White Rabbit signs ‘rollicking’ memoir from former Q editor Kessler 

White Rabbit has snapped up Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed the British Music Press and Other Misadventures, the memoir from former Q editor Ted Kessler.  

Publisher Lee Brackstone acquired world rights from Becky Thomas at The Lewinsohn Literary Agency. Paper Cuts will be published on 21st July 2022.  

Kessler worked at NME as a writer and editor between 1993 and 2003, before joining Q magazine’s staff. He was Q’s editor for four years until it closed in 2020 and now co-edits "The New Cue", a music newsletter delivered three times a week to 7,000 subscribers. Alongside his memoir, Kessler has also edited and devised My Old Man: Tales Of Our Fathers (Canongate), published in 2016. 

Paper Cuts tells the inside story of the slow death of the British music press, but it is also a love letter to the “tale of how music magazines saved one man’s life”. Highlighting how Kessler found redemption in music, the memoir takes the reader on a journey alongside the some of the biggest names in the music industry. Expect tales from nights out with Oasis and The Strokes, chats with Jeff Buckley and Florence Welch, while witnessing Radiohead enact “cold revenge” upon Kessler in public.

The publisher wrote: “A story about love and death, about what it’s like when a music writer shacks up with a conflict of interest, and what happens when your younger brother starts appearing on the cover of the magazines you work for, this is the memoir of ‘a delinquent doofus’ whose life was both rescued and defined by music magazines.”  

Brackstone said: “Paper Cuts is an irresistibly entertaining portrait of the lifestyle of a professional writer on popular music, an occupation that is now at best moribund; at worst, extinct. Was Ted Kessler responsible for harpooning the Great White Whale of British music journalism? Read Paper Cuts, a memoir which has the rollicking pace of an adventure novel bursting to escape the body of an elegant, but slumming-it bildungsroman, to find out. The music press may have died a slow and agonising death, but Ted Kessler survived to tell us these wild and sometimes improbable war stories of its final glory days and its ignominious decline.” 

Kessler added: “I decided to write Paper Cuts on the day that we cleared out the office of Q, where I had until that day worked as editor. It felt significant, and not just because I was now back on the dole, where I’d aimlessly spent so much of my teens and early twenties. It was the death of the last of the mass-market magazines devoted to contemporary music and I had some very juicy stories to share, having worked in the alternative reality of the music press for nearly 30 years. I wanted to convey the lifestyle arc and career prospects of someone foolishly arrested in their place of employment at 21, of someone whose life was subsequently saved by music mags.”