The Bookseller.com

3rd December 2008

Martin Latham

Martin Latham is manager of Waterstone's Canterbury.

Festival style

07.06.08

Antonia Fraser, with whom I am secretly in love, has given several talks at my shop and they are informal affairs—unlike a literary festival talk which she was told to begin with the phrase: “I am sponsored by Häagen-Dazs.”

Literary festivals can still be creaky, featuring the same old suspects, orating to an audience of Rotarians, divorcees, solicitors, and what Alan Bennett calls “Saga louts”.

The atmosphere is reverent; one longs for the Pink Panther’s assistant Cato to come flying through the wall during a discussion with Julian Barnes. It was a festival-style audience member who once berated me for not wearing a suit to introduce an Edward Heath talk. I wanted to say: “I do not possess a suit and I have not spent 15 years organising 1,200 bookshop talks to be insulted by a Daily Mail reader.” But I didn’t.

There is so much to admire in the blossoming book festival scene, but I wish its directors could reflect wider reading tastes, attract a broader demographic, stream more happenings on the internet (Edinburgh is excellent at this), and move away from the “talking head” event.

And fewer literary novelists, please. They are rarely good at public speaking. In Canterbury we recently launched Robyn Young’s Crusader novels with a medieval procession which brought Canterbury to a halt: crusader horsemen, falconers, medieval musicians and a crier.

For another event, Richard Mabey’s nightingale talk was followed by an evening walk to hear the real thing. Tibetan lamas have led group meditation. Hay-on-Wye had yoga this year, but will we ever see reflexology or oil-painting demonstrations at festivals? Or sci-fi or transport represented?

Part of the answer lies in sponsorship. Big banks and legal firms want the predictable: ex-presidents and Martin Amis. But bookshop sales show that biography and fiction together account for less than 30% of what customers buy.

Councils are another big sponsor, and I fear that ­festivals will remain risk-averse until they desert the withered dugs of local government funding.

Then a Venetian spirit of commerciality could arise and, like the self-funding Albert Hall which hosts anyone from Shirley Bassey to J S Bach, they could become an adornment to the nation. Meanwhile, pop festivals are muscling in on the genteel lit-fest world; at Latitude last year, I found a packed and lively book tent: no £10-a-seat torpor in there.

So, if at the big Cheltenham marquee this year, you see a crazed figure with a Swiss Army knife sawing at the guy ropes—comb-over, cheap shirt, merlot-stained chinos, signed copy of Marie Antoinette—that’ll be me.

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