avoid some of the raunchier bits. Jilly reveals all to Roz Owen."

The third item on the list asks "Do you have £1,000 in your attic?…we investigate the world of first editions and help you to find out if your ancient Girls Annual is worth anything."

However the article which interested me was by Bestseller's editor, Peter Grose, headed "Who gets my tenner?" It was an explanation of who gets the largest cut from the price of a book and, not surprisingly, they were Bookseller, Publisher, Printer, Author in that order.

Curious to know how long Bestseller survived and what Peter Grose is doing now, I tracked him to the Orion website where I found that he has a book coming out later this year called A Very Rude Awakening : The night the Japanese midget subs came to Sydney Harbour.

He is described as a former publisher at Secker & Warburg, founder of Curtis Brown Australia and former chairman of ACP (UK).

Orion's publicity department has not yet responded to my request to be put in touch with him.

"Glaring glitches" in crime novels?

I was delighted to read in his comment yesterday that Adrian Weston thinks "Ann Bridge's Peking Picnic is a novel directly comparable with books like A Passage to India - well worth serious consideration. Some of her later books tapered off but her first handful were outstanding."

I would rate Peking Picnic more highly than E M Forster's A Passage to India, but it's several decades since I read the latter. Must re-read.

At his Books That Matter site, Adrian writes – "It also made me reflect upon the places where I most often encounter really bad typos, sloppy editing, inconsistencies, etc .... yes, crime novels. Am I imagining this or is there a lower standard of desk editing in that sector of the industry? Surely the sort of audience that is poring over hints, clues and innuendo is going to be enraged by glaring glitches? Or am I unusual. I don't think so."

Is he right, or is sloppy editing the norm now? The website of a leading literary agent has "due to" instead of "owing to" on her submissions page, but probably no one under 60 would notice it.

Discovering a cache of magazines about books

2007-06-06T11:35:00.000+01:00

[Apologies for today's blog being up later than usual. Last night I had techie problems with the sewing machine and today is Mr Bookworm's birthday.]

Also in today's blog

Reply to Lorna's comment on "corporatization"

The Grand Purge on my workroom has revealed a forgotten cache of copies of Million magazine and Bestseller magazine.

The earliest copy of Million I seem to have is No 3 published May/June 1991. It cost £1.95 and the cover lists profiles of
Anne McCaffrey
Robert B. Parker [see photo]

Leslie Thomas and others.

All their websites are well worth a visit, even if the authors are unknown to you.

The last of the three carries a quote from Larousse Dictionary of Writers by Rosemary Goring, a book I haven't come across before and will investigate.

Getting back to Million, it was published bi-monthly by Popular Fictions, Brighton, the editor and publisher being David Pringle with Kim Newman as associate editor.

Replying to readers' letters in issue No 3, David Pringle wrote –

"The readership of Million is shaping up to be predominantly female, while that of Interzone is mainly male. Also, I suspect that Million readers are older on average (some of them are even old enough to recognize what the title means – "the million" was a pre-World War II term for "the masses", and one reader in his seventies has informed me that there was actually a short-lived left wing political journal called Million, published from Glasgow in the 1940s; although ours is a very different sort of magazine, it's highly likely they were using the title in exactly the same sense as we are.)"

"Moreover, the new magazine is succeeding quite spectacularly with public libraries, in a way which Interzone has never done, Although its subscription base is much smaller so far, Million already has about twenty times the number of UK library subscriptions that Interzone enjoys. Librarians love it! Because of all these factors, we suspect that the new magazine will eventually outstrip the older ones in total sales and subscriptions. This will take a while to achieve, though."

However, in an interesting interview with him, mainly about Interzone, he says –

"Million was my other pet hobby. I made mistakes; I was feeling a bit cocky. Interzone had been successful, and with Million I invested too much money too quickly. I shouldn't have started with a bi-monthly; I should have started with a quarterly. And the colour covers: I really should have started it as a fanzine. But the main reason it didn't succeed is we're talking about a very different kettle of fish. Interzone is primarily a fiction magazine, and Million was a magazine that commented on popular culture, popular fiction. And I suppose I discovered that the world didn't need such a magazine... "

Corporatization of the arts

In a comment earlier this week, Lorna of Sacramento, CA, wrote -

"Thanks for your explanation about Past Forgetting, Anne. I think that corporatization (if that's a word) of the arts has done a lot of harm, not only in writing, but also in the news media.

It's been a long time since I have read a new novel, mostly because whenever I have picked one up in a bookstore, I end up putting it back on the shelf after reading a few pages. Most of them just do not appeal to me."

I'm in the same boat, Lorna. Most of my current reading is non-fiction, or I re-read novels I've had for years.

If you can get hold of a copy of Ann Bridge's Illyrian Spring, first published by Chatto & Windus in 1935 and re-published as a Virago Modern Classic in 1989, I'm pretty sure you would enjoy it.

From time to time I make an effort to keep abreast of the books in the bestseller lists. Recently I read a couple of titles by a British writer who sounds a nice woman and whose books are selling 100,000 plus copies in the UK alone. But, for me, it was an effort to plough through novels about people whose suburban lives don't interest me and who seemed to have no interests apart from their emotional problems.

From Ann Bridge's novels, at first reading, I learnt many fascinating things about other countries and aspects of life I hadn't known about before. They were enriching in a way that the popular fiction of the early 21st century rarely is.

Autumn paperback preview by marketing man

2007-06-05T08:46:00.000+01:00

In the Autumn Paperback Preview which came with the 1 June 2007 issue of The Bookseller, Paul Henderson selected "the best paperbacks from the publishers' lists for July to December."

In an introductory piece, he wrote, "My choices are driven by volume, so apologies to the smaller publishers that [sic] have sent me material and books, but which I really don't believe will deliver the sales to take them into the higher sales echelon."

Alongside this was a photo of Paul "who has worked in the book trade in a variety of roles since 1983. He was marketing director of Ottaker's from 1999 to 2005, and is now m.d. of Leading Edge UK. He was World Book Day chair in 2003 and has served on the BA Council. He lives in Wiltshire with Fiona."

The books he has chosen are arranged in four categories.
Giants 100,000+ sales
Bestsellers 50,000+ sales
Breakthrough
Bubbling Under 30,000+ sales

A name which caught my eye was Elizabeth Buchan whose novel, The Second Wife, Mr Henderson places first on his list of August Giants.

His comment on it is – "Although not a prolific writer, Buchan's last two books, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman and The Good Wife, both sold extremely well. Penguin will therefore be working hard to remind readers who she is with a targeted campaign.

Having read a couple of Mrs Buchan's books, I don't need reminding who she is, and I'm puzzled by his reference to her as "not a prolific writer."

Since 2000 she has published eight books which seems a more than satisfactory output for a quality novelist.

But Mr Henderson is a marketing person and, in my observation, they go for quantity rather than quality. Maybe it was "Fiona" who influenced him to give Elizabeth Buchan precedence over the other authors – including the super-prolific Danielle Steel – he includes in his August list.

A Seventies passion that died

Four annual reports of the Jane Austen Society [1972-1975] and 35 books by or about Jane Austen, housed on the top shelf of a former-cupboard-now-a-bookcase in our bedroom, are evidence of my once passionate enthusiasm for JA.

But it's possible to overdose on favourite authors. I did with Jane Austen. Now I watch the attempts to package her for the chick-lit market with cynical disdain.

Marina Lewycka, see photo, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was writing about JA in The Times on Monday.

Extract : "So what is it that comic woman writers such as Jane Austen and Sue Townsend have, which their contemporaries such as William Thackeray and Douglas Adams don’t have? I was tempted to say that the special characteristic of female humour is kindness – we smile with Austen and Townsend, we don’t sneer. Then again, Nick Hornby is unfailingly kind to his hapless characters, while that famous female wit, Dorothy Parker, is very sneery."

In praise of a book about gouache

2007-06-04T09:00:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

Being driven mad by the comment situation
Past Forgetting : a reply to Lorna's comment

Being driven mad by the comment situation

This morning Blogger informed me that
"Adrian Weston has left a new comment on your post "Is there a market for novels about older women?"

The text of his comment was -
"really age should be no barrier on all sorts of books: I loved Mary Stewart as a teenage boy (having got into her via her more teenage-friendly Arthurian books, but then working my way through my mother's stash of the rest of her fiction) plus all sorts of books by men and women of all ages and eras. It deeply depresses me that there is the expectation that people should only want to read books by people of the same gender and age as themselves. If you think about it it's a ludicrous proposition ("Oh, no Mike, I haven't read The Kite Runner because, y'know, I'm not like from Afghanistan") - I mean, really, isn't fiction supposed to be about getting into places, thoughts, feelings that are not necessarily our own. It's actually something I get quite heated about, given too much rumination. My eldest child is currently doing GCSEs and looking at how lame the curriculum is nowadays ("why, when I were a lad...&c &c") and I think it's largely from the belief that people can't relate to experiences that diverge from their own.

Oh, I despair.

DID YOU HEAR ME????

I despair.

Shuffle off.
Adrian"

At the moment this does not appear where it should and I can't find a way to make it do so. The cache where, recently, I found about ten comments waiting to be released is proving elusive.

My apologies, Adrian. Will keep trying. Meanwhile thanks for your input.

In praise of a book about gouache

As he was returning some videos to Guernsey's public library, I asked Mr Bookworm to bring back a couple of books I had checked in the online catalogue.

One was Pamela Kay - A Personal View - Gouache [David & Charles 1995 £17.99] and the other Fathers and Sons, The Autobiography of a Family by Alexander Waugh [Headline 2004 £20].

Pamela Kay's book was not to be found so Mr B consulted a librarian who fetched it down from the library's reserves. The loan stamps showed it was borrowed for the first time in August 1997 from which I conclude it was bought at the request of a library member.

It was borrowed seven times in 1997, four times in 1998, 1999 and 2000 and twice in 2001. Then it was transferred to the "stack" or reserves.

At the New English Art Club site, I learned that there is also a monograph on Pamela Kay, written by Michael Spender and published two years before her book. [By mistake, I showed the jacket of the Spender book in last Wednesday's blog.] There are five used and new copies for sale, the prices ranging from £44.55 to £167.99. No reviews.

On the Amazon page about Pamela Kay's book, two reviewers praise it, one of them writing, "There aren't many books around on the art of gouache painting and a great many misconceptions surround this medium. As someone relatively new to gouache I was interested in Pamela Kay's book, which seeks to inform and enlighten its readers. Her art is very beautiful and her descriptions evocative and detailed. A wonderfully insightful book, highly recommended."

In her acknowledgements at the front of the book, Pamela Kay writes, "My grateful thanks must also go to John Ward, in whose atelier I learned so much."

Past Forgetting : a reply to Lorna's comment

It was afternoon tea time in Guernsey when I read your comment on Thursday, Lorna.

I'm replying here so that I can show the jacket of another book called Past Forgetting. [A number of books with this title are listed at Amazon UK]

The one I bought when I spotted it in a bookshop is Past Forgetting: A Memoir of Heroes, Adventure, Love and Life with Fitzroy Maclean by Lady Veronica Maclean, published by Headline in 2003.

"Veronica MacLean was born in the 1920s in the Scottish Highlands to the illustrious Fraser family and married the diplomat and politician Sir Fitzroy Maclean. "Past Forgetting" is the story of her life played out against the dramatic social, political and diplomatic history of the 20th century. From her acquaintance with the Kennedys, Bushes and the Astors to her friendships with Belloc, John Singer Sargent and Freya Stark, the autobiography also charts her journeys overland to China, Persia and Yugoslavia, her lecture tours in America and her medical mission to the Balkans in the late 1990s."

You ask what happened to the book about Longwarden I was going to call Past Forgetting from the song I'll See You Again written by Noel Coward for his 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet.

I'll see you again,
Whenever spring breaks through again.
Time may lie heavy between,
But what has been
Is past forgetting.
This sweet memory
Across the years will come to me;
Tho' my world may go awry,
In my heart will ever lie
Just the echo of a sigh,
Goodbye.

Unhappy first experience of mainstream publishing

What happened was that I wasn't happy with my first experience of mainstream publishing. Having started writing in my twenties, by the late Eighties I had been published by the legendary Boon brothers for 30 years and imagined that other publishers would be like them. Which, ten or fifteen years earlier, some still were.

But by 1987, publishing was starting to change into the "industry" as we see it today; a world of giant corporations heavily influenced by marketing people rather than experienced editors.

Also I had begun to realise that I couldn't write 250,000 words of mainstream fiction a year plus two romances for Mills & Boon totalling around 110,000 words. I was going to have to make a choice.

At that time, M&B were enjoying what are now seen as the "golden years" for romance authors, still relatively few in number and, if they had a good track record, encouraged to write as they pleased rather than obeying the diktats of marketing people with regards to themes and titles.

Before I had made up my mind, a mainsteam editor I had met and liked made a good offer for next Longwarden novel. Less experienced writers would have jumped at the opportunity, but I read the book trade press and was uneasy about future of the company. While I was hesitating, the editor was moved to another imprint and her successor didn't like the Longwarden proposal. So I put Longwarden on hold for a while, a situation which has continued for a long time.

Now I think the best thing to do is to publish the book myself. I really couldn't bear another jacket like the one on the paperback of All My Worldly Goods which shows six of the main characters looking nothing like my idea of them, particularly Nick Dean.

He, as Lorna knows, returned to Longwarden after two years as a caballero legionario in the Spanish Foreign Legion but is shown on the cover looking pasty-faced instead of bronzed and wearing a French Foreign Legion kepi instead of the scarlet-tasselled cap he should have.

"Ghastly 'chicklit' covers"

2007-06-01T09:04:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog

More on Katie Fforde's book jackets
Madame Arcati self-publishing her novel
Lorna's comment

As a matter of courtesy, I try to let people know when I blog about them. Recently I emailed three men, a best-selling American author, an historian whose TV programme I had enjoyed, and the economics editor of a national newspaper.

How long does it take to hit the reply button and type, "Thanks"?

But only one of these three did the polite thing. Which one?

The journalist, Jeff Randall.

First I received an Out of Office [until May 30th] reply. No doubt his Inbox was full when he got back, but at 9.53 a.m. on the day of his return, I received the following message – "Anne Many thanks for letting me know. JR"

"Ghastly 'chicklit' covers"

I am indebted to Transita author Jane Gordon-Cumming for steering me to an interesting discussion about Katie Fforde's book jackets.

On May 31, Jane G-C posted the following comment on my blog about Katie's covers. She wrote -
"Funnily enough Elaine Simpson-Long blogged about the very same subject on her
'Random Jottings' a few months ago: I commented that I too much prefer Katie's older covers, but a young friend much prefers the new ones."

So off I went to Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover, sub-titled "A commuting book and opera-aholic personal assistant living in the oldest recorded town in the UK, Colchester."

Here are a couple of quotes from the discussion.

"I've never read Katie Fforde because the current covers put me off while the old style would not have done."

and

"Katie Fforde used to be published by Penguin and the books were beautifully designed with lovely covers which caught the eye. She then moved to Michael Joseph who kept up the high standard, but then moved again to Century who immediately started to produce the books in the most ghastly 'chicklit' covers. They were the usual candy pink, orange and pale green with which publishers seem to be obsessed in this genre, and I really feel they do these books a disservice. Whereas the first books looked classy, the later ones look, well, just ordinary really."

Other comments suggest that the Century covers are more attractive to younger readers.

But as we are frequently told that oldies now have more cash to spend than their children and grandchildren, I wonder why publishers court the young to the exclusion of middle-aged readers and those like myself who are long past normal retirement age but still working full-time and firing on most of their cylinders?

The answer seems to be that most publishing people, except at the highest level, are under 40. But CEOs are not. Gail Rebuck head of Random House – they publish 1500 books a year - is 55. Marjorie Scardino, head of Pearson, is 58. Doesn't it ever strike them that their minions are neglecting a lucrative market?

