From The Times Literary Supplement (London)
Jacques Bonnet does (he can't stop buying them) – but what's the future for the book business?
By Paul Duguid
Conventional booksellers are familiar with the customer who makes a grand entrance into the shop, proclaims loudly, “I love books”, and after scanning the coffee-table section, makes the discerning purchase of a greetings card. There are many ways to love books and many books to love. Nor should we dismiss greetings cards. In their single-fold codex form, cards represent the primal book. Some historians claim that it was the codex, not print, that really mattered in giving us the “book” we love to love. Greeting cards, moreover, offer more than a link to the book’s past. They also helped point to its future: cards with a chip singing “happy birthday to you” were the first digital items sold by many bookshops.
From cards to chips, books come in many guises and the books under review help us to appreciate the range. John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture explores Anglo-American “trade publishing”, the canonical book business that offers advances in the millions and can be disappointed with sales in the tens and even hundreds of thousands. Irving Louis Horowitz's Publishing as a Vocation focuses on scholarly publishing, where citations can be as important as sales, and a thousand in either column lies beyond most dreams. Jacques Bonnet’s The Phantoms on the Bookshelves is the enjoyable confession of a “bibliomaniac”, a man who (like the bookseller in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps) shelves books in his bathroom.
Together the three embrace the bundle of forms and genres on which the term book confers a spurious uniformity. They help us understand that books (like many objects of love), though easy to idealize, can be complex, contradictory and obdurate objects....