Private Eye‘s ‘Pseuds Corner’ this week picks up an advert from the London Review of Books, for ‘special limited first edition’ copies of Ian McEwan’s new novel The Children Act:

‘Comprising 100 copies only, printed on Logan Book Wove 150gsm paper. Seventy-five are quarter-bound in Kaduna Green Nigerian Goatskin, the sides letterpress-printed on Passport Sage Felt with a design by Edward Bawden and numbered 1 to 75. Twenty-five copies, number I to xxv, are fully-bound in the same leather and contain three facsimile pages of notebook manuscript and one page of hand-corrected typescript from an early draft of the novel, all supplied by the author. Full leather £350 (sold out); Quarter £175’.

It’s always startling to be reminded that the modern book world, apparently so open and democratic, is in fact full of status distinctions. There is the basic distinction between paperback and hardback, which seems fairly trivial but has significant implications–in the way it creates a pecking order of early readers and latecomers, or its tendency to separate formal, sit-down reading from informal reading-on-the-hoof. Now we also have ebook editions, bought over a wire, weightless, malleable, accessible from numerous platforms, and so divorcing the experience of reading from any particular physical form. But as we come to terms with this new technology, our culture is still busily producing leather-bound books with mock-manuscript fragments tucked into them–not to mention typescripts with marks from the author’s hand. What should we make of this? More interestingly, perhaps, what would Ian McEwan make of this?