Madame Arcati to self-publish her novel

Thanks to Grumpy Old Bookman [see link in sidebar] I learn that Madame Arcati has written a novel and is publishing it herself.

She writes, "It astonishes me how potent still is the glamour of commercial publishing to writers of fiction, as if a freely hatched chicken would choose to live in a battery, behind its bars. How sad.

Far better to synchronise with technology's liberating applications and produce a book that matches or exceeds the production values of orthodox publishers. Readers can decide whether it was worth reading."

I agree with Madame A that commercial publishing presents a pretty dismal prospect these days. On the other hand DIY publishing demands huge amounts of energy which most writers would rather reserve for writing.

Lorna's comment

Lorna, if I may I'll reply to the question in your comment on Thursday's blog in Monday's blog because I need to look up some links.

Butlers : real and fictional

2007-05-31T08:38:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog [at the end]

Checking the comment situation
Liz Calder interview

The third leader article in yesterday's Daily Telegraph was about butlers.

"The world faces a worrying shortage.
As the number of wealthy households expands, so does the demand for butlers. Those who keep a tally of these things say as many as two million are needed around the globe. Can there be enough suave imperturbability to go round? A butler - not to be confused with his inferior, the valet - is a multi-talented beast whose duties may range from ironing the morning copy of The Daily Telegraph to managing dozens of staff in a number of houses.
Rock stars love them, so do Russian oligarchs, and at least one Labour minister couldn't possibly function without his gentleman's gentleman. They may be redolent of a bygone age, but they are, as a species, natural-born survivors.
Whatever the modern world throws at them, they ensure that good order reigns with a murmured "very good, sir" issuing from the stiffest of upper lips."

Earlier this week I mentioned that Mr Bookworm had brought home two second-hand books: A Sensible Life by Mary Wesley which he has read and enjoyed, and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro which I have read and was bored by.

I long to know what Mr B thinks of it. It's possible he will find it as enthralling as did the judges who awarded it the 1989 Booker prize, and the people who filmed it with Anthony Hopkins in the starring role.

On page 8 of the Tiscali bio of Hopkins, I found this –

"In Merchant/Ivory's The Remains Of The Day, he was superb as James Stevens, butler for James Wilby and a man so repressed that duty has become everything to him. Thus he loses a chance at happiness with housekeeper Emma Thompson and looks away when Wilby foolishly sympathises with Hitler. With realisation comes torment, and Hopkins is in his element, seemingly dormant then suddenly on the verge of a volcanic emotional eruption. He well deserved his Oscar nomination."

Maybe the film moves faster than the interminably slow novel. If our public library has the video, I'll be interested to compare it with the book.

For those who have neither read nor seen The Remains of the Day, it's a long-winded reminiscence of a life spent in the service of the late Lord Darlington of Darlington Hall, now owned by an American, Mr Farraday. The principal characters are the butler, Stevens, and the housekeeper Miss Kenton. The action takes place over six days, but it seemed to me like six years, so slow was the pace.

On Saturday [June 2nd] Kazuo Ishiguro is the subject and star of a conference at Liverpool Hope University.
On the conference page of the university's website, I read this –

"Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest writers of his generation. Although primarily a novelist, he has also written short stories, television scripts and a screenplay. Ishiguro’s work explores issues of class, ethnicity, nationhood, place, and the functions of art itself. As a Japanese immigrant coming to Great Britain in 1960, Ishiguro has used his unique perspective to write international novels that contain ‘a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world.’ This diversity is underscored by the surreal masterpiece, The Unconsoled (1995), and his latest novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), a stunning affirmation of Ishiguro’s ability to investigate moral dilemmas without compromising the art of fiction."

Is it possible for a first class piece of fiction to leave an enthusiastic reader unmoved?

The book has 137 reviews at Amazon UK and 174 reviews at Amazon US, all but a few wildly enthusiastic. Clearly I am out of step here. Or are the reviewers writing what they think they should rather than what they really feel?

Checking the comment situation

First, a word to Gloria who noticed the strange times at which I appear to be posting blogs. I'm a lark, not a night owl, Gloria, and I used to post between getting up at six-ish and breakfast at eight-ish. But I found that when I did that the posts would often appear under yesterday's date. So now I post after breakfast around nine-ish.

Why the times shown are not accurate I have no idea.

If the people who made comments on Tuesday's blog will scroll down, they will find that their comments are now where they should be.

On investigating, I found ten comments suspended in limbo. I hope this won't happen again, but will make a point of checking.

Liz Calder interview

Much as I wanted to hear this, downloading Real Player seemed to involve downloading a lot of other programmes I was unlikely ever to use. In the end I decided to play safe and not download any of them.

Book jackets past and present

2007-05-30T09:02:00.000+01:00

In today's blog

Katie Fforde
Pamela Kay

On a Sunday morning in May 2001, I went to look round the rastro [flea market] on the public car park of the village in Spain where I spend part of the year.

On a stall selling books, my eye was caught by a painting I recognised as being by Pamela Kay.

You can see the original jacket on Katie Fforde's novel Stately Pursuits on the left, and the style of jacket she has nowadays on the right.

Stately Pursuits, hardbacked by Michael Joseph in 1997, was Katie Fforde's fourth book, her first, Living Dangerously, having come out two years earlier.

She now has 13 titles listed at Fantastic Fiction, and is a well-known name in the book world.

I paid 750 pesetas for Stately Pursuits. The story opens with 24-year-old Hetty Longden arriving at her lover Alistair's cottage for what she expects to be a blissful weekend. Instead she finds him in bed with another woman, a circumstance he explains by saying, "I'm sorry to spring this on you, Hetty, but there was never anything serious between us, and all good things come to an end. This seemed the best way to tell you."

What a rat!

Although readers of a certain age will probably think, as I did, "Well, if he had never said he loved her, she was a bit of an idiot to embark on an affair with him."

Another book of Katie Fforde's I missed when it came out is Wild Designs. "After losing her job, Althea decides to develop her passion for gardening. When she wins the opportunity to design a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show - with the unexpected help of gorgeous architect Patrick Donahugh - it looks as though she may have unearthed a new man as well as a new career."

The jacket I'm showing, borrowed from Amazon UK, is the original one. Again, in my view, much more attractive than the one which has replaced it.

A book I'm greatly looking forward to borrowing from my public library is
The Art of Pamela Kay, published by David & Charles in 1993 when I must have been overseas, cut off from news of the book world.

From the Amazon UK synopsis : "Pamela Kay is known for her regular appearances in national painting magazines and the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibitions. She first exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of 19, and her popular appeal is such that, in the years when a prize was awarded by the Royal Watercolour Society to the artist whose painting was voted best by the public, she won every year. This celebration of Pamela Kay's life and work includes more than 100 of her paintings, covering still life, gardens, flowers and interiors."

Comment problems

Two Transita authors who wanted to comment on yesterday's blog had problems leaving comments. One of them, after entering her password several times, thought she had succeeded but hadn't. I've had problems leaving comments at Susan Hill's blog. When time permits, I'll go to Blogger's help files and see what they have to say about this apparently widespread difficulty.

Is there a market for novels about older women?

2007-05-29T09:06:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Professor Patricia Duncker
Transita website
Mr Bookworm's book bargains

My diary for 22 September 2004 records that, during a crowded week in London, lunching and dining with book world people, I had a morning coffee date with two interesting newcomers to the publishing scene at the Royal Overseas League.

They were Giles Lewis and Nikki Read, MD and ED of Transita, a new publishing house specialising in fiction for women over 45.

At the time I would not have bet serious money on their survival, and one or two early Transita titles I read added to my doubts. Although I have to concede that my idea of a good novel is not in line with the fiction that reaches today's bestseller lists.

Someone else with doubts about the new publishing venture was Professor Patricia Duncker of UEA, who, in an article in The Guardian by Michelle Pauli in May 2005 was reported as having little time for Transita.

Indeed she was quoted as saying, "An imprint aimed solely at middle-aged women is a waste of time. That's what women's interest fiction is there to do: pulp fiction to feed your fantasies. There are plenty of wicked books by women that should be celebrated. What about Alison Fell's Tricks of the Light, which is about being middle-aged and as passionate as ever? The heroine of my next novel, Miss Elizabeth Webster, is 70, smart and aggressive. Bring back Miss Marple: the older woman is often a detective. Experience, intelligence and cunning are strong elements in their characters".

Seven Tales of Sex and Death

You can listen to Professor Duncker talking about her "adults only" book Seven Tales of Sex and Death at Meet the Author. It seems she suffers from insomnia and watches the late night horror movie which inspired the book. It was paperbacked by Picador in 2004 and, according to details at Amazon UK, a Financial Times reviewer wrote, 'This collection of stories confirms Patricia Duncker as one of Britain’s leading fiction writers . . . She should be required reading’.

The Duncker title which interests me is Miss Webster & Cherif which Bloomsbury published last year and paperbacked earlier this month.

The Amazon UK synopsis describes it thus –

"Elizabeth Webster is a cantankerous spinster pushing 70. Forced out of her old school teaching job, she unleashes her sharp tongue and dogmatic opinions on everyone in the English village of Little Blessington. Then one cold spring night, sitting on the sofa alone, she grinds to a dead halt. To recover from this mysterious, near-fatal illness her doctor sends her on a journey to a North African country where she ventures into the desert and has a brush with terrorism. But Miss Webster no longer cares about anything, least of all Islamic politics and suicide bombers. Three weeks after her return there is a ring on her doorbell. Standing there in the gusty darkness is a young Arab man of astonishing beauty. Worryingly, he is carrying a large suitcase. But who is Cherif? Why is he there and what does he want? Entertaining, intelligent, provocative, Patricia Duncker's new novel is a comedy of errors set in the aftermath of 9/11, in a darkening world moving towards war. This engaging tale about friendship, trust and liberation is full of reversals and surprises, tenderness and humour."

Transita website

Transita's website is excellent, although while I was there I started to read the opening chapter of Redemption by Kay Langdale and felt that the third paragraph would alienate an awful lot of happily married readers, of whom there are many in the age group this imprint is aiming at.

The site includes a good blog. I was interested to see that a reference to Mary Stewart had nine comments.

Mr Bookworm's book bargains

Returning from one of his cross-island walks, Mr B unloaded a beautiful aubergine and two second-hand books from his pack. One was Mary Wesley's A Sensible Life of which we already have a copy, the other Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

Rather to my surprise, he has since read and enjoyed the Wesley novel. But as he pointed out, three of the reviews quoted on the cover are by men.

'As usual she made me both laugh and cry.' Philip Howard, The Times.
'It is delicious…she writes with the knowledge and wisdom of serene old age and the emotional exuberance of glowing young womanhood.' Patrick Skene Catling, The Daily Telegraph.
'Such good company that in more than one sense it's hard to put down.' David Hughes, The Mail on Sunday.

I had never thought of Mary Wesley as an author appealing to both sexes before, but clearly she was and is. I'll write about the other book tomorrow.

Using Chelsea Flower Show as book background

2007-05-28T09:32:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Children's Laureate has 15,000 books in her private library

It's 21 years since my only visit to the Chelsea Flower Show which last week I watched on TV.

The reason I went to Chelsea in 1986 was to set a scene in a novel at the show.

Although, today, many writers seem to be satisfied with second-hand information for their backgrounds, I have always felt that it's essential to visit places and experience events at first hand.

One of the principal characters in my first mainstream novel All My Worldly Goods [Century 1987, Arrow 1988] is a 50-year-old widow, Penelope Carlyon, who in that book spent her days trying to keep in order gardens which, like the house they surrounded, had once been run by a large staff.

So it was not as myself but in the fictional shoes of the Countess of Carlyon that I toured the 1986 Show and later wrote –

"When the marquee filled to the point at which Pen began to feel stirrings of claustrophobia, she slipped out by the nearest exist, which was close to the stand of Chatsworth Carpenters.

The shirt-sleeved, green-aproned figure of the Marquess of Hartington, only son of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, caught her eye. As she passed he was wrapping a black tray for a small white-haired woman with a plastic rain bonnet protecting her perm.

There was no sign of Deborah Devonshire whom Pen knew slightly, not well. Perhaps she would be there later. Chatsworth Carpenters had grown out of the Duchess's involvement in enlarging an inn on her husband's Yorkshire estate. Much of the furniture needed for the additional bedrooms had been made in the building yard at Chatsworth. From that initial project had grown the garden furniture business, all the seats, tubs and trellis pillars being solidly made and based on classical designs.

As she walked on Pen wondered if a more enterprising woman than herself could have instigated something similar at Longwarden, in the days before the maintenance staff had dwindled to one desperately overworked handyman."

If I hadn't been to the show, I should not have seen the present Duke of Devonshire, then in his early forties, serving a customer.

It seemed reasonable to suppose that Pen Carlyon would have met his mother, well-known to all Nancy Mitford fans as one of the author's five younger sisters.

Life-long hobby and obsession

I haven't read any of her books, but I've always admired Jacqueline Wilson's style : the boyish silver hair, the rings. There was an interesting First Person Singular column by her in the Review supplement of Saturday's Daily Telegraph.

It begins -
"I've always loved books: that's why I collect them…As I grew older, I discovered second-hand bookshops. My Dad took me for long hikes in the hills around Guildford, and if I was good he let me browse in a second-hand bookshop before we went home.
It was a long, dusty shop, with rickety steps and odd little rooms. A round room in the middle was crammed to the ceiling with children's books. I saved up my pocket money for months so I could buy some E Nesbits or Noel Streatfeilds."

Wilson says her library is now up to 15,000 volumes.

Scribblers For Bread

2007-05-25T09:04:00.000+01:00

In 1989 Hodder & Stoughton published George Greenfield's Scribblers For Bread which I bought in hardback for £15.00 and last night started re-reading.

Who was Greenfield? He spent six years in publishing after WW2 and then 35 years as a literary agent before retiring in 1986 as MD of John Farquharson Ltd.

The aim of his book was to show how, since 1945, the conditions in which novels were written and published had changed and how those conditions, and the outlets and markets for fiction, had influenced the professional novelist's aims and achievements.

In the Introduction he writes –

"In the forty years to the end of 1987, discounting reprints, new editions and translations, 90,859 novels were published in the United Kingdom. If the average thickness were an inch and the titles were stacked one on top of the other, the column would rise to a height of over 7,500 feet. But in case the reader might think that the great expansion of post-war fiction writing occurred in the early days and has been dwindling ever since, the facts are surprising. In the period 1946-50, 10,345 novels were published; in 1983-87, 14,762 novels appeared, an increase of nearly 43 per cent."

What would Greenfield make of the situation today? At the end of his book there's a chapter called 'Once upon a future time'. I've forgotten his conclusions and look forward to reading them again. More about Scribblers later.

Links to other blogs

As you may or may not have noticed, in the right-hand sidebar I've added three links to other people's blogs to the original three.

Many bloggers have long lists of links but I prefer to link only to blogs I visit regularly.

I wonder if anyone else has had difficulty posting comments to Susan Hill's blog?

Language so much worse today?

Visiting Arts & Letters Daily this morning [link in sidebar] I read an interesting piece in City Journal by John Leo in which he writes –

"At the beginning of his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell made clear that he thought the language had become disheveled and decadent. Intending shock, Orwell offered five examples of subliterate prose by known writers. But these selections don’t look as ghastly to us as they did to Orwell, because language is so much worse today. Consider some recent usages."

John Leo also writes - "Kurt Vonnegut has said that a writer’s natural style will almost always be drawn from the speech he heard as a child. Vonnegut grew up in Indiana, where, he said, “common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin.” He wrote: “I myself find I trust my own writing most and other people seem to trust it most, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.” "

I suppose this might be true for people who had settled backgrounds as children. I doubt if it's true for those with pillar-to-post childhoods like mine.

Misery memoirs? No thanks!

