The Spectator has put its 1828 to 2008 archive online -- a spectacular trove of material, where:
There's endless material of interest here -- a quick, fairly random look around already yielding nuggets like this from a 23 July 1971 'Bookend" piece, where Marion Boyars explains: "translations don't sell very strongly in England", and Peter Owen is quoted:
Every page has been scanned and digitised, each article tagged and extracted, so that you can search the whole archive by content, keyword, topic, location, and date.See also Sebastian Payne's Welcome to The Spectator Archive: 180 years of history now online at The Spectator weblog.
There's endless material of interest here -- a quick, fairly random look around already yielding nuggets like this from a 23 July 1971 'Bookend" piece, where Marion Boyars explains: "translations don't sell very strongly in England", and Peter Owen is quoted:
"Ten years ago," he says, "the British were xenophobic about translations. Now it seems to me that books are judged much more on their merit, and that younger people in particular are more discriminating. When we first brought out Cocteau's Opium we were lucky if it sold twenty copies a year. Now we would be selling 150 in hardback, and in paperback with Icon Books it's selling rather more. It all depends on the writer's obscurity. Hermann Hesse is a runaway best-seller, but with Miguel Asturias, another Nobel prizewinner, we haven't needed to print more than 1,200 of each of his two novels."