Mayoral advice

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just weathered his first big snow storm in New York City. We are told we have fifteen inches outside our doors. Hard to measure — the other day the radio informed us that the pros do this by use of a snowboard, which is just a flat bit of wood onto which you let the snow fall for one hour, at the end of which you measure its depth then wipe in clean and start again. At the end you add together all the hours’ worths of snow and declare a total. Someone, a lot of someones, must have been staying awake all night — different totals are reported for various spots on all five boroughs so presumably there are at least ten snowboards and their minders at work across the city!

One of the mayor’s bits of advice was to stay home and read a book, and specifically he tells us that New York Public Library is offering downloads of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, the basis for a popular television series — to, of course, holders of a library card.

(Photo from The Hollywood Reporter.)

Here’s the Publishers Lunch 26 January story about the New York Public Library offer:

The New York Public Library is offering ebooks and audiobooks of all six books in Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” series, the inspiration for the Heated Rivalry series on Crave and HBO, without a wait. Starting Saturday January 24 and running through February 14, anyone with an NYPL library card can download the books immediately through the Libby app.

Previously, Heated Rivalry had a wait list of approximately 3,000, the Cut reports, and the NYPL tells PL that as of this morning there were more than 13,000 downloads for the series, and counting. The NYPL said on their website that they are adding more print copies to their branches as well.

The NYPL said that they “want to encourage New Yorkers to read for pleasure” and “want to reduce one of the barriers to reading: access.” In order to offer the books for immediate download, they used OverDrive’s cost-per-circ license and allocated a budget for the series. “We aren’t able to do this for every title, but this is one way that we are attempting to meet demand for our most popular requests,” a library spokesperson said.

“One of the joys of reading is being in community with other readers, devouring the pages of a book and finding yourself at the heart of a broader cultural conversation,” NYPL chief librarian Brian Bannon said. “At The New York Public Library, we want our patrons to be able to be a part of the zeitgeist—and help shape it. I can think of no better way to stay cozy through a snowstorm than with a coveted copy of this undisputed bestseller.”

According to OverDrive, since the show’s release there has been a 698 percent increase in checkouts, tags and hold requests for Heated Rivalry across all libraries that use Libby, and a 744 percent increase in checkouts, tags and hold requests for the Game Changers series as a whole.

Not covered in this story is what part in this deal is being played by the author of the Game Changers series, and its publisher (Carina Press, an imprint of Harlequin). But we can be sure they do have a role. Whatever you may ideologically want to think, OverDrive is a business, and lending ebooks comes with a cost, which is making up an ever increasing part of library budgets. Without knowing, I’d bet that the deal, time dated as it is, represents a promotional gift on the part of author and publisher, bringing as it does massive good PR — as well of course, as the story notes, extra purchases of physical copies by NYPL.

Unindependent bookstores

I’m not sure just what I think about this story in The Spectator, The independent bookshops that aren’t what they seem (paywall protected). Its author, Arthur Kay, is in no doubt: he thinks it’s a bad thing, but then he is an independent bookseller himself, owner of The Gilded Acorn.

The trouble is that an organization named Book Retail Midco Ltd. owns many bookshops which don’t display any sign of being part of a large group. In other words, Mr Kay accuses them of masquerading as independent bookstores, while enjoying the benefits of making part of a large group. He reports that the money behind it all “Book Retail Midco Limited is part of a multinational retail and online operation with 1,000 stores worldwide, turning over roughly $4 billion a year”. Even worse (?) it’s owned by Elliott Investment Management, the money behind Waterstones and Barnes & Noble. I’m not sure, but it rather looks like the company is an outgrowth/expansion of Waterstones. The plot for Mr Kay thickens when we discover that heading the operation is James Daunt. “In addition to owning his eponymous chain of bookshops and acting as chief executive of Waterstones since 2011 and Barnes & Noble since 2019, Daunt has led this strategy as executive director of Book Retail Midco Limited.”

I suppose we can feel a bit of mild disapproval at this bit of subterfuge, if that’s what it is, but I’m not altogether convinced that there’s too much wrong here. Mr Kay allows as how “None of this is unlawful” — I’m not even sure it’s shady. Buying in bulk may earn them a bit of extra discount, but not huge amounts — we here still have the Robinson-Patman Act though enforcement has become pretty lax. Of course buying in bulk carries its own risks — you can end up buying too many copies of a book none of your outlets is able to sell. Mr Daunt has rescued Barnes & Noble by applying his successful policy carried over from Waterstones, of forcing buying decisions down to the level of the local manager, who is unsurprisingly better placed to know about local tastes than a purchasing manager in some central office. Presumably this is how things are being done at Book Retail Midco.

