Authors Electric

James Allingham at his desk He worked out the cost of the printing, the office and the distribution and soon became fascinated. He saw the venture in its clearest and most material light. To him it appeared as a method of selling low-grade bulk paper at forty times its value with the added advantage that the more of it one sold, the higher the profit became. He saw too that it was the ink on the paper that did the selling, so, the only real problem was which words to print with the ink. (Dance of the Years 1943) Margery &Herbert Margery Allingham was looking back, fictionally, to her grandfather’s decision to found a penny paper, The Christian Globe, 150 years ago. James Allingham had been apprenticed as a compositor. When his father died, he seized his opportunity to invest his legacy share in a slim weekly newspaper. Literacy was beginning to boom in the 1870s as the educational initiatives following the 1867 Electoral Reform Act began leavening the number of readers within the...

          Last weekend I arrived bright and early at the Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe, Suffolk expecting to put a few handouts on seats, deliver an optimistic box of books for sale, shove a memory stick into a laptop and waltz away for coffee with a friend before returning to spend a happy hour talking about 'Boats and Books' whilst flicking contentedly through my Power Point presentation.           It wasn't quite that simple. This was the first Book Festival event of the day in the wonderfully named 'His Lordship's Library,' and the sound engineers were hard at work. They were perfectionists; the rest of us were a trifle ad hoc  and possibly de trop . The festival organiser had loaned us her laptop and it needed to be woken from deep slumber before it could be persuaded to link to the projector. There was a wireless mouse which would only squeak in one direction – either I could go forw...

Last night I picked the final piece of paper from my newly emptied attic floor and placed it in Box 16 of 22 (labelled Amalgamated Press serials 1931-1935, print and manuscript, since you ask). I turned the page and this was how the story began. WOMEN WORSHIPPED HIM! MEN ADMIRED AND ENVIED HIM! WHO WAS THIS HANDSOME STRANGER WHO CAPTURED ALL HEARTS? Well, the answer to that question was not Herbert Allingham – the author of The Spell of a Rogue and about 300 other magazine serial stories. The issue of The Oracle  that I was packing away was published in March 1934 when Allingham was approaching the end of his fifty year working life.  Less than two years later Allingham would be dead but neither The Oracle  nor any of the other cheap papers would mention the fact – let alone pay tribute to his lifetime of work. The first instalment of Allingham's first serial story had been published in 1886, the last would be completed posthumously in 1937. Allingham...

  From the Penny Dreadful to the Halfpenny Dreadfuller by Robert J. Kirkpatrick – it's my current reading and what a handsome volume! Published by the British Library, 576 pages, copiously  illustrated   indexed, appendicised, footnoted, bibliographed; rrp £50 and weighs in at a thunderous 1.6kg. It almost certainly costs more (£6.50, second class, £7.95 first) to post a single copy than the hapless author or even the publisher will expect to earn. I mention this fact not only as a thank you to Robert for his generosity in sending me this copy (and because I'm incensed by the current Royal Mail hike in parcel costs) but also as a passing reminder that every development in publishing is inextricably linked to the current state of the distribution network. As a print publisher I howl with anguish every time I do my sums and remind myself that to post a single copy of even my paperback books costs almost as much as I paid to have them printed. As an e-publisher I tr...

Jaywick Martello Tower When you think of a literary festival you think tasteful: You think Edinburgh, Oxford, Cheltenham, Harrogate, Bath and countless smaller events in delightful venues such as Aldeburgh, Southwold, Ilkley, Henley-on-Thames. You don't think Jaywick. It's quite possible that you never think of Jaywick at all – unless you're an architectural historian interested in the plotlands of the early twentieth century (read Arcadia for All by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward) or you're a planner or a project manager concerned with the indices of deprivation. Jaywick is on the flatlands, west of Clacton on Sea in Essex. In 1928 developer Frank Stedman bought several hundred acres of marsh grazing on which he founded the Jaywick Sands Estate. He'd hoped to build permanent houses but Clacton council refused co-operation over the rather important issue of mains drainage so Stedman sold freehold beachplots of 1000 sq feet plus a hut. These were heavily ...