DAMIEN GRANT

Half a century back newspapers were everyone’s principal news source. But in the face of the new digital option with its immediacy, they’ve gone over like ninepins and the handful surviving, knowing the game is up, are all actively trying to build a pay-per-view digital option.

In the interim they stuff their print pages with opinion pieces, this in stark contrast to yesteryear when they were filled with news and opinion was strictly confined to editorials.

Wellington’s Post has a dozen or more regular opinion writers. With two exceptions, first Josie Pagani who writes from what might be described as a central left view but nevertheless, is always well worth reading, they’re all utterly predictable in their witterings. Re Josie, take this for example.

“… it’s hard to see how you create a religion lasting 2000 years on the basis of an infant born in Bethlehem. Mary gave birth on a pile of straw. It can’t have been easy. Her husband didn’t know who the father was.

Three dodgy guys on camels then turned up wearing a lot of cologne. And just as the baby fell asleep, the Drummer Boy started up. Ta rum pum pum.”

Bloody good stuff, as with all her contributions. But her great failing is she effectively protests at humanity’s constant irrationality, something which certainly doesn’t apply to her.

Nevertheless, it is a failing for the cold hard fact is humans are not programmed to be rational. Instead they possess a brain lobe, larger in females than males for sound biological reasons, devoted to emotion, and emotion is the enemy of logic.

Josie is exceptionally good but by far the Post’s stand-out columnist is Damien Grant who writes from a libertarian view-point.

I don’t know him (he’s Auckland based) but have no doubt I’d hugely enjoy his company.

My great love is books. I have about 25,000 in large libraries in my homes in four countries.

Obviously there’s a lot of duplication, my own 28 published books for starters, but also standards such as dictionaries, atlases and my favourite novelists, notably Evelyn Waugh.

But also in every library are circa 200 favourite columnists books which I love re-reading, such as Bernard Levin, A.J Liebling, Clive James, H.C Mencken, to name but a few.

Here’s what puzzles me.

Book publishing has never been more difficult thanks to circa 10,000 new titles appearing weekly. That enormous figure is due to technology which has made their production costs a fraction of yesteryear. But one gilt-edge quick seller would be a columns books by Damien Grant.

I’d certainly be quick off the mark to acquire four copies for my libraries as he passes the critical test of a successful columnist, namely his writing being clever, age-less and laced with unique humour. I don’t doubt they’d rocket out of the door. By contrast, imagine a book of the Herald’s tedious in-house doomster Simon Wilson’s columns. The possibility of a single sale is inconceivable.

A final thought; the obvious publisher is Stuff which apart from bookshop sales could market them by mail-order.

When I wrote a weekly column for them back in the mid-1980s, they published a hard cover book of my previous year’s efforts and quickly sold all 15,000 printed. Subsequently, 6 further volumes of my newspaper columns were published and similarly all sold out.

If Stuff are not interested then this is a splendid opportunity for a publisher to produce an easy winner.