Features

Looking backward: The Bookseller archives

09.01.12 | Tom Tivnan

25 years ago
Breaking news: The word "conglomeration" appears in The Bookseller time and time again throughout 1987 in reference to mergers, acquisitions and global players coming to the UK. Simon & Schuster launched in the UK in January, while one of the biggest deals was in May when Random House bought the CVBC group (Chatto, Virago, The Bodley Head and Jonathan Cape). In July, Paul Hamlyn sold Octopus (a company he founded in 1971 with £10,000) to Reed for £535m. On the retail side, Bertelsmann snapped up W H Smith's half of the then mighty BCA for  £69m (the German company already owned the other 50%) and John Menzies bought Hammicks for £6m.

Books and rights: In those pre-BookScan days, The Bookseller reported­ that the top three Christmas 1987 titles (apart from the ever popular Guinness World Records) were One Day for Life, Bantam's picture book of ordinary Britons in aid of the Search 88 cancer charity; The Discovery of the Titanic, through which Hodder "achieved a turnover of £1.5m"; and the TV tie-in Yes, Prime Minister, Vol. 2 (BBC).  

"Aggressive buying and increased internationalisation" were the main characteristics of the rights market in 1987. Blockbuster deals include Danielle Steel's move from Michael Joseph to Bantam/Corgi in a five-book deal worth $4.75m (about £2.6m in 1987 rates) and Rosemary Cheetham (now de Courcy) snapping up Joan Collins' first novel for Century/Arrow for a tidy $750,000 (£469,000) from agent Swifty Lazar.    

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there: Almost shocking to the modern reader, given how zealously retailers ­currently guard this kind of information, is a story in December in which the now dearly departed Sherratt & Hughes bookselling chain announced its 1988 promotion rates. The price for a three-week window, in-store promotion and p.o.s. in all of S&H's 43 ­branches? £8,000.  

Almost equally shocking is that publishers freely and on record rubbished the terms. Charles Taylor at CBC complained that previous Sherratt & Hughes promotions had "been disappointing", while Hodder's Bob Jackson said: "I can't see us getting a return on one title . . . at the moment I don't think we are going to put anything forward for the full £8,000."

Plus ça change: The Bookseller spent a good deal of 1987 reporting on how the trade was dealing with technological changes. Expanding Epos and TeleOrdering systems—and the need for industry standards—were the hot button issues at many a trade fair (the "digital" conference is hardly new).

New media were being grappled with. In the 22nd May issue, a feature in The Bookseller blared: "CD-ROM—the migration from print", which extolled the virtues of the "small miracle" of CD-ROMs which could hold 550 MBs of information, "or the equivalent of 20,000 typewritten pages of A4".

Key statistic: £16.41, the average price of a book. This was not average selling price as absolute sales figures were difficult to collect in any accurate way, The Bookseller simply divided the number of titles produced—52,311—from the overall retail price. Yet compare the unadjusted for inflation £16.41 to the current a.s.p. of £7.45.

20 years ago
Breaking news: Economic conditions were of immense concern to the trade in 1992, or as The Bookseller rather poetically put it: "This was the year when recession took root and the green shoots of recovery . . . refused to unfold". The poor economy and an IRA terror campaign on the British mainland—which included a bomb detonating outside a W H Smith in Wood Green, north London, injuring 11 people—led to a year on the high street with "an overall feeling of disappointment".  

Still, the Booksellers Association membership increased by 17 by the end of 1992 from the previous year to 3,240 (the BA had 1,099 indie members as of June 2011).  And there was enough money floating around in the City to see the merger of Reed and Elsevier, which created one of the world's biggest publishing groups. 
    
Sony's Data Discman, the first commercially available e-reader,­ was launched in the summer of 1992. E-books (on CD-ROM) included Time Out London Guide and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which retailed for between £24.99 and £39.99.

