Book marks
British publishers are understandably irked by the American government's attempts to dismantle the British Market Agreement by means of its recent Anti-trust suit (this column, December 14). For one thing, the British Market Agreement — which encourages publishers not to enter into any contract for a book unless the rights granted in it include those for the traditional British Commonwealth — is fully in accordance with British Law. For another, any legal action which disrupted the principle of territorial exclusivity would not merely damage the sale of British books and drive book prices even higher than they are at present; it would also disturb the law of international copyright.
Such weighty matters are best left to the experts, but Bookbuyer cannot refrain from asking the American government this: is it not odd that it should so energetically seek to "liberate" foreign publishing practice when, in its very own backyard, it perpetuates one of the most discriminatory pieces of anti-copyright legislation this side of the Iron Curtain? For if you are an American author, and your book is manufactured outside America and more than 1,500 copies are imported, American law requires that you forfeit copyright protection. Even the Russians must find that hard to believe.
Press perplexities
It has been a perplexing week. There we had the usually reliable Evening Standard telling us that Eric Major is head of publicity at Hutchinsons (it's actually Hodder); then the Sunday Times informed us that Canada is an open market for books (it is not); and to cap it all we had the Daily Telegraph saying that Heinemann are planning a new paperback venture — which is news to everyone at Heinemann who already have a third share in one. Nonetheless Bookbuyer is not altogether despondent. The Committee investigating the technical and cost aspects of Public Lending Right has just published its first report. The 300-page report of the Faulks Committee on Defamation is now on sale. The newly published 600-page report of the Committee of Inquiry into Reading is clamouring to be read. Life need never be dull again.
Bottom Geare
For some time past The Bookseller, a trade magazine, has been publishing a facetiously Philistine review of reviewers by a stand-up comic who goes under the pseudonym of Quentin Oates (Quaker Oates to the initiate). The Oates column is often written by one Michael Geare and, lurching without aid of synchromesh from first to second, Geare is now about to publish a "humorous novel" called First Account. Should he voice the usual apprentice novelist's complaint that the reviewers have failed to see what he was getting at, they can retort that that is precisely what he has been doing to them for years.
March of time
From Publishers Weekly, April 1972: "Meet the House of David & Charles, blissfully located in an English railway station — an article by David St. John Thomas."
From The Bookseller, March 1975: "David & Charles are to make substantial cuts in their new books programme ... As a result of their decision the publishers have made 'about a dozen' members of staff redundant. This, they say, has enabled them to leave the railway station offices which they have occupied for the past ten years."
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