Bookend
Bookbuyer
Spring is here and can't you tell. With that frisky optimism which the season inspires, several new publishers are beginning to blossom, or soon will. Certainly the climate is right enough, for publishing is currently enjoying one of its buoyant bouts — not least the large corporations, most of whom are now showing a tendency, irritating for their detractors, to make even more money than they did last year. So welcome to Saxon House, a new trade offshoot of the large educational publishers, D. C. Heath — they launch in June, a general non-fiction list of history, sociology and the like; good luck also to Spencer Brown who, with an interesting pseudononymous novel called Annie, start in May; and to Wildwood House, already mentioned in this column, who have already started.
Of the infant ventures, Quartet Books clearly have the well-deserved silver spoon. Their imminent Midway Editions of original fiction (software and jacketed a la Francaise), at prices of just over a pound, seem a well-conceived and overdue response to a public which has rightly proffered a Harvey Smith to the expensive hardback novel. 'This energetic outfit — which will also produce conventional paperback reprints as well as .hardcover library editions — needs no further publicity from Bookbuyer who, if he did not already spend all his money on books, would feel moved to invest some of it in Quartet.
Another engaging newcomer, launched last month, is Milton House — small editorial unit set up by the printing firm Hunt Barn
. ard. That particular alliance — printer and publisher — is less common in Britain than one might imagine. One danger, as BPC discovered during their Fred Karno period in the late 1960s', is that a printing manager with a Captive book contract may see little incentive to be competitive or even efficient, with the result that the publisher often suffers. In the case of Collins, whose chairman is a publisher first, this has not as a rule been allowed to happen, and the arrangement works tolerably well for Dent (who usg their own Aldine Press) and for Hutchinson, whose Printing Trust includes Ole Anchor Press and Benham. Not surprisingly, the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses do for themselves, as do two map publishers, Philip and Bartholomew.
What is intriguing — or amusing, depending on your turn of mind — about the Hunt Barnard/Milton House association is that HB won't print for their publisher — not out of .masochistic bloodymindedness, but because their plant is geared to the printing of paperbacks, whereas the policy of Milton House is to produce, initially, hardcover fiction only. There is, of course, a bit more to it than that. Milton novels will be made to measure in the same proportions as those of the standard paperback (that is, taller and narrower than most hardbacks) so that if, as the publishers hope, they succeed in selling softcover rights, Hunt Barnard will be able to offer a complete litho printing package as well. And from business cometh business . At the same time. Milton are canvassing for hardcover rights in paperback ' originals' — like, for instance. Sphere's novelisation of the ITV series Upstairs, Downstairs. They are budgeting to produce twenty-four novels this year, forty in 1974, and hope to achieve a turnover of some E100,000 in their first twelve months.
Several literary agents have been slow to come forward with properties although, mammon knows, they are usually ready enough to bleat over the difficulty of finding publishers prepared to undertake middlebrow fiction. Nor could'Hunt Barnard be accused of being on the verge of bankruptcy; their turnover last year was something over Eli million and their profit came to . . no, Bookbuyer sees no reason to save agents a taxi fare to Companies House.
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