International excellence, local twist

In this episode, Arthur talks to Jeremy Boraine, the publishing director at Jonathan Ball Publishers, one of South Africa’s biggest publishers of general-interest books, and now parent company to Icon Books in London. They talk about what it’s like to be a publisher, balancing predictable bestsellers with new voices, about audiobooks, and about acquiring Icon. They also reflect on the challenge of diversity in publishing, and the recent fallout over an unauthorised biography of Siya Kolisi.

Links from the show:

• Jonathan Ball Publishers
• Icon Books
• Mark Gevisser on The Book Lounge’s podcast

Transcript

Arthur Attwell 0:04
Welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I’m Arthur Attwell.

Arthur Attwell 0:10
For many of us, the role of ‘The Publisher’ is almost mythical. That distant, unknowable keeper of dreams, to writers of fiction and general interest books. This mythical publisher lies behind a curtain of agents and assistants, occasionally dispensing little notes of rejection or encouragement, whose effect on our self worth is wholly out of proportion to reality. Somehow, as a society, we have invested publishers, the people who decide what to publish, with enormous cultural cachet. Still, they’re just people. I’ll be very, very happy if my conversations with some of them here can make that clear. Because I think everyone would be better off if our relationship with publishers were more human, if we knew a little more about them, and the kinds of decisions and trade-offs they make. At the very least, perhaps that’ll help us write better submission letters for them to read.

Arthur Attwell 1:26
I’ll get to talk with many publisher humans in the coming months about what it’s like to make books possible, and to choose which books to make. Today, to start, I’m talking to Jeremy Boraine, the publishing director at Jonathan Ball Publishers. Jonathan Ball, the company, is one of South Africa’s biggest publishers of general interest books, what publishing folk call trade books. Having recently bought Icon Books in the UK, Jonathan Ball is now properly an international publishing company. Jeremy runs a team of half a dozen publishers and editors that find and craft much of South Africa’s best nonfiction. I wanted to know more about what it’s like to be a publisher, and how he balances new local publishing with selling imported books. How they think about audiobooks, and what acquiring Icon Books might mean for his company and their authors. We also got to talk about the steady but glacial pace of change in the unbearable whiteness of publishing, and the impossible dilemmas of staying afloat while publishing new voices. And, I finally get to ask Jeremy about the recent fallout over their unauthorised biography of Siya Kolisi.

Arthur Attwell 2:43
Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Jeremy Boraine 2:45
It’s a pleasure to be here, Arthur.

Arthur Attwell 2:48
I have a little confession to make, you have the job that I tried to get. Not your specific job, I mean, a job like yours. In the mid 2000s, I left schoolbook publishing, to specifically try to get into trade, general interest publishing. The industry, as you know, does not have high turnover in the publisher realm. It was just at the time when you were publisher at Penguin. It was literally my dream job at the time. Because I couldn’t get it, I had to start my own company. Here I am, 15 years later, running an agency and still occasionally wonder what would have happened if I’d pulled it off. So that’s my little confession. I’m gonna leave it up to you to explain to me why it would have been a terrible idea, that it’s the worst job in the world. But I suspect you won’t be able to do that.

Jeremy Boraine 3:34
I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disappoint you. Yeah, look, I mean, I also, I did an escape from educational publishing. I did my time there, but with always an eye to move into trade publishing. I’d worked in trade publishing in New York, years before that, and got a real taste for it. I think I got lucky because there are not a lot of positions in the industry for a commissioning editor or a publisher. It took me a while to kind of get to the position. You know, I think I sort of frittered away my 20s, and maybe even my early 30s, doing things that are, you know, kind of were interesting, but not really what I wanted to do. In fact, it was my dream when I left school to work in publishing. I think what I love about it is that, is that it’s something new every day, a new author, a new contract, a new book, a new audience, a new reader, a new jacket design. It’s sort of endlessly interesting.

Arthur Attwell 4:33
The other thing that Jonathan Ball does is distribute international books locally. How do you manage the relationship between those agency sales and the local publishing? They might be quite different headspaces.

Jeremy Boraine 4:46
So Jonathan Ball has the contract to distribute a number of British and American publishers here. So HarperCollins, and Hachette, and Simon and Schuster, and Faber and Faber, a whole lot. This is something that we’ve built up over, well, 40 years, in fact, since Jonathan Ball started the company. We take their copies, and we put them in our warehouse, and we sell them to the bookshops, and we market them. If their author is coming out here, we tour them and organise launches or events, or whatever it is. I just kind of get on and run our publishing. Course I liaise at the London Book Fair, or through email, or what have you, with publishers at these various companies.

