It's a weird fact of a literary editor's life that Monday is actually the middle of the week: books sections tend to be printed at the weekend, and the days when everything was done the day before went the way of the printer's devil. So, Saturday Review goes to press at midday on Wednesday and that afternoon the new week begins.
This messes with your head in several ways - not least because it gives you three days to spot all the gaffes you've made and wait to see if anyone else does, while agonising about when, in the next three days, to alert the readers' editor.
It also means that you're editing with a long pen - if a book is embargoed to the week of publication (as anything remotely newsworthy usually is these days) you have two choices: get someone to do a quick turnaround and congratulate yourself for being first in, even if this means the review is more of a "notice" than a considered opinion, or give them the time they need to make a proper job of it and accept that it's going to be late.
For Saturday's Review, I decided to scramble a review of Benazir Bhutto's posthumously published book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, partly because it was newsworthy and partly because I had a very good critic, Kamila Shamsie, in Pakistan, who I knew was up to speed with the subject.
The final draft of book itself had been delivered to the publisher only five days before Bhutto was assassinated and had been rushed to publication, so its passage from manuscript to review involved an international operation that went like this:
December 22: final m/s delivered
December 27: Bhutto is assassinated. Sue, from publishers Simon & Schuster says: "Normally it takes around a week for the proofs to be approved, any corrections signed off and a pdf produced for the printers. In this case it was 24 hours after the files were downloaded from the American publishers (HarperCollins). Likewise, the printers had to do an extremely quick turnaround of 24 hours to turn the pdf into thousands of finished copies ready for shipping (the export market) and into the warehouse for UK stores." We discuss sending the manuscript by email to Kamila but decide to hold out for the real thing.
On Thursday, February 7, the finished book arrives from the warehouse and Simon & Schuster courier it from London to Karachi. On Friday, a fretful email arrives from Kamila: "no sign of the Bhutto book yet. It'll probably arrive tomorrow, but if you have any way of chasing it up and seeing where in the world it is, that might not be a bad idea." On Saturday, the book arrives. On Monday, Kamila emails the review back to London, with a note: "What a strange experience it was to read it, particularly while in Karachi, where it's impossible to leave home without encountering billboards and banners with her face smiling down in triumph from them."
She adds that she's off to Lahore, out of internet contact, for two days. Because of the time difference (Pakistan is several hours ahead), by the time I realise there's a bit missing, she's on her way, which means holding the page until the very last minute. On Wednesday, the time difference plays to our advantage. At 10am the extra paragraph arrives in time for the section to go to press at 12noon.
The easiest way to accommodate the extra text would be to take out the head-shot of Bhutto that we've used to illustrate the piece, but - after reading Kamila's email about the ubiquity of her image - I decide we have to keep it in. Bhutto's smiling face points up the drama of the review more than the few lines we need to cut.
Though nothing shows up more clearly the tension between journalism and literary culture than The Case of the Embargoed Book, I have to admit that it's not just news values that come into play but vanity and competitiveness and sheer fear of being thought dopey. The standoff reached a peak with the Friday midnight embargoes on Harry Potter, which amounted to seven years' bad luck for those of us with the misfortune of going to press on Wednesday. I have a sad story to tell about Harry involving a dame of letters, a broken arm and a stand-off with the New York Times, but you'll just have to wait for my memoirs (enough to report that the NYT won by holding its nerve). Potter's publishers were clever in the way they manipulated anticipation, but the result was that JK Rowling, the most successful writer of the last century, didn't get very interesting reviews (most were either gimmicks or adrenalised head-rushes). The Potter palaver confirmed my general instinct to value quality over velocity. But in the case of a book like Benazir Bhutto's, history has its own imperatives.
