You, certainly, will recognise the calibre of Harvill books. It’s one of the few lists available to us that produces translations, for a start. Some of the books, as with any interesting and diverse list, I can do without (I don’t understand Christopher MacLehose’s penchant for Peter Matthiessen and he seems to get on less well with women writers than the other kind), but this is the publisher who brought us Peter Hoeg, Torgny Lindren, and Georges Perec. Frankly, if you look at a HarperCollins catalogue, beyond Harvill the list of things worth reading has dwindled swiftly over the past few years. The coffee table regales: the brain starves.

Take a look at what Christopher MacLehose means – ‘simply’. No room for the stylish. No room in a huge, all-engulfing, book-publishing, money-making concern. In the past, the justification for publishers to exploit the goodwill and expertise, knowledge and interest of readers has been that they throw all their noisy resources into noisy trash books in order to make the money needed to support quality publishing.

With whatever good intentions publishers start out, the pressure to make it pay, to sell books like hamburgers and to snatch and grab as much of the short-term attention as they can by means of all the crass, dishonest marketing strategies they can copy, means they lose sight of the uniqueness of book publishing. What lack of imagination. What lack of joy in their remarkable product. What lack.

There was, thank goodness, an outcry over the news that HarperCollins wanted to dump their real books. And MacLehose (yes, I know it sounds like a brand of Scottish lingerie) looks like going out on his own. This is crucial. Can a quality independent publisher make it work? Can we afford not to have them make it work?

The simple answer is, no we can’t. We are at the delirious peak of mass production and consumption, and for our century it is the ideal that blots out, drowns out, prints out, any other way of thinking. Dominated by the mass mentality, we count literary worth in the number of copies sold – not even the number of copies read, but simply the number boxed up, bundled out, and eventually trashed. Just like hamburgers.

Books, of course, resist, and readers make their own demands, regularly pulling a book into the limelight almost against the will of publishers. Look at this story about Jill Paton Walsh, shortlisted surprisingly by the Booker judges this year. She was unable to get Knowledge of Angels published, and resorted to doing it herself. According to the British Bookseller, here’s what Paton Walsh said about publishers on hearing of her success with Knowledge of Angels: ‘The idea of supporting and nurturing a writer has disappeared, and this is one of the consequences of conglomeration. They want instant sales and success.’

The critics have a role in all this, strangely enough. Look at Jim Crace. You could bet your bottom dollar that, because he received a huge advance from Viking for a three-book deal, when he produced his first, they’d run in for the kill – almost willing it to fail. It’s an insidious result of money-publishing. Play dirty. Be envious.

We all know, you certainly, that this is not just a problem for book publishing. As usual, the book industry is simply scuttling along in the wake of every other global big-bucks rort. But that’s the point. Books are the best. Their market is readers, you, certainly, and with imagination and intelligence, this combination of publisher and reader can surely find a better way.

Now get looking! Ooroo – and many thanks for your time and interest.