Wolfish

John Sutherland

• Publisher by Tom Maschler
  Picador, 294 pp, £20.00, March 2005, ISBN 0 330 48420 6
• British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s by Eric de Bellaigue
  British Library, 238 pp, £19.95, January 2004, ISBN 0 7123 4836 0
• Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane by Jeremy Lewis
  Viking, 484 pp, £25.00, May 2005, ISBN 0 670 91485 1

Tom Maschler’s memoir, Publisher, appeared in bookshops on 18 March. It might as well not have done. The book was dead on arrival, having been subjected to a barrage of premature review and ridicule. Private Eye’s Bookworm feasted on the still warm corpse. The Guardian’s Editor page ‘digested’ it satirically: ‘I was 27 when Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of Maschler as a leering parasite.