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Trade turns out for Cooper's 'Tackle!'
Over 100 figures from across the publishing trade crammed into the upper echelons of Hatchards Piccadilly to celebrate Jilly Cooper’s new novel Tackle! (Transworld).
The launch, on Wednesday evening (9th November), featured pink champagne and caterers dressed in football kit which was Searston Rovers-themed, matching the fictional kit in the latest in Cooper’s Rutshire series.
Tackle! follows Cooper’s hero Rupert Campbell-Black as he takes to the football field as he becomes chairman of a local club, to help ensure their rise to the top of the Premier League.
Transworld publisher Bill Scott-Kerr praised “the incomparable Jilly Cooper” and said: “Larry has just celebrated his 40th anniversary at Transworld which coincided with the publication of Riders so he has been present with all your Rutshire publications... I joined 35 years ago so am a relative newcomer.”
Scott-Kerr told the assembled fans, as they crammed in against bookcases and down the winding staircases in the store: “We’ve been with you since the beginning, we’ve sold a lot of copies and we’ve had a lot of fun... She’s always given us the best books.”
“This is a massive publishing event and we’re going to sell the hell out of this book, aided as ever by Jilly, who has been the most wonderful author to work with all these years and we are very proud to be her publisher.”
Cooper paid tribute to “dear Bill” as well as many across the books and journalism trades who had supported her over the years. She told the crowd: “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wonderful agent Felicity Blunt and her heartthrob husband Stanley Tucci... I’m also so grateful to Hatchards for letting us have the party here. Back in the mid 1970s, I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times about working in Hatchards for a day and I was staggered at how hard the staff worked... ringing up the bills... searching for books and being charming to everyone, so nothing has changed. Throughout the day, we’d watch celebrities and we had several footballers coming in and they always went straight to the biographies and would pick them up to see if they were in the index.”
The 86-year-old author described the wide range of responses towards her books and added: “I have to confess I get quite nervous at book launches like this because I’m aware of being a very unliterary author. The Daily Mail once said I was such a bad writer I made Jeffrey Archer look like Dostoyevsky.”
She added of Tackle: “It’s not quite as raunchy as some of the other books but it’s full of heroism and love stories and I hope it will cheer people up.”
Blunt told The Bookseller: “Jilly is a titan. I don’t know any other writer who has been operating at her level for the length of time she has and continues to operate at exactly the same level. She is more celebrated now than most debut authors are today, it’s incredibly exciting. There’s just not another writer like her and I think she’s one of those authors who manages to appeal to so many people and there’s no snobbery about her. She just wants people to have fun and enjoy her books... she lives to write.”
Cooper’s daughter-in-law, Edwina Cooper, said: “She still writes her books on a typewriter called Monica. and works morning, noon and night, and at weekends. She works incredibly hard so she really deserves this.”
Since Nielsen BookScan records began, Cooper has sold 2.2 million books for £15.2m. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Gloucestershire and Anglia Ruskin, and won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award in 2019. She received a CBE in 2018 for services to literature and charity. In 2022, it was revealed one of her best-known novels, Rivals (Transworld), would be adapted for a Disney+ TV series.
