There’s a certain sort of arts fan, and there’s a lot of them about, for whom a pleasure shared is a pleasure halved. It’s as if the meaning of a piece of art is actually diluted by other peoples’ appreciation of it, as if the object of their affection is having a succession of random extra-marital affairs with complete strangers. You can see this mindset at work in McDonald’s book - the work of art should be hard, proud and independent, formidable and a tad threatening, like some stern, formidable Wagnerian goddess accustomed to worship. It most definitely should not make its meaning available to any Joe who walks in off the street and expresses a casual interest. Courtship must be protracted and difficult - and when a jealous arts fan mates, he mates for life.
Once consummation has been achieved, obstacles must be placed around the inamorata to guard against any unwanted attentions from potential suitors. These are usually social (she’s out of your class) or intellectual (you’re not clever enough to understand her), and reviewers, critics and academics will play their part in guarding her chastity by trying and make the work of art appear as complex as they possibly can. It’s a pretty sorry spectacle all round, particularly if you think, as I do, that art should be the good time had by all. And while I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that the literary snob is a Freudian basket case, I reckon they do have a few screws loose. Isn’t it natural to want to share enjoyment?
For the publisher and the retailer, however, this distinction between Popular and Literary doesn’t matter a jot - they’ll happily sell to both markets. Money is money, no matter whose pocket it comes out of, so they’re not going to come down on one side of the argument or the other. They recognize the reality of the situation and act on it. So, even in smaller branches of High Street bookshops, there’s a section dedicated to each, and there need be no confusion as to which one is which, because all we have to do is look at the book itself. The format it’s published in will give you an idea of what you’ll find inside.
If it’s a small, thick book with gold blocking on the front and the author’s surname in far bigger type than his first name, it’s ‘Popular Fiction’ - an airport novel, a thriller, a romance, sci-fi - whatever. Apparently, we like our popular fiction to look that way - small close print, tight margins and lavatory-quality paper (which is chosen to ‘bulk out’ the book to make it look chunky and substantial). It’s easy to carry around, and you can break its spine because it’s not that expensive and you’ll probably only read it once anyway before lending it to someone else. It’s there to entertain more than it exists to stimulate or inform, so it’s designed to look brash and slightly vulgar.
But if you can’t find what you want there, try the ‘Literary Fiction’ area, distinguishable by its rows of titles in the larger ‘B’ format pioneered in the UK by Picador Books from 1972 onwards, and which just about every publisher has now copied. This has wider margins, larger print, thinner, better quality paper and a tasteful cover design. It also costs a couple of pounds more (on average) - all of which indicates that we’re in PLBOAMS territory. You’re more likely to find your challenging read here than in the land of gold blocking - and, if you’re so minded, you can sneer at your fellow readers flicking through the latest Ken Follett in the next aisle.
Two paperback formats, two worlds of reading, both of which have been extensively researched by the marketeers to help us readers find what we want. But formulated using the prejudice that some books are inherently less worthwhile than others.
I find it odd that the physical aspect of a book’s circumstantial meaning should prove so influential - but it always has. In the 1930’s, paperbacks as a format simply weren’t reviewed by the literary weeklies - they weren’t thought ‘serious’ enough, so editors tended not to bother with them, seduced instead by the more substantial cardboard of the hardback. It was almost as if, subconsciously, the added strength in the binding lent them more substance. I also remember an episode of the BBC’s sitcom ‘The Good Life’ in which the queen of the Surbiton snobs, Margot Ledbetter, says she wouldn’t allow a paperback on her shelves. People might think she was common, or, heaven forbid, couldn’t afford hardbacks.
It’s almost too stupid for words, and there are, of course, many examples of where these artificial barriers have been broken down.
Perhaps the most celebrated of these was the foundation, in 1935, of Penguin Books by the publisher Allen Lane, who sought to bring a range of quality fiction to the market at affordable prices (6d, originally) in paperback. The first ten books that appeared under the imprint were an inspired mix of the popular and esoteric: rubbing shoulders with mainstream writers such as Agatha Christie, Eric Linklater and Compton MacKenzie was Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’, and even more surprisingly, Andre Maurois’s biography of Shelley, ‘Ariel’ - hardly light reading. Although advance orders of only 7,000 wasn’t an auspicious start for the new imprint, over 3 million were sold in the first twelve months of Penguin’s lifetime, proving that ‘popular’ and ‘poor quality’ were not necessarily synonymous. (1)
Heartened by this success, and following the easing of the paper shortages of the Second World War (which saw book production cut by around two-thirds), a new range of Penguin Classics was launched in 1946, putting yet another nail in the coffin of those who thought ‘difficult’ stuff wouldn’t sell: EV Rieu’s translation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ shipped three million copies and held the title of the most popular Penguin until sex overtook it in the form of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in 1960. It was cheap, available, and a clearly-written translation of a damn good story. By the law of averages, there must have been a quite a few Recreational Readers who shelled out their tanners for a copy, giving the lie to those who feel that most of us are happy on an exclusive diet of crap. (2)
But it doesn’t necessarily take a revolutionary publishing venture to break down the barriers - just look what happens when a ‘classic’ is serialized on TV or made into a film. When this occurs, fiction usually stops being ‘literary’ and is simply regarded as a good story, whether it’s Stephen King or Henry James. Then a “popular” edition is released with a still from the production on the cover. And it sells like mad.
