Nu-age Angst-bytes!

 

It must be official! Lapwing has been remarking and harking on for years that our culture has changed and changing. The Irish Examiner recently ran an article on the perils of the book trade and an edition of Books Ireland had some discomforting interviews with a number of Irish publishers and perceptible negative things on the book business home front.

 

Meanwhile, across the sheough, bookshops are continuing to suffer the effects of a culture which seems to be run by cooks, crooks and siliconised good looks. One heroic band of managers, having disposed of 13 shops so far are now looking to shed another 9 outlets. A typesetting company which did work for 30 years for publishers such as Faber & Faber and other ‘major’ publishers, have shut their doors, citing the speeding trend of publishers to have their work done overseas.

 

Of course that doesn’t matter in the least when there are major worries about Google and other digitisers and the few ha’pennies that an author may pick up from the sale on-line of a forgotten book, digitised and brought back to life. Worries too about piracy, intellectual rights and all sorts of western literary angst.

 

The local market, Britain and Ireland, still luxuriates in the product of state funded literature on one hand and commercial ‘pop lit’ on the other, which, in a Wildean sense is journalism dressed as literature. The problem is a cultural one, as Wilde put it and a I loosely paraphrase, ‘journalism is unreadable and literature is read by no one’. Still, people have to earn a crust or as some advances suggest, a diamond encrusted living. But not the bookshops in spite of all sorts of marketing ploys, from instore cafes and internet to online ordering which of course still depends on a pony-and-trap mail service. I think the next thing for bookshops will be quiet rooms, massage and tanning services to maintain the fiction of reading whilst on holiday. There may even be a buy-back service by which a crap prize-winning book may be exchanged for a cookery book or DIY revolutionary war vademecum or the taxi fare home.

 

A couple of hundred new titles out in our little island, 224 from 33 publishers according to Books Ireland; 800 plus on the 1st October across the water, 1.5 million first print-runs for each of the Kennedy and Palin books (no mention yet of the advances) indicates the the book trade isn’t really dead but changed. Its substance hasn’t changed but its practice has and will continue to change.

 

A looming danger is America’s strict entry policy. Recently the German publisher, Karl Dietrich Wolff, was detained at Kennedy Airport, refused entry and stuck on the next plane back to Germany. So statements such as ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ and ‘whatever you say say nothing’ can be given a slanted translation and interpretation, a free ride home for those of us who still believe in the myth of democracy.

 

So writers beware, the nutting squads are a great danger to your liberty in the eastern part of the world, people power and the eye of god is a flaming sword set on the eastern shore of Eden and in the middle earth of geriatric Europe, apathy rules.