Bookbuyer
Sir: Although he devotes the whole of his November 15 column to me, Bookbuyer does not quite indicate what my article in the New Review was about — even in the relatively incidental passage which he chooses to belabour. The suggestion was not that publishers be indiscriminately shaken down, but that the money which the Arts Council awards via its literature panel could be supplemented from profitable areas of publishing. Judging from recent press reports it is unlikely to be supplemented from anywhere else. The notion that a state-appointed body should redistribute a portion of publishing profits for the benefit of literature may strike Bookbuyer as emanating from cloudcuckoo-land but the experiment has been tried in lands as actual and nearby as France.
If Bookbuyer is indeed a book-buyer he might have noticed that the article was principally concerned with the effects of rising prices on marginally profitable books.
John Sutherland Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, London WCI.
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