Dept of It's An Ill Wind?
Or rumoured return of the Real Book to bookshop shelves... Maybe.
Waterstone's, Britain's biggest book store, has warned it could be left with piles of unsold celebrity autobiographies and cook books in the new year unless sales pick up sharply in the next two weeks.
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Fox said: "We've seen a big slowdown in the big non-fiction hardbacks, largely your Christmas celebrity autobiography and cooking books ... Although the quality of the titles is good, we're just not seeing the sales levels we were expecting. The big weeks are ahead of us so it's too early to say what will happen over Christmas. "
Last year titles such as My Booky Wook by Russell Brand, Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson and On the Edge by Richard Hammond dominated Christmas sales for all but the most specialist book retailers. At Waterstone's, such non-fiction blockbusters typically account for more than half of sales during the peak festive period.
Though perhaps the schadenfreudery should be moderated, since presumably the people who aren't buying the non-books aren't buying proper books instead, and the turnover on the things that infest bookshops for a brief span and then hit the remainder shops or become landfill, supports the shelves of Penguin Classics, etc?
But, perhaps, they might reorientate their mission to providing a service for people who buy books at other times than Christmas - utopian concept, I suppose.