Inside the London Review of Books

i'm very pleased to welcome mary kay wilmers the editor of the london review of books she's been editor since 1992 her career started at faber in the 1960s and she has worked in literary journalism particularly the listener times literary supplement and the lrb since the mid 1970s mary kay was part of her foundation team that started the lrb in 1979 but more on that later because i think it's quite important to the story of the magazine she is the author of the etigons a 20th century story a memoir published in 2009 that involves three members of her family and an early incarnation of the kgb the guardian called it a superbly written book nicholas spice has been the publisher of the london review of books since 1982 he is an occasional contributor to the magazine writing mainly on fiction and music he gave one of the three winter lectures at the british museum this february a series the lrb has run for a number of years his lecture was called is wagner bad for us and he is kindly repeating it at the melbourne arts centre tomorrow at 2 30. jacqueline rose is internationally renowned for her writing on feminism psychoanalysis literature and more recently on the politics and ideology of israel palestine thank you her books include sexuality in the field of vision the haunting of sylvia plath the question of zion the last resistance and a novel albantine conversations with jacqueline rose came out in 2010 the jacqueline rose reader in 2011 and crossed among the nations from dreyfus to the middle east in this year she's currently got a book i haven't caught up with you to find out if it's coming out next year this year next year next year called women in dark times from rosa luxembourg to marilyn monroe jacqueline is a regular writer for the london review of books she is a fellow of the british academy and teaches at queen mary university of london and lastly but certainly not least jeremy harding has been a contributor to the london review of books for 25 years his first pieces were about the unfinished wars of liberation in entreya angolia mozambique and south africa small wars small mercies journeys in africa's disputed nations was published in 1994. he joined the lrb as an editor two years later and we will discuss this later but it's interesting um that jeremy's work has began with a long report in 2000 on the unauthorized migration and refugee routes and we were just saying before that a lot of your work is to do with the borders and that piece has been updated with new material from europe and the u.s mexican frontier for his most recent book border vigils he's also worked in the balkans west africa and the middle east in conjunction with the palestine festival of literature he has run writing workshops in the occupied territories his memoir mother country is a record of his search for his two elusive mothers adoptive and biological in london and the backwaters of the times valley i'm sally heath an executive publisher with melbourne university publishing and a former editor of the literary journal mee engine uh so i wanted to start this discussion because i as i alluded to the origins of the lrb i i do think and i i'm hoping we'll all jump in with this discussion that the origins of a magazine do leave an imprint the russian journal novomir was established in 1925 but in 1960s became crucial to the writers it was publishing most famously uh soldier nitskin then in paris we had the english language literary journal merlin which published the early language the early works of um beckett and janae miyanjin small as it is you know started in the wars because clem christensen believed there should be poetry published during the war the lrb was founded during a year-long lockout at the times and for the and you as part of it believed there should continue to be a literary supplement and so for the first six months it appeared and i love this expression they say marsupially in the new york review of books and then in may 1980 it became a fully independent literary paper so mary kay i'll start with you but i hope you'll all um you were deputy editor then and how do you think that history that sort of passionate determination to have a book review publication how does it influence the magazine that literally sort of politic heritage i would i would say that that we're very influenced by having been started by the new york review that the new york review is in my head a constant model and that that i don't think i mean i think we publish longer pieces that essays in the tradition of blackwood's or the edinburgh review whether we were strictly necessary to the world i'm not so sure but um it seems that we we have filled the gap because quite a few people read it um but our main inspiration really is to produce a good paper and our inspiration i don't mean that i mean motivation um and sometimes to put forward put forward arguments and make cases for thing for cases that we feel need to be made but it's it's not a great crusading thing there are quite a few weekly magazines in england and the times literally supplement in a way does more than we do because it reviews many more books and notices many academic books that we don't but i think there's always room for a good paper and that's what we try to produce as writers are you aware of that heritage or again as mary kay is suggesting it's it's just to produce the best article for this issue i'd say i was very aware of this heritage i mean there's a kind of romance to it the idea of it all starting with a lockout the idea of it being part of the the politics of that epoch and the idea that certain things should be spoken regardless of a political situation which was you know at the center of the destruction of the trade union movement and so on so i think certainly for someone like me who's the outsider of this insider panel by the way because i'm not on the board or the the publisher or the editor or anything i just write for the paper i think that gives it a kind of radical pedigree which you will have noticed that mary kay's virtue is modesty and understatement already you will have noticed that so she's we're going to have to make the case right