Richard Curtis Verses the Publishing Industry, 2009

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early '90s Publisher's Weekly ran literary agent Richard Curtis's end-of-the-year summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, "Merger, He Wrote," (1986), "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine" (1989) and "Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off" (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with "The Year of the Platform," which boasted such lines as,

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

Last year's effusion, "The Coming of the POD People," had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009's poem, "The Yr of the Tweet", Curtis writes,

It’s fine for paradigms to shift
As long as authors don’t get stiffed.

Click here to read it in its entirety, and discover how Curtis actually found a rhyme for "Shatzkin". Verses for prior years as well as his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.

The only problem is that if you really enjoy his latest poem, you'll have to wait a whole year before you get to read another.

John Douglas

Poem excerpts (c) Richard Curtis reprinted from Publishers Weekly, December 31 2007, December 22 2008 and December 21 2009 Reed Elsevier Magazines.