Jeremy Boraine 5:28
We’re always looking for opportunities to collaborate. You know, by way of example, Martin Meredith is a British journalist and academic. He’s written a lot on Africa over the years. His UK publisher is Simon and Schuster, and whenever he brings out a new book that we feel is a good fit with Jonathan Ball, then we’ll do it as a co-edition. You could just print it in the UK as a Simon and Schuster book and bring it in here. But instead, it’ll become a Jonathan Ball branded book, and we may have input on the, on the editorial, on the jacket design. Some may recall Martin’s book The State of Africa, published some 15 years ago or more, but we, I think we’ve sold about 40, or 45,000, copies just in South Africa.

Jeremy Boraine 6:20
There are other benefits that are less tangible. You know, so we have an annual sales conference and the export sales managers come out to South Africa to present, you know, their forthcoming titles to our sort of collected masses of Jonathan Ball, the sales teams and the marketing teams and publicity and what have you. We might get a heads up on jacket design, on new genres that are growing, technical developments, you know, what’s happening with audible.com? What’s happening with amazon.com? What are the kind of rates that are being paid for sales through new channels, you know, and these are relationships that are built up over years and years. To have access to that is very useful. I mean, it’s all, it all works pretty well. I should just add that, you know, the local publishing division is a smaller part of the whole in terms of revenues. You know, a major part of the business is the import market. It’s similar to Penguin Random House, or Pan Mac, is that the local publishing is not the bigger part of it. But, the local publishing is more profitable. So in that sense that’s another sort of complementary factor between the the large imports, which gives us the infrastructure to do our small local publishing. In return, we give sort of higher profits to the company.

Arthur Attwell 7:42
That’s fascinating, because I’d always worried that the local publishing to some extent had to be cross-subsidised. Recently, Jonathan Ball publishers bought Icon Books in the UK. This is the first time I’ve heard of a South African publisher buying a UK publisher. Have I got that right? If so, that just sounds exciting. What possibilities does it open up?

Jeremy Boraine 8:02
It all happened at a quite unusual time, which sort of gave us pause for thought. I mean, this is something we’ve been sort of looking at doing for some time, and the sale actually went through on the week that we went into, under lockdown. It was a kind of a moment of like, well, what have we done? Because this was something that we’ve thought about on and off for years. In fact, before I was even at Jonathan Ball, and I’ve been here, I think it’s 14 going on 15 years. Strategically, you know, there’s, the South African market, even if it were to grow, is only going to grow so much. In fact, what we’ve seen is shrinkage.

Jeremy Boraine 8:43
If you think about it, you know, one of the big dips came with the launch of ebooks. You know, so we were bringing in, as were any import publishing company, they were only print, and then suddenly, we lost all those ebooks that were being imported. Of course, we realise revenues from our own ebooks, but none of the, you know, Hachette, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, any ebook goes through direct. It’s a direct sale. So that, you know, there was quite a rupture to the South African market, both publishers and the bookshops. This was a plan to sort of like establish a base elsewhere in a market that may offer us new opportunities. For now, Icon Books is pretty much that they must get on and do what they do. It’s not that we are telling them what to publish or how to run their business. I mean, they’ve been, they’ve been around for a while and that’s … and that’s what they’re doing.

Jeremy Boraine 9:39
I think the goal, you know, I mean, there’s no point in just like letting things stand still, you know, I think the goal is to grow Icon Books over time. If you stuck in a market like South Africa, and you’re publishing books for South African readers, well, maybe one needs to put one’s head up and say, well could one publish for a more global market? Is there a way that we can curate content or commission authors and publish books for, you know, an international market? So Icon Books, you know, they don’t just sell their books in the UK. I mean, because they’re based in the UK with, you know, access to international markets … I mean, they sell a lot of their books to the US and Australia and you know, basically the English language world plus Europe. Perhaps it’ll be a conduit to trying to earn foreign income. I think it’s a excellent survival strategy, to be honest.

