Culture

Call me superficial, but I would far sooner buy a beautiful book than an ugly one. It’s something to think about when Christmas shopping — a concern that’s only magnified when it comes to buying a book as a present, rather than for oneself. It’s also something to bear in mind in the broader context of the battle of physical books versus eBooks. Sales of eBooks are soaring ever upwards, making even the most old-fashioned of publishers think that they really must be the way forward. Why is it that so many readers don’t mind losing contact with books as physical things in favour of scrollable words on a grey background that only exist inside a pocket-sized computer?

Sir Henry Raeburn’s exquisite nineteenth-century portrait of Sir Walter Scott hangs — magisterial, but unfamiliar — in an ordered sea of Scottish portraits, of Scottish subjects, in the renascent Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As the stock picture question of University Challenge well attests, putting a face to a famous name, especially that of a writer like Scott, is no easy feat. Having succeeded, there’s always something satisfying about staring into the eyes of an illustrious figure formerly visualized in the mind’s eye alone. The Edinburgh gallery provides well for innate curiosity, making familiar the unknown faces behind great novels, philosophical tracts, paintings by those more accustomed to residing on the other side of the canvas.

Veteran SF writer and devout Luddite Ray Bradbury has finally bowed to the inevitable and allowed Farenheit 451 to be reproduced in a digital format. Bradbury's hand was forced by contractual reality: his publishers refused to re-sign him without digital rights. Surely print must now be damned if even Bradbury has to consort with his Devil? To mark the occasion, we have commissioned two posts about the brave new world of the eBook. Here, Paul Torday, author of the award-winning novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, tells of his latest digital foray. Where will this end up?   This December,Breakfast at the Hotel Déjà Vu, a novella I have written, will become available only as an eBook.

Last night, at a secret location in the East End, Andy McNab addressed the London branch of the Royal Green Jackets Association, the body representing former members of the Rifles Regiment. McNab, a decorated Rifleman before he entered SAS folklore on the botched Bravo Two Zero mission, was drumming up support at a private bash for Care for Casualties, the regiment’s appeal to care for the families of its wounded and dead. The building was packed and donations flowed as if these were times of plenty. Care for Casualties has raised more than £1.5 million in the last two years. Such generosity is necessary. Since the regiment was re-formed in 2007, 61 Riflemen have been killed in action, leaving more than 40 wives or long-term girlfriends and 31 dependent children.

Cambridge academics spend a lot of time worrying about how to persuade taxpayers to keep them in ivory towers. Perhaps it’s for that reason that, twice a year, Cambridge Wordfest invites the reading public into the lecture theatre to be reminded how pleasant it is to chat about books. David Baddiel was there this weekend to discuss his latest novel. The Death of Eli Gold is about a heroically macho American novelist who finds that death is no respecter even of sexual reputations. Baddiel spoke about his desire to interrogate the fate of the Great Man in the modern world. Gold was one of these men.

How much would you spend on a joke stocking-filler? £5 £10 £15? Not much more than that, surely, the ways things are at present. This vacuous question was prompted by yesterday’s astonishing news that Penguin has apparently paid Pippa Middleton a £400,000 advance for a book on party giving, working title: How to be the Perfect Party Hostess. The Guardian’s Alison Flood relates how there was a 'fierce bidding war by some of Britain’s largest publishers' over Middleton’s first book, with Random House overwhelmed by Penguin at the eleventh hour. As Flood says, publishers obviously have faith in Middleton’s winning smile, so much faith in fact that they expect her to sell glossy tomes.

In some ways, publishing in early post-independence India was like publishing in pre-sixties Canada: cautiously seeking native voices without much financial success. Take GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr (1948), the first Indian novel to ‘go beyond the Englishness of the English language’ as Salman Rushdie once said. It languished out of print for many years, despite critical acclaim. Anita Desai and VS Naipaul’s classics may sell well today, but when they started out in the sixties, their readership was select and modest. In the seventies and eighties, new writers like Manohar Malgaonkar and Aubrey Menon as well as the popular RK Narayan, came to prominence in journals like the seminal Illustrated Weekly of India.

Several usually eloquent pens spat venom last weekend. The spat between Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra and the London Review of Books has escalated. You might recall that Ferguson and Mishra trading insults over the latter’s review of the former’s book Civilisation; their acrimony has been underscored by references to racism. Mishra has since said that Ferguson is not a racist; but the matter remains unresolved. Ferguson has had another letter of complaint published in the latest issue of the LRB. He opens by saying that Mishra is ‘in full and ignominious retreat’ and ends by writing, ‘I am still waiting for an apology, from both Pankaj Mishra and the editor who published his defamatory article.