Call to action

The European and International Booksellers Federation has issued a call to action. In this year of elections to the European Parliament, the EIBF presents its wishlist in its Manifesto:

1. Standing up for freedom of expression; We continue our work to uphold the freedoms to express, publish and disseminate ideas, books and cultural materials, while acting firmly against all forms of censorship.
2. Standing up for literacy; We keep calling for initiatives that promote reading, to enable well-informed, democratic participation in society.
3. Embracing digital technologies; We call for digital legislation that is progressive, innovative and balanced, holding the protection of SMEs* at heart.
4. Embracing the green economy; We embrace green policies and initiatives that empower and support booksellers throughout their environmental transition.
5. Maintaining freedom for small businesses; We defend the freedom for booksellers to make their own well-informed decisions, to ensure the viability of their businesses for all readers – both now and in the future.
6. Maintaining bookselling as a viable and desirable career path; We encourage policies and initiatives that acknowledge, support and invest in both high-street businesses and a new generation of booksellers and readers.

This is all pretty unarguable and uncontroversial, though of course there are no doubt lots of places where progress on many basic issues needs to be made. Embracing digital technologies would perhaps be better worded as “using digital technologies”. I have long thought that the best way to compete with Amazon is to go ahead and compete with them, rather than to foster legislation against them. Of course you can’t expect to outperform them or match their volume and reach, but at least offer a digital ordering service, so that you are not actively driving customers away to Amazon. Bookshop.org provides a straightforward way to set up your own online store.

The European and International Booksellers Federation represents national booksellers associations in the European Union and beyond. It does seem “beyond” means what it says. Here’s a list of member organizations, including America’s ABA and Britain’s BA. (It might be objected that this is presented as a list of organizations, not a list of member organizations. I trust that this is nothing more than a copyediting issue!)

Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the story.

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* SMEs stands for “small and medium-sized enterprises”, I think.

Overtime

We tend to assume that only hourly paid workers are eligible for overtime, but starting on the 1st of July employers will be required pay overtime to most salaried workers who make less than $43,888 a year. That salary cap will then rise to $58,656 by the start of July 2025. Thus the U.S. Department of Labor on Tuesday 23 April, St George’s Day. Another dragon slain?

It may be no coincidence that these days the general starting salary in publishing is about $5,000 or $10,000 above the current overtime threshold of $35,568 a year. The disgruntled editorial assistants reported on in my recent post, Cheeseparing?, may perhaps look for some imminent relief. Raising the minimum salary might well be cheaper than monitoring and financing the payment of extensive overtime!

There is an upper limit to the right to be paid overtime, currently $107,432 per year, which will also rise. Exclusions are made for “bona fide executive, administrative or professional employees”: no idea how far that definition can be stretched on the ground. Starting on July 1, 2027, these earnings thresholds will be updated every three years.

Isn’t publishing awful; isn’t publishing great

Here’s yet another essay proving how misguided book publishers are (who despite their handicaps still manage to do pretty well). The piece is by Elle Griffin at Elysian Press, and is a good introduction to how trade publishing works, though it is entitled “No one buys books” — a claim which is patently nonsensical. This image from the piece might almost take the place of reading all Ms Griffin’s arguments.

The problem with this sort of crisis crying is that everybody knows what you are saying, and has discounted it a million times already: it’s almost like spending a couple of hours proving that water is wet. That so few books are profitable is not an indication that publishers don’t know what they are doing: it is the nature of the beast — nor does it mean online “publishing” is automatically better. Clearly publishers keep on doing what they do, so the mathematics must be working out over the long run.

