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This will be my final column for The Bookseller. Two years on the job have provided me with ample opportunity to say what I have to say, and I feel [...]

The recent proposal that public libraries should cease to offer fiction (The Bookseller, 3rd August) is a bit of a shocker. It seems unlikely to succeed, but it is a [...]

Every year in the late spring/early summer an expectant mother pigeon checks into the left-hand window box on the ledge outside our living room and attempts to raise a family. [...]

Why don't booksellers make more money? This is, after all, the Golden Age of Big Retail, when Philip Green can pay his lady wife a billion-pound dividend, and the likes [...]

As I plough on into the middle 60s, I find myself increasingly prone to a severe neurotic disorder brought on by three-for-two offers in bookshops. I have sought help. Colleagues [...]

One can only admire the courage and initiative of the team at Asda in asking publishers to come up with 2m £ or so in retrospective donations in order to [...]

It's good to see that one of the big groups, Hachette in this instance, has at last come up with a policy on the troublesome question of European rights. The [...]

Experience suggests that the best way to enjoy a literary award banquet is to be 90% certain that your author is not the winner. On this basis, Team Quercus turned [...]

The season of our Lord's nativity is over, and the pilgrims have returned home. This year it was 'The Jester's Tale' that stole the show. But 'The Cook's Tale', not [...]

Am I the only person who occasionally loses the will to live when contemplating the bestseller lists? Is this really what we came into publishing to do? As I stood [...]

Until recently, one of my most treasured possessions was an edition of Homer's Iliad first published in Rome in 1525. The typography of the ancient Greek text is in itself [...]

Here we are, back at our desks for the Michaelmas term. Every year, there is an abrupt change of pace as lazy summer days give way to autumn, and suddenly [...]

Most book people feel a bit queasy about the contents of our national bestseller lists. The blend of celebrity soup and over-familiar brands appears to deliver a depressing verdict on [...]

Bad, naughty Brits. We've been arraigned on charges of land grab for attempting to secure exclusive territorial rights within the member states of the European Union. The most difficult arguments [...]

Stuart Alexander Dalgleish was born in 1921 in Edinburgh. He embarked on a 50-year career in publishing while still a teenager, just before the Second World War, when he joined [...]

Spare a thought, if you will, for poor King Canute. Once ruler of a formidable empire that linked Britain with Scandinavia, he is now remembered only for commanding the incoming [...]

The proposed Wottakar merger was greeted with cries of dismay and its referral to the Competition Commission was seen as a victory for the good guys. But last week the [...]

I am sorry that my recent column ('Does Anything Eat Reality TV?', 17th March) offended Amanda Ross. This was wholly unintended. Far from harbouring a low opinion of Ms Ross, [...]

Two recently published books I've enjoyed, in different ways, are Katie Price's Jordan: A Whole New World and Roger Osborne's Civilization. The first is a slender memoir of marriage and [...]

O tempora! O mores! I slip away for a couple of weeks of winter sun under the Southern Cross, and look what happens. The Gauls overrun Time Warner Book Group, [...]

As I am writing this on the first day of 2006, I'd like to start the year with a cheerful wish list of good things which might come to pass [...]

Back in the Dark Ages, when Amazon was a river and publishers determined the price at which their books were sold, real sales figures were an arcane art practised by [...]

The process which has seen the building of publishing's Premier League is now almost complete. Among the few deals waiting to happen is the raising of the tricolour over the [...]

After their first grilling by the Office of Fair Trading, our team at the Publishers Association feels it has made some telling points on behalf of an independent Ottakar's. I [...]

Nobody (other than a successful predator) wants a takeover of Ottakar's. This is not because the people at HMV are more venal or less committed to books than James Heneage [...]

These are interesting times, with the bookmen of Britain engaged in a re-enactment of the English Civil War. The publishers are Royalists and Cavaliers (though not without some trimmers with [...]

There was a time when risk, in publishing, meant paying a large advance for an important book. No longer. In the marbled atrium of the conglomerate risk is now associated [...]

One hundred years ago, in 1905, the admiralty commissioned a battleship, 'HMS Dreadnought', which opened a new chapter in naval history. The size of her guns, the range of her [...]