This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

One of the funniest Grub Street exposés ever written is a novel by Nigel Williams called My Life Closed Twice (1977). Its hapless and eternally unpublished hero, Martin Steel, makes a point of keeping and numbering his rejection slips.

The 729th of these items is from a Scottish theatre company and runs: “Dear Martin Steel, Sorry about reading your play but we are rather behindhand. I found it quite interesting. Have you any new stuff we might see?” All very encouraging, you might think, and just the thing the apprentice scrivener needs, were it not for the fact that the play in question had been submitted a good four years back.

The dilatoriness that used to be such a feature of the literary world in the days when it relied on the postal service and the telephone has, you suspect, been somewhat allayed by the forward march of technology.

A text can serve as a rap on the knuckles. For some reason the email winging in through cyberspace is less easy to ignore than the unlooked-for brown envelope with its freight of unpublishable poems. The man who, succeeding George Orwell as literary editor of Tribune in 1945, found a desk-drawer full of contributions that his predecessor hadn’t been able to nerve himself to send back, is a comparative rarity eight decades later.

Where dilatoriness has kept up, on the other hand, and in some respects got worse, is in the field of corporate decision-making. You are, let us say, a writer with an exciting non-fiction project whose agent has taken it to messrs Tender & Mainprice, once a standalone firm with genteel premises in Bloomsbury but now merely an imprint of some many-tentacled book-world squid, with a London base housing the half-a-dozen other firms it has bought up in the last 20 years and a head office in Manhattan.

The agent loves it. The editor to whom he submits it is equally enthusiastic. The editor’s assistant, to whom the darling work has also been shown, can’t wait to start work. And yet, and yet …

At which point an extraordinary game of publishers’ pass-the-parcel kicks in. Your sponsor at Tender & Mainprice takes it to the editorial meeting, through which it providentially sails.

Any sign of a contract? No, because the proposal then has to go to the sales meeting, whereupon a dense fog of financial realism rises up to engulf a landscape previously filled with wide-eyed optimists — there are still a few of these left in publishing — who think that because a book has merit, it ought to appear between hard covers.

Someone then remembers that next week is half-term, so the sales meeting is postponed for a fortnight. After that, the sales director decides to go on holiday …

And so it goes on. The sales meeting finally takes place, approves the project but offers an advance so nugatory that your agent despairs.

Protracted negotiations ensue, a fresh offer is eventually cobbled together, with the proviso that “only Simon [the harassed MD] can sign it off”. Simon, of course, is by this juncture also on holiday.

By the time a deal is agreed and a contract signed, a good three months will probably have dragged by. The zeal you brought to the outline that exploded out of your agent’s inbox for, as it may be, Bloomsbury at War or Stephen Spender: The Pursuit, will very likely have diminished into a mild enthusiasm.

If Carmen Callil wanted to publish a book, she would publish it and the accountant could take a hike

Thirty or forty years ago, it was not like this. Or rather, it was sometimes not like this. Readers of this column will know that there never was a golden age in publishing, and that the world of books then was just as venal, short-termist, keen on rubbish and obsessed with the bottom line as the world of books now. All the same, if the mavericks and one-person bands who dominated it in those days had a distinguishing mark, it was a certain amount of room for manoeuvre.

Anthony Blond, for example, of Anthony Blond Ltd, was famous for setting out on his nightly round of parties with a sheaf of contracts which he would distribute to potential authors in the course of the evening, leaving his business partner Desmond Briggs to deal with the fall-out in the cold grey light of day.

It was the same with Chatto & Windus’s Carmen Callil. If she wanted to publish a book, she would publish it, and the accountant could take a hike. Thirty-five years ago the Secret Author was passing the door of the chairman of a recently established firm when the man himself wandered out.

Was the Secret Author working on anything at the moment, he enquired? As a matter of fact he was. Interest was expressed, an outline hastily contrived, an agent alerted, and within a week a contract was agreed. They were great days, and they relied on people being given autonomy, which of all business attributes is the one the modern publishing industry most thoroughly detests.