booktwo.org

As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation.

Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World War, is unique in English letters. I’ve managed to amass an almost complete set of his books with a particular penchant for the Kafkaesque Image of a Drawn Sword and the angst-ridden The Scapegoat, and extending to his delightful botanical treatise The Flower in Season, and his extraordinary Surrealist work of 1956 The Crisis in Bulgaria, or, Ibsen to the Rescue! His semi-autobiographical novels are works of a rare quality, combining a deliberately Proustian longing for things past with a very English melancholy and sense of place, and a sensual quality that feels quite out of its time, and which is deeply rooted in his private and currently little known life. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Brooke’s works are currently in a kind of limbo. I approached the agents for Brooke’s estate several months ago with a view to acquiring the rights to republish several of his works, as some of the lead titles of a new imprint launching later this year. Although I was initially informed the rights were available, it subsequently appeared that Faber, in the form of their ‘Finds’ POD imprint – who are already republishing Brooke’s Military Orchid trilogy – have expressed an interest in the other books as well.

While I’m pleased that anyone is interested in republishing these works, anyone who knows my opinion of Faber Finds won’t be surprised that I’m deeply opposed to this – and not for entirely selfish reasons. Faber Finds, while a great way to get little-known works back into print, does no promotion of the titles on its list, and there is no way that Brooke will find a new audience through this method. As time passes, it becomes harder and harder to revive a writer’s reputation, but it can be done: see the recent renaissances of B.S. Johnson and Julian Maclaren-Ross. For this to happen to Brooke, he needs to be republished properly, and promoted.

Conflicts between long-tail POD databases like Faber Finds and true classics republication are only going to increase, and Brooke’s agents are currently considering their position on POD and the way they license rights. I hope I get the opportunity to work with and increase the readership of Brooke’s outstanding work, and in the mean time I’ll crack on with jocelynbrooke.com.

Happy New Year.

Faber Finds is the new print-on-demand (POD) offering from Faber. It’s a classics list made up of old Faber titles, with the intention (I believe) of extending to a wider range of ‘forgotten classics’.

Slowly, the larger publishers are coming round to the view that much smaller publishers (such as Salt) have had for a long time: POD offers great benefits for publishers, mostly through doing away with the old and horrifically wasteful system of printing thousands of copies up front without any real idea of whether they’ll sell or not. This increasingly outmoded system is the root cause of much of the mid- and backlist malaise currently affecting the industry.

Publishers have traditionally looked down on POD as the domain of vanity publishers and cranks, largely due to the unacceptably poor quality of the final product. This disdain is no longer justified, and POD lists are starting to appear. I’ll declare my interest now: I’ve been working on a POD project for some time, the fruits of which will be available soon.

However, I don’t think many of these publishers have really got it – including Faber Finds, and the recently announced PFD list – and I’ll explain why.

Publishers have been at pains for some time to stress that what matters in their books, after the quality of the writing, is the production and presentation. The book as a premium object, well-made, lasting, and respectable. This is why they’ve stayed away from POD, and, to a large extent, ebooks, for so long. Leaving aside the fact that many, many current paperbacks produced by ‘traditional’ methods don’t really stand up to this, it has been the statement.

So what are Faber’s aims with the Finds list? They claim to have have spent a long time looking at the various POD offerings from printers, and they’ve gone with Antony Rowe over the US-owned Lightning Source (these two are the only real possibilities at the current time). At a glance, the books look good (they do on the website too), but both my editions arrived in substantially less-than-pristine condition. Both are heavily marked with dirt and even a large thumbprint – more obviously than these photographs show – a recurring problem with white-covered books, and surely one Faber could have anticipated. Far less forgivably, the Newby edition is badly cut, with jagged edges.

Dirt aside, I like the front covers, I really do, but there is little more to appreciate in these editions. They have generic back covers trumpeting not the book but the Faber Finds list. They have no introductions, nor any signs of individual craft or attention. Worst of all, they are both – and I expect the whole list is – photostat editions: straight reprints of previous editions without regard to consistent typography or the book format they are printed in. The result is acres of white space as an old edition is shoehorned into the new. POD printing costs by the page, so it’s no wonder they have to sell lots of copies before they make any money.

All of this seems to fatally undermine the publishers’ insistence on the premium object. Both of these books may technically have been ‘out of print’, but the Conrad is easily available in a much nicer edition from Amazon, and Abe Books has plenty of old editions of the Newby, all for far less than the £10 – £15 asking price of Faber Finds. So with no added extras, who is expected to buy them?

POD does offer a huge opportunity for publishers, but these current offerings from Faber and PFD appear to have more to do with hanging on to the rights to these works than any genuine desire to see them prosper. The rights to books that are out of print for a particular length of time revert to the author, and while the new technologies have muddied this issue somewhat, the lack of care and attention given to these reprints smacks of opportunism rather than any genuine benefit to readers or the authors’ estates.

We’re all for publishers using new technologies to create new markets for old as well as new books, and applaud any move in this direction, but these shoddy POD titles, coupled with the recent spate of lazily-designed, ill-conceived and just plain broken websites, suggest that publishers have a long way to go before they understand the workings of the new market.