Bookbuyer's
Bookend
This autumn's publishing programmes, looking for all the world like last spring's publishing programmes (which in several cases they are) make better reading than many of the books themselves. Even without indulging in the popular reviewer's sport of blurb-bashing, there is a feast of fun to be had between those catalogue covers. You can, for instance, follow the case of the creeping price-rise, as illustrated by Chris E3onington's Everest SouthWest Face which, having been announced by Hodder at 63.50 in February, jollied itself up to 63.95 and is now to be published in September at 64.50. You may, if the mood takes you, enjoy the trick of the changing title, a metamorphosis embodied in Paul Foot's The Fall and Fall of Reginald Maudling (Deutsch)
which has become — courtesy no doubt of the
libel lawyers — A Little Pot of Money. Or
again, there is the trick of the changing publi sher, so that our old friend, the Memoirs of Sir Adrian Boult (previously announced under the Cassell imprint) now pops up on the Hamish
Hamilton list as My Own Trumpet.
There are books appearing that one could swear had been published already. And there are books mysteriously disappearing without ever having been published at all. Designer Royal, the autobiography of Norman Hartnett, is a case in point — though since his publisher, Tom Stacey, threatened to adorn the book with scented endpapers, its quiet demise is probably just as well. You can observe ex amples of an almost psychic sympathy among publishers as a result of which we have eight books on Hitler, not to mention the memoirs of Himmler's astrologer. There are studies of history as seen through newspapers (from Murray and Tom Stacey); there are histories of the typewriter, from both Heinemann and Tom Stacey; and of Lloyds, from Peter Davies and Tom Stacey. Sidgwick and Jackson have histories of the great Atlantic liners (so did Cassell, last Au tumn) and airships (so did Cassell, the Au tumn before) and a biography of Sukarno (like Allen Lane, last Spring). Hutchinson publish
Haunted Britain, Harrap Haunted London and Muller kaunted Inns. You can choose between Murderer's London (Hale) and Murder in Lon don (Barker); or The Faber Book of Love Poems; or Joan of Arc and Jeanne D'Arc; or Stunting inthe Cinema and Stunt . . .
It is heartwarming to learn that Christopher Dolley, the mercurial former chairman of Penguin, is about to come in from the cold. It is now just over six months since his departure in unfortunate circumstances from the Penguin pinnacle. The 41-year-old Mr Dolley has become an expensive fellow since the days of his modest 610,000 a year service contract under the late Sir Allen Lane, as those publishers with whom he has had recent talks must have quickly discovered. His new employers will not, however, be either BPC or CCM but another conglomerate — the Reed-owned 1PC.
Those who escaped the 'healing knife* which IPC found it necessary to apply to its subsidiary the Hamlyn Group three years ago, may have wondered whether another highly paid executive was the company's first priority in its hard-fought struggle back into the black. They need uot worry, however, since for the time being at least Mr Dolley will be involved in neither Hamlyn nor Butterworths, IPC's legal and medical publisher. He will be responsible for " book development." Bookbuyer will watch such developments with interest.
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