The most obvious thing to say is, as we've noted elsewhere, if you live in
the market place, don't be too surprised if a market stall falls on you -
that's what they call market forces, right? As the Bunting editor, I got
OUP's dear john letter on Friday, saying they were "making every effort to
accomodate [the titles] elsewhere" - and same post I get a letter from
another wellknown publisher saying hello? can we be of service? - which is
nice, welcome, indeed potentially a lifesaver if we don't want to go into
B's centenary without his book available (this couldn't have come at a
worse time - I'd already talked to OUP about the centenary and had their
assurance that the book would stay in print...). I won't say too much
about it since obviously it's under discussion etc. But two observations:

1. This move was in a way previewed some years ago when OUP sloughed off
Roy Fisher. 

2. It's one prospect finding a publisher for Bunting, who is, after all, a
steady seller - altogether different for some of the others, whatever we
think about them. The efforts to find regugee housing for even part of
Oxford's list will impact on poetry publishing in the UK, reducing the
numbers of "new" authors printed elsewhere in the chain, and - obviously -
reducing the number of outlets. Authors particularly "at risk" will, as
usual, be the ones perceived as a little to one side of the "mainstream" 
in any sense. Not a good thing, however remote we may feel from it.
Remember the crash in the Indonesian market. 

OK, and a third:
3. Spare a thought for the poets who have books due out this year, whose
contracts OUP will "honour" - the last yaks on the reservation, alone on a
prairie from which all the other wildlife has been shot.

"And Another Thing" - 
4. It's my first experience of the simultaneous goodbye-hello two
publisher routine. It feels a little squalid, being passed along from hand
to hand like the aging mistress in a french novel (apologies to any aging
mistresses from french novels on the list) but that again is, I guess, the
supreme example of a market realism. Bunting will live.

RC



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