Bookbuyer's
Bookend
It is pleasant to be able to acknowledge a dazzling achievement in this gloom-ridden Christmas week. The honours, with hearty seasonal congratulations, go appropriately to, Bookbuyer's favourite Christian publishers Hodder and Stoughton, who have capped an eventful year by carrying off the E50 Auberon Waugh Memorial Prize for the best blurb of the year.
Lest readers think that Bookbuyer's friend and former colleague has conceived a sudden benevolent affection towards the publishing trade, let the facts be made quite clear. The prize is the offspring and plaything of one Desmond Elliott, owner of the Arlington Press and a very able literary agent to such authors as Leslie Thomas, Derek Lambert, Adam Diment (remember him?) and Stanley Morgan. Mr Elliott instituted the Auberon Waugh award in honour of his favourite literary critic earlier this year. and the Oscar-style presentation was made at the Publishers Publicity Circle Christmas party in the sauna-bath salons of the New Press Club last week.
Mr Elliott was a little coy about the number of entries for the prize, but since there was a second award for the wotst blurb of the year, it is fair to imagine that publishers were somewhat nervous of sub mitting specimens for the first category in case they unwittingly won the second. Nonetheless there could be no disputing the
winner. Bookbuyer is indebted to Hodder and Stoughton's trade department for supplying a copy of Caradog Pritchard's novel Full Moon, from which the following memorable jacket blurb is taken:
"A young man is walking up an empty village street under the full moon, his world in his pocket, and out toward the dark lake on
the Welsh mountainside that was the boundary of his childhood. As he walks he
remembers how that same full moon marshalled a drunken Will Starched Collar to salvation and the transvestite Em to the asylum, smiling like a collie who's been killing sheep. Here, he and Moi and Huw dug for pignuts and discussed the mechanics of
crucifixion; there the visiting choir sang for funds to sustain the pit strike in the distant South. And in the reassuring centre of the
world there was his mother, a lulling presence in the big bed, who contrived to keep the two of them from Friday to Friday on the parish money, and fought the remorselessness of life until it became an unequal struggle against the fury of the moon ..."
It is sad to record that this epic tour de force was also awarded the prize for the worst blurb of the year. As Bookbuyer left the party he saw a representative of the publishers in shifty collusion with the trade press, ungallantly uttering the most fervent denials that he was the author of the piece. If he is to be believed — and after reading that, Bookbuyer is prepared to believe anything — then the real copywriter may never be known to the outside world. It is a tragic note on which to end a year which has seen its full share of publishing tragedies. May 1974 bring us better things.
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