So what? I don’t feel aggrieved when buying a book at Heffer’s in Cambridge if I discover that years ago the shop was bought by Blackwells in Oxford, now in turn owned by Waterstones, which may now mean Book Retail Midco at the end of the trail. Masquerading isn’t a term that comes into my mind. Should Melrose’s bibliophiles be upset that their bookshop is now being run by Wedale Books from Stow? That our local bookshop is owned by the bakery up the street doesn’t disturb me at all. Why should I mind that The Weybridge Bookshop is owned by BR Midco? As long as they have the books I want, I am still doing what so many deem a “good thing” by not buying from Amazon! (In my mind Amazon’s just a very successful and efficient retailer.) Mr Kay doesn’t say they haven’t, but if they’d came and opened up “Shoreditch Books” right next door to The Gilded Acorn, perhaps aggrieved feelings might be in order, but as long as The Gilded Acorn offers interesting books people will buy them no matter how many branches Book Retail Midco, Waterstones, or T. G. Jones have in the rest of the country.

I attach a photo of the article which is what Jeremy sent me. If you can’t get past the Spectator paywall, maybe you can enlarge the image enough to be able to read it — as I did.

Malcolm Cowley

Here’s a New Yorker piece by Kevin Lozano on Cowley, provoked by the recent publication of a biography by Gerald Howard, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature (Penguin Press, 2025). (Possibly not the year’s number one jacket design I fear.) Link via Lit Hub.

“Susan Cheever, who knew Cowley through her father, John — whom Cowley picked out of the slush pile — thinks that Cowley was forgotten simply because most editors are. They aren’t the stars, after all.” Forgotten? Not everyone gets a road marker.

Malcolm Cowley was born in 1898 in Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania. (Maybe the marker’s not there any more? I found the picture on the internet.) He died in Connecticut in 1989. The New Yorker article focuses on his The Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934), “which documents how his cohort forged a literature in the crucible of national disaffection, war, and exile. It’s a remarkable and unusual work — alternating between first and second person, its account is at once intimate and general”.  In the thirties Malcolm Cowley was influential as literary editor of The New Republic. However for most people nowadays his most memorable work is as the creator of Viking’s Portable series. He himself edited the early volumes, the most notable in modern memory being The Portable Faulkner which is often held to be responsible for Faulkner’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Faulkner himself wrote “I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay”.

For myself I rather like The Blue Juniata, a reminiscence of home, as the road marker reminds us.

Biography of a book contains reminiscence of Cowley and details of The Portable Faulkner.

Amazon power?

Shelf Awareness of 26 January 2016 reported from The Winter Institute — one of the American Booksellers Association annual meetings:

