But our most exciting and inspiring occasions were always the meetings organized by the School Library Association. To be invited year after year to come with our books, to see how they all delighted in these books, to share their enthusiasm, to join their discussions, to join them in the audience listening to their guest speaker . . . and then on two occasions to be one of the speakers myself: this in my bookselling life was my hilltop, and I know I shall never find a hilltop that will bring a greater sense of pride, happiness and achievement. One can fool oneself that books are ‘culture’ and that booksellers are therefore purveyors of culture. But one knows that for the most part this is not true. And though one may not be selling books solely in order to earn money, one is very conscious of (and sensitive to) the fact that many people see booksellers in this light. ‘Commercial’, ‘profit’, ‘money’: these words are used and they hurt. They hurt so much that earlier in this chapter I felt I had to show that they were often used unfairly. This attitude towards booksellers, that we are only in it for the profit, is particularly common among teachers and librarians. So let me now say how happy and grateful I was that no teacher ever seemed to feel this way about me. Indeed, selling to schools I was spared even the occasional mercenary twinges that I get in the shop – for I could never disguise from myself that if I persuaded someone to buy a book, though he might go out spiritually the richer, he would undoubtedly be financially the poorer. With teachers, however, it was different. It was not their money; it was the County’s. They had been given their allocation and it had to be used up by the end of the financial year. I knew too that my books were good, that what I was selling was worth buying, that money spent with me was money well spent. So with a clear conscience I could be as persuasive as I liked. Yes, on my hilltop I could pause and say: ‘What I am doing is worth doing and I am doing it well.’ And then I could remember that it all started in 1960 at Dartington Hall.
At the end of the Conference I was publicly thanked. At the end of every Conference of the School Library Association that Lesley and I attended (for on many happy occasions she was able to come with me) we were publicly thanked. So now it is my turn.
This is not the sort of autobiography that has an index to which all who knew the author at once refer, hoping to find a mention. It is too personal a story for that. In any case I find it embarrassing to write about people I know, knowing that they will later read what I have written and that others will read it too. What right have I to drag private individuals on to my stage and make them dance for me? On the other hand to mention nobody is to imply that I have gone my way and done whatever it may be I have done entirely on my own and owing nothing to the existence of others. And I owe so much to those teachers; and there were so many of them, all so different, each with his or her own special enthusiasm and so making his or her own unique contribution to our lives. Each name I recall brings to mind another . . . and another . . . and another. Where do I start? Where do I stop?
If from them all I am to choose a single name, there can be no doubt, no dispute that the name must be that of Gwen Petty. To name others would be invidious: not to name her would be unthinkable. In 1960 she was our Branch Secretary. Later she became our Chairman. Later still – since you don’t let people like that slip away into honourable and well-deserved retirement – she was our President. That of all the many Branches of the School Library Association the South-Western was among the most lively was her doing, her triumph. Small, neat, hawk-like, utterly dedicated, she was the librarian of Torquay Girls Grammar School. She would, one felt, have been no less at home at Cheltenham Ladies College; and I say this to give an idea of the standards of learning and of behaviour that she upheld. Such a person might well not have welcomed the very different standards of the New Education with its lack of discipline, its abandonment of formal teaching, its preference for ‘creative writing’ rather than good grammar and spelling. But this was not so, and it was probably because she could see the good in both worlds that she was able so brilliantly to harness and control the enthusiasm that blazed around her. How could one not feel – as we used to feel – that any conference at which she presided, whether as secretary, chairman or president, was a very special affair. None – least of all her two devoted booksellers – could grudge the weeks of preparation that led to an event so perfectly organized so immensely enjoyable. And when it was all over, when the books had been packed back into their boxes and willing hands had borne them off to the waiting van, when the hall was empty and the caretaker had been found and thanked, when the last goodbyes had been said, everyone of us could take home the glowing embers of a happy day that would give us warmth for months to come.
END OF AN ERA
Could it last? Could it be expected that the fires of the sixties would burn as strongly in the seventies? After spring and summer come autumn and winter.
One small incident stands out. It was at the Annual General Meeting of the local branch of the National Union of Teachers. These meetings were held in Newton Abbot in March, and each year for many years I had been there with my books – though on these occasions not the only bookseller. I had been disappointed in the lack of interest the previous year and, having agreed rather reluctantly to come again this year, was watching the teachers with a more than usually critical eye. . . . You can take a photograph of a leaf falling to the ground and you can call it ‘Autumn’. In the same way I could have taken a photograph of my book exhibition. It would have shown ten teachers lined up in front of it, none of them looking at it, each with his back to my books, gossiping, smoking or just contemplating, using my tables merely to recline against. It would have meant as little and it would have meant as much: a trivial incident, a solitary leaf, yet marking the end of summer.
Winter was indeed on its way and there were many signs of its approach. There was a bitter wind blowing from the offices of Local Government. At first it made me feel bitter too, but in retrospect I see that I was trying to have it both ways.
