Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal August 2005 Volume 3 (4)

Endpiece

Deadlines & bylines

The first thing I do on receiving Information Scotland is turn to this page. If I am on it I breathe a slight sigh of relief because I know that it will be more than two months before I need turn my mind to the column. However if my distinguished partner in crime, Colin Will, is occupying this space I immediately turn to the title page to check when the deadline is for my Endpiece for the next issue.

Deadlines and advance bookings are the joys or perils of life for the vaguely literary persons who have the pleasure of filling this page. Back in the days when I earned a crust by being a librarian I felt that my life was entirely governed by my diary and that retirement and self-employment as a vaguely literary person would be so much more relaxed and less structured. Fat chance!

As I write this I am just back from Winchester. Six months ago I was contacted by the organiser of a Writers’ Conference there who had discovered my book Writing Biography & Autobiography and thought that I would be the ideal person to talk about ‘Life writing’ at her conference. She was somewhat distressed to find that anybody could come from somewhere as remote and as expensive to travel from as Kirkintilloch but she bit the bullet and hired me. So I had six months to try to work out what to say in a one-hour talk (not too much of a problem) and how to occupy five and half hours of workshop time (quite a serious problem!)

Do you remember all the discussions back in the last century about “the death of the book”? Four hundred eager potential authors at the Winchester conference did tend to suggest that the book is taking “an unconscionable time dying.” Fortunately most of the 400 were not anxious to become writers of biography although Colin Will might be happy to know that poetry seemed a slightly less esoteric interest; however would-be-novelists were there in truly alarming numbers. As a sociological phenomenon I would add that approximately 85% of those attending the conference were female. Whether this represents the true gender balance of potential writers or just proves that women enjoy conferences more I leave to others to study.

Of the potential “life-writers” I met most seemed anxious to write their own life-stories – one even asked me if I had ever been tempted to do this myself. I explained that 33 years as a librarian did not generally make for exciting reading and any remotely interesting bits in my life were staying private – I’m Scottish after all!

While at Winchester I visited Jane Austen’s house at Chawton. This pretty cottage would, one might think, be an ideal retreat for an author; but then you see the little round table at which Miss Austen composed her novels, and the creaking door that warned her when anybody was approaching, so that her manuscript could be tidied away and something more respectable and lady-like taken up, you realise that modern writers have it rather easier. Today, writing fiction is “respectable” even if faintly eccentric and the twenty first-century aspiring authors at Winchester, if and when they are published, will at least get proper credit – Jane Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility was billed as being “By a Lady” and subsequent ones as “By the author of Sense and Sensibility.”

Even Walter Scott, who could safely publish poetry under his own name, felt that fiction was no suitable occupation for the Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire and Waverley appeared without his name on the title page – just as well Public Lending Right was not in force in 1814.

Let me close with a recommendation of an intriguing book: Julie Myerson’s Home: the story of everyone who ever lived in our house. (Harper Perennial, 2005, £8.99) Myerson had a really clever if simple idea – to research and tell the story of everyone who ever lived in her very ordinary late nineteenth-century London house. Worth checking out.

Brian D Osborne

Information Scotland Vol. 3 (4) August 2005

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