We're being told that the lightning-fast release of Elton John's amended Candle in the Wind constitutes a record in more senses than one, but book publishers are also proving themselves no slouches when it comes to commemorating Princess Diana.
Andrew Morton, as you would expect, is busy updating his multi-million-seller Diana: Her True Story to take in her death and its aftermath, and O'Mara Books will have it available early next month. The same firm is also rush-releasing Diana: Her Life in Pictures, while Weidenfeld & Nicolson have another picture book, featuring photographs by officially-approved Diana-snapper Tim Graham, ready to hit the shops this weekend.
Meanwhile the Daily Mirror's long-time royal watcher James Whitaker is penning The People's Princess, due from Quadrillion next month, while former Daily Telegraph editor William Deedes is writing about the trips he took with her to Angola and Bosnia. This is being published by Macmillan, who are donating the profits to the anti-landmines campaign.
So far, Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay, a close confidant of the Princess (she phoned him just a few hours before her death), hasn't done any deals with anyone, but that's not because of lack of offers, and a book can confidently be expected from him.
Interestingly, a couple of people in the business are adopting the high moral ground. A spokesperson for Blake Publishing has sniffily said that "the idea of getting involved at this early stage is distasteful" - which is pretty good coming from a company that was only too happy to publish the idiotic memoirs of Fergie's soothsayer. And Ed Victor, swashbuckling London literary agent, has solemnly announced: "I think there is going to be a convocation of ghouls around this thing. I have decided not to be part of it."
Noble sentiments indeed, but I wonder what he'd do if the Queen were to offer him a manuscript entitled My Life with That Impossible Girl.
WHEN they're not churning out Diana books, the London publishers will be trying to sort out this year's Booker dilemma. All of them, of course, will want to be in the Guildhall on prize night, but it's just dawned on them that due to a planning cock-up this clashes with the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and all of them will want to be at that, too.
Irish interest will probably focus on the Booker rather than on Frankfurt, given that more than one Irish novel might well be on the shortlist. John Banville's The Untouchable is the likeliest contender, but Niall Williams's Four Letters of Love is being whispered about, too, as are Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes and Timothy O'Grady's novel-with-photographs, I Could Read the Sky, which is being published next week.
Speaking of John Banville and Bernard MacLaverty, I note that they're among the curious omissions from a book about to be published by the Aldwych Press in London. Entitled Modern Irish Writers and subtitled "A Bio-Critical Sourcebook" (whatever that means), it's edited by Alexander G. Gonzalez and has detailed entries on seventy-six Irish authors from the 1880s until the present day.
Still, they're in good company - such novelists as Neil Jordan, Patrick McCabe and Roddy Doyle also go unremarked. Among poets, Desmond Egan, Eithne Strong, Rita Ann Higgins and Paula Meehan are included, but not Brendan Kennelly or Frank Ormsby. And while dramatists John B. Keane and Tom Murphy are given their due, Frank McGuinness, Tom Kilroy and Billy Roche are disregarded.
In the space that might have been allotted to all these missing writers are detailed entries on such minor and largelyforgotten figures as Mary Colum, John Eglinton, Darrell Figgis and Susan L. Mitchell. Very strange - or perhaps not, in a book that sees fit to ignore both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Not really Irish, I suppose.
Oscar, I'm glad to say, isn't being ignored elsewhere. Indeed, it will be impossible to get away from him over the next couple of months, what with the Stephen Fry movie due to open in mid-October, Tom Kilroy's play about Constance Wilde premiering at the Abbey a week earlier, and a new edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol being published later this month.
That's not all. A new edition of Wilde's letters, edited by grandson Merlin Holland, is due in mid-October, a statue of Wilde by Danny Osborne will be unveiled in Merrion Square at about the same time, a musical based on The Picture of Dorian Gray opens at London's Arts Theatre in November, and Liam Neeson will play Wilde in David Hare's The Judas Kiss in the same city's Almeida Theatre next February.
Anything else? Oh yes, Brian Lalor's woodcut illustrations for The Ballad of Reading Gaol will be exhibited in Kilmainham later this month, Maggi Hambling's portraits of Wilde can be seen in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery next month, while both the Gate and the Abbey are continuing their current Wilde productions until September 27th.
Oh, and did I mention the fourth Oscar Wilde Autumn School, which begins in Bray on October 22nd with lectures from such notables as Polly Devlin, J.P. Donleavy, Patricia Donlon, Christopher Fitz-Simon and Danis Rose? No, I didn't, nor did I mention the forthcoming lecture by Wilde School director D.C. Rose, which takes place in the Hugh Lane Gallery on November 2nd, nor next Monday's 1997 Oscar Wilde Memorial Lecture in the Shelbourne Hotel by the Abbey's artistic director Patrick Mason. This is entitled Oscar, Constance and Earnest, and if you're lucky there may be a few seats left. Phone the Wilde School at (01) 2865245 to find out.