THE INTERESTING LIFE AND STELLAR CAREER OF LIZ CALDER

On Wednesday of this week Liz Calder, noted British publisher & co-founder of Bloomsbury Publishers, and her husband Louis Baum, (children's author and former long-time editor of The Bookseller), were interviewed by Random House NZ Publishing Director Nicola Legat at a meeting attended by over a hundred authors and publishers. The event was organised by the British Council and held at The Pumphouse on Auckland's North Shore.

It was an interesting and discursive discussion covering Liz Calder's publishing career, the 80's fiction boom and the part played in that by the Booker Prize, the state of the British publishing industry today, the rise of small to medium size publishers such as Canongate, Profile, Granta and others who jostle for space among the international heavyweights, the significant trend of recent times with editors moving within the publishing industry to become literary agents,(more than 20 have made this move), the enormous success of literary festivals around the world, (the first Liz Calder ever attended was the Adelaide Festival in 1988), digitisation, and the phenomenon of Harry Potter.

Apart from the faulty sound system, (really there is no excuse for this), and the absence of air-conditioning in a small theatre on a stifling hot day, the occasion was a great success and once outside in the fresh air beside Lake Pupuke with a glass of Sav Blanc in hand these two trials were soon forgotten nd conversation flowed on the topics covered by the two interesting guests.

Warm thanks to the Britisih Council and their NZ Director Paula Middleton for their organisation of this event. More please!

In the course of his comments Louis Baum quoted from an article that had appeared in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

Here then for your interest is that piece :

TWILIGHT OF THE BOOK
What will life be like if people stop reading?
by Caleb Crain writing in The New Yorker, December 24, 2007

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”

This decline is not news to those who depend on print for a living. In 1970, according to Editor & Publisher International Year Book, there were 62.1 million weekday newspapers in circulation—about 0.3 papers per person. Since 1990, circulation has declined steadily, and in 2006 there were just 52.3 million weekday papers—about 0.17 per person. In January 1994, forty-nine per cent of respondents told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that they had read a newspaper the day before. In 2006, only forty-three per cent said so, including those who read online. Book sales, meanwhile, have stagnated. The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005. In “To Read or Not to Read,” the N.E.A. reports that American households’ spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is “near its twenty-year low,” even as the average price of a new book has increased.

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.

For the rest of the article use this link.

And here is a story on Liz Calder from The Guardian published in July 2005.

And tomorrow morning (Saturday 2 Feb) Liz Calder will be interviewed on Kim Hill's Saturday morning show on Radio New Zealand National. I predict this will be well worth tuning in for.