The press
Quantity, not quality
Paul Johnson
To judge by the total of books published in 1980 by Britain's 10,000 firms, you would not think there was the smallest hint of recession in this trade. The number of titles they put out leapt by more than 6,000, from 41,940 in 1979 to 48,158. It is true that some 10,000 were reprints and new editions. All the same, there were 5,145 new volumes of fiction, which formed the largest category – so much for the widespread notion that 'the novel is dead' – a colossal number of 4,269 , new books on politics and economics, 3,485 new children's books (that doesn't surprise me), and 3,323 new titles in medicine, the fourth largest group. After that came school textbooks (2,317), religion (1,725), engineering (1,594) and history (1,587), which did not include biography (a farther 1,360), The number of titles is now almost four times the number in 1947, and has doubled even since the early Sixties.
Seeking to explain the 15 per cent increase in titles over the last 12 months, the Bookseller thinks that publishers have 'decided that during a difficult time of failing print runs and sales per title the only way to maintain turnover and contribute to overheads is to increase the number of titles issued'. Certainly the rush to put out new titles conceals some sharp financial worries. Publishers have been reporting drastically reduced profits or even actual losses. In the current year, Pitman's, on a £13.5 million turnover, had a trading profit of £540,000, and after deducing interest payments of £833,000 (almost doubled), found themselves with a pre-tax loss of £293,000. The Oxford University Press, which put out the huge total of 972 titles in 1980, including 673 new books, saw its profits up to March last year fall to €217,000, against £8.16 million the previous year – including a £1.55 million publishing loss in Britain.
Hodder reported a pre-tax profit halved at £710,000, Associated Books Publishers half-year profits down to £202,000 compared with £1.02 million the previous year. In the first half of 1980 Penguins notched up a turnover of £15,7 million but a loss of £1.6 million, Collins, it is true, crept back into profit in 1980, after a fearsome bad patch, and Weidenfeld's had a record year. But for most publishers smaller or non-existent profits meant selling or closing down part of the business and getting rid of staff. Of the big four publishers, Collins has shed 500 people, Macmillans are to lose about 10 per cent of their staff of 800, the OUP 40 from a total of just under 1,000, and Longman UK about 70, with the closure of three of their publishing offices. Most smaller publishers have done likewise.
Cuts in editorial departments, which get the publicity, conceal an even more drastic contraction in the printing industry itself. The failure of British unions to accept the new technology over the past decade is now bearing its evil fruit, Some of us have maintained all along that, whether in the book trade or in newspapers and magazines, a sensible attitude to electronic printing would mean more jobs, not less. This is borne out by the experience of the United States, where (except in New York) relevant unions are weak or cooperative. Despite the worst general recession since the early Thirties, the US newspaper industry in 1980 employed 421,000 people, an increase of nearly 15,000 over 1979. This improvement is demonstrably attributable to new technology, which has boosted circulations and, more important, the number of titles.
By contrast the British printing industry is losing its markets. Cost of production in the US is now up to 50 per cent lower than over here, and more and more books published in Britain are being printed and bound on the other side of the Atlantic. Printing contracts for British titles are also going in increasing quantities to Holland, Germany and other European centres, and even to the Far East. A case in point is the monumental new edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. This greatest of all musical encyclopaedias was first published in 1890, and the last edition, the fifth, in 1954. 'Grove Six' is completely new: a ten-year effort involving nearly 2,500 contributors, who have produced 22 million words (plus 4,500 illustrations) to fill 20 volumes, each of 900 pages. As from 19 February you can bus/ it all at £850 a set. This enormous enterprise represents an investment by Macmillans of £4 million, but only part of the employment involved has gone to Britain. Though the work has been set or engraved by three firms here, the whole of the printing and binding was carried out in Hong Kong. No wonder so many British publishing firms are anxious to disembarrass themselves of their printing and binding divisions. The strong pound has something to do with the problem but the root of it lies in union resistance to change.
The arrival of the magnificent new Grove, and the record number of titles published in 1980, should not mislead us into supposing any improvement in the quality of Britain's output of books. If anything, and if impressionistic evidence is to be believed, the recession has accelerated the trend towards undemanding picture books. The country Diary of an Edwardian Lady remained on the bestseller list through 1980, has now gone through 137 printings, sold over 300,000 hardback copies in the year and has total worldwide sales of 2.250,000. Life on Earth and James Herriot's Yorkshire also remained year-long best sellers and are in their 78th and 45th printings respectively. Most new best-sellers are much of a muchness, an exception being Henry Root's curious volumes of Letters, selling 94,000 and 57,000 each, which made the year for Weidenfeld's.
The consoling thought is the success of solid, old-fashioned high-quality novels. The latest Graham Greene and Hammond Innes have sold over 30,000 each, Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers is pushing 20,000 and William Golding's Rites of Passage, which pipped Burgess for the Booker, is nearing 40,000. A literary trend? Possibly. but more likely confirmation of the old adage that recession deflects the middle class away from restaurants and theatres and into their armchairs.
Previous page
