Bookbuyer's
Bookend
It was nice to see the new publishers Wildwood House figuring on the short-list for this year's Booker Prize. Although most papers managed to omit the fact — they merely gave Michael Joseph as the publishers of Elizabeth Mayor's A Green Equinox — the book was one of the first titles chosen by Wildwood's literary adviser as part of the firm's new Fiction Scheme, under which they publish in conjunction with hardback publishers like Joseph and use run-on sheets to produce a cheaper edition. .
A Green Equinox is not published until this week — short-list candidates for Booker are usually already out — and it will .be interesting to see whether the Goncourt-style prepublication publicity can give the book a sig
• nificant sales send-off. As to the ultimate :winner, to be announced on November 28, it
▪ would be folly to try and predict. Nobody wIseemed to think John Berger's G would win
• last year, nor that P. H. Newby would win in the prize's inaugural year. On those grounds
/Beryl Bainbridge's The Dressmaker would seem a good candidate. Several bookmen are . tipping J. G. Farrell's The Seige of Krishnapur, but can the judging committee really go on ignoring that veteran Booker campaigner Iris Murdoch who has appeared on the short-list twice before without ever winning? Once may have been an accident, twice a coincidence, but three times . . . it will look like pure provocation.
Not to be left out of it — there are, after all, more than fifty literary awards this year, ranging from the Clarifoil Laminated Design Competition to the Auberon Waugh prize for blurbs — Bookbuyer would like to bestow a few of his own: The Award for Chumps of the Month goes without hesitation to the Library Association, proud producers of a fine new recommended list of quality children's books. There is only one thing wrong. In calling it What Shall I Read? the Association has contrived to duplicate the name of the excellent children's book list which Leonard Fearnley's Book Promotion Services have been producing every year since 1966. Since 40,000 copies of Fearnley's catalogue are mailed to school librarians, since the catalogue is often used by public librarians, and since it has frequently been the subject of discussion between Fearnley and the Library Association, one can only marvel at the Association's capacity for perpetrating utter confusion.
Party of the Month Award goes to Studio Vista for their magnificent launching of Poiret — complete with mannequin parade — at the Cafe Royal. It cannot have cost a penny under two and a half thousand pounds.
Party Trick of the Month was performed by smooth Knightsbridge public relations firm, Galitzine and Partners. In organising on behalf of the Maltese Tourist Board a reception in honour of Nicholas Monsarrat and his superb book The Kappillan of Malta, they succeeded in printing the wrong address on the invitations. Among the mystified victims was the author himself, whom the organisers nearly omitted to invite in the first place.
This month's Prize for Quick Commercial Thinking goes to the Times' advertisement department. Moved perhaps by friend Will Waspe's gentle reproval .of Bernard Levin for unashamedly using his columnist's platform to plug his own cartoon shop, the Times admen have now sent Mr Levin an invoice for E250. They might have been safer with a pro forma. Finally, the Remark of the Month (attr.) must belong to Mr John Attenborough, the ever-sonear-to-retiring director of Hodder and Stoughton. Surveying with a general sense of gloom the recent book developments in Australia — many Australians would like to see an end to Britain's virtually exclusive rights to that market — the, quick-fire Attenborough quipped wittily: "Have the Australians the faintest idea of what they are doing? By rejecting us they are opening the door to the Americans.' If he hadn't said that, then he deserves a consolation copy of Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough. If he did say it, he deserves two copies.
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