Finished copies of all these beauts, pretty little things, CBeebies – I need a series title for them: suggestions welcome – are now in: Agota Kristof, The Illiterate; Charles Boyle, 99 Interruptions; Caroline Clark, Own Sweet Time. They are small (A-format: 178 x 112mm) and slim (the longest is 82 pages).
£8.99 for one of those? Yes, actually. Like the temperatures last week, printing costs are hitting record highs. But if you scroll to the bottom of the Books page on the website you can get all three for £24; and if you press the Season Ticket button on the Home page you can choose them for £6.25 each. (The Season Ticket has been tweaked: up by £5 in price but more books for your cash, up from 10 to 12 books of your own choosing.)
They have insides as well as fronts and backs. I wrote about the Kristof’s The Illiterate here. 99 Interruptions is in some ways a sequel to The Other Jack, published last year (but life rarely proceeds in a straight line). Caroline Clark’s Own Sweet Time offers two texts, running parallel on the versos and rectos; for more about ‘one of the most tender and moving books due to be released this year’, listen to this Rippling Pages podcast.
There are many precedents. New Directions offer Bolano, Bulgakov, Gogol, etc, in a slim A-format minimalist-designed series titled Pearls. Melville House offer novellas by Chekhov, Maupassant, Kate Chopin, etc, in a wide A-format. OUP offer more than 700 books in their excellent A-format Very Short Introductions series (one of best publishing projects in recent decades; titles range from Abolitionism to Zionism and include Terry Eagleton on ‘The Meaning of Life’). Among the most desirable A-formats – both for their content and because they are now scarce – are the Cape Editions published in the late 1960s and edited by Nathaniel Tarn; below is a handful from my shelves:
No one is reinventing the wheel here. But these are good wheels. Buy while stocks last. Read within one month of opening. Serve chilled.
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