The bookseller’s riposte. They maintained that they didn’t need representatives anyway. There the matter currently rests. Either American booksellers are omniscient, dissembling or naive if they truly believe that a publisher’s representative has no validity. These germinations were fertilised by the news that Chris Grant, sales representative with Australasian Publishing in Sydney, has left to have a child. Chris represented all that is beneficial to her employers and to her friends, the booksellers and the authors she respected and nurtured. She was not sycophantic. She actually read most of the books she represented and her expertise and ‘nose’ for children’s books instilled sufficient confidence in may booksellers for them to invest money, space, time and learning experience combining to develop sales of children’s books. Ask the Children’s Bookshop at Beecroft, Jean Ferguson of Coddingtons/Collins, Brays of Balmain, the Hunter Hill Bookshop and the majors – the Angus and Robertsons, the Dymocks and the Co-op Bookshops.

A happy motherhood Chrissie, we will miss you. There are many publishers representatives like you in their dedication. The long hot kilometres, the cheap motels, the niggardly expense accounts, voracious entertainment seeking booksellers, pressuring sales managers, petulant authors, heavy sample cases and paperwork in unvarying quadruplicate are hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. Dreams of the mystique of publishing and bookselling.

The mystique of publishing. There’s a phrase to conjure with. The creativity, the discovery and accolades, the flowering of new authors, the incandescence of the written word. Mystique sometimes has feet of clay and hands of dross. Christopher Koch received rave reviews in the Australian and elsewhere for his new novel The Doubleman (Chatto and Windus). This universal recognition did not quite spread to the sub-editors on the Sydney Sun Newspaper, who pleasingly listed the novel number 2 on their bestseller list, but listed the author phonetically but pathetically as ‘‘Christopher Cosh”. “Sic Transit Nomen” or “names to make me vomit!”.

Mystique mislaid example number 2. Take a recent Academic and Scholarly Book Sale held over a weekend at Goldstein College at the University of New South Wales. Fifty trestle tables radiating to all corners of the cavernous room, fifty tables groaning with mountain avalanches of books, forgotten dreams of their authors, painfully reminding their publishers of financial and editorial misjudgement. Dropped texts were there, lapsed novels and outdated ephemera, trawled in the indiscriminate nets of the thousands of avid bargain hunters. Babies were ejected from strollers to make room for stacks of books, trollies, cartons, rucksacks were marshalled into lines unending loading their way towards the city.

Surveying the turbulent throng the two principals cooled down the overheating cash register, and counted the queue of would be purchasers. The anonymous one turned towards the anonymous other, both with long varied and occasionally distinguished careers in publishing and bookselling in Australia, and uttered the valediction “See, oh anonymous one, the mystique of bookselling”. They both went to the bank well satisfied. Mystique was left behind.

But Rigby will continue to publish fiction. Henry Lawson will be recovered and rediscovered (now available extremely cheaply in the Landsdowne two volume edition sitting like the Albatross of the Ancient Mariner in the bookshops of the land). New writing talent will surface; most journalists will spell Koch correctly; the book that bastion omniscient of knowledge will phoenix its future. Mystique may fade but will not perish. For every 10 failures while there is one Facey then publishing and bookselling will continue with enjoyment to take its chances with the lottery of literature.

There is a noise outside, voices, a knock on my office door. Cheerful face, outstretched hand, a firm handshake, the lists are entered; the tournament begins the joust between Sir Gawain, the green bookseller and Sir Certitude, the publishers representative. It follows its ritual. The orders are placed, the fingers crossed, the promotion plans agreed, returns negotiated the computer programmed distribution acts and ultimately some of the books parade their enticing dust jackets in front of the torpid browsers. This is exciting; it is dreadfully speculative and it is our booktrade the only one and the best we have.