Take Robert Graves’s classical epic ‘I, Claudius’, for example, still regularly reprinted nearly 30 years after its first TV transmission on BBC2 in 1976. Not an obvious choice for an impulse buy before the serialization, but a title which raced off the shelves after Penguin put a mosaic likeness of Derek Jacobi (who played the title role) on the cover. And there was a knock-on effect: sales of Suetonius’s ‘The Twelve Caesars’ started to grow, once eager readers found out it was the source for much of ‘I, Claudius’. And who knows, many may have been propelled into a lifelong love of the Latin classics after they’d been given this tantalising glimpse of an entire new world of literature they didn’t even know existed.
The same thing happened after the movie version of Michael Ondaatje’s novel ‘The English Patient’ was released in 1996. Reading the histories of Herodotus as a prelude to intercourse certainly worked for Ralph Fiennes’s character, Almasy - and, judging by the number of Recreational Readers who bought a copy of “The Father of History’s” work on the strength of the movie, they were going to have a try themselves. Even Marcel Proust enjoyed a surge in popular acclaim after part of ‘A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu’ was filmed as ‘Swann’s Way’, starring Jeremy Irons in 1983.
So to build sales for an author who is one of the benchmarks of “difficulty” is, after all, possible. Which only goes to show; in most cases, it’s not the work of literature itself or how difficult or easy it is to read that’s the issue. It’s whether we know it’s available at all. Knowledge is the key, and, in many cases, it can start a momentum that will see a hitherto Recreational Reader seek out his own path through literature that will turn his tentative forays into a grand passion. Who cares how people come into the realms of literature, as long as they get there?
And this is an attitude increasingly prevalent in publishing, although, of course, it’s one driven more by business principles than cultural altruism; all you’ve got to do is provide accessible information, combine it with an attractive pricing policy, and you might just be able to sell more copies of a wider range of titles.
One of the less public inroads into the PLBOAMS mindset, was the abolition of the Net Book Agreement, a cosy cartel assembled in 1900, which, until 1995, fixed the price at which books could be sold throughout the UK. Eight years on from its demise, the above-mentioned Harry Potter tome is retailing in hardback from between £7.34 (Tesco OnLine) to the full price of £16.99 in smaller shops who don’t have the buying power to negotiate publisher discounts at this astonishing rate of 43 per cent. Furious lobbying greeted news of the NBA’s proposed withdrawal, and, it’s true that freeing the market up has been a mixed blessing. The downside is that a lot of independent, quirky bookshops have gone to the wall, which concentrates more power into fewer hands, which isn’t noted as being a good thing in any walk of life. But the dire warnings that fewer books would end up being published as the outlets for low-circulation books evaporated have been proved completely wrong, as we noted above. There’s now more books appearing than ever, right across the subject spectrum. And there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that it’s not just the potential big sellers that are being discounted; in my local Waterstone’s this morning, I counted at least a dozen first-time authors that were being stickered, which might just persuade our Recreational Reader to take a punt on a name he’s never heard of rather than buying the latest John Grisham. You never know.
Then there’s the introduction of the Book Charts. The music industry’s had theirs in one form or another for over 65 years; and it’s a mark of how wonderfully blase the book business can be sometimes that it took them half a century to catch up, and even then, few were convinced of the value of having these statistics to hand. It was all rather grubby and smacked of, well, commerce. But then the multinationals arrived and started demanding rather more grown-up market indicators than the ‘I counted ‘x’ number of books out and I counted ‘y’ number of books back’ that had served the trade so well for so long. Now most MD’s are glued to the middle pages of ‘The Bookseller’ every Thursday to see how their offspring are faring ‘out there’ in the dog-eat-dog world of properly audited sales.
Since 2002, the sales of every title can be monitored from point of sale tills in the UK, the USA/ Canada, Ireland and Australia. So we can tell what everyone’s reading in the major English-speaking markets, with data from over 6,000 retailers.
Footnotes:
1. The name ‘Penguin’ was thought up by Allen Lane’s secretary when her boss asked for ‘”dignified yet flippant” suggestions for the new company. Those first ten titles were ‘Ariel’: Andre Maurois, ‘A Farewell to Arms’: Ernest Hemingway, ‘Poet's Pub’: Eric Linklater, ‘Madame Claire’: Susan Ertz, ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’: Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Murder on the Links’: Agatha Christie, ‘Twenty-five’: Beverley Nichols, ‘William’: E. H. Young, ‘Gone to Earth’: Mary Webb, ‘Carnival’: Compton Mackenzie. But as with so much we’ve looked at so far in this section, there was a precedent for both the appearance of Penguins and their editorial policy: Albatros books [notice the recurring bird motif], themselves based on the Tauchnitz editions of Leipzig started in 1842, were founded in Hamburg in 1932 - there’s nothing new under the sun in publishing, it seems . . .
2. And now there’s loads of classic imprints, all doing reasonably well in what’s become a crowded area of the marketplace. Penguin now has several hundred titles available, joined by Wordsworth Classics, Picador, Dover and Oxford World’s Classics, to name a few.
