"Who are but weasels fighting in a hole" - WB Yeats

So the long-awaited follow-up to the Da Vinci Code is about to be "released". Embargoes have been broken already by reviewers, half-price advance orders have been taken before publication – and now there's a new Brownesque twist in the story: not the usual price competition but an all-out war between retailers. The big W – and even the mighty Amazon – have been caught by surprise by the supermarkets' slashing from £18.99 to as little as £5.00. The Book Depository entered this loss-making competition and announced today that they'd be selling The Lost Symbol for just under a fiver. Obviously it didn't take Amazon long to follow suit and match that price – even retrospectively for the books already preordered… Insane. It is evident that online retailers are exposed to exactly the same dangers as high-street retailers when they try to compete with the supermarkets on discounts.

The Lost Symbol is yet another lost opportunity (for publishers and booksellers). I am pretty sure that many people would have happily paid the full price for it. But intellectual property is being degraded and devalued so much these days, in this brave new Internet world of free music, free news and – soon – free books that it will be even more of a struggle for anybody concerned (authors, publishers, journalists, bookshops, distributors etc.) to survive.

"Bring the Net Book Agreement back!" cries a voice in the desert. You think it won't work? Can it get worse than this? The fixed price is still in place in many European countries, and it could make the difference in UK, too, where publishers and retailers seem to have lost any sense of reality and are prepared to sacrifice profits and margins for that magical words – "sales" and "market share".

When we all go bust, and the majority of readers download books illegally from the Internet rather than buy them from shops, they'll realize that 100% of zero is zero.

Read here my post about Barbers' Wars.

AG

A visit to the Louvre

I was mildly depressed yesterday after hearing the gloomy news about the mighty Waterstone’s axing hundreds of job. I thought there must be a “W” curse – after Woolworth's and Whittard's, now it’s Waterstone’s turn to tread dangerously on the brink. I think that shoppers will have to queue even longer at the till this Christmas – not because of longer queues, but because of staff reductions. And I have a feeling that publishers will soon have to start selling their books door to door, pace Google and Amazon.

To cheer up, I went to Calder Bookshop for a Finnegans Wake recital. The bookshop was packed – there were at least sixty people – eighty per cent nostalgic Irishmen I think. But the event, Mark Ryan’s flawless recital of the famous Anne Livia Plurabelle passage entirely by heart, was truly one of the most sensational things I have seen or heard in many years. The crowd of course was delighted, not only by the performance, but also by the ensuing conversation, which “cast some obscurity” on the most difficult bits of this dense and hardly intelligible text. I must admit that hearing Finnegans Wake out loud won me over completely. As you may remember, I recently gave up reading the book after only a few pages. I may try again reading it when I retire.

After the event, Mark and I joined John Calder for dinner at the nearby Italian restaurant, where wine and spirits are served with great liberality to habitués, especially those who are Italian or speak Italian (Mark’s wife is from Sardinia).

The dinner was the cherry on the cake of an unforgettable evening. John was, as usual, in full reminiscing mode. He told us how he used to spend afternoons playing chess with Max Frisch, Beckett and Vicky (an artist), coming always bottom of the table (not surprisingly), or about his occasional meetings with Graham Greene or Trevelyan (it's got to be GM Trevelyan, not the nineteenth-century Trevelyan), or some story about Alexander Trocchi or Sadegh Hedayat, or about a thousand editorial projects he would like me to pursue. In short, after a couple of hours with John, your mind goes into intellectual overload, just like when you see too many paintings at the Louvre or at the National Gallery.

Just before I tottered back to Waterloo station, Mark also explained the meaning of the Irish expression “fond of the drink” – and I could not help but think that all the people we had talked about during the evening fitted very well with this description – the three of us included.

AG

Sales, a very British obsession

I will always remember the ecstatic face of a young British publisher who was trying to enthuse me with the story of one of her books which had sold – so she said – more than 50,000 copies. I am also amused when I read, in the trade press, publishers bragging about their sales, trying to hype each other out and perhaps infect the market with obviously false claims.

All right, Harry Potter has sold millions of copies worldwide, making the fortune of some Scottish ex teacher and transforming her into a lady and a celebrity. Fine. Has it got any literature value? Is the world a better place with it? What is the impact, at any time, of the UK Top 50 bestselling titles on our culture?

Atalantis has been forgotten, but not the Rape of the Lock. I am sure there are books that are now read by very few people which may change the world as we know it – or even people’s lives.

(Still, when I confessed, during a talk, that Keats’s Letters was one of my favourite works of all time, and a book that you couldn’t find in Waterstone’s or Borders – and certainly not in Smith’s – I was called a snob by a member of the audience.

I must here point out – to pre-empt the inevitable censure of the anti-intellectual brigade – that I am proud to come from a working-class background and to have paid for my own education to the last penny.)

Jane Austen’s books sold poorly during her lifetime, and she had to finance the printing of most of her books. Joyce had Ulysses printed by a French bookseller, and – well – didn’t become rich with the proceedings, unlike his grandson. Leopardi sold a handful of copies of his Canti. Dante sold no copies at all of his Divine Comedy. I could give a hundred more examples.

So why is every publisher so obsessed with finding the next Richard & Judy or Oprah pick – the next Bestseller? And why do readers buy what most other readers buy?

But I am rambling and ranting. Let’s all go to sleep.

AG