Publishing in Peace and War

First published in Tribune, 20 October 1944

In Mr Stanley Unwin’s recent pamphlet, Publishing in Peace and War, some interesting facts are given about the quantities of paper allotted by the Government for various purposes.¹ Here are the present figures:

Newspapers . . . . . . . . . . .250,000 tons

H.M. Stationery Office . .100,000 ”

Periodicals (nearly) . . . . . .50,000 ”

Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22,000 ”

A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons allotted to the Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than 25,000 tons, or more than the whole book trade put together.

I haven’t personally witnessed, but I can imagine, the kind of wastage of paper that goes on in the War Office and the various ministries. I know what happens in the B.B.C. Would you credit, for instance, that of every radio programme that goes out on the air, even the inconceivable rubbish of cross-talk comedians, at least six copies are typed—sometimes as many as fifteen copies? For years past all this trash has been filed somewhere or other in enormous archives. At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most hackneyed ‘classic’ is liable to be out of print, many schools are short of text-books, new writers get no chance to start and even established writers have to expect a gap of a year or two years between finishing a book and seeing it published. And incidentally the export trade in English books has been largely swallowed up by America.

This part of Mr Unwin’s pamphlet is a depressing story. He writes with justified anger of the contemptuous attitude towards books shown by one government department after another. But in fact the English as a whole, though somewhat better in this respect than the Americans, have not much reverence for books. It is in the small countries, such as Finland and Holland, that the book consumption per head is largest. Is it not rather humiliating to be told that a few years before the war a remote town like Reykjavik had a better display of British books than any English town of comparable size?

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1. Stanley Unwin was a British publisher who founded the firm Allen & Unwin. Unwin was the original publisher of J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.