Bookend
Bookbuyer
In the light of Bookbuyer's remarks recently about the pros and cons of ' vanity publishing' — the Regency Press and the like — he is pleased to receive a letter about a genuinely helpful and even altruistic enterprise. This is something called the Poetry Bureau, operating out of Cranbourne Street, which offers critical and ' marketing ' advice to would-be poets. For £3, so his correspondent informs him, the 'Poetry Bureau will give a full and cogent appraisal of 100 lines of verse (£1 for every extra 100 lines), and may even be persuaded to criticise for free any background material sent in with it.
Bookbuyer is delighted to publicise this activity if the Poetry Bureau is as good as his letter makes out. And he has something else in mind. If only a few of the hundreds of poets who submit verse each month to his overworked colleague on the Spectator books pages (not to mention other magazines aad poetry publishers) could be persuaded to temper their steel in the burning critical furnaces of Cranbourne Street — would not the world be a more tolerable place? Bookend is more commonly a postbox for dissatisfied bookbuyers, and this column is quite happy to air their grievances when these are well-founded.
A lady writes from Edinburgh that she applied to her local lending library for a copy of Frances Yates's The Rosicrucian Enlightenment published recently by Routledge at £4.50. Told by her lending library that the book was £5.00 and thus outside its purchasing scope, she applied to another of Edinburgh's leading booksellers only to be assured that the price was indeed £5.00.
An important book like this, given laudatory reviews and chosen by Hugh Trevor-Roper as his Book of the Year, is clearly worth checking up on. Routledge were convinced that such a mark-up contravened the Net Book Agreement. Bookbuyer contacted the four best bookshops in Edinburgh — James Thin, John Grant, William Brown and Bauermeister's — and got no further. Not one copy was to be found in stock.
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