And as for publishers, well….

It’s been an interesting year (in the apocryphal-Chinese-curse sense of “interesting,” sometimes) for me, and at Bapton Books. In addition to our longstanding nursing of a biography and a history from two Shy Woodland Creatures, I mean authors, we have also been in negotiations for a novel and a set of ghostly short stories. The former is going to do everything Aristotle ever intended when he spoke of catharsis; the latter would keep M.R. James or Susan Hill awake at night, partly with delicious terror and partly with envy. And someday, God willing, I will actually be able to announce these works.

We believe, of course, that good work takes the time it takes. No complaints there. And let’s face it, commissioning good work, signing an author, cajoling a manuscript, really is a lot like fly-fishing. Not only in matching the hatch and gently dropping the fly upon likely water, but in delicately playing your trout until you can reel him in.

But consider this. It’s 2014. For all the splash occasioned by Cross and Poppy – and rightly: it is a magnificent book, and if you haven’t read it, go now and do so; this post can wait – for all the splash occasioned by Cross and Poppy, I repeat, we are an imprint thus far best known for critical editions of classics, and for history. And it is 2014. Obviously, the Great War is lowering over us. Gerv and I are hard at work on a history to match. At the same time, he and I both in our respective spheres are, through our authors, hip-deep in the post-war; the American Civil War; the joy and drama of human relationships; and the subtly spine-chilling atmosphere of the proper British haunting. Atop this, Gerv is hewing and adzing and planing smooth the structure of the sequel to Cross and Poppy, the next in his Village Tales series; and I am amongst those who is casting a first-draft eye over the great themes and small quotidian doings of life in the Woolfonts parishes, that fictional Arcadia … in which “et ego” is never far away.

This is the marvel and the high responsibility of the writer, the reader, and indeed that inky wretch the publisher. To open a book or leaf through a manuscript is to pass through a doorway that is Blake’s door of perception, to the infinite; to step onto the road that, as Bilbo knew, goes ever on, and that can sweep one to far and dangerous places. This is the magic, that – at once – one can be “in Heill and [in] Gladnes”: this the magic of the “maker,” and those who lament the makars as Dunbar could lament them. This is the magic that allows one – being one, undivided – to dwell at once in all times and none, in every place at once. The Maker is a sub-Creator; and in books, through books, for the maker, the reader, as for God, all times are one, and omnipresence is dead easy.

It’s exhilarating. But it can also be a bit schizophrenic. Spare a thought for the writer, the editor, the small publisher (I’m five foot six and a half, and Gerv’s barely five foot five) – let alone those who are all these things at once – who may at any moment be forced to divide hither and thither the swift mind (and Odysseus, lucky stiff, had Athena helping him) between, say, the romantic entanglements of Cambridge undergrads; the post-Sarajevo tunnel-vision at the Ballhausplatz; Evensong in Woolfont Crucis, and which setting to use for the Mag. and Nunc; the bloody shambles, fly-swarmed and noisome, of Jesse Grant’s tannery, and young Sam recoiling from blood; the political ferment of the 1920s in the Trentino; and the cauld grue of a Jamesian haunting.

The doors of perception must be opened carefully: humankind cannot bear very much reality. If we’re all a bit mad, we writers and publishers, bear with us: for we on honeydew have fed, and we’ve drunk more of the milk of Paradise than was good for us, and we’re never quite certain if we’re in this world or the next, in Woolfont Parva, Selwyn College, the Wilderness, the Alto Adige, or the Western Front.