Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – part #2

I suppose I owe you all a charitable high-five for not pointing out that not only had our previous Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker been done before, but it had been done by me. Shameful. But you were all v sporting for not whispering about my fading cerebral powers behind your hands. Or were you?

This Friday, new thoughts (one hopes). I'm only fifty pages or so from the end of this (which has possibly the best collection of quotes on the jacket that I've seen for a while) and I'm desperate that it wasn't so. At least with this one, there's two whole sequels, which are equally excellent. I'm just not particularly eager to leave the world of Priss, Lakey and Kay, despite those throwaway name-references making the whole thing sound a little too Blyton. Still.

So, my question to you this fine Friday is: which are the books that, while you're reading them, you wished they'd never end? Subquestion: which book would you actually like to live in?

To complete your happy Friday, here's a man we should all be cheering and whooping and celebrating all round. (Actually am, for once, crying as I read this.) Please read this, as it's so very, very important, and go to your library this weekend, and show it some affection.

Sam the Copywriter

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Dirty Rotten Scavengers

At the Penguin Press ‘launch lunch’ I talked about a book called Waste, by Tristram Stuart, which we're publishing in July. It's about food waste. We throw away up to 20 million tonnes of food in the UK every year, and that amount is matched by some other European countries, Japan, and the US. If there was a way of redistributing the excess it would feed 1 billion of the world's hungry three times over. Food is wasted all along the supply chain. Farmers overproduce because they know as much as a quarter of their crop may be rejected for aesthetic reasons – if a potato is too knobbly or a carrot too wonky  it will be thrown away. In the supermarket, because of unnecessarily strict food  safety guidelines and sell-by dates that again are there for aesthetic reasons, food is thrown out weeks before it would be unsafe to eat. And finally, in the home, we buy too much food and don't eat it all. If we wasted less, global food prices could stabilise, thereby allowing the hungry to afford more, and because there would be less demand in the rich West, the countries that export food to us at their population's expense would sell it where it was needed. Pollution would be drastically reduced – there would be fewer cows emitting methane and fewer fuel-guzzling machines transporting and processing food.

 

The author lives by example. As a student he fed himself on what food shops and supermarkets threw away. He is a Freegan. To this day, as well as the pigs he rears and his vegetable patch, he lives largely on what is discarded by others. Now I have always wanted to go bin-dipping, and when I mentioned this to my colleague, Emily Hill, she confessed that she did too, so on a Sunday afternoon in April we went looking for our dinner in bins around the Strand and Covent Garden.

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The first supermarket we came to had closed a few minutes before we arrived, and there was no sign of food being wasted front of house, but when we went around the back we saw a man unloading several green pallets into a green skip. The pallets were full of food that had reached its sell-by date but was fit to eat. When we asked if he minded us taking pictures he was delighted. He had complained to his manager about the amount wasted every day but was told there was nothing they could do about it. Not only was this food fated to expend its nutrients in an incinerator or pit, it was sprayed with blue dye to prevent the food being sold on, a slightly less offensive deterrent than bleach, which some supermarkets use to put off scavengers.

The second supermarket, within walking distance of the first, was more careful about who it let look at its bins. We came to locked doors and a warning sign that rhymed: ‘This door will not open before 8AM, unless it is the dustbin men.’ We moved on to a doughnut shop. A black bag nestled innocuously by its doorstep. It was heavy. I opened it and found a buffet of multicoloured, icing-smeared, cream-filled unhealthy snacks. They had been put in the bag an hour earlier, when they would have been fine to eat, and now were soiled by cup dregs and damp tissues.

 

Our last two stops were coffee shops. One we passed as it was closing, saw the fridge shelves stacked with ready-to-eat sandwiches and resolved to come back to find out what was being done with them. The other we were drawn to by the small hill of transparent bin bags outside it. The first, we discovered, did not throw its sandwiches away, but saved them till the next day – a guiding star of frugality in a sea of commercial effluent. But the see-through bin bags of the second were full of sticky Danish pastries, soggy bread pitted with dried fruits, and croissants.

 

We went home hungry, but not because there wasn’t enough to eat.

