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Alice Thomas Ellis
Ibelieve we must spend the next five years finding ways of reallocating resources within the industry so that we market the product better overall and so that we strive to produce a product which is going to be popular and of the highest quality. We have to do this together.' When I started reading this (I confess I didn't get very far in the article) I thought it must be the voice of the National Coal Board, or perhaps the association of garden-gnome manufactu- rers; but no, it was somebody speaking for the dear old British book trade which is desperately seeking a place in the sun, or at any rate the high street. Apparently such concerns as Laura Ashley, Next and Ben- neton each have more than 200 'outlets', so they are in no danger of going down the communal drain. Marks & Spencer 'began as a small venture' and now are 'an important part of the high street'. Book- shops, on the other hand, are finding it harder and harder to pay high-street rents and are condemned to the back streets.
The trouble is the product. In particular, there are too many books. M&S have succeeded in refining their product. One cucumber, as the poet says, is very like another and, more important, the cucum- ber is one of only a limited number of products on offer from St Michael to the housewife. Of books, on the other hand, as we all know, there is no end: some 50,000 of the damn things appeared last year. If only these multiple titles could be reduced to, say, 100 standard lines — ideally to ONE BOOK written jointly by a commit- tee of tried and tested best-selling authors: a work of 'faction' perhaps, incorporating the life story of Mary Queen of Scots, say, or the Rolling Stones and the best parts of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, illustrated by a few photographs of Edwar- dian country ladies or the latest royal wedding. It could be advertised like any other product on the telly. The book trade, like everybody else, would be rich and happy.
Better still, we could do without the authors altogether. 'One characteristic that I envy of all those companies is that they don't negotiate terms; they don't take somebody else's output and decide which part of it they want to buy. They identify their customers' needs and then manufac- ture quantities and qualities which they can sell at • a price which customers can afford. . . . As their success grows they are able to pay levels of rates and rents that an operation like ours cannot match.'
The idea is not foolish. What indeed is the point of all these books — if we discount the vanity of authors? Judging from the publishers' blurbs, most of them are duplicates — literary cucumbers, so to speak, with as little nutritive value but very much more expensive. I asked Someone for his view, since publishing is the vineyard in which he toils (and increasingly spins). He says that, alas, educated people buy very few new books. They just read the reviews. Reviews don't sell books: indeed the opposite, since the best reviews tell you what you want to know in a book while saving you the fag of ploughing through the attendant verbiage. But fortu- nately there are very few educated people around these days.
Certainly this house, I reflect, is a monument to the book trade. Someone has distributed his 10,000 dusty tomes in three separate rooms — the scholar's library containing dictionaries and so on, and texts in unknown languages; the gentleman's library with books 'which any sensible man would want to read and reread' such as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the ladies' library with books 'which you admire for their outsides'. All are arranged by colour, which not only furnishes a room, he says, but maximises the uniformi- ty of the product.
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