PRECIS OF VOLUME 18 ISSUE 1

The first issue of our eighteenth volume reorganizes the contents page for the first time into three sections - featured articles, book reviews and departments. The last of these, not as grandiloquent as it sounds, consists of themed opinion columns, some of which appear in each issue, others intermittently. Two of the three departments in the current issue are not new - “The Editor's Place” where the editor has his say and “The Last Word” where the editor emeritus has his. The third department, previously called “Cause for debate” has been re-titled “Point Counterpoint”. In this issue the participants, Richard Guthrie and Joseph Esposito, argue vigorously about the e-book. One of the two remarked to the editor that they couldn't be more opposite in their views. Fine with us.

The issue leads with a masterly treatise by doyenne of rights Lynette Owen: where do we stand on copyright in China today, how did China get there and where is it going? (This is our eighteenth article on China in seventeen years.) Somebody inquired the other day: “What's all the fuss about China?” To which the LOGOS editors reply: “Others have now discovered it.” The editor emeritus had the honour of leading a mission to China twenty years ago, in 1987, which was the genesis of his interest. Other members of that mission included literary agent Andrew Nurnberg, who was on the LOGOS advisory board for fifteen years, and now has now own office in Beijing; and Philip Kogan, distinguished independent British publisher, who was subscriber number one to LOGOS.

What sells trade books? Partly the cover, especially when it comes to fiction. Once a prospective buyer is tempted by the cover to pick up a book, it's half sold. This means that marketing people and booksellers today have much more influence over covers, particularly of fiction, than they had ten years ago. Angus Phillips, director of the Oxford Brookes Centre for International Studies, tells how covers are designed, not to mention redesigned and repositioned nowadays, by those at the sharp end of marketing.

The history of a remarkable British publishing institution which has lasted for sixty years in spite of its rule that its members have to keep changing (all members retire at thirty-five) is chronicled by one of its current members, Jason Mitchell of Taylor & Francis. It has no recorded history, although it does have a lively journal, InPrint. Mitchell proposed to LOGOS that he should put this right. It is part of our mission to tell stories about the book business which no one else has told. The name of the institution is the Society of Young Publishers.

Veteran of publishing education in the United States, Elizabeth Geiser, has wrapped it all up in a brief historical overview. Publishing can no longer be called “the accidental profession”.

The latest in our series showing how personal libraries mirror their owners, revealing their characters and their history, is penned by Frank Herrmann, late of Bloomsbury Auctions, whose large house in South East England is in danger of subsiding under the weight of his enormously varied and patiently assembled book collections. We commend this series, being built under the editorship of Stephen Horvath in California, not only because of its main message that books are extensions of the people who own them, but because every article is guaranteed to lead readers into at least one area of books with which they are not familiar.

Our book review section has some familiar names and features two books which aroused controversy in widely different ways. The first is the new edition of Roy MacSkimming's The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada. Careful readers of our previous issue (Volume 17 Issue 4) will have noticed that MacSkimming, a long-time supporter, indeed apostle, of government subsidies for Canadian publishing, has changed his views, or at least modified them. The multinationals who dominate Canadian publishing are no longer seen as deadly enemies, just as competitors. The reviewer, Rowland Lorimer, director of the Simon Fraser Center for Publishing Studies in Vancouver, does not agree.

The second controversial item under book reviews is probably unique, because it is a favourable review which the author did not want to see published. We won't say any more in this précis. Read and judge for yourself the review of The Trees are All Young on Garrison Hill.

Finally, Eric de Bellaigue, long-time editorial advisor and a trustee of the LOGOS Foundation, best known for his financial expertise on publishing, emerges as having antiquarian books as another string to his bow. In his perceptive review, sprinkled with his typically wry obiter dicta, on the massive, multi-authored history of the rare and secondhand book trade in Britain in the 20th century, Out of Print and into Profit, he points most of us to an area of publishing which puts the book business all in historical context.