I3ookbuyer's
Bookend
Well, there's no sense in beating about the bush. This week is Prediction Week, and the best opportunity of the year for readers to catch Bookbuyer out. Here then is a selection of nonfiction most likely to be selling in four months' time, always provided that their publishers promote them properly and manage to keep them in print.
If Christmas booksellers fall true to form they will be characterised by humour, beauty, kindliness, conservatism, chauvinism and escapism. This may rule out several otherwise worthy books — Simon Winchester's Holy Terror or Lord Bethell's The Last Secret—which tell stories of human horror, Of the funnies, expect success for Ronnie Barker's Book of Bathing Beauties, Beachcomber, The Book of the Goons, Jilly Cooper's Women and Superwomen and anything by Spike Milligan who has three books coming this autumn. It goes without saying that funnies from the telly (Upon My Word! for instance) will do well.
And that brings us to another fact of life: the power of the TV programme and the popularity of the TV face. Because of the first, there should be a large market for John Terraine's The Mighty Continent, Nigel Calder's The Weather Machine, yet another biography of Jennie (Churchill) and yet more of the Duke of Windsor (especially Frances Donaldson's Edward VIII and Ralph Martin's The Woman He Loved). Because of the second, autobiographies by presenter Michael Aspel (Polly wants a Zebra) and Pat Phoenix, alias Elsie Tanner of Coronation Street (All My Burning Bridges), not forgetting Lord Hill's Behind the Screen. No doubt Alistair Cooke's America will still be there for the second year. From the large screen there will be memoirs by Rex Harrison and Anna Neagle, and, because he writes well and is much respected, Bryan Forbes. Mr Forbes wife Nannette Newman has a nice Christmassy confection Lots of Love.
The perennially popular Elizabeth Goudge has chosen a perfect Christmas title for her autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, which is certainly one to watch. Other memoirs include Lord Clark's Another Part of the Wood and Lord Longford's Jesus Christ (no that should come under 'biography'). The late Richard Crossman's Diaries could do well although, like the second volume of Khruschev memoirs, may be more written about than bought. Michael Holroyd's Augustus John is certain to enjoy both privileges; and Richard Hough's Louis and Victoria (Mountbatten), Elizabeth Longford's Winston Churchill, Corelli Barnett's Marlborough all have the right Christmas idea. H. G. 'Wells and Rebecca West will be the season's best literary love story and Graham Green's Lord Rochester's Monkey will prove to be one of those rare cases where a biography is bought because of its author rather than its subject.
Three publishers who can generally bring something special off at Christmas are Thames & Hudson, David & Charles and Cape. From the first comes a facsimile of The Book of Kells, for which a £29 price tag should prove no deterrent; from the second a facsimile of Gamage's Christmas Bazaar 1913; and from Cape, a magnificent photographic work on Shipwrecks, with text by John Fowles. Further photographic experiences will be Scott's Last Voyage and The House of Windsor. Other popular seasonal subjects include travel (Heyerdahl's Fat u-Hiva, Chay Blyth's Theirs Is the Glory and a Collins special, Among the Elephants); poetry (Betjeman and a posthumous Auden); children's books (new offerings from John Bumingham, Graham Oakley, Richard Scarry, and Oxford's Classic Fairy Tales); war (Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far and James Leasor's Green Beach). There will of course be plenty of mileage in the so-called publishing industries: that is, Sherlock Holmes, Tolkien, The Wombles, Cookery and Rung Fu, J. B, Priestley and the British Lions, Bibles and Backgammon, and Guinness.
But for the real surprise bestsellers it is often necessary to look outside the conventional categories. Bookbuyer's 1974 tips are books whose titles give little away; but you will hear more of them soon: The Secret Life of Plants, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, The Romeo Error, Colony Earth, Word Play and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
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