Jeremy Boraine 10:38
I think further, I mean, I don’t want to make any commitments here, but I think it’s also could be a boon for authors, in that we will be able to more efficiently take their books onto an international stage. Of course, a lot of the books we publish are very much geared for the South African reader. That’s shown through our ebook sales and our Audible sales and our export sales over the years. I mean, you know, it’s, our South African. It’s not like suddenly they’re going to start selling tens of thousands of copies to Americans and Australians, I mean, we won’t. But something might happen. It’s kind of a maximising opportunity, I guess.

Arthur Attwell 11:18
It gives me such pleasure to even discuss such a thing, because I remember 20-something years ago, being a bookseller at Exclusive Books, and feeling a bit sad that the South African publishing shelf had books and covers on it that just weren’t up to the production standards of the books we were seeing from the US. The covers were never quite as slick. The paper stock was, was poor. A lot of South African books are still published on 80 gram bond. It just felt wrong in the hand. Then something seemed to happen in the early 2000s, where all of a sudden, our books started looking like anything you’d get out of London or New York. What was that? This was the, of course, the time when you hit Penguin, so maybe you did it. Anyway, what do you think happened?

Jeremy Boraine 12:10
Exactly. 2002, I left educational publishing and join trade publishing and … [LAUGHS]. No, I, you know, I, I don’t know, I’m not that familiar with trade publishing before then in South Africa. I suppose it could be a, you know, perhaps it was a continuum, following the end of isolation. It could be, there could be a number of reasons, sort of a number of companies or individuals that started to influence things and to look more closely at well, what paper do you use? What cover designs are there? What kinds of finishes are there? Why don’t we adopt the format that the UK uses? Or what, you know, whatever that might be. I mean, it’s a, it’s a good thing, isn’t it that we, you know, that we … that we sort of moved in that direction. I mean, of course, from a production standards point of view, you want that, but sometimes it’s also a case of kind of getting the right balance of sort of international excellence, but also sort of local quirkiness or a local twist.

Arthur Attwell 13:09
Yeah, I remember when I met my wife, Michelle, in 2005, she had just started as a publisher at Oshin, which was what is now PRH, really. Because she didn’t come from book publishing, she came from magazine publishing, she couldn’t quite believe that books were being printed on 80 gram bond paper, and set off to find a printer who would import some creamy, bulky paper. Little moments like that, individuals getting into the industry and making small decisions really put us among the best in the world in cover design these days. The, I was just looking through the Jonathan Ball Publishers website, before this podcast, just marveling at just how good that stuff is now. We’ve really got some exceptional designers.

Jeremy Boraine 13:50
There are some brilliant designers in South Africa. There really are.

Jeremy Boraine 13:54
Do you feel that there have been shifts in what’s being published over the last 10 years? I mean, for the longest time, it was clear that publishers were essentially publishing to a market the size and colour of New Zealand, you know, 2 million white people? I’m sure that’s still unfortunately has to be the case, to some extent, but are we beginning to shift out of that? Is the market changing? Is the author base getting the kind of representivity that we all want it to be?

Jeremy Boraine 14:22
Yeah, it has, there has definitely been been a shift and I mean, you can look at the Nielsen figures, you know, over time, and look at the demographics and there certainly are more Black authors, not only being published, but also in the best seller lists. You know, there are best selling Black authors, local authors. I mean, we’re not just talking about the last sort of six months or year with with a sort of world explosion around identity and Black Lives Matter. I mean, this, there’s publishing that precedes this. There’s a long way to go. Because there is still a rump of this kind of middle class white market that exists. It’s sort of predictable and, you know, safe. It’s an easy choice. Let’s, let’s face it, I think you said at the beginning of this talk, there’s not a lot of sort of staff turnover in South African publishing. That remains the case. So I mean, most of the decision … the gatekeepers are still white. That needs to change, that does, that does need to change because it’s ah, gatekeepers will be gatekeepers.

Jeremy Boraine 15:28
I think, you know, there are positive signs of sort of authors sort of bursting onto the scene, shaking things up, publishers trying different imprints. Yes, you know, there will always be problems, and there will always be sort of further to go. But certainly, I mean, it’s quite extraordinary, you know, if you think that, so whats it been, 25 years now, and it’s only kind of now in the last few years, it’s taken an awfully long time. You know, I mean, probably, one could sort of look at oneself and sort of say, Well, you know, you were part of the impediment, you know, but I suppose, as a publisher, you know, the thing is, is that one mustn’t be fooled into thinking that you’re some kind of national treasure. You know, at the end of the day, if you’re not making money, you either get closed down or you lose your job, you know, they are commercial enterprises. Yes, they do sort of control cultural output. But you know, you have to keep turning, you can’t pay the salary. Yeah, that’s also, unfortunately, impacts on things, but you can’t have really have a funded model of publishing, that doesn’t work terribly well.