#WI11: ‘Sobering Statistics’ About the Effect of Amazon

One of the most well-attended and discussed sessions yesterday at the Winter Institute featured the release of a new Civic Economics-ABA study called The Fiscal and Land Use Impacts of Online Retail, which aims to demonstrate the effects of the growth of Amazon on American towns and cities. The study determined that in 2014, the last year for which it could get full-year statistics, Amazon sold $44.1 billion of retail goods nationwide, which is “the equivalent of 3,215 retail storefronts or 107 million square feet of commercial space, which might have paid $420 million in property tax.” Also in 2014, Amazon avoided collecting state and local sales tax of $625 million. Between uncollected sales tax and the loss of property tax, state and local governments lost more than $1 billion in revenue–about $8.48 per household in the U.S.–the study found. In 2014, Amazon’s warehouses–65 million square feet of space–employed roughly 30,000 full-time workers and 104,000 part-time and seasonal workers. But including all the jobs lost from stores whose sales Amazon supplanted, Amazon sales “produced a net loss of 135,973 retail jobs.” Matt Cunningham of Civic Economics noted, too, that in 2014 Amazon book sales were about $5.618 billion, some 11.6% of Amazon retail sales. That amount of sales represents about 3,600 “bookshop equivalents and 40,000 bookstore employees,” which he called “a sobering statistic.” The study noted that as of the beginning of this year, Amazon is collecting sales tax on purchases in 27 states–soon to be 28–which is helpful for some state and local governments, but that other trends continue to get worse. “The displacement of retail space from communities to the Internet… has contributed to a slowdown in the occupancy and development of commercial space,” the study wrote. “This, in turn, has an invisible but certain impact on an essential source of revenue for most states, cities, and schools: property taxes.” And Amazon’s warehouses and distribution centers “on the peripheries of cities” are valued and taxed at lower rates than the spaces they are supplanting, often in downtowns. In an effort to make the results more usable for showing government officials at all levels the cost of Amazon to them, the study ranks the impact of Amazon on individual states in several categories. In the case of “sales tax gaps,” Missouri has the largest gap, at $62 million, followed closely by Colorado, Louisiana and Alabama, each of which is more than $50 million. In the case of property tax losses and job losses, the states’ order was more generally comparable to its population, with some exceptions. At the presentation, Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance emphasized that the study should serve as the basis for “generating a much bigger public conversation about the impact of Amazon,” particularly with government officials at all levels. Too often, she said, those officials don’t understand the implications of their decisions to support Amazon with ranges of grants and tax breaks and road improvements and the implications of not supporting independent, local businesses that provide so much value to towns and cities. Mitchell noted that the current situation with Amazon reminds her of the monopoly on railroads in the 1800s, when “they were owned by industrialists who owned other kinds of businesses such as grain mills and steel mills and used transport to mess with competitors”–until the Interstate Commerce Commission was created. ABA CEO Oren Teicher said that the “unprecedented study makes abundantly clear the deleterious effects on the American economy resulting from Amazon’s strategy of retail dominance. It’s our hope that the facts included in this report will help policy makers and the public better understand the need for more diversity in the marketplace, and recognize the potential long-term costs of the loss of healthy local economies.” Booksellers can see the study here.

Ten years later independent bookshops are still going on about Amazon’s baleful effect, but the passage of time does seem to suggest that the doom and gloom were possibly overstated. Of course lots of books are still being bought from Amazon. Sure people are still going into their local bookstore and check out the goods, then retiring and ordering what they want online. Who knows how large this effect is? I’d bet it’s declining. Many shops have little notices on the counter pointing out how unfair such behavior is, and the “buy local” movement does exist despite the evidence of gigantic carts of Amazon packages clogging our sidewalks. Local independent bookshops keep on opening, and Barnes & Noble plans to open sixty new stores this year. Traffic’s coming from somewhere. More bookshops are willing to offer a bit of a discount to keep the sale, and are able and willing to order an out-of-stock book for delivery to the customer’s address.

Are we just indulging in wishful thinking if we believe the book market has matured into a fairly stable state where lots of local bookshops can prosper alongside Bookshop.com and Amazon?

Phillis Wheatley

Unsurprisingly the date and place of her birth are unknown, as of course so too is her “real” name. Phillis Wheatley was captured at the age of six or seven, in whatever part of West Africa she’s from, and sold into slavery. Slave trader John Avery took her to Boston, and in July 1761 she was bought by the Wheatleys, John and Susanna, a wealthy merchant family. The name we know her by links that of slave ship on which she arrived, the Phillis, with the family’s surname.

The frontispiece from Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral  (London 1773). This is probably by the enslaved African, Scipio Moorehead.

Phillis Wheatley was clearly highly intelligent. In a poem addressed to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, a sort of authenticity test set by by Thomas Wooldridge, a visiting English merchant, a test to establish that it was really she who was writing these poems, Wheatley makes a plea for independence, for the freedom of all Americans:

. . . 
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.

Despite the last line there, this poem is not about slavery — Phillis Wheatley was too smart not to know that such a poem from such a source would hardly be welcome. It’s about American independence, a cause which was boiling up at the time. This was written in Boston in 1772, two years after the Boston Massacre, and one year before the Boston Tea Party.

In 1773 — at the age of eighteen or nineteen — she went to London to arrange for the publication of her poems. The reception of her work was pretty tepid, though George Washington hailed her “poetical genius”. Thomas Jefferson however used her as a case in point when writing of the supposed inferiority of black people in America — “Religion, indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet.” Shortly after her return to Boston after publication of her book the Wheatleys died, and in 1778 Phillis, now free, married John Peters, a struggling shopkeeper. Three children died in infancy, and in 1784 their mother died poor and ignored, at the age (probably) of 31.

