Bookbuyer's
Bookend
Sir Neville Cardus, in his memorable autobiography, tells a delightful story of his experience in the Long Room a Lord's. It was late in the summer of 1939, and standing beside him inspecting the play was an immaculately preserved gentleman with spats and a rolled umbrella. They did not speak, of course; they had not been introduced. "Suddenly", wrote Sir Neville, "two workmen entered the Long Room in green aprons and carrying a bag. They took down the bust of W. G. Grace, put it into the bag, and departed with it. The noble lord at my side watched their every movement; then he turned to me. 'Did you see that, Sir?' he asked. I told him I had seen. 'That means war', he said."
Bookbuyer detects a similar sense of foreboding in the actions of Mr Edmund Fisher, that energetic young managing director of Michael Joseph. When the three-day week was announced last December he issued a ban on private phone-calls and business lunches (presumably not to waste a vital four hours of daylight). This week Michael Joseph hold their spring sales conference, and those representatives expecting, the usual lunchtime revelries at the Horseshoe hostelry may soon be in for a shock. Mr Fisher plans to entertain them in the candle-lit confines of the company boardroom — with generous helpings of ham sandwich and lemonade.
There are few things quite so invigorating as a good literary row. We do not get enough of them. One of the last surviving masters of the art is Bookbuyer's erstwhile colleague Auberon Waugh who has managed to enrage some quite decent folk during his relatively short term as a reviewer. Take for instance Giles Gordon, the publisher-turned-agent who also writes books. Two years ago Mr Waugh did an accomplished demolition job on Gordon's About a Marriage which can hardly have helped the young novelist's literary reputation. Then there was Waugh's own novel A Bed of Flowers which The Spectator sportingly invited Gordon to review ("sans characterisation," he wrote snootily, "sans wit, sans style, sans (almost) everything").
Last year it looked for a disconcerting moment as if the two were about to become friends when Gordon, in his fledgling agent's innocence, tried to get Waugh to write a book on the English public school. Waugh's regular agent A. D. Peters soon put a stop to that, however, and Gordon was duly ticked off by the trade's elder statesmen for behaving like a cad. Things soon seemed back to normal and earlier this month Mr Waugh was cheerfully panning Gordon's third novel Girl With Red Hair in the Evening Standard and panning it again, in Gordon's presence, at the PEN Club the same night. Bookbuyer has sad news to impart. A few hours earlier the ferocious pair were to seen joking together in the friendly atmosphere of a smart West End eating house. On top of that, they are soon to appear, side by side like the heavenly twins, on the Michael Joseph March publication list. And to cap it all, Mr Gordon has now asked Mr Waugh to contribute to a new anthology he is editing. Life will seem so dull.
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