Bring on the hard times?
Robert McCrum in The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009

After the fear, the grip of this recession on our collective imagination is all to do with its cliffhanger narrative. Is this the end? The beginning of the end? The end of the beginning? Here, we're all on the same page. No one knows. Once again it is Shakespeare who provides the best consolation. "The worst is not," says Kent towards the end (Act IV Scene I) of King Lear, "So long as we can say, 'This is the worst'."

And what about books? Again, no one knows anything, and the signals are mixed. On the one hand, like all businesses, publishers are in hard times. Last week HarperCollins was the first to post redundancies. Random House UK is said to be looking at layoffs close to 20%. Across the Atlantic it's no better. TS Eliot's publisher, Harcourt Brace, is for sale; Doubleday has been swallowed up, and several other well-known imprints are threatened.

At the same time, the market in the UK seems to be holding steady. The Bookseller reports that "book sales are outperforming the wider economy". Volume sales are marginally up on last year, and some seasoned publishers remain optimistic. In difficult times, according to Bloomsbury's blogging chairman, Richard Charkin, "people turn to quality, reliability and good value. Books represent all those things."

Historically, this fits. Penguin was conceived and reared during the Great Depression and the second world war. Books remain a dependable commodity (middle-class readers are not likely to stop buying or reading books); their comforts go well with recessional introspection. Moreover, their shop floor has virtually no industrial muscle (authors do not unionise well), and every incentive to keep working through the night.
So how will writers respond to this crisis? There are few, if any, precedents now, but the one guide to a likely outcome of this recession might be found in the 1980s.

Read McCrum's full story online.