On her voyage to England to get the poems published she was accompanied by the Wheatley’s son, Nathaniel, and indeed sailed on the London, one of the Wheatley’s ships. This was a significant trip for the Wheatleys to permit — it was officially given out as a sea air cure for her asthma — since in 1772 England had registered a legal ruling making it illegal to reexport a slave from England to any country in which slavery was permitted. So not only were the Wheatleys supporting the writing of their young “servant”, they were effectively granting her her freedom. This she did indeed receive upon her return to Boston.

“The AIien in the Room”

WNYC’s Radio Lab 12 December episode under this title explains AI for us all, not just for advanced mathematicians. This is well worth listening to. It makes plain stuff we none of us really know.

The broadcast, hosted by Steven Adler and Latif Nasser, features Stephen Cave, director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University, Terry Sejnowski, a Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, YouTuber Grant Sanderson, and Steven Levy of Wired. The main message is that AI’s all token prediction — converted into massively complicated, but instantaneously executed mathematics. Simple for computers, bewildering to humans — with a glimpse of an explanation provided here. It all starts with octopuses!

And of course AI keeps on getting slicker and slicker at its predicting. Latif Nasser remarks “Like, there are times when it gets spooky, when there’ll be a time I’ll be listening to an AI-generated podcast, and then one of the hosts breathes. And I’m like, ‘Wait, that’s so weird — it doesn’t even need oxygen. Why is it breathing?’ And now it’s like, oh, because you know that’s just the next statistical thing that would come in that sentence is a breath. That to me — that to me is like — it’s much less eerie because you can see where it got it from.”

Fan Hui, a professional Go player, three-time European champion, famous for being the first champion to have lost games of Go to a computer program, AlphaGo, reminds us that while the machine may be able to out-compute us it won’t be able to out-human us. At the end of the broadcast Professor Thomas Mullaney, author of Chinese typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017), comes on to reassure us all that computer programs are actually computer programs; “even if at the end of the day, an AI is orders of magnitude smarter, AI, just by definition, cannot suffer and rejoice and live and die in quite the same way that humans can, in the same way that we cannot live and die and suffer and comprehend and feel the way an octopus can. I mean, the only thing an AGI [artificial general intelligence] will be able to do is contemplate, ‘My goodness, what does it mean to be an AI?’ And so I am not worried at all about what AI means with regard to meaning, human identity — what it means to be human — or any of that.”

I still keep a little worry in the back of my mind that if Stephen Hawking warned us against AI, maybe attention should be paid, but at the end of the day I do believe that our concern is overstated. We built this thing not some omniscient entity — so it can’t be all-powerful. We seem drunken in our belief it must be able to do anything and everything: it almost certainly can’t and we’ll probably shortly be railing at AI because it failed to live up to our hype. In a Guardian piece Ed Zitron forecasts a big AI bust — both functional and financial.*

As for danger — AlphaGo had to have a human assistant who moved the Go stones for it. Whatever an AI bot may tell us, we are perfectly capable of destroying the world in a whole bunch of ways which don’t require any help from AI or robots!

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* Thanks to Annabel Hollick for the link.

Stagnation?

Ted Gioia knows best. In his post The Day NY Publishing Lost its Soul he warns “Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on just 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.”

The trouble with this description is that, while it’s quite true, it just isn’t news; it isn’t a problem. That’s how publishing is, always has been — and always will be. You throw thousands of plates of spaghetti at the wall and hope that two or three will stick there. Most books sell many fewer copies than “the man in the street” would ever guess, and that “back catalog” has forever been the salvation of the book publisher.

The day our industry’s alleged loss of soul took place is identified as a lunch in 1995 when the boss of Random House, Peter Osnos, told one of his editors that first printings of ten thousand copies were killing the company. They had to publish books that could justify first printings of fifty thousand or so. Now this is a fine thing to say in conversation — but nobody in publishing is silly enough to think it’s a real strategy for success. It’s sort of like a football manager revealing his cunning plan to his players “All we have to do, guys, is score one more goal than they do. So if you’ve let in four at the back — no problem, just go up the other end and score five”.*

It’s rather charming in a way to read about people who discover for the first time that books mostly don’t sell very well, and imagine that they’ve stumbled on some guilty secret. Anyone who’s worked in publishing knows it’s no secret — most books “fail”. So we try, try, try again. You’ve got to be a cockeyed optimist to work in publishing. The unpredictability of it all is actually one of its glories: you just have to keep on doing the right things and hope they’ll work one of these days. When they do all work — who can explain it, who can tell you why — that’s the thrill of the job.

