Along Publishers Row
By Campbell Geeslin
First, the good news. Last year, 3.13 billion books were sold, compared to 3.1 billion in 2006. Higher retail prices, according to Book Industry Trends, helped increase revenues by 4.4 percent to $37.3 billion from $35.7 billion.
Juvenile hardcover sales were increased by 10.5 percent to $301.6 billion last year (bumped up by Harry Potter). Religious books were up by 4.2 percent last year, selling 274.5 million copies. Adult trade hardbacks and paperbacks increased 1.8 percent to 839 million copies sold. Net revenue increased 4.3 percent to $9.39 billion from $9.18 billion. Mass market paperbacks sales were down 5.8 percent.
This spring, however, several publishers reported weak sales. Random House had a 4.9 percent decline in operating profit. Simon & Schuster reported 32 percent decline in operating income in the first quarter of this year.
Al Greco, a senior researcher at the Institute for Publishing Research, told The New York Times, “There is an economic malaise that’s hitting this business. Basically what we’re seeing when we look at the entire retail sector is that consumers are obviously very cautious.”
OUR POET: Adam Gopnik, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote an essay about why W. H. Auden “is an indispensable poet of our time.”
Gopnik observed: “Being everywhere at once while going nowhere in particular is what poets do, and Auden did it. Where journalists write about what people are arguing about in public, and novelists about what they are talking about in private, only poets seem able to show that what people argue about in public is identical to what they talk about in private, that what we are arguing about is the sum of our own guilts, fears, anxieties, hopes.”
Gopnik concluded: “If [Auden] sometimes sounds in the forties as if he were speaking to us from a very high soapbox in a very big square, well, listen: we can hear him, still.”
MOTHER TONGUE: The quotable W. H. Auden had this to say about English: “I think we are frightfully lucky because being a mongrel language, we have this enormous vocabulary. And then because it is an uninflected language, you can turn nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns in a very nice way: the line of Shakespeare’s ‘The hearts that spaniel’d me at heels,’ which you couldn’t do with an inflected language.
“And then we have this lovely, rich vocabulary. I couldn’t live without . . . the thirteen volumes of the OED. . . . By far the best one-volume dictionary is Chambers. Obviously, if you are going to be a poet, one of the first requirements must be a passionate love for your mother tongue.”
MORE AUDEN: Readers of this column might enjoy these four lines from W. H. Auden’s 1940 memorial to the poet William Butler Yeats:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique.
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives. . . .
BUT HE DID: Harold Robbins, who sat down and wrote a lot of best-selling novels, once said, “There’s no way anybody can sit down and write a best seller.”
NEW SERIES: For a time, back in the early ’90s, horror novels for children by R. L. Stine were selling at a rate of four million copies a month. Then they dropped out of favor, sort of, and Harry Potter took over. Even without new titles, however, the Goosebumps series sells about two million copies a year.
Now Stine is producing a new series: “Goosebumps HorrorLand.” The first title is Revenge of the Living Dummy.
The New York Times said that Stine ”intends to link the scary stories of Goosebumps with a serialized tale set inside an evil amusement park called HorrorLand. The children in the first book are invited to the park, where they discover a werewolf petting zoo, bottomless canoes, a quicksand beach and other wicked attractions. Their misfortunes will be chronicled in serial form in 30-page installments at the end of the subsequent books, which will focus on different characters.”
Stine said, “I’m just waiting to see if kids will pick them up again.”
LISTENER: Lisa Unger is the author of two suspense novels, Beautiful Lies and Sliver of Truth, that feature a New York City freelance reporter named Ridley Jones.
Unger’s new novel is a thriller titled Black Out.
Unger told Publishers Weekly: “I never thought of the Ridley Jones books as a series. I finished Beautiful Lies and knew there were a lot of un¬answered questions, but I figured, that’s life. Ridley lives to fight another day, and that’s the important thing. I continued on with her in Sliver of Truth simply because I couldn’t stop hearing her voice. My process is less about conscious choice than it is about listening to voices, following the image in my head.”
HOW TO: Julie Andrews’s book, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, moved quickly onto the bestseller lists. The singer and actress told USA Today that her daughter, Emma Walton, pushed her to write the book.
Andrews said, “Emma set me a task. She said you’re just going to talk, and she took out her tape recorder. Then she sort of assembled the talk and handed it to me. And from that I began to write. She really pushed, prodded, questioned and made me go a little further.”
FITS THE CRIME: Twenty-eight young people were charged after they broke into the Robert Frost home in Vermont, had a party, and damaged the place. Their punishment included classes in Frost’s poetry. John Quinn, the prosecutor, asked Jay Parini, a Frost biographer, to teach the class.
Quinn told the Associated Press, “I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience.”
