Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Whatever Happened to Books?Source: Fortnight, No. 174 (Dec., 1979 - Jan., 1980), p. 19Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25546762 .

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December 1979-January 1980/19

H^H^HHI^''^::mi'1 :'': :':' :^jlili,!ill^|!'l|fJ:! The publishing trade is full of contradictions. Technological and economic I^^^^BI^^^^B^m^^mmmMBBMBBBHB pressures seem to make books less profitable, the English language, |H^^B^b^^H^^^H|^H^H^^^HHB| changing rapidly, or deteriorating, is frequently mauled in the press and

^^HHj^H^^^^H^HHf^^^T^^MWB books. Looking at the evidence, including the three successful publishing ____^B_^___^___________%____T f1'"' l'''''i^'EmK houses in Belfast, where does the written word seem to be going? J_\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\^^

It is accepted wisdom that we live in a post verbal society. We have better television (though less choice) than

anyone, we don't have the time to read

three volume tomes of the size

Victorians preferred. We buy news-,

papers like the Star, the Sun and the

Sunday World, in which English plays a diminishing role. In book and

magazine publishing, standards have

gone out the door with the last of the old manual compositors. Literacy has not improved in thirty years. And what with the silicon chip, we soon won't be

buying books at all. We'll be swamped with video games, optical fibres and

floppy discs. The medium is the

message. Dyslexia rules KO.

The truth is less alarming. Rhodes

Boyson and his chums may deplore the fact that some children can leave school illiterate, but is it reasonable to

expect literacy to constantly increase? There's been universal education for

quite some time, and there must always be a percentage of children who will be unable to learn reading, for a variety of reasons.

CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING? Technology need not be the threat to

literacy that many fear, though it will

change consumption and production patterns. We may use television and

telephones more, but the new facilities, such as Ceefax and Prestel, allow the screen to carry words as well as

pictures. The silicon chip allows words to be stored and processed, and optical fibres allow them to be transmitted,

more efficiently. Words are made more

accessible, not eliminated.

Newspapers do seem to deteriorate in standards of English, but a glance at

newspapers, gazettes and intelli

gencers from the very birth of

journalism to the present reveals that the inability to spell or construct a

grammatical sentence is nothing new in the profession. Standards of layout and printing are incomparably better

today. Book publishers in particular may

yearn for the romantic days of the California job case with its individual lead characters, but in this they are deceived by the apparent "mystery" of the old system and the apparent simplicity ofthe new. It is much easier and quicker to learn how to set a

passable text on the new system^utB there is just as much potential to use I skill and precision as ever. There is I

more scope, rather than less, forB creative typesetting, and corrections can now be made before any "hardH

copy" (i.e. a piece of paper with the textB on it) is even produced. The fact thatH

most publishers have not exploited I these possibilities to improve standards _\ says more about their financial restraints, their failure to understand the new technology, and their lack of

rapport with compositors (as anyone who has seen a newspaper office can

testify) than about the shortcomings of

computerised phototypesetting.

PUBLISH AND BE PROFITABLE The British buy more newspapers

than any nation except the Japanese. They use public libraries more than

anyone. Publishing novels, we hear, does not pay. Yet British publishers will produce more novels in 1979 than ever before. The annual number of new titles of all books steadily approaches the half-million mark. Irish publishing has recently experienced a boom, and is an important exporter.

This has not come about through a vast increase in public appetite for

reading matter, but through reorgan isation at the business end. These days the publisher is more likely to commission books for specific mark ets, to get tv, radio or even political personalities to lend their names, to use

more (and more expensive) illust rations (indeed, to plan the text around

them), to sell the book more

aggressively. There are even publishers who do nothing else but put together lavishly illustrated "non-books" (trade

jargon, apparently). If there is no

prospect of a deal for multi-national

publication or film rights, some will not even consider publication. Some

specialise in arcane subjects which have a more or less guaranteed sale to afficionados.

Several large houses will subsidise the publication of worthwhile novels and poetry with the profits from their

more lucrative enterprises. For in stance, it is rare for a novelist to become profitable before his third or fourth book, yet big publishers will offer advances on second or third novels to keep the author in bread and

typewriter ribbon until he starts

making money for them. The three large Belfast publishing

firms have survived and even prospered by a combination of some or many of these tactics. Christian Journals (Wilbert Forker, prop.) go in for

specialisation and international deals. Blackstaff Press (founded by Jim and Diane Gracey) have filled a gap in the market for local interest books and have diversified too, managing to combine money-spinners with an

important contribution in the most difficult areas of publishing?poetry, first novels and short stories. Appletree Press (run by John Murphy) has tended to concentrate on the more immed

iately lucrative ventures, mostly heavily illustrated, Irish interest, coffee-table

books or academic works with a definite market.

In one sense, publishing is a very insignificant industry. Though there are 'literally thousands of tiny publishers, the number of people employed is small. (For instance,

Weidenfeld and Nicholson, a major London firm, has been contemplating a big expansion plan to increase its number of employees to just over 100.) Yet the contribution of publishers to cultural life is out of proportion to their contribution to employment or the

economy. Pace Robert Maxwell and George

Weidenfeld, few people can enter

publishing to get rich. While new business techniques and new technol

ogy have brough radical changes, the book publishers seem to have adapted rather well, still finding room to

produce literature occasionally. Biblio

philes should keep their fingers crossed and hope that publishers will continue to subsidise (or invest in) quality. Here and there, it appears that they do continue to do it as much for love as for

money.

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