Book sales trends are “just cyclical”, publisher Jacques Testard reassured London book fair attenders this week, speaking on a panel with Anna Pazos, the author of Killing the Nerve. “Nonfiction will bounce back at some point.”
Though he has “heard someone say that podcasts are to blame” for falling nonfiction sales, he thinks “we have a tendency to overdramatise these kinds of shifts”.
Testard sees the future of nonfiction in writing that “challenges the form somehow, reinvents it”.
His press, Fitzcarraldo Editions, famously prints books in two distinctive colourways: blue covers (International Klein Blue, for aficionados) with white text, and white covers with blue text. The general rule is that a blue cover signals fiction and a white one nonfiction. But often, things aren’t so clear cut.
Where to put Annie Ernaux’s books, for instance, the first two of which were labelled novels upon publication in France before she confessed they were drawn from real life? It would have felt “weird” to put her books in the blue series, says Testard. All of her work is published between white covers, along with other books that are often “hard to pin down”, compared with the “works of imagination” making up the blue fiction series.
The white series features “straight-up reportage” such as Jon Lee Anderson’s book To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban. But it also includes books that are “very much not nonfiction”, such as The Ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell. “The conceit is that it’s a found manuscript”, an “esoteric history of art in fragments” – to believe, at least initially, that it is perhaps a real manuscript “makes the reading experience more interesting”, says Testard.
How this experimentation, or uncertainty, in nonfiction is received depends on the type of reader you are. “Someone described a certain kind of middle-aged English reader to me as ‘the Cheltenham Dad’ – I think the Cheltenham Dad does expect certainty in his biography of Churchill,” says Testard.
Yet, Pazos, whose book, Killing the Nerve, is billed as “auto-journalism”, suggests certainty isn’t possible, at least in memoir: there is “no way to be objective about your own life”. Memories, she says, “are lies that you tell yourself”. In nonfiction, what matters is the intention to be faithful to those memories. And she offers us an alternative, perhaps more accurate, description of books such as her own: “a book of things as I remember them.” For Testard, nonfiction, far from being dead, has its future in “writing like Anna’s” – that which “finds new ways to tell a story”.
Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
