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 W


HAT’S THE TRENDY non-fiction publisher wearing these days? Nautique, as I believe the fashionistas call it. You


know, those stripy Breton tops favoured by the hirsute Shoreditch hipster and Ernest Heming- way in his beardy, tubby Key West years. Orion’s Amanda Harris was sporting nautique (although let’s be clear, she wasn’t beardy—think Jean Seberg in “Breathless”1


, not Papa) at yesterday’s official


launch of her Seven Dials imprint, held in Olym- pia’s Apex Room. The list’s logo, you see, is seven horizontal black lines. Geddit?


However, there must have been a three-line (seven-line?) sartorial whip for the entire team. The Orionites had so much Breton on that there was a deep, underlying fear that they were about to break into a sea shant. Or maybe it was just one of those colleague clothing coincidences, like when Bonnier’s Richard Johnson and Mark Smith2


rock


up to the office wearing the same open-necked shirt and gold medallion.


But Seven Dials is a somewhat bold choice for a lifestle imprint name, isn’t it? Sure, the area is near Orion’s pre-Carmelite House HQ (where the bloodstains are probably still on the boardroom carpet from the Anthony Cheetham days), and now it’s all posh and trendy. But historically Seven Dials was famous for being one of London’s most crowded slums. John Keats once said it was a place “where misery clings to misery for a litle warmth, and want and disease lie down side by side, and groan together”. I suppose those feelings would chime with Orion staffers who have had to sit


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through the annual state-of-the-company speech Arnaud Nourry3


delivers at Frankfurt.


The launch was a packed, rather jolly affair. There was Felicity Blunt4


, Cathryn Summerhayes


and Karolina Sutton in a close confab. What’s the collective noun for a group Curtis Brown agents? A “pre-empt”? Or maybe a “poach”? And there was Furniss Lawton’s newest hire, Rachel Mills, whose hot book this fair is Catherine Gray’s The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober—a tome for the “sober-curious”. Given that Mills was merrily quaffing some pale, bubbly liquid in a champers glass (which, to be fair, I could not verify the contents of) she might not be practising her client’s abstemious view.


Affront crawl This reporter can also reveal what is probably the scandal of this year’s LBF. Orion Fiction’s Clare “Making” Hey nabbed one of the books of the fair, Libby Page’s The Lido. Hey said one of the things that atracted her to the début was that it is part-set in Brixton’s Brockwell Park Lido, near to where the editor used to live.


But, hear me readers, Hey never swam in said outdoor pool, citing the (quite frankly lame) excuse that she lived there throughout the winter months. Shocking! That’s all for another year. See you in Bologna. Or, if you’re not lucky enough, in Frankfurt. ×


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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