As a writer of twenty or so published books and performed plays I experienced recently a baptism of showcase noise and dense crowd immersion by visiting the London Book Fair. Julian Friedmann, my agent, gave me an entrée to online enrolment so I duly submitted to the box-filling tedium, messing up one attempt after another just as I do with my VAT return. On arrival at Olympia, clutching an A 4 paper pass I dodged the laminating tag machine (what point more plastic waste in the universe?) and hit the huge sea of faces and stands. I sought my publisher’s foreign rights specialist for my book about a German pope. What an overwhelming plethora of stalls, a bazaar for soul baring and trading, where cubic footage of space proclaimed power and publisher prestige, and thousands of earnest faces over tiny tables bobbed up and down in one-to-ones in their rare encounters in the flesh.
Soon I was light-headed and dazed in the Kasbah. At last I found she whom I sought. My appointment over I went to find a coffee. Everywhere was too crowded. An acquaintance I hadn’t seen for many years caught up with me. I remembered his name, just about—and he mine. I knew he had been a book-seller in a highly respectable second-hand book shop.
‘What do you do now? Why are you here?' I asked. ‘I am a sample buyer' he said, ‘A what?’ ‘ I buy samples, and we, the people I work with, sell them through Amazon?’ I couldn’t work this out. Oh, books laid out as samples on stalls! ‘How?’ We get up to 85% discount on the sale price just to cart them away. They can’t be bothered to crate them up and take them back: you’d be surprised how expensive too some of the big publishers’, like Chatto, wares are.’ ‘ Oh, so you’re a buyer?’
‘ I carry cash usually and arrange for them to be packaged and taken off at the end of the fair. We have a warehouse.’
I was staggered. Here was a highly privileged –ex-public schoolboy, a BA or MA, dressed to fit the right book fair image, working, I daresay lucratively, as a scavenger: buying up the orts and greasy relics of the fair, and handsomely profiting from them. An eye-opener to the ways of the giant Amazon—and no profit or royalty for the humble scribe!
"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds Ad infinitum." Jonathan Swift
Soon I was light-headed and dazed in the Kasbah. At last I found she whom I sought. My appointment over I went to find a coffee. Everywhere was too crowded. An acquaintance I hadn’t seen for many years caught up with me. I remembered his name, just about—and he mine. I knew he had been a book-seller in a highly respectable second-hand book shop.
‘What do you do now? Why are you here?' I asked. ‘I am a sample buyer' he said, ‘A what?’ ‘ I buy samples, and we, the people I work with, sell them through Amazon?’ I couldn’t work this out. Oh, books laid out as samples on stalls! ‘How?’ We get up to 85% discount on the sale price just to cart them away. They can’t be bothered to crate them up and take them back: you’d be surprised how expensive too some of the big publishers’, like Chatto, wares are.’ ‘ Oh, so you’re a buyer?’
‘ I carry cash usually and arrange for them to be packaged and taken off at the end of the fair. We have a warehouse.’
I was staggered. Here was a highly privileged –ex-public schoolboy, a BA or MA, dressed to fit the right book fair image, working, I daresay lucratively, as a scavenger: buying up the orts and greasy relics of the fair, and handsomely profiting from them. An eye-opener to the ways of the giant Amazon—and no profit or royalty for the humble scribe!
"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds Ad infinitum." Jonathan Swift
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