There is a newish tradition at this time of year of CEOs emailing all staff reviewing the year just closing. Peter Olson at Random House is probably the star performer. Jack Romanos ('utterly charming, handsome and delightful') at Simon and Schuster has issued something similar and also Gail Rebuck. I'm never quite sure whether these letters are meant just for staff or for general consumption. Extracts always seem to make their way into the trade press anyway and so I suppose they are not confidential. The theme is usually the same (and I can be equally guilty). I offer this, copyright free, to all CEOs for use in any circumstances.

It's been a great year for us in spite of a number of market difficulties. Underlying sales and profits are at record highs (allowing for exchange differences, changes in GAAP, varying retail distribution criteria, enhanced accounting practices for advances and stock, intercompany tax movements,etc). Our competitors are struggling with the market conditions but we've managed to find solutions while maintaining our commitment to the highest standards of integrity and caring. All our authors are truly wonderful both creatively and as human beings. Incidentally, we also support environmental action, the developing world, inclusiveness, positive discrimination (where legally required) and fair treatment for all our stakeholders. India and China are really important places with many people and we are investing since our successful presidential visit. Next year will be even tougher but, thanks to the foresight of the senior management team, we'll probably survive. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart and have a wonderful holiday season with your friends and family. I loook forward to working with you to achieve our 2007 goals together when I return from (enter holiday destination) towards the end of January.

I decided not to put out such a letter this year. Instead here are a few milestones with round numbers. I'd be grateful if anyone from Macmillan would let me know of other statistics which should be included here to make the list more comprehensive.

Macmillan India processed over 1 million pages of text for publishers worldwide. We now employ more than 3,000 people.

Nature Publishing Group had 40,000 papers submitted - they accepted 3000. Nature itself rejected 11,000 of the 12,000 papers it received. The electronic version is now available on 10 million desktops and we've recorded 1.5 million podcast downloads.

Gill and Macmillan managed a 10% profit on general books in a market less than half the size of London.

College Press in Zimbabwe sold 500,000 books in spite of the dreadful conditions in that country.

Our co-venture with the leading Chinese educational publishers FLTRP sold 50 million copies of New Standard English in the year, taking the total to 150 million.

Macmillan Spain supplied 600,000 users with their new Bugs course.

More statistics to come in due course.

Whilst there is no diminution in the debate about public library maladministration in the UK it is always encouraging to see some parts of the library business addressing the challenges of the future with determination and optimism. Against the Grain is a journal which 'links publishers, vendors and librarians' and consistently adds transparency and understanding to what can be fraught relationships. Just check out their latest contents list for a flavour. They also organise the successful Charleston Conferences and run a newsletter which has just landed on my desk, The Charleston Report. A regular feature is a column called By the Numbers and I hope they don't mind my lifting a few statistics from it:

50% of web visitors don't scroll down to view the portion of a web page which is not visible on their monitor screen.

45% of people use Google for search, 28% Yahoo, 12% MSN and 6% ask.com. (What I find strange is that Google is not higher).

1.5 million people have joined the online social network Second Life already.

136 million people have registered with Skype.

And after all these wonderful numbers I was shocked to find a truly depressing number. One of our books which was identified as in the top ten best books of the year by the New York Times has managed to sell fewer than 1500 copies in the UK - an indication of the problems of publishing high-quality non-fiction successfully in a UK high street market dominated by celebrity biographies. Perhaps the fog-induced chaos at Heathrow Airport may stimulate book sales.

But publishers must remain optimistic and today is the birthday of the 32nd Nature branded journal, Nature Photonics. Its editorial team is spread between Tokyo, San Francisco and London and already it is attracting the very best research papers in what is one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific endeavour. Fingers, toes and optical fibres are all crossed.

Walking to work this morning listening to BBC Radio 4 I tuned in to two pieces about Nature. They were triggered by the journal publishing the results of an experiment we undertook where we invited scientists to submit their papers for public (as opposed to the more traditional system of confidential reviewing) peer review. You can hear the debate at 7.25am here between the editor of Nature and the editor of an online scientific journal from the charity-supported Public Library of Science. There was also an earlier journalistic piece at around 640am. I've also pasted in below an article from the Wall Street Journal on the same subject.

It's great that a subject so apparently arcane as scientific peer review should be considered important enough to warrant two slots on the most important radio programme in the UK and a feature in the world's leading financial newspaper. What is not so great is that the discussions manage to confuse open reviewing with free access, comment with criticism, freedom of information with free information, an excellent system which catches nearly all attempted scientific fraud with a flawed system which allows fraud to happen, the desire to speak confidentially and openly as opposed to the apparently open but necessarily guarded alternative. In other words and as usual, a tricky and important debate has been reduced to a few soundbites of little value and significant distortion.

