Bookbuyer's
Bookend
Publishers will shortly be told officially of the demise of Book Addict, a monthly magazine launched independently just over a year ago to "supply information to bookshop customers." There are already few enough book journals in Britain to make this latest event a sad one, but many of the trade's selfappointed pundits felt that Book Addict was doomed from the start.
For one thing it was what is optimistically called a " consumer magazine " (that is, free) and serious-minded folk are inclined not to take such things seriously. Worse still, this meant that the proprietor's sole source of revenue was income from publishers' advertising and that, as every cynic knows, is tan tamount to trying to sell sand in Syria. To cap it all, Book Addict was conceived hastily, launched on a proverbial shoe-string — just over £500 — and for the first two issues had no proper editor.
It is certainly ,true that Book Addict's founder, Frank Casey, had a greater flair for selling advertising space that his predecessor
on the late lamented Book News (that lasted only three issues) but as time passed, Mr
Casey's persistence, amounting sometimes to rudeness, lost him more goodwill than it gained him cash. This, and his failure to sa tisfy some that the magazine was being distributed on the scale he claimed, made a less than favourable impression on several larger publishers whose support he needed One of the virtues of ventures like Book Addict is that they can provide a friendly, somewhat down-beat conspectus of the new
books appearing, and particularly the 'popular ' ones often unlikely to be recorded else
where — the name of the game being to help the public and please the trade. It was all the more surprising, therefore, that the front page of its first issue was devoted to panning
Sir Billy Collins's pet spring novel (Bryan Forbes's The Distant Laughter) which, far
from encouraging book addicts, must have made them wonder why the magazine was launched at all.
Yet in its ten-issue existence, nook Addict did carry some worthwhile things, in particu lar FredNolan's knowledgeable, abrasive pa perback round-ups and Jilly Cooper's sporting monthly spifferoos, and latterly, under
Michael Barber's editorship, it tried earnestly if not always cleverly to do its bit for books. There is already talk among publishers of producing another such magazine, not to mention preliminary murmers from the good old Booksellers' Association — though since the latter only began discussing the idea a year last March, nothing seems likely to appear much before 1984.
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