LOST HORIZON

I have just this moment finished reading James Hilton's book, "Goodbye Mr Chips". What a genuinely touching story - a novella I suppose we would call it now - and one which stands four-square in the midst of the British tradition of public school writing.

Reading the preface to this 1969 edition, I find there were significant difficulties when Hilton delivered his manuscript or, more likely, typescript. The commission was for a 3,000 word short story for The British Weekly but Chips actually runs to over 17,000 words - too short for a conventional book and far too long for a short story. In the end the magazine's editors apparently decided the material was far too good to ignore but, equally, too difficult to serialize so they chose to publish it as a special Christmas supplement. The same sort of solution was adopted by the novella's US publishers a few months later.

My reason for mentioning this touches a conversation I had the other day with the estimable Emma Davey and followed a remark made by the technology journalist, Jonathan Margolis, in his regular page in the FT's 'How to Spend It' magazine. Margolis was reviewing a new electronic book reader - one of those gizmos which can store many hundreds of books in a structure little different from a large-screened mobile 'phone.

He wrote that while he was not against such devices, he felt that they needed to develop beyond displaying the author's words as if they were no more than an extended email.

Emma and I agreed with this sentiment wholeheartedly. With both of us from a publishing background (mine albeit only a brief one), we remain conscious that typography has a lot to do with conveying information and that, for the moment at least, an electronic reader provides only a few of the valuable sensations that should arise from handling and reading a physical book.

To name one: there is the quality of the paper and, more directly the book's weight. The notion of a 'weighty tome' comes into play here but there's also the reverse. I for example take great pleasure in my smallish collection of paperback Penguin books published during the strictures of the second World War with, therefore, thin paperstock and a small print size to cut down on wastage. Few of these books have survived (at least in my shelves) in anything more than ordinary condition but they each have a story to tell beyond the words printed.

Another very important - and again tactile - aspect of a physical book than cannot even be mimicked by an electronic version is the sense of progress through the pages. How near one is to the end, how we know, for example, just by opening to the next chapter, how soon the denouement of a detective novel will occur - and conversely how much fighting there still is to take place before "War and Peace" reaches its conclusion.

(With this in mind, I must mention a reviewer's jibe at Norman Mailer's massive book about the CIA - "Harlot's Ghost". He said that the most frightening thing about the book were the words on the last page: To be continued ).

All of which brings me back to "Goodbye Mr Chips" and the fact that in a paperback or hardback copy (if such exists), one knows from the beginning that this will be a short, fine tale. One recognizes, with pleasure that Mr Chips' reminiscences will be succinct and will finally drift to a distinct Horizon - one which is not lost in that other world of computer Chips.