2007-05-24T09:02:00.000+01:00

According to this week's The Bookseller, 17,856 copies of of Stuart Howarth's Please, Daddy, No were bought in the week ending 12 May, bringing this Harper Element title from No 15 on the Top 50 list to No 7.

Who are the readers who want to wallow in an account of a wretchedly unhappy childhood?

People who've have the same experience themselves?

Surely, if you've had a rotten upbringing, the thing to do is to get out from under ASAP and put it behind you?

At the Spiked Review of Books I found an article headed "An emotional striptease" by Frank Furedi, [see photo] Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, and author of Politics of Fear, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Therapy Culture, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear.

"Ignore those publishers who claim ‘misery memoirs’ are popular because they tell life-affirming stories of survival. In truth, these books are a voyeur’s wet dream."

Furedi goes on, "These days, if you pop in to your local bookshop you are far more likely to pick up yet another autobiography revealing the sordid details of a despondent childhood than to leaf through an uplifting story of human endeavour. Welcome to the ever-expanding misery memoir market. The titles weighing down the shelves of bookshops throughout Britain, and on the other side of the Atlantic too, tell their own story. Behind Closed Doors, Don’t Ever Tell, God’s Call Girl, A Child Called It, Don’t Tell Mummy, Sickened - they all point to the dark and menacing secrets of a childhood dominated by toxic parents and other assorted paedophiles. This is human degradation on display."

Later he asks, "So, why is the market in misery books booming? Over the past three decades, traditional views of childhood, the family and private life have been constantly challenged. As a social scientist I am continually amazed to find that there are hardly any positive accounts of family life in academic literature these days. Instead the family is vilified as a site of child abuse and domestic violence. Rather than treating such dreadful episodes as tragic but thankfully rare occurrences, numerous ‘experts’ insist that they are the norm. One such expert has argued that the American home is ‘more violent than any other single institution’. "

"Family life, once idealised as a haven from a heartless world, is now widely depicted as a vile and abusive institution. Child protection professionals and media commentators seem to issue endless warnings about the dangers children face from their parents. This normalisation of child abuse has given rise to the idea that all those who live in families – which is almost everyone – is ‘at risk’. In academic literature on family violence, it is frequently argued that every child is potentially at risk of harm and every man is a latent wife-beater."

Towards the end of his article, Furedi writes, "As a social scientist, I am uncomfortable with the trend for intelligent adults to present themselves as debased victims. And as a father of an 11-year-old boy, I am deeply disturbed by the ideas that he is already picking up about childhood and family life. Like his friends, he knows too much about child abuse and seems to assume that family instability and even violence are the norm. Cruelty to children is no longer confined to dramatic fairytales; instead it is a daily theme in today’s ‘Real Life’ stories. Children growing up in our misery-saturated era are encouraged to interpret their lives through the prism of abuse and failure. By the time they are adults, many of them, too, will have learned to blame their shortcomings and problems on the bad stuff that happened to them in childhood.
This is where we can see the real damage caused by misery memoirs. In line with today’s prevailing cultural outlook, people are more and more expected to blame their personal failings on their parents or siblings."

Do read the whole article.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

2007-05-23T09:13:00.000+01:00

Today a party is being held at Oxford to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring.

"Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world."

"Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures."

Yesterday I came across a clipping from Charles Clover's Earthlog column in the Daily Telegraph in which he wrote, "Liz Rothschild, with whom I attended tutorials on English literature, has written a play celebrating the aspects of Carson's life that were largely secret at the time – she never disclosed to the chemical companies on whom she declared war in the 1950s that she was dying of cancer."

Intuition, not market research, the crucial factor

2007-05-22T17:25:00.000+01:00

I'm deep in the most enthralling book I've read in several years.

Swimming Against The Stream [sub-titled Creating Your Business and Making Your Life] by Tim Waterstone, hb Macmillan 2006, pb Pan Books.

Although the paperback was published on 19 Jan 2007, I'm the first person to borrow it from Guernsey's Guille-Alles Public Library.

Maybe it wasn't displayed on the face-forward shelves at the top of the staircase. Had it been, I'm sure it would have been grabbed long before now. The island is awash with ambitious young businessmen and women. Though perhaps they don't use the library in their lunch breaks.

On page 5
Tim Waterstone writes – "My own logic behind Waterstone's, when, with just £6,000 of my own left in my pocket, I founded the business in 1982, lay in the fact that as a devoted reader I found it inexplicable that a city as great and culturally diverse as London had within it barely a single stockholding literary bookshop, and certainly not one that was open past noon on Saturdays, let alone in the weekday evenings. New York had great bookshops open at every hour, and Paris too. Rome also. San Francisco. Boston. All the civilised world over. So why not London?"

He goes on, "It was intuition on my part, and intuition only. What else could it be? The business schools teach that the four hallmarks of good new business launches are these: sound market research, skilful planning, a strong customer focus and a dilegent execution performed in line with the plan. Well, I'll tell you what I think. It is difficult to argue with an orthodoxy of that sort at first glance – and yet a reliance on these classic maxims is not in the least how an entrepreneur actually operates. It certainly was not how I was thinking at that moment. And the fact that I was not gave me one of my points of advantage against the overwhelming market leader of the time, WHSmith."

"It was always so. The big corporations' simple, blind, safety-first reliance on these classic maxims is invariably a severe mistake. It disadvantages them against the entrepreneur. For what is the weakest link in it all. Market research. It always is...It is not market research but intuition that is crucial if a corporation is to enjoy continued growth in the future, find new markets, and exploit them. Intuition, and nothing else, will have to find those markets. But big corporations do not do intuition. What they do is safety. It is the reverse of entrepreneurs, who are all intuition and have contempt for safety…So, at Waterstone's we used not one jot of market research in deciding our action plan. We just did it."

This is good advice for writers as well as entrepreneurs. Today many authors and would-be authors are writing to a market defined by editors rather than following their own instincts. Sometimes the editors are influenced by the reactions of panels of readers.

Within the limits of the genre they're aiming at – crime, romance, adventure etc. – writers should write what they long to write, not what other people tell them will sell.

Boyd Tonkin review

Reviewing the hardback in The Independent Boyd Tonkin wrote -

"Tim Waterstone himself sprinkles plenty of romantic anecdotes about the early days of his chain through his handbook for entrepreneurs, Swimming Against The Stream (Macmillan, £16.99). He offers bold advice about trusting to intuition, and spurning market research: "Waterstone's was aimed at me." He delivers splendid broadsides against "the current state of capitalism". Yet the exiled bookstore Bonaparte says little about the current state of his creation.

The unromantic truth is that British chain bookselling - with Waterstone's as its battered figurehead - now looks suspiciously like a murder victim who has decided to speed up his demise by committing suicide. The pincer movement executed by the likes of Asda and Amazon has made the cut-throat discounting of a few sure-fire bestsellers the norm - with all of its risks to future diversity. Far from resisting this assault, the retail chains - and the corporate publishers whom they now bully - have opted to act as their own Sweeney Todds. At Christmas, stores worked frantically to teach shoppers that the true value of a much-publicised new book with a cover price of £18 or £20 is, let's say, £6.99. It amounts to voluntary death by a thousand cuts."

Re comment button

This seems to have disappeared. Only temporarily, I hope.

Napoleon's penis, Shelley's heart

2007-05-21T08:01:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Misuse of blog comments
Dot com address theft
Helpful anonymous comment

An interesting article [link from Arts & Letters Daily] about these famous owners' organs here.

It was written by Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of "The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors."

She tells us that the penis had "supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries".

I was more interested to read : "After Napoleon's capture at Waterloo, his possessions toured England. His carriage, filled with enticing contents like a gold tongue scraper, a flesh brush, "Cashimeer small-clothes" and a chocolate pot, drew crowds and inspired the poet Byron to covet a replica. When Napoleon died, the trees that lined his grave site at St. Helena were slivered into souvenirs."

Professor Pascoe goes on, "If, as Freud suggested, the collector is a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, then the emperor's phallus is a collector's object nonpareil, the epitome of male potency and dominance. The ranks of Napoleon enthusiasts, it should be noted, include many alpha males: Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, Stanley Kubrick, Winston Churchill, Augusto Pinochet. Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm has never accounted for women collectors, nor does it explain the appeal of collections for artists like Lisa Milroy, whose paintings of cabinet handles or shoes, arrayed in series, animate these common objects."

I went in search of Lisa Milroy who was born in Vancouver but lives and works in London. Not sure what to make of her painting 'Handles'.

Misuse of blog comments

On Thursday, February 15, 2007 I wrote a blog headed Flower Confidential. By chance, yesterday, I saw that it had attracted 10 comments which I hadn't read. They turned out to be all advertisements for commercial sites.

On Monday, October 03, 2005, Grumpy Old Bookman wrote the following about Comment Spam.

"You will probably have noticed that this blog offers the chance to make a comment on what the blogger has written. Some people read these comments, some don't. And some of you, of course, go to the trouble of writing a comment.

Well, it seems to be an unfortunate fact of life that any blog which attracts even a modest number of readers will also attract the attention of people who put out what is known as 'comment spam'. That is to say, the spammers make a comment (of sorts) and then add a link to some other site which they are being paid to plug.

Much of this comment spam is done by machine, and until yesterday it wasn't a problem. There was only the occasional fake comment, which I deleted by hand. However, yesterday there were 37 fake comments, and this morning there are 384."

I hope Bookworm is not about to become a target for this form of spam.

Dot com address theft

If so, it won't be this year's first unpleasant online experience. In 1999, I signed up with a US domain name, email and website hosting service, thinking it wouldn't be long before I launched a website.

All went well for seven years, although the website didn't materialise. [It went through a lot of re-designs and I hope is nearly right.] Then the email forwarding to anneweale.com began to have problems. At the end of 2006 I decided to cancel the contract.

Foolishly, as it turned out, I didn't sign on with another host but switched to my Yahoo email address. Then - shock, horror - I discovered my dot com address was being used by a range of commercial firms.

On March 31 I received the following alert.

"Google Web Alert for: "Anne Weale"
anne weale homes for sale at anneweale.com
used cars car accessories cellular cell phone deals download"

The same day I emailed to the legal department at Whois. No reply. Maybe the next step is to ask the Society of Authors if any other members have had to deal with this problem.

Helpful anonymous comment

Some kind person who prefers to be anonymous left a link to "The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club"

I went to look and at the About Us page, read the following -

"The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club has been in existence for over 110 years, having celebrated its centenary in 1994. It has a membership of over 350, most of whom live in or around Edinburgh and Glasgow, but there is a considerable number from other parts of Scotland, and also from England and overseas.

The object of the Club is to foster the name of Sir Walter Scott through meetings, lectures, publications and excursions and to advance the education of the public concerning his life and works.

The Club is the senior and most active of its kind and has numbered among its Presidents distinguished statesmen, novelists, historians and men of letters, including Stanley Baldwin, John Buchan, James Bridie, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan, David Daiches, and more recently, Allan Massie, Edwin Morgan, Dorothy Dunnett, Paul Scott, Magnus Magnusson, Tom Fleming and James Robertson. In its centenary year we were honoured to have as President of the Club the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

Our 2007/8 President is A.N.Wilson."

I haven't read any of Sir Walter's books for years and now feel inspired to re-read him.

Vexation with careless mistake by famous author

2007-05-18T12:14:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Reading in bed
Douglas Reeman's website
Mrs Reeman's first novel
Two comments from male readers please me

The titles on Mr Bookworm's bedside reading stack are even more eclectic than those on mine.

He is not a bookshop browser, but uses the public library and buys books "off the hedges" which is Guernsey-speak for the roadside stalls of vegetables, plants and books he passes on his walks round the island.

I was dismayed to be told by a Guernsey-born couple that these stalls are under threat from thieves. At least one stall, on a main road, has closed down because of pilfering.

When we first came to Guernsey in the Sixties and when we started to summer here in the Eighties, people could be trusted to put payment for goods bought in the open jam jars already holding coins and notes in case they needed change. Not any more it seems. What a sad turn of events. We read that standards have fallen to a very low level on the mainland, but somehow, foolishly perhaps, we hoped that the islands would remain the safe, law-abiding havens they used to be before drug-dealers targeted them.

Getting back to Mr B's books, at present the night table stack is topped by Sinfonia Napoleonica, a Spanish edition of Anthony Burgess's Napoleon Symphony [1986]; John Parker's Desert Rats [Headline 2004]; Café de artistas by Nobel-winning Camilo José Cela. In the back of this book is an article clipped from from a 1986 Time magazine headed "Spain's 'First Dissident'"…"not on the side of those who make history, but of those who suffer history."

Vexation with careless mistake by famous author

However Mr B's current reading is Alexander Kent's Signal-Close Action! described above the title as "Action under sail from the master story-teller of the sea."

The other night, while we were reading, cosily sandwiched between the electric blanket and the duvet, he suddenly gave a wordless exclamation of annoyance. When I asked the reason, he said, "I can't believe he could make such a mistake…or that his editor didn't pick it up."

The mistake he was referring to is on page 292 of the paperback 1982 reprint. See if you can spot it. It's in a comment made by Captain Thomas Herrick to Commodore Bolitho, the hero of 23 books until, in 1815, he was killed in action on his flagship, following Napoleon's escape from Elba and succeeded as hero by Adam Bolitho.

What Herrick said was : "There is nothing more you could do, sir. Even Rear Admiral Nelson was dismasted in a storm and allowed the Frogs to escape from Toulon. It's like seeking a hare in a burrow. With only one ferret, the odds of success are hard against you."

Perhaps I should explain that Mr Bookworm had the luck to be one of the many generations of schoolboys who were able to explore the countryside near their homes with a freedom few if any lads enjoy nowadays. As long as they were home by tea-time, no one worried about them. Consequently Mr B learned a great deal about wild life. He and his brothers kept rabbits and later in life, in his wildfowling years, he owned a ferret.

So he knew – as must many other Bolitho readers – that hares do not live in burrows and ferrets aren't pack animals.

Wikepedia tells us – "Hares do not bear their young below ground in a burrow as do other Leporidae, but rather in a shallow depression or flattened nest of grass called a form. Young hares are adapted to the lack of physical protection offered by a burrow by being born fully furred and with eyes open. They are hence able to fend for themselves very quickly after birth, that is to say they are precocial. By contrast, the related rabbits and cottontail rabbits are altricial, having young that are born blind and hairless.
All rabbits (except the cottontail rabbits) live underground in burrows or warrens, while hares (and cottontail rabbits) live in simple nests above the ground, and usually do not live in groups. Hares are generally larger than rabbits, with longer ears, and have black markings on their fur. Hares have not been domesticated, while rabbits are often kept as house pets. The hare's diet is very similar to that of the rabbit."

Douglas Reeman's website

Alexander Kent is the pseudonym of Douglas Reeman at whose excellent website I learned that "Today the exploits of Richard and Adam Bolitho are featured in twenty-six novels, the lives and deaths of other men, equally heroic, in thirty-five Reeman novels." A prodigious output.

Mrs Reeman's first novel

I was also interested to read that Mr Reeman's wife, Kimberley Jordan Reeman, has her first novel, Coronach, coming out on October 15, 2007.

"Coronach is a historical epic of the eighteenth century, spanning forty-four years and three generations, and is set in Britain, the Caribbean, America, and France on the eves of their respective revolutions." You can read an extract at the site.

We are also told she had attended one of Douglas Reeman's readings "at Toronto's Harbourfront complex as a fan of the Bolitho novels. In 1985 they were married in Toronto, the culmination of a romance credited at least partly to Richard Bolitho, and on a date which, quite coincidentally, was that fictional hero's birthday."

Two comments from male reader please me

I had begun to think that Adrian Weston was my only male reader, although I try hard to make this a unisex blog.

So yesterday's comments from Frederick and writer Richard Havers were particularly pleasing.

