My American publisher Peter Mayer received a Lifetime Achievement award at the London Book Fair and said some pertinent things in his speech. He is a book-man to his fingertips - he knows a thing or two and he made a very good case for putting out of print titles back into print - to every reader who has not previously read a particular book, that book is a new book. The argument used for Print on Demand is that no book is ever out of print with POD. But there are many things wrong with POD, and setting aside the fact that each one is very expensive, that the digital print is unattractive and strains and eyes and the covers are dull, the most important one is that you cannot browse through PODs in a bookshop. If you know you want a title and find it is OP but available as a POD then you may (it`s a big may as yet) be able to order a copy. There may - I don`t know - be POD catalogues but if so, where are they ? How does the book buying public know what is available ? So many of the books I buy I know nothing about until I see them in a bookshop and the same goes for libraries. Browsing leads you to treasures, you become the reader for whom the old book is the new book because you have never read it. The conglomerates will point to the old system as being hopelessly uneconomic - storing 1,000 copies in a warehouse of a book which sells in average 100 a year costs... oh, you know.

 My own publishing company, Long Barn Books,  will continue bring some out of print books back into print if they are good and deserve to find those new readers to whom they will be new books. They sit alongside the new/new books very nicely.

Meanwhile, the recession we are talking ourselves into, the global economic horrors, de blah de blah seem to have had little impact on the LBF, which reportedly was buoyant, visitor numbers up, deals being done, the Prime Minister popping in and the Minister for Culture (yuk) patting our industry on the back. (When that happens, when politicians start cosying up to us, we really should be worried. Books and writers, even some publishers, have always had an anarchic bone or two running through them and they should never allow themselves to get close to politicians. Except in a good way.) People have stopped buying clothes they don`t need and are re-learning that if it works you don`t need a new one. The price of food and oil has made even the things we DO need cost twice as much. But books are apparently recession proof. We buy them long after we have stopped buying everything else. Well good. I`m not sure I subscribe to the theory but I`m not going to argue against it.

I am reading Simon Gray`s The Last Cigarette, his third volume of  memoirs/diaries which began with The Smoking Diary. There are some very funny things and some very daft things and some very moving things and the parts about the present are much more interesting than the parts about his, to the reader though I am sure not to him, rather dull childhood.  For a writer, every new book read should ideally provide something to admire and preferably to envy. I need to become sick with envy and jealous rage that the author of the book I am reading wrote a certain line or paragraph and I did not. Here, from Simon, is today`s cause for a fit of jealous r. It is so very simple and unflashy and packs a punch which gets stronger every time you read it. All the best writing is simple, all the best writing yields a little bit more each time. SG is on holiday in Spetses. It is a warm and beautiful evening and he has just finished a phone call with Harold Pinter who is desperately ill with throat cancer and in London.

'Anyway, there he is, in a place I can`t visualize even though I`ve been to it, and here I am, in a place he certainly can`t visualize as he`s never been to it, with the moon above and the sea below and the cicadas clicking their knees.'

I am absolutely furious with envy.