My LBF Horace Bent


Due to overwhelming—okay, moderate—public demand, the erstwhile custodian of the Organ of the Book Trade returns to guide you around the aisles of the London Book Fair...


Bent’s Notes M


ARILYN MONROE ONCE said that in Holly- wood “they pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul”. If so, publishers, agents and authors are certainly puckering up this week. Given the weight of film, TV, new media, cross-media, trans-media, etc, deals filtering through, we might as well rechris- ten the 2017 Olympia-fest—this cit of stars (and temporary stands)—“La-LaBF Land”. Of course, this is nothing new. The Dream


Factory’s siren song has been heard by publish- ing and authorial heavyweights ever since F Scott Fitzgerald moved to Los Angeles to keep himself and Zelda in gin fizzes. But there seems to be an extra frisson in the air, with the trade becoming directly involved: see Jamie “Bling” Byng1


producing a film with Bene-


dict Cumberbatch (how apt that an indie publisher is teaming up with an actor who famously can’t pronounce “penguin”) and Georgina Capel seting up her Miami Pictures film and TV development division. By the way, is there anything more “Miami” than an agency that is headquartered above the Pizza Express on Wardour Street? Apart from the deals being struck around the fair, what really caught this observer’s eye was publish- ers being portrayed in the media. Take “Denial”, the recent film about Holocaust-denying “histo- rian” David Irving’s libel trial with Penguin. The hero in the piece is not author Deborah E Lipstadt (whom Irving sued; she is played on-screen by Rachel Weisz2


) but her fearless, handsome, coura- geous publisher: Anthony Forbes Watson. Management


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I know what you’re thinking: who has the chops


to play Forbes Watson? Dickie Burton or Larry Olivier in their prime, maybe Brando before he piled on the pounds. But alas, those titans are long gone and we are lumbered with today’s carbon copies. The man the producers chose is a chap called Pip Carter2,3


.


Literary tpes may remember him playing W H Auden, vying against Matt “the most annoying Doctor Who of all time” Smith as Christopher Isher- wood in “Christopher and His Kind”. Gossipy tpes (i.e., readers of this column) will know him as the former long-time squeeze of Jessie Burton3


who,


incidentally, is currently making Forbes Watson a not-insignificant wedge with her bestselling novels The Muse and The Miniaturist. London publishing, like Hollywood, is small town. But my favourite recent publishing “guest star” in other media is Jonathan Cape’s Analogue Dan Franklin4


, who has been brought to life in glorious


graphic-novel form in Hannah Berry’s Livestock. (More on which in tomorrow’s Bookseller Daily.) Berry is an “indie” graphic novelist, so there are no superheroes—although editing Howard Jacob- son for ages, only to see him win the Booker with another publisher, surely required superhuman strength of character—so if you wanted to see Franklin in skin-tight lycra, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Perhaps next year’s #PenguinPresents conference? One lives in hope... ×


If there’s something you would like to share with your old pal Horace (in the strictest confidence, naturellement...), email horace.bent@thebookseller.com or tweet @horacebent


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