All right for columnists
Sir: Celebrating the end of fixed prices for books, Simon Jenkins is guilty of uncharac- teristically muddled thinking (Centre point, 11 November).
The case against a price free-for-all is simple: the effect of large publishers offer- ing cut-price bestsellers to large bookshop chains will be to deprive smaller, indepen- `We're getting overtures from Andrew Lloyd Webber.' dent bookshops of the bread-and-butter sales upon which they depend.
Does the potential demise of indepen- dent bookshops matter? Yes it does. In recent years, various attempts by bullies, fanatics and lawyers to suppress publica- tions — Spycatcher, The Satanic Verses, Bower's biography of Maxwell — have been foiled not by the large chains, who for the most part cowered behind the skirts of their lawyers, but by independent bookshops.
It will be fiscally marginal publications new fiction and poetry in particular — that will be the first to be squeezed out. Few authors spring fully-fledged to maturity; some even produce what Jenkins airily dis- misses as 'mediocre works' before they hit their stride. Until now, price control has allowed publishers to invest in future talent.
Jenkins' comparison of the price war to Allen Lane's paperback revolution is as wrong-headed as his apparent belief that most journalists have supported the Net Book Agreement. The opposite has been the case. Of course columnists, with their in- built readership and public profile, have lit- tle fear that their own occasional books will be numbered among the mediocre works.
Terence Blacker 91 Wendell Road, London W12
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