I have just unearthed a letter I wrote in 1966 to the Times Literary Supplement. There had been some correspondence about the poor quality of bookshops in some areas and the suggestion that the remedy was for Local Authorities to set up their own shops alongside their public libraries.
I felt all the indignation of a Christian listening to an atheist.
In my reply I said:
. . . To remain solvent and to display the sort of stock that would meet with the approval of your correspondent, booksellers today must secure a good slice of educational business.
I am luckier than many of my colleagues. I live in Devon and my local authority allows its schools to buy their library books where they please. The result is that I do a relatively very large amount of school library business, and consequently I can carry a much larger and wider range of stock, particularly in children’s books, than if I were supplying only private individuals. The two markets overlap, each benefitting from the fact that I also supply the other.
But booksellers elsewhere may be less lucky. Other authorities, seeing book-buying and bookselling as no more than a bill that ultimately has to be paid, are concerned only with securing the highest discount on textbooks and will pass their entire educational contract – textbooks and library books lumped together – to the supplier, wherever he may live, who bids the highest. Few bookshops can cope with the whole of a county contract at any price, let alone at cut price. But many booksellers could give efficient service to a few nearby schools – to the benefit of both the schools and the community generally.
So before local authorities are tempted to set up and subsidise their own bookshops, they might first consider the extent to which the malaise is of their own making and whether they might not remedy it by adopting, as customers, a slightly less discouraging attitude towards existing local bookshops.
The cure would not be immediate, but it might be cheaper and surer in the long run.
This might be described as my Booksellers Faith and I prea
ched it to unbelievers at every opportunity. So when the County Borough of Torbay was formed, how very proper that Torbay teachers should be directed towards a Torbay bookshop. And when Plymstock and Plympton left Devon to join the County Borough of Plymouth, how very proper that they should be directed towards a Plymouth bookshop. How very proper too that a large and wealthy grammar school in Exeter should be told that it must no longer buy all its books (or indeed any of its books) from a shop thirty miles beyond the Borough boundary. But of course it was sad for me. Even in what remained of Devon there came the realization that you cannot expect a contractor to offer a high discount on non-net books if the best of his net business is going to another bookshop.
So, one by one, the doors began to close, and in the end I lost almost every school.
With regret? Not altogether, for these were not the only signs that summer was coming to an end. There were signs in the books themselves.
When they had first appeared, these school library books, they were new and exciting – and there weren’t enough of them. Demand was terrific and publishers were falling over each other in the scramble to meet it. Those with children’s books were offering schools their better, more serious titles; those with textbooks were picking out their gayest and dressing them up in gay jackets. Other publishers were hurrying off to America, and many and colourful were the series they brought back. Others again were commissioning authors and illustrators and producing their own information books. What a jungle of series there soon were! Look Books, Outline Books, True Books, Junior Reference Books, Study Books, Signpost Books, All-About Books – and dozens more. And my job was to know them all and stock what I thought were the best. Each year brought more and more: new series born, new titles added to existing series. Each year schools would say ‘What’s new?’ and I would sort them out and take them along. Each year our stock grew larger and larger. Where was it to end? It had to end, of course. With the forty-seventh addition to the What’s-its-name Books I could no longer stock the entire range, nor perhaps could the publisher keep the entire range in print. With the arrival on the scene of the How-D’you-Do Books (first four titles: ships, space travel, dinosaurs and baby animals) I found myself wondering what particular gap this series hoped to fill. One needs choice, one needs variety, but there comes a point when one more book on the marvels of this or the wonders of that is one book too many.
So I escaped to fiction. I had been loading up my van with factual books for quite long enough: schools knew all about them, and what was new was not necessarily better than what was old. Now I loaded it up with story books. I had said all I wanted to say about non-fiction. So now I began my campaign for fiction. Invited to talk to teachers at a Teacher’s Centre (for example) I gave them a list of a dozen stories, and asked them to choose any one, read it to their class and then get the children to write or paint or make or act whatever the story inspired them to do. A Harbour Bookshop Book Token would be given to the class with the best entry. . . . This sort of thing helped for a while. But the wintry weather had come. It was only partly due to over-production. Demand was falling off too. Enthusiasm was dying. The Great Advance was coming to a halt.
Today we look back on the New Education and the El Dorado that it never reached. ‘Ah,’ say the wise ones. ‘I knew it. Life is not fun, so why pretend it is? Most children will end up having to do as they’re told, so they might as well learn how to do it from the start. And if they’ve got to join the rat-race, the nearer the front they are, the better, and so the best thing we can teach them is self-discipline, the ability to hold their noses to the grindstone however much it hurts.’