You can’t publish only books which will print 50,000. 10,000 runs may well be killing you, but that’s because you are only selling 5,000 of them. A print run of 50,000 indicates a book you know will succeed: it’s by an established author who’s got a huge faithful audience eagerly awaiting the next offering, and whose previous books all sold over 100,000. You can’t get these bestselling authors to write two or three books a year, (OK, James Patterson can try) and even off you did, their eager fans wouldn’t be able to read them fast enough to need multiple purchases. Result: your old 100,000-sellers would become 10,000-sellers, and once again you’d end up with heaps of unsold books — now even larger heaps. Mr Osnos was making an ironic joke, not proposing a new business plan. He knows that wishful thinking alone can’t flood the market.

Mr Gioia, who has written many books, really ought to know better. It doesn’t really matter that most commentators assume all books sell in the thousands — the real victims of such assumptions are jejune newbie authors, aspiring Danielle Steels, who write a book and immediately assume they can chuck their job because they’ll be employed full-time hauling their royalties down to the bank. Being a full-time writer is hard, and while the ones we tend to read about are the ones who make a bundle, most can’t get by without a decent job or a well-paid partner.

In 2024 170 books made it to the New York Times Fiction bestseller list. How many books were published that year? Surprisingly hard to know, but let’s say 200,000, leaving self-publishing out of the count. I’ve no idea how many of these books would be new fiction, but let’s arbitrarily pick on 20,000. This would mean that you, aspiring author, have got an 0.85% chance of hitting the jackpot. Not odds that’d make you want to throw up your job. And just creeping into the list at number ten is not going to reap you huge royalty rewards anyway.

The consolidation that has gone on in the last thirty years may be responsible for creating the impression that publishing’s a real business. These big companies, pushing efficiencies, and generating huge sales (huge not because each book sells huge numbers, but because huge numbers of titles selling moderately will end up producing huge aggregate sales) create the impression that there’s something going on here. Well there isn’t really — every book ever published goes through the same sort of process; it’s all very individually tailored up until the books get printed and delivered to the warehouse. Big companies employ many people, in order that they can publish many books, but probably the ratio of books to employees is pretty constant at all levels of publishing (ignoring the warehouse end of things, including accounts, and to some extent sales — basically the only real source of efficiencies in the publishing business). The book:employee ratio in the central publishing functions probably sits around ten, maybe fifteen books per person. That has to be pretty invariable, though of course there are unscrupulous publishers who effectively defraud their authors by skipping a few stages in the vetting/editing process. It’s just not a game at which real money folks will waste their time. But it is rewarding — fascinating and fun!

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* The effectiveness of this strategy was demonstrated by Tottenham Hotspur in 2024-25. Their manager Ange Postecoglu advocated all-out attack. The success of this strategy is demonstrated by their narrowly avoiding demotion. It kind of worked at the start of the season, but opponents gradually worked out what they were up to, and were then able to score quite easily against them.

Martin Luther King Jr. and books

The King Center offers to sell you copies of Martin Luther King’s books.

Here’s a list of biographies, provided and annotated by the site SFMLK Day. They also list many other books on Dr King’s life and work.

• “Bearing the Cross” by David J. Garrow (1986)
  A Pulitzer Prize-winning biography detailing King’s life and leadership in the civil rights movement.
• “Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life” by Marshall Frady (2002)
  A concise biography that examines King’s personal and public life.
• “King: A Biography” by David L. Lewis (1970)
  One of the earliest biographies of MLK, offering an in-depth account of his life.
• “Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.” by Stephen B. Oates (1982)
  A comprehensive biography capturing the essence of King’s mission.
• “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.” edited by Clayborne Carson (1998)
  A collection of King’s writings and speeches, edited into an autobiographical narrative.
• “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography” by Ralph David Abernathy (1989)
  Written by MLK’s close friend, this autobiography provides an insider’s view of the movement and King’s leadership.
• “MLK: An American Legacy” by David J. Garrow (2004)
  A compilation of Garrow’s works, including “Bearing the Cross.”
• “Martin Luther King Jr.: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations” (2017)
  A collection of interviews and conversations that provide insight into King’s thoughts during the final years of his life.
• “My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.” by Coretta Scott King (1969)
  Coretta Scott King’s memoir offers a personal account of her life with Dr. King and the challenges they faced.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 as Michael King Jr., and was apparently addressed to the end by family members as Mike. The name change came about when Dr King’s father visited the Holy Land and then Germany in 1934, and in enthusiastic response changed his name from Michael to Martin Luther King. He then changed his son’s name shortly thereafter. Time magazine tells the story.

