One aspect of being a published writer I have come to dislike is book signing. Why? The answer is simple: though a “funny writer” who is “seldom lost for words” (according to some overgenerous reviewers), in reality I am quite shy and find it hard to come up with a witty and original dedication on the spur of the moment, face-to-face with a “fan” or would-be reader. I normally limit myself either to some boring “best wishes” or to a rather banal quip, borrowed from a colleague during my First Life, in Moscow: “To So-and-So, with a warm dedication!”
I am not the only one to suffer from this peculiar writers’ dread. The legendary Joseph Heller, author of the immortal Catch-22, with whom I struck a warm yet sadly short friendship several months before his death, told me once over breakfast at the Cheltenham Literary Festival how much he hated book signings.
He recalled how he was once invited to sign some books in the Mall of America. “There were three people at my table. And next to me, the lady from Wheel of Fortune, who never says a word in the programme, just rotates the wheel, was signing copies of her autobiography. And you know, Vitali: the queue to her table was stretching for over a mile!”
My fear of dedications, or even simple autographs (autographobia?) has increased dramatically since I stumbled upon a website trading in celebrity autographs a couple of years ago. Remembering Boris Pasternak’s “It is not seemly to be famous”, I’ve never considered myself a “celebrity”, and yet, to my consternation, I found my own hasty signature on offer for £10—the same price suggested for Nick Hornby’s, yet far below Barbara Cartland’s at £20 and Dr Seuss’s at £85! The website was effectively encouraging potential buyers to base their appreciation of writers on the relative value of their autographs!
Another shocking revelation occurred recently, when I accidentally discovered several of my books with “warm dedications” on eBay. Their duly reproduced half-title pages were dissected with uneven, as if embarrassed, diagonal scribbles of my dedications to people I could not even remember. Despite such blatant desecrations, the books were priced well above their normal market value.
Wikipedia defines a book dedication as “the expression of friendly connection or thanks by the author towards another person”. Among those “eBayable” books, there was one which I remembered signing for a former colleague: “For J—a fellow investigative hack—with all warmest wishes!” it ran. The signed book was priced at £52.60—close to the overall royalties I received for that particular title.
I was happy for J, who must have “investigated” the book market before deciding he could benefit from it. In any case, I had no moral right to judge him. Once, when I was very hard up, I auctioned a book by Arthur Conan Doyle, signed by the author to his spiritualist researcher and assistant William Leslie Curnow. (I had bought it for a fiver in a secondhand bookshop a couple of months earlier.) The only difference was that, unlike with J, I hadn’t had a “friendly connection” with the creator of Sherlock Homes.
Writing dedications is increasingly regarded as a separate literary genre, with its own undisputed classics. One of them was the actor, writer, raconteur and director Peter Ustinov. Sir Peter and I had been friends from our first encounter in 1990, to the day of his passing in March 2004. I think that the best ever general dedication (meaning one printed in the book, rather than being handwritten) comes from his autobiography Dear Me, recently reprinted by Penguin Books: “To all those who, by accident or design, have not been included in this book.”
I also had my own dedication on the half-title page of an early edition of this book, handwritten by Ustinov, or Piotr Ionovich, as I used to call him jokingly, Russian-style—after his first name in Russian, Piotr, and the patronymic (his father’s name was Iona): “For Vitali—the Antipodean Statue of Liberty—with love and affection”. It was the first of many “warm dedications” to me on the pages of his other books. I treasure them all, alongside his impromptu sketches, drawn on napkins in the restaurants of Melbourne, Sydney, London, Manchester, Rome and other cities, where we lunched or dined. His friendship was one of the biggest gifts of fate I have ever received.
After one of our last meetings, Piotr Ionovich presented me with his book My Russia, with the following dedication:
For Vitali—Brother, Nephew, Son—in Spirit, in Laughter, in Rotundity, and in a tranquil earnestness of purpose.
No matter how rich (“rotund”?) or impoverished I may get in the future, I am not going to put this book on eBay!
