Book marks
I feel bound to commend the initiative of Routledge and Kegan Paul who, along with other academic publishers, are finding life particularly tiresome in these inflationary times. Faced with spiralling production costs and a decline in library and student spending power, Routledge are appealing to authors to muck in and help. Authors — at least those accosted by the eye of economic reality — will be asked to produce columns of pristine clarity, etched by an elite electric on pre-printed paper, ready-made for the platemaker's acid bath while the printer's compositor looks helplessly on. There will be savings horary; there will be savings pecuniary. Though they be bound only in paper covers, works of abstruse but worthy content will continue to appear. They will be known as Routledge Direct Editions, at prices ranging from £3.90 to £4.90, and they will be launched next month.
Striking campus
Just to get things into perspective, let it be said that academic — or, as they call it, "scholarly" publishing — seems not exactly to be booming in the United States either. In the latest issue of Knowledge Industry Report, a newsletter for educational and business "communicators," it is revealed that twenty nine members of the seventy-six-strong American Association of University Presses reported combined net losses of 1.6 million dollars in 1974, after applying over one million in subsidies — "and the situation is expected to worsen this year as subsidies drop to 940,000 dollars and net losses exceed two million dollars. At least two University Presses have apparently stopped publishing altogether; several others are maintaining "caretaker" operations; and in the three years 1970-73 Yale University Press's output dropped by 35 per cent, Stanford's by 37 per cent, M.I.T. by 43 per cent and Nebraska by 64 per cent. "The past several years," says the report, "have been a nightmarish cycle of declining sales, which reduce press runs, which lift production costs and retail prices, which further depress sales."
No true bookman will derive pleasure from this. But it may help to dispel the catastrophe complex that invariably seems to afflict the British publishing industry.
Mr Biggs
I arri sure it can have nothing to do with my paragraph of 16th August, but I hear that Messrs Hart-Davis MacGibbon will not, after all, be holding a press reception for Colin Mackenzie's story of Ronald Biggs, The Most Wanted Man. Originally, you may recall, the publishers were planning a somewhat unusual bunfight at which journalists were to be invited to address the Rio-based con, courtesy of the GPO. Then an unhappy libel incidence caused them to withdraw advance copies of the book and postpone the party by four weeks. Now it seems that the board of Lord Bernstein's Granada Group (owners of Hart-Davis) has become sufficiently embarrassed by the whole business to cancel the press junketings.
Bookbuyer
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