for this paper's radicalism and i would say therefore the origins and the sense that there's a commitment to a certain kind of intellectual and political life is crucial for me as a writer in writing for the paper yes i think also the really important thing about the origins of the london review of books is that it was obviously and is designed as a book review that can seem relatively contingent but in the last 30 years there has been a consistent predation of space for the reviewing of books for critical discourse about contemporary books and the the fact that the times retreat supplement was not going to be available for a whole year in 1979 i mean it was less of an issue then probably than it would be now because there are so few places where books get reviewed in the uk i know in australia it's very difficult but in the uk it's also it's it's shrunk and book reviews are not just you know information about new books for consumers it's about the whole critical discourse and the discussion of books is about a discussion of issues and if we don't discuss books publicly in this kind of publication we will stop having the kind of complex discussion of the issues that concern all of us that every society needs so i think the origin in the new york review of books is a very important thing and it isn't just about buying books it's about criticism and critical discourse which remains incredibly important so i think that legacy is extraordinarily important there's a particular tone i think of the lrb um and it's rather nice because long-form essays sit along the cult following personals and i really like that you advertise that the book and cake shop expresses the ethos of the london review of books which you say is independent-minded surprising and energetic so how do you achieve that blend of compelling intelligence if you put it that way well you do it very often well i don't know i mean the tone was described by frank kermode as not exactly not flippant and that seems to suit it quite well um i don't know whether the cake shop has exactly that but it has a bit of that um we try well we don't want to be or i don't want to be heavy-handed about things i uh i don't see that one should put people through a terrible ordeal and reading what even closer you are is that better for everyone yeah did you buy any happy chance not hear any of the things yes i mean i think the thing about the cafe is particularly interesting because i mean the cafe represents as it were the furthest point that we've traveled to we started out with a magazine and for whatever it was 25 years we had the magazine and then we opened a book shop mary kay and we've always felt that mary kay's kind of understanding of the spirit of this enterprise has always been informed by gaiety that is a it might seem odd because the magazine looks so severe but in fact if you kind of get into it it turns out you know to have this not unflippant side and so we open this bookshop because i think we felt it would be a really entertaining thing to do fun to do it though we didn't know anything about book selling but we got some very good book sellers then we decided because the next door unit became free that we'd open at cafe i mean a proper cafe not just a coffee point now managed by a simply stunningly energetic and imaginative australian cafe manager in fact most of the business the london review of books is supported by australian women actually i would say at this point not exactly not clifton so she is not exactly not flippant absolutely right but i mean i remember when when we opened the cafe saying that we were becoming cantilevered further and further above the abyss of our own incompetence because we were getting further and further away from the pivotal point of what we knew but in fact actually that's not really true because you could say that london review of books takes its origin right back in the 18th century and 18th century essay culture and that culture itself emerged out of coffee houses so it's kind of returned to where it started i think with the cafe but as it were the main rock on which do we we clambered to get to the cafe was the bookshop or it is to my mind and the bookshop was a pretty serious undertaking because i mean book book shops are a kind of they are a withering phenomenon now um and to to to put together and and and run an independent bookshop where you could go and find titles that you needed or you could quickly order them it was really something that uh seemed to me serious and also it's a place where people meet and talk there are once a week more than once a week on occasion uh meetings with authors or people with ideas who want to talk about them and people fetch up we put chairs in the in the bookshop and talk for an hour when we say it's independent it's also independent of the editorial of the paper so we don't particularly promote books i mean we discuss them and point out what we think is good or not good about them but as nikki said we're not a consumer journal and there's no connection between our reviews and the selling of books um no in fact i mean emphatically not i mean you cannot find a book on the commercial shelves that has an endorsement london review of books because there are no single sentences that you can lift from a review in the london reviews it says that anything is unequivocally good so you know which is quite right because very few things are so it's actually really the few things we've not been accused of what do you think it's true yes nicholas you started to talk about that before about the place of the the discussion and the lrb clearly does much the essays are broader than they're not always based on books that you're reviewing and i i love that expression literary journalism oh well i mean i think i don't like it at all i think literally well i mean i don't know it depends on what you what it means to you well i was going to ask you what does it mean for the magazine well i think you know the trouble with the word literary in literary journalism literary magazine and so on is that it brings to mind it means literate journalism but to most people it suggests literature so poetry fiction and immediately