BY RAUCOUS HYPE, BOOKS EDITOR

EVER FELT the book you were reading did not live up to the praise that covered it?

Well, a new study, by the New York bookshop, Writer’s Wrong, indicates that the quality of books published has diminished in inverse proportion to the growth in the number of literary festivals around the world over the past thirty years.

“It’s an exact fit,” says F. Scott Mailer, who organised the project. “As literary festivals and the like have spread, the quality of what they are supposed to celebrate his retreated. Soon, if this continues, there won’t be a book published worthy of the name, and there will be literary festivals celebrating literary festivals. They’ll have run out of books to talk about.”

“It used to be that writers were lonely curmudgeons, whom nobody knew, or liked, till they were dead; and then maybe kids would be forced to read them for school, or maybe what they wrote had some substance and they were reinvented by publishers to make some money. Then some academic might write a biography of them in three huge volumes, which no one would read. But that would be it. Now, some writers have a kind of rock star cult status, where their mere presence is all that’s required of them. The books are almost – no, they are – secondary, an afterthought. Indeed, if publishers could get away with not having to put anything in print, they would. Just sell the writer.

“This actually happened with a writer called Menace PJ Rantbuttocks, whose first novel I, Me, supposedly sold in the hundreds of millions. He appeared on bestseller lists, was praised in supplements, had the most fantastic reviews, won the Pulitzer, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. And best of all, he murdered three wives and drank himself to death while chasing the ghost of Herman Melville up Fifth Avenue. His obits were pages long. While alive, he was darling of the literary festival circuit, in all languages. A sort of Martin Amis without the stench of nepotism. No one remembers him now. You see, there was no book. And he was an unemployed soap actor hired by a down-at-heel literary agent. He just talked so well at festivals no one ever bothered about the book. If only someone had written it. They’d probably have been rejected.”