Publishing
Woes of the trade
Paul Johnson
The slump has now got British publishing firmly in its grip. Cassell's decision to drop its general list by the end of this year (with 50 redundancies) captured the headlines, but most 'houses are reducing staff. The record number of titles produced in 1980 will not be repeated in 1981. The Bookseller's Spring Export Number, with 793 pages, looks healthy but in fact the number of titles announced for the season is 2,000 fewer than last autumn and all categories, except travel, are hit.
Obviously there is less money around. Equally obviously, British books are too expensive. New York prices are up to 50 per cent below ours and a recent tour of Paris bookshops convinced me that comparable books in France cost a third less. Our books, indeed, are now going on the never-never, with Blackwells of Oxford offering purchasers of Macmillan's new Grove's Dictionary of Music, which costs £850, two years to pay.
Publishers acknowledge prices are too high by slashing them. OUP are holding a Spring book sale, 9 March — 10 April, of 1,000 titles with reductions of a third to a half. Last week, in advance of the academic book fair at the Bloomsbury Centre Hotel, on 11 March, the Times Literary Supplement carried a 12-page special Spring books offer giving its readers the chance to buy academic books (not remainders) at up to 50 per cent reductions, post and package included. There are some real bargains, but the offer also serves to draw attention to rocketing prices. Thus E.H. Carr's History of Soviet Russia in 14 volumes, some of which go back to the Fifties, costs a whopping £105, though reduced from £175. Six volumes of the new Yale edition of Joseph Farington's diaries still look dear at £70 (reduced from £95). Five volumes of economic essays by Lord Kaldor, reduced from £100, will still set you back a princely £75.
In many academic fields it is now rare to find books with a list price below £10, and most seem to range between £15 and £30. True, there has recently been a deceleration in the terrifying increase in prices. In the first six months of 1980, book prices rose nearly 10 per cent; in the second half the increase was only 5.9 per cent, better than the general price trend. All the same the average cost of a British book went up from £8.06.in 1979 (second half) to £9.35 in 1980, and the Spring lists indicate it is now well past the £10 mark.
You would have thought .that, in the circumstances, the unions would be showing restraint, as they undoubtedly are in other parts of the private sector. Yet the NGA, Natsopa and Slade are charging ahead with a 15 per cent pay claim, while the NUJ, which has got, I am sorry to say, a footing in the publishing business, is busy living up to its growing reputation as Britain's silliest There is, for example, the case of the British Printing Corporation, where Robert Maxwell is about to become chief executive. Its publishing division, Macdonald Futura, formed in January 1980, seems to have lost £1 million in its first year, and the group as a whole is in trouble. According to the Bookseller, it owes £25 million to the bank, lost £6.54 million in the first half of 1980, and its losses for the year will probably top £10 million. That is why BPC, on 16 February, reached a provisional agreement with Maxwell, whose Pergamon Press will provide a £10 million injection of capital.
Naturally Macdonald Futura is seeking to cut costs, and one way it is doing so is by the sensible use of freelance labour, thus avoiding the grotesque financial penalties and 'aggro' generated by the Employment Protection Act 1975 and various other of Michael Foot's blessings. The NUJ does not like freelancing (even though it has a freelance branch): staffers are easier to control and milk. It opposes BPC's plan to save £80,000 a year by cutting nine jobs (since reduced to seven) but it has also demanded all kinds of figures about the use of freelances and, in effect, is telling BPC how to run its business. It is characteristic of NUJ officials that they think they possess extraordinary insights into the world of commerce. At the drop of a cliché they will subject circulation managers, advertising salesmen and publishers — let alone editors — to sub-Marxist harangues on the mysteries of their trades. To those desperately trying to keep a publishing firm afloat in the worst 4 recession for half a century, compulsory NUJ advice is about the last cheese straw.
The result is that BPC is now the victim of one of the longest staff disputes in British publishing. On 21 November 64 NW members were sacked for refusing to accept redundancies and promptly took over various BPC premises. BPC had to hire security men, at £2,000 a week, to end the so-called `work-in', and NUJ people still occupy one office. They are also picketing BPC's headquarters in Great Queen Street with the menacing slogan 'NUJ Here to Stay!' Macdonald Futura see the issue as whether they, or the union, run the business. Most people in the trade hope management prevails because, in the long run, NUJ militancy poses a bigger threat to British publishing than the recession itself.
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