Bookbuyer's
Bookend
The interesting thing about published lists of names is often the names that are missing. It was intriguing in the case of MPs who signed (or did not sign) the Early Day Motion on Public Lending Right (Bookend, last month), and it is no less so in a list appearing in the latest issue of The Author. Outspoken without being hysterical, the official quarterly of the Society of Authors has never shown excessive tolerance of publishers' inefficiencies and it has now had the nice idea — some might say nasty — of compiling lists of publishers with good and bad records for prompt payment to authors. The first instalment enumerates the goodies, some thirty-three firms of whom the Society's members have spoken highly; but the second, promised shortly, seems likely to produce exclamations of wounded innocence.
It is fair to imagine that not all the 250-odd Publishers' Association members absent from the " white list " are guilty of slow royalty payments. Some, particularly the small or specialist ones, have no authors who are members of the Society; others just have no authors, or .— if they are like W. H. Allen — mostly foreign ones; and there are always those writers who are too shy or too lazy to let the Society know how they are treated.
, Nevertheless the threatened "black list" of publishers will be awaited with a certain amount of ghoulish excitement. 13ookbuj,ei feels almost tempted to open a book on the outcome. What, one wonders, are the odds on some grateful authors speaking up in the nick of time for Tom Stacey, Pergamon Press or Weidenfeld & Nicolson? Will Granada and the Thomson Organisation be able to improve on the solitary imprint which each of them has on the list of prompt payers? Will the several distinguished houses not so far mentioned — among them Bodley Head, Chatto, Harrap, Longman, Murray, Thames & Hudson, Ward Lock and the University Presses — emerge as black or white? More to the point, will the Society of Authors receive any writs?
Bookbuyer apologises to Mr James Callaghan for omitting to mention his study of the Irish question in a recent round-up of politicians' autumn offerings. It should do well, despite the fact that his publishers Collins did not think it worthy of inclusion in their trade advertisement featuring thirteen " best-selling books" for Christmas.
Lest Mr Callaghan and his colleagues think they have the field to themselves, it is only fair to point out that they face unusually stiff competition from the ranks of the civil service. In October Humphrey (Lord) Trevelyan will reveal what goes on in Diplomatic Channels (Macmillan); while Geoffrey McDermott, onetime British Minister in Berlin and adviser to MI6, revealed a bit too much in The New Diplomacy and its Apparatus, which Plume • Press had to withdraw for security reasons a few days before its scheduled publication — it has just re-emerged, in a slightly modified version. And in January the former head of the Foreign Office, Lord Gore-Booth, will treat us to his memoirs With Great Truth and Respect (Constable) — though with a paradoxical title like that, there is little telling how much he will reveal.
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