There will always be arguments about what children should be taught – and how. It’s hard enough to know what is best for one’s own child, let alone the children of an entire nation. Nor is it easy, looking back, to be sure how successful or otherwise one has been. But if the Great Debate on education continues, one thing is beyond debate, one thing is certain, and let all in the book trade say it as loudly and clearly as they can. The New Education brought one great unmixed, undeniable blessing, and it brought it to children’s literature.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Though it may be the author who writes the book it is undoubtedly the buyer who determines what sort of book is written. So if we are to understand what happened to children’s books in 1960 we must see who was buying them and how they chose them.
Before 1960 those who bought children’s books were either the children themselves or adults buying presents for children. Children’s books, as I have said, fall into two main types: story books and factual books – or as they are more usually called, fiction and non-fiction. Let us take non-fiction first. The child, money in hand, looking around him, judges these books rather as he judges cakes, going for the large and colourful, not too concerned about the exact nature of the contents provided there is enough of it. The adult, with Christmas approaching, unsure of the child’s exact age, even more unsure of his current interests, plays for safety with something fairly general. The result is ‘The Jolly Bumper Book About Almost Everything’, printed on thick paper (to give bulk), poorly bound (to keep price down), lots of gaudy pictures (because this is what matters), an indifferent if not actually illegible text (because who’s going to read it anyway?) and finally a jacket to dazzle the eye. Such is the typical factual book.
Fiction is different. If factual books can be judged by their looks, this is certainly not true of story-books, for the words inside are what matters. So can we blame the child for here choosing not the eye-catching but the familiar – something that in some way resembles what he last read? Children are, I believe, naturally conservative, wary of the unknown. Also a story can be so real and a child can identify so closely with the hero that coming to the end of a book is like waking from a wonderful dream, and he longs to return. But even if this were not so, how, without guidance (and who was there to offer guidance in the fifties?) could we expect him to find his way among unknown titles by unknown authors? So naturally he looked for yet another adventure about the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Naughty Nine or whatever particular gang he favoured. And children’s writers, aware of this, kept him happy with Biggies after Biggies, Bunter after Bunter, Jennings after Jennings, with gymkhana after gymkhana and ballet after ballet. If this suited the child it also suited the adult; and what a relief it was to both when the Terrible Ten had yet another wonderful escapade just in time for Christmas. But some adults aimed a little higher. They wanted a good book, perhaps even an improving book, by which they meant – for what else could they possibly mean? – a ‘classic’. They knew that classics were good, for they remembered them from their own childhood, and they may even have enjoyed them. Thus fiction before 1960 could have been summed up (if you were feeling mildly cynical) as Enid Blyton and ponies on the one hand and Coral Island and Water Babies on the other. And what encouragement did this offer to the new author, what hope for a new Alice or Wind in the Willows?
Then came the New Education and with it the New Buyers. They were the Public Librarians and the School Librarians, professionals whose job it was to know what was good and to choose it; and they had a lot of money to spend. So for the first time good books were worth publishing, worth writing. Merit at last was being recognized and rewarded.
I have already mentioned the new ‘Information Books’. They always remained separate from the Jolly Bumper Books, as if not quite liking to rub shoulders with anything quite so vulgar. But they set certain standards which the latter, if they hoped occasionally to be bought by schools, were wise to follow: better binding; text, typography and illustrations planned as a whole; a more enterprising range of subjects.
But it was with fiction that the influence of the new buyers was most welcome. I remember in 1955 when I was doing a little reviewing for Smith’s Trade News being sent a batch of children’s books that included a book called A Swarm in May by a writer then unknown to me. And just as a falling leaf can symboliz
e the approach of winter, so here was a first green shoot that announced the approach of spring. I wrote my review, and I like to think that it put me among the first of the talent-spotters to welcome the arrival of William Mayne.
Others soon followed, unknowns all of them until their sudden emergence, following no tradition, setting entirely new standards in children’s literature; and setting also entirely new problems in children’s bookselling. How easy it had been to sell the latest ‘Lone Piner’. How very much harder it was to sell, for instance, Flambards, The Piemakers, Jack Holborn, Owl Service, A Dog So Small, The Intruder or A Handful of Thieves.
The first thing to do was to make room for them on our shelves, to give them a chance. So we pruned down our classics to half a dozen or so books that were really good not merely old. And then we got rid of all our Blytons and Biggies. Yes, indeed, for fifteen years or thereabouts I have not stocked a single book by Enid Blyton and I have often been asked to explain why. One can argue that her books are immoral, encouraging contempt for the law and hostility towards outsiders. One can argue that her emotions are shallow and her language feeble. And although one must recognize that her books have given great pleasure to a great many children (myself included) one can argue that a diet of nothing but Enid Blyton like a diet of nothing but cream cakes leaves out too much that is beneficial. But I think that my real reason for saying ‘No’ was that I was able to say ‘No’, and having said it was then able to sell more children’s books than ever before. Saying ‘No’ to Blyton and the rest was a little like saying ‘No’ to stationers’ cards. Our shelves looked better without them.
The Path Through the Trees Page 21
