“Good…The thing is this, Mr…er…Major Gray. I like to publish good books which make money. I don’t expect all that much money and sometimes I’m prepared to make none at all, but in your case I think we’ve got the makings of a minor prestige novelist with a broader appeal than most such. Which means both cachet and cash.”

The publisher looks after his authors well, proposing a three book deal with generous advances when he signs Fielding, who has difficulty “resisting a strong impulse to cry”.

“Let us say that I am prepared to…err…back my beliefs with hard money. So many publishers are not. With the result that in the end they lose both money and the author.”

Blond himself wrote books on publishing, and in The Publishing Game (1971) we can clearly see the same publishing ethos.

“Publishers should regard authors, who are the source of their bread and butter, cake and occasionally caviare, with humility, respect and affection.”

Simon Raven, Alms for Oblivion (10 novels), 1964-1976

“He sent it from an accommodation address to Pope and Potter, and it came back. He sent it to Simms and Shotter, and it came back; to Melville and Monks, and it came back; to Popgood and Grooly, Bissett and Bassett, Ye Panache Press and half a dozen other firms, and it came back again. It might have been a boomerang or one of those cats which, transferred from Surbiton to Glasgow, show up in Surbiton three months later, a little dusty and footsore but full of the East-West-home’s-best spirit. Why it should eventually have found journey’s end in the offices of Alfred Tomkins Ltd one cannot say, but it did, and they published it in the spring, with a jacket featuring a young man with a monocle in his right eye doing the rock ‘n roll with a young woman in her step-ins.

After that, as is customary on these occasions, nothing much happened. It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.”

As is to be expected from a Wodehouse plot, the pseudonymously published novel is at the centre of an entanglement of personal relationships, misunderstandings and various mischief. Purely by chance (the denunciation of Cocktail Time by the Bishop of Stortford) there is a succès de scandale that leads to big sales, serializations and movie deals.

Barbara Crowe works the agent’s magic for Edgar Saxby literary agency, now run by Howard Saxby, who provides some lessons on how playing the fool might help one to be a successful agent.

“As a boy he had been inclined to let his mind wander – ‘needs to concentrate’, his school reports had said – and on entering the family business he had cultivated this tendency because he found it brought results. It disconcerts a publisher, talking terms with an agent, when the agent stares fixedly at him for some moments and then asks him if he plays the harp. He becomes nervous, says fifteen per cent when he means to say ten, and forgets to mention subsidiary rights altogether.”

P.G.Wodehouse, Cocktail Time, 1958

I was there at the beginning. I was the beginning – but if you trawl book shops and gift shops and computer shops and duty-free shops and mail-order catalogues, and ads in this magazine or that magazine, and special offers on the back of certain cereal packets, you will find some of the following: the original five paperbacks (of course), the boxed set of the original five paperbacks, the activity book for older readers, the hardback deluxe compendium edition with the coloured illustrations (or colourized – the originals were black-and-white) illustrations, the board game (‘A throw of the dice decides which entrance you take into the Darkwood’), the PlayStation Hayseed game (‘Do you dare to be Mt Toppit?’), the Royal Doulton cereal-bowl set, the eggcups, the porcelain figurines of Luke, the DayGlo rucksacks, the pencil boxes, the notepaper, the Christmas cards, the T-shirts with ‘My brother went to the Darkwood and all Mr Toppit allowed him to bring back was this lousy T-shirt’ emblazoned on the back (unauthorized, I suspect – I’ll get the lawyers on to it), the baseball caps and the keyrings.

Charles Elton, Mr Toppit, 2009

Nathan Glass, the narrator of Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies is no publisher: he is a retired insurance man. But towards the end of the book he has a publishing idea. Waiting in hospital to see if he has or has not had a heart attack, he comes up with Bios Unlimited, a firm that will write up and publish the life stories of ordinary people – “something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all”, possibly financed by “biography insurance”. As the book finishes there is a “brilliant blue sky” when Nathan leaves the hospital with this idea spinning in his head. “One should never underestimate the power of books”, he asserts, but things are about to change.

“It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001.”

When the situation gets serious, the bookseller recognizes that the “publishers haven’t been bad really. There is no other business, I am sure, where they treat creditors with more consideration, but things are too tangled for any remedy I can see“.

With the bank, it is a different matter.

If I go tomorrow and see the bank they will give me more time. They must. If they give me a little longer things will improve. The book trade is like everything else, it is passing through a phase of depression. I can bring it round. I will work hard. I won’t waste time writing or talking too much. I will be keen. I will change my windows every week and dust the place properly. My personal appearance, I will improve that.

They have no more patience for me. They can let my shop to that man next door and he will fill my windows with knickers and hats and God only knows what inconceivable muck.

What will fill the windows of all those empty Border’s stores?

Anon (William Young Darling), The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller, 1931

“That had been towards the end of the nineteen-twenties. Glober had arrived in London as representative of a recently founded New York publishing house. Even before he landed, his name went round among the London publishers as a young American colleague with a head full of bright new ideas; by no means an unqualified recommendation to that particular community.”

In Temporary Kings, Nicholas Jenkins meets up again with Dan Tokenhouse, with whom he had worked when younger, and Louis Glober who had once been involved with Tokenhouse in an aborted project to co-publish some books on Cubists. But Glober had moved on. “His firm fell into liquidation the following year. Several go-ahead American publishing houses went bust about that time.” Since then, he had been many things. “The Herald-Tribune had termed him playboy-tycoon, this type-casting to cover publisher, film-producer, sportsman, ‘socialite’, a lot of other more or less news-valued labels, most with some basis in fact.”

