Bookend
Bookbuyer
The suicide rate among publishers' sales managers is surprisingly low. Theirs is certainly no task for the timorous. A book may be ill-conceived, tattily produced and publicised by stealth, but after everyone else has had his fling, the overstock are counted against the sales manager. If the book fails, it is because he has not appreciated its true potential; if it succeeds, his editors get full credit for flair. But foe final indignity is for him to be saddled ten times a month with the silliest publishing decision of all: how many copies to print. Should he be cautious and risk running out, as Cassell did, several times, with The Cruel Sea? Or should he show daring and perhaps, in so doing, become the overnight darling of the remainder merchants?
With Christmas, comes the crunch. Printers who have been begging for work in late spring are suddenly snowed under wit'n requests for last-minute reprints of books which have gone better than expected — and they are aften unable to oblige. Last year, a superb publicity campaign for Monty Python's Big Red Book helped produce at least one big red sales face when Methuen discovered — too late, and to other publishers' seasonal merriment — that they had under-printed to the tune of some 20,000 copies. This year they have put it successfully into paperback, and with a sense of fun worthy of the TV programme itself, have proceeded to run out again. Some booksellers, the prospect of bumper sales melting before their eyes, may not share the joke; nor will they split their sides at the thought of Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler, My Part in his Downfall, which Penguin can't get back into print until after Christmas. Meanwhile, those perennial best-sellers The Day of the Jackal (Hutchinson) and The Moon's a Balloon (Hamish Hamilton) have been out of stock for the past week.
Bookbuyer's sympathy for publishers in a similar predicament is tempered only by the knowledge that they — if not booksellers — will be laughing most of their way to the bank. Other books you may have difficulty in getting for Christmas include Mysterious Britain, Garnstone Press's major autumn title which, mysteriously or not, won't be reprinted before January; the Marx Brothers' Why a Duch?, copies of which, report Studio Vista, are somewhere on the Atlantic, or otherwise in the soup; and Dent's Everyman's Encyclopedia "printing difficulties "). Macmillan have found the going too good for Roger Longrigg's highly praised History of Horse Racing, and so have Chatto for their happily conceived biography of Virginia Woolf — now available in January.
The answer to the problem, Bookbuyer concludes, is for the publisher to have his own printing works. This rare suggestion did, however, fail to raise much enthusiasm from Collins: after. oversubscribing Sir Arthur Bryant's history of the Rifle Brigade (out next Monday) they discovered that they were unable to get a reprint from their own Glasgow works before December 29.
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