DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
January must have become the cruellest month for publishers. This is when their normally compliant authors, reacting to their Public Lending Right returns as uhver was supposed by Mr Bumble to react to red meat, ring their agents and editors demanding to know why their readership is nowhere near matched by their sales. Since PLR came in, I have discovered to my surprise that I am a far More popular author than I had ever supposed, my books being among the top Eve per cent of borrowings, with my first novel of 30 years ago still clocking up an books readership of around 15,000 and my nooks in sum being taken out last year by 299,563 readers, God bless them. Not Dick slice of by any means, but were my slice of last year's £700 million total book antes proportionate to my slice of national borrowings (622 million), my royalties would have increased tenfold. Where did we writers go wrong? Some of us didn't. tlost of that £700 million is accounted for Y swift-turnover high fliers — airport Paperbacks, television spin-offs, promoted ,430kery books, anthologies of Famous reople's Most Embarrassing Moments and s° °II, and the best of British luck to their inuthors and compilers. The runners-up are ne,f1 gasping for shelf-life with titles which Fe the more grotesquely overpriced the less they can be found — even paperbacks new average a quarter of the already Preposterous hardback cover price (by the same ratio, when Allen Lane founded bores Books they would have cost three :les their original sixpence). I would say that were priced out of the market except `ii at they are barely in the market in the first place. Thank goodness, then, for the Public library, the best medium there is for 7?ic distribution. Budget cuts and politic- ,`", interference notwithstanding, you can '_elY on finding a book in the libraries swhilen You can never find it in the book- e °Ps. Every writer — and, come to that, tkv.erY reader — has anecdotal evidence of er. I shall therefore not be backward in „„'ering mine, though mercifully sparing total nlY own gripe about the seemingly . disappearance from the shops, since well before Christmas, of my erstwhile hot Pro The The Theory & Practice of 11,401, for all that there exists a cache of nils°1d stocks (perhaps my publishers are „„rallning a warehouse sale, like the dis- count carpet companies). A few weeks ago, I wrote a Daily Mail) ail column around a vewlY-published anthology of popular terse. It attracted some interest and a _tick_tickle of letters began to come in from le asking where they could buy it. n'noe obvious and sardonic response is 'Why , t trY a bookshop?' but it is not as simple ' that. If we are to regard a book as a product like any other — as the new breed of conglomerate publishers would wish us to — and supposing that my readers were trying to buy, say, a loaf of Hovis, then this was their experience. Some were told by their bakers that there was no such brand as Hovis. Others were told that Hovis was on the production line, but not yet baked. One was advised that should it be her wish her baker could order a loaf of Hovis, but she had no idea whether she would see it that side of Christmas, and why did she not take a loaf of Mother's Pride, this being every bit as good? One baker claimed that there was no call for Hovis, for all that a potential customer stood in front of him, calling for it. Out of, I think, 15 letters, there was just one from someone who had succeeded in tracking the product down, and who was writing to thank me for recommending it. I suppose the rest finished up trying to borrow Hovis from their public bakeries.
There is a breakfast war going on in my neighbourhood, with four rival establish- ments offering 'The Great British Break- fast' at between £1.60 and £2. Alas, vie as the contenders may to tempt in the punters by shaving another ten pence off their prices or throwing in an extra sausage, there are few takers. The truth is, a few pockets of croissant-crumblers in Chelsea and Soho notwithstanding, we are not a nation of breakfasters-out. In most areas, indeed, it is impossible to find anywhere open for breakfast except the big hotels, where the prices are stiff. It is a pity, for breakfast out is such an agreeable institu- tion. One of the pleasures of visiting the United States is the bustling coffee-shop breakfast, obtainable not only in the big cities (and the reason why Manhattan smells from tip to tip of Danish pastry) but in the smallest townships, where audio- typists, cops, cleaners, lawyers, all huddle gregariously around the counter. Why has it never caught on here? Perhaps we are too stingy to pay for what we can equally fix at home. After all, the idea of going to a restaurant for pleasure rather than mere sustenance is still fairly new to us. Rarely does one hear a good word said for telephone answering machines. Some people actively loathe them and refuse to respond to their disembodied voices. I was rather that way inclined myself until, tiring of my incompetent human answering ser- vice, I had one installed, and now I swear by it. By leaving it switched on 24 hours a day I am completely liberated from the tyranny of the telephone — the calls from people I've no wish to speak to, the long conversations I haven't time for just now, the unwelcome invitations I've weakly accepted for lack of a spur-of-the-moment excuse for declining. Thanks to an ampli- fier device, I can hear all my messages as they are recorded, whereupon it is entirely up to me whether I intervene by picking up the receiver. It is the relationship I have always wanted with my telephone. The only drawback is that it can be somewhat ego-deflating to arrive back after a long absence only to find that nobody, but nobody, has rung. A friend bought an answering machine and then took himself off for the day to give it chance to build up a storehouse of important calls. Returning home, he was chastened to find only one message — 'Oh, sorry, wrong number.'
0 ne piece of machinery I can do without, though, is the pocket calculator. I am forever hitting the wrong buttons and making a nonsense of my figures. Yet there are educationists who would still have us believe that in the computer age mental arithmetic is redundant. The school- leavers manning the electronic till at my newsagent's are always getting their sums wrong, and have no instinct that they have made a mistake. If I were their guvnor I should issue them with pencil stubs.
0 ne of the small meannesses of Eng- lish life is 'No change given for tele- phones' — as ubiquitous a hand-scrawled sign as 'Use other door'. I find it particular- ly annoying in the ticket offices of railway stations, where I would guess that 90 per cent of all public telephone calls are directly to do with passengers' business with the railway — usually to give warning to their loved ones or business contacts that British Rail will be getting them there late. On Day One of the Big Adverse Weather Conditions it seemed that every stranded soul on Victoria Station wanted to ring home. But — 'No change given for telephones'. Is this a BR regulation, or a churlish little sanction which the ticket clerks have taken it upon themselves to impose? British Rail should provide free telephones for the use of its regularly inconvenienced passengers.
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