Are you awed by an autograph? Swayed by a signature? As you peruse the shelves and tables of a bookshop, is your eye drawn more readily to a cover if it bears one of those little stickers announcing that the copy in question has been signed by the author? Plenty of people’s eyes are, apparently.
Publishers always encourage their authors to get out there in the shops, pen in hand, offering to sign whichever copies of their latest work happen to be in stock. I did this with my first book, and felt a little silly walking up to the counter in Waterstones, carrying half a dozen copies of the novel lifted from a nearby table. But the assistant didn’t bat an eyelid. In fact she was very pleasant, asking me about the book and how it was going. Clearly authors popping in to apply their monikers was a common occurrence. Since then it’s become an enjoyable little hobby whenever I have a new book out. Apart from being an excuse to get out of the house (always welcome for writers), it gives you some feedback not just on how your own book is doing, but how the trade is faring more widely.
Customers, the assistants always tell you, are indeed influenced by whether a copy is signed or not. Some buy books simply because they’re signed, even if they have no interest at all in the subject matter or genre. This seems sad, if not downright spooky. Maybe they’re stockpiling the books in the hope that one or two will become bestsellers, thereby making the signature valuable.
As well as the ‘signed on site’ copies, there are those autographed by the author centrally before being distributed to the shops. I was driven by my publishers to a warehouse to sign 400 copies of one novel, which made me feel very big and clever, until someone happened to mention that John McEnroe (whose autobiography had just come out with the same firm) had done 3,000. Surely not all in one go? Still, the number begs the question of quality. How good will someone’s thousandth consecutive signature be? I checked out some of the signed copies currently in the shops, and can report that Andrew Miller’s has a certain swagger (though a hurried M and a hasty finish seem to turn his surname into ‘Nott’). Alain de Botton, on the other hand, is way over the speed limit. His first name becomes an ‘H’, the ‘de’ is virtually a dot, while the surname looks like ‘R’. All he needs is another ‘H’ to portray himself as a member of the Royal Family. Which may or may not be the impression he’s trying to create. If you want to go super-formal, incidentally, the ‘correct’ way of doing things is to cross out the printed version of your name on the title page before applying your signature underneath. The only person I’ve ever known do this is Simon Heffer. No surprise there, then.
My own writing, is has to be said, is nothing to write home about. A friend who saw an early signed copy of my first book warned that it was all too spiky, particularly the sharp-pointed ‘M’s, and was in danger of making people think I was a serial killer. As he knew a lot about the autograph market, and had recently seen Dennis Nilsen’s signature, I paid attention. We were in a pub at the time, and proceeded to cover an entire copy of The Times (then still a broadsheet) with practice efforts, Matt gradually coaching me towards a more rounded and less off-putting version of my name. Only after a while did we look up and notice that a man at a nearby table was watching us. His thoughts, you could see from his expression, comprised but a single word. A word beginning with ‘w’.
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