IF you ever doubted the impact of the Booker Prize on readers, a new British survey will set you straight: among other findings it shows that library borrowings of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha increased by more than tenfold after its 1993 Booker win.
Using data supplied by Public Lending Right, Book Marketing Ltd aimed to discover how a book's popularity was affected by the winning of a literary prize or by film and television tie-ins. It discovered that library issues of Booker winners showed a more dramatic increase than that of classics which had been filmed, but this was partly because the Booker winners had been borrowed far fewer times before they received the award.
Nonetheless, borrowings of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers doubled when they were serialised on television, while interest in Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm increased by 75 per cent after the BBC adaptation of it was screened. Such tie-ins also tended to push up borrowing rates for other books by the serialised writer - George Eliot was the most requested author here.
Still, the effect of a prize or tie-in may be short-lived. "The stimulus of a literary prize," the Book Marketing report states, "makes many people try any winner. But the longevity of the effect may be rather less with a `difficult' book, as the early readers are less likely to recommend it to their friends and family." Indeed, I had precisely that experience with Keri Hulme's The Bone People, though for "difficult" I'd substitute "unreadable".
OF course, you can ignore the Booker Prize altogether and read instead the six books on Everyman Paperback's Centenary Booker Prize shortlist - books that were first published in 1896 (which, incidentally, was the year of the first Olympic Games, the first Nobel prizes and the discovery of gold in the Klondike).
In the third year of this intriguing alternative to the Booker, Everyman has come up with the following six books: Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands, Henry James's The Other House, Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago, Mark Rutherford's Clara Hopgood, Robert Louis Stevenson's Weir Of Hermiston and H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau.
No women figure in the list, I notice, but there are a couple of intriguing choices: Mark Rutherford was much admired by Lawrence and Orwell, while the James novel is almost unknown. John Cole and Rachel Billington are among the judges for this 1896 prize, the winner of which will be announced on October 19th - ten days before the Booker. I can't help feeling that the 1896 list will make for more rewarding reading.
TWO book launches on Wednesday evening provide striking contrasts in style and atmosphere. The first, in the Gresham, was like a particularly exuberant Sinn Fein Ard Fheis - hardly surprising, really, given that the book being launched was Gerry Adams's autobiography, Before the Dawn (see Fintan O'Toole's review).
The author said that among all the friendly faces he noticed a few begrudgers. This observation surprised me, given that almost everyone present, from Sinn Fein activists to journalists, seemed to be on intimate terms with each other and to be thrilled to have Gerry in their midst. Indeed, I felt I'd strayed into a club of which I was not a member and when the author started making political points (about twenty seconds into his speech), I headed for the door.
Up in the elegant confines of the National Gallery's Atrium an hour later, the atmosphere couldn't have been more different - posh and polite. And while Gerry had talked at his audience, James Knowlson, launching his official biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, talked down to them - from a balcony about twenty feet above everyone's head, actually. Yes, I know the subject was lofty, but I still have the crick in my neck.