Cooking the books

A woman from Nottingham wrote to me recently to register her outrage that the London Review of Books was not available free on the web. She said she ran a pensioners' reading group and they couldn't afford a subscription.

I pointed out that at £29.95 for 30 issues, the LRB would cost her group less than £1 a fortnight, less than the cost of a Penguin biscuit each. I heard no more from her.

As a punter, I sympathised. We all want intellectual entertainments for next to nothing. Why else do we make such a fuss when our daily paper goes up by 5p or cry foul when Picador charges £14.99 for a paperback?

It isn't that we don't properly value the written word, so much as that we regard it as ours by right - like our daily bread. Paradoxically, it's the very importance to us of ideas that makes us resist paying a going rate for them.

Given our collective unwillingness to pay sensible sums for serious print, it's amazing any literary publishers survive at all. We throw up our hands when another venerable imprint kicks the bucket, or when Oxford University Press closes its poetry list, and we think it rather a cheat that Faber and Faber should be kept going with the proceeds of Cats or Bloomsbury with Harry Potter. Yet still we drive the prices down.

So we should be thankful that the Times Literary Supplement has reached its 100th birthday this week. Around 35,000 punters will have bought last week's edition. Probably about double that number will have read it, lost in contemplation of the fate of extinct birds, the life and times of Atatürk, the history of Russian theatre or the teachings of the Catholic church on abortion.

Those 35,000 readers make roughly a full gate at the Arsenal on a Saturday afternoon, so millennial talk about cultural dumbing down might seem premature. Indeed, the 38,000 who take the London Review of Books are mostly a different public. Yet, the fact that between them the TLS and the LRB are purchased regularly by around 75,000 people, and read by twice that number, is not enough to guarantee their survival as viable commercial entities.

The arithmetic is simple and dire. Writers' fees have shot up as demand for good literary journalists has outstripped supply. Rates now start at £100 per 1,000 words - and a typical literary journal contains 50,000 words. Add in typesetting and newsprint production costs, which set back the LRB around £13,000 an issue. Meanwhile, a streamlined news trade has become increasingly inhospitable to small and medium circulation titles, pushing them towards costly subscription promotions. Then budget for office costs, distribution and salaries. The explosion of magazine and review sections in the broadsheet press, which has made it a seller's market for good writing, has exerted a parallel upward pressure on editors' salaries.

Against these formidable costs, a literary magazine like the TLS or the LRB has as its main source of revenue a product that nets not much more than £1 for every copy sold. As for advertising, the book publishers can't make their own sums add up, so they advertise their books only with the greatest reluctance.

It's no surprise then that, since the Second World War, no serious magazine of ideas has survived in Britain without generous amounts of public and private support.

In the case of the TLS, a string of newspaper proprietors has been happy to pick up the tab, with Rupert Murdoch as the last in line.

It might seem odd that a man so ruthlessly devoted to making money out of the mass market should tolerate losing money from an organ of the chattering elite, many of whom presumably hold him directly responsible for taking culture into a new dark age. And it's probably the greatest accolade the TLS could wish for on its 100th birthday that its present proprietor should think the magazine a sufficiently effective cultural fig leaf for it to be worth losing a few bob to hang on to it.

Nicholas Spice is publisher of the London Review of Books.