The adman between covers

SPEAKING VOLUMES

One of the unsung joys of publishing is the quantity of bizarre mail one receives as an offshoot of being in the books business. Even so, I hadn't expected to be approached by an enterprising travel operator with a big idea.

"If any of your books features exotic locales, we can place advertisements inside the book for those destinations. Imagine the joy of the reader!" I regretfully declined, on the grounds that I could imagine the reader's reaction all too well and was fairly sure that "joy" wouldn't come into it.

Books are one of the few havens left in this world where you're not bludgeoned to death by someone wanting you to buy their new, improved shaving cream, and I'm old-fashioned enough to want it to stay this way.

I may be behind the times, though. In an attempt to raise funds for libraries, a new scheme in the UK allows advertisers to insert ads into library books, which means that your copy of the trite new bestseller of the month will be rendered doubly annoying when flyers and other junk mail emerge from its pages.

But ads in books, unthinkable though they might be for today's literary purist, were once quite common. My mother's edition of Dr Spock's venerable Bible of child-rearing, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, dates back to 1960s America, and features ads for Q-tips, guaranteed not to harm baby's tender ears.

Mills & Boons routinely carried ads, with Anne French urging readers to experience the life-transforming power of depilated limbs. They told the story of some unfortunate woman, handicapped by hairiness, in comic-panel form. In the early years of the ads, smooth arms helped her get the man; over time, it helped her get the job. Other "feminine" products were routinely peddled alongside the romances. Even Puffin was not immune to the lure of advertising "" some of its early children's books carried ads for children's shoes, for instance.

The only genre where ads seemed an intrinsic part of the book itself was that of comic books, and there they sometimes offered as much of a lure as the adventures of Batman or Archie and the gang.

It's hard for this generation of readers to understand the thrill we got from those ads, but in pre-liberalisation India, ads for junk were something of a window to a Western world where even its flotsam and jetsam, its garbage, was coveted. On my first trip to America, I shocked my hosts "" and my palate "" by eating Hostess Twinkies cupcakes. They tasted of tenderised foam rubber and synthetic cream, but they had accompanied Archie and Veronica's high school romances in my imagination, as had the ads for sea monkeys, X-ray glasses, mood rings and other unmitigated rubbish.

As a reader, I'm grateful that the practice of carrying advertisements in books died out "" in part for reasons of good taste, in part because advertisers found more lucrative hunting grounds. Imagine Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children complete with an ad for "No-Cold" tablets, guarantee to cure even Saleem Sinai's permanent sniff. Or Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide with tasteful flyers offering a luxury cruise to the Sunderbans. Or the horror of robust Delhi restaurant chains offering butter chicken within the pages of Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, despite the writer's confession that he himself is vegetarian.

There was a time when this was not so unimaginable, though. Early editions of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield include a motley and beguiling collection of ads, inserted with no regard to the reader's sensibilities. Would Walker's Manly Exercises have cheered David up in his sojourns, or would Morton's Vegetable Universal Medicine have made a better man of Steerforth? Would it have improved the reading experience of the average Victorian if he were to read Dickens with the aid of Freeman's Spermazine Wax Lights rather than any other illumination?

As a publisher, I am surprised that the noble aim of preserving a book's essential integrity has survived this far in what must be one of the most commercially driven eras in book publishing.

I'd predict that as paper costs go up, we could come to a compromise: business books, cookbooks, and the health and self-help genres might be acceptable canvases for ads. Both advertisers and readers could make the case for sparing literary works from the defiling touch of the adman "" who really wants their reading of Lolita interrupted by a tasteful pitch for adult dentures, or their perusal of Beowulf disturbed by ads for lite beer? On the whole, though, that travel operator wasn't deluded so much as ever so slightly ahead of the curve.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The author is Chief Editor, Westland and EastWest Books; the views expressed here are strictly personal