I also made an unpleasant discovery about the misuse of comments. More about that on Monday.

If I were a TV presenter, I'd conclude with "Have a lovely weekend!" Do you share my irritation with their habit of saying, "Have a great evening" etc?

But then Mr Bookworm and I fume every five minutes when watching TV, not that we do a lot of it. Maybe younger viewers don't mind all these irritations. Constant hand movements. Bad vowels. Horrible hair styles. "Absolutely!" etc.

Fantasy Island...a must read?

2007-05-17T09:40:00.001+01:00

Also in today's blog : Hesperus Press
Constable Robinson and Sir Walter Scott

Fantasy Island

It will be interesting to see if Fantasy Island by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson [Constable Robinson £7.99], about which Jeff Randall wrote
in the Business supplement with yesterday's Daily Telegraph, will soar to the top of the bestseller lists.

After reading Randall's column about it, had I been in a bookshop yesterday, and seen the book, I should have been tempted to buy it.

Randall [see photo] writes : "Read this book and weep. In a week when three London town halls rejected official immigration figures for grossly underestimating the real numbers, Fantasy Island sets out in exquisite detail the lies, damned lies and statisical legerdemain that define Labour in office."

"So, who's behind this excoriating work?" Randall asks.

The surprising answer is Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian, and his joint author is Dan Atkinson, a former Guardian journalist who works now for the Mail on Sunday.

Randall continues : "Their theme, which I crudely summarise, is that on just about all issues of importance to ordinary folk – personal finances, health, education, immigration, unemployment and defence – the season is about to change: from Blair's illusory everlasting summer to a cold, dark winter."

Constable Robinson

At the Constable Robinson website, we're told, "In December 1999 Constable & Co Ltd and Robinson Publishing Ltd combined their individual shareholdings into a single company, Constable & Robinson Ltd.
Constable & Co founded in 1890 by Archibald Constable, grandson of Walter Scott's publisher. Robinson Publishing Ltd founded in 1983 by Nick Robinson.
We publish primarily in the following areas: biography and autobiography, current affairs and world politics, general and military history, health and psychology, travel and endurance, landscape photography, crime fiction and literary fiction."

You can read about Sir Walter Scott's publisher here

Extract : "Constable made a new departure in publishing by the generosity of his terms to authors. Writers for the Edinburgh Review were paid at an unprecedented rate, and Constable offered Scott 1000 guineas in advance for Marmion."

Whether Constable Robinson are equally generous with their authors, who knows?

Hesperus Press

I spent an enjoyable hour reading two catalogues [Spring 2007 and Autumn 2007] from Hesperus Press.

As I may have mentioned before, it was reading Rudyard Kipling [see photo] as a child that convinced me that newspaper journalism was the best training for a would-be writer.

Now there's a note in my diary that, in August, Hesperus will be publishing Kipling's Something of Myself in their Modern Voices series. This autobiographical sketch was the last work Kipling [1865-1936] wrote.

Hesperus also have a presence at
MySpace where I read "Hesperus Press, as suggested by the Latin motto 'Et Remotissima Prope', is committed to bringing near what is far - far both in space and time. Works written by the greatest authors, and unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English-speaking world, are made accessible through new translations and a completely fresh editorial approach. Through these classic works, the reader is introduced to the greatest writers from all times and cultures."

Unfortunately this, and the rest of their MySpace text, was in white text on a pale blue background, so I had to "select" it to read it easily. I hope they will change to black on white. It may not look as artistic but it's a lot less off-putting to site visitors.

There are other tempting titles in the Hesperus catalogues which I hope to write about in future blogs.

My comments on your comments

2007-05-16T17:31:00.000+01:00

10 May, 2007 Gillian said...
I recently did a 1 day "Drawing on Buildings" course at the John Soane Museum and it turned out to be far more interesting than I had expected. We were given access to parts of the museum not usually open to the public: his drawing studio, his model room (we sketched buildings), and his collection of architectural drawings. These included some early drawings by Adams - it was heartening to see that drawing didn't come naturally to him in his early days either. I can highly recommend the course - the museum is a fascinating place to work in.

Anne : Thanks for mentioning the course, Gillian. Sounds just up my street. It's some time since I signed on for an art course. Have done several at West Dean and at Can Xenet in Mallorca/Majorca.

"Can Xenet is a 400 year old manor house idyllically set amid 25 acres of cornfields, almond and fig trees. The large rustic barn, used as a studio and for alfresco lunches, lies between the swimming pool and the croquet lawn.

A varied and excellent menu includes some regional dishes and students may help themselves all day to drinks which are provided in a special fridge for them in the barn. Tapas, wine and cocktails are served on the terrace every evening. All wines, liqueurs, coffee and drinks are included and there are no extras whatsoever in our holiday.
The school offers courses for beginners; courses for students of mixed ability and workshops for advanced students and professional artists. These courses are advertised in the Artist and Leisure Painter from January-March and take place mainly between April-October."

I also went to Venice with the Can Xenet people and had a marvellous time.

09 May, 2007 Judy Astley said...
"He wasn’t faithful to his wife. I wondered why she didn’t value him more; so many women, including me, would happily have changed places with her."

Interesting - perhaps the wife DID value him, till he started cheating on her. Judy

Anne : We have only Elizabeth Jenkins' word for it. Sir Eardley Holland died almost 40 years ago at the age of 87. His obit is here. He was married twice.

I think it was rather silly of EJ to waste her life longing for someone who was unattainable.

09 May, 2007 Helen said...
I am often amazed when I find out the a partner of one of my friends and acquaintances are being unfaithful. I often refuse to believe it. But it is not possible to see what is going on in other peoples relationships. Maybe Dr Holland's wife was glad he was having sexual relationships with others, or maybe she had lost respect for him. When you lose respect for your husband it is usually the death noll for the relationship.

Anne : Other people's relationships can be baffling. Someone I've never heard of before, Allan K Chalmers, wrote "The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." Change the second 'something' to 'someone' and I'd agree with him.

I don't often leave comments on other people's blogs but did add one to Danuta Kean's piece on the future of reading.

If you haven't already discovered it, this is an excellent blog by someone with a keen understanding of the publishing "industry".

More about West Dean

"Edward James was born in 1907 into a world of privilege. He inherited the West Dean Estate on the untimely death of his father in 1912. He is perhaps best known as a passionate supporter of Surrealism, a movement that was born from the political uncertainty and upheaval between the wars. Surrealist artists escaped into a world of fantasy and irrationality. Edward was an early enthusiast of Surrealist artists and supported them by building up a collection of paintings and art objects that subsequently came to be accepted as one of the finest collections of surrealist work in private hands."

"He also provided practical help, supporting Salvador Dalí for about two years and allowing Magritte to stay in his London house to do some paintings."

The West Dean website is well worth a browse. They offer many other courses besides art.

Jilly Cooper

2007-05-15T11:00:00.001+01:00

Every morning, after breakfast but still at the table, I go through five newspapers or magazines, clipping pages to keep. A recent addition to this hoard was
"The world of Jilly Cooper, novelist" from the 5 May issue of the Telegraph magazine from which I have borrowed the photograph taken by James King.

This clipping will be filed in the back of my copy of Riders, now shelved in the space behind newer books.

Talking about her 20-year-old Olympia typewriter, called Monica [!], in an interview with Isabel Albiston, Jilly is quoted as saying, "I use scissors to cut and paste when I need to move things about. I know using a computer would be much easier but there is always a danger of accidentally wiping the whole thing. I haven't got round to using the internet yet – there never seems to be time between books."

This prompted me to take a look at Jilly Cooper's website, designed by Angus Scott, at whose own website I read, "To view this site you will need the Flash plugin…"

If there's one thing I hate on arriving at a new-to-me website, it's being told that I must have some gizmo I've been avoiding for years. The Wikipedia article about Flash tells us that 98% of US users have it installed. But that doesn't persuade me to install it and I wouldn't mind betting that Angus Scott would find more prospective clients with my mind-set than among the devotees of Flash. They're more likely to want to design their own sites than to pay him to do it.

The site he has done for Jilly Cooper isn't bad, although there's not much point in having a gallery of author photos if they can't be copied in one easy movement.

Jilly's input consists of periodic descriptions of her social life which includes fairly frequent trips to London to mingle with book world celebs.

My comments on your comments

I intended to post some today, but this week is being rather hectic.

Daphne du Maurier centenary

2007-05-14T09:11:00.000+01:00

On Saturday afternoon, on BBC2, we watched Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in the film, made in 1940, of Daphne du Maurier's most famous novel Rebecca.

We had both seen it before, not when it was first made but probably in the late Forties, our late teens.

I had thought I might only watch the opening scenes in the south of France. I remembered being greatly amused by the performance of Florence Bates as the obnoxious Mrs Edythe Van Hopper for whom the girl to become the second Mrs de Winter worked as a paid companion.

Before she became an actress, Florence Bates was a lawyer, the first woman lawyer in Texas in 1914 at the age of 26.

However by the time Mrs Van Hopper had warned her ex-companion that she wasn't up to being mistress of Manderley, I was hooked, even though Olivier no longer seems as attractive as he did when I was a schoolgirl.

Rick Stein in Du Maurier Country

This was the title of BBC2's next offering. "The chef pays tribute to Daphne du Maurier as he searches for the sources that inspired her work in Cornwall, visiting the locations she brought to life in her novels."

An excellent production with interviews with D du M's children and some TV clips of interviews with the author. Rick Stein is a very engaging personality – which can't be said of all TV stars.

Daphne

"Drama celebrating the centenary of Daphne du Maurier's birth, starring Geraldine Somerville. The progamme charts her unrequited love for American heiress Ellen Doubleday."

How typical of the media to focus on the possibility that du Maurier had lesbian tendencies. This programme ran for an hour and a half, but after 30 minutes I was bored and switched off, preferring to go to bed with the Virago Press 2003 edition of Rebecca which was reprinted nine times that year and in 2004, 2005 [twice] and 2006.

This edition has a 12-page introduction by Sally Beauman who was authorised by the du Maurier estate to write Rebecca's Tale.

Having re-read the intro, I'm inclined to agree with
Amazon UK reviewer Richard who wrote –

"The book itself is a classic and was recently promoted in the media as something people *must* read. Well, yes, read the book by all means, it is everything the glowing reviews say it is.

Bear in mind, however, that since this book was being touted as an introduction to good literature (whatever that is!) you might expect that many people who were new to the book would be expected to buy it. If you're someone who has never read the book previously - SKIP THE INTRODUCTION!

If Ms Beauman had any concern about new readers, she doesn't show this in the rather overblown introduction in which she gives away the story complete with the twist. It is arrogance itself to presume that "everybody has read the book" because it is "great literature" and therefore think it is fine to blather on about what made the book great (it certainly wasn't any introduction I ever read).

I'd read the book many years ago and bought it for my wife who'd never read it. Ms Bauman was personally responsible for reducing my wife's enjoyment of the book to merely an appreciation of the quality of the prose that followed.

Buy Daphne du Maurier's work by all means, just skip the pointless and counter-productive ego-trip that Ms Beauman begins the book with."

Books about Daphne du Maurier

One of the best is her own book Growing Pains : The Shaping of a Writer, published by Victor Gollancz in 1977.

The Author's Note begins – "All autobiography is self-indulgent. Approaching my seventieth birthday, I find that I forget what happened a week ago but have a vivid memory of childhood days and the awkward age of adolescence, much of the latter period recorded in diaries which I kept from the year 1920, when I was twelve, until I married in 1932."

In 1991 I bought The Private World of Daphne du Maurier by Martyn Shallcross, published by Robson Books with a foreword by Joan Fontaine.

Is Somerset Maugham ripe for revival?

2007-05-11T09:19:00.000+01:00

A reference to W Somerset Maugham on a writers' forum [private] yesterday reminded me how much I enjoyed his novels in my early teens.

There seems to be a feeling that the movie of his book The Painted Veil will revive his popularity.

Looking for Maugham online led me to a delightful site called Cap-Ferrat à Pied? by Ted Jones.

Mr Jones writes : "I left the coastal path at its southernmost point in search of the scrambled-egg coloured Villa Mauresque, built by King Leopold to house his personal priest. His lifestyle - he was known as le noceur - required confessional convenience.

Today, the street opposite, the Avenue Somerset Maugham, commemorates a more recent resident. Here the great storyteller spent the last 38 years of his long life - except for the years of the Occupation during World War II, when it housed German and Italian officers. André Cane, a retired builder and regional historian, now aged 95, remembers being called to brick up the window of Maugham's study because he found the panoramic view a distraction.

Many of Maugham's guests at the Villa Mauresque were writers, such as H. G. Wells, Ian Fleming and Evelyn Waugh, but many others achieved their fame in other fields. They included Winston Churchill, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cecil Beaton, press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who lived on nearby Cap d'Ail, musician Arthur Rubenstein, dancer Isadora Duncan and painters Matisse, Picasso and Marc Chagall."

Villa Mauresque can be rented

Then at an American site, I found that anyone with enough money – I don't know the cost but would guess it's extremely expensive – can rent Maugham's house on Cap Ferrat.

"Villa Mauresque is available for rental year-round. Substantially discounted rental rates apply November through March. Because of its many sculptures and the delicacy of some furnishings, the owner declines to accept children less than six years of age. A large security deposit is required."

Titanic blackguard cleared

Another writer who spent his last years in the South of France was Sir Anthony Glyn whose obituary in The Times [22 January 1998] I keep among the pages of his biography of his maternal grandmother, Elinor Glyn, about whom I wrote on Monday 9 April.

Another clipping I've added to the biography is a recent Telegraph story headed "Letter clears 'blackguard of the Titanic'."

It opens – "He was one of the great blackguards of pre-First World War British society: Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, the man who not only was said to have bought his way off the sinking Titanic, but then stopped his half-empty lifeboat from returning to pick up drowning passengers.

However, the history books might have to be rewritten. A letter discovered in a London attic appears to exonerate the old Etonian baronet and fencing champion Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon of either cowardice or callousness."

What is the connection between Sir Cosmo and Elinor Glyn? He was her brother-in-law, the husband of her eldest sister Lucy who later became famous as the dressmaker Lucile.

Re-reading Sir Anthony Glyn's obit made me realise I should hunt for his other books, particularly The Companion Guide to Paris published in 1986 which sounds exceptionally good.

Comments on readers' comments

There have been some interesting comments recently which I hope to discuss on Monday.
Until then...

Ruined by women?

2007-05-10T10:21:00.000+01:00

"The BBC is being ruined by women, says Patrick Moore" was a headline I noticed this week. The piece began -

"Sir Patrick Moore has identified an alien species that threatens to destroy intelligent life – the women who have taken over the BBC. The veteran astronomer celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Sky at Night with a withering attack on the female executives he believes have dumbed down the corporation."

"Sir Patrick, 84, was asked by the Radio Times if television had got better or worse during a career spanning the medium’s life. The answer was worse – “much worse”. He said: “The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn’t have had that in the golden days.”

At the time I read it, there were 68 comments, one of them this – "I'm a woman, and I hate soap operas, makeover shows, reality TV, property porn, & c. The problem is not gender-based, but one of programmes aiming for the lowest common denominator. Terrestrial TV seems to have abdicated all responsibility to provide universal access to work of real cultural purpose and value. Doc M, Glasgow"

Although some comments disagreed with Sir Patrick's views, the majority supported his opinion.

Daily Telegraph columnist Jan Moir was outraged. "Sir P may still present The Sky at Night, the longest-running series on television, but the poor old fossil seems not to realise that some of the programmes he has enjoyed appearing on, such as Have I Got News For You, have women at or near the helm, too. It is an understandable mistake. Sir Patrick only recognises a woman if she's wearing a crinoline and a bonnet, or bent double over the smoothing iron as she attends to a pile of his capacious gaiters."