Arthur Attwell 16:38
That dilemma of having to choose between another book you know will sell well to your predictable market, versus an experimental book, a book that is the new kind of book we might want to see much more of, but you can’t be sure about the sales, because you, there really isn’t enough track record to go on. How did those dilemmas play out in the decision-making conversations that you have with your colleagues?

Jeremy Boraine 17:02
You’re doing … however many books you’re doing in a year, you have to have some best sellers. You just simply don’t make target, you don’t make your budget, if you don’t have a couple of best sellers. You know, you can see it year in and year out, if you have a poor year, it’s like, oh, there were no best sellers. They are the books that sort of bring in the bacon, and in a sense, subsidise a lot of your other publishing. If one maintains that kind of strategy that does give you – and you continue to get the best sellers, of course, I mean, that’s a big if – then it does give you leeway to actually experiment more and take risks on other titles. It may be that you change in that experimentation, what you experiment with, you know, you could move into a different market or try and appeal to a new audience.

Jeremy Boraine 17:54
But it remains the same strategy, which is to sort of like peg your list down with some big sellers, and then populate it with other books that may surprise you, some won’t. The big danger is and, you know, we are kind of in the midst of, you know, this sort of economic disaster with the lockdown. It’s difficult to know, you know, will, how will the market recover? How will it look going forward? I’m not sure if anyone really knows. So, will we still be able to find the best sellers in a market that is curtailed? People simply have less money, and they just can’t buy books. So we shall, we shall see. We shall see.

Arthur Attwell 18:37
Another area which I’m just personally fascinated in is audiobooks. I know that South African publishers have only been really doing audiobooks regularly for the last year or two, so it’s early days. It just does seem to me that South Africa is kind of a perfect place for audiobooks. We’ve got so many people commuting, so many people who aren’t confident readers. Increasingly, we’re able to get over WiFi constraints or, you know, data constraints with just the downloading of files. I like to believe we’re on the cusp of seeing a boom in audiobook sales for publishers. Am I being too optimistic? What are the challenges there and what is the level of interest, do you think, from publishers, in really exploring audiobooks as a serious sales channel?

Jeremy Boraine 19:21
Look, first let me say that I absolutely love audiobooks and you know, I’m quite a convert to them. One thing about lockdown is that you know, I used to listen to them on my commute and although I’m delighted not to be spending that much time in the traffic, I do miss the occasional audiobook. I think it’s a fantastic area. We, Jonathan Ball, we signed a contract with audible.com, I think it was about two years ago. We’ve sort of come on stream for the last year now. The sales pretty much track our print sales, you know, not to the same numbers, but you know, if a book is selling well in print, well then the audio, Audible book seems to also do well. I mean, one of the barriers is the cost. It can be R100,000, you know, quite easily that you could spend on a good voice and recording and, and what have you. You know, currently, if you sell a couple of hundred, then you’re happy. You are not, you know, it’s quite hard to cover your costs, it really is, which is why we went in with Audible. They, I mean, essentially, we licensing our Audible rights to them. They pick up all those costs.

Jeremy Boraine 20:30
I mean, the great thing was, is that I, I sort of thought that they would have studios in the UK in the US, and we would have very little input on who got to read the books. In fact, they came out here, cased the joint, and they use local studios quite a lot and local voices. So it has given work to that industry, but more importantly, the voices that they use are realistic, you know, so, so for Kwezi by Redi Tlhabi, you know, they’ve used an African woman’s voice, and not, you know, Stephen Fry, who I’m sure would do a good job, but you know, would be wholly inappropriate. So that’s been good. I mean, the, not the downside. Well, the downside is that they so dominant, it’s the obvious choice to make. And I think they’ve come in here, and they have signed up a few other publishers.

Jeremy Boraine 21:25
You know, the thing about licensing your content, as opposed to doing it yourself is that the revenues are, you know, you get paid a royalty which you share with the author. I mean, you sell your, your, your 10,000. I mean, you’re not gonna make much money. The print edition is still where we make our money. I mean, that may all change. I mean, when I joined Jonathan Ball it was like, right, you do the print book. That’s it, you know. Then the ebook came along. Then there’s, you know, we have, we have an international distribution through Ingrams, the lightning source program, which is a, you know, print on demand program. Now we have the Icon option and you know, Icon Books option, we have the Audible option. So there are these sort of multiple editions, which is excellent, but the primacy remains local print, for now.

