A Matter of Dedication

In the first of an occasional series on literary do’s and don’ts, Oliver Pritchett takes up his pen (or ballpoint?) to ponder the pitfalls of book-signing.

Before this book-signing craze gets completely out of hand, we must establish some rules. After all, what may be considered correct in Waterstone’s could be frowned upon in Hatchards and be beyond the pale in Hay-on-Wye. Is it ever acceptable to ask an author to sign another author’s book? Fountain pen or ballpoint? What if the author mis-spells the recipient’s name? These are some of the questions I intend to tackle.

The first topic I must address is Queue Envy. Now that the straightforward and dignified process of the author signing his book for admirers has become entangled with the celebrity industry, the Queue Envy problem is more acute. Proper authors find themselves competing with chefs, gardeners and persons who are famous for appearing on television. Imagine yourself, as the author of a number of admired and fairly successful novels, seated at the table all alone, waiting to sign your latest, and next to you there’s a glamorous TV historian with his spin-off coffee-table book and a long queue snaking out of the bookshop and along the pavement past two Costas and a Starbucks. How do you handle this situation? At all costs you must avoid looking like a victim, because this makes people uneasy. They go and hide among the dictionaries at the far end of the shop to avoid you. So put your feet up on the desk and very obviously read the book of the popular TV historian. Chuckle indulgently from time to time and jot notes in the margin. People often ask me: is it bad form to swap authors in mid-queue? Certainly not, this is perfectly acceptable, provided you don’t give the impression that you are doing this out of pity. By all means, take your celebrity book and get the novelist to sign it. He or she will enjoy the irony. (Also, a copy of Sofa of Despair: My Turbulent Life in Breakfast TV, actually signed by, say, A. S. Byatt could be worth a lot in the second-hand book trade.) Is it permitted to ask someone to use your mobile phone to take a photograph of you and the signing author together? This is certainly not done – although you might get away with it in W. H. Smith. There is also a practical reason for not doing this: when you hand your camera or phone to a passing stranger that passing stranger will probably be an author who has come into the shop to see how his own book is displayed and will therefore be too crestfallen to take a decent photograph. A few words of advice to the signing author: good manners demand that you produce a decent signature for the customer; some scrawl which looks like an overwrought caterpillar may be good enough for the postman but it won’t do for the person who has just forked out £29.99 for your book. (Also, dashing off a signature too fast will shorten your queue and won’t allow you to compete with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, signing at the next table and still laboriously heading towards his hyphen.) Ballpoint or fountain pen? Obviously a ballpoint pen is more convenient for the author who is being slave-driven by his publisher to produce 150 signatures an hour, so we must accept this as a sad fact of life. A fountain pen, however, still has distinct advantages – more gravitas certainly. And an inky smudge can personalize a signature in a special way. Many people would be proud to have a Quinky blot by Martin Amis on the flyleaf of their copy of London Fields. What about the dedication? Imagine now that you are the customer and you have reached the front of the queue, face-to-face with the author and holding your copy of his or her book. Do not on any account say ‘Just write something witty.’ Not only is this very bad form, but it could also trigger a writer’s block lasting several months. Most authorities on literary etiquette agree that nine words of dedication is the absolute maximum you may expect from an author. If you intend to give the book to someone else, it is usually all right to ask the author to write something quite formal like ‘With best wishes on your 40th birthday’. You certainly must not use the occasion to send specific messages, like ‘Our turn to do Christmas this year’ or ‘Sorry I was sick on your azaleas’. What if the author signing your book mis-spells your name? It’s easy to do – say, writing ‘John’, when you are actually Jon, or ‘Katharine’ for Catherine. The point is that you obviously respect the author’s creativity or you wouldn’t be asking for his or her signature. So, out of respect, you must change the way you spell your name. Simple. Getting a friend to sign a copy of his or her book for you is what we experts call ‘a whole new minefield’. Let’s face it, when you ask your friend to put a signature on the book he has written you are saying ‘Look here, I bought a copy of your A Lepidopterist’s Adventures in Baluchistan and here’s the proof.’ You might just as well hand him the bookshop receipt to sign. The author is now obliged to write a particularly personal message inside the book. Something like, ‘The anecdote on p. 146 will particularly appeal to you’, or ‘Remembering our happy times in Theydon Bois.’ Once this deal is done you are stuck with the lepidopterist’s adventures; it has a permanent place in your bookshelves along with your old school friend’s (self-published) volume of early poetry, your neighbour’s life’s work – a guide to the Wiltshire dialect – and a cousin’s round-up of Toll Bridges of the World. Only an absolute bounder would Tipp-Ex out the inscriptions and signatures and put the books in a jumble sale. If you need to have a clear-out to make space on the shelves, your treasured copy of London Fields, personally smudged by the author, will have to go first. Sometimes these signed volumes do show up in charity shops and even (heaven forbid) on eBay. If you are unlucky, the author, loitering in the Oxfam shop, will spot the book he signed for you and will draw this to your attention. His feelings are hurt, of course, and you must do something to ease the pain. Perhaps you could say: ‘I was burgled last month and the only thing they took was my precious copy of A Lepidopterist’s Adventures in Baluchistan. Thank goodness you told me; now I can go straight to Oxfam and buy it back.’ I hope this deals with most of the questions that authors and book-buyers may have about signing rules. I have one final word of warning: it is absolutely not done to ask an author to autograph your Kindle.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Oliver Pritchard 2011