Turning Up the Volumes or Find That Book
This year sees the centenary of Margery Allingham who was regarded as one of the Queens of Crime from the Golden Age, along with the likes of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. The Allingham Society has all sorts of special events planned. So it should be a good year for this crime writer's fans. Well, not entirely. By visiting several large book stores and the usual crime fiction specialists, I discovered that the good lady is out of print. Not one of her vast output of books, including her classic Tiger in the Smoke, is in print. I did find some tatty, ancient and over-priced paperbacks down Charing Cross but that's by the way. I could find racks of the afore-mentioned Christie and Marsh, but the Allingham cupboard was bare.
It was a puzzle to me why such a respected and apparently popular writer was allowed to fade from the shelves. Then I fell into conversation with a CWA friend who I suppose one might consider a mid-list writer and she told me that her last book actually sold out before publication date and was not republished. So, although the publishers sent out review copies and the book received some excellent reviews, no one would be able to buy the book to read. Investigating further, I found this is a fairly common situation. Indeed, I have a book out this month (The Veiled Detective published by Robert Hale) and I gather this fate may well await me too. I know the publishers would say, it is better to sell all the copies than have many remainders. But there must be a middle route, surely. It nearly makes you think that if you see a book on the shelf in Waterstones, it's a failure.
Then I read a piece in the Weekend Review of The Times by Rod Liddle. He was bemoaning the fact that he couldn't replace a tattered copy of John Updike's Couples with a spanking new edition. Apparently this book had a profound effect on Liddle as an adolescent and changed his thinking about many things. So off he goes to his local Waterstones and... You've guessed it. According to Penguin it is 'temporarily unavailable'. As Liddle observed, the word 'temporarily' is a misnomer as the book has not been available for two years at least.
This discovery led our intrepid journalist on the trail of current versions of some other treasured books in his library. He gave up when he reached fifteen that were 'temporarily unavailable'. His 'unlucky 15', as he called them.
It is a strange situation. Bookshops are crammed with books - 100, 000 are published every year in Britain - and yet certain titles either never get there or are very soon relegated to the Temporarily Unavailable Store. And yet in the number of remainder shops you can find in any High Street there are stacks of thick volumes of Confessions of a Naughty Goalie by a disgraced footballer who went out with Ulrika Johnson's chiropodist, Pulling Pints and Blokes At The Rovers Return, a soap siren tells all or Secrets of a Stuntman, by someone who worked on Thunderbirds Are Go. Two months ago they were £18.99, now they're piled on the floor and reduced to £2.99. Why not print less of those in the first place and more of the others. Bring Margery out of retirement, up the print run of mid-list authors and ensure books of quality do not become temporarily unavailable.
Or am I being naïve?
David Stuart Davies on Monday, April 1st 2004 @ 03:56 PM GMT [link]