And that brings us to the arts, and to the unsung art of book reviewing in particular, which, if monetary value is anything to go by, comes out if terms of words per dollar on a level with those $10 readers’ ‘pars’ the women’s mags are so fond of. One result is that book reviewing in this country (and I don’t mean literary criticism) is in a sorry condition.

Despite the telly and the tranny and all that computer technology, books still play an indispensable role in keeping individuals au fait with the world around them, both in terms of information (which in its broadest sense accounts for the lion’s share of the book publishing industry) and in the development of ideas.

When newspapers and books cross paths on the book pages of our daily and weekly press, it is really the meeting of chalk and cheese. No newspaper can overcome the ephemeral nature of reporting world events one day and wrapping the fish and chips the next, and it is still mainly through books that we come in contact with the Great Notions.

A tremendous responsibility then, rests on the shoulders of literary editors and book reviewers. Every year countless thousands of new titles are appearing around the world, and in any one newspaper of the standard of, say, The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald only about 500 of them can be reviewed. A brief notice might be given to a few hundred more, and for the vast majority of the Australian book buying public, who do not buy literary periodicals or listen to the ABC, that’s it.

Even when you subtract text books and pure esoterica, foreign language books and those which are obviously rubbish, there remains the fact that a staggering number of worthy books fail to make it onto the review pages.

First a book must excite the editor enough for it to be suggested to a reviewer. Usually the editor will not have actually read it, and this is where dust-jackets and publishers’ blurbs (which are often less than honest) come into their own. Less often, a reviewer will recommend a book to an editor. But the selection having been made, the reviewer might walk out of the ed.’s office with four or five books to be ‘looked at’. Two or maybe three of these might actually be reviewed and one or two of them might appear.

Recently, I read through the book review pages of eight of the major Australian dailies and two of the weeklies for the month of November, 1985. At the top of the range were The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Courier Mail, and The Canberra Times which gives the largest coverage, with a book review page in the Sunday edition as well as the two or three pages in the Saturday magazine. The National Times was remarkable for the gaping difference between very good work by contributors like Sylvia Lawson and Don Anderson, and some other very ordinary efforts, but in any case the NT reviews only two or three books a week. The Australian certainly has the acreage, with two pages of reviews each week, but the reviews tended to be bland.

All papers ran separate profiles and articles on writers or aspects of literature – the stunning example being a syndicated profile of the two Mills brothers who head the Mills and Boon publishing empire. I came across that particular piece in no less than four different papers. The smaller circulation papers like The Western Australian and The Mercury offer less space to book reviews, which might be predictable but is also just another indication that if you’re at all interested in culture it pays to live in the bigger cities.

At the top end, papers like The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age run a mini-blog of the reviewer, while The Northern Territory News doesn’t even run a by-line. Both The Age and The Canberra Times feature a regular booklovers column. Stuart Sayers, literary editor at The Age produces his ‘Writers and Readers’ column, which might at times seem rather homely, but which has the unique virtue of bringing Victorian readers into contact with people at all levels of the publishing industry, from visiting literary gods from overseas to local folk publishing their own books. Maurice Dunleavy’s ‘Writers’ World’ in The Canberra Times is written in a more lively style. Dunleavy is hot on the facts and figures and I now know, for instance, thanks to Dunleavy, the astonishing fact that James A. Michener’s novel, The Covenant accounted for twenty-five per cent of all fiction sales in the US in the week before Christmas, 1980.

Obviously I can have no real idea of which worthy tomes didn’t get reviewed in the month of November, although I can say that hardly any of those that did were poetry. Children’s literature didn’t do so well either, while a seemingly disproportionate number were thrillers, memoirs and other bits and pieces to do with soldiers and war, some of the more obscure aspects of Australian history, and an amazing number of biographies and autobiographies of famous people – Eric Ambler, Donald Horne, Clive James, John Laws, Gough Whitlam, Rupert Murdoch, Nancy Mitford, Noel Ferrier, Samuel Pepys (the diaries) to mention only some of the best-known of those reviewed in that month. Donald Horne, Clive James, and David Malouf were done proud by most papers, although in Horne’s case the reviewers were almost unanimous in finding the weaknesses as well as the strengths.