Michael's Bookshelf: A Look at Publishing

Michael Schmidt also edits PN Review

Today's blogpost is taken from a lecture delivered by Michael Schmidt at the 100th anniversary of Manchester University Press (MUP) in 2004.

[...] Into the post-modern world the academic and the literary publisher (if I may link our fates together and pretend we are similar and going in the same direction) – into the post-modern world we bring quite a lot of baggage. What does that baggage include? 

Well, in material terms, it includes a substantial stock of books accumulated in an age when print runs were longer and stock turn was expected to be slower than it is today. A few years back Oxford University Press sold the last copy of, if I recall, a Coptic Bible that had been in the warehouse since 1712. Remarkable to have had a warehouse for so long without a single warehouse fire or flood, and to have had inventory control so efficient that the book could be found! The Penguin warehouse recently lost 100,000 copies of one of their best-sellers. They turned up in the end, when the book was no longer a best-seller: just in time for the remainder merchants at the back door, no doubt. Stock control isn’t what it was.

We carry substantial stocks and we are reluctant to part with them. It is not only that we have a lot of books: we have a lot of different books. I don’t know how many ‘live’ titles MUP has. A tiny press like Carcanet carries more than 800 active ‘lines’, 800 royalty accounts, 800 stock checks, all those authors who think about us every day and write to us asking why their books, published twenty years ago, are not in the shops.

It is an important question. Why are they not in the shops? Part two of the old equation: the bookshop.

Victor Ross, who helped set up Reader’s Digest in the UK and was briefly my Chairman in the mid-1980s used to speak of the book trade as the most inefficient system of distribution in the world. ‘You nail down the bee and tell the flower to go and find it.’ Certainly this is the case for the academic and specialised publisher. The reasons for the change in pattern in bookselling:

• increase in title production, up from 24,000 when I came to the UK to well over 200,000 now. No bookseller can deal with the process of rational and imaginative selection. Poetry for example: more than 2500 collections of modern verse [...]

• after increase in title production, there is the end of retail price control, the Net Book Agreement, with the acceleration of competition and the edging out of independents, or where independents survive their stock reflects the holdings of the successful chains.

• the emphasis on market leaders, the death of backlist. In poetry, again, 60% of the market three years ago was two authors, Heaney and Hughes. In most smaller bookshops poetry is a row of anthologies, classics, and a tiny smattering of market leaders.

• in the area of the Humanities, the triumph of secondary material: read about rather than read. Wyndham Lewis: nine books in print about him, only one book widely in print in this country of him; Ford Madox Ford, whose conference is being held here next week, loads of studies of him, three biographies, but only the tip of the iceberg in publishing terms. A biographer in the States was offered $1,000,000 to write the life of one famous American poet; the poet in question has never earned anything like that much from his writings. He agreed to cooperate if the biographer would share the advance 50/50. The book was never written. Ian Hamilton famously made more out of his biography of Robert Lowell than Lowell made out of his book advances all together [...]

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Even disregarding his considerable talent as a writer, it is easy to see why Ford Madox Ford attracted biographers. His mother, Catherine, was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a German emigré, a musicologist and music critic for The Times. Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were his aunt and uncle by marriage. Ford published his first book, a children’s fairytale, when he was seventeen. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad from 1898 to 1908, and also befriended many of the best writers of his time, including Henry James, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy and Thomas Hardy.

Carcanet publishes several of Ford Madox Ford's novels, including his wartime masterpiece, Parade's End, in four volumes - the first is pictured here. Parade's End has been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard, and will be broadcast later this year by HBO and the BBC.