split suck those subjects away from other subjects which is kind of deplorable and the other thing that it does is it raises the spectra of a kind of relatively unfocused beletrism um so george sainsbury that kind of you know from sainsbury from back in the early 20th century and actually for us literally means medicaid it says literate it means simply writing that is concise and communicative in a sharp witty oblique and entertaining way and really there is no subject or in principle there should be no subject at all that is not susceptible to that treatment so really the word literally far from actually just suggesting a segregation of subjects for us means a cosmos of subjects which are held together by the quality of the writing the tls is called the times literary supplement i mean it's just a word that's wrongly used or has come to mean something else yeah um i i think it's it's just a paper that publishes among other things book reviews or discusses books in a much wider context and the context in which books are published so in that sense its focus if you like is literally um though it's also just as much but you could argue with it's just as much political law if if we did better at it sciency but you know it's harder to find literate scientists how important is it for the magazine to maintain a connection with with current affairs perhaps jacqueline and jeremy you want to it's very important i mean before i joined the paper and and when i began reading it um yeah i'll hold it um i mean when i came to the paper i started reading it in the probably the the early 80s um i felt there was a current affairs deficit and actually at the time one of the things that was going on in small magazines in britain was that reportage was gaining a kind of it was acquiring a literary aura not a great thing in my opinion um but but nonetheless the fact that that was going on seemed to point out this deficit in the paper and little by little as i i as as time went on through the 80s i i felt that that that things were vastly improving and that the paper was was doing more and more interesting reportage would have which which was not these were freestanding pieces which didn't actually have a book under review and um shall i hold it i think one of the differences is that in the the papers the weekly papers in in in britain or in england they're very interested in party in the tory party versus the labour party and the liberal party or the lib dems on the side and actually we're not particularly interested in parties or don't find them particularly interesting so that we do discuss issues independently of what cameron or miliband or clegg has to say about them and i think that so that's also the part that reportage plays also there is the change that england as it becomes less and less important um recedes and there's much more and the global um situation is much more interesting more often discussed and people are much more informed about it want to know more do know more and that that's a big shift yeah yes and i feel it's an occasion to which we've risen every time there's an election um in prospect there's a kind of groaning and misery in the office because we have to find someone who's going to write at least one piece we can't just walk away without covering the election in some form or other um and back in the day as it were in the 90s we it was sort of older dignitaries who used to do the electoral pieces and it's quite an interesting phenomenon that we do not really have younger writers who want to do a political piece about parties and elections because the ground is shifted it's much more it's both it's both more diffuse and it's far more pertinent in to our way of thinking i mean people are focused on issues and there and although we as as a as a group of editors spend a lot of time worrying about the notion of englishness and and what's what's become of england um this is always very broadly contextualized um we're always thinking about how we how we can produce a paper that talks to the world and has the world talk back to us and so um i think in that sense reportage is quite important um some of the some of the some of the most reputable pieces we've done uh the most well known have actually been about britain i mean reportage by andrew o'hagan on on farming and also on on poverty on the streets and sleeping rough other pieces that we've done um uh which are more like a long essay but they have the same quality as reportage and they have the same resonance would be jacqueline's piece on honor killings i mean this is a huge reverberation but but not a precise topicality it's in we know it's in the air and it's what we need are the writers to pick it out and say this is really what's going down and it's what i want to write about and it's not coming up on the news in the next next three weeks it's very interesting for me to hear this account of it because from where i'm sitting i have a slightly different experience which is something i would have been thinking about and been very disturbed about like honor killing or suicide bombing if that's what you want to call it and then you get the phone call from mary kay saying wouldn't you wouldn't you like not would you wouldn't you like to write about suicide bombing and my first reaction is always absolutely not um are you kidding right and then i walk away and then what i call the sort of lrb super ego starts working you know which in relationship to honor killing says something like come on you're a feminist you should be able to think about this you should and then it becomes an opportunity for self-education in something which is so current and so topical that you may have thought you know what you think but you don't know enough and you don't know enough what you think and then are you i realized that's probably what the reader's position is as well so then it feels like a task it feels like a kind of political demand that's been made on you that it's very very important to try and fulfill but i was going to start actually by saying that it's um a pleasure and a privilege to be here which is true and i was going to compare that with writing to the lrb and then i realized