PLR is not an abbreviation for pleasure, of course, but stands for Public Lending Right which is a fee paid annually to writers based on the number of copies of their books held in public library collections. PLR is paid to Australian writers or writers resident in Australia and in 1983–84 the rate per book was 66 cents; this should rise to about 70 cents for 1984–85. The total amount that is distributed to authors and publishers under the PLR scheme is surprisingly large. In 1983–84, $1,453,000 was distributed; in comparison the Literature Board of The Australian Council distributed $1,512,000 to authors and publishers in the form of grants and subsidies.

Allan Johnson, the administrator of PLR, sees PLR as a compensation to the author for the multiple use of his or her works and as a recognition of their creative and intellectual endeavour. The median payment is $200, although last financial year eighty-three writers received PLR payments over $2,000.

The problem with paperback originals is this: PLR is assessed by sampling collections of selected libraries; this sampling is done from the libraries catalogues. If a book isn’t catalogued in the libraries sampled then it isn’t counted for PLR. What my writer friend was suggesting was that many libraries don’t catalogue paperbacks and that a writer whose book is only published in paperback will miss out on PLR payments.

Allan Johnson and librarians admit that PLR may be eroded because many libraries do not catalogue paperbacks for a number of reasons and principally because the cost of cataloguing paperbacks is not justified against their value. All the librarians I spoke to said that is a book only existed in a paperback format and was purchased by a library then it would be catalogued. As Carmen Hannaker head of Victoria’s Moonee Valley Regional Library, said, ‘It’s not much use having a collection if you can’t tell what you have in a collection. For that reason we try to catalogue as much as we can.’ Ross Gibson from Carringbush said that there had been a tendency in some libraries for paperbacks to be regarded as not proper books but that this attitude was now pretty rare.

Many libraries have what they call browsing collections of paperbacks and it is these collections that are often not catalogued or where multiple copies of a title are bought only one or two copies are catalogued. In these browsing collections Beverly Farmer’s Milk (which appeared only in paperback) would suffer as much as the paperback reprint of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip in terms of being under assessed for PLR.

At Moonee Valley, they estimate that ten per cent of their Australian fiction is not catalogued. However, Ross Gibson maintains that the computerisation of libraries will enable all books to be catalogued in some form or other and when his library installs its computer this month they will begin to enter every book onto it. He believes that the problem of underassessment of paperback editions for PLR is therefore only a short term one.

Authors, it seems, have mixed feelings about PLR and over the issue of hardback versus paperback. One writer said that PLR wasn’t even the price of a mediocre lunch. ‘It all goes to Colleen McCullough and Morris West,’ he said bitterly. Others are more positive. Helen Garner, who got about $200 from PLR last year said, ‘It’s a really nice thing to get and I seem to get more each year.’

Allan Johnson, the PLR administrator, is sufficiently concerned about the problem of unassessed paperbacks that he has appointed a firm of library consultants to make an assessment of the problem. ‘Everyone admits that there is under assessment, but nobody knows to what extent. We may find that the percentage of books not assessed is so small that it wouldn’t be cost effective to implement systems to overcome it.’

Caroline Lurie has a large literary agency in Melbourne. She can see no connection between the amount of PLR a writer gets and whether a book was published as a paperback original or as a hardback. The amount of PLR really depended on the number of books an author had published. As any book over 48 pages was eligible for PLR the best way to maximise PLR was to write lots of short books!

William Collins have been fairly quiet as publishers lately, especially in the literary field. In June, however, they have three important titles coming out in two originals and one paperback reprint. They are doing the paperback edition of Laurie Clancy’s fine novel, Perfect Love and then a collection of short stories by Renata Yates called Fine Bones. Her first novel, Social Death, was published by James Fraser last year. The last book is a collection of newspaper pieces and short stories by Ian Moffitt called Deadlines. Moffitt’s Retreat of Radiance was one of the best books of 1983.

John Bryson has just completed a mammoth study of the Azaria Chamberlain case. Bryson has been working on the book for almost three years. People who have read the manuscript say it is magnificent and that it will be compared with the work of Mailer and Capote. Penguin are hoping to publish it around October.

Writers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians met in Melbourne last month to begin planning a campaign to oppose the imposition of a retail or wholesale tax on books. Books and literacy are the keystone of our culture; any tax on them is philosophically and intellectually indefensible. Federal, State, and Local governments are also huge consumers of books through libraries and educational institutions and any imposition of a tax on books would mean that governments are just taxing themselves.

The Melbourne meeting resolved to resist strongly any attempt to impose a tax on books. The trade will be able to draw on its experience from its previous successful campaign against the Fraser government’s attempt to introduce a book sales tax. Australians will be able to get support from British authors, publishers, and booksellers who successfully fought a recent attempt by the Thatcher government to introduce a tax on books.

MR HAS AN AIO BIO.