Arthur Attwell 22:16
One thing that I’m curious to talk about, if it’s something you’re comfortable talking about … Last year, you published the Siya biography, Siya Kolisi biography. It’s written by a friend of mine, so I got to hear Jeremy Daniel’s story, as he was working on it, he was very excited. Then it was published, and then there was a bit of a negative reaction. I’m being understated here, it was fairly significant negative reaction, to Siya Kolisi’s story being told without his involvement. There was just so much more to the story than I knew. But it’s an interesting question for publishers about unauthorised biographies, about how we choose to tell stories, and about how we run businesses. How do you think about the publishing decisions, and how we can be sensitive publishers in South Africa and tell peoples stories? Maybe you can tell a bit more about the story, if it’s a story that you feel can be told in a short space of a podcast. It might deserve much more time than we can give it.

Jeremy Boraine 23:18
I mean, I’m happy to … I’m happy to talk about it. So yes, I mean, there’s a long tradition of the unauthorised biography. I think the, you know, our, our starting point is really, so if you have a person of national, international prominence, what would it be like if you only had one biography on that person, and it was the authorised, sanitised version? What would the world be like, without unauthorised biographies or multiple biographies? You know, I think the world would be a poorer place. There’s a space for the authorised and I think that there’s equally a space for the unauthorised. There are many reasons why something, why this one, why we attracted the opprobrium of Siya Kolisi and, and his wife. I mean, I had been trying to land his official biography for some years before I commissioned the unauthorised and in fact, made a, an offer, at the size of which I’ve never made before, through his agent, and he turned it down. He chose to turn it down. Which is, you know, his right to do.

Jeremy Boraine 24:20
What I tried to say is that if you don’t publish around the time of the World Cup, it’s not going to sell as well. It will sell at its best during or after the World Cup, depending on how well you do. We published in August, I think it was, and you know, it trickled out of the stores. I mean, there wasn’t really, seriously not very little interest, but of course, as we got closer to the final that sold more and more and more. Suddenly people woke up and suddenly Siya was a massive, massive hero. I mean, he was the, he was the Springbok captain, so there was going to be some interest but if we had been knocked out in the quarterfinals, I mean, no one would even read the word about this because it would have been over, you know, we would have been waiting till, till the next World Cup. So we were kind of a victim of success as it were. Because I mean, we took all the risk, we, you know, we made the investment, we went out and found the author to write this and we gave, you know, Siya Kolisi an opportunity to, to participate.

Jeremy Boraine 25:20
I really feel quite strongly that, you know, we had every right to do this. It isn’t commonly known that we approached them, made a, frankly, a massive offer for the authorised biography. And, you know, the agent said, turned it down, the agent then when we said we’re doing an unauthorised biography she said, okay, you know, that’s fine. There was no kind of push back then. It was just kind of like, alright, well, you know, you do it. In fact, she collaborated a little bit in the beginning. We didn’t have any direct dealings with Siya and his camp other than through the agent. It was done in good faith. We have done unauthorised biographies before and we’ve got some in the pipeline now. You know, we and we won’t, we won’t treat them any differently.

Jeremy Boraine 26:07
As to why someone who is a public figure … I mean, if you sort of say, okay, let’s compare an unauthorised biography, to an extensive feature in You Magazine. There’s no real difference. Other than that, the You Magazine article runs to six pages and maybe 1,500 words with lots of pictures. You Magazine is making a tremendous amount of money from it. But I mean, the subject is not necessarily making, you know, any money from it. So what is, what is, what is the difference? Or newspapers endlessly putting something on the front page of their newspaper to sell more copies? Because there’s public interest in the subject. I mean, it’s a public interest debate. I mean, I, I’ll tell you who I do feel sorry for and that’s for Jeremy Daniel, because he put his heart into it. I think he actually wrote a really, really good book, you know, and he was an enormous fan of Siya, he went out of his way to write a really, really lovely story about him. And, you know, so for the sort of the insults that he’s faced, I just think it’s just really inappropriate and unfair. So yeah, I mean, that’s my … that’s my say on the matter. I … hopefully it’s kind of over now. But you never know.