Not enough time in the day

Yesterday was a bit of a madhouse and there wasn't time to complete today's blog. Whether I'll get time to post some additions today remains to be seen. They may have to wait till tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you haven't already done so, read what Danuta Kean has to say about fictional prostitute memoirs. I agree with her that these books are a disgrace to publishing.

TV trash dished out for the uneducated

2007-05-09T09:44:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Liberation Day

Today is Liberation Day in Guernsey and the other Channel Islands, the only part of Britain to be occupied during WW2.

At nine o'clock the All Clear siren, a familiar sound to people of my generation, sounded. Later, returning from posting a letter, I saw a Royal Marines band, including two young women, climbing into a coach outside an hotel on their way to play at St Peter Port's harbour when most of the festivities will take place.

Unfortunately the weather this morning is bad, grey and windy, but perhaps it will clear up this afternoon.

How's this for a rant?

"The eighteenth century was an age such as our imagination can barely comprehend; weltering as we do in a slough of habitual ugliness, ranging from the dreary horrors of Victorian sham gothic to the more lively hideousness of modern jerry-building, with advertisements defacing any space that might be left unoffendingly blank, and the tourist scattering his trail of chocolate paper, cigarette ends and film cartons, we catch sight every now and again of a house-front, plain and graceful, with a fanlight like the half of a spider-s web and a slip of iron balcony."

The writer goes on, "That there was no cheap, sophisticated entertainment for the masses was part of the state of things in which thousands and thousands of people were less comfortable, less well dressed, less entertained, less informed than they are today; but it also meant there was not a vast majority which by its very numbers imposed its ideas, it prepossessions and its tastes on the world in which the educated person must now exist; the lower middle class, as it is the most considerable among consumers, dictates the canons of taste by which, by its preponderating bulk, has corrupted and destroyed the standards of language, of architecture, of entertainment and of literature, which once prevailed."

That was published in 1938 in Elizabeth Jenkins' biography of Jane Austen [Victor Gollancz], "one of the best literary biographies published in England for many years. Everything that a biography should be: beautifully written, full of atmosphere, lively in humour and wisely critical."

What would Elizabeth Jenkins make of today's society, dominated by money and celebrity worship, one wonders?

In fairness to her, she does balance her criticisms by writing – "But if we are in danger of breaking our hearts over this spirit of beauty which has vanished from the earth, it is our duty to remember that there existed with it, ignored and tolerated, a state of squalor and wretchedness which, to this relatively humane and hygienic age, is nearly as difficult to visualize as its heavenly obverse."

"The state of English prisons as revealed by Howard's survey published in 1777, the London slums, in which Dr Johnson roughly computed that one thousand people starved to death every year, conditions in the Army and Navy, on active service, and when thrown crippled and destitute, without pension and without charity, on a heedless world, the savage callousness of the officials entrusted with the administration of Poor Relief…" and so on.

You would think that, almost 70 years on, our society would have found a way restore the spirit of beauty and eliminate the squalor and wretchedness. Some improvements have been made, but not nearly enough.

One has only to turn on the television to see that educated people still have little influence on the trash dished out to the uneducated masses.

The other evening I watched Hannah Scott-Joynt, [see photo left] daughter of the Bishop of Winchester, concluding a series about south coast cathedrals. Twenty years ago she would not have repeatedly referred to her father as "my dad". This was clearly a sop to the Coronation Street type viewer, who probably wouldn't have been watching the series anyway.

Interview with Elizabeth Jenkins

"Memoirs of 100 years as a literary lion" is the heading of an interview with Elizabeth Jenkins by Ruth Gorb I found at the Camden New Journal

The piece ends – "Doctors of the first rank, she says, are always attractive. She is quiet for a moment then says she had some successes with men, was always going from one disastrous attachment to another, but it was a doctor who was the love of her life and it was their relationship that inspired her to write her novel, The Tortoise and the Hare. “He was a surgeon and gynaecologist, Sir Eardley Holland. He was very distinguished, handsome, charismatic. I worked during the war in the Ministry of Information with one of his daughters, Chloe, and she engineered a meeting with him. “He took rather a shine to me. He wasn’t faithful to his wife. I wondered why she didn’t value him more; so many women, including me, would happily have changed places with her. I offered him my heart on a plate. Yes, he made me unhappy, but it was worth it. My feeling for him lasted after his death. It is still going on now.”

Public rebuke for Savoy over costly ramp

2007-05-08T09:15:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Lesley Blanch dies
Rosie Thomas interview

An extraordinary story has emerged in the aftermath of the Romantic Novelists' Association's 2007 Award lunch at the Savoy Hotel, London, last month. You can read it in full at Buzzle, but the bones are as follows -

"Equality chief threatens boycott over charge to install wheelchair ramp
The Savoy hotel in London has been publicly rebuked by Trevor Phillips [see photo], chairman of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, after it demanded £1,000 to install a temporary ramp for a wheelchair-user who was the star guest at an awards ceremony.

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain's greatest Paralympian with 11 gold medals, was chairwoman of the judges at the Romantic Novel of the Year award last week. The organisers requested a ramp on the platform leading to the top table and were shocked when the Savoy told them a £1,000 charge was involved. They eventually managed to negotiate a reduction to £200."

Lesley Blanch dies

Browsing the UK broadsheets this morning, I was sorry to read in The Independent that Lesley Blanch has died, aged 103. She wrote some excellent books and, until it was burned down, her house in the south of France sounded bliss.

Don't miss a visit to her excellent website. There's also good piece about her, written in 2005 by Joe Boyd, here.

Extract : "Born in London in 1904, she was entranced as a child by a mysterious Russian, later her lover, who instilled a love of the exotic. She became features editor of Vogue, then married the writer Romain Gary who took her to Bulgaria and the US, where she wrote a cult book which pioneered a new approach to history writing. Now 101, she is writing a new volume of memoirs."

Rosie Thomas interview

The Guardian has an interview with Ms Thomas which is worth reading if you're interested in women's fiction.

Interesting men...Dr Thurley, Sir John Soane, Ptolemy Dean

2007-05-07T17:30:00.000+01:00

An oasis of engrossing television in the desert of tripe dished out most evenings by the four TV channels we receive was Simon Thurley's Houses of Power from 7.35-9.05 on Channel 4 last Saturday night.

Dr Thurley, who is head of English Heritage, was comparing the history of No 10 Downing Street with that of the White House and the Kremlin. I particularly enjoyed the part where he examined one of the splendid drawings of Sir John Soane's plan for the reconstruction of Downing Street.

The Soane Museum at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields has long been one of my favourite places in London. It was there I discovered the beautiful drawings of Ptolemy Dean, now one of my favourite artists.

[See jacket of his book below the picture of the Soane Museum facade.]

"Soane was born in 1753, the son of a bricklayer, and died after a long and distinguished career, in 1837. Soane designed this house to live in, but also as a setting for his antiquities and his works of art. After the death of his wife (1815), he lived here alone, constantly adding to and rearranging his collections. Having been deeply disappointed by the conduct of his two sons, one of whom survived him, he determined to establish the house as a museum to which 'amateurs and students' should have access."

Getting back to Simon Thurley, he tells an amusing [for the reader] ]anecdote in a
My Hols piece he wrote for The Times last summer.

"Wherever I go, I try to mix with the locals, assimilate myself. That can backfire, of course. My car got broken into in Tunisia, and the policeman was so chatty, he ended up inviting us to supper at his home. What a nice idea, I thought: but we arrived to find a really grim police barracks, where he was cooking up vile-looking goat stew over a Bunsen burner on the floor. My girlfriend was a doctor, and I could see she wasn’t going to eat this stuff, but I felt I had no choice. She knew I was going to be poisoned; I knew I was going to be poisoned; even the policeman knew, probably — and sure enough, I spent the rest of the trip delirious in bed with a temperature of 103 and my girlfriend shoving Valium suppositories up my bottom. That serves me right for a piece of typical English folly. I’d rather die — almost literally — than offend somebody by not eating their food."

I hadn't heard of Valium suppositories before. They sound a useful addition to the first aid kits of those of us who travel to places where the food can be dodgy.

Susan Hill's piece on the state of play for writers

On Friday May 4, author and publisher Susan Hill posted
a piece about the difficulties currently facing writers. This seems to have cast some aspiring authors into deep gloom.

Ms Hill wrote : "But professional setback is occurring more and more to established writers who until the last year or so have enjoyed good, even extremely good, lifestyles, as a result of large book advances. They may not, as new and aspiring writers also may not be aware just how these have fallen. The public and indeed the Trade only hears about the 2 million pounds for a footballer, a politician, a z-list celeb. It assumes these amounts are normal. But even people in the writing business will be shocked when, based on their past reputation and ability to command a LOT of money in advance, they discover that the offer for their new book is below 10K. Foreign advances are even lower – Germany, France etc regularly pay 2/3,000 euros in advance.
It is even harder for a writer who changes genres. Supposing someone who has had great success as a popular novelist decides to write a biography, or a Science Fiction Big Name presents with a Literary Novel, a children`s book writer whose name is a byword for big sales in that genre, decides to turn to crime. Or let us suppose the writer had a big success and could command six figure advances fifteen or twenty years ago but is now re-emerging with a new book after a long gap. All of these are going to be shocked by the fall in advances. To be offered 5 or 10K – and 25 for world rights, is very very usual now but I have heard of many a writer calling the figures ‘an insult’ ‘a slap in the face.’ The fact is that these are now the NORM.
A top literary agent told me that if a novelist has had modest success – decent reviews, not bad sales but not HUGE sales – with three books, they are simply not going to find a publisher for a fourth. Many writers will find their careers over after two books unless something big happens."

Real people in novels : a new idea?

2007-05-04T11:47:00.001+01:00

Also in today's blog
Finding Dalrymple's articles

My apologies for misleading you into thinking that Theodore Dalrymple's new column for The Spectator is readable at their website. Apparently it's "subscribers only".

However, a wide range of his excellent pieces can be found by typing his name into Google. A good starter piece is at the Brussels Journal from which site I borrowed the photo of him. Wonder who the flowers are for? His French wife is my guess. Since TD's retirement, the Dalrymples have made their home in France.

Real people in fiction e.g. Sigmund Freud

Perhaps I'm having a lapse of memory but, off hand, I can't remember a novel featuring an internationally-known real person in the way that Jed Rubenfeld uses Sigmund Freud as a character in The Interpretation of Murder.

As a Princeton undergraduate, Rubenfeld wrote his senior thesis on Freud and, at the back of his novel, there's a long Author's Note explaining that, while TIOM, is "a work of fiction from beginning to end", much is based on fact.

"Sigmund Freud did of course visit the United States in 1909, arriving aboard the steamship George Washington with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi on the evening of August 29…Freud did stay at the Hotel Manhattan in New York City for a week before traveling to Clark University to deliver his famous lectures, and he did contract a kind of horror of America. While in the United States, Freud was indeed asked to render impromptu impromptu psychoanalyses, although never, as far as we know, by the mayor of New York City."

What's your view of pyschoanalysis, I wonder? To be honest, my feeling is that it's largely claptrap. Perhaps I'm unfairly prejudiced because I've known one or two people who've tried it and, in my opinion, they would have been more usefully occupied digging the garden or making new curtains rather than pouring out their souls to an analyst.

My doubts about Freud were confirmed by a conversation he has on p 285 of The Interpretation of Murder.

Someone asks him if marriage is a good thing.

"For society or for the individual?" Freud responded. "For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilised morality are too heavy for many to bear. How long have you been a wife, Mrs Banwell?"

"I married George when I was nineteen…that makes seven years."

"In that case you will know enough," Freud went on, "if not from your own experience, then that of your friends. not to be surprised by what I say. Satisfying intercourse does not last long in most marriages. After four or five years, marriage tends to fail utterly in this respect, and when this happens it spells the end of spiritual communion too. As a result, in the great run of cases, marriage ends in disappointment, spiritual as well as physical. The man and the woman are thrown back, pyschologically speaking, to their premarital state – with only one difference. They are poorer now. Poorer by the loss of an illusion."

It may be that Freud's negative message was based on personal experience. Many happily married people could have told him that, in fact, good marriages get better as time goes on, in every respect.

Jed Rubenfeld, Rosie Thomas, Theodore Dalrymple

2007-05-03T12:42:00.001+01:00

Having finished reading Jed Rubenfeld's thriller The Interpretation of Murder, I find that it's not the main characters – Dr Stratham Younger and Nora Acton – I cared about most. The character who captured my interest was Jimmy Littlemore.

"The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short, Jimmy Littlemore wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything it was closer to red. He had a distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles, was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the red bow tie that he liked to sport below his straw boater."

Why did this man make such a strong impression? Why, at a point in story when it seemed he was out of the action permanently, did I feel horrified? And wonder if I could go on reading?

Maybe because none of the rest of the characters seemed quite real and Littlemore did.

For me the book's second strength are the riveting descriptions such as this -

"The Manhattan Bridge, nearing completion in the summer of 1909, was the last of the three great suspension bridges built across the East River to connect the island of Manhattan with what had been, until 1898, the City of Brooklyn. These bridges - the Brooklyn, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan - were, when constructed, the longest single spans in existence, extolled by the Scientific American as the greatest engineering feats the world had ever known. Together with the invention of spun-steel cable, one particular technological innovation made them possible : the ingeneious conceit of the pneumatic caisson."

The author then goes on to describe these caissons and weave them into the plot in a most gripping way. None of the men in my life are engineers and I've never been particularly interested in engineering before, but Rubenfeld has me hooked.

The book's third strength is his presentation of Sigmund Freud, but I'll write about that tomorrow.

Rosie Thomas's award-winning novel

You may already have read Grumpy Old Bookman's review of the novel which won the Romantic Novelists' Association £5,000 Award last week. I made some comments on the book on 14 March this year, since when I've been waiting to hear news of Ms Thomas's website.

Theodore Dalrymple's new column

This week one of my favourite writers has started a new column in The Spectator. Worth keeping an eye on.

Granger, Grigson and Glasse : three very different cookery writers

2007-05-02T14:37:00.001+01:00

[Posted 2 May 2007]

Also in today's blog

Richard Charkin's site statistics

First off, a thank you to everyone who used the comment button to wish me well.

From Australia, another Anne wrote – "Welcome back Anne - as you are a part of my daily routine, I have missed your insights into new books that I might read.

As an Australian who has known about Donna Hay for years, I am pleased that you have discovered her cookery style. I am not much of a cook, but my sister is fantastic. One of her favourite Australian cooks is Bill Granger who is more of the personality type but if you get a chance look him up. He has a regular coloumn in the Sydney Morning Herald and if you enter the search site at www.smh.com.au you will see a number of his recipes."

So I shot off to the SMH and found a piece by Granger about tomato sauce in which he writes "One of my favourites meals using the sauce is bistecca alla pizzaiola (grilled steak with tomato sauce) to which I add oregano and dried chilli flakes. You can also stir the sauce through pasta and serve it with torn mozzarella and roughly pitted olives. The other night I used some leftover roasted tomato sauce cooked down with green beans and served it with roast chicken. Tomato sauce is a true kitchen staple and, as you have suggested, it should not be limited to pizza."

Then I found Bill Granger's website. Obviously the new generation of male cookery writers are not as paunchy as their predecessors.

Another Australian, Treva, wrote - "So pleased you are back at your desk, Anne. I was starting to worry when your blog didn't appear. I'm afraid Donna Hay is a bit too minimalist for me. As another Australian, I've been familiar with her work for quite a few years. I'm afraid I prefer my cookery writers to add a little bit of anecdote to their recipes. Past favourites have been Jane Grigson & Josceline Dimblebey, and on television I like my cookery experts to be just a little bit over the top such as the Two Fat Ladies and Nigella Lawson. At the moment Australia has an ABC TV cooking series "The Cook & the Chef" which is just the right blend of personality & information."