this is a privilege to write for the lrb but i wouldn't call it a pleasure well in fact um i think it was michael hoffman who said that you get cancer writing articles from the review books can you elucidate can i elicit what i mean by that on the lack of pleasure but on the lack of pleasure well i was it's really unfortunate marina warner is at a prize giving that clashes with this session otherwise she and i would really run with this one together as we have many times um it's the reason why it's it's it's a pleasure it's always a pleasure to write it's a pleasure to educate yourself and to and to respond to a challenge like that but it's not a pleasure because you always feel that you never know enough that the subject you've been given is impossible certainly in relationship to honor killing and suicide i mean you feel this is an impossible subject but it's also because you just feel this the standards are so high and and there's an expectation of a certain kind of work which you then internalize and which you then hugely exceed in terms of what's being demanded of you but i know this works for a number of writers that you feel to write for the lrb is to to try and be equal to something which is impossible to be equal to so you can treat it like an a level which is a 18 year old exam in england where you you know you work very hard and you try and get ideally somewhere between an a and a c you can treat it like that but then you know you sort of missed the point because it has a capacity to go to go for the jugular i suppose to take so it's not just current affairs it's not just reportage in the way that jeremy's describing it it's also thinking what are the issues that need to be thought and what are the most difficult ones and can we create i mean i just know that's how you think about it consciously can we create a space in this paper where that unthinkable difficulty about where we are can be written about in some way i think it does relate to what nikki said about the sense of uh obligation and and the coffeehouse culture and the political space i mean it feels as if you know you're doing that i suppose that is that possibly what explains there have been some notable sort of flashpoint articles the kate middleton the um jewish lobby the post-911 is it because they are resonating with as you say what readers are struggling with and you come out with something that perhaps makes an uncomfortable truth or not the post 911 was was really i mean whatever some people um were offended by it but in in my eyes it was a not exactly a tribute to the occasion but a marking of the occasion that that something really important had happened and that we had to make you know take note of that and we which we did is something we'd never done before um as you see everything comes back to the paper the paper has an existence of its own and actually the people who work on it are not very different from the people who write for it it it is its own thing and we all genuflect to it as it were so that when something like 911 comes we we think what's the paper going to do is it appropriate for us to do that and i i mean it turned out quite well just despite the mary beard business everybody said they would never speak to her again and there she was lecturing in the states two months later so obviously um it wasn't so bad the israel lobbying israel lobby rather than the jewish lobby i guess is or i know um is something that it really mattered to say that um it's an unspoken thing but there's no reason for it to be unspoken there's no reason in reason for the the lobby not to be talked about and its influence not to be discussed as i see it um israel is an independent country like every other country and should be treated like every other country um it's just that the french lobby or whatever wouldn't it's not if there is one isn't terribly important um well in that sense um as for kate middleton well you know the the daily mail wanted to to take up the piece because kate middleton was going to be doing her first job as it were after she announced her pregnancy and felt a bit sick and the male wanted to mark it by saying how evil hilary mantel was and how evil we were but it was of no consequence except that david cameron for some reason thought he should comment on it why and then ed miliband thought he should comment yeah and then admit about exactly but there's nothing in it so she described her as looking like a doll so what um that it's i mean all these things happen adventitiously we don't i was a little bit aware of the israel lobby creating a stir in the states it didn't create a stir in in britain um can i just respond to this sorry i shouldn't have interrupted but i think you're understating something here which is the israel lobby piece have been rejected in the states right the israel lobby piece had been rejected in the states it was meant it couldn't get published in the states it was the atlantic the right okay and then there's the famous case of the piece by edward saeed when he went back to palestine with his son and i think that was meant to be being published in the atlantic monthly and it is a legendary story that you said to him don't worry when they fail to publish it we will right and that's exactly what happened so i would really want to just go back to this thing about saying the unthinkable which is i think the paper must take more credit for publishing and saying things that it has become almost impossible to say and the kate middleton will be another example she's the icon against austerity she's the icon that's meant to make us feel good in dreadful times and you say publish somebody who's saying she's a doll it's dreadful that is to really break a taboo so i would just want to say more on behalf of the the the exceptional nature of some of these interventions that the paper makes i mean there are occasions in the office when something is going to press where i begin to feel queasy and think just a minute um you know what what what kind of ritual landscape are we about to intrude on here and what's the you know what's what's the feedback going to be what are the consequences but actually this is you i think you have