To cap an avalanche with an earthquake, Longman Pearson, the deus ex machina owning Penguin, Longman, Viking, Ladybird, Frederick Warne and still honeymooning with Thomson, has also announced the acquisition of Pitman. The publishing merry-go-round jangles on. Charge horses and carry on bookselling.

Q:        If it takes a bookseller two hours to order a month’s new publication from the Penguin representative, how many days will it take in future?
A:       About as long as the representative call time saved eventually, as Thomson trade books and Pitman mesh gears with the Longman Penguin machine.
Q:        What will happen to the Australian Broadcasting Commission books, currently a Pitman strength in bookshops?
A:        No break in ABC transmission. Normal service will be maintained. IN the meaning here is a recording of the best of The National.
Q:        What will Longman Penguin do with all the books?
A:        Occupy by force of folios the entire suburb of Ringwood. They will breed mini-warehouses from their Maroondah Highway monster, buy the railway lines between Sydney and Melbourne, fill the Southern Aurora and the Spirit of Progress, take over the Melbourne trams, Brisbane racing stables, Adelaide Arts Centre, and Perth’s Swan Brewery, fill them with books and mail the keys to those booksellers who phone in first with the correct answer to the first question.

If any publisher can meld this shibboleth into shape, then Longman Penguin can and no doubt will. These international events, which will inexorably shape our choice, our standards and our reading future, are a time warp away from a searing, squally Sunday in March at Sydney’s Circular Quay. In front of the Customs House, the Book Trade (that creature of uneven parts and jaundiced eye) passed a noble if pointless day, trying to instil the excitement of books into a candy floss audience. The wind blew, the grit irritated, the act became a penance. Australian Authors Week was swept with the litter, the detritus of downtown Sydney into the harbour and into history.

It is rumoured that the occasional excellent bookseller window display was to be seen in Sydney to highlight the promotional week. Unfortunately, such delights were rare and in an unfashionable minority. Of course there was publicity, radio interviews and column inches but all too easily brushed aside as the Monday after Authors Week turned cynically and efficiently into non-Authors Week.

Nigel Lawson, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Keating counterpoint, enjoyed watching a costly and vociferous campaign mounting against any proposal to introduce a tax on books, the dreaded V.A.T. He smiled as the froth of debate spittled the body politic and then calmly announced that he had never countenanced the remote possibility of the vague probability of taxing books. Were these the action of a man of a sadistic nature, perhaps a reluctant reader or a rejected author? He stewed the collective book fraternity of the green and pleasant land (leaving aside the cities) in their own juices of anxiety, marinated them in the mire of their misfortune, then pulled the plug to leave them floundering but untaxed. So Mr. Keating and Mr. Hawke, don’t tax books and don’t torment us with the scathing tease of possibility. Eternal vigilance is the price of tax-free books.

A personal greeting to Pitman’s Philip Harris. How enjoyable it was to greet him again in Sydney recently. Restored to health, did the twinkle in his eye indicate dancing Penguins that I was too blind to see? My memories of happy times, when publishing was fun and bookselling a pleasure, before the night of the accountants remaindered the past, include the sight of Philip dancing on one leg, whiling away the small hours at the Regent Hotel in Nandi. One foot Woosterish in dancing shoe, the other coy in gouty bandages. Shall I shame him with recollections of that sybaritic, idyllic seminar, a veritable Brideshead Revisited in the South Pacific? The world of publishing and bookselling taken apart and reassembled during long meaningful and marginally inebriated dissertations on the beach.