16 MARCH 1974, Page 24

Bookbuyer's

Bookend

The sad saga of Barrie and Jenkins, publishers to P. G. Wodehouse, continues to unfold. Ever since last November when the Hon Tony Samuel made it known that he was open to offers, the firm's future has hung in a somewhat rickety balance. A consortium led by Barnes suspended editorial director Christopher Maclehouse looked, talked, and went off with its tail between its legs. The American-owned New English Library looked, and looked again, and despite reports to the contrary has now withdrawn from the fray. Another consortium hovers in the background but, so far as Bookbuyer knows, is still just looking. Mr Pat Newman Of Corgi is just looking. So whither Barrie and Jenkins? An unexpected newcomer has now appeared on the scene: its spokesman appears to be merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson — prompted by none other t.han Mr Christopher Shaw, whizz-kid passe whose disappearance from the English publishing scene four years ago went surprisingly unlamented. Bloomsbury has not heard the last of Mr Shaw. And nor have BookbuyeF's readers.

Felicitations to Ian Norrie, the Hampstead bookseller who has spent the past six years battling to get the book trade to reveal a little of itself. Last week the result of his endeavours — a revised edition for Cape of Mumby's Publishing and Bookselling — saw the light of day. Bookbuyer has always had a weakness for Mumby, which succeeded in the space of 180,000 words in presenting a scholarly yet thoroughly readable history of the British book trade since its beginnings. Published in 1930, it was revised in 1949 by Mumby himself and again by Max Kenyon in 1956, since when it has sat like a bible awaiting its new testament.

Anyone undertaking the task, which would inevitably involve rewriting much of the twentieth century history, had clearly to be an egotist or an altruist. Mr Norrie shows flashes of both. He is less than modest, for instance, in the way he does away with everything Mumby wrote of the years after 1870, though it is true that short shrift had been given to modern bookselling; he is self-indulgent in his perpetual wisecracks against anything he personally disapproves of (computers, banks, that sort of thing) and in his apparent determination to give every postwar publishing individual a mention — which may have a place in a column like this, but not — with respect to the dozens of nice chaps Norrie refers to — in a history of the book trade "from earliest times to the present day."

Having said that, however, it should quickly be added that Mr Notrie has also produced a mass of detailed new material on the trade's prime movers over the last hundred years: for every publisher a potted history; for most booksellers a racy curriculum vitae (nobody ever bothered with them before); and for each trade issue, whether obscenity, discounts or the Net Book Agreement, a witty and fluent analysis. For that (and never mind the errors, said the journalist) he deserves simple and grateful thanks. One day the book trade may find its Liddell Hart, but there is no sign of him yet. In the meantime Ian Norrie is as entertaining a substitute as one is likely to find.