a an unending flair for for identifying what it is that has to be said um even at the um even at the risks of of causing offence because so much of the offence that people take and in britain people are charging around kind of giving and taking offence in equal measure at the moment this is part of the whole media thing um the kind of offensive take that's taken in the end is about the inhibition of intelligence that that sounds condescending i don't mean it to be but i just feel that there are ways in which the paper can speak to areas of intelligence that are that that are publicly useful um even when we're sometimes appearing to ourselves or occasionally to others to be taking it a little further than we than we than we might have you've talked about um the the choice of of um you know perhaps the the things that are being thought about and going there what happens are there topics that you decide not not to engage with or not to write about what what's the process there well i mean i don't i don't have any influence over that so i'm not sure that i'm the right person to ask but i mean i mean clive james said something very long time ago about the london review of books he said um one review of books is the paper to be in because it knows what to keep out and i mean obviously a lot of people interpreted that not unreasonably as a very kind of snotty and elitist thing to say uh because obviously he was in the paper but the thing is that there is a there is a sense there is a real sense in which our position in as it were the publishing market is a privileged one because we don't have to cover subjects we don't have to cover everything and our main raison d'etre is to give people an entertaining and good read that's the main purpose of what we're doing so we're not there as an organ of record we don't have to cover stuff and we're not there to make synoptic and general statements of truth so we have a great luxury to be free to foot and to be able to choose things where we have people who can write in the 80s we had no one who we didn't know of anyone who would write about the soviet union in a way that we liked so we simply didn't cover it um there were just for many years no pieces about what was happening in the soviet union because we couldn't find anyone to write about it and that that's you know that that's an overriding concern if you can't produce a good piece or even a piece that you can rewrite to make it a good piece i don't mean to rewrite the opinions but to rewrite the sentences then don't do it other there are many newspapers let them cover it um and that that on the on the whole is is how we proceed and we're always on on the lookout for for people who know about things we don't know about whose writing would fit with the paper this sort of entity that that isn't any of us and you know i don't i don't mean to make it sound like some thing at the altar of which we worship but there is an element of that and surely also the point is is that the pieces don't originate in a subject they originate in a writer the pieces start with the writers in sort of way but obviously we're trying to cover subjects but if the writers are not there they rapidly sink away i mean i can remember in the early days you know sort of going on about the fact to carl and mary kay about the fact that there was very little coverage of germany in the paper at a particularly interesting point and i remember carl who was not not you know tremendously patient with this kind of thing said you know don't know who's going to write it don't make suggestions about subjects if you don't have a writer lined up to do it because the readers are not going to want to read i mean when you're a reader of a magazine just as when you're listening to a concept of doing anything else what you are conscious of is what is in front of you not what is not there you don't think of all the things that are not there you think about whether the thing that's in front of you is entertaining you stimulating you making you think and so i think that the editing policy paper is is really right in that respect that it is trying to give the reader something to keep them awake something to interest them something to keep them entertained something to make them laugh whatever it is something that needs saying i mean in the current number there's a piece about europe well it's taken us years to get a piece about europe it's true that nobody's much interested in it and that that's an issue in in every way but still we're interested in it but we didn't get anywhere until this piece which then took the writer roughly speaking a year to produce and there's an issue too isn't there with something like europe about how you generate interest in it i mean you can test yourself on it i mean as we do am i interested in europe well kind of i mean is it brussels and the euro and and maastricht and all these incredibly tiresome things how would it become interesting how can we get a writer to make those things interesting i was going to say also about the um about the quality of writing and what nikki and mary kay were saying if you can't find the writer then you you haven't got the subject actually as as things went on in in the in the ex soviet union we did in the end light on a writer we found a guy his name was john lloyd he was he was he was in moscow for the financial times and he was he was putting himself about he knew a lot of knew a lot of stuff and and we'd met him in moscow and said look why don't why don't you have a bash at covering it for the paper and he he did and actually he he did he did pretty commendably for about two years but but john lloyd did not have time to write so what would happen would be he'd be filing all his pieces for the financial times and on wednesday sort of well tuesday two days before we go to press this junk would arrive which i used to edit and it was like like he'd filled a supermarket trolley with a whole load of food and just tipped it through the door and said now you you make supper you know but but we did it and and this is another thing that we we are capable of doing if the interest is there the material is there and now the soviet union