I'm a Grigson fan too, Treva. I've just been to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and to fetch my treasured copy of Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, first published by Michael Joseph in 1978 and by Penguin in 1980.

It's dedicated to her husband "who introduced me to John Evelyn and gardenage" and below the dedication are two quotes.

"Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find the private message, assurances of love and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner." R L Steveenson

"Most people spoil garden things by over boiling them. All things green should have a little crispness, for if they are overboil'd they neither have sweetness or beauty." Hannah Glasse

Jane Grigson

For those of you who haven't discovered Jane Grigson, at Penguin's website I found this –

"Jane Grigson was brought up in the north-east of England, where there is a strong tradition of good eating, but it was not until many years later, when she began to spend three months of each year in France, that she became really interested in food. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery was the result, exploring the wonderful range of cooked meat products on sale in even the smallest market towns. This book has also been translated into French, a singular honour for an English cookery writer.
After taking an English degree at Cambridge in 1949, Jane Grigson worked in art galleries and publishers' offices, and then as a translator. In 1966 she shared the John Florio prize (with Father Kenelm Foster) for her translation of Beccaria's Of Crime and Punishment. It was in 1968 that Jane Grigson began her long association with the Observer Magazine for whom she wrote right up until her untimely death in 1990; Good Things and Food With The Famous are all based on these highly successful series. In 1973, Fish Cookery was published by the Wine and Food Society, followed by The Mushroom Feast (1975), a collection of recipes for cultivated, woodland, field and dried mushrooms. She received both the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award and the André Simon Memorial Fund Book Award for her Vegetable Book (1978) and for her Fruit Book (1982), and was voted Cookery Writer of the Year in 1977 for English Food. A compilation of her best recipes, The Enjoyment of Food, was published in 1992 with an introduction by her daughter, the cookery writer Sophie Grigson. Most of Jane Grigson's books are published in Penguin.
Jane Grigson died in March 1990. In her obituary for the Independent, Alan Davidson wrote that 'Jane Grigson left to the English-speaking world a legacy of fine writing on food and cookery for which no exact parallel exists ... She won to herself this wide audience because she was above all a friendly writer ... the most companionable presence in the kitchen; often catching the imagination with a deftly chosen fragment of history or poetry, but never failing to explain the "why" as well as the "how" of cookery'. Jane Grigson was married to the poet and critic the late Geoffrey Grigson."

Hannah Glasse

The Independent newspaper has a good piece on Glasse here.

Richard Charkin's site statistics

Richard Charkin, CEO of Macmillan, whose site I visit most mornings, is complaining that "In April we had a disappointing 68227 visits. This is down from March's record 81424 bringing the total visits to 689184. Any ideas for boosting traffic (apart from the obvious ones) gratefully received. I'm returning to London this morning, just another seventeen hours travelling. Thank goodness for books."

I don't envy the man his life which seems to be spent flying round the world. Even travelling first class with plenty of good books to read, it must become awfully wearing. I've been flying since 1951 when it was a still an exciting adventure, but alas that time has long gone. Though I still like people-watching in airports.

Techie problems

2007-05-02T14:35:00.001+01:00

Today's blog [May 2] on cookery writers has somehow got itself behind/after yesterday's blog. Will try to sort it out. AW

Jed Rubenfeld's extraordinary bestseller

2007-05-02T07:38:00.000+01:00

[Posted 1 May 2007]

Also in today's blog

Claudia Roden and Liz Fielding
Is there a danger that reading will stop?

Now to tell you something about the marvellous book I was lent while in hospital last week. It's so enjoyable that I'm rationing myself to 30 pages a day.

Had I been on top form last month, I should have spotted a photograph of the author on page 18 of Publishing News [13 April issue], part of their coverage of the 2007 British Book Awards.

Being an early riser, I don't often stay up late and the opening scenes of the TV coverage of the Awards didn't tempt me to watch the whole thing. Which was a pity because I should have liked to see Jed Rubenfeld receiving his award for The Interpretation of Murder.

Extract from Publishing News : "It was a family celebration for Jed Rubenfeld, who took the Richard & Judy Award for his debut novel The Interpretation of Murder [Headline]. He was accompanied at the Awards by his wife, Amy Chua, also a best-selling author, and agent Suzanne Gluck of William Morris. His children were back at the hotel – "I can't wait to tell them. I'm thrilled beyond description – this is the only honour I've had in my life," claimed the high-flying Yale law professor. Having refused a two-book contract, what about that second novel now the first is so successful? "I'm going to skip the second one," he replied. Straight on to the third, then!"

Last Friday's issue of The Bookseller shows Rubenfeld's book at No 1 on the Top 50 chart with a total of 453,140 units sold.

Neither the R&J Award or the No 1 spot on the Top 50 chart would have influenced me to buy the book had I not been lent it. Too many books are hyped to the skies these days and prove disappointing.

For a change, the praise for this book is justified. I agree with The Times critic who wrote "…and unusually intelligent novel which entertains, informs and intrigues on several levels" and with the Independent reviewer's comment, "Rubenfeld's brilliant conceit is to weave this real-life event into an accomplished thriller…a dazzling novel."

Bookreporter has an interesting interview with Rubenfeld whose site is here.

Why am I enjoying this story so much? Partly because it's full of what so many current novels lack : interesting information. I have been to New York only once – an enthralling experience – and therefore am keenly interested in its history.

On p 7 the author writes – "At the beginning of the twentieth century, an architectural paroxysm shook New York City. Gigantic towers called skyscrapers soared up one after another, higher than anything built by the hand of man before. At a ribbon-cutting ceremeony on Liberty Street in 1908, the top hats applauded as Mayor McClellan declared the forty-seven-storey redbrick and bluestone Singer Building the world's tallest structure. Eighteen months later, the mayor had to repeat the same ceremoney at the fifty-story Metropolitan Life tower on Twenty-fourth Street. But even then, they were already breaking ground for Mr Woolworth's staggering fifty-eight ziggurate back downtown.

On every block, enormous steel-beam skeletons appeared where empty lots had been the day before. The smash and scream of steam shovels never ceased. The only comparison was with Haussmann's transformation of Paris a half a century earlier, but in New York there was no signle vision behind the scenes, no unifying plan, no disciplining authority. Capital and speculation drove everything, releasing fantastic energies, distinctly American and individualistic."

Some readers might find those details boring. I find them enriching. They enhance a gripping murder story. I like to emerge from a book knowing more about the world than I did on Page 1, and Rubenfeld satisfies that hunger in a way that too few contemporary novelists do. Particularly women writers who nowadays seem to concentrate almost exclusively on "emotion", much of it tediously repetitive.

Supermarket fiction seems to be going the same way as supermarket vegetables, increasingly tasteless and lacking in nourishment. Yesterday, fancying a tomato with my bread-and-feta-cheese lunch, I cut up a Guernsey- shop-bought tomato which, apart from being red, bore little resemblance to a tomato from the street market where we shop in Spain. In a word, it was tasteless.

The problem is that UK supermarket shoppers, unless they spend time in mainland Europe, don't realise how second-rate most imported produce has become. The same thing seems to be happening with popular fiction.

Claudia Roden and Liz Fielding

A comment by Liz Fielding, on yesterday's Bookworm blog referred to cookery writer Claudia Roden. [See first photo] I'm pretty sure I have one of her books on my Spanish shelves but haven't yet got around to trying the recipes.

Cooking was one of my passions back in the Seventies, but other interests have taken over and being married to a first rate cook is another disencentive.

As I used to in an earlier, less stressful era, Liz Fielding writes for Harlequin Mills & Boon. She has amazing energy. [See second photo]

Liz not only has a website, but also a blog and now a place on MySpace. The three sites must need a good deal of attention and I wonder if they are worth the time involved? It's difficult to judge how rewarding these promotional exercises are.

But with parent companyHarlequin currently publishing over 1,300 authors from around the world – I think there were fewer than 40 authors when I joined the Boon brothers' list more than half a century ago – today's M&B writers have a much tougher row to hoe than their predecessors.

Is there a danger that reading will stop?

Extract : "The truth is that the book and newspaper businesses share the same dreadful fear: that people will stop reading. And the fear may be well-founded. Across the country, newspaper circulations are down — and this is clearly part of the reason for the cuts to book sections. At the same time, the book business increasingly relies on an aging customer base that may not be refueling itself with enough new readers.

In the past, newspaper executives understood the symbiotic relationship between their product and books. People who read books also read newspapers. From that basic tenet came a philosophy: If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers. That loss-leader ends up helping you build and keep your base."

Read more of this piece by Michael Connelly, author of 17 mysteries, most of them featuring LAPD Det. Harry Bosch, at the L A Times.

Granger, Grigson and Glasse : three very different cookery writers

2007-05-02T07:09:00.000+01:00

Jane Grigson

Hannah Glasse

The Independent newspaper has a good piece on Glasse here.

Richard Charkin's site statistics

Apology for absence

2007-04-30T15:54:00.000+01:00

[Posted 30 April 2007]

Also in today's blog

An exciting parcel from Bibliophile
A new-to-me cookery writer

I'm sorry Bookworm has been offline since Monday, 9 April. The reason : having caught a cough which wouldn't clear up, unexpectedly I was whipped into hospital with pneumonia.

The first time I had pneumonia was in January 1936 while a pupil at Stafford House, the junior section of Norwich High School.

While I was in bed, recovering, the death of King George V was announced on the wireless, as the radio was called in those days.

Both my mother and our landlady – we were living in furnished rooms in a house in Mount Pleasant not far from the school – shed a few tears, a display of emotion much less usual in The Thirties than today when people often weep and wail in public.

Being stuck in bed for about a month in 1936 was boring.

Spending 12 nights in Guernsey's Princess Elizabeth Hospital – opened by H M The Queen in 1948 - was far more interesting. Indeed there was never a dull moment. Both the staff and my fellow patients included some fascinating people and, to my delight, I was lent the most interesting novel I've read in a long time. This morning I shall be ordering my own copy from one of St Peter Port's bookshops.

More about this book tomorrow.

A parcel from Bibliophile

On Saturday morning, a parcel post van delivered four biographies ordered from Bibliophile. They are -

Patrick O'Brian : The Making of a Novelist by Nikolai Tolstoy [Century 2004]

Clarice Cliff by Lynn Knight [Bloomsbury 2005]

Gwen John : A Life by Sue Roe [Vintage 2002]

Nigella Lawson :The Unauthorised Biography by Gilly Smith [André Deutsch 2005]

Three are hardbacks, all are in immaculate condition. Cost, inc. postage, £28. Excellent value. New, they would have cost me £55.98.

My interest in Clarice Cliff "one of the most prominent ceramic designers of the twentieth century" goes back to the early Sixties when my small son's push-chair was often parked outside antique and junk shops. One of my favourite dealers frequently tried to persuade me to buy pieces by Clarice Cliff, and an excellent investment they would have been. But my collecting budget was limited and I had fallen in love with antique needlework tools. Though often tempted, I rarely bought anything else.

A new-to-me cookery writer

While I was in hospital, my eye was caught by some photographs of food illustrating an article headed "Making sun while Hay shines" on the Food & Drink page of The Telegraph Weekend for Saturday April 21.

It began - "Australian cookery writer Donna Hay bucks the celebrity-chef trend. Unlike Nigella, Gordon and Jamie, she doesn't do television. She doesn't have a restaurant and her photograph is hardly ever seen, even in her Donna Hay magazine. Her writing style is mininmalist in the extreme, entirely devoid of reminiscence or description. Yet Hay is the bestselling non-fiction writer in Australia and has a growing following worldwide. She has published more than a dozen books and her magazine is exported around the world, with a circulation of almost 100,000. What's remarkable is that it's her cooking rather than her personality that has made her an international phenomenon."

My thanks to Telegraph columnist Xanthe Clay for introducing me to Donna Hay. Can't wait to try out Hay's Peaches in Prosciutto and Salmon Carpaccio with Campari Dressing.

Elinor Glyn

2007-04-09T08:17:00.000+01:00

Continuing the grand purge on my work room, at the weekend I spent half an hour removing rusty staples from print-outs of articles read online in 1998.

I used to print out a lot more often in those days. The result was half a box of Croxley Script A4 typing paper, one side of each sheet reusable for drafts.

Some of the print-outs I'm keeping. For example The Times obituary of Sir Anthony Glyn, Bt, the author who died at his home in the South of France on 20 January 1998, aged 75.

The obit began – "In his novel The Dragon Variation, published in 1969, Anthony Glyn was widely regarded as having made the game of chess a subject for literary drama as no novelist had done before him. Less delicately put, Glyn's book made "chess sound like the most exciting thing since bullfighting" – the verdict of The Times of the day. Even Vladmir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence of 1929, until then thought of as supreme among chess novels., was acknowledged as having been surpassed."

Anthony Glyn's obit is now tucked between the pages of my copy of his biography of his maternal grandmother, the novelist Elinor Glyn, "a fiery-haired Edwardian beauty who sprawled in sin-tight silks on tiger skin rugs. She coined the usage of the word "It" for sex appeal, wrote torridly shocking novels and inspired the lines :

Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
To err with her
On some other fur?"

My copy of the biography has a Boots Booklovers Library stamp on the front. It was published by Hutchinson in July 1955 and reprinted in August and September that year. So my guess is that I bought it, for three shillings, from the London Street branch of Boots in Norwich where we lived in the late Fifties. In those days Boots had a popular lending library and periodically sold off books to make room for new titles.

"Elinor Glyn was born on the English Channel island of Jersey. Following the death of her father, her mother returned to the parental home in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Here Elinor was schooled by her grandmother (a minor French aristocrat) in the ways of upper-class society. This training not only gave her an entrée into aristocratic circles on her return to Europe, but it led her to be considered an authority on style and breeding when she worked in Hollywood in the 1920s.
She was the celebrated author of such early 20th century bestsellers as It, Three Weeks, Beyond the Rocks, and other novels which were then considered quite racy, as tame as they might seem now. Glyn was also the younger sister of Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, famous as the fashion designer "Lucile". She [Elinor G] had a long lasting affair between 1906 and 1916 with George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston."

Comments on comments

More of these are in the pipeline.

In praise of Anne Scott-James

2007-04-06T14:57:00.000+01:00

For a provincial newspaper reporter, which is how I started my working life, a public holiday is a working day. As far as I'm concerned, this is an ordinary weekend.

According to the birthday list in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, April 5th was the 94th birthday of Anne Scott-James, one of first women journalists in Fleet Street and greatly admired by my generation of post-WW2 newspaper reporters.

Maddeningly, I missed the book published to mark her 80th birthday, but it shouldn't be difficult to get hold of a copy.

"Anne Scott-James, journalist and gardening writer, was one of the first generation of career girls, rising to become a magazine editor at thirty and later a famous and controversial columnist. She has written her autobiography in the form of letters to her daughter, Clare, a series of memorable sketches of her life and times.

She vividly evokes the period charm of her childhood; growing up in the twenties in town and country; and Oxford - disillusioning, but salvaged by music, tennis and Greek. At a time when a professional woman was something of an oddity, she became one of the first female journalists in Fleet Street, joining Vogue in the 1930s and - a rewarding experience - working for Picture Post during the war.

After marriage (to writer Macdonald Hastings) and children (her son is journalist Max Hastings, Clare works in television), she was Editor of Harper's Bazaar and had columns on the Sunday Express and Daily Mail. This exhilarating career took her worldwide and involved her with such personalities as Bert Hardy, Lesley Blanch, Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann. She writes, too, of her marriage to Osbert Lancaster in 1967, of their travels in Europe together and their mutual love of architecture and gardening. Soon afterwards she began to write her well-loved gardening books.

Anne Scott-James recalls with wit and insight a wealth of stimulating experiences, people and places; her rich interests; and the adventures of a career that she adored - a life that, with characteristic modesty, she says has `never been boring'.

Elegant and beautifully written, Sketches From a Life is as engaging and charming as all who have read Anne Scott-James's columns and books will expect."

