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.

Cheese, wine and John Keats

(Originally posted on 7th July 2007)

I came across something rather splendid in our cookery department today: a self-published book called The Cheesemonger's Tale by Arthur Cunynghame. The author was once a Royal Warrant Holder as cheesemonger to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. I'm not sure what treachery one has to commit to lose such a warrant, but it doesn't seem to have dented the man's enthusiasm for his subjects, those of cheese, wine and the elegant marriage of the two.

It's the sort of book that the big publishers don't really do any more, a gorgeous gallimaufry with no more of central thread than the search for great cheese, a book that could only come from the mind of someone so immersed in the subject that the wider world is probably much of a mystery to him. Anyone who speaks of brie as 'temperamental' clearly communes with the stuff in a way a dabbling amateur like me can scarcely appreciate. Dull adjectives like 'steely' and 'floral' are reinvigorated here and he certainly has my mouth watering at the prospect of some proper Wensleydale, especially after foolishly buying a bland lump of the stuff from Sainsburys last week.

There are earnest little asides too, on the evils of supermarkets and a remarkably unlikely, given the author's undoubted Englishness, defence of EU policy of protected foodstuffs. And I particularly liked his definitive statement on the eating, or not, of rinds: if you like the taste, eat it.

Today's award for outstandingly ignorant pomposity goes to the customer who first was disgusted that we no longer stock a book he had bought from us in 1976 and, after a brief hiatus during which he ferreted fruitlessly for Keats in children's poetry before being directed to the adult section, declared himself baffled why we did not have that author's 'The rime of the ancient mariner'. I imagine that you will take rather less time to spot the fatal flaw in his reasoning that it took me to convince him of it.

He just shades the accolade from the ill-advisedly mustachioed gentleman who raged about Philip Pullman's being kept in teenage fiction when 'he clearly writes for adults'. Let not the fact that he been published only by Puffin and Scholastic, two of our finest children's publishers, deter you, sir.

I suspect there is going to be a prominent vein of literary snobbery running throughout this blog. Still, I'll brook no objections and all who take offence should go off and reread their 'adult cover' versions of Harry Potter.