Tokenhouse, on the other hand, was the model of the gentleman publisher and got into publishing art books, according to Nick’s father, because he “always hankered after publishing picture books”. After a nervous collapse he has given up publishing, moved to Venice and devoted himself to painting. There are evidently great differences between the British and American publisher, although all publishers are obviously part of the cultural scene. In Venice, they are counted among Jacky’s “Communist chums, movie people, publishers, other rich people like himself“.

There is another more pragmatic British publisher in the book, J. C. Quiggin who is married to Ada Leintwardine, a novelist, who also works for Quiggin & Craggs. She pushes Glober to make a movie of one of their books, Match Me Such Marvel, and we learn that, although Quiggin and Craggs once had a strong left-wing leaning,“Quiggin himself, anyway commercially, had so far abrogated his own principles as to have lately scored a publishing bull’s eye with the memories of a Tory ‘elder statesman’.” He rejects another potentially interesting title that Ada suggests they might publish. “A book on X. Trapnel is never going to sell. Why get us involved in it at all. It would only mean more money down the drain”.

Perhaps Quiggin is an example of a British publisher who adapted well to the new publishing culture arriving from the other side of the Atlantic.

Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings, 1973

Bubis sticks with Archimboldi in spite of very poor sales. He buys him a typewriter, pays larger than warranted advances, and, when he dies (laughing at a novel by a new writer from Dresden), his wife Baroness Von Zumpe continues as his publisher (and occasional lover), not even bothering to read his latest novel, The Return, before giving it to the copyeditor with instructions to publish it in three months.

When Archimboldi wanted to know why she kept publishing him if she didn’t read him, which was really a rhetorical question since he knew the answer, the baroness replied (a) because she knew he was good, (b) because Bubis had told her to, (c) because few publishers actually read the books they publish.

Much of Archimboldi’s dealings with Bubis are covered in the later part of this monumental book, although we first hear of him in the first section of the book: The Part about the Critics. Two of the Archimboldi specialists, Espinoza and Pelletier, visit Hamburg to see the publisher, but learn little. On a visit to Mexico, they hear an interesting view on publishing from Amalfitano.

In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they’re laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this may be true across Latin America, intellectuals work for the state.

There are various other references to writing and publishing, with Archimboldi himself declaring the importance of the book.

“An old book is the past, too,” said Archimboldi, “a book written and published in 1789 is the past, its author no longer exists, neither does its printer or the ones who read it first or the time in which it was written, but the book, the first edition of that book, is still here. Like the pyramids of the Aztecs,” said Archimboldi.

Like the pyramids of the Aztecs, 2666 is large, mysterious but obviously of some great significance. Even if the novel suggests that publishers have motivations very different from those of writers, it is clear about the importance of the act of publishing.

Roberto Bolaño, 2666, 2004

Jeremy is impressed: “based on name recognition alone, it’ll be an instant success“. He is even more impressed when he is sent off to Tuscany to persuade another once famous novelist (and his personal hero), Weldon Parish, to start writing again after twenty years, and give Pearce Learner the bestseller the boss craves.

Tuscany is lovely, he falls for the writer’s horse-mad daughter, gets Weldon back tapping at the keys of his old typewriter, and discovers his inner novelist. Needless to say Jeremy ends up staying in Italy.

Wow! Is this what happened to all those 25 year old editors we used to know?

Shadows in the Sun (2005)

“And as I sat there alone in the lugubriously comfortable hall, and read the publisher’s advertisement and Sebastian’s handsome black name in block letters, I envied his lot more acutely than I had ever envied it before.”

As is the case with many books about writers there is little mention of publishers and publishing, although we do hear something of Sebastian Knight’s lackadaisical dealings with the profession. What a lark that “The Funny Mountain was published simultaneously in two American magazines, and Sebastian was at a loss to remember how he managed to sell it to two different people”. The first publisher of The Prismatic Bezel spotted an obvious libel and “advised Sebastian to modify the whole passage, a thing which Sebastian flatly refused to do, saying finally that he would get the book printed elsewhere – and this he eventually did”. When the book was published it “fell completely flat” and “was appreciated at its true worth only when Sebastian’s first real success caused it to be presented anew by another firm (Bronson), but even then it did not sell as well as Success, or Lost Property.” Bronson is the only publisher mentioned, and the author’s successes are not attributed in any way to publishing expertise.

Books are central to the story V unfolds, and his view of The Doubtful Asphodel obliquely presages now overworked predictions of the death of the book: “The man is dead, and we do not know. The asphodel on the other shore is as doubtful as ever. We hold a dead book in our hands. Or are we mistaken?”

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941

At Maypole Books they love David’s title. “I call Sarah and tell her the book’s called ‘That’s All We Have Time For’. Sarah rings back to say that Caroline Bliss loves it and she loves it and everyone loves it in the office, which is open-plan to make love spread faster.”

In case you haven’t guessed, Sarah is an eager young publishing recruit, who “writes down everything Caroline says, nodding muppetly. She’s a sarah in the Young Publishing Army. Many of her fellows will fall along the way. In this building alone, in the next twelve months, they’ll probably lose two sarahs, a poppy, various kates. But Sarah will survive. She knows what has to be done: agree with Caroline Bliss.”

We learn a lot about Jack, David, their families, lovers and friends, but the biography never gets published quite as planned. But at least David is rescued from his life working in a bookshop in Suffolk, from where he “has dispersed enlightenment in all directions” for fourteen years.

“This is not the Suffolk of the eighteenth century, most easily approached by boat. This is the Suffolk of email, where a book I recommended to the Person from Peasenhall was electronically touted that very morning to her friend in New Zealand.”

They must know a thing or two about good books in Peasenhall.

Jon Canter, Seeds of Greatness, 2006