Move over hygge, the Christmas book is back in vogue

PUBLISHING is not an exact science — more like pinning the tail on the donkey, blindfold. At no time is this more evident than at Christmas. By long tradition the Christmas market has been the happy hunting ground of the Quirky Book, emerging out of nowhere to become a surprise bestseller and gift of last resort.

The heyday of this phenomenon was years ago, virtually part of folk memory. Ben Schott’s Original Miscellany of 2002 sold two million copies, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves of 2003 two-and-a-half million. These glories were succeeded by such classics as Is It Just Me or is Everything S***?, Crap

Towns, Bunny Suicides, Does Anything Eat Wasps? and The Dangerous Book for Boys.

Since nobody in the business ever knew which Quirky Book would turn out to be The One, for years the publishers chucked them into the shops in vast quantities, fingers crossed. There were years when the only practical way of assessing the wannabe QBs piled up in the bookshops seemed to be by the stere, as used for pricing up firewood.

Then fatigue set in and celebrity memoirs took up the Christmas slack: David Beckham’s pioneering triumph being trumped by Sharon Osbourne’s Extreme, before this market too descended into hopeless D-listers and unknowns, best summed up by the words “Kerry Katona”. Pretty much a dead duck now, the sleb-memoir, David Jason not withstanding.

Celebrity cookbooks continue: Jamie Oliver’s umpteenth, 5 Ingredients, may yet prove the bestselling hardback of the year. Quaint Enid Blyton and Ladybird spoofs are still thriving, as are temptingly tiny guides to salvation in the form of Little Books of Hygge, Lykke, Ikigai, Lagom and Silence. We are also, it seems, seduced by sympathetic accounts of caring for livestock — ovines last year; bovines this — with Rosamund Young’s reprint The Secret Life of Cows threatening to outsell Robbie Williams’s big Reveal.

Yet there is one surprising new trend. This Christmas the bookshops are full of actual Christmas books. In a year that has been fallow for bestsellers (even the head of Waterstones has admitted) the season’s most appealing books are properly seasonal, not blatantly silly.

There’s The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by the much-missed P D James. There’s A Maigret Christmas, full of poignant evocations of Parisian misery. There’s Wendy Cope’s styptic Christmas Poems. There’s Murder in the Snow: A Cotswold Christmas Mystery by the great Gladys Mitchell. There’s Nancy Mitford’s second novel, Christmas Pudding, nicely repackaged. And many more. Even a scholarly “biography” of Christmas by Judith Flanders. Almost a Christmas miracle, this.