Ms Griffin does provide quite a lot of interesting detail though — her post is ultimately a digest of her reading of The Trial, an account of the 2022 trial which prevented Penguin Random House’s attempt to takeover/merge with Simon & Schuster. Here for instance is what we are told are Random House’s “guidelines for who gets what advance”:

• Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
  • Advance: $500,000 and up
• Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000-75,000 units
  • Advance: $150,000-$500,000
• Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000-25,000 units
  • Advance: $50,000- $150,000
• Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
  • Advance: $50,000 or less

Commenting on this list Ms Griffin asks whether “anyone else [is] alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that”. Among those not alarmed are all publishing houses. Does the fact that Taylor Swift gets millions of listeners mean that orchestras should never again play anything by Beethoven? Nor of course is Ms Griffin really alarmed or surprised: just a few paragraphs before she has told us “The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies“. Clearly, while we have no objection to sales of 75,000 or more, publishers are by and large not spending much time thinking about such numbers.

It is of course ultimately irrelevant, but Substack* views should not be counted as equivalent to book sales. If we cared enough to invent a system which would register every time someone cracked a book open we might easily find that that chemistry monograph which amassed sales south of 2,000 had indeed been looked at 75,000 times. Just think of all those people picking up a book in a bookstore and putting it down again — online that counts as a view. Book publishing self-evidently remains a viable business. You may think there are better ways to do things, and that’s fine: we manage to survive in the city with both busses and subways. If you chose to live online, that’s just hunky-dory; but if publishers chose to print and publish books it’s not because they are crazy, misguided or motivated by a death-wish; it’s just not what you’d do in the mode of publication which you prefer.

Thanks to John Samples for the link.

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* Substack is an online platform allowing authors to collect payments (or not). Perhaps it goes without saying, but writers on Substack are not in the business of book publishing.

Language phrase books

The publishing of phrase books for the traveller used to be big business, but that now we can just speak into a phone and have it translate our words into a foreign language, the need to thumb through many pages has disappeared. Soon AI may take us even further. Efficient of course, but boring. Disdaining phrasebook help, when my uncle took us to Germany when I was 14, I ordered a sandwich of bread and donkey. I don’t remember what we got, but all considered it quite acceptable. Is such serendipity to be lost from the world?

Atlas Obscura brings us an account of the immortal publication English as She Is Spoke (or O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez). The guide includes helpful phrases like “He has spit in my coat”; “take that boy and whip him to much”; and “these apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth.” Such help would take the Portuguese traveller far in 1883 London.

Mark Twain wrote an introduction to the 1883 edition, assuring us “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.” It is assumed that the main author Perdo Carolino wrote the guide by using French as an interim point as he happened to own a Portuguese/French dictionary and a French/English one too. Still, that seems unlikely to be enough to explain the elegance of his translations. Here’s a picture of the opening of the section on Idiotisms and Proverbs:

Hard to know what proverbs some of these are seeking to render — you can click on the image to enlarge it. The author is clearly guilty of intent “to build castles in Espagnish”.

Whether or not Monty Python’s Hungarian phrasebook skit is inspired by English as She is Spoke, it merits inclusion in a discussion of phrasebook publishing.

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St. Mawr

I recently read a book entitled Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History, by Ulrich Raulff, (Liveright, 2018) and in it I discovered that D. H. Lawrence had written a novella about a horse. It’s called St. Mawr — the story, and the horse. I had always associated this story, without ever having looked at it — the royal road for authoritative lit crit — as having something to do with St. Mawes in Cornwall.

How wrong can you be? St. Mawes and St. Maur/Mawr even refer to different saints!

St. Mawes takes its name from the fifth (or sixth) century Saint Maudez, venerated in Brittany with which Cornwall of course had cultural links. Maudez is apparently invoked mainly against fevers and snakes. On the other hand St Maur is Saint Maurus (512–84) the first disciple of Benedict of Nursia, whose biography by Gregory the Great tells us that Maurus was the first oblate, given to the monastery by his parents. The horse is no monk, although as a stallion his sex drive seems to be somewhat lacking. He is however a monomaniac, and is regarded, particularly by the women in the story, as a sort of magnet of masculinity. It must I suppose be coincidental that he is spooked by a dead snake, falling over backwards and injuring his rider: after all, that’s the wrong saint.

