This week I got my contract from the BBC for ‘Teeth’. It will be recorded in the same studio as the Archers, although not at the same time. Then it will be broadcast in July. I’m not going to be reading it, people ask me that. Nor will I be famous. Some people say that too.
“You’re going to be famous. You’re on the radio.”
These are the same people who when I mention my book ask, “How many pages is it?” Then when I show them the cover, “Did you design it?”
That’s right. I’m a book designer. I’ve just kept it quiet.
Then they go on to say, “It might be a film. Just think.”
I’m thinking. I love books. I write books. I’m happy that it’s a book and that’s why I wrote it as a book. If I wanted to be famous I would have a sex change, swim the channel to the Netherlands and then tie myself to the wing of a windmill while local children throw wet flannels at me denouncing the plight of Iraqi wildlife.
“Those bombs, played havoc with the camels. Yes sir!”
So I’m excited, I’m going to be on the radio. It might be a film! And while we’re not talking about money I’m being paid £260. People want to ask that too.
I admit it. I am famous and rich!
Move out of the way of the roller-coaster of my life before you completely lose your breath and asphyxiate yourself slowly.
This is at exciting as it gets. Today I’ve been moving between the sofa and my bed reading ‘Penguin Special’. This is a history of Penguin books. This is what the rich and famous do.
Penguin Books was started by Allen Lane in about 1935. Before that cheap, high quality paperbacks weren’t available. Penguins were sold for 6p and you could buy them in Woolworth’s. The fist ten included books by Agatha Christie, Hemingway, Dorothy L Sayers. Other publishers thought Lane was mad.
The first twenty included reprints of ten Jonathan Cape books. Cape had a literary list second to none (and still true today - they are my publisher). Lane went to see Cape. Cape negotiated Lane’s offer up from a £25 advance per book to £40.
Cape was described as the ‘most tight-fisted bastard’. Cape thought the Penguins would be a disaster but if they were going to be a disaster he ‘wanted to get £400 off Lane’.
Of course they were a huge success, selling millions in the first year to the new mass market of the 1930s, offices were springing up everywhere, there was a new middle class.
Virginia Woolf was horrified. She didn’t think that kind of person should be reading. But she wasn’t very nice, was she?
I bought a Penguin myself this week. A new edition of The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. It has the most brilliant cover and is part of Penguin Red Classics. In the same series, Books for Boys, are The 39 Steps, The Lost World, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Riddle of the Sands, She.
I’ve read them all except She.
What a brilliant world, with such things in it.
Currently reading - see above
Currently listening to - Strangefolk by Kula Shaker
Orson Wells players present - ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’
Hi Drew,
Were you protesting the plight of Iraqi childred? Or the kids? Or the flannels?
I was only vaguely aware of the revolution force of Penguin books. I think you could do the same now. paperbacks have become very expensive again, and are all hidden away in shops that look like you have to be called Blake or Penelope to be allowed in, on the whole. If there were books for a few quid in amongst the glossy magazines (maybe with glossy covers of their own) I think people would love them. But now I’m starting to rant again.
Damien
Perhaps you’re right. I bought all of those Penguin 70 books - £1.50 each.
Or perhaps not - the public wants to buy novels. As the guy who came to WIC said, his biggest selling book is his biggest (in terms of pages) book. I’d like to see shorter books and novellas.
What can we do to make the change??
I’m thinking already of doing Me and Mickie James B sides - short stories. And I thought it would be nice if the M&MJ sequel could be four shorter novellas. But I don’t think the publisher would go for it.
Drew
I’m all for the idea of shorter, cheaper books so yay! I’ll wave the flag with you.
It was Penguin’s 60th birthday when I was a teen. They published loads of little books for sixty pence each with about 60 pages. My god, did I learn something with my pocket money from them.
I’d love to see more of this sort of stuff.
I’d love to see more short story chapbooks and pamphlets, with no more than thirty odd pages. Cheap to print, cheap to post… Me and my colleague David have talked about doing a chapbook series like this for a couple of years now.
We thought of running it like a singles club. Not a one where you desperately lower your standards in the hope getting a shag, but a one where you pay a subscription for the year and in return get a set number of short, punchy and eye opening publications.
Cheers,
Mark
There’s an interview with Dave Eggers in this month’s Dazed and Confused. He’s talking about McSweeneys. Obviously, they produce such a successful short story quarterly.
The thing is, he says, is to concentrate on the design. He says that the price difference between producing a beautiful looking book and an average one is very small.
I can see that.
I’m often more impressed by McSweeneys as a hold-in-the-hand object than I am when I actually sit down to read it. It has a status as an object as well as a publication.
As you point out, something looking good does make you far more well-disposed toward it.
I think a series of little books with a unifying look and feel, a bit like those Penguin Great Loves books, would be terrific. I’d love the opportunity to read three or four stories by someone up-and-coming rather than running into their writing very occassionally spread across a number of publications.
Those thing Penguin 70s were terrific. The Jonathan Safran Foer one was brilliant, and the Ali Smith one. Top design, enough pages to give you a proper reading experience and for less than the price of a magazine.
Imagine that for new writers you’ve never even heard of yet… I’d subscribe like a shot.
That’s what I’d like to see.
It’d be interesting to do the numbers for it and see if it’s possible.
Cheers,
Mark
It’d be interesting to do the numbers for it and see if it’s possible…