How Much Future Is There?

I guess the state of the future only really starts to concern you when you pass forty. Before that it’s all zoom and delight. My approach has been to find someone at least a decade older than I am and watch how they get on. If they are still having a good time then everything’s fine. I ran into our National Poet Gillian Clark reading, opening things, making welcome speeches and generally elevating the art form on at least four occasions last month. She’s older than I am by the requisite amount and shows not the slightest sign of flagging. Her work continues to hit target perfectly and the world clearly loves her. Plenty of future left.

When you die in Wales they name a competition after you. Just before that they have an event celebrating your life and work. Herbert Williams, whose lifetime achievement writer of the people event was put on more than a decade ago, told me that the next thing was daisies. Pushing them up. Since then, however, Herb has published two books of poems and at least half a dozen novels. And there are more on the way this year. Herb is clearly not ready for slowing down yet.

Those who have actually moved to another plain, including a few who managed to get their celebratory event after they’d gone, live on as names attached to gongs. The Dylan Thomas Prize. The John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. The Harri Webb Award. The RS Thomas Poetry Prize. This latter trophy was actually only awarded once. It was given by the prize founder, Dafydd Wyllt, to the best poet who happened to be in the room at the time.

Some of you will remember Dafydd. He used to stand outside the Post Office in Hills Street playing an accordion. Welsh airs. The prize was an elaborately woven dressing gown cord attached to an engraved brass tag. I can’t recall now who actually won but it wasn’t me.

The Rhys Davies Short Story Competition is actually a contest of a totally different stripe. Set up in memory of the great Rhondda author the award offers a first prize of £1000 for a piece of Welsh fiction written in English of no more than 2500 words. That’s quarter of an hour’s worth read out loud. The entry fee is £6.00 a story and to enter you need to either live in Wales or have been born here. That makes both Prince Charles and Rowan Williams eligible. But would they win?

Judges this year are Trezza Azzopardi, Russell Celyn Jones and Sian Preece. Closing date is July 22. Winning stories will also be broadcast by the BBC. Funded by the Rhys Davies Trust and managed by Literature Wales entry forms are available online at www.literaturewales.org . Good luck.

#200

The Book Future

If Dickens had been alive today then he would have been writing for television. How many times have we heard that? Dickens bringing the Cybermen to the London workhouse. Little Nell the new companion of Dr Who. If Russell T had been alive in the ninetieth century then he would have written vast, wordy novels and they would be issued in serial parts. It’s possible.

Books themselves, of course, change their form. In the nineteen-eighties publishers were convinced that the paperback as we know it was finished. CD-Roms were the future. Or if not those then electric books. Hand-held readers the size of boxes of washing powder were predicted to be in the briefcases of the entire population before the decade was out. Hasn’t happened yet.

Books do, however, have fashions in the way they look. The nineties saw super-glossy covers with lots of reflective silver. Paperbacks were throw-away. Hardbacks were the Rolls Royce you kept on the front room shelf. But not forever. “Set of hardback books, excellent condition, unread. £10.” That was a For Sale card I saw in a local shop window. Does anyone ever respond?

Innovative publishers have tried almost everything to make their products move. Books appear with CDs as inserts (soundtrack of the book, while you read hear what Nick Hornby heard while he wrote). A while back a London small press published titles with coat hangers bound into the spines. “Solve your storage problems overnight. Hang your books in the wardrobe with your shirts.”

To mark themselves out from the pack publishers have bound their books between pieces of wood, samples of carpet and metal sheets. None of these innovations have ever proved effective. Paper stays best. Flexible, manipulable, light-weight, cheap.

But now that bookshops themselves are under threat publishers are casting around for ways to mark their products out. Free gifts. Coupons in the back that win you holidays. Entire editions published only on the web. iTune iBooks read by the author. But most see the future as involving downloading. And once the reading machine problem has been solved then this will all be upon us. Bought your reader yet?

Meanwhile expect to see print on demand machines appearing in your local store. Books will be ordered up from a central database containing everything in the known universe, printed and bound in shop and then sold to you five minutes later. This is not tomorrow, this is today. The implications for small, niche and minority publishers are enormous. Nothing will ever go out of print. Everything will be always totally available. Books will be as vast as they need to be. Editing will end. Editors will become as passé as lamplighters. I’m not inventing this. This is round the corner.

The above first appeared in an earlier form as an Insider column in the saturday Western Mail (#56)