has died we have got somebody who rises but that's how it works there's no soviet union but we have a writer typical really um you've mentioned that you published something that was would not be published in america you've talked about um europe um the circulation which is just massive 59 265 last year um and it has a huge you know worldwide reach but it is a very english publication but you have a global readership so how do you balance um i just want to say something about that which is somebody this morning somebody here said i don't really that he didn't all that much read the new york review i always think everybody wants to read the new york review so i was quite pleased and surprised and he said there's too much about america in it and i thought that actually it's quite good for us that nobody's interested in britain because although i'm conscious of the fact that we have difficulty covering what happens in britain and we do have to cover some things it doesn't take up the entire paper because it's of no consequence and that's helpful also i mean the circulation which has now reached 62 and a half thousand yeah um is mo well it's more outside the uk than it's inside i mean 25 000 of that 62 thousands in the uk and the rest is elsewhere of course there's a huge chunk of that overseas readership in north america but we also have about 15 000 subscribers outside north america and the uk so in a way it's a more non-uk publication than it is a uk publication and in any case the subjects we cover are largely not local in any way they're issues that should be of interest to everybody really sally and i were talking before we met about about the subscriptions and and wondering how it was that that did the crisis in in british journalism have a bearing on the sub subscriptions no no absolutely not i mean the i'm afraid to say that well there are two things that bill well we get this could get very boring um the mechanics and arithmetic of circulation building is largely down to direct marketing exercises in combination with a good publication you have to have a publication that people want to go on reading once they start reading it that's the crucial thing so obviously if your so-called renewal rates which your retention rates start to drop you have to pack up and stop doing what you're doing so we watch those rates incredibly carefully if people will continue to read what you produce after they've read it for a year in sufficient numbers which you know are defined by industry norms then if you want to build a circulation you have to throw a lot of investment at junk mail largely speaking in the in the days before the internet and you have to do that over 20 25 years 30 years i mean it's relentless if you don't do that you will not get a large speculation but if you don't have a great publication you won't either so it's a combination of those two things now that the internet has come along it has become a sort of three-dimensional game from the marketing point of view and we have been incredibly gratified to discover because we had actually reached a kind of plateau before we relaunched our website about four years ago five years ago that we are now getting 500 new print subscriptions every month through the website and so that's what's pushed the circulation up so it's a function of distribution channels rather than anything else i also took what we were talking about that um actually sat a festival session like here last year and one of our leading former political commentators said he no longer read newspapers he got his news from the lrb and the new york review of books so i do wonder if the sort of state of contemporary journalism has created a a a a place a hunger for what you're producing in the lrb well i think it's i think it's like book reviews yes it it it dumbs down but on the other hand if you want to know what's happening in the in the world on a day-to-day basis you won't get very far with the new york review and the lrb you still have to look online or listen to the radio you won't get it from television news either but if you want something more thoughtful yes you do have to read a paper of that sort i think um you've also mentioned your online your online readers and i i wondered what the balance is between um the rise of digital publishing and and uh what you do online and what you do in print and you've got quite an active twitter following so it was true i mean it's been a very interesting time and i think that fascinating time probably the most interesting time to be involved in magazine journaling journalism or book journalism has been the last seven or eight years because of this revolution which is the biggest revolution to take place in this information media since well since gutenberg so i mean there's been an incredible amount of of anxiety and activity about how to handle that transition and i think five years ago six years ago there was a lot of gloom there was a great deal of apocalyptic talk about how digital media were going to simply replace print media that the book would die that people would no longer want to read magazines and so on and there also was uh as it were an ancillary or a related anxiety that there would be no revenue stream associated with the digital media so that everything would go down the plugin because nobody would want to read the print but you couldn't make any money out of the digital side of things but in fact this has not really transpired there seems to have been a leveling up and we've seen prevented a period now of kind of hybrid reading where people are reading in terms of the context of what they want to do so they will use their kindle or their phone or whatever when they're in certain situations but they will want to read a book or a magazine uh in others i could tell you one thing which is when the paper goes completely when the paper if it does goes completely online we will be able to work a half week because you would not believe the amount of time we spend on hyphenation and spacing um we could really our hours would be half one week out of two if we didn't worry about that so it it panics us but for the most absurd reasons but i mean do you do you find