 

 

 

 

 

Phillip Birch

Assistant Editor, Penguin Press

 

Emily Hill

Publishing Co-ordinator, Penguin Press

          

Settle down, everyone: Round One…

The gloves were off last night, as Particular Books launched with a head-scratching, brain-teasing, knowledge-dredging Quiz to End All Quizzes at the Ivy House in Holborn. The six-man teams included booksellers and Penguins alike, and ranged from Occasionally Right (Rights), Economic Collapse (Finance) and http://www.winners.com (Online), to the heart-breakingly named Hopefully Better Than Waterstone's.

The first round – English Countryside – had us baffled with questions about swan-upping, but reassured us when our teams got the correct answers for questions about a man being buried with his heart in a biscuit tin (Thomas Hardy) and the misconception of Gypsy provenance (Egypt). The Pubs round brought the teams close to fisticuffs, with quotes from Coleridge, Churchill and Ogden Nash, and all the teams frantically trying to remember the words to Pop Goes the Weasel (fact lovers: it references The Eagle on City Road). Round 3, a fashion round, introduced quizmaster extraordinaire Simon Winder to the world of Jefferson Hack, Kanye West and Milla Jovovich, and made us all resolve to wear a little more colour, a little wilder heels, and accessorise a little neater. Just as long as we can name which film Lauren Hutton starred in alongside Richard Gere in the 80s (American Gigolo. Yesssssssss.) The Weird English Words in round 4 introduced us to B.U.R.M.A., a baby oyster (a spat), the oche and the hiphop female equivalent of 'pimpjuice' ('Milkshake', apparently. Discuss). Aaaand… relax.

Ten minutes to scoff some delicious Thai food, and then onwards into battle. The fifth round, titled 'Q & U', baffled some team-members. After answering 'lacquer', 'Quebec' and 'equals sign' for previous answers, one of our group decided the answer to 'A traditional lawn game involving the throwing of a metal or rubber ring to land over a pin?' was hoopla. Weak. Link.

The Animal Names and Facts of the sixth round gave me enough fascinating facts to bar me from a pub for a month. (Did you know that the deadliest marine animal is the box jellyfish? And that George Washington's teeth were made from hippo tusks? Or that itching powder is made from tarantula hair? Or that the only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat?) The final round saw us reaching deep into our GCSE memories to recall how French we were, with questions ranging from the most hated man in French schools (Charlemagne – he invented school) to the Four Musketeers (no, none of them was called Dogtagnan). Having been in the top three for much of the night, we were cruelly pushed into fourth place, and victory was snatched from the Colophon of Publishers by the seven-strong team, Bardini the Magnificent.

If I've learnt anything from the night it's that a gricer is a trainspotter, Shakespeare's father was an ale-inspector, and I shouldn't do pub quizzes with anyone I have to face the next day.

Sam the Copywriter

How to Sell Books in a Recession

In one of the darkest years of the 1930s depression, Allen Lane founded Penguin with the — then groundbreaking — notion to sell quality writing as cheaply as a pack of cigarettes and to sell them everywhere.

Studying our own history gives us pause for thought as we tip headfirst into recession: bleak economic times are sometimes the crucible of inspiration and creativity. I think of the black box theatres so beloved of Peter Brook and endless student productions, in which limited resources became the spur to imagination. And I compare that to a particularly bloated production I once saw where just one effect must have cost thousands of pounds, scores of unionised man-hours and added precisely nothing of meaning or value to the piece.

When I say we're ready and inspired to take the challenge of an economic downturn, I don't just mean cutting a few long lunches, but having a vision and being fleet of foot enough to respond to changing market conditions. Historically, the publishing industry thrives on such challenges. I think I've said in a previous blog that for an "old" industry, we're pretty responsive and innovative. We have to be.

Our customers are still there and a book remains fantastic value for money. Apparently at such times we skew more toward escapist fare, rather like the cinema goers in the 30s flocked to gangster films, musicals and screwball comedies. When the Canary Wharf Waterstones opened the day after the collapse of Lehman Bros, the first two books to be sold were books on spirituality. Another huge growth area is teenage fiction thanks to the Harry Potter effect on our growing kids, with help from teenage vampires in Twilight and teenage fathers in Nick Hornby's Slam. The common wisdom is that this mortgage-free demographic market's disposible income remains relatively unaffected, although books compete for it with games and music. People will also still buy books for their kids. The success of Ascent of Money, Black Swan and The Great Crash 1929 shows that those books helping us understand what's happening are also flying out the door.

