One of my tasks as SHARP’s Director of Publications and Awards is the administration of the DeLong Book History Book Prize. Awarded annually, the prize goes, as our rubric has it, ‘to the author of the best book on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, or uses of script or print published in the previous year’.
We’ve just announced the latest winner (John B Hench for Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II) and, I hope, we will hear a little more from the author here, as well as from one of our judges. We won’t reveal too much about the judging process (be assured it is thorough and rigorous) but, administering the process alongside the (much harder but also very rewarding) work of the judges, has led me – as a sometime scholar of literary prizes – to reflect on the role of literary prizes from the perspective of book history and publishing studies.
The literary prize is an institution of literary sociology that is fascinating both to book historians and a general (reading) audience. They can reveal much about genre hierarchies and concepts of literary value (the Man Booker Prize is clearly for the best ‘literary’, not crime, scifi or romance novel); about the career paths of individual writers (feted early or late in their careers, like Arundhati Roy or Pat Barker); about the ascendancy of market sectors (Philip Pullman’s success in the Whitbread Awards as a children’s author over those writing for adults); and, more generally, about modes of production and consumption.
Pierre Bourdieu tipped a wink at literary prizes when he commented in The Field of Cultural Production that ‘lack of success is not in itself a sign and guarantee of election [to the status of those who have “cultural capital”…], while some box-office successes may be recognized, at least in some sectors of the field, as genuine art.’ Where might that leave the literary prize winner, the recognition of whose cultural capital is frequently converted to economic capital by the marketing and promotion interventions made by prizes? Prizes very frequently mean sales, after all.
James F English’s impressive The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (a possible past DeLong Prize winner, although its broader remit of cultural rather than solely book awards might have disqualified it) introduces the concept of ‘journalistic capital (visibility, celebrity, scandal)’ as the mediating – and transforming – force between economic and cultural capital in the late 20th century. This ‘journalistic’ capital, or marketing power, is peculiarly appropriate to the world of the literary prize, as English goes on to explore. Not all prizes are particularly scandalous, though some of the better known ones tend to operate with a certain degree of promotional flair and public relations know-how.
The Booker (since 2002, Man Booker) is past master at this game; its younger British rival the Orange Prize, with its all-female judges and nominees, has already proved itself to be no mean competitor. How Booker built its reputation through this PR proficiency is detailed in part through its archival record, held at Oxford Brookes University. The Booker (and any other literary award) can be studied through multiple sources (for example, via media reception; through demographic and sociological analyses of its judges and prize-winning authors; in its paratextual place on book covers and in marketing materials such as bookshop point of sale; through sales figures of its winners and shortlistees; and through textual analysis of its winners). An archive adds immeasurably to this record.
The catalogue for the Booker Prize archive is now available online, and its materials to scholars in person at Oxford Brookes. Initial investigations with colleagues revealed a richness of materials: initialled lists hinting at the debates between judges from the longlisting to shortlisting process; the attempt to court literary journalists through a series of dinners; intricate awards ceremony seating plans; a flurry of letters trying to secure the presence of the Queen at an early ceremony; pre-email memos and notes of telephone conversations in the wake of the first resignation of judge Malcolm Muggeridge, as The Sun had it, in a ‘porn storm’ (the official press release has it more moderately as a ‘lack of sympathy’).
However, there are relatively few traces in the archive of the evaluative process undertaken by judges; the discussions about literary merit (or lack thereof) that take place, behind closed doors, each year. The initial investigations with colleagues demonstrated some disciplinary difference: colleagues less interested in book history and publishing studies were disappointed that little if anything of these conversations was recorded, while those of us with a more literary sociological turn of mind found the details of the menus fascinating. The latter, of course, is both part of the froth of the gossipy, networked publishing world, but also, combined with information about eligibility, criteria, and processes, it is the meat of book historical study and the material conditions surrounding the text.
The concern sometimes voiced by those who don’t see themselves as book historians (and indeed by those who do) is how scholarly attention on this froth, or even the more obviously serious accounts of literary sociology, drive our focus further and further away from the ‘text’ itself, when the outsides become emphasised to a degree that, arguably, occludes the insides. When do we (get back to) talk(ing) about the book?
I am reminded of this as I take up another book award role. Since moving to the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication I’ve become immersed in Scottish literary and publishing culture. This summer, that process goes one step further, as I take on the intimidating task of reading and evaluating over 100 books as one of the Saltire Book Award judges.
This is already a treat – an opportunity to immerse myself in the texts of this year’s books by authors of Scottish descent or living in Scotland, or for a book by anyone which deals with a Scottish topic (as Saltire’s eligibility criteria dictate).
Already, though, I find myself becoming self-conscious about my record keeping. This is my own mini-archive: the brief notes I’m taking on all these books in sorting out the first cut of yeses, nos and possibles, and I can’t help but record my own ethnographic impressions of our judging meetings thus far. Who knows what might happen to these notes in the future, and how my self-consciousness as a scholar of literary prizes inflects both my notes and my behaviour as a judge.
A friend from my graduate studies tells the tale of visiting a US university library from her Oxford base, and finding within a contemporary literature archive a note from herself to her graduate studies supervisor. This is rather different from the auto-archiving tendency I feel myself falling into with regards to the Saltire, but as book historians we are all creating as well as analysing literary sociology. We too create and even become the stuff of archives – our task, then, is to make those archives as rich, as significant and as worthwhile as we can.