Books and rights: Two celebrity books dominated 1992, Andrew Morton's blockbuster Diana: Her True Story (Michael O'Mara), and a title with even more prurient appeal than an inside look at the break-up of a royal marriage: Madonna's Sex (Secker). The Bookseller seemed to have a lot of fun with the latter, at any rate, indulging in a lot of "Carry On" style headlines like "Sex—coming again for Christmas" in a report on title's stock availability.­ Meanwhile, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Bantam) finally fell out of The Bookseller's Top 15 hardbacks bestseller list in October after 173 consecutive weeks.
    
Celeb books were top of the rights agenda with Viking paying six figures for Cher's memoirs and Transworld paying a similar amount for Brian Clough's. The fiction deal of the year had to be agent Giles Gordon selling Vikram Seth's 1,700-page début, A Suitable Boy, to Orion for £250,000.    

Foreign country: In late May 1992, Waterstone's announced that it would implement an across-the-board pay hike of 4.5% beginning on 1st June, a measure that if it happened in 2012 would be met with widespread staff celebrations. However, Waterstone's staff had submitted a claim for an 8.5% increase via the Retail Book, Stationery & Allied Trades Employees Association (RBA). An RBA spokesman had described Waterstone's 4.5% offer as "extremely disappointing".
    
Plus ça change: A library service under pressure from a government intent on cuts, plummeting book loans and people taking to the streets to try and save local library services. Yes, 2012 will have much in common to 1992. Public Lending Right figures at the beginning of 1992 showed annual library loans had fallen to 568 million, a 20 million unit drop from the previous year (public library loans in 2009 were 310.8 million).   
On 27th February 1992, the Library Association organised a Save Our Libraries Day, which included a rally outside the House of Commons and meetings with MPs. Speaking at the rally, novelist Ken Follett said: "The underfunding of the library service will impoverish future generations, spiritually as well as materially." This year's National Libraries Day is on 4th February.  

Key stat: 25.5 million. The number of books shifted by the Top 100 books of 1992, led by Jilly Cooper's Polo (Transworld) which sold 597,562 copies. The Top 100 bestselling titles in 2011 sold 21.8 million copies.  

10 years ago
Breaking news: Two of the biggest, longest running stories in 2002 involved Blackwell: the blood on boardroom floor resulting from a family feud in which majority shareholder Toby Blackwell tried to force a sale of the publishing arm; and Blackwell's retail side acquiring James Thin's academic shops after the Edinburgh-based chain went into administration in January.

In May, John Murray was sold to Hodder Headline ending 250 years of ­independent publishing. Agenting shake-ups included the Jonathan Lloyd-led m.b.o. at Curtis Brown and Peter Straus' surprise departure from Pan Mac to join ­Rogers, Coleridge & White.   

Books and rights: The charts were ruled by the famous in 2002 with eight of the top 15 books by value by or about celebs, topped by Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Kitchen (Michael Joseph, £4m) and the fashion duo Trinny & Susannah's What Not to Wear (Weidenfeld, £3.9m).  Yet, the out of nowhere Christmas hit was Ben Schott's Schott's Original Miscellany (Bloomsbury), which sold 172,000 copies through BookScan, 156,000 of those in December.

The biggest rumoured advance of the year was the £1m Bloomsbury reportedly paid for Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, somewhat amusingly signed a couple days before business guru Sir John Harvey Jones attacked publishers for overly large advances at a London Book Fair seminar sponsored by . . . Bloomsbury.  

Foreign country: Unthinkable now, but in July 2002, three of the six biggest UK publishers—Headline, Macmillan and Time Warner—ceased supplying Amazon with books because of negotiation over terms. "They are asking wholesale terms but they're a retailer," said one sales director.

Plus ça change: "Booker judges rile publishers" screamed a headline on 27th September. A tiff between the trade and the judges of the UK's pre-eminent book prize? How . . . usual. In 2002, the judging panel, led by Lisa Jardine, complained that publishers had submitted "pompous" books and omitted younger and more popular writers. Publishers reacted angrily, strongly criticising the submissions procedure. Then Viking publishing director Juliet Annan said: "I don't know how the panel had the nerve to throw this brickbat at us when we are forced to play Russian roulette [in submitting books]."    

Key stat: 17%—the market share of independent bookshops according to a Bookseller survey. Indie bookshops' market share was down to just under 10% by the decade's end.

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