So what are we worried about?

In short, it might not be our readers, but our retailers.

The once mighty high street has been fighting competition from online and supermarkets for a few years, but when every day another high street name goes into administration, we have to assess the risk. When a company goes into administration, the independent administrators sell off as many assets as possible, paying off debts in order of priority. If we have lots of stock sitting in a customer's warehouse or on their shelves, we first have to prove to the administrators that we supplied it, rather than a third party wholesaler, and then once that value is assessed, we may only be awarded pence in the pound. So a retailer going under is bad news for its suppliers.

There is a theory that in these times it's best to be very big so you can take a hit like the one I've described, or to be very small, so you can turn on a dime in response to tricky market conditions. Each of our retailers needs a strategy to suit these times as much as we do: whether it's negotiating down rents and utilities, increasing margin on every book sold, increasing marketing income, consolidating roles, departments or even outlets, making cost savings in the supply chain, and so on. That can make for even tougher negotiations between publishers and retailers, but it's not the only game in town. How do we get back to creativity and innovation? How do we as publishers and retailers inspire our customers to buy books?

Peter Brook felt passionately that a theatre of more limited means helped to bring theatre-makers and their audiences into a closer rapport. The stage is bare. Enter an actor and a book.

Fiona Buckland
Sales Manager

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Credit Crunch Blues

My posh dress is hanging up behind my desk and I’m hoping rather forornly that the creases will fall out of it by the time I finish writing this post. Spring 09 Conference is over and tonight I’m off to the Bookseller Retail Awards to celebrate supply chain initiatives. I wonder how many times the credit crunch will be raised tonight? You couldn’t avoid it at conference. Everyone at Penguin is wondering just what effect it will have on us this Christmas, not just here in the UK trade, but also in our group and international territories.

Joe Stiglitz says those who claim they can see light at the end of the tunnel are only seeing the light from the freight train coming right at them. For, he claims, we are only just beginning to face into the storm.

Strong stuff.

And yet, there is a view (hopefully not a complacent one) which says that books are relatively recession proof. Is this true? I have heard three possible reasons for this view:

1. The lipstick effect: that in tough economic times, people may baulk at buying a new wide-screen tv, but a lipstick (or indeed a book) is a relatively low-cost, feel-good purchase, whether for yourself or as a gift.

2. For the same reason pubs are suffering, books may thrive as more people choose to save money by staying in, and what better way to relax as the nights draw in than reading a book?

3. This one from our MD in Singapore who cites the 20:80 rule: that a small fraction of people buy the majority of books and these people are themselves relatively recession-proof, their disposible income being such that they don’t deprive themselves of anything in order to buy books.

I’m tempted to call Niall Ferguson to ask his opinion as I sat in a room with him at the beginning of the year discussing his new book The Ascent of Money, and he predicted everything we’re seeing. What did the book index look like in previous cycles? I find consolation in history, in knowing that this is part of a cycle, rather than a free-form meltdown with no precedent.

Sales, well, sales are always tough. We are looking down that long runway toward Christmas and it’s nerve-jangling waiting for the rush to hit. So we’ll raise our glasses of chardonnay to the company that wins the Award for Expanding the Retail Market, we’ll share the gossip, we’ll invoke the crunch again as the answer to our questions and the question we need to answer, and then tomorrow, we’ll have one more coffee and then pick up the phone and sell some more books.

And perhaps no-one will notice the creases after all.

Fiona Buckland
Sales Manager

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Mayday! It’s the end of literature!

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty big fan of Jean Hannah Edelstein. I often read her posts and feel a pang of recognition, albeit by replacing her hi-falutin’ titles with the ones I actually read. But this time, the headline writers of the Guardian have gone too far. "Can the novella save literature?" may be both an interesting question and a tongue-in-cheek way of addressing the fact that London’s public transport is crammed with crummy freepapers, but it smacks of the terror that seems to riddle the whole world of books like woodworm. Or bookworm.

