Bookbuyer's
Bookend
Publishers who write books may, as Arthur Koestler once, suggested. be like cows in milk bars, but they have never allowed the simile to sour their appetite. Company histories aside — and with the exception of Michael Howard's Jonathan Cape, that is precisely where they should be put — there are usually at least two autobiographies a year, not to mention innumerable textbooks, symposia and the occasional work of purest fiction. Bookbuyer is an avid consumer of such outpourings, if only to compare what little he knows with what little their authors usually choose to reveal, and if some of them show a surprising modesty, it tends to compare with that of the politician who, having accepted an invitation to speak for four hours on the Common Market, begins by telling his audience that he is not an expert really.
But although publishers have always enjoyed writing books, they seem less inclined these days to want to publish them themselves. Fredric Warburg surprised several observers when, in 1959, he had his memoirs published by Hutchinson, and four years later Constable's Ralph Arnold chose Rupert HartDavis to do his own autobiography — John Murray having previously undertaken his delightful little publishing novel, Spring List.
Two years ago Sir Stanley Unwin's nephew Philip went to Heinemann for his personal
memoir of The Publishing Unwins and two
self-made publishers — Anthony Blond and Clive Bingley — defected to Cape and Per
gamon for their respective accounts of what goes on in publishing. (Philip Unwin's Book Publishing as a Career, incidentally, came out under the Hamish Hamilton imprint.)
The trend shows no signs of abating. Lord Longford, who among other things is chair man of publishers Sidgwick and Jackson, has signed a contract with Collins for his third volume of autobiography, Earlier this year W.
E. Williams' portrait of Sir Allen Lane was published by Bodley Head (Penguin, admittedly, having turned it down) while Jack Morpurgo's definitive biography
of Sir Allen is being written for Hutchinson; in October the same firm is to publish another instalment of Fredric Warburg, but they will not be doing the memoirs of their own deputy chairman, Sir Robert Lusty, which will eventually come from Cape, as did Frederick Whyte's biography of William Heinemann.
Bookbuyer is hard pressed to account for such wholesale coyness which did not, after all, afflict the doyens of days gone by: Stanley
Unwin, J. M. Dent, George Harrap. Cassell's Newman Flower and even Leonard Woolf had
no qualms about launching autobiographies under their own imprint and, in the best traditions of self-advertisement, most Ameri cans don't either. Perhaps the new pattern re
flects a heightened spirit of trade co-operation. Maybe today's publishing gurus have a more enlightened consideration for their own staff;
or is it that they lack the moral fibre to endure the slings and arrows of cynicism which ac company most manuscripts through their vari ous stages of production? Possibly they believe that one of their rivals is more likely to do a better job. Bookbuyer has a suspicion that the real reason lies elsewhere. Publishers, whatever one may adduce from this column, are a cunning crowd and their desire to be published by someone else is undoubtedly born of the shrewdest commercial instincts. And in any case there are few things more amusing in life than the sight of a competitor losing money.
Previous page