The Invasion of Laodicea
By JOHN ROSSELLI • A 'COTTAGE industry,' an 'occupation for ,Mgentlemen'—publishers are beginning to find stuck on their name-plates a collection of tags like these, each of them an invitation to some Mr. Clore to walk in and clean up. For over a year scarcely a month has gone by with- out news of some American takeover or some domestic merger supposedly aimed at keeping the Americans out. Publishers are news; the breakaway directors of Michael Joseph, whose toing and froing would, a few years ago, have kept the Garrick Club in small talk, now turn up in the gossip column of the Daily Express. But the news is seldom of a kind that publishers ought to welcome.
A trade that becomes takeover country sounds like a backwater, almost as marshy as the lower reaches of bookselling. The stories that go the rounds tell how one firm rejected Saturday Night and Sunday Morning because its proletarians were not virtuous enough and how another nearly lost one of the key works of the Mac- millan era because the chairman could hardly bring himself to talk to the provincial author. Those who know a bit more about the trade lament its failure year after year to do much about the chaos of its distribution, system. So far as publishers have an image it is of a ripe well-connected personage who takes his time over a good lunch, but is not specially com- petent at spotting either a financial manoeuvre or an uncommon new writer.
Is this justified? Looking in from outside I should say that the image is overdrawn, but that there runs through it an awkward water- mark of truth.
The trouble, so far as one can see, is not that the trade has got stupider or lazier, but that the world is changing. British publishers do many things as well as they have ever done them; they are still among the best in the world at the tech- nical job of putting out a middlebrow but sober novel or biography. Some of these things, though, are no longer wanted as badly as they were, while the world would probably like other things which most publishers are not supplying.
Then, too, the part of the trade most in the public eye is now also the weakest—the publish- ing of new general books. People who read that Collins made a trading profit of just over £1 million in 1960 are mostly unaware that much of this comes out of Bibles, diaries, a printing works and a long-established series of classics, just as people who see a Longmans biography reviewed in the Spectator seldom guess that in Longmans' 1961 trading profit of £966,000 the biography is a mere drop to the oceans of edu- cational books, many of them written, printed and distributed in Asia and Africa. The amount of newspaper space given to the recent Cape- Joseph affair seems ;odd when one recalls that, as businesses, both these distinguished firms are small, and that so long as they can go on putting out books of their usual quality the public need not worry much about who owns them. In con- trast, not many people outside the trade have heard of Mr. Paul Hamlyn, a businessman whose business is a good deal larger and whose output, even if one dislikes it, is something of a portent —though what really props up the few estab- lished fortresses of the trade is neither Hamlyn's glossy encyclopedias nor Cape's novels, but pile upon pile of algebra or engineering textbooks.
General publishing is the part of the trade where firms are capable of unknowingly issuing a book cribbed, as it turns out, from a foreign original or larded with errors and mistransla- tions; where, again, one Kon-Tiki lets loose a flood of indifferent books about ocean crossings, in small boats, and Lucky Jim a series of novels hopefully set in redbrick universities. When book buyers, that rare breed, complain of long delays in getting single copies of the books they want it is usually biography or history or travel books they are thinking of.
Some British textbooks, too—one hears it said from time to time—are unsatisfactory or out of date. But this is a market where the customers —the teachers—are better able to spot weak- nesses straight off and where publishers need a good deal of professional skill to keep going. By the same token the firms with the back lists of classics or Bibles or algebra textbooks arc the hardest for economic winds to shake, as they are the hardest to establish. But even their operations, vast though they are on the scale of British publishing, are not vast enough to save the trade as a whole from feeling the American draught.
Sooner and faster than most people here, the Americans have realised that books are now big business, simply because more and more people will want to read them. This is above all true of educational books of all sorts, from Gray's Anatomy to a booklet that tells you how to take a motor-scooter apart and put it together again. In the United States itself some universities are doubling or quadrupling their population; in Ghana, Singapore, Jamaica and wherever else the new nations use English as a means of ab- sorbing knowledge, especially technological knowledge, the hunger for English-language text- books (and for English paperbacks, the 'partly educational' ones in particular) can only increase with the years.
This is the kind of market that, calls for a great capital expansion among the suppliers, as Wall Street has been quick to see. In the past few years American publishing has undergone astonishing transformations. Firms like Random House and Harcourt Brace, which before the war were distinguished imprints with a solid, middle-sized output, are now large ventures con- trolling several other firms; their general list, though still of good quality, is now only a corner of an educational empire; their capital issues have been known to quadruple in value within a short time, such is the American belief in this `growth industry.' Other giants are McGraw-Hill, with its technological books, and Crowell Collier, which controls Macmillan of New York and, under shrewd Wall Street ownership, is deter- mined to sell books the world over.
Previous page
