Horace Bent: Malaviya settles in as Bent ponders Diagram

Scandal rocked the Messe yesterday at Nihar Malaviya’s talk. And no wonder the new PRH supremo revealed some untoward secrets; he was facing the exacting grilling by Porter “Paxo” Anderson, who opened with words that might chill anyone sitting down for a full-scale interview at the global book industry’s biggest hoe-down: “We’re going to be very gentle, he’s very new to this job.”

Certainly Malaviya has been gentle since landing at the top spot: just ask Madeline Mcintosh and a raft of senior US PRHers. Anyway, the conversation, as it will inevitably do this week, strayed to BookTok—or perhaps AI-generated BookTok. Malaviya said he had recently been visiting family in India when his 13-year-old niece received a book delivery full of a “whole bunch of Colleen Hoover books”. Malaviya joked that he didn’t know what worried him more: whether CoHo’s books were age-appropriate for his niece, or that they are published in India by Simon & Schuster. Of course, a PRH c.e.o. having qualms about S&S-related matters is understandable, as dealing with the firm doesn’t appear the path to long-term employment.

A scramble throughout the Messe reveals that PRH and Pan Macmillan have departed Hall 6, leaving the Anglophone sector for Hall 5.1 with their international colleagues. This left fairgoers pondering the tea leaves. Are PRH and the Mac abandoning their regimes of flooding the European markets with cheap English-language TikTok books? Or maybe it provides a chance to sit with colleagues from their parent HQ’s countries. I’ve heard of plans next year for HarperCollins to be on the Australian collective stand—with the entire HC contingent jammed onto two tables, sandwiched between Text’s Michael Heyward and Scribe’s Henry Rosenbloom.

As you will read in today’s Das Bookseller Zeitung (see p24), this is the 45th anniversary of the most seismic event in the fair’s history, when the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year was kick-started in these very halls by the sainted Trevor Boundford and Bruce Robertson.

It got me thinking, is anyone going to stop McFarland & Co? The North Carolina academic indie, based in the Appalachian foothills, has won the last two Diagrams, with 2021’s Is Superman Circumcised? and last year’s RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning With RuPaul’s Drag Race. A whistle-stop tour past the indie’s stand (I didn’t want to reveal myself, should they try to bribe me for this year’s gong) shows McFarland might be consolidating its grip on the Diagram. New, deliciously-titled oddities include Kermit Culture: Critical Perspectives on Jim Henson’s Muppets and The 12 Days of Christmas: The Outlaw Carol that Wouldn’t Die.

Perhaps we should kick it old school at FBF 2023 and go back to the Diagram’s roots? In the early days, nominees were limited to odd book titles seen at the fair. If you spot a contender, swing by The Bookseller stand and tell Uncle Horace what it is. The best one I see by the time I’m wheels up at the Flughafen on Bent Force One this Friday gets you a special gift (which, if I am being honest, might be a duty-free bar of Toblerone).