JHE argues: "the vast majority of new writers – even the very good ones – trying to crack in to publishing with their first novel are inevitably told that times are hard for fiction right now … the chance of publishers successfully launching a novel by an unknown writer on the reading public are indeed slim in an information culture where we struggle to get through 10 pages without losing focus to the buzz of media white noise. Several hundred pages can feel like too much of a commitment when there is so much information to consume … And who could deny that the actual experience of reading a long book can feel a little arduous if it doesn’t really make your heart sing?"

I think partaking in anything you find rubbish is a pretty poor way of judging that oeuvre. Going to see my sister’s childhood orchestra would never have made a classical music fan of anyone, and seeing one Young Vic performance of Hamlet is not the way to judge that theatre is "over". Yes, we are pretty busy these days, and yes, there is a lot going on in terms of the information being fed to us – but how much more do we appreciate sinking into a good book? A thick, good book. Whether it’s a Rowling, Clarke, Mitchell or James, a book that requires dedication and commitment is exactly what many people are desperate for at a time where restaurant meals last 45 minutes and you can cross the planet in a day or so.

JHE also suggests that novellas battle dumbing-down charges, because "without exacting quite the level of austerity presented by the task of writing a good short story, novellas challenge writers to use words like wartime rations: with care and thought and the extra level of creative gusto required to ensure that they stretch to make a miniature read that is just as satisfying as something more substantial." Why not encourage full-length novelists to work that way? Neither Lolita nor The Talented Mr Ripley are particularly brief, but neither has a word wasted – unlike some of the sprawling rambles novelists (as opposed to novella-ists) can be inclined towards. And if a reader didn’t have to wade through 150 pages of foggy childhood recollection, who knows – 800-page tomes might fly by.

I think the bell for literature has been tolling for a few hundred years now, with no noticeable shift away from books over walking, talking, dancing, playing the piano/Wii, or any of the myriad other options. And since Penguin Towers keeps on ticking over, I think I’ll hold off on tearing down my bookshelves for novella racks/computer brain sockets/iron gates to keep away the barbarian hordes. Although since one of them fell down recently, I may have to reinforce the ‘tome’ section.

Sam the Copywriter

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Ban this book?

Back in the UK… but a little wistful that I’m not still in the US to witness the fireworks sparked off by the non-publishing of OJ Simpson ‘hypothetical’ account of how he might have murdered his ex-wife. . Such furore throws up all sorts of interesting questions for us publishers – where does one draw that un-crossable line? And is it redrawn each time the industry is thrown a curveball such as the OJ book, or every time the government wrestles with legislation concerning free speech, or when the home office questions the right of convicted criminals to profit from writing their memoirs? While the vast majority of people in the industry wish to stamp as high as possible a level of quality (editorial, design, production etc) on our books, the reality is always going to be that the bottom line of pounds and dollars matters just as much –  no sales means no books. And there is no doubt that the OJ book would have sold – and sold rather well.

And so creaks the rollercoaster debate about the balancing act between public appetite and censorship… Penguin has had a long history of courting with such controversy – from the days of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (link), to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and more recently Roy Keane’s fiery autobiography. So how do we make those judgement calls? Surprise surprise – there really is no magic formula – not that I’ve seen, anyway. Lots of debate, a few responsible people sat round the table, and a bloody good legal team help – but still no quadratic equations to make those decisions for us.

But, I guess as a fiction editor I’m lucky – mostly I’m immersed in a wonderful world of action thriller and historical mysteries, and such issues aren’t waiting round the next corner to jump up and bite my arse…. mostly… I have a wee sideline in bloke-ish humour books – and am very excited to be publishing a wonderful book this month by Icelandic cartoonist Hugleikur Dagsson. www.shouldyoubelaughingatthis.co.uk. He’s captured many hearts here at Penguin with his very kooky and cute, but ever so slightly controversial cartoons. But (there’s always a but) – it seems not everyone is so enchanted…

Download irish_sun.pdf

Alex Clarke, Commissioning Editor – Michael Joseph