Tom Maschler's memoir, Publisher, appeared in bookshops on 18 March. It might as well not have done. The book was dead on arrival, having been subjected to a barrage of premature review and ridicule. Private Eye's Bookworm feasted on the still warm corpse. The Guardian's Editor page 'digested' it satirically: 'I was 27 when Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.' The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the 'body of literature': 'And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You'll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.' Alongside these lines was a caricature of Maschler as a leering parasite.

LRB 5 May 2005 | PDF Download