The Bookseller.com

21st November 2008

Neill Denny is editor-in-chief of The Bookseller. He will be blogging on the book business and on how the print magazine is produced each week.

Happy Birthday Bookseller

20.06.08

Right now on the site you can download our special 150th edition of the magazine.

I'm feeling a little tired and hungover this morning, so you'll forgive me for being slightly emotional, but I would say it is the best issue we have done for at least the four years I have been on The Bookseller.

What we didn't want to do was just a trip down memory lane, be purely backward looking, so you'll find the issue split into three sections – past, present future.

Actually, the first 20 or so pages is a truncated version of the normal mag, because stuff is still happening out there in the real world even while we lurch into solipsism.

Then from page 30 we're into the guts of the 150th. There are about 30 editorial pages on the past, 15 or so on the present and another 10ish on the future. It's all colour coded at the top of the pages so you can work out where you are; orange is old, blue is now and grey is the future. Don't ask me why we picked those colours.

Best bits I think: past publishers and books, notable obits; the war; 70-90s in pics (check out Ian McEwan); former editors on their spell in the hotseat; the unmasking of William Boot; the two big-hitter round tables.

For the 100th birthday edition in 1958 they did a couple of paragraphs on every year from 1858 – a lot harder than it looks because you have to read the entire year to find the killer extracts. I tested this approach last November at the British Newspaper Library in Colindale and it nearly killed me! I've no idea how they did it in the 50s but I take my hat off to them.

Basically, from the first year we were publishing a million words annually  - in incredibly tiny type – and by the time the mag went weekly in 1909 each year takes 2 ft on a shelf.  After a week, in which I only got as far as 1865, I discarded this approach.

(As an aside, the team at the library were great and let me handle the actual volumes, not use the dreaded microfiche. All our original copies were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940 and there is a real visceral thrill about handling the first edition ever – perhaps the only one still in existence – so thank you).

So we had a bit of rethink and went thematic, looking at the big themes like key books, censorship, the net book agreement etc, and structuring the content around that. Also, everyone who knew the early stuff is now dead – obviously -  and I thought we should skew the thing a little towards the history people could half remember, essentially post-war onwards.

Producing a mag roughly three times our normal size, while doing the regular weekly, website, and a major research project on consumer reading habits, has nearly finished off the entire team. So don't expect this much again until 2058 at the earliest! Now I must go and lie down in a darkened room.