I read lots of book reviews, but rarely find reference to a topic which is of interest to me - value for money. I shop around for good prices on petrol, a new lawn-mower, a decent second-hand car, but it sometimes seems that book reviewers live on a different planet where the price and the publication values of a book are rarely mentioned (I suppose most reviewers get their books free of charge, so perhaps they think its a bit churlish to look a gift horse . . . etc, etc). Well, as "a common reader", I think the publishing industry needs to realise that the price/quality axis is not ignored by their market, and can be quite a significant factor in purchasing decisions.
I began to think about this post after reading a review of Tom Fort's Downstream: Across England in a Punt in The Oldie magazine in which the reviewer, Michael Leapman, criticises the production values of the book - "the publishers . . . too mean to add a section for pictures on proper paper, they have inserted them on the same pages as the text, all in black and off-white, many smudgy and several indecipherable".
Ahh, W G Sebald, what did you start? Of course, in Sebald's case the photographs were deliberately grainy and misleading. His black and white images strewn amidst the text of his prose books, without captions or credits, have the purpose of arresting time; to quote Sebald himself, "they act like barriers or weirs, which stem the flow, slowing down the speed of reading" (The Emergence of Memory by Lynne Sharon Schwartz). The photographs are an integral feature of Sebald's books and no doubt his publishers were quite bemused at having to print them among his discursive paragraphs (we bloggers can quite happily publish photographs of themselves aged 10 as here!).
Since then, a number of other publishers have cottoned on to the economic benefits of this type of book illustration and it has become quite common to publish photographs in this manner, rather than having a separate section of photographs printed on glossy paper.
Of course, with Sebald, the graininess was the point - his photographs were enigmatic and sometimes deliberately misleading. But where the photographs are genuinely illustrative, perhaps in a biography or history book, I think there really is no excuse for adopting this method of publishing them. For example, Orlando Figes book, The Whisperers, (pub. Allen Lane) contains many illustrations which would be far better printed on quality glossy paper, and with a cover price of £25, the "in-line" images just look like penny-pinching. Similary with Wibke Bruhns, My Father's Country (pub. William Heinemann) you expect properly-presented photographs in a book with a cover price of £20.
An example of how it should be done is Katrin Himmler's, The Himmler Brothers, which contains 24 glossy pages of extremely well-produced photographs, with additional explanatory text. The cover price of this book is £14.99, so congratulations to Macmillan for its publication values. Another excellent example is Gavin Pretor Pinney's The Cloudspotter's Guide which manages to have a large number of in-line images, plus a section of full-colour photographs on glossy paper, all for a cover price of £12.99, so another pat on the back to publishers Sceptre.
I know little about the cost of publishing books, but I do hope that publishers realise the difference between books where in-line photographs may be acceptable, and those others which really demand a higher quality section on glossy paper. When they get it wrong, it just looks like they're being cheap-skates and it does them no good in terms of reputation. Some readers really do notice these things!