The story was written in 1923 while Lawrence was in New Mexico, living at Kiowa Ranch (which had been given to Frieda in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers). Having first decided to publish St. Mawr as a stand-alone novel (a short one, at an estimated 160 pages) Martin Secker changed his mind, eventually publishing it with one other story. St Mawr was published on its own by Knopf in the USA. A week before publication Secker received an order from W. H. Smith for 200 copies “provided that certain words are deleted from page 65”. The offensive words were “Even our late King Edward”, a sentence which compared the late monarch to “goaty old satyrs”. Secker changed the text on 200 copies and filled the order. This would have been relatively easy to do. Secker would have printed a decent run, but only a part of the run would be bound up — after all if the book failed to take off at least you hadn’t spent money on binding copies which you’d end up wasting! So all he’d need to do was reprint 200+ copies of a single signature (16 or 32 pages) and incorporate this revised sig in the Smith’s binding run. All the rest of the edition remained unaltered. This must make for delirium for bibliophiles. The book was published in 1925 (May in UK, June in USA).

D. H. Lawrence thought quite well of St Mawr, but the poor steed seems like a broken-backed beast to me. Two thirds of the way though, or maybe it’s ¾, the horse is taken to America with its owner, and is left in a field in Texas with his Welsh groom. (Immigration laws were obviously laxer then.) The author really is more interested in the sexual fantasizing of his two female protagonists who don’t act on their flirtatious thoughts about mating with working-class men, who are, we all know, don’t we, so much less effete than all those middle-class chaps the ladies have been hanging out with in Britain. Ugh!

Although the Manchester Guardian headlined its negative review “The Horse as Hero”, I do realize St. Mawr is not a horsey book along Black Beauty lines, but all this macho phallic obsession wears on one. The Times Literary Supplement gave it a good review — all the rest were unfavorable. “He is bending all his intelligence to the task of persuading us that intelligence is a mistake” said the Saturday Review. Edwin Muir in the Nation and Atheneum criticized DHL’s technique, saying the book “is formless; the development loose and arbitrary, the ending insignificant, showing a weakening of power”. Fair enough!

New Grub Street

My comment on George Gissing’s New Grub Street yesterday drove me to the book itself. Here within the first few page we find the essence —

The young Jasper Milvain* holds forth to his family: “You have no faith. But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t make them; he can’t supply the market. I — well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that’s a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he’ll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits. Now, look you: if I had been in Reardon’s place, I’d have made four hundred at least out of ‘The Optimist’ [we know Reardon got £100 for the book]; I should have gone shrewdly to work with magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers, and — all sorts of people. Reardon can’t do that sort of thing, he’s behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lived in Sam Johnson’s Grub Street. But our Grub Street of today is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy.”

Jasper Milvain should obviously have been a literary agent, a profession which in 1882 was as yet a-birthing. One of the minor characters in the book, Whelpdale, does actually open a literary agency.† But Milvain of course goes on to be a successful writer and popular journalist.

New Grub Street, published in 1891, was Gissing’s ninth book. His first, Workers in the Dawn came out in 1880, so he was pretty much keeping up a one-a-year pace. Workers in the Dawn was published at the author’s own expense; he got £30 for The Unclassed in 1884, £15 for Isabel Clarendon in 1886, and £100 for Demos in the same year. For New Grub Street he got £150. Outright purchase was the norm in novel publishing in the nineteenth century.

If we wonder how much it cost to live in London in the eighteen-eighties Gissing is on hand to tell us. Jasper’s indulgent mother says “I really don’t see how he can live on less than a hundred and fifty a year. London, you know —”. Her daughter replies “But I know what I’m saying. I’ve read quite enough about such things. He might live very well on thirty shillings a week, even buying his clothes out of it.” Thirty shillings a week would come to £78 a year. Now these sums came from middle-class judges — Mrs Milvain lives on an inheritance of £240 a year, supporting two daughters and giving her son occasional subsidies. So maybe at £30 a year Gissing could get by: he was a stubbornly un-self-interested, self-pitying man, believing that suffering was essential to his art. As a student at Owens College, Manchester he had been caught stealing in order to help a prostitute (whom he later, disastrously, married) and had served time in jail. Opportunities for earning from his writing being suggested to him, he’d refuse, almost glorying in his poverty. Though he documented a broken system he has no thought of reforming it — he just wants us to know how awful things are, and how there’s nothing anyone can do about it. A substantial beef of Reardon/Gissing is the tyranny of the triple-decker — so much extra scribing to pad things out. However as he admits the three-volume system did enable the poor authors to make a living. Outright purchase meant that remuneration was not tied to sales success. The circulating libraries could be relied on to take their 1,000 copies; and the poor author sharpened his pen and started in on the next triple-decker.

