And now for someone completely different

I need to get something off my chest: America, bless it, is really pissing me off.

The cultural imperialism, the tendency to wear shorts, the appalling lack of decent cheese: all of these I can cope with. But I cannot, and will not, abide their describing second-hand books as 'used'.

What the hell is a 'used' book? "Here, have my copy. Sorry, I've read most of it, but if you give it a shake, there's still a bit left."

A 'used' book is surely a dubiously stained and dog-eared paperback, shedding yellowed pages like some sort of paginary alopecia, just an unexpected puddle away from papier-mâché. 'Used' has connotations of the car lot, and its rapidly depreciating jalopies sold by sweaty-palmed men with too much hair gel.

A second-hand book is a fragile treasure made precious by its venerability and scarcity. Once it has been read, it is not drained of value. It is passed on, with a story of its own already attached. It is an heirloom, a time capsule, a lost world to be rediscovered.

So, let's have no more talk of 'used' books. And 'pre-experienced' is right out.

Star customer of the day was the tall, austere gentleman enquiring about a couple of theology titles. I graciously bestow this accolade on the grounds that he was the Comic Messiah, Our Lord John Cleese. I cannot possibly reveal exactly what he asked for, for so to do would be a heinous breach of bookseller-Python confidentiality, but unfortunately both books were out of print, which rather curtailed our conversation. I was tempted to ask whether the religious curiosity was in aid of a sequel but resisted, which is probably just as well. He is very austere and very, very tall.

It later occurred to me - l'esprit d'escalier indeed - that if he had asked for some fiction recommendations along the same lines, I might quite reasonably have led him to Quarantine by Jim Crace and told him it was about this bloke called Jesus and his forty days in the desert, only he's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy. This too though I imagine would have led to the kind of disapproval of which only the very tall and austere are capable.

This means that so far in the shop I have been of little service to John Cleese, embarrassed Michael Palin, collided with Eric Idle and failed to engage in any way with Terry Jones other than to glimpse him between the stacks. So, when can we expect you, Mr Gilliam?

Never meet your heroes: you'll only disappoint them.

We're only here for the beard

This week I was privileged enough, courtesy of Atlantic Books, to meet that doyen of alt.history and postcyberpunk and paradigm of pognophilia*, Neal Stephenson, in anticipation of the September publication of his new book, Anathem. The venue was a dim, slightly stuffy underground bar near Holborn, serving a range of tapas, including a sweaty cheeseboard featuring a cheese so odd I'm not unconvinced I may not have been confusing it with the bread.

(* I am aware that this is a gratuitous piece of sesquipedalianism, but anyone who wishes to accuse me of bombast and magniloquence at the slightest provocation would be right on the money.)

His editor remains the maverick's maverick Ravi Mirchandani, with whom I did work experience when he was at William Heinemann about nine years ago, when I still entertained furtive dreams of editing a Booker winner or two as an editor at Picador. I saw little of him while employed as an ersatz editorial assistant, since he tended to leave for lunch a little after eleven, leaving a trail of unreturned messages in his wake, and return about three days later.

He did, however, give me a proof copy of The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, which remains one of my favourite novels. I also did a little work on Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, published at the end of my three weeks there; I seem to remember typing out long passages from the manuscript, although to what end I really couldn't say.

The author gave the obligatory sales pitch, an unenviable task even in front of a small audience naturally inclined toward him. Of course, being an author in today's market is almost as much about image and media skills as it is about being able to write; on publication, the usual cavalcade is de rigueur for all but the most established and stubborn writers. I'm told that the Richard & Judy team do bear in mind how an author will come across on the studio sofa when making their selections for the Book Club.

Anyway, after the usual toasts, I took the chance to speak with him. This is one of the perks of the book industry, compared to other media. I doubt I should get the chance to speak, at least without a PR's close supervision, to many stars if I worked in film or music. He seemed a little diffident, but, looking back, I do wonder if assailing him with questions about postapocalyptic dystopias in contemporary British literature - Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away-World - was a little unfair on him. I'm not as familiar with his work as I like to be when meeting an author, so perhaps I was trying too hard to assert my own credentials, for fear of looking ignorant.

Later, when I was saying my goodbyes to the Atlantic staff, he was deep in conversation with a couple of the Waterstone's buying team. I'm not very good interposing in conversations and tend to hand around awkwardly on the periphery for a few minutes until finally plunging in, usually at an utterly unwelcome juncture, so I decided to leave. As I started up the stairs, he came bounding after me, to thank me for coming.

This is a symptom of something I don't really like about the industry. When meeting head office buyers and the gentlemen of the press, an author is presumably given clear instructions to be as amenable and patient, since the impression given will probably end up having some bearing on the enthusiasm with which the book will be promoted. It's not so much the fact that one feels more inclined to support those one finds likeable, but the fact that the whole thing is a symptomatic of the author's being part of the package, part of the product.

We forget sometimes that a book is a commitment of considerable intensity on the part of the author - I know this is a generalisation and a romanticisation of the life of a writer - and that they are the one essential component, the spindle on which the whole wheel turns. Not even Mark Booth at Century - the man who publishes Katie Price and then recently had the gall to announce 'the death of the novel' - has yet devised a way to take that human element from the process, although I wouldn't be surprised if he spends his time these days coding algorithms to generate novels spontaneously.

