For three days this week, the world of books will descend on Kensington’s Olympia exhibition centre for the London book fair, one of the biggest set pieces of the international publishing year. After being cancelled in 2020, forced online in 2021 and losing a hefty proportion of its delegates last year to lingering Covid anxiety, it is hoped to be a return to form.
To those on the outside, the annual gathering might resemble an update of a Lowry painting of besuited figures hurrying towards a football stadium, only with fewer hats and bigger bags. Inside, however, it is more like a cerebral version of London fashion week, with cubicles instead of catwalks, where the business brains of the books world vie to identify, sell and take ownership of next season’s fashions.
One of the biggest changes of the pandemic years is the arrival of BookTok, the literary strand of the online community, TikTok. Though video sharing (on TikTok or YouTube) only accounted for 3% of UK book sales in 2022, according to the market analyst Nielsen, its influence is rising rapidly. Social media is behind some of this year’s book fair buzzwords: romantasy (novels combining romance and fantasy), dark academia (occult mysteries with Oxbridge or Ivy League settings), and its more frivolous younger sibling, light academia.
Novelty is always easy to mock, and a lot of the new forms will undoubtedly end up in the great pulping house of history, but this is by no means always the case. Consider the remarkable history of Peter Usborne, whose death last month has robbed publishing of one of the great innovators of the last half century. He founded his eponymous imprint in 1973, four years before a wheeze by a military publisher to attract librarians to niche books hatched into the London book fair.
Mr Usborne’s aim was to make nonfiction fun for children. His reliance on in-house writers and designers, and person-to-person selling, prompted many a snooty joke about Tupperware literature. But his books appear likely to outlive Earl Tupper’s plastic boxes, becoming a byword for home learning across the world, and one of a tiny handful of children’s brands that are now household names.
Just as some of today’s new genres might seem to stretch the definition of literary, some of Mr Usborne’s output stretched the definition of books, from touchy-feely and lift-the-flap books for the earliest readers, to fold-out demonstrations of machines, and beginners’ books on everything from languages to money. More than 1,200 fans, including The League of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith, joined a successful online campaign to resurrect the 1977 book The World of the Unknown: Ghosts.
Spook-obsessed comedians are not the only people who owe their early inspiration to Mr Usborne’s determination that learning should be fun and available to children at home. Generations of palaeontologists, biologists, doctors and bankers do too – along, no doubt, with many bookish aficionados of today’s vogue for dark and light academia. At a time when enjoyment of reading is showing worrying signs of waning among children, a light should be kept burning for the visionary enthusiasm of Mr Usborne at the London book fair.
