A busy Macmillan stand at the book fair with a pensive blue-shirted loner in the centre (photo courtesy of Keith Martin, Senior Lecturer in Publishing at the London College of Communications).

Our big announcement was one which filled me with pride - the news that Peter Ackroyd was moving his future publishing to Macmillan. I was involved in his last big and successful publishing deal when I was at Reed (and the lists were later sold to Random House) and so somehow it feels more like a continuation than a change. He is one of Britain's great literary talents and his new projects are humdingers. More on Peter here.

And this happy event was matched by the announcement that long-time Picador author Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with The Road.

These two important literary events follow a debate after a recent blog about our publishing Geri Halliwell's children's books. I think the knockers are wrong about Geri Halliwell but that notwithstanding I also think that a healthy publishing campaign thrives on diversity and at Macmillan we are nothing if not diverse in what we publish, how we publish and where we publish.

Here are the red Macmillan English Dictionary balloons taking off from Sao Paulo, Brazil and Beijing, China.

Yesterday was the first day of the LBF in its new home, Earls Court Exhibition Centre - see the strange building below and imagine Books instead of Beer on the giant posters.

Just to remind you why we're here. In the old days the Fair was down the road in West London at Olympia. The organisers persuaded the industry that we had to move - Olympia was too small, it was being turned into a casino, we needed much more modern facilities, We transferred to a new purpose-built facility in the Far East of London. It didn't work. It was hard to get to, not enough women's loos, lousy catering etc. But the organisers were adamant. We had to stay.

And then a team from the Frankfurt Book Fair appeared, like the US Cavalry, over the horizon with an offer to launch a new London Fair in the Spring at Earls Court. The industry was delighted and the press releases were ready to go when all of a sudden the original organisers, Reed Exhibitions announced that the Fair was moving to Earls Court under their management and ownership. The owners of Earls Court had done a quiet deal with Reed thus leaving the Frankfurt bid scuppered. Perfidious Albion was the phrase which came to mind.

Nonetheless, the Frankfurt team were incredibly restrained and dignified; the Reed team were magnanimous and professional; and the Fair is back in West London which suits most exhibitors and visitors.

The new venue is excellent - spacious, well lit and comfortable. The catering is okay but hideously expensive. The management and support staff of the organisers are terrific. There is a smile back on the face of the Fair.

And here's a pic of our stand this year, taken by hotshot photographer Tim Godfray:

My only remaining concern is to ask what it's all about. My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that the elimination of all trade book fairs (LBF, BEA, Bologna, Delhi, Guadalajara, Tokyo, Cape Town etc) might reduce total industry costs by several billion dollars.  Makes a boy think.

I have just received a copy of Green College News, the alumni magazine of Green College, Oxford where I was once a supernumerary fellow (whatever that means). The college was set up by Sir Richard Doll with money from Cecil Green, the founder of Texas Instruments. Doll was then Regius Professor of Medicine and was committed to growing the Oxford faculty of medicine significantly (which has indeed happened, spectacularly successfully). Many of the established colleges were sniffy about offering college facilities to all these new medics ('we'll be over-run...') and so he established Green to abosrb some of this growth and to offer a new sort of Oxford college. He succeeded.

The sad news reported in the magazine is that Green is to merge with Templeton College, an institution set up to specialise in management and business studies. The move is justified on the grounds of scale, cost, academic strategy and available capital (Templeton sold some land and they could use the cash generated to develop further the Green College site in the centre of Oxford).

So, why sad? I'm not sure but I'll bet that academic politics has played a part and that this merger was driven by that more than anything else. The new entity will not differ significantly from the other colleges. The medical and management strands of the individual colleges will be lost. And I'll bet the synergies promised do not emerge. It all sounds like the mergers that happen in publishing on a fairly regular basis where two and two end up making three.

On a more positive note, warmest congratulations to Joe Wikert whose Publishing 2020 blog has won the 2006 Annual Litty Award for Best Publishing Blogger from the Book Chronicle. I'm not surprised.

And finally today is the first birthday of Macmillan New Writing and I asked its editor, Will Atkins, to bring us all up to date with this heinous (in the eyes of some people) creation.

Macmillan New Writing – ‘The Ryanair of Publishing’™ – is a year old this month. We launched in April 2006 with six debut novels, and have published one per month since then. News of the imprint’s creation was greeted with scepticism from some quarters of Literary London: apparently Macmillan was not only ‘abdicating cultural responsibility’ but taking advantage of ‘impressionable young authors’.

So what was all the fuss about? The business model is simple: we consider unsolicited novels from unpublished writers; we don’t pay an advance but we do pay a good royalty. (Nicholas Clee lamented in a recent Bookseller piece that royalties from sales of his own recently published book were ‘lower than they would have been under the terms of the Macmillan New Writing list.’) Anyhow, suffice to say some commentators found this rather modest, rather old-fashioned way of publishing distasteful.

In other respects, MNW works in the same way as any conventional publishing imprint: the books are edited and produced to the same standard as other Pan Macmillan titles; jackets are designed by Pan Macmillan’s design department; publicity is handled by a dedicated publicist.