Raymond Briggs and Elfrida Vipont

2007-04-05T09:03:00.000+01:00

When my three small grandsons came to lunch last Sunday, the eldest brought a new book sent to him by friends of his parents.

It was a Puffin picture book called The Elephant and the Bad Baby. The Amazon UK summary reads – "One day, an elephant offers a bad baby a ride through the town, and so begins an adventure and a chase. But when the elephant realizes that the bad baby has forgotten his manners, the chase ends with a bump and tea for everyone."

The book is currently ranking at 1,544 and here's one of the reviews. "My goodness, what a blast from the past. This book was my all-time favourite book. I remember reading with with my dad. Now, I'm a student teacher, and i recommend this book to parents and children everywhere, and i will certainly be reading it to my class."

The story is illustrated by Raymond Briggs whose biography, here, tells us he "was born in 1934 to a milkman father and a mother who had been a lady's maid. He left school at 15 to study painting at Wimbledon School of Art. After a typography class at the Central School of Art and two years of national service he went to the Slade School of Art to study painting. His first work was in advertising but he was soon winning acclaim as a children's book illustrator as well as teaching illustration at Brighton College of Art. Raymond Briggs is one of the foremost creators of illustrated books for adults and children. He has won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice, as well as numerous other awards."

The author was Elfrida Vipont (1902 - 1992), to whom a delightful web page has been put up by Jo Robins and Sue Tredrea.

The page is part of Collecting Books and Magazines, a website based in Australia's Blue Mountains [of which I have happy memories] which has been serving collectors since July 1997.

What worried me about the story was that although it was made clear to the Bad Baby that he must say "Yes, please," not just "Yes", nothing was said about the elephant's habit of taking things from shops without paying for them.

Maybe when Elfrida Vipont wrote the story, shop-lifting was not as widespread as it is today. But no doubt most of the people who read it to their children and grandchildren will stress that taking things from shops is Seriously Bad Behaviour!!

Another comment on a comment

Anne McAllister, whose comment on sex with a stranger I'm answering today, is an American writer I had the pleasure of meeting at a Harlequin Mills & Boon author day held in London in the Nineties.

Her bio tells us, "Anne lives in the Midwest now, though she left her heart in the far west as a child, which explains why even her Caribbean beach bums and New York entrepreneurs are, at the core, cowboy heroes." She calls her husband The Prof.

She starts her comment by asking, "Still stirring up hornet's nests, are you?" This suggests that she sees me as an habitual "stirrer". Not so. Surely anyone with a long overview of the romance genre must feel deeply concerned about where it seems to be heading?

Anne McA goes on, "Like Jenny, I would be far more concerned if Julie's heroine were habitually hopping into closets with strangers. Or ended the book thinking it was a good idea (yes, I know that's a fragment). It all has to do with character development, doesn't it? I, for one, like my characters to have a bit of growing and changing to do. If they're paragons to begin with, why bother?"

Have we really arrived at the stage when a heroine who has never had casual sex is regarded as an unnatural paragon?

How many middle-aged romance writers had casual sex when young, or would wish their daughters/granddaughters to go in for it. So why make their heroines behave in a way that, in their own heart of hearts, they think is unwise and/or wrong. There are plenty of other flaws a heroine can be given.

Of course Anne McA is correct in her comment, "And teenage pregnancies have existed longer than romance novels or, indeed, any kind of books at all."

But must they exist forever? Surely, by now, in advanced societies where reliable birth control methods have been available for decades, accidental babies should almost be a thing of the past?

I gather that, in Julie Cohen's book, birth control is used during the sex-in-a-cupboard scene, but the condom breaks having been in the hero's wallet for too long. I hesitate to do a search for how often condoms break for fear it might result in a deluge of spam from condom sellers but, from what I've read, breakage appears to be extremely rare.

Another comment-on-a-comment tomorrow.

Stanley Morgan booked for [James] Bond event in Germany

2007-04-04T09:18:00.000+01:00

An interesting private email came from Stanley Morgan last month. [If the link doesn't work, check the January archive for my previous blog about him on Saturday, January 13, 2007].

On 18 March – and I have his permission to quote – he wrote,"Linda and I had a most interesting weekend at the Radisson Hotel, Heathrow 2/3/4th March. We met many delightful people, most of whom are featured in the attachment. Never imagined that one day we would chat with astronauts and a Dambuster bomb-aimer."

The photo of Stanley, playing the concierge in the James Bond film Dr No, is borrowed from the Autographica site attached to his email.

His email continued, "I have enjoyed your recent blogs, particularly, perhaps, the piece about Arthur Hailey. He exemplifies, par excellence, the advisability of 'writing what you know', and of 'coming to the subject fully prepared', the theme of my offering, you may recall in Part 1 of The Boss Articles.

It did not surprise me to learn that he received cool critique of his books. No author that commercially successful could avoid the viperous vituperation of the literati.

When I first arrived in Ireland, driven there by excessive taxation, I was interviewed by the Irish press who advised me, as a successful yarn-spinner, to 'avoid the local literati like the plague, they'll eat you alive'. I took their advice, yet still managed to attract a wickedly snide piece on signing £100,000 contract with W.H.Allen.

I have just received an invitation to attend a Special Bond Event in Germany in August, linked to UNICEF. Incredibly, it has been suggested that I read from and talk about my books! I replied that I'd be delighted to do both. But doubtful sufficient interest since my books are not published in Germany. I have this awful vision of myself, on stage in a vast auditorium, with Linda in the only occupied seat."

Buying Bond books in the Fifties

I'm sure that won't happen and there will be a full house. I should love to be there. I started buying Ian Fleming's Bond books [in hardback] in the Fifties, after the first was serialised in the Yorkshire Evening Press at York while I was a YEP reporter. Another staff reporter was Vivian Brooks, who wrote detective books under the pen-name Osmington Mills.

The only information I can find about her is in her father's Wikipedia entry. She was born in 1922 and died in 2003. I remember her as a large, jolly, but perhaps sometimes lonely, woman in her early thirties who sometimes came to lunch with us. Afterwards, the three of us and her dog would walk on the nearby flood meadows beside the River Ouse. When I left the YEP, we lost touch.

Bella Andre's comment on current discussion

Commenting on the Julie Cohen/sex with a stranger discussion, Bella Andre wrote, "You said it yourself--why can't novels can be fantasy?--in your recent post about the MISERY category for new books. "Who wants to read those books?" you asked. Well, not me. And I don't want to write them either. So that's why I, too, write very sexy contemporary fiction.

And, I'm not ashamed to say, I hope you and your readers do go to my web site. A little self-promotion is not a bad thing. After all, if it gets one more reader to pick up a great love story--that, indeed, happens to begin with some extremely hot sex--then I say hooray for all of us. I get to write more fun books for Simon & Schuster and my readers get to vicariously experience fantastic love and sex through the pages of my books as well.

In fact, it's time for me to get off the internet for the next few hours. I've got a sex scene to write."

Book world equivalent of sleazy mags

I had a quick look at Bella Andre's blog where I read -
"Monday, January 31, 2005
Erotic Romance: A how-to guide
Ever thought about writing erotic romance? Me either, [sic] until I found out what a hot market it is. Which got me wondering, "Can I do it?" So I sat down one Saturday with an idea in my head about two erotica authors who meet at a writer's convention and lo and behold, three chapters flew from my fingertips. Seriously, I had written 8,000 funny, sexy words before I so much as looked up at my computer."

I have nothing against born writers writing for money rather than literary acclaim, but I don't approve of the thousands of not-born writers who are currently cluttering the market with largely second-rate stuff.

This writer also contributes to a blog called RedHotRomance described as "The best in SIN LIT from 9 red hot Bay Area writers!"

This sort of thing strikes me as the book world equivalent of writing for those sleazy magazines on the top shelves in newsagents' shops. I'm amazed that a wife and mother, which I gather Bella Andre is in her private life, would demean herself by writing borderline porn. The market for children's books is also booming. She would do better to turn her talents to that field.

More comments on your comments tomorrow.

Sir Patrick's lost love

2007-04-04T06:15:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Moral Guardian's comment and Lee Child

There was an interesting interview with Sir Patrick Moore in the Daily Telegraph recently, but unfortunately it isn't available online yet. Here, for anyone who hasn't heard of him, is another piece from an earlier Telegraph.

"Sir Patrick Moore has brought astronomy to the masses now for half a century, and is widely celebrated for his enthusiastic and supremely knowledgable commentary on television coverage of the Apollo missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s."

"His programme, The Sky at Night, has a devoted following, which is not least why it has clocked up 650 editions. Yet the BBC, absurdly, chose to put out the 650th at 1.55am, when only the most dedicated insomniacs would be watching, and when even most astronomers have gone to bed.
Perhaps someone thought the programme had to go out under cover of darkness to be appropriate. Or perhaps it was thought that, at a time when so much rubbish is on television, something genuinely good should not be allowed on until well after the watershed. Either way, the great Sir Patrick and his devotees deserve better."

According to the recent interview by Neil Tweedie, "Talk to him about his own life and you won't get much…He fell in love but once, with a nurse called Lorna. She died in an air raid. "My girl was killed. That was that," he says in a matter-of-fact way, refusing the temptation to "emote". "I didn't want to be a bachelor. I wanted a wife and a son but Herr Hitler had other ideas. I didn't want to live my life alone but that's the way things went unfortunately."

The interview carries a picture of him as a young man, looking rather dour but definitely attractive. Born in 1923, he would have been only 22 when WW2 started so, however much he loved Lorna, it seems a little surprising he never met anyone else. Perhaps he was discouraged from forming another attachment by his mother. His father was gassed in WW1 and died when Patrick was 24, after which he lived with his mother, who had trained as an opera singer, until her death at the age of 91. It was she who gave him a book The Story of the Solar System written in 1898 by G F Temple.

Patrick Moore was only six, with a weak heart which had necessitated his removal from preparatory school, when he received this present. "A few pages were enough to launch him into outer space."

In 2002 his mother posthumously published Mrs Moore In Space, described at Amazon UK as "A whimsical view of life on other planets by the late Gertrude Moore, mother of famous astronomer Patrick Moore, who provides the foreword. Her drawings and descriptions are humorous, yet informed. She paints a picture of a universe inhabited by exotic beings, often with amorous intentions. The paintings were made over an extended period, between 1900 and 1974."

Moral Guardian's comment and Lee Child

On the Julie Cohen/sex with a stranger discussion, Moral Guardian [rather an off-putting pseudonym] wrote - "Thank you for raising this issue. I think the key point is that novels are not meant to be morality tales. If they were, we would have to ban a high percentage of them on the grounds of encouraging murder, torture, irresponsible shopping as well as every form of sexual behaviour - a quickie in a cupboard being one of the least disturbing, by a long way."

As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of Lee Child's thrillers. The photo of him receiving an award is borrowed from his Wikiepeda bio.

I don't remember any of Lee Child's books, or books by other crime writers I like, that don't make it clear by the end that baddies invariably or usually get their comeuppance. Will blog about the "irresponsible shopping" bandwagon another day.

[Novelist, publisher and blogger Susan Hill is another Child fan. "I have finished reading a very very good Lee Child thriller. I do find the Jack Reacher books absolutely compulsive. Graham Greene once said that the hardest writing of all was description of fast action but Child makes it look like a piece of cake."]

By the way, when I clicked on Moral Guardian's link, I didn't get taken to her blog or website but to the link above Kate Walker's comment. I have asked Kate if there's some connection, but she hasn't replied yet.

Finally, M/Guardian wrote, "As for website colours; let she who has perfect taste cast the first stone."

I can't claim perfect taste, but surely one of the functions of a website reviewer is to point out when a site needs improvements such as deleting a Flash intro, installing a search facility or email link, making the text adjustable etc? Fortunately Julie Cohen's content counterbalances her [to my eyes] garish colour scheme.

Sorry if that's not PC, but I prefer plain speaking to PC-ness and I think most of my readers do too.

More comments on comments during the week.

An ideal place for a respite for writers?

2007-04-02T14:39:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
My comments on readers' comments re sex with a stranger

I wonder how many readers will recognise the house in the bookmark on the left side of today's blog?

Long ago, when I was a reporter on the Eastern Evening News at Norwich, the Editor, Alfred Cope, gave me an excellent piece of advice.

A small man, as lean as a jockey, with piercing blue eyes, he said, "Read the obits in The Times every day."

I've been obeying that instruction ever since, though latterly the Daily Telegraph's obits have been better than those in The Times. It was reading the obituary of Sir Joseph Cheyne in the Telegraph recently that inspired today's blog. Unfortunately the online obit doesn't include the photo of Sir Joseph as a good-looking Major in the 11th Battalion of the Queen's Westminsters with whom, during WW2 he served in Africa and Italy where, later, he lived.

From 1976-1990 he was curator of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House on the Spanish Steps where Keats had lived for three months before his death in 1821. From the K-SMH's excellent website, I c&p-ed the following.

"In 1907, the house in which John Keats died was finally bought outright for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. This is the story of how that came about."

"In 1903 the rooms in which Keats and Severn had lived were occupied by a pair of American women, both writers, Mrs James Walcott Haslehurst and her mother who spent much time permitting the curious to see where Keats had spent his last days. The house was in a dreadful condition and the women wanted to buy it so that it could be preserved as a shrine but did not have enough money. In February 1903, Robert Underwood Johnson, an American poet, walked down the Spanish Steps to look at the house in which Keats had died, noticed its bedraggled appearance, entered and made enquiries. He called together a dozen of the American literati resident in Rome, one prominent Englishman, and their spouses."

Discovering that the house has a first-floor apartment, with an outside terrace, for short-term rentals, from three nights to six months, and as neither of us has been to Rome, I emailed the site for more details.

By return I had a reply from the Assistant Curator, Josephine Greywoode, who told me the rental rates are - per night 150 euros, per week 700 euros, per month 1500. Mr Bookworm tells me the euro exchange rate on Saturday was 1.44 euros to the pound sterling.

Ms Greywoode also sent me a link to an availability chart and more details about the apartment, including, "The large and comfortable bedroom is set slightly back from the Steps whilst the small living room looks out onto them. The separate kitchen opens onto a creeper-covered pergola and terrace furnished with table and chairs."

Two more replies to readers' comments

Julie Cohen wrote three comments in response to my blog about her and I'm going to reply to the points she raised when I've read the book under discussion.

For the time being I will only applaud her diplomatic tone. Some writers become very hot under the collar about any breath of criticism of their brainchildren, or even of their genre/publisher, but Julie has far too good a grasp of PR make that mistake. Apart from the PR aspect, at both her site and her blog she comes over as an as easy-going, laidback personality. Without having read a book of hers yet, my instinctive feeling is that she will go far and before long, I hope, emulate Jennifer Crusie by breaking free of the constraints of series romance and being published in mainstream women's fiction.

Jenny Haddon's comment

I was surprised and delighted to find a comment from Jenny Haddon because I know how much extra work her role as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association involves.

Jenny began her comment -

"Surely the important thing is that sex with a stranger is the starting point of Julie's book, not the end? According to Robert McKee, stories start when people do (or have to do) something out of their norm. If Julie were advocating SWAS as a lifestyle, there would be no story. "

Jenny's comment continues, "It's not a 21st century phenomenon either. In 'This One Night', Denise Robins's heroine falls into bed with a stranger on a train, as they flee the Nazi advance in Europe. It was published in 1942."

Denise Robins' 1942 novel about sex with a stranger

The reference to Denise Robins made me hunt for my copy of Stranger Than Fiction, her life story published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1965, in which she refers to being elected as President of the RNA in 1961.

Towards the end of her autobiography, she describes a September 1938 holiday with one of her daughters in Czechoslovakia. After crossing the border into Germany, they were woken up, told to pack their bags and leave the train. Escorted by black-uniformed Stormtroopers, they were taken to be questioned by an official.