Despite all this rather negative stuff, I have to insist that New Grub Street is a book well worth reading.

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* Q. D. Leavis sneers “When any nineteenth-century novelist names a character Jasper, I think we may safely conclude that that character is intended to be the villain”.

† Relevant to the previous post, as an unsuccessful novelist, Whelpdale does also take a stab at teaching fiction-writing.

Middle class author?

LitHub starts on a six-part series in collaboration with Dirt about “The Myth of the Middle Class Writer”. Part One is by Alissa Quart, and can be found here. For other installments go to this link.

We all know that it is actually possible to live on your writing alone. Some writers, the bestselling authors, presumably live pretty well. Lots of others get by, but the vast majority, we believe, make very little from their writing. Any making anything are working extremely hard. I find it difficult to see why we should be surprised about this. Writing books is not a job. You don’t get a salary, a pension, and health benefits. In a way it’s not essentially different from seeking to make a living as a professional gambler: you may become fabulously wealthy, though the odds are stacked against you! Can there be anyone who has set their course on making a living from writing who is not aware of this problem? OK, let’s give it a go you may decide, but when your poems, novel, essays etc. fail to earn you enough to cover your rent, you surely should not be too surprised.

Still, lots of people have been drawn to the attractive (idea of the) life-style of a writer. Signing on to a course of study in creative writing may be thought of as carrying a sort of “job-training” vibe. Ms Quart tells us that the number of creative writing programs has increased from 79 in 1975, to a recent count of 602 undergraduate and 247 postgraduate programs. Now I’ve no idea what sort of story teachers of creative writing are telling their students, but it’s hardly likely to be discouraging.

The “job” of writer has never been an easy one. Looking back into history we tend to remember the successful writers, the ones who wrote books generally held to be worth reading still, and of course they all seemed to have done OK, didn’t they? We forget about all of their contemporaries who never sold worth a damn. All we see is Charles Dickens building a big smart house at Gad’s Hill Place, in Kent. Yet Ms Quart tells us “‘doing what you love’ was more achievable in previous eras — at least for some slices of the population — when writing was a job and compensated accordingly.” Wisely perhaps she refrains from telling us where these “previous eras” are to be discovered.

Actually, within that sentence she has the qualification which answers her bewilderment. Affording a decent life-style as a writer has indeed always been possible “for some slices of the population”. Go back to medieval or early modern times, and the slices of the population she envisages would have included members of the aristocracy, and members of the church — people the cost of whose lodging and food would be taken care of for them. Later we move to a world where smart young men (by and large all of them would be men) might find a wealthy patron who would support them while they did their research and writing. We may then notice a surge of novels written by ladies; Mrs This and Mrs That: no doubt Mr This and Mr That, stolid Victorians to a man, were taking responsibility for some of the annual household budget (oh, all right, all of the annual household budget). That many lady authors became financially very successful (see for instance Romolan royalties) should not be allowed to obscure the view. Grub Street was real: you either pandered to the public or starved. In illustration I quote myself: “George Gissing, who explored this tension between the meretricious and the meritorious in his great (and serious) novel New Grub Street (1891), was himself such a self-destructive pessimist that the opportunist Jasper Milvain naturally ends up with the girl and the gelt. The impoverished serious writer Edwin Reardon, in the shape of Gissing, is of course still being read a century later.”

