to him.
When times were good, he looked forward to board meetings, and the praise of his fellow directors as the latest sales figures were announced and the quarterly forecast kept being revised upwards, but now he would much rather be any place but here, looking down at the orange shine of the boardroom table and wondering how he is going to conjure up something magical from the pitiful list of books he has in the bag.
He thinks wistfully of his years as an editor when his entire existence revolved around books and their creators. He misses the joy of being the first reader of an exquisite piece of fiction, the satisfaction that came with adopting the voice of the author and working within it to make something that was first-rate even better, and then the final thrill of propelling that beautiful work of art into the world. He remembers his enormous delight when he saw a scary-looking Goth kid on the Tube reading the first book he had ever worked on as an editorial assistant. It was impossible to reconcile the two, progress in his career and the purity of doing nothing but the precise manipulation of text that had filled his days and nights as an editor – he gets that. Moreover, he knows too that much of what he is hankering after is nothing but a sepia-tinted fantasy that exists only in his head. Little of his time as an editor had actually been spent editing manuscripts – nobody
edited
books anymore, you merely did some cursory tidying up of a text before hurrying it through the production process – and even less of his time had been spent editing masterpieces. Of the millions of new books published every year, how many were genuine masterpiecesor, opening the filter a little, books that had made a genuine impact on readers? Two? Ten? A couple of dozen? And of those how many had passed through his hands? Seppi, for sure, Ron Carruthers, Muhammad Khan, Emily Baines, Wu Chen, and Sandy Knowles maybe, and that wonderful series that highlighted just one outstanding feature in London’s greatest monuments for the casual visitor (with text and pictures provided by the country’s best-known writers and photographers) that had sold and sold to their delight – but that had been it more or less. Like most other London publishers, and publishers everywhere for that matter, he had spent his years as an editor, and then as publisher, chivvying on his troops to turn books that were second-rate into ones that would muster a B+ with a very lenient examiner marking the sheets, until it had become a self-fulfilling way of doing things. He was now exactly like every other publisher he had spent his formative years in the industry decrying – a cynical purveyor of mediocre texts that he and everyone else in the company hoped would sell enough to enable them to do it all over again the next year, and the year after that.
The eyes turn to him. He makes his presentation and it falls flat, as he and Gabrijela, with whom he had shared it beforehand, had known it would.
“Nothing from the Seppi estate?” the chairman booms. He is a chunky man with a jowly face, and he looks troubled.
Zach glares at him. He recognizes the need to be polite, but Sir William gets under his skin. He is not a book man, he is a wealthy investment banker who got out of the profession before bankers became the pariahs of the businesscommunity; now he makes a nuisance of himself on the various boards he sits on, and spends the rest of the year relaxing on his country estate in Oxfordshire. Zach doubts he reads more than a book a year.
“The estate is in a mess,” he replies. “As his mother, the person he was closest to, died a few months before he did, Seppi left everything to a cousin in Toronto, with a small bequest to his translator. The translator complained about the will, but that went nowhere; the last I heard she was thinking of suing the cousin – unless a settlement is reached, of course.”
“And if a settlement is reached, and title to
When times were good, he looked forward to board meetings, and the praise of his fellow directors as the latest sales figures were announced and the quarterly forecast kept being revised upwards, but now he would much rather be any place but here, looking down at the orange shine of the boardroom table and wondering how he is going to conjure up something magical from the pitiful list of books he has in the bag.
He thinks wistfully of his years as an editor when his entire existence revolved around books and their creators. He misses the joy of being the first reader of an exquisite piece of fiction, the satisfaction that came with adopting the voice of the author and working within it to make something that was first-rate even better, and then the final thrill of propelling that beautiful work of art into the world. He remembers his enormous delight when he saw a scary-looking Goth kid on the Tube reading the first book he had ever worked on as an editorial assistant. It was impossible to reconcile the two, progress in his career and the purity of doing nothing but the precise manipulation of text that had filled his days and nights as an editor – he gets that. Moreover, he knows too that much of what he is hankering after is nothing but a sepia-tinted fantasy that exists only in his head. Little of his time as an editor had actually been spent editing manuscripts – nobody
edited
books anymore, you merely did some cursory tidying up of a text before hurrying it through the production process – and even less of his time had been spent editing masterpieces. Of the millions of new books published every year, how many were genuine masterpiecesor, opening the filter a little, books that had made a genuine impact on readers? Two? Ten? A couple of dozen? And of those how many had passed through his hands? Seppi, for sure, Ron Carruthers, Muhammad Khan, Emily Baines, Wu Chen, and Sandy Knowles maybe, and that wonderful series that highlighted just one outstanding feature in London’s greatest monuments for the casual visitor (with text and pictures provided by the country’s best-known writers and photographers) that had sold and sold to their delight – but that had been it more or less. Like most other London publishers, and publishers everywhere for that matter, he had spent his years as an editor, and then as publisher, chivvying on his troops to turn books that were second-rate into ones that would muster a B+ with a very lenient examiner marking the sheets, until it had become a self-fulfilling way of doing things. He was now exactly like every other publisher he had spent his formative years in the industry decrying – a cynical purveyor of mediocre texts that he and everyone else in the company hoped would sell enough to enable them to do it all over again the next year, and the year after that.
The eyes turn to him. He makes his presentation and it falls flat, as he and Gabrijela, with whom he had shared it beforehand, had known it would.
“Nothing from the Seppi estate?” the chairman booms. He is a chunky man with a jowly face, and he looks troubled.
Zach glares at him. He recognizes the need to be polite, but Sir William gets under his skin. He is not a book man, he is a wealthy investment banker who got out of the profession before bankers became the pariahs of the businesscommunity; now he makes a nuisance of himself on the various boards he sits on, and spends the rest of the year relaxing on his country estate in Oxfordshire. Zach doubts he reads more than a book a year.
“The estate is in a mess,” he replies. “As his mother, the person he was closest to, died a few months before he did, Seppi left everything to a cousin in Toronto, with a small bequest to his translator. The translator complained about the will, but that went nowhere; the last I heard she was thinking of suing the cousin – unless a settlement is reached, of course.”
“And if a settlement is reached, and title to
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