The author is not a nuisance - certain persistent offenders demanding ongoing front-of-house presence against all sensible retail practice notwithstanding - but a cultural definer, standard bearer and baton passer. My nerves at meeting a senior member of the marketing team at a publisher whose lists I like owes themselves to the wish that I might make a good impression for professional reasons; nerves at meeting a favourite author are more profound and personal because I am responding in whatever small way I can to someone who has shaped my thoughts and has made me contemplate life afresh.

So, when Anathem is published this autumn, I hope the launch will be a celebration of the man, his ideas and his artistic vision.

The obligatory Harry Potter post

(Originally published on 22nd July 2007)

So, Harry Potter. It's all over. The boy has become a man. Marvellous.

This isn't going to be a rant about Harry Potter. I'm not a fan - I have the read the first of them, as I felt it my duty as bookmonger, and was reminded of the pleasure I got from Roald Dahl as a child - but I'm happy enough for people, young and old, to enjoy them. In a way, I wish I were a fan, getting caught up in the all the anticipation, excitement and attendant persiflage.

But the Harry Potter phenomenon does concern me. And I think it's because it's become so much more than a way to show people what wonder can be found in the humblest of bookshops. Now anyone can, and apparently does, flog Harry Potter, even shops that don't normally stock books. Last Friday night certain clothes shops adjacent to bookshops dressed their staff up in all manner of thaumaturgical regalia to tap into the craze.

So I think what worries me is that people drawn to reading Harry Potter are going to expect this sort of glamour to attend the book trade generally. Hollywood tries to turn all its products into a relentless cavalcade of stars and CGI, all sound and fury signifying nothing, while the independent film industry continues its lonely decline, so it'll all be about making each release into an event. A film's success is determined in its first weekend's ticket sales.

The book industry is trying to ape that sort of business model, making authors, especially the media-savvy and photogenic, into stars, with the result that the general public's critical abilities are those which will suffice for 'watercooler' autopsies. But Harry Potter is a one-off. Anyone waiting for this kind of hullabaloo to show them what to read next isn't going to buying books again any time soon.

Back in January, when Stef Penney won the Costa Book of the Year (next year awarded alongside the Monster Munch Award for Contemporary Architecture), books made one of their occasional forays beyond the review supplements and into the news pages. But most journalists just wrote about Penney's agoraphobia and the supposed incongruity of this condition with her writing about the wilds of Canada, it not apparently occurring to any of them that having an imagination tends to be very much part of the job spec when it comes to writing fiction.

Reviews, sometimes even in the Sunday broadsheets, are often no more than a description of the plot. (I’d like to make an honourable mention here of Claire Allfree, who reviews for Metro, a publication not normally associated with intellect and insight; but both are abundant in the two and a half inches the newspaper is prepared to give her in lieu of more mobile phone ads and text messages from idiots.) It’s no wonder John Banville’s masterly Booker winner, The Sea, has sold so poorly in comparison with more prosaic winners, when nothing happens until 20 pages from the end, but after 80,000 words pieced together with such rare beauty. There are distressingly few of us who feel aggrieved that Jim Crace, England’s most stylish novelist, is not paraded through the streets of his home city of Birmingham in a streamer-festooned, open-top bus every time he publishes a new book.

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist from The Los Angeles Times about the then imminent Potter: she said she knew the films but not the books! They had no book readers up to the task? Books seem to have become a niche interest, a novelty, a hobby for the socially retiring. (The same day I also appeared on Al-Jazeera, in a piece on Alastair Campbell's diaries; my mother is now convinced I'm a prime terrorist target.)

There will always be word-of-mouth titles which skew the market - A Year in Provence, A Brief History of Time, Captain Corelli's Lousy Rotten Stinking Mandolin - and names, even at the literary end of the spectrum, who shift books no matter the quality of their latest (yes, I do mean you, Ian McEwan and Sebastian Faulks). And then of course there's The Da Vinci Code.

Now, anyone who's ever read a line of Nabokov or Conrad or Walcott will be able to tell from reading a single sentence from The Da Vinci Code that the publishers have made flesh the philosophical exercise involving an infinite number of monkeys and a similar number of typewriters (and no copy editors). The language in that book is so excruciatingly poor that the manuscript ought to have been so scored with blue pencil by its editor that one might have wondered if a young Picasso had been doodling on it. I'm sure the story is gripping, but one man's page-turner is this man's stomach-turner.

This total lack of analytical skills is why The Lord of the Rings gets voted the best book of all time, why students quote from Wikipedia in their essays, why the media's coverage of any political issue or scientific development is reported such starkly black and white terms that any debate is reduced to mindless sloganeering.

So, I hope all those waiting for Harry savoured every last word, but I hope that that you’ll pick up something that needs a bit of engagement some time soon. It doesn't matter that people read trash or watch trash or eat trash; it does matter when our minds, our palates, our expectations become so dulled that we don't want anything more, that we can’t even recognise something with real value, something worth treasuring.

I address that last adjuration to all those fans of G P Taylor, Jennifer Donnelly, Meg Rosoff, Philip Pullman and all the other children’s authors whom publishers are pushing on readers scared to pick up anything not first vetted by Richard & Judy. And that includes all of you out there who made The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into a word-of-mouth bestseller and even voted it as a 'Vintage Future Classic'. Let's not be coy here: it may shed light on a previously relatively unreported condition, but it's a children's book. If you found the plot satisfying, then you have a reading age of nine and almost certainly read the book with a supply of Cheesestrings and Sunny D within easy reach.