Bookend
One of the incidental delights of lee-through publishers' Spring List catalogo is the " brilliant," " sparkling," "even tive," " fiercely sincere " prose that lop literary editors on to review their bOSir: and booksellers to stock them for the gor eral public. Who, for instance, could resToll, this hymn to novelist Catherine Gavio A,ton talents, which Hodder and Stoughton u'hec up from the Los Angeles Mirror-News? Boi ,bef Her writing cuts across life and death, la:USE and war, debauchery and devotion with t'hlo
of sei Tolstoy. boldness and not a little of the grasp
a What Miss Gavin would do with the gra5wc of Tolstoy is left unsaid; but I'm afr3.1 the Mirror-News failed to move our oo; novel reviewer, Auberon Waugh, who ie to Give Me The Daggers to make its own th At least in this case the publisher's ed tor and publicity people were given thel roef head. What is much harder to deal with w an author who insists on writing his 01 CT blurb — and is important enough to ge his own way. Robert Graves is the oril ire Cassell author who insists on providing K own copy, and Denis Wheatley apparer10 0 contributes the thrilling intros on the lac s' kets of his own books. Vladimir Nabo10 goes further. In his, contracts with paperback publishers Panther and Penguir, he specifies approval not only of blur` copy but of jacket design as well — until quite recently has taken advantage 0' the clause to get his son, Dimitri NaboRo/' to do the design work. Sometimes it isn't too hard to tell wile° an author has been at work, earnestly corn peting with the copywriters. There are n° prizes for guessing the authorship of ale following passage — The invocation of Blake in the title of thi5 book is not gratuitous. As the author insi5t5 in the introductory chapter, the opening lec' ture had for its inspiration and essential drill a positive concern, and for aim to present and further that. The nature of the concert' is, in its complexity, force and urgency, whet the totality of the lectures that form the bonit defines, developes and communicates."
It is, of course, F. R. Leavis, whose ne°, book Nor Shall My Sword is published bY Chatto and Windus next month.
There is inevitable competition at the tnn: ment for the editorship of the Guardians Woman's Page, now that Mary Stott (wide' ly-regarded as a first-rate editor) has re' ceded to a fortnightly column. Jill Tweedie. naturally, is in the running. So is Linde Christmas, and there are those who would not deny the possibility that her recent promotion to a regular staff appointment on Features was a first step in edging Mis5 Tweedie out of the top job.
What may very well happen is that the job will go out on commission, overlord0 by Peter Fiddick, the present Features Edl" tor of the Guardian. The hope is that this vaguely unisex approach will attract more men readers to the page — although comparison of the Women's Pages in the Observer and Sunday Times suggest that It makes little difference either way.
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