Bookend
Weidenfeld and Nicolson seem on the face of it to be about to have a very good year. In their Spring list they have new novels from Margaret Drabble. Richard Condon and Andrew Sinclair. together with Vladimir Nabokov's first Russian novel Glory, previously unpublished in this contry. There is also Paul Johnson on a thousand years of British history from the Roman Occupation to the rise of the New Statesman, and memoirs from Lord Gladwyn and Cecil Beaton dealing with various aspects of foreign affairs.
But Print Out, the valuable and informative newsletter of the publishing branch of ASTMS, Clive Jenkins's white-collar union, has some very hard things to say in its current issue about the present state of Weidenfeld finances. They quote a fall in the profits of the company's holding group from £18,991 in 1968 to a loss of £4,083 in 1970 (attributed by the management to "trade cost inflation ") and the very high level of unearned advances. "Royalties paid in advance of publication," they say, "in 1969, totalled £365,521 and in 1970 £377,066 while authors' unearned royalties on published books totalled £65,298 at the end of 1969 and £135.429 at the end of 1970." In this situation, apparently, there have been many staff redundancies declared and a number of other resignations.
Sir George Weidenfeld would undoubtedly declare these figures to be misleading and inaccurate, and, indeed, made several comments about the Print Out analysis which must remain off the record. What he does admit is that the several large longterm advance contracts entered into over the past two years, coming at the same time as the devaluation of the American dollar and the great escalation in costs, involved his company in serious liquidity problems—" a sort of Rolls-Royce story," Sir George Weidenfeld explained, and certainly it is a story which the figures printed by the ASTMS tend to bear out.
But for all this, Sir George is cheerful enough and hoping for a record year. The American publishers, with two bad years behind them, are now retooling, he says, and the firm orders are coming in for Weidenfeld and Nicholson books.
The American publishing compaly of McGraw-Hill, busy trying to recover the £250,000 paid to Clifford Irving for his autobiography of Howard Hughes, have just agreed to pay damages to the estate of James H. Macgregor whose book The Wounded Knee Massacre was apparently plagiarised by Chief Red Fox for his Memoirs. W. H. Allen, who publish the Memoirs over here, are very happy about the situation. They will make no attempt to take it off the market, and if anyone tries to sue them, they can claim from McGraw-Hill, from whom they bought the rights in all good faith.
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