BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

Having admired her earlier book, Jack, I meant ages ago to buy the novel This Book Will Save Your Life by AM Homes but I neglected to do so. Then I picked up a copy in a branch of Waterstone’s, our local independent bookseller having run through his quota. The copy I bought had in its top right hand corner one of those “3 for the price of 2” stickers: they never have any influence whatsoever on my purchases but Waterstone’s use them to favour books that are already selling well – you’d think it would make more sense to use the ploy on underselling titles. When I got it home, I peeled off the sticker and found beneath it a circular promotion for something called “Richard & Judy”. This was not a sticker but an overprint on the cover.

Upon enquiry, I established that this mysterious couple are a daytime television programme. The presenters are clearly so famous that they don’t need surnames, like Bill and Ben. It (the programme) promotes various books that come its way and, it seems, a mention on the programme can have its effect on sales. This is a deplorable development. In the States, apparently, no book sells any copies at all unless it has been blessed by the Oprah Winfrey programme. At a time when corruption in television is a daily news story, the broadcasters will need to be especially vigilant that the money to be made out of such television exposure is not tempting publishers to attempt to influence the producers of the programme. There might well be a case for suggesting that the use of a book cover to promote Richard & Judy – a piece of reciprocal product placement, if you like – is itself a corrupt practice.

On three separate counts, I did not want to own a copy of this book defaced by this piece of cover advertising. First of all, I am a proper grown-up book reader. I don’t need to be told what to read by the presenters of some daytime television programme. They are not, I take it, professors of semiotics or critics from the intellectually reputable journals. As a rule, I only allow myself to be guided to a hitherto unfamiliar writer by reading a combination of reviews by critics with whose tastes I am already comfortable in the better newspapers and magazines.

Not even friends are necessarily reputable guides when it comes to books. Over many years, one particular friend has strongly recommended just two novels to me. I read one and thought it a piece of derivative twaddle. I have never read the other although it sits pristine on the bookshelves. Quite recently, my friend’s partner revealed that my old friend almost never reads fiction at all. It would be putting it too strongly to suggest that I felt a sort of betrayal on the part of my friend in perhaps only ever having read two novels and then presuming to recommend both of them to me; but I was sorely aggrieved. For myself, I can think of hardly any book that I would commend wholeheartedly to everybody. Just occasionally I will tell a friend about a particular book that I fancy might appeal to her. This is a gambit used very sparingly.

But I digress. My second objection to the publisher’s despoiling of the cover of Ms Homes’ novel concerns the slither down into the murky world of marketing that has been imposed upon literary fiction. These days it’s hard to find a paperback edition of a novel that is not festooned with promotion. Either there is a quote from some such goon as Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons or Stephen Fry on the cover, as if their approbation is any kind of commendation: after all, Fry will be revealing on a television programme tomorrow night that among his pleasures are Countdown, darts and Led Zeppelin. And I am meant to be encouraged by his sensibility? Otherwise we must be assured that the novel in question was “shortlisted for the Booker Prize” or even, dear god, “longlisted for the Booker Prize”. Any day now I expect to pick up a paperback that proclaims it was “overlooked for the Booker Prize”.

Writers who have yet to join Valhalla routinely have their Nobel laureateships emblazoned on the covers of their books: see Coetzee, Grass, Morrison, Saramago, Mahfouz and so on. Happily, the old masters who received the same recognition – Tagore, Kipling, Mann, Mauriac, Steinbeck, Shaw, O’Neill, Sartre and so on – are evidently sufficiently classified as “classics” for their Nobels to be omitted from the marketing.

Finally, I have an aesthetic objection to the promo on the cover of the Homes. Its paperback cover design is a symmetrical arrangement of six doughnuts, quite a cute image. The promo obliterates one of the doughnuts, ruining the look of the book. What is the point of a publisher paying good money for a jacket design if he’s then going to spoil it with trash?

I visited a great many bookshops in the dwindling hope that an overlooked copy of the Homes with an unsullied cover might lurk but bookshops are less musty and disorganised that they used to be, sadly for the customers. Evidently the publisher had recalled the pre-Richard & Judy copies and replaced them.

There was nothing for it but to contact the publisher direct. I emailed the Sales & Marketing Department of Granta. A gentleman called Julio Ferrandis replied, saying that he had “a hard copy of this book sitting on my desk (it’s a new copy!) for you”. Well of course I didn’t want a hardback copy. I could buy one of those at a bookshop and save the postage. What I wanted, as I had explained carefully, was a paperback without the Richard & Judy promo. Had they really pulped all the early editions? It seemed so wasteful. I wrote again, in self-deprecatory terms (“grateful for … your patience with what I am sure you will see as my unnecessary pickiness”). Sr Ferrandis wrote back saying they had no “pb copies without the sticker at the present. What I can send you however is a picture of the pb cover without the sticker! Hehe”. That “hehe” seems calculated to be offensive. I feel disinclined to believe Sr Ferrandis on the lack of copies but I shall not pursue the matter with Granta. I shall look for a decent copy of the book in a second-hand shop.

Even if I eventually find an acceptable copy of the Homes, I shall probably never get to read it. The American novelist Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, which I have read) once declared that he had calculated his life expectancy, reckoned up how many books he read in an average year and realized that he already, in his mid-30s, owned more books than he could possibly read. I too probably passed that point in my mid-30s but I continue to amass books at a rate that, by true bibliophile standards, is very modest. There is something blissful about the home none of whose internal walls can be seen for the mass covering of bookshelves. We do not go that far, we have pictures too. And a few empty spaces. Oh, and videotapes (thousands of those).

There is a quotation from Cicero on display in one of our guest rooms: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. I think I might add a kitchen and a means of listening to music but I like his thrust. People sometimes find a display of books a bit overwhelming, especially perhaps if they never read a book from one month’s end to the next.

Occasionally, some visitor (usually a woman, perhaps because men are less likely to notice such things) will exclaim “Look at all your books!” and you rejoin, with a tiny touch of asperity, “oh, this is but the tip of the iceberg” while you wonder “did you never enter a cultivated home before?” And then comes the inevitable corollary, as predictable as it is dull: “have you read them all?” “And where,” you ask yourself pityingly, “would be the pleasure in that?” To have a myriad of masterpieces – and diversions too, let’s not be precious – from which to choose is to be alive and engaged.

I know that there are copies of books on our shelves that will remain virgin until after I am gone. There are, as a New York teeshirt often worn by my partner declares, “too many books, too little time”. But that is the condition of our short passage through this vale of tears. We can never see all the places, meet all the people, indulge all the joys, sample all the flavours. Rousseau complained that “the mountain of books is making us ignorant” and that was 250 years ago, even before Barbara Cartland added several small hills of books to the range. Maybe I can do without This Book Will Save Your Life altogether.