I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too.
It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism would make a wonderful ironic present. Then it occurred to me: isn’t it sad we don’t have an equivalent to Pelican today.
For the ignorant among you, Pelican was the non-fiction arm of Penguin’s great project to deliver cheap, intelligent books to the masses. It was set up in 1937 by a noble Welshman called William Emrys Williams who sensed there was a public appetite for accessible titles on history, science, philosophy and current affairs – and was proved right, as these pocket-sized paperbacks with their distinctive blue covers sold in their hundreds of thousands. Though the imprint survived until 1990, Pelican’s heyday was its first two decades, when its serious books chimed with serious times of global crisis, social upheaval and austerity.
As today’s world wobbles on the edge of economic and political catastrophe, I wonder if we will experience a similar hunger for knowledge and big ideas. It would certainly be refreshing after the glorification of ignorance that blighted the late nineties and noughties (and continues to infect Channel 4).
On the surface, the intellectually curious reader of 2011 will be far better served than her mid-twentieth-century counterpart. Serious, popular non-fiction is modern publishing’s greatest asset. Step inside a bookshop and you will see a vast range of books on a vast range of subjects, written by experts and aimed at the layman. Alexandra Harris’ introduction to Viriginia Woolf, Darian Leader on our understanding of madness, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, Michael Lewis on the European financial crisis – just a few of the erudite yet readable nonfiction titles that have come out recently.
The problem with all this popular science, history, economics and so on is that it’s not all that popular. Yes, these books get reviewed widely — if they’re lucky they might get a plug on Radio 4 or Newsnight — but are they read? Not really. With the exception of the Dickens biography, these titles will be lucky if they sell 10,000 in hardback.
Why? Part of the reason, of course, is price. Books are a luxury these days. Although they’re a lot cheaper on Amazon, the RRP for most hardbacks is between £25 and £30 which, for a lot of people in this country, is half a day’s earnings. Yes, they can wait for the paperback, but current affairs titles like Michael Lewis’ Boomerang will be out of date in nine months’ time.
The other explanation for dwindling hardback sales is portability, or lack of. True, they’re great for libraries and presents. But no one wants to lug one around with them, especially one of those super-sized hardbacks all too common nowadays. Take Steven Pinker’s 832-pages-long The Better Angels of Our Nature: it sounds fabulous and I can’t wait to read it, but a book that weighs the same as a bag of potatoes is not ideal for public transport.
This is why Kindles are so popular, especially — I’ve noticed — with (handbag-less) men. It’s not because they can store a million books at once, or because you can download lots of cheap thrillers. It’s because they are light and small enough to fit in your pocket, just like the original paperback.
Back to my idea. Now I’m not suggesting we do away with hardbacks altogether: there are plenty of important reasons to keep them, and the associated publishing cycle. But I do think the one-time success of Pelican shows there is a real gap in the market for cheap, pocket-sized, intelligent non-fiction.
This is how to fill it: when a high-profile hardback like The Better Angels of Our Nature is released, it would be accompanied by a ‘lite’ edition in paperback. Sold in supermarkets and railway stations and on special stands in bookshops, Better Angels *Lite* would be a fraction of the length of the full-sized tome — the sort of heavily abridged version that already gets serialised in newspapers, or on Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Cheaply produced and essentially disposable, it would also be a fraction of the price: just as the original Penguins cost the same as a packet of cigarettes, Better Angels *Lite* would priced no higher than a sandwich. It could even contain a voucher to redeem it against the full-priced hardback or ebook.
These public transport-friendly books would be a great marketing tool for publishers: not only would they remind people of the joys of print (the main aim of the World Book Night giveaway), they would also maximise the impact of the initial burst of publicity, which would be particularly helpful for topical books such as Boomerang. Most crucially of all: by encouraging the democratisation of ideas and debate, they would both celebrate the spirit of the original paperback and be the perfect tonic for these interesting times.
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