Last week your correspondent contributed a post to the Bookseller’s excellent FutureBook blog, a rolling commentary on digital developments in publishing and one that I consider utterly essential to publishers and authors (and so, by extension, to readers…?) – for all that it occasionally induces alarm/panic over the pace of change we’re witnessing in the business of books. But then the challenge, as always, is not merely to get up on the surfboard but thereafter to stay on the wave… I concede that I am quite possibly the least contentious/controversial poster FutureBook has yet had, attributable perhaps to the Janus face of Faber Finds which looks, yes, forward to the future of production technology but necessarily back into the past of literary endeavour. Still, and as I say in the piece, we’re running to catch up on that score.
The following bits of my post are the ones that would count as News around this parish:
“In the months ahead I hope readers will see an increased thematic coherence to Finds publishing, a sense of different topics and literary flavours being curated. Our August offerings, for instance, include special focuses on the history and aesthetics of the English suburbs, and on the legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851…
Anniversary publishing has been a function of Finds from the start… Looking ahead to September, we will be pleased to join the wider celebration of Sybille Bedford’s centenary by returning to print her marvellous Faces of Justice…
I’m also committed to Finds offering a kind of complement to Faber’s front-list publishing, a means for readers to explore more deeply the subject areas of Faber’s lead titles. On that score I’m especially delighted that in September, alongside Nick Rankin’s Ian Fleming’s Commandos, Finds will offer The Hazard Mesh by J. A. C. Hugill, a veteran of Fleming’s WWII intelligence unit whose 1945 account of same was one of Nick’s key sources, and for which he has now written a splendid new introduction.”