Booker and oblivion

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

article seems to disrespect the Man Booker Prize - and suggests the winning books are out of print. However, there's a link on the bottom of the page to a contest to win all the prize-winning books, the intro to which says that all but one Booker winner are in fact still in print...
got intrigued, read the "background" page at the Man Booker site - it seems the founders were emulating the French Prix Goncourt:
"The Booker Prize was set up in 1968 as the result of an approach from Tom Maschler, the celebrated publisher at Jonathan Cape, to what was then Booker Brothers. Booker at that time had a highly profitable "Authors' Division" which published a galaxy of writers including Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley, Georgette Heyer and Harold Pinter.
Inspired by the French Prix Goncourt, Maschler set up a meeting with Booker hoping to persuade them to plough a small percentage back into a literary prize. As Tom Maschler recalls, "We put our case and we were frank about the fact that the prize would take several years to make a mark. We pointed out that once it did so (as we were convinced it would) Booker might well find their sponsorship something they could be proud of."
The Booker Prize for Fiction resulted from that meeting. It was supported throughout by Sir Michael Caine who was Chief Executive of Booker from 1975, and Chairman until his retirement in 1993.
More than three decades later, Tom Maschler's pledge to Booker that the prize "might well be something they could be proud of" has exceeded all expectations."
---- it doesn't say what the Man company's motivations are for sponsoring the contest. They are a big investment firm (big enough to buy the remnants of Refco) but maybe they have a bibliophile on the board -----


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ya Sam [mailto:takoitov at hotmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 9, 2006 01:09 PM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Booker and oblivion
> 
> "Something to Answer For; Holiday; Saville. I'd lay good odds you can't even 
> remember who wrote these books, never mind what year they won the Booker 
> prize. To save you looking it up, I'll tell you. It was Percy Howard Newby, 
> Stanley Middleton and David Storey. And, for that matter, I wouldn't mind 
> betting that in five years time you will be able to add last year's winner, 
> The Sea, to that list as it was memorable only for its forgetability." ....
> 
> "The Booker prize is a great way of promoting books and getting literature 
> on to the front pages. But as a means of judging literary merit it's pretty 
> much useless. This year's shortlist is a case in point. Black Swan Green and 
> Theft may not be David Mitchell's or Peter Carey's best efforts, but both 
> books are streets ahead of any of the six that were chosen and are 
> guaranteed to have a longer shelf life than all of them." ...
> 
> "Booker juries are notorious both for fudging the result - choosing a 
> compromise winner that no one really wants - and for losing all sense of 
> perspective. How else can one explain otherwise reasonable people selecting 
> so many books that have clearly been turned out by authors who appear to 
> have memorised their creative writing classes by numbers?"
> 
> 
> 
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/manbooker2006/story/0,,1891191,00.html
> 
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