Perhaps what Ms Quart is really thinking is that it ought to be possible to conduct a middle-class life-style while being a writer — in other words that writing should be better rewarded. I doubt if many think that authors should be employed, at good wages, by the government. But maybe royalties aren’t high enough. Just pay authors more, and there you are. This sounds like an unanswerable argument until we have to face the consequences. There’s just not enough money in a book for everyone to be well off — perhaps we could all accept that books should cost two or three times as much as they do now, but it’s difficult to see how such a movement might get started. I had a go at this a couple of weeks ago in the context of publishing wages.

In the end we may perhaps reflect that all authors are almost by definition middle class. Authorship is after all not manual labor. Authors don’t have to be born into the middle classes, but it is unusual, shall we say, for an author to spend a full shift down the mine and come home to pen a great novel by candlelight. The problem comes not with the class bit; the problem is the earnings bit. A middle-class life lived on poverty-level pay, must be just as bleak as poverty tout court. If you went in for writing (or books, either publishing or selling them) because you wanted to be wealthy — well I’m afraid you’ve probably made a mistake.

Displacement activity

“Ever since the publication of that first book Mr. Quarles had been writing, or at least had been supposed to be writing, another, much larger and more important about democracy. The largeness and the importance justified an almost indefinite delay in its completion. He had already been at work on it for more than seven years and as yet, he would say to anyone who asked him about the progress of the book (shaking his head as he spoke with the expression of a man who bears an almost intolerable burden), as yet he had not even finished collecting materials.

“It’s a labour of Hercules,” he would say with an air at once martyred and fatuously arrogant . . .

If the questioner were sufficiently sympathetic, he would take him into his study and show him (or preferably her) the enormous apparatus of card indices and steel filing cabinets which he had accumulated round his very professional-looking roll-top desk. As time passed and the book showed no signs of getting itself written, Mr. Quarles had collected more and more of these impressive objects. They were the visible proofs of his labour, they symbolized the terrific difficulty of his task. He possessed no less than three typewriters. The portable Corona accompanied him wherever he went, in case he should at any time feel inspired when on his travels. Occasionally, when he felt the need of being particularly impressive, he took the Hammond, a rather larger machine, on which the letters were carried, not on separate arms, but on a detachable band of metal clipped to a revolving drum, so that it was possible to change the type at will and write in Greek or Arabic, mathematical symbols or Russian, according to the needs of the moment; Mr. Quarles had a large collection of these alternative types which, of course, he never used, but of which he felt very proud, as though each of them represented a separate talent or accomplishment of his own. Finally, there was the third and latest of the typewriters, a very large and very expensive office instrument, which was not only a typewriter, but also a calculating machine. So useful, Mr Quarles would explain, for compiling statistics for his great book and for doing the accounts of the estate. And he would point with special pride to the little electric motor attached to the machine; you made a connection with the wall plug and the motor did everything for you — everything that is to say, except actually compose your book. You had only to touch the keys, so (and Mr. Quarles would give a demonstration); the electricity provided the force to bring the type into contact with the paper. All muscular effort was eliminated. You could go on typing for eighteen hours at a stretch — and Mrs. Quarles gave it to be understood that it was a common thing for him to spend eighteen hours at his desk (like Balzac, or Sir Isaac Newton) — you could go on, indeed, almost indefinitely without experiencing the slightest fatigue, at any rate of the fingers. An American invention. Very ingenious.” — Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (Chapter XX).

Mr Quarles is Sidney, the father of the narrator of this roman à clef. That narrator, Philip Quarles, is a sardonic self-portrait of the author himself. Aldous Huxley’s father was Leonard Huxley, son of “Darwin’s bulldog”, Thomas Henry Huxley. According to his Wikipedia entry Leonard was a schoolmaster, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, and author of several books including a life of his father. It seems certain that the viciously-written portrait of the obnoxious Mr. Quarles should not be read as a portrait of Leonard Huxley! Point Counter Point was published in 1928, five year’s before Leonard’s death. As author in potentio sublimating all their “writing” into displacement activity, Sidney Quarles has nothing on the Reverend Edward Casaubon, but then of course neither does Point Counter Point have anything on Middlemarch. Perhaps large sprawling topics like “Democracy” and “Key to all Mythologies” lend themselves inevitably to writer’s block.

