It’s funny that, of all the things I saw and learned at the London Book Fair, the thing that stuck with me was Peter Collingridge (of Apt Studio) using the Canon Tales event to talk about failure, about all the failures that made up his life and got him where he is now. Jon Gray also talked about failed designs and showed some of his very worst (which mostly were quite good, I thought), and all of these made me feel much better about potential failure to get a job in the publishing industry. The thing was not to be complacent, you see, not to try to fail, or to fail and not make the effort to get back up and try again. Quite the opposite. Peter said we have to listen to Samuel Beckett, and “try again. Fail again. Fail better”. It’s all about trying. And it looks like it might have been a well-timed presentation too. We all need to be ready for failure, here in the land of very few jobs, just in case.
Currently, I am failing to sum up London and the Fair as best I can or should, because there was so much activity and so many clever, successful, enthusiastic people who I am very much in awe of, that I haven’t quite organised my thoughts, but I promise I’ll make a list of the best things to come out of the fair very soon. In the meantime, I’m squeezing my eyes closed tightly as my RSS feeds pop up one after the other, shouting about all the news I’ve missed by being offline for so long. I am also dragging myself away from some very tempting proofs and galleys I picked up at the fair, both from publishers at home in Ireland, and from a huge bunny who made my day with the new Nick Cave novel, no less than four months in advance of the scheduled release date. Thanks, bunny. Still wondering who was in there. I had a daydream that it was Nick Cave, and a marginally more realistic notion that it was Jamie Byng wandering the fair in disguise, but in reality it’s likely to have been one of the marketing team/lowly office monkeys.
The other members of the Publishing Circle at Stirling have, thus far, remained ominously quiet, but they are slogging away, as I should be, at their dissertations, and hopefully, there’ll be a bit of diversity once that burden’s off. Until then, here is a link to Fail Harder, a brilliant slideshow that will make you feel joyous about experimenting and trying and having the glass half full and all that. We don’t mind what it’s half full of. This is publishing, silly. Unfortunately, you’ll have to do without Peter’s voice until the SYP get the individual speakers up, but the images alone will get the gist across.
