Where's Drif?

It's surprising, but the Festival has never had anything remotely to do with the prosaic trade of successfully selling secondhand books. That's been a rare observation down the years in Hay-on-Wye, although it was true when Roy Strong and the mayoral entourage blocked the Bullring traffic on the eve of first Festival, and it's true now. It's become wholly against the interests of Hay to imagine that publishing for national consumption (a highly capitalized process), and secondhand bookselling to an international market for the benefit of a local economy (an extremely poor faux-relation), can exist as two parts of one idea. Very simply, old books and new books are such distant cousins, so many times removed, they can only be mistaken as belonging to the same species.

The mantra of the best of the old booksellers in Chicago, John Chandler, was that new books and old books are as like as apples and oranges, and John was never liberal with the tripe and onions. Although he never visited Hay, John would have clearly seen the Festival for what it isn't, and not what it is. The Festival isn't a local resource, to be rolled out to the cheers of otherwise cash-strapped hicks with nothing better to do than follow the Sky line for a couple of weeks in the year, and then to retire like a gaggle of cidered-up peasantry in yonder meadow, a lost troupe from Miss Julie, pouring away the profits through long and lazy summer nights.

Ours can be a lonely and largely sober job, and the business carries on like coal-mining, out of media scrutiny for most of the time. In consequence, breaking canapés with Booker Prize short-listers, sometimes even winners, is an unusual hobby for the rump of our tribe. Secondhand booksellers don't habitually lionize literati; as a group, we sensibly leave the business of selling new books and newly-signed new books to the professionals in the field. I suspect those among us who can't avoid the lure of organizing public signing sessions are genetically similar, if not identical to the Literace, a species delineated by Drif in a once moderately famous and now mostly forgotten guide to secondhand bookshops in the British Isles. "To rhyme with Liberace", he said, these people have shops which "are extremely showy, very flash and unnecessarily expensive." Drif sometimes gleefully sliced through a lot of pretension with bracing candour.

Perhaps we should discourage the practice of oiling the market for instant collectables by legally requiring publishers to put critically honest blurb on dustwrappers; it would certainly have the effect of cutting down on all the self-congratulatory parties. A periodic dose of cold custard in the eye for the successful few might even temper the proliferation of the large mass of published but forgotten authors, whose works are arranged by the ton in shops which make you wonder if Poundstretcher has acquired Borders. Not only would my plan be artistically useful, it would also be a downright ecologically sensible. Is Drif available, does anyone know?