Wolfish 
John Sutherland
- Publisher by Tom Maschler Buy this book
- British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s by Eric de Bellaigue Buy this book
- Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane by Jeremy Lewis
Tom Maschler’s memoir, Publisher, appeared in bookshops on 18 March. It might as well not have done. The book was dead on arrival, having been subjected to a barrage of premature review and ridicule. Private Eye’s Bookworm feasted on the still warm corpse. The Guardian’s Editor page ‘digested’ it satirically: ‘I was 27 when Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of Maschler as a leering parasite.
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John Sutherland’s Life of Stephen Spender was published in May 2004. Formerly of University College London, he teaches at Caltech in Pasadena.
Other articles by this contributor:
Who owns John Sutherland? · intellectual property in the digital age
The Fight for Eyeballs · John Sutherland reports on the Drudge Report
A Dangerously Liquid World · Alcoholics Anonymous
The Browse Function · web business
Long live the codex · the future of books
Sad Professor · John Sutherland listens to REM
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