I READ That the eminent publisher Carmen Callil has defined a new genre in her industry: "jockstrap publishing".

Details have not been provided, but we must assume it involves macho, ultra masculine, liniment coated prose (perhaps even poetry). The interesting thing is that our own Roddy Doyle and Seamus Deane have been named as practitioners. I don't know if they have been told.

A female equivalent to jockstrap publishing will undoubtedly emerge in the near future, and when I encounter sports bra publishing or anyone involved in it I will let you know.

Meanwhile, according to a Daily Telegraph review, Ruth Brandon's new book, The Uncertainty Principle (Cape, £15.99) "belongs to that emerging genre which will tell future generations so much about the doubts of the Nineties woman: the Disillusioned Widow novel."

Thrilling news. Yet another development in the trade is the publication of many new books for people who don't normally read books, as opposed to people who have stopped reading books because most books are so awful. This new development is being laid at the door of the famous author of Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh.

What has he to answer for? Yes: a lot. Pale imitations (instantly recognisable by their pastel covers) of Trainspotting are springing up everywhere. Most are unspeakably awful, and written by people whose publishers make a virtue of the writers supposed non conformity to social norms, and even propensity to violence, as if that were an indication of talent. It isn't.

A lot of nonsense is talked about books. Some time ago the US ambassador, Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, described the act of reading as one of our greatest luxuries. That is fair enough if we accept that indulging in luxury is usually synonymous with wasting time. But she then quoted the historian Barbara Tuchman (with whom you are all familiar) to the effect that "books are the carriers of civilisation. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."

This is true only of a tiny percentage of books. Applied to the enormous amount of drivel being published today it is plainly silly. Furthermore, it could be philosophically argued (think of Schrodinger's cat) that a book does not exist until it acquires its first reader.

A book is not going to carry civilisation and make literature speak and get science out of the wheelchair and do all those other backbreaking jobs until a reader comes along, a decent skin ready to lash out a few hard earned shillings on the gamble that he will get a bit of a laugh or otherwise profitably pass the time of day (or night). And the more rot the reader encounters, the more likely he is to give up buying books altogether.

Is there any way we can stop people writing and publishing books, short of legislation?

Probably not, but there must be ways to dissuade writers. More, people must be disabused of the notion that one can easily make fortunes through writing fiction.

If cash remains the spur, some would be writers might profitably be directed towards the production of legal reports. My colleague Fintan O'Toole pointed out last August that the fee of £52,000 made by the State (you and me) to Dermot Gleeson SC (now the Attorney General) for two written submissions made during the beef tribunal was very much more than an author might expect to receive for a best selling book.

Unfortunately this is a rather specialised field of writing, involving as it does grammar and punctuation. On the other hand, literary style is not needed, and might even prove a hindrance.

We could learn from the past, too. A couple of years back, Steve Holland wrote a book called The Mush mom Jungle, an interesting history of postwar paperback publishing in the UK. In this heyday of the trade there were thousands of what Holland calls cheap publishers, and "the cheapest of all may have been Scion Ltd, who kept an alcoholic hack in their basement under Kensington High Street. He wrote two novels a week under a bare light bulb for £7.10, from which they deducted £2.10 for his board and lodging."

With the hack giving up less than 30 per cent of his income for board and lodging, this arrangement strikes me as reasonable. Allowing for inflation, there is no reason why such contracts should not be acceptable today. An added attraction would be the exclusion of the literary agent. I might point out, too, that London's Kensington High Street was quite a fashionable address even in the immediate post war years.