On a more immediately important subject, the disgraceful death sentence imposed on the health workers in Libya. Declan Butler has written a professional state of play piece. Do read it and do, if you can, support the resistance to this terrible injustice.

Visitors to this blog may have noticed an omission in the last few days - no progress report on England's attempt to retain the Ashes, the every 18-month cricket battle between Australia and England. A little while ago I suggested that I'd be very happy if England was boringly 3-0 up in the series at this stage and I could claim my winnings (I bet A$500 at 2-1). I was nearly correct. The score is 3-0 but the wrong way round and I have had to concede the bet and any pride in the 2005 victory in England.

The defeat has been crushing but the strange thing is that, apart from the first match where England were completely dire throughout, the other two could have (or even should) have been won at various times. Apart from the obvious talent and professionalism of many of the Australian players I can't help thinking that a significant difference was about leadership. Somehow, England just didn't have it. This is the England manager after the defeat - his face says it all.

For more detail on all this disappointment go to the Ashes on cricinfo. In spite of this gloom - or maybe as an antidote - some cricket books are doing really well in Britain. My favourite, Wisden Anthology,was made Book of the Week in the Sunday Times and garnered this great review in the Guardian. I quote from the beginning of the ST review:

'If Wisden is cricket's Bible, here is the New Testament.'

The book, all 1300 pages and £40 worth, has reprinted and, hallelujah, a major bookshop chain has finally agreed to purchase some copies for sale at Christmas - better late than never. Perhaps they should have read my previous blog and taken note.

Finally on cricket someone sent me this rather unkind joke about England's cricketers.

Billy was at school this morning and the teacher asked all the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came out, fireman, policeman, salesman, chippy, captain of industry etc, but Billy was being uncharacteristically quiet and so the teacher asked him about his father.

"My father is an exotic dancer in a gay club and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes if the offer is really good, he'll go out with a man, rent a cheap hotel room and let them sleep with him."

The teacher quickly set the other children some work and took little Billy aside to ask him if that was really true.

"No" said Billy, "He plays cricket for England but I was just too embarrassed to say."

For a while I was a member of the Athenaeum Club in London's Pall Mall. It is very posh.

There were, however, a number of drawbacks. The food was terrible, women were not allowed into the club except after 6 p.m. The last straw was to discover that 'members may not take off their jackets in the sitting room' - even when the temperature exceeds 30 Centigrade. I resigned.

A few years later I was invited to join the Chelsea Arts Club which is about as different as it can be. It is not posh.

The food is pretty good. Jackets are not compulsory.Women are welcome. Cats are also welcome.

There is a decent snooker table.

And a gorgeous garden,

One of the joys of membership of the club is receiving the monthly chairman's letter. Today's has a nice literary story:

There has, of course, also been a strong literary tradition at the Club with diverse writer and poet members such as A.S. Byatt, Roger McGough, right through to Laurie Lee, for whom we always kept a special supply of Ruddles County behind the bar! The Club has a bust of Laurie Lee sculpted by Lyn Bamber. I will never forget the story that one day Laurie was sitting for the sculpture when he asked  “can you do something about my pendulous lower lip?” to which Lyn reportedly replied “I’m a sculptor darling, not a f***ing plastic surgeon”!

I can't find a picture of the sculpture in question but here is a picture of Laurie Lee in the gorgeous garden.

And here is the marvellous Erich Mendelsohn designed house where Paul Hamlyn used to live and which is immediately opposite the club.

PS from Grumpy old pedant. I saw a sign at Heathrow Terminal 1 yesterday beautifully typeset and printed under the BAA banner:

Everything you purchase now including liquids are allowed on board.

Nobody on the BAA staff could care less.

We are all suspicious of lists, particularly lists based on subjectivity. The newspapers are full of Christmas choices of books. There might be an element of mutual back-scratching, of intellectual snobbery or exhibitionism, or simply puffery. Yesterday I blogged/bragged about one of our titles in the New York Times best of 2006 which is probably the most objective list.

I have since discovered that we publish three of the best ten and here they are.

Danielle Trussoni's Falling through the earth, Rory Stewart's Occupational hazards and once again Claire Messud's Emperor's children.

I hope all our independent bookselling colleagues are stocking these titles as an antidote to celebrity biographies!

Opening today's Sunday Telegraph and turning to the gossip column about books, Literary Life, (which I couldn't link to for some reason) I found the following:

'Congratulations to Claire Messud, the only British author to feature in the New York Times top five most notable works of fiction of 2006.'

