Look at all the big books on the shelves - those macho novels unloosening their belts and boasting of their narrative know-how, those bad long poems with their pretensions to girth, all the fat, flushed, inconsiderate histories, the two- and three-volume tweedy biographies that no one has ever finished. What's so big about big? In the end, doesn't everyone want small? Smaller portions, fewer pints. Life is diminution. We all of us end in abbreviation: RIP.
One should always beware anyone or anything that attempts to bully you into admiration, and in particular one should beware bullies whose only real boast is their size. It is virtually impossible to think of any literary works, even of great historical importance, that would not benefit from being cut down to size. Marx, Spengler, Rabelais - all of these are crying out for editing, abridging and repackaging in a handy pocket format. One might even eliminate large parts of Ulysses .
But, alas, there is no cure for gigantism, a disease for which most writers seem to share a genetic predisposition: the latent Proust awakens within them, and before they know it they're chewing the carpet and working till 2am on their summa . In Britain in particular, where the prevailing fictional mode remains 19th-century realism, the shelves are filled with books as thick as bricks, and as pigshit. Only the rare writer - one possessed of the wit and great good sense, say, of a Jonathan Coe, or the sheer mad stamina of a Lawrence Norfolk or a Barbara Taylor Bradford - can pull off the successful big book. The rest are destined to be remaindered before the epilogue is drying in the laser printer's output tray.
Thank goodness, then, that short books are back in vogue. And that's short books, note, rather than small. Short and small do not necessarily go together: a good Bible should ideally fit into the pocket of a cassock or a pair of combat trousers, or a small tooled-leather carrying case. Even the Observer Pocket Series, undoubtedly the most toothsome and exquisite series of small books ever produced in the English language - no larger than a bar of Kendal Mint Cake and to the adolescent male just as sweet - were never exactly short. Some of them ran to hundreds of pages.
At the point-of-sale in a bookshop you might currently find a Little Book or two, of Calm, or Text Messaging, or Trepanning, all small enough to fit in the palm of your hand or under the leg of a wobbly table. Some publishers have even started to produce books that are small and short and cheap and good. For the price of a tortilla wrap and a decaf cappuccino you could purchase a Canongate Pocket Canon, one of the Penguin 60s or a little bit of the LRB , courtesy of Profile Books, and keep it in your lunchbox. Granta has begun a series of Granta Specials, too, with Ian Jack's dissection of Hatfield, The Crash that Stopped Britain . The Granta/LRB approach will be popular because many newspapers no longer give their journalists the time for in-depth features. We must have short books because we can't have long articles.
A new publisher, the Short Book Company, set up by two ex-journalists, Rebecca Nicolson and Aurea Carpenter, now adds to this small pile of good things. The company's first set of publications is a series of mini-biographies called Short Lives. Not much bigger than a postcard and exactly 96 pages in length, each book can be read in under an hour and then either discarded or posted on to friends and family in parts of the country where the only books on sale are near the cheese counter in Tesco's.
There are snapshot portraits of Carrie Kipling, the "hated wife" of Rudyard, and Commander John Kerans, "last action hero of the British Empire". To give you some idea of how short, small and readable they really are: Edward Fox's excellent baby-biog of Alexander Csoma de Koros, The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven , took me exactly 56 minutes and 32 seconds. This included: one brief trip to the toilet (ground floor); a short break for refreshments (microwaved reheat of the remains of a four-cup cafetière of coffee); several moments staring out of the window as a troupe of Irish dancers in full fig arrived for a competition in the community hall across the road; half-listening to two screened phone calls; and the brief comforting of a crying child who'd accidentally hit himself with the plug on the end of the Hoover flex. Isn't this how most people read?
I could of course right now tell you virtually nothing about Fox's life of the extraordinary de Koros, who may have been a Hungarian linguist and the compiler of one of the first Tibetan dictionaries. But I could be confusing Fox's short book with Rupert Christiansen's about Arthur Hugh Clough, the bottle-cap salesman and inventor of the disposable safety razor. Or Tim Dowling's about King Camp Gillette, the almost-famous Victorian poet. I shall have to read them all again.
The Short Lives series, in other words, is excellent but also instantly forgettable, since that which you read quickly you soon forget. This is not helped by the fact that the subjects covered are all more than a little obscure - glorious, but obscure. The overlooked, it has to be said, are sometimes overlookable.
This is not to deny the possible charm of the unconsidered, the minor or the minute. There are short books that represent a distillate or epitome, or act as an emblem; an exquisite novella such as Fred Uhlman's Reunion or a slim volume of verse by Michael Longley is clearly worth much more than its weight or cover price and certainly more than the latest prize-winning bit of puff.
Most books, however, whatever their length, are trivial, trite, forgettable and perishable, and do not deserve lingering over for even 56 minutes and 32 seconds. A bad short book may therefore be better than a bad long book, since all of us read up against the clock, and we don't like to have our time wasted. Many of us have to read quickly under the necessity of acquiring information. For such purposes, publishers such as Butterworth's and Tolley, the tax and law people, provide an excellent service. A few of us read late at night and for the challenge. For this, and for helping to put us to sleep, we can thank Harvill, Picador and Faber. But most of us read merely for distraction, on the train or the toilet, for which passing pleasures we can thank the editors of the Sun , the Fortean Times , local newspapers, small-circulation poetry magazines and the Short Book Company.
The space for Short Books is wide. Forthcoming joys include a series of reportage, Front Lines, and The History Files, books of narrative history for children. And there should surely be more Short Lives. A short book about the great Miss Frank Buttolph and her notorious menu history of New York, perhaps? Or about Edward Carpenter, the wealthy Victorian homosexual, anarchist, lecturer, writer, sandal-maker, market-gardener and author of the pioneering sex manual, Love's Coming of Age ? You may have suggestions of your own. Why not send your ideas to Ms Carpenter and Ms Nicolson? At least their slush pile will be smaller.
The same people who hate CD samplers and Classic FM will probably hate Short Books and everything they stand for, but they'd be missing the point. There is undoubtedly a virtue in persisting, in revisiting, in the full symphony; in scope and length and depth and breadth. But there is also a wonder in concision: look at the microchip, for example, or the sayings of Oscar Wilde. Of course, to really make their point, Short Books should set up a sister company specialising in the three-volume page-monster. For there is no such thing as the average person. And there is no correct length for a book.