Arthur Attwell 27:22
Yeah. Thank you. I know that you shouldn’t have your favorite children. But of the books you published recently, just kind of as we wrap up, what do you think are things, books that you are particularly pleased to have published in the last year or two?

Jeremy Boraine 27:38
I suppose every book offers, it offers something, you know, in what we publish, and the sort of, the joy of the publisher might be in the, in the figures, in the text and the, in the, you know, in the the way the author promotes the book. But I think a book that I mean I waited a long time for is The Pink Line by Mark Gevisser, which we released two months ago. You know, you, I mean, Mark took 10 years to write the Thabo Mbeki biography. It was, it was a tour de force. Now the The Pink Line took him five or six years. For those who haven’t, aren’t familiar with what it’s about, I mean, The Pink Line is a term that he’s come up, which is to explore where gay people around the world have either won or lost rights. Political rights, human rights. So he spent time, in-depth time, in a number of countries in the world. Mexico, Kenya, Russia, Israel, the United States, and really sort of like through these stories of these individuals has sort of explored where they’ve lost and where they’ve won. It’s a, I think it’s quite a groundbreaking book.

Arthur Attwell 28:53
I know that Mark Gevisser recently had a fantastic interview on the Book Lounge podcast. I’ll put that link in the show notes so that people can listen to Mark talk about it himself.

Jeremy Boraine 29:01
I think, it’s I mean, just to mention one other, and this goes back a year now. I mean, it’s always a great day to publish a new Johnny Steinberg book. So you know, we did that last year, One Day in Bethlehem. I do regard him as one of South Africa’s greatest sort of, you know, writers, and he’s been consistently delivering these extraordinary stories for about 18 years now. I think. So. That was that. That was another one.

Arthur Attwell 29:28
Fantastic. Last question, as we head into the end of the year, what are your highlights? What’s the book or books that we should look out for?

Jeremy Boraine 29:39
Look, I mean, this, this, this financial year is about survival under COVID. Any book that’s out there and selling at all I’m immensely grateful for. It’s, it’s not it’s not easy, and I think any publisher would back me up on that. It’s really, really, really tough. So you know, we have quite a few. We’ve got a few books out there. I’ll just mention two. You know, one is Miracle Men by Lloyd Burnard. That’s another foray into rugby. It’s basically how … how we won the World Cup. It’s just as fabulous sort of inside story of how Rassie and the boys sort of won the World Cup. It’s a great one for the fans. You know, if let’s face it, when we did bring the Cup back, there was great joy and celebration. It’s just a great story.

Jeremy Boraine 30:31
Then I have this other book that, you know, it’s an totally unknown author. Her name is Joan Louwrens, and she’s a medical doctor in her 60s, she lives in Knysna. She’s written a memoir called A Wilder Life. I just love it because she has lived life the way I think a lot of us don’t, which is, you know, we’re in our offices and we behind PCs. Really briefly, she was a young GP, not a GP, a young medical doctor, married, two kids, working somewhere near the, near a game park, and her husband died young. She was left with two young daughters. You know, most people would kind of think, well, I need to kind of find a safe job and raise my daughters, and then sort of see what happens in life. Well Joan was having none of that. She has worked on all seven continents, but mostly in the remotest place she could find. On ships in the middle of, you know, the Atlantic or on islands or, anyway. It’s just as wonderful journey where she kind of, as a medical doctor, she’s used this as a way to just keep exploring the world. I think as we are kind of stuck in our houses under lockdown, and can’t travel outside our borders, it’s just a great escape. It’s kind of like, yes, I could have lived my life like that. But you know, Joan, she’s, she’s an amazing, amazing woman. So yeah, so those are those are two.

Arthur Attwell 31:56
Fantastic. Thanks. I look forward to that. Jeremy, thank you so much. I have absolutely thoroughly enjoyed that conversation and I really appreciate your joining us.

Jeremy Boraine 32:06
Arthur, thanks very much. I also enjoyed it and I hope I haven’t sort of given too much away [LAUGHS]. But a lovely interview. Thank you.

Arthur Attwell 32:17
Thank you for listening. Please make sure you subscribe, and it would be such a help if you would tell a friend about the show. Also, don’t forget to send us your own book-making topics and conundrums at howbooksaremade.com where I’ll also post links to things we talked about today.

Arthur Attwell 32:34
How Books Are Made is supported by Electric Book Works, where my team and I make books all day, every day, in mostly-sunny Cape Town, South Africa.