ANNE O'DONNELL, who looks after publicity for Marino and Mercier, has sent me their catalogue of spring books, and very interesting it is, too, with lots of intriguing titles.
However, I was especially intrigued by the list of "sales points" appended by Anne to the book blurbs and intended, I imagine, to alert distributors and sellers to their marketing possibilities.
For instance, I learn that the main advantage of Pat Henry's Hollywood Legs, a six week programme due next month from Marino and designed to give women more beautiful legs, is that "It works! Pat's routine can make any woman's legs longer and lovelier." Lovelier perhaps (though these things are subjective), but longer? Gosh, I only hope it doesn't involve surgery or the rack. Pat's other sales point is that "he's a whizz at publicity!" He must be - he has managed to get slots, not just on RTE 1's Twelve to One, but also on the Gareth O'Callaghan show. How does he do it?
Media exposure looms large among the sales points. David Harvey, presenter producer of Crimeline, the programme that makes you want to lock yourself in your house, has written Be Safe, due in March. This will accompany a television series of the same name and among the sales points mentioned by Anne is that it "will be promoted on RTE". No kidding. And John A. Murphy, editor of The French Are in the Bay (published next month by Mercier) "is very well connected in media circles".
Some other sales points caught my eye. Danny Morrison's "taut, intriguing political novel" The Wrong Man "will be popular in Northern Ireland, where the author is well known". Very well known, I'd say, though perhaps not especially popular in Unionist circles. Anne also mysteriously thinks that Sean McMahon's A Book of Irish Insults will be "popular with stag, football and rugby weekenders", who, though undoubtedly good at insults (mostly unprintable), are usually too stupefied by drink to be able to read.
Sex and Marriage in Ancient Ireland, apparently, will be "extremely popular with tourists" (they're all sex mad, anyway), but the best Anne can come up with for Des McHale's Spiritual and Thought Provoking Quotations is a somewhat timid "There is always a good market for reference books." Of course there is, though perhaps the title could be a bit more arresting. Only a thought.
HODGES FIGGIS tell me that nine out of the ten bestselling books in their Dawson Street store over the Christmas period were by Irish authors.
Biggest seller was Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody?, followed by Jacqueline O'Brien's Dublin: A Grand Tour, while also very popular were Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Maeve Binchy's Evening Class, Micheal O'Hehir's My Life and Times, Joseph O'Connor's The Irish Male at Home and Abroad and Thomas Pakenham's Meetings with Remarkable Trees.
Hodges Figgis manager Walter Pohli points to the "increased international standing of Irish authors" as a reason for this huge interest in Irish books, and he points to the impact of the Michael Collins movie as another stimulus - Tim Pat Coogan's biography of Collins and Sinead McCool's Hazel, Lady Lavery. A Life were among the top ten.
Also worth noting is that four of the top ten books come from Irish publishers, which must be encouraging for the industry here.
WHEN Seamus Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, Faber brought out two handsome boxed packs of the paperback editions of his first eight collections - Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North in one box, and Field Work, Station Island, The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things in the other.
These are now available at a remarkable bargain price from Eason - £8.95 for each boxed set. And do get them from Eason, because they're being cheekily priced in at least one other store at £18.95 per box.
I've come across some other outstanding bargains in Dublin bookshops over the last few days. In Hodges Figgis, the Weidenfeld hardback edition of Kenneth Tynan's Letters (a must for admirers of this great critic) is reduced from £22 to £4.99, while the large format HarperCollins paperback edition of Simon Schama's engrossing Landscape and Memory is a trifling £3.99.
In Books Upstairs on College Green I came across the elegant Knopf edition of Victoria Glendinning's Trollope reduced from $30 to £9.99, Richard Wilbur's New and Collected Poems (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich) marked down from $27.95 dollars to £9.99, and, from the same American publisher, Harold Bloom's contentious and stimulating The Western Canon, also at £9.99 (it was originally £29.95).
Other finds in Books Upstairs include a magnificent two volume boxed set of eight Muriel Spark novels from Houghton Mifflin at £19.99, the Knopf edition of Denis Donoghue's Walter Pater reduced from £27.50 to £9.99, and Andrei Sakharov's Memoirs (from Knopf again) at £7.99. And for scholars of Paris in the Twenties, This Must Be the Place. Memoirs of Montparnasse, by Jimmy (The Barman) Charters, and with an introduction by Hemingway, is a steal at £4.99.
Philip Davison, who first emerged on the Irish literary scene with The Book Thiefs Heartbeat (published by Co Op Books) and who followed it up with two other novels, Twist and Shout and The Illustrator, is now being published by Jonathan Cape, and the initial result of the new partnership will be in the shops next week. It's called The Crooked Man, it concerns an Irishman living in London on pre packaged airline food and gin, and it involves bodies buried in back gardens and secret service skullduggery.
If this sounds heavy duty stuff, I'm told that the book is blackly comic. You can judge for yourself next Wednesday at 6pm in Waterstone's in Dawson Street, where the 39 year old author, who was born and lives in Dublin, will be reading from it.