I was sitting next to this
lady during a dinner recently, who asked me what I did. When I
replied that I was a publisher, she immediately wanted to know what
genre. I said that it would be easier to list what I didn’t do:
business and self-help. “Oh, do you publish text books then?”
“No, that’s another specialised field.”
“What, then? Magazines?”
She had no clue about general publishing.
As a publisher and a bookseller I get this question often: how do I get my children to read? The obvious answer to that is another question: what do you read? Children imitate adults, and if parents read children are likely to as well (though not always – but that’s a different story). Ever heard the Malay proverb about a crab trying to teach his son to walk straight? (Some readers do emerge from non-reading families, influenced by peers, teachers, co-workers, etc.)
That little conversation with the lady next to me made me think. If one does not even know what books are …?! Certainly, this might be truer in Malaysia than elsewhere, but it’s still scary.
Second, I remember how, when I was young, books would be classified as ‘real books’ and ‘story books’: the former made you clever while the latter was little more than trash, and a waste of time not to mention money. Fortunately, I didn’t grow up in such a family, but a very large number of people still do, and (to many parents) reading ‘story books’ is useless, as in:
“Why are you wasting your time reading ‘story books’? You have your finals next year!”
Third, not only is reading difficult, it’s boring; and (worse still) it feels like work. Why would I want to punish myself?
How did I start reading? I grew up in a house full of books, and there were no restrictions on what I could read. Reading ‘adult’ books was a buzz. By the time I was fifteen, I had already read (unabridged editions) of Dickens, Dostoyevsky and DH Lawrence. (Not telling which book.) They made me feel clever and some of them were … er … quite entertaining!
I read mostly for entertainment, and I love the serendipitous nature of knowledge. But I understand, perfectly, the point of view of the non-reader.
Reading has been (and will always be) a minority activity, although, particularly since the eighties, with the advent of the celebrity author, reading has taken on a new dimension – glamour. It became chic (and smart) to be seen clutching the latest bestseller in public, although there were some titles I’d be too embarrassed to hold!
There has never been a period in the history of the world when so many people have been so totally bored out of their minds as the present time, and the entertainment industry has never had it so good. I read a report in Fortune magazine recently that in the US alone 216 million people played video games! Can you imagine the size of that industry? Then, there is the radio, television, internet, and the latest thing, social media. Boredom is big business. No, huge business.
Even as recently as the fifties, people were too busy staying alive (and, in many cases, dodging bullets, and bombs) to be bored. In places like India, Africa and China, a sixteen-year-old would have already started a family of his/her own. But people still wrote books (even in their bunkers) and many more read them.
Traditionally, reading (and writing) was the preoccupation of the elite and the gifted few. It still is. People, who are not reading now, would not have been readers then. There’s no point in complaining, “My son is spending all his time on video games.” In the sixties he’d be hiking, playing with marbles, tops and kites, or hunting fighting spiders, or ... whatever. I did all that, too, and still had the time to read. I guess it’s about inclinations. So, people, who don’t read, won’t read. Period.
But that does not mean we can’t make reading more pleasant for those who do. I got two new books recently that I was keen to read. The first was Silent House by Orhan Pamuk (Faber), and the other Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape). I had read only the first page of both and my immediate reaction was, “WTF!”
Is there no one in Jonathan Cape who understands typography? Or is it that they simply don’t care, because McEwan will sell, anyway? No time? Someone slashed the budget? One of my favourite features of a traditional book is design and packaging. With that kind of page layout, one might as well buy an ebook, if that.
Books are beautiful objects readers like to collect. One only asks for publishers to treat them as such, and show readers some respect too, or they’ll start losing even those.
What happened to the ‘publisher’ as the ‘creative intermediary’? Every book must count. If stuffed-suits become impatient and leave, that would not be a bad thing.
Someone once said, there only good books and bad books. Let’s get back to basics, then.
