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Cadwell NOT Caldwell
My Publishing House
[4 minute read ]
In the city library a few days ago, I fell into a conversation with a seated librarian behind her desk. When I say 'fell' I mean I engineered it by looking at her as I approached. And, when I say 'conversation' I mean she asked questions and I answered.
'Can I help you?' she smiled at me.
'Yes. I am looking for a book on publishing.' I thought that was specific enough but after a minute or two her creased brow was matched by her exasperated, 'It would help if you could be a little more specific!'
'Ah! Yes. I see. There is a big gap in the book publishing world. There is vanity publishing at one end and the huge multi-national publishers at the other end; you know the ones who own every other smaller publishing house.'
'The big four.' she satisfyingly smiled.
'Tesco, Asda....Are we talking about supermarkets now?' I hoped it was amusing, but really I wanted, as usual, to show off a little, and bizarre is my style.
She smiled that same smile that meant she had been dealing with the weak public for a long time. I suppose to her, I had just interjected an 'ad' into a quite dull YouTube video. I pressed the 'Skip' button for her, and moved on.
'I am interested in, perhaps, opening a very tiny publishers of books and such-like, and really have no clue about the industry, so I was wondering if you have a book on publishing that might give me an insight.'
'705' She didn't leave it there though. She wasn't rude. She didn't say it tiredly. 'They are a monopoly.' I didn't let it go. 'They', 'Big Four' and 'monopoly' just didn't square with me because I knew I know the actual word for a group of controlling influencers in a market.
'Not a monopoly, is it? There's an actual word for it, but it escapes me right now.' I blurted.
She looked at me tiredly, but with some compassion. I could see her think, 'So what? Is it that important to you to correct me? And trying to be comedic in the first instance too?'
She told me where to go. You wish! No, she directed me towards the right place. The nearest shelf to where we were sitting, though still twenty to thirty metres away (60 - 90 feet). I walked the whole of the rest of the library floor, looking, and then worked my way back towards the desk looking for 705. I got lost twice and ended up in the Cookery section and then the Pregnancy section.
You should remember that I had been drinking the 'orange squash' with its mind-altering sweeteners in them, so it wasn't my confusion I was carrying; it was the confusion of the chemistry and psychiatric world that set my thoughts into turbulence at that time. I got home with books I neither needed, nor had time to read, but only a single book on publishing; a book published in 2000! How relevant is a book that old? It has to have something in it, right? Time will tell, but I have to have an open mind and prepare to freely extrapolate from it to loosely compare ideas to modern practices; modern practice I have yet to read about or discover. I need to remember what could now be obsolete.
It often takes a great deal of effort to get even the tiniest piece of work done, or gain the key statement in a book before we can actually set about making progress. I call the 'key' statement, 'the 1% that I must seek'. It is the crucial piece that holds everything together, the 'king-pin'. So, I shall have to read the entire ?outdated? book on publishing, just in case I learn something that allows me to learn something elsewhere at a later time.
'More wine, sir?'
'No. Thank you, Jeeves. I shall need a clear head for a period.'
'Very good sir.'
'Oh, one more thing, Jeeves. Re-instate the pastry-chef, would you? This might take a while.'
Jeeves cocked an eyebrow but I didn't elaborate. 'Very good sir'. He left but not before he poked the fire a little, which sent exciting crackles into the air. The book is not that good, I thought.
Reality struck, last night, when I spluttered a dead fly out of my mouth along with the last dregs of cold and rancidly-cheap coffee I had swigged from my mug. Hmmm. Things were different when things were different in the past. I could not help but think of my father showing me how to make a 'weasel', 'pop' with a tin of Tate and Lyles Golden Syrup. Of course, all he did was turn the tin upside-down and then after a few seconds turn it right-side-up and open the lid. The empty air space that had temporarily been at the bottom of the tin rose through the syrup and 'popped' across the whole of the contents of the tin. It isn't really 'pop goes the weasel' because that is an old dish much in the same socio-economic category as bread and dripping, I think. It has half a pound of tuppenny rice and half a pound of treacle in it, anyway.
Just like the 'pop' or the 'weasel' my head was feeling treacley and glutinous and everything inside was slipping, but not at all like the beauty of Picasso's 'Persistence of Memory' with the melting clock. Time had passed, but nothing had 'stuck' except what most of us would throw away with the empty Golden Syrup tin; the sticky syrup that stubbornly lines the inside and no spoon will shift. That persistence would get washed away and my mind would again be an empty receptacle, but, you know what? I didn't just sit and stare into mid-space and make stuff up, like I normally do. Fantasy is great if you can afford to be poor in coin, but rich in mind, I always say. Well, if I remember it, I will from now on...to myself, of course, maybe; because that maxim is not really that good, is it? But, it's a start.