The third age of Grub Street – and a new era for books

Once the talk was all typewriter ribbons and galley proofs – now it's Facebooking your editor and keeping up a Twitter profile. The fundamentals of writing, however, are the same

Robert McCrum

Monday 4 March 2013  guardian.co.uk

The pen is mightier than the keyboard? … Ian McEwan – one of the authors interviewed in Alex Hamilton's Writing Talk. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

This week I've been reading the former Guardian journalist Alex Hamilton's Writing Talk, a fat paperback with an engaging, offbeat subtitle: "Conversations with top writers of the last 50 years."

More of Hamilton in a minute. The first thing I take away from this enthralling collection is that we who ply our trade at the intersection of books and media (acknowledging that books are a vital subset of media) now find ourselves in the third age of Grub Street. Let me explain.

Take the present decade, first. There can be little or no question that we are in the midst of a rare and momentous paradigm shift. The digital revolution of the new millennium (including the internet) will go down as one of the turning points in the history of the book, indeed of information technology as a whole. As this blog has noted before, not since Caxton and Gutenberg has the printed word experienced so much change in so short a timespan.

The effect on the society formerly known as Grub Street has also been momentous. In this third age a whole way of life has been, and is being, swept away. Grub Street 3.0 is unrecognisable to anyone who can remember a time when paperbacks were Penguins and when public libraries a home from home.

Dip into any page of Alex Hamilton and you are back in the original Grub Street (GBS 1.0). That – and it's not so distant – was a world of ink and paper, whisky and cigarettes, jiffy bags and coffee, borrowed time, marginal living and threadbare subsistence dominated by day-to-day worries about typewriter ribbons, carbons and galley proofs. Need I go on? Anyway, it's extinct.

But its demise did not come out of the blue. There were premonitory tremors. Before the revolutions of 2000-2013, there was an interim, the second age of Grub Street (GBS 2.0). I've described this before, too, as the Long Boom, a generation that ran roughly from 1979/80 to 2009/10, or (to put it another way) from Thatcher to the credit crunch. The Long Boom was just that: a modest bonanza whose effects touched every back alley in Grub Street. As such, it was an aberration in the history of books in Britain.

For three decades, the writers and journalists of the UK (and America) enjoyed an age of plenty. During the second age, the numbers of new books published each year almost doubled. The sales of new books soared. Publishers' advances went through the roof. A few writers did exceptionally well; a majority were quite prosperous, and even the most marginal made a kind of living. I think it's fair to say that, compared with previous years, no one starved.

McCrum's full piece