Bookbuyer's
Bookend
It used to be said, though not by this columnist, that the best way for a publisher to get newspaper reviews was to commission the literary editors to write books. It was a scandalous suggestion, of course, and those who saw a connection between the appointment some years ago of one well-known critical sage as editorial reader for Gollancz, and the generous attention given to Gollancz books by a well-known national newspaper, were clearly troublemakers of the first water.
It is true that today's literary editors do write books — indeed some of them do not wait to be invited — but Bookbuyer attributes this to a sporting determination to see how the other half lives, rather than to any desire to make a name for themselves as writers. Most of them, one suspects, would bend over backwards to avoid any charge of nepotism — not least, the cynic might say, because they know what's good for them, the rewards of full-time literary editorship tending to exceed those of full-time authorship. Here, with no conscious innuendo and merely to demonstrate what industrious chaps they are, is a brief look at some of the season's offerings from the lit. ed. ranks.
— Anthony Hem n (London Evening Standard) has now completed his modestly titled book Literature which Hodder are to publish later in the year.
— Derwent May (Listener) is a novelist on the Chatto list; his latest, Laughter in Djarkarta, was submitted, without much success, for last autumn's Booker prize.
— Graham Lord (Sunday Express) is also a novelist, and one who shows commendable independence by changing publishers each time he writes a book. After coming third in a Macmillan crime competition he had his second novel published by Macdonald and his third — The Spider and the Fly, out last month — by Hamish Hamilton.
— Anthony Curtis (Financial Times) has just had his neatly timed study of Somerset Maugham published by Hamish Hamilton.
— W. L. Webb (Guardian) edits, to no-one's surprise, The Bedside Guardian for Collins. — David Holloway (Daily Telegraph) has contributed a new volume in Weidenfeld's 'Explorers' series (Lewis and Clark) which comes out this spring.
— Claire Tomalin (New Statesman, very shortly) is the author of The Life and Death of Mary Wolstoncroft, soon to be published by Weidenfeld. (She'll be in good company there: her predecessor John Gross was also published by Weidenfeld, as indeed will be the Spectator's film critic and erstwhile lit.ed. Christopher Hudson when he finishes his book on the Renaissance).
— Peter Ackroyd (Spectator) shares with the New Statesman's former literary editor Anthony Thwaite (Oxford University Press) more modest commercial aspirations and has recently had a volume of poems appear under the Ferry Press imprint.
This week's column was not intended to be read by cynics.
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