The Prospects
The Believers are scattered; there are some within the walls of Laodicea, but it is difficult to think of Believing firms other than one or two small ones like John Calder, which publishes Beats; French nouveaux romans and other oddities still less fashionable, chiefly—so far as one can see—becauie Mr. Calder is devoted to them. (His authors seem unlikely to get rich, other perhaps than the authors of the bread- and-butter sex books he has published from time to time, but they are also unlikely to see them- selves described as an undisciplined work-foree.) Is there any reason, then, why Laodicea should not let in the invader? Or why we should lament when it does? Americans might show a livelier interest in experiment, whether in business or in writing. They might mend, rather faster than our people seem likely to, the distributive chaos of the trade; they might speed a vertical re- organisation, with publthers putting much]. needed capital into the ood bookshops and opening up themselves Other ways of selling books. No doubt there is some danger of 'homogenising,' There is Always a danger. But if our culture is alive it should be able to withstand some manipulation by Americans; if it is too weak to be other than a puppet we might as well hand over the strings to those who can best work them.
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