Dress code: Nudity, blue paint and combat boots

DID WE MEET ON GRUB STREET? by Emma Tennant, Hilary Bailey and David Elliott (Quartet £12.99) VAL HENNESSY

ALARMING news for book lovers! Britain’s once lively publishing industry has taken a nose-dive. Gone are the golden days of small, often eccentric independent publishers. Gone are their feuds, gossip, glamour, wild launch parties and men-incardigans taking risks, encouraging scribblers who turned up with unsolicited manuscripts handwritten on scrap paper. In those days, publishing wasn’t all about profit. It was about taking chances, creating literature and having fun. As David Elliott, selfconfessed ‘fuddy-duddy’, explains in this entertaining compendium by a trio of writers, ‘the book trade is losing its soul’. That loss is due to digital technology, conglomerate greed and small publishers being engulfed by multinational mergers. Ours is an age when any illiterate with a keyboard can publish a book on-line at the touch of a button. That book can reach its readers and be earning within minutes. Gone are editors, proof-readers, typesetters, printers, booksellers — all ousted by technology. As Elliott says: ‘The computer changed everything. A 600-page, soft-porn gut-buster can be written and topping the bestsellers in under a week.’ The publisher as cultural force with clout has almost disappeared. As have the bookbiz’s mad shenanigans. People still laugh about the window display in a grand London store to launch four feminist children’s books. A giant Winnie the Pooh was painted on the glass with the slogan WINNIE THE POOH IS A MALE CHAUVINIST PIG. TRUE! Alas, the real Christopher Robin, then a Devon bookseller, saw it and threatened legal action. The shop stuck to its guns for two weeks, but not one feminist children’s book was sold, although sales of A.A. Milne’s books went through the roof. People still talk wistfully about wild launch parties, such as one at the Regent’s Park Diorama to celebrate director Derek Jarman’s autobiography. Hundreds of punks and gays were there, along with sultry 76-year-old singer Elisabeth Welch, who arrived with a troupe of fire-eaters and blue-painted naked women wearing combat boots. Novelist Hilary Bailey advises that, when writing, there are only three statements you can make without being a bore: ‘I’m writing a book’, ‘I’ve finished my book’, ‘I’ve sold my book — open the champagne!’ This volume is packed with literary anecdotes and gossip, and the authors’ tub-thumping observations are a mustread for all those who still believe passionately that books should be of literary merit and printed on paper with gorgeous dust-jackets.