That there were electric typewriters with changeable faces a century ago is surprising — to me anyway. The Selectric typewriter wasn’t introduced till 1961, and we all thought we were looking at a revolutionary concept as they became available to publishers.

Digital distribution

I found this a confusing term when Publishing Perspectives used it in the headline for Richard Chaikin’s latest post. Mr Charkin’s post claims to describe the transitioning of his Mensch Publishing to a “wholly digitally-driven model”. I assumed, as I started to read, that that this meant that all Mensch’s books would henceforth be available only as ebooks. It doesn’t mean that at all. It focusses on the print side of the operation, telling us that from now on their physical books will only be available as print-on-demand books, stored digitally at the printers, and printed out only when a customer orders a copy.

To me this is the way any small publisher should handle manufacturing. Don’t print lots of copies and then have to figure out where you’re going to store them. Don’t print any: just set the digital files up and after you’ve received an order print the number of copies called for. Sure your unit cost will be higher, and thus your margin less — but you won’t have to pay any bills for warehousing, or the cost of capital tied up in inventory, or face the need to waste books that don’t sell. It may not balance out precisely, but together these moves should make for a viable small company.

Mr Charkin informs us that bookstores are reluctant to stock print-on-demand books. If this is true, (and I find it hard to know how the book buyer would know which books were POD and which were not) it’s the result of overly apologetic marketing by the publishers. In the early days of print on demand, old books had not been created from electronic files: they had (mostly) been typeset at a composition house, and one clean pull of the type would have been photographed and used as an original for offset printing. Print on demand technology was first used in reprinting books which didn’t sell many copies and this meant that when we came to do a print on demand version a digital original had to be created. This was done by scanning a printed copy of the book. Scanning isn’t a faultless technology, but worse, nor is offset printing, and many of the printed copies used for scanning were embarrassingly poor reproductions. Result: the POD version was a poor reproduction too; and people noticed. Years ago Oxford University Press used to print a cringe-making line on all their POD books — something to the effect that they apologized for the lousy printing, but did it so that valuable material in low demand could nevertheless be supplied to scholars. Now, if you are a bookstore owner and are confronted by such an apology, I think it absolutely reasonable that you would refuse to “represent” the book — let any devoted scholar get it from the publisher direct.

But of course all the old books have pretty much been taken care of now — and none of Mensch’s would have been in this category anyway, as the company didn’t exist in the bad old days of analog production! Yet apparently we are allowing booksellers to maintain the false idea that POD = substandard. Exactly the contrary, as Mr Charkin admits — POD’s digital printing, from a proper file, will probably actually yield a superior image to that which we could have gotten from offset — even, be it noted, when it comes to a halftone or a color image. In fact, refusing nowadays to countenance a book printed by POD makes precisely the same amount of sense as refusing to countenance a book because it was not typeset by an old-fashioned typesetting house.

So, don’t shout from the rooftops that you are changing to digital printing (most of the industry is too anyway) as if it were something in need of explanation or worse justification. Just treat the books as books, and when a bookstore orders six copies, print them six copies — when they get them they’ll be none the wiser. Actually, what’s wiser would be their appreciating that print quality has nothing to do with content quality — and even if it did would now be impossible to distinguish.

Gatsby’s green light

Last year the Library of America issued a paperback edition of The Great Gatsby, together with associated stories. The idea of the LoA’s small collection of paperbacks is to make the books available for class use in the most authoritative texts. This video features a discussion of the novel (and its movie interpretations) by the volume’s editor James West, New York Times critic Wesley Morris and author Min Jin Lee. Although it’s an hour long, do stick with it.

If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

In his introduction Library of America’s Publisher Max Rudin references the LoA donations page, which you can find here. And just because it’s there I give this link to a 2017 description of the manufacturing of the Library of America volumes. Unfortunately Edwards Brothers Malloy no longer exists.