The Spring List: Three Books and an Argument

Every September we sit around the packing table with a pile of manuscripts and a bottle of something cheap, and we do the thing that publishers pretend is mysterious. We choose.

The spring list for 2027 has three books on it. A fourth almost made it. Here is what happened.

The three

A Short History of Broken Lifts is a book of essays by Idris Blackwood about the machinery that fails in tower blocks and the people who climb the stairs instead. It is funny in the way that only angry people are funny. It argues that a lift is a small democracy, and that its breakdown is a civic event.

Tin Heron is a first collection of poems by Maren Toll. They are short, they are strange and they reward being read standing up. Our youngest editor read the manuscript on a train and missed her stop by three stations.

Night Shift Atlas is a novel by Pell Hargreaves, a thriller in which the map is a character and nobody can be trusted with the directions. It is the long one. It will make us nervous.

The argument

The fourth book was a memoir by a retired ferry captain. The prose was clean, the stories were good and nothing in it surprised us. I loved it. My colleague Dov pointed out that a book you love and a book you can sell are not necessarily the same, and that we already had a quiet book on the list.

Dov and the press's other editor, Hettie, voted against it. I voted for. Two to one. We sent the captain a letter that took me four drafts, and I hope he knows how close it was.

How we actually decide

It would be nice to report a method, a scoring grid, a committee. We have none. We read. We argue. We ask the questions that have stood up over the years:

• Could this book only come from us, or could any press have published it?

• Would one of us stand up in a bookshop and sell it by hand?

• Does it cost more than we can bear to lose?

• Will we still be glad of it in five years?

A book that gets four yes answers goes on the list. A book that gets three goes into the cupboard and sometimes comes out again. A book that gets fewer than three gets an honest letter.

What I regret

The letters. Each year I decline more good books than I accept, and I know that every one of them took someone a year or more to write. I try to say something specific in each reply, so it is at least not a form. Some writers send a note back. A few have become friends.

There is a certain grim comfort in the arithmetic. We cannot publish everyone, so we publish what we can't stop thinking about.

Coming up

The spring list will be announced to booksellers in November, with an advance copy of each title. Meanwhile, the autumn books are on the table already, and the whole catalogue is on this page.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.