The criticism that greeted MNW’s launch twelve months ago doesn’t appear to have been taken seriously by writers (and it has, in any case, been outweighed by far more positive coverage since then): around 7,000 completed novels have now been submitted, of which we have published eighteen. The latest, Brian McGilloway’s superb police procedural, Borderlands, was launched last Thursday at a packed event in Derry.

One of my favourite columnists is Matthew Parris. His latest piece is entitled 'So much for world progress. We have failed. We're stuck.' It promotes the contrarian view that there has actually been little progress in the last fifty years in the West (accepting that developing countries have seen significant change). He also referenced this link to the February 1950 issue of Modern Mechanics magazine predicting how the world will be in 2000. The predictions are, by and large, wrong. Here is one paragraph which is fairly typical.

'When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors — all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled “linen” into the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.'

This got me thinking about our ability to predict and how hopeless we probably are. We all remember predictions for the paperless office. Ha. Remember when libraries were going to get rid off all books and replace them with microfilm? Ha.

However, sneakily things do change (usually in an unpredicted fashion) and book publishing is changing. Last year we commissioned Jeff Gomez who is head of internet marketing at Holtzbrinck Publishers USA to write a book about these changes. It's called 'Print is dead' and will be published in print form this Autumn (or Fall). As part of writing the book Jeff has set up the brilliant Print is dead blog and I was particularly taken by this photo and quote from Woody Allen:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

I ran into a little trouble recently when I posted about a competition to promote the Macmillan English Dictionary by releasing red balloons and offering a round-the-world air ticket to the competition winner. In spite of the balloons being biodegradable there was still the issue of carbon dioxide emissions from the plane. In any event, things went ahead and I'm not really too ashamed that the competition has got off to a great start with this launch from Bucharest.

And this one from Madrid.

And while on matters green, you can hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu reading The Gospel according to Judas via audi download without harming a single leaf of a tree. Give it a whirl. On the same theme, Pan Macmillan launched its first e-list with nine titles. There are many many more to come but we wanted to act fast and start learning as soon as possible. I don't suppose we shall make any money on this first list but we and our authors have to engage in the digital world and find the new opportunities and we won't do that by sitting on our hands.

And finally a link to an article in The Spectator all about developments at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the be-all and end-all, the alternative title for our new Complete Shakespeare.

Have a good Spring weekend. I'm preparing for the London Book Fair which, glory be, has returned to West London and within walking distance from my home.

It's an open secret that one of the most innovative and most important parts of general book publishing is in the children's arena. We are very proud that Macmillan Children's Books has been in the forefront of creativity for the last decade and has grown faster than almost any other children's publisher, matched only perhaps by our colleagues at Priddy Books.

Yesterday we announced a major coup in children's publishing, the Ugenia Lavender series from Geri Halliwell. Coverage of the announcement has been extensive and there is much more to come. Congratulations to everyone in the team who has worked so hard to win this programme and thanks in advance for all the work that still needs to happen.

One of the best books published by Picador is John Lanchester's Debt to Pleasure. He is also a journalist and has written an extremely interesting and cogent piece on copyright in a digital age. It's a shame he spoils it by arguing for a legally imposed (but almost certainly legally unenforceable) minimum royalty rate which would have no effect but to increase rancour and bureaucracy.

Exactly a hundred years ago this year (and approximately 99 years before some large American publishers descended on the Beijing International Book Fair 2006 to teach Chinese publishers how to do business) Macmillan appointed F.G.Whittick as travelling representative in China. A year on the headcount was doubled by the appointment of M.E.Taur as his assistant on $40 per month (not bad for those days) but this didn't work out and Taur was 'demoted' to being a 'mere' translator. Selling Macmillan's very British and rather imperial titles in China proved tough and so a local publishing programme was established including 'Arithmetic for Chinese Schools' and in 1912 a Chinese school atlas.

In 1979 the programme was revived after a visit by Harold Macmillan, then aged 85 but still determined to do a publishing deal and to muse on the 'unheard of possibilities we must be ready for.'

This century of hard (and often unprofitable) work is beginning to pay dividends now with the establishment of New Standard English as market leader in the Chinese English Language Teaching market; Nature China as the premier shop window for Chinese science; Nature Asia which makes English-language scientific information available Chinese, both simplified and traditional, as well as Japanese and Korean; Macmillan Production Asia which sources print and associated products for Macmillan and many other publishers; and much else.

The latest venture in this centenary year I mentioned earlier in the week and I can now link to a page all about Picador Asia which we launched at the excellent Asia House with the help of our Chinese literary adviser and make-things-happen guru, Toby Eady. It is a great initiative with great books, great authors and a continuation and enrichment of a great tradition of learning from China rather than lecturing to China.

Here are the first two authors in the list, Diane Wei Liang and Fan Wu.

Yesterday I wrote in praise of Wilbur and in the hope that his clutch of number one best selling positions (in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand) might be added to in the UK. I can now confirm that The Quest is indeed the best selling novel in the UK this week, way ahead of number two.

And finally and with no particular logic I thought I'd show you this link which popped up as a Google ad here recently. It is quite extraordinary but perhaps I'm simply being old-fashioned.