Dr King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April 1968.

See also my MLK Day post from 2021, MLK.

Digital audio numbers

I was struck by this graphic when I saw it at Technology • Innovation • Publishing. What hit my eye wan’t the content so much as its striking exemplification of how easy it is for commentators to distort statistics — though that’s not what the writers were doing here in their story at Insider Intelligence.

Look at the black bar graph — a tale of increasing success: look at the red line — oops, disaster is at hand.

There’s really no reason to show that red percentage change number: it only serves to confuse. This is the sort of dodge unscrupulous writers like to get up to. An increase in the sales of audiobooks as against print books will look much more impressive if expressed as a percentage than as an absolute number — an increase of 8 on a base of 114 (7%) will look more impressive than an increase of 114 on a base of 8,000 (1.425%). One is sometimes forced to suspect that the statistics are presented in whatever way will best support the writer’s parti-pris. Another example: assume the death rate from Disease A has increased by 100%, while the death rate for Disease B has been reduced by 10%. Obviously we have to divert funding to research into Disease A — until we notice that Disease A’s death rate increased from 2 to 4, while the rate for Disease B dropped to 270.

Anyone wishing for an antidote to this sort of statistical sleight of hand could do worse than read Gerd GIgerenzer’s Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (Penguin, 2015).

Benjamin Franklin as newspaper man

I am told by Adam Smyth in his The Bookmakers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives (Basic Books, 2024) that in eighteenth-century America it was conventional for the newspaper editor/proprietor to act as an agent in the slave trade. Benjamin Franklin was a printer. In the thirty-seven years during which he edited, printed, and published the Pennsylvania Gazette, his newspaper printed at least two-hundred and seventy-seven advertisements offering over three-hundred slaves for sale. Tag lines such as “Any person that wants such a one may see him by enquiring of the Printer hereof” unambiguously implicate Franklin in the business.

Obviously we now regard this as appalling. But isn’t it problematical to judge attitudes of people in bygone centuries by the standards of today?

Do we have to set aside John Buchan’s novels because he uses the word “Jew” to indicate “financially acquisitive”, or writes “white man” when he means “jolly good, honest fellow”, and allows his hero Richard Hannay to address his fiancée as “child”? This sort of unthinking slur was not uncommon in everyday talk back then, and no doubt we in turn will end up guilty of analogous infractions of standards of which we currently have no inkling. However we do have to reflect that despite this it remains unusual to find such loose talk in writings from the early twentieth century: writers seemed perfectly able to restrain themselves in this regard. Maybe Lord Tweedsmuir, towards the end of his life an ardent supporter of Zionism, would argue that this mode of speech merely reflects the attitudes of his characters, such as Richard Hannay, a hunting-shooting-fishing Scot, a soldier, returning from the colonies where’s he’s made a bundle. In his late novel, The Island of Sheep, (1936; published in USA as The Man from the Norlands) Buchan, much less slur-laden, has Hannay deliver a nice little put-down, describing a group of flashy vulgar tourists as “making an ugly splash of aniline dye on this sober [colonial Rhodesian 1900s] landscape”.

For myself I rather think I’d prefer a world in which John Buchan’s vocabulary had been cleaned up. Reading his carelessly deployed epithets always gives me pause, and repeatedly sends me through a boring internal moral argument which interrupts the yarn. This trouble can however be as nothing compared with the offense given to the casually maligned groups themselves. No doubt they avoid these novels. The books are pretty silly, but there’s always a good adventure story lurking in there — and of course for me there’s the plus that he’s always dropping in a man from Galashiels, or someone racing for the Carter Bar, or catching the train at Hawick, or dodging “aeroplanes” where “Annan, Tweed and Clyde rise oot o’ the yae hillside”*.

_____________

* Not quite the one hillside, but these three rivers all rise within six miles of one another, in Tweedsmuir parish — the one flowing south to the Solway Firth, the next east to the North Sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed, and the Clyde north-westerly to Glasgow.

When Buchan became Governor General of Canada in 1935 he was created the first Baron Tweedsmuir. Born in Perth in 1875 John Buchan died in 1940 in Montreal. He wrote over 100 books, including large parts of Nelson’s History of the War (WWI) in 24 volumes. There are twenty-eight novels, seven collections of short stories, and biographies of Sir Walter Scott, Caesar Augustus, Oliver Cromwell and the Marquess of Montrose. Much of his output remains in print.