If you may follow the NYT link you'll spot that is the top ten novels (although she does appear to be third and thus arguably could be described as being in the top five). But what surpriseme was that she was described as British. I checked on Wikipedia:

'Born in the United States, Messud grew up in Australia and Canada, returning to the US as a teenager. Her mother is Canadian, her father is of Algerian origin, and her sister is French. Messud was educated at Yale University and then Cambridge, where she met her spouse, the British literary critic James Wood [1]. She has taught in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and in the Graduate Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Messud was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, but none of the three passports she held was British.'

I double-checked with Andrew Kidd, described by Robert McCrum as the  'charming, sophisticated publisher of the cutting-edge paperback list at Picador' who confirmed that she is not British.

Why am I pointing this out?

I suppose firstly because I'm fed up with journalistic inaccuracy. It's pretty easy to check that sort of fact. Harder to check whether the £12m Jeffrey Archer is supposed to have received as an advance from Macmillan is correct because we don't disclose our financial arrangements with authors. What I can say is nobody should believe what they read in newspapers, particularly when it comes to authors' advances.

Secondly, because the story is a perfect illustration of globalisation in our industry. The New York Times is as important in the UK now as the London Times used to be. The nationality and domicile of an author is becoming irrelevant.

However, the really important thing is that Claire Messud's books are receiving the attention and praise they deserve. It's not too late to buy The Emperor's Children - just check out the reviews.

Incidentally, can anyone help me find a dvd of my favourite poker film, Big Deal at Dodge city (properly known as A Big Hand for the Little Lady)?

In the olden days, when I lived in Oxford and worked at Oxford University Press I was honoured to be made a Supernumerary Fellow of a very new Oxford institution, Green College. I was reminded of those days by the receipt of their alumni magazine, Green College News, this morning.

The creation of Green College was made possible by money from Cecil and Ida Green, the founders of Texas Instruments, and inspiration and vision from Richard Doll. He was convinced that, as medical sciences and adjacent disciplines exploded in importance, traditional Oxford colleges would simply not have the resource to offer scientists and scholars enough support. The only solution was a brand new college. He dedicated his later years to the college and ensured its success not just when he was Warden but in supporting the Wardens who succeeded him.

I spent time with Doll during the publication of a small book originally published by the National Institutes of Health as an extended journal article. We republished in paperback as The Causes of Cancer and sold quite a few copies. Neither Doll nor his distinguished co-author Richard (now Sir Richard) Peto would accept personal royalties. It was small but startingly important and is still the starting point for discussion about the effects of smoking, food and other environmental factors on cancer incidence.

I have always regarded Richard Doll as an example of the very best scientist, very best scholar, very best university politcian, very best person and not a bad wicketkeeper in his prime. I was therefore horrified by the recent attacks on him suggesting that his payment for consultancy by chemical companies threw suspicion on his research findings and statements. This piece by Cristina Odone puts another slant and finishes by saying:

Each age has its mores: we cannot expect the giants of the past to live by ours.

This is true but might imply he did something wrong. Rubbish. Richard Doll has saved more lives through his research than almost any other medical scientist in history. He lived frugally and his earnings went to support Green College and other causes. He nurtured students and encouraged colleagues.The character assassins should  be ashamed of themselves and we should continue to be grateful for human DNA which occasionally produces simply great human beings.

Incidentally here is a key slide of Doll's epidemiological experiment which proved the link between smoking and cancer and a quote from the British Medical Journal:

The study was remarkable in many ways. First was its magnitude. Despite the fact that it started in 1951, when England was still recovering from the economic devastation of World War II, the field of epidemiology was just emerging, and 13 more years would pass until the U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health, Dr. Doll was able to recruit 34,439 of the 40,000 male physicians in the United Kingdom to participate in the study. Second was its duration. The study spanned 50 years, capturing the time in the subjects’ lives when tobacco use was just starting to show an impact on mortality, and continuing through most of their deaths, when the risk of use again met the risk of no use. This is illustrated in Figure1, which approaches perfection and evokes accelerated heart beats and gasps for air among statisticians, much as Michelangelo’s David does among artists. Third was its execution, which resulted in attrition of only 8.8% over 50 years, an average of 63 people or .147% per year. Finally are the results, which tell us that smoking cigarettes reduces life span by approximately 10 years, and increases the likelihood of death by 100% at age 50, 111% at age 60, 121% at age 70, 45% at age 80, and 26% at age 90 and will be the likely cause of death for two thirds of the people who smoke. It also tells us that quitting smoking adds 10 years to a person’s life if they quit by age 30, 9 years if by age 40, 6 years if by age 50, and 3 years if by age 60.