And a collective “oooops” was sounded by all

The Sunday Times of London decided to update an old, but effective experiment from 30-odd years ago: take a book that was published and well-reviewed, take the author’s name off the cover and submit it as if it were an unpublished partial to agents and publishers. Would they regard it as the classic it was, or reject it wholesale? Well, in the case of Jerzy Kozinski, it was the latter. And now, the same goes for V.S. Naipaul and Stanley Middleton:

None appears to have recognised them as Booker prizewinners from the 1970s that were lauded as British novel writing at its best. Of the 21 replies, all but one were rejections.

Only Barbara Levy, a London literary agent, expressed an interest, and that was for Middleton’s novel.

She was unimpressed by Naipaul’s book. She wrote: “We . . . thought it was quite original. In the end though I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”

The rejections for Middleton’s book came from major publishing houses such as Bloomsbury and Time Warner as well as well-known agents such as Christopher Little, who discovered J K Rowling.

The major literary agencies PFD, Blake Friedmann and Lucas Alexander Whitley all turned down V S Naipaul’s book, which has received only a handful of replies.

It would be all to easy to cover our collective mouths and gasp, then cry foul, but the truth is, publishing is all about subjectivity and taste, and both change periodically. Do you really think most classic novels would get published today? More to the point, should they? Granted there’s a relativistic approach because plenty of contemporary literature owes much to what preceded them – as it should – but who’s to say that history will look kindly upon Naipaul and Middleton anyway?

(Ron here: In fact, as author Paul Collins points out on his blog, “it’s not 1971 anymore,” and past acclaim is not inherent proof of contemporary relevance. “What was an agent supposed to think of the originality and freshness of ostensibly new writing that was, in fact, probably at the proofreader when the Beatles were still playing on a London rooftop?” Collins asks of the Naipaul. He also describes his own experience stumbling onto a copy of Donald Barthlme’s out-of-print National Book Award-winning children’s book The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine: Or The Hithering Dithering Djinn, which holds up just as poorly thirty-some years later.)

That said, if any agents and editors reading had been given a piece of either book to read, would you have had the same reactions as the above UK agencies and publishers?

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