when you write for the lrb and your piece goes online it's a different experience isn't it i mean you in terms of your contact with the readers i never say this just shows it's a generation thing but when i'm writing for the llb i'm not thinking about the online readers i'm thinking about the piece on the page because one of the things i mean i said it wasn't a pleasure but it's not a simple pleasure it's what i perhaps should have said because one of one of the pleasures of writing for the lrb is the process of editing and the meticulous one-on-one careful attention to every single sentence and hyphen and comma the only thing i can only other time i've had an editing experience like that was when i wrote the novel albertine which sally mentioned and i will have the great again privilege to be edited by jenny uglow at chateau and i remember when i mentioned this to the literary editor of an observer then of the observer robert mccrum he said you have got the last great literary editor in britain you're very very lucky and she was the only other person i've ever come across who can turn a sentence on a comma and it is partly because mary kay has her own particular brand of syntactic regularity and expectation but you can be argued into a corner over a single sentence and it is of course a combination of extremely enraging because all writers are committed to every comma and every hyphen and extremely flattering and loving and and it's it's sort of gives you the sense that you're being read before you've been read that's the point about writing the nrb you're being read before you've been read once you get past that hurdle let me be honest you're very very concerned about the rest of the readers but you sort of feel you've got past that hurdle you've made it you've made it onto the page and then you hope everybody then will be nice of course there's complete nonsense because you've written anything of any interest there's going to be trouble but i don't make a huge distinction possibly because i like as you said hybrid readers i read now online and i read uh in the on the page as it were and i think lots of people are moving between the two so i don't yet make an absolute distinction between those two kinds of readership and i'd be interested to know i'd be interested whether you think you will go completely online completely online i don't i see it on the page but the paper i edit is the one on the page but i do look at it online no but do you think it's going to go you said when we go completely online we'll have a half day week when if and i hope i i hope we don't but that's more nikki's the purpose well i mean i think the the really really interesting thing about the digital medium is that or media is that now the pieces themselves act as their own promotion i mean in the days of exclusive print publication you could spend a lot of effort and indeed money commissioning really really really wonderful and special pieces that would go into the magazine but since you were a subscription-based print magazine everybody had paid for it already so it made no difference to your commercial position and you could enrich it really as much as you wanted to it might make a slight difference to the renewal statistics at the end of the year but digitally you put one exactly in pieces and you make it free access on the website and it immediately goes out it immediately gets shared on facebook it immediately gets amplified through twitter and you get the piece moving out of its own accord into new as it were fields of readership now that never happened before and i think that's a really really significant thing you get instant feedback even more instant feedback the nearest we had to that actually before before the the online um edition was that papers sometimes used to buy our pieces didn't they yes um and and carry them for a second time to acknowledge them and not wish to acknowledge just what we're talking about print and digital i think it would be a good time to stop and think about the design of the print article which is so beautiful um we're just going to show six slides of peter campbell and then i think jeremy you want to talk a bit about his influence and then we'll have time for a few um questions before this i think we should probably all talk about it because um i mean this was not long before my time and and and peter campbell had actually conceived the design of the paper when it first took off um and for the covers he used to go and um rummage through the picture libraries and and find something he liked and that was how the that was how the cover evolved and the the masthead is in a um i think it's in a a font called castle on and we had and the the columns in the uh in the original uh layout were were kind of um a little bit congested and it wasn't it wasn't a terribly attractive read but in 1997 he had a chance to to completely redesign the paper and we'd already begun by then using some of his own his his own designs and illustrations or paintings i should say on the cover we could we could move on to the next one um this is this is a typical one of typical peter's typical modes which was to create as it were a a series of uh of of illusory horizons and between these we could we could put the uh we could put the names of the contributors and try and kind of uh condense an idea of what what the stories were about but a lot of these we could go to the next one now uh a a lot of the business of creating a a cover was really to have a hospitable space for the contributors and their stories um so as you see with that rather wonderful waistcoat you know there's room on either side of the buttons for something to to actually uh go in about what the contents of the paper are and on that occasion i think is that is that your hand i think you did that you you actually wrote the uh you wrote down the title so all the names of the authors mary kay said right here and let's have a look at the next one but i think even the type he used is it is it a quadrat you know it was even to have a text only page yeah it was not overly daunting in 97 he he he got hold of this typeface called quadra which was done by a a young dutch sort of