In a piece titled “Paperback reprints: the anatomy of literary survival,” Nigel Cross analyzes how a relatively few books manage to survive past their first print runs, and his diagnosis runs true to my experience in over forty years of studying neglected books:
While much that is in print is not literature, all literature is in print. This is the assumption behind most teaching and research in English literature….
Literary survival, then, amounts to rather more than the critical selection of the fittest. It is, above all, a publishing process involving advisers and editors, reviewers and readers, promotion and marketing, and — sooner or later — reprinting. If a book misses out at the reprint stage, through bad luck or a bad publisher, it dies….
If the first stage in the decay of a literary reputation is to fall out of print, the second, and usually terminal, stage is to disappear from the standard reference books. Of Orwell’s Tribune list [his article “The Good Bad Book” (November 2, 1945)], Leonard Merrick, J. D. Beresford and W. L. George vanished long ago. Barry Pain has managed a line or two as a cockney writer, but was dropped from Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature. Only May Sinclair has staged a small recovery. Her entry in the Companion reads, “Her novels … were largely forgotten until their revival (by Virago) in the 1980s.”
The fate of Merrick and Beresford demonstrates that a normal prerequisite for an author’s survival in print is not only quality but quantity. It is useless, from posterity’s point of view, to be the author of nineteen passable novels and only one good one. If the good novel seems to be a fluke, it will go the way of the rest. The same holds true for the writer of only one or two good books and no bad ones.
Source: The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, September 27, 1985, p.1067; Issue 4303.
His brother, David, was a friend of the Rolling Stones (and many London mobsters). David is thought by many to be the model for the Stone’s “Jumpin Jack Flash.” See “Jumpin Jack Flash”by Keiran Pim
His brother, David,was involved with the Rolling Stones (and lot of London’s mobsters) and is the subject of a great book,”Jumpin Jack Flash” by Keiron Pim. David is thought by many to be the model for the Stones’ song of the same name.
” The same holds true for the writer of only one or two good books and no bad ones.”
James Joyce?