"I can't say however that we were at all frightened. As yet, the black shadow of the Swastika had not fallen across our country."

In fact it had and a later RNA President, Mary Burchell, was already involved in rescuing Jews from Germany which she wrote about in We Followed Our Stars whose jacket I found at Fantastic Fiction with this summary - "Ida Cook was born at 37 Croft Avenue, Sunderland. Together with her sister (Mary) Louise Cook (1901-1991), she rescued Jews from the Nazis during the 1930s. In 1965 the sisters were honoured for their rescue work and named among the 'Righteous Gentiles' in Jerusalem, thus joining Oskar Schindler among others. Ida Cook wrote over a hundred romance novels, many of which were translated. She helped to found and was for many years president of the Romantic Novelist's Association."

But probably Denise Robins was too preoccupied by her divorce from her first husband and her relationship with the man who became her second husband to be paying much attention to world affairs.

Having, through a slip-up by their travel agency, no German visa, mother and daughter had their luggage searched but were issued with temporary visas.

Although 65 novels are listed at the front of the autobiography, This One Night is not among them. However Fantastic Fiction lists a 1975 paperback published by Avon.

No doubt the novel was inspired by the journey to Czechoslovakia. And it may be that the powerful attraction the author felt towards the man she had met on a trip to Egypt, O'Neill Pearson, made her feel that her hero and heroine, if strongly attracted and feeling their lives were in danger, would make love. Whether Denise and O'Neill consummated their relationship before the divorce from her first husband is not revealed, but seems probable.

During WW2 many virtuous young women who, in peacetime, would have remained virgins until their wedding night, made love with their boyfriends and fiancés for fear that they might be killed. Who, in those circumstances, wouldn't?

Memorial site to Sir Dirk Bogarde, novelist & memoirist

2007-03-30T09:24:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
My comments on readers' comments
Bibliophile's 250th catalogue arrives

By a happy chance, on Wednesday I happened to see a print edition of The Independent that contained a feature about the memorial site to the late Sir Dirk Bogarde launched on that day which would have been his 86th birthday. Surprisingly I couldn't find the feature at the online edition of the newspaper.

I have most of Bogarde's books, preferring the autobiographies to the novels, although I greatly enjoyed his second novel, Voices in the Garden, first published by Chatto & Windus in 1981. Amazon UK offer 60 new and used copies, but they've removed the reviews.

However if you haven't come across it, the all-important first page can be read at the site where the novel is summarised thus -

"In the splendid gardens of the Riviera villa a small group of people of widely differing character come together by chance, link, hold, and finally break away. Dirk's second novel explores these disparate lives - the elegant well-born English hosts, ageing, aware, and vulnerable; the two young holiday-makers, from opposite worlds in love and eagerly exploring their way together; a dynamic Italian film director (with yacht and entourage) intent on his own ambitions and at the height of dangerous powers. All are caught up in the potent chemistry of their meeting; none remains untouched as the mid-summer picnic ends, the yacht sails away, and the garden voices fade."

At a guess, the site will take at least an hour to explore fully. It could do with a search facility as I now can't find the page with the delightful photograph I have borrowed. It was taken by actress Charlotte Rampling.

My comments on readers' comments

As there have now been eight comments on Wednesday's blog, I can't deal with them all today. Perhaps it would be best to respond to them one at a time.

The opening line of the first comment on the blog about Julie Cohen amused me. Kate Walker, [see photo by Stirling Photography] a Mills & Boon romance writer, wrote, "Well Julie's web site, like her books, is not aimed at readers of your generation, so I wouldn't expect them to appeal."

When, in 20 years' time, you're my age, Kate, you'll find that, given good health, 77 is very little different, mentally, from 57. There are physical deteriorations, of course, but the mind, if kept active, doesn't change much and many eighty-something readers can identify with heroines of their great-grandaughters' generation…providing they have a spot of common sense.

I'm puzzled by your suggestion that no comment on a book is allowable unless one has read the whole thing, which I plan to do with Julie's.

As an infrequent Mills & Boon reader, it was news to me that "the unplanned pregnancy has been the basis of so many M&B stories" for longer than Kate has been writing. Even in the 1950s when my first M&B was published, there was plenty of advice available on how to plan pregnancies. So why, all these years later, sensible heroines - and who wants readers who can identify with the other kind? - are not in charge of their own bodies is puzzling.

Perhaps, as one of my paternal aunts had her life blighted by an unplanned and outside-marriage pregnancy, I was always particularly conscious of the risks of pre-marital sex. My own pregnancy was planned after nine years' of marriage with my thirtieth birthday looming. The following year, 1960, my eighth M&B, A Call For Nurse Templar, was published, dedicated to my [home] midwife - "with my warmest thanks for her help with the book and the baby."

All is grist to the writer's mill!

Bibliophile's 250th catalogue of book bargains

Yesterday I was delighted to receive a copy of the 250th Bibliophile catalogue - a 40-page tabloid-newspaper style list of "Britain's Best Postal Book Bargains".

"Founded in 1978 for budget bookworms of all ages, we have 30 years' experience of selling the finest selection of bargain books, which we have haggled over individually from publishers to get the best prices for you. We publish the the free catalogue every five weeks and this month we are celebrating our 250th issue!"

If you're not already on their mailing list and would like to be, email orders@bibliophilebooks.com

As some of you may remember, on Sunday, July 24, 2005, I wrote the following -
It was Frances Whitehead who introduced me to one of my life's delights. On 4 December 1986, she wrote -

"I'm enclosing a copy of Bibliophile, an organisation which may not be familiar to you. They specialise in the slightly off-beat (invariably remaindered because they don't have wide appeal) and they quite often feature art, antiques, embroidery and horses, all of which I know are amongst your interests. Scrap it if it's of no use, but I usually find something different and they will post overseas."

At that time Frances was deputy editorial director of Mills & Boon, then at 15-16 Brook's Mews, London W 1, conveniently close to Claridges where Alan Boon, whom Frances later succeeded as editorial director, took his authors for long, champagne-fuelled lunches.

That's all for this week. Back on Monday.

Penguin and The Bookseller going downmarket

2007-03-29T08:06:00.000+01:00

Also in today's blog
Supporting new authors
New sex memoirs section
Penguin should be ashamed of themselves

Last night, after supper, I settled down on the sofa with a glass of wine and a dish of walnuts to read The Bookseller's Paperback Preview for July.

This monthly feature is written by Sarah Broadhurst. Here's what Lovereading.co.uk has to say about her.

"Sarah Broadhurst spent her early working life in the book trade in both retail and wholesale until the arrival of children forced her to look for freelance work she could do from home.

Her position of paperback buyer in Hatchards and then director of a book wholesale company gave her a wide knowledge of all sectors of the trade. She felt the trade lacked unbiased opinion, every publisher had the “best thing since sliced bread” and she knew the trade would benefit from an independent overview of the books published each month. She sold her idea to the trade journal The Bookseller and has, for the last 25 years, been writing a monthly article (from home!) on the new paperbacks on offer.

Over the years her opinion has become highly valued in the trade and she has become an expert in her field,'contributing to many radio and television shows and reviewing in a wide range of newspapers and magazines from The Daily Express to Good Housekeeping.

Supporting new authors

Her speciality is supporting new authors. Writers who have a tough time getting recognised. She has backed unknown first novels from the likes of Terry Pratchett, Joanna Trollope and Minette Walters and joins us now in introducing some of the unknown stars of the future to you."

[In passing, don't you hate the expression "the likes of" which is suddenly cropping up everywhere?]

July is not a good month for discriminating bookworms because most publishers aim their July list at holidaymakers, many of whom don't read much for the rest of the year and don't want their brains stretched too much while they're lying on sunbeds working up tans.

In my January 1st blog last year, I wrote, "The Bookseller's December 23/30 issue arrived yesterday morning and I see that the Paperback Preview for April by Sarah Broadhurst now includes a section headed Misery with four titles, including one in which "A 25-year-old looks back on her life of neglect and abuse, her severe depression and her eventual recovery."

I used to look forward to the Paperback Previews as a source of titles for my To Buy or Borrow list. But as time goes on I find fewer and fewer titles worth noting. Not Sarah Broadhurst's fault. She can only reflect what is happening in the UK publishing industry which, even by middlebrow standards, is moving relentlessly downmarket."

Sex memoirs

This week, Mrs Broadhurst has introduced a new and even further downmarket section : Sex Memoirs.

She has selected three, of which the nastiest-sounding is Kinky Confessions of a Working Girl by Miss S which is a Penguin original at £7.99

Penguin should be ashamed of themselves

Mrs Broadhurst's comment is - "The diary of a student's first year working in a London brothel. She is now 28 and running her own business."

A search at Penguin's website failed to produce any info, but Amazon UK describes the book thus –

"Miss S is smart, sassy, sexually frustrated and broke. With the rent money due, she spots an ad for a student job with a difference - in the massage parlour at the bottom of her road. Suddenly she can earn money doing something she is good at and get all the sex she needs. Offered a job on the spot by Mrs B, an ex-madam herself, Miss S quickly gets to grips with the rest of the girls. They include: Bella, the house 'Domme; Carrie, the resident shrink; Tina, the house snitch; and Suzie, the amateur porn star. That's not to mention the cast of clients: Mr 'Suck it Bitch', Mr Gay, Mr Pacemaker, Mr Councillor and the Willy Wacker ..."Kinky Confessions of a Working Girl" is the true, intimate diary of Miss S's extraordinary first year in a brothel and reveals what a Gemini half-hour really involves ... "

Would you want to read this book? Would you want your teenage daughter to read it?

OK, a long time ago an elderly judge, or maybe it was the defending counsel [I'll check it out for tomorrow's blog] made a fool of himself by asking a jury if they would want their wives or servants to read Lady Chatterley's Lover.

But that was then, and this is now when porn - not that I regard LCL as porn - is easily accessible. Supposedly respectable publishers shouldn't be jumping on the "prostitution is fun and profitable" bandwagon.

I doubt very much that Sarah Broadhurst has read Kinky Confessions, or that she would have given it to one of the team of readers who nowadays help her to evaluate the flood of books sent to her.

It may be that she has been pressed to include the new category by the management team at The Bookseller.

Coming tomorrow

A review of the new Dirk Bogarde memorial site
My comments on reader comments on yesterday's blog

Julie Cohen's thoughts on BookCrossing

2007-03-28T10:24:00.001+01:00

Also in today's blog
Patrick O'Brian
Sex With A Stranger

One of the younger published authors in the predominantly middle-aged Romantic Novelists' Association is Julie Cohen.

I became aware of Julie's presence in the Association when, a year or two ago, the programme for an RNA conference included a talk by Julie on how to write sex scenes.

At that point her first book for Mills & Boon had yet to be published.

My reaction was an amused "How about that for chutzpah!"

If you click on the Mills & Boon link above, you can read an interview in which Julie is asked "What is the most romantic gesture or gift you have received?" Her answer : "When my husband knew I wanted to write, he bought me a computer--a beautiful orange iMac. And hardly ever complained when he hardly ever got to use it himself."

[Two "hardly ever"s in one sentence. Tsk,tsk! One of them needs to go, Julie.]

American by birth, Julie now lives in England. In general Americans are much better at self promotion than the British. Although, that said, I have to add that her website/blog, designed for her by four North American women who call themselves collectively Swank, is one of the most garish I've encountered in nine years of website reviewing.

Well, maybe if your favourite colours are lime green, yellow and orange, and you like clusters of blobs, your first impression of the site will be more favourable than mine.

However the site's content is much better than the design, and Julie receives a lot of comments on her posts. [Although sometimes, old cynic that I am, I suspect that romance writers comment on each other's blogs from promotional motives.]

One of Julie's posts which recently I heard discussed on a private writers' forum was dated July 2, 2006 and headed "some thoughts about BookCrossing".

[If you have never heard of BookCrossing, take a look here before reading what Julie has to say.]

Julie's 2 July post concluded – "But there is that tricky issue of authors making a living, and publishers staying in business. A BookCrossing book has many readers, and the author only makes his or her very small profit on it once. A book traded is a book not bought. It’s also not a book taken out of a public library, which pay authors PLR and which need everyone’s support.

On the other hand, I’ve borrowed many books, enjoyed them, and then gone out and bought the author’s other books. If this is what BookCrossers do, then that can benefit authors. Is it?

Let me make it clear again–I’m not in any way questioning the validity or benefits of the organisation to its members. I saw that yesterday. And personally, the convention was an opportunity for me to get my work more well known, which will benefit me. But how about authors in general?"

There have been 22 comments on this post. It doesn't take long to read them all. One of the most interesting is this –

"Hi Julie
I was at your workshop and thoroughly enjoyed it - so much so that I picked up my own writing project when I had some time on Sunday.
I can appreciate your points about authors not receiving payment from books which have been ‘Crossed - we all need to make a living - but I wanted to tell you a little about myself and my book-buying habits.
All through school I was a reading fanatic and pocket money was spent on books. When I went to University and later to work, I continued reading and buying books. Then I became ill (I have Bipolar Disorder). My concentration was completely shot and I spent far too much time watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer videos as, intellectually, that was just my level.
After a few years, I realised that all my books were gathering dust as I was unable to concentrate sufficiently to read them and so I decided to BookCross them with the intention of getting rid of the lot and the bookcases they lived in to boot.
And so I encountered BookCrossers for the very first time. They insisted on sending me books. And it would have been rude not to at least try to read them. And I found that I *could* read again and that much of my concentration had returned.
Because I was reading again I returned to the bookshops and started restocking my shelves. Sunday afternoon is no longer the Eastenders Omnibus and a big bar of chocolate - I’d far rather spend it in Waterstone’s and then go for coffee with friends.
I often buy two copies of books - one for me and one to BookCross - and have discovered so many new authors whose books I now have on the bookcases (fortunately I didn’t get rid of them!)
My point, obviously, is that pre-BookCrossing I wasn’t buying any books and now I buy far too many (and love every minute!)
This is just my experience but I have heard other, similar stories.
With best wishes and thanks for a wonderful workshop.
Laura"

Patrick O'Brian

Like many of the people who posted comments, I always buy second-hand copies of books by new-to-me authors. But if I love a book, I will then buy the author's new books in hardback, as I did with the wonderful Patrick O'Brian.

Actually he was discovered by Mr Bookworm in Polly's [second-hand] Bookshop on the sea front at Jávea in Spain. Whether the shop is still there, I don't know as we never go to Jávea now. Thirty years ago it was a delightful little fishing port. The last time I saw it, a few years ago, it was horribly overbuilt, like most of the Costa Blanca's coastline.

Sex with a stranger

While at Julie Cohen's website, I read this –

MARRIED IN A RUSH
Mills & Boon Modern Extra, October 2006
"Joanna Graham treats commitment like a communicable disease. She likes her affairs fun and string-free. So when she ends up having amazing sex with a gorgeous stranger in a closet in the National Gallery, she thinks it’s the carefree beginning to a perfect summer holiday. And then she takes the pregnancy test."

I have serious misgivings about authors romanticising situations which, in real life, are 99% likely to end in disaster.

Having sex with a stranger is an act of reckless stupidity. Ideally, making love should only be done by people who love each other, and love involves knowing the other person well and trusting them. Yes, casual sex happens and the fall-out is all around us. But what happens in the real world and what happens in romantic fiction are, or should be, two different things.

No doubt in Married In A Rush, the author contrives a happy ending. But, by the sound of it, the beginning of the story is totally irresponsible and I'm surprised that Julie's editor didn't express my own misgivings.

Yes, the majority of Mills & Boon readers are sensible adults who take the romances with a strong pinch of salt. But what about the teenagers who read them?

Is Kizzy Neal,the 14-year-old who is expecting a baby in May, a Mills & Boon reader? Maybe not. But there are many silly young girls who are. Responsible writers and editors should bear them in mind.