Bookbuyer's
Bookend
The purpose and point of review pages is a matter that has occupied the finest minds since the birth of the printed word. Whether. like John Osborne, you believe that critics are "negligible, untalented and totally contemptuous of anyone trying to do asything serious." or whether you think they perform a useful service in helping sift, monitor and assess the formidable number of new titles appearing, is a matter of your own taste and the literary editor's ability. On balance most bookmen regard review pages as a good idea c4ther than a bad one and indeed they do provide a weekly publicity platform out of all proportion to the consumer demand for hardback books.
Be this as it may, the review system seems to survive, and on a reasonably equable and unquestioned basis — at least until last month. The trouble started when Mr Tom Rivers, a small and serious-minded publisher from Leicester, decided to send out review copies of John Cowper Powys' WeyrnouihSands stamped with the words "review copy." The books went off and the publisher sat back and waited. Some days later a copy was returned to him by the literary editor of a provincial paper with a letter explaining that he made a point of not assigning books for review which were marked "review copy," adding that the reviewer was entitled to have a clean copy to keep for himself, to give to his friends or "to Mr Rivers had the gallantry not to reveal the name of the newspaper concerned (Bookbuyer, cad that he is, suggests it is the Birmingham Post) but confessed to some concern because he thought the practice of selling review copies to second-hand dealers was something to be discouraged — on the grounds that it deprived both publisher and author of revenue. He also implied that it was not the publisher's job to subsidise reviewers, but rather that of the newspaper itself. Pausing only to say that the Birmingham Post book page is one of the best in the country and that on this issue the literary editor has at least had the courage to nail his colours to the mast, Bookbuyer finds both attitudes somewhat curious.
On the one hand it is absurd for Mr Rivers to complain of loss of revenue on a copy sent out voluntarily and for reasons of commercial or personal self-interest. It is almost as absurd to complain that the author is losing money too — for if Mr Rivers could quite easily transmit his compassion into cash by paying his author royalties on all copies dispatched — whether free or purchased — rather than expect that author to subsidise the cost of his own publicity. At the same time Mr Rivers is right to be disturbed by the ever-growing trade in review copies. There are now 33,000 books published annually. Some are re-issues, some highly specialist, some little more than pamphlets. Nonetheless it is fair to assume that between 3,000 and 5,000 titles are sent out, in some quantity, for review each year. The eleven principal national dailies wbuld get most of these; the six or so serious weeklies would get many of them; the twenty-odd provincial dailies would get some of them; and the BBC would get as many as it could get. Add to that the multifarious monthly glossies, local radio stations, literary hangers-on and others, and you can see that this is hardly hay. Bookbuyer's own estimate would be that the turnover in half-price review copies is well over E100,000 a year — (a mere drop in the ocean as against the cost of advertising), but a sizeable amount when you consider that authors, poorly rewarded as they are, do not receive royalties on free copies and that any such loss is in a sense a double loss. Some journalists, like the Sunday Mirror's Mark Kahn, donate review copies to a good cause, but most regard the sale of them as legitimate perks. It is perhaps asking too much for poorly paid reviewers (many of them authors too) to be as charitable, but the literary traders of Fleet Street might do well to remember that they are probably being paid at least six times as much as the authors who provide them with a living.
Previous page