desktop designer and it is it it looks really pretty at a distance i mean you can just see what the the shape of the thing is it's quite different from the um from the earlier format that we had and in fact the guy who that guy who designed quadrat was tremendously keen on the lrb he loved it he thought it was a model that exemplified this new typeface he designed and especially the pages without that's right he wrote a letter to peter saying there's a wonderful wonderful uh edition of the paper there are no ads we spend our lives hunting for ads right please keep it you know send me as many copies of this as you can festive uh elements but the things that peter did well um christmas was a good one for him you know he was so good at kind of throwing around the paint actually he used to use very thick um 300 grams per square meter paper and you could actually wash the water on like a fireman at that point um and um he could do fast rapid senses that pictures that evoke sort of festive occasions or things that have been seen in a hurry let's have a look at another um or he could be extremely meticulous um this is one of the most beautiful ones i think i think we all think it is it's a sort of um a trajectory of of a planet a kind of a movement um peter peter had peter at his best which was often um maybe that's enough okay we've got um time for a few quick questions if you can please keep it to a question rather than a comment um i think we have microphones or just speak loudly and i'll um repeat the question yes sir the woman yes please stand up and i was wondering um jacqueline whether you could just take us briefly through your work on say the honor killing uh just what you would have done and bringing the material back to the editors and what sort of maybe discussions that you had about that particular subject just getting more specific about that i mean that's a very interesting subject and i'd just love to know about a little bit more about the process of writing the honor killing piece yes sorry yes i'm not sure how to answer the question except that i it felt like a mandate and i mean it really was this is your subject honor killing and then i decide i kept on putting it off because it was so distressing to write about and i took it nearly a year reading to before i felt i was even anywhere near beginning to be able to write about it but i was very lucky because there were a few things i read um like maps for lost lovers by nadim azlam and the amazing article by leila abu lugod about honor killing um that's been reprinted over and over and over again i think that's the right essay forgive me if i there were there were two essays that i used and so there were certain sort of like beacons in the night which i found myself hanging onto because i thought they were saying what i would have wanted to say or what i needed in order to understand what i might want to say but then you write the piece and you send it in and as i was saying earlier to my co-panelist you send a piece into the lrb and then you sit by the phone a bit like waiting you know will he call me you know will i ever hear from him again sort of is it is it even vaguely okay and then you get the phone call which is always very you know very positive and then there are the problems right and they can i mean in fact i can't think so clearly of what the problems were with that one but i remember on suicide bombing a long harsh i put it dispute argument about whether i could make the comparison between uh you know martyrdom operations in the middle east and tony blair sending young men to go off and die in iraq and i lost the argument i lost the argument because the analogy was too crude i was furious at the time when i then republished the essay i thought great my chance to put my sentence back i reread it i thought no she was right it can't go back in it doesn't work okay so it's a kind of it's a battle it's a battle over but it's it's not just syntactic it's over every thought and behind every argument you have there is a major issue about war in the west versus acts of martyrdom and suicide in the middle east and how they're all implicated in each other so it's an education another question no questions am i missing um sorry yes stand up and we'll speak loudly we'll hear you yeah oh microphones coming thanks i just wanted to ask possibly the least intellectual question and i'm prepared to be under bid on this um i used to quite enjoy going the long distance of the articles despite how turgid they might be and then as a counterpoint turn to the back and uh read the 50 words or less short stories in the personal columns and i wonder what happened to that personal the personals with the brainchild of a man called david rose who was at that time the advertising director and he was a is a very imaginative brilliant funny man and he managed to create that column over a number of months about i suppose eight or nine years ago and it flourished during his time at the paper but he left a couple of years ago and we had tried to get other people to be able to act as a sort of midwife to that section but it needed as it were i think he worked very very hard with the advertisers on helping them to produce that particular quality and the sort of the sense of poetry peculiar quirky poetry that went through those all of those ads was because it was fed through his as it were editorial help and when he were left it was very difficult to get anybody else to do it um i would just remind you that uh all four panelists will be over at the bookshop um after this event signing we have they're in the bookshop there are copies of everyone's books i would urge you and this beautiful book on peter campbell's artwork is also over in the bookshop so please delve deeper into the work that all everyone has done and please join me in thanking them very much for being here tonight you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 8,241

Rating: 4.4418607 out of 5

Keywords: London Review Of Books (Magazine), London (City/Town/Village), Literature (Media Genre), Publishing (Industry)

Id: a8QAx8nf4Mo

Length: 58min 37sec (3517 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 04 2015