Those who have travelled with us thus far will have realized by now that although the Lost Club Journal focuses principally on the unheralded and unsung, any authors and books which lack bestseller status, and take readers' fancy, are suitable for Lost Club treatment. It could be argued that in Britain today, apart from living multi-million-copy novelists, the majority of writers are largely unknown. We have encountered individuals who have heard only dimly of Oscar Wilde (or not at all) and J. K. Rowling, while there are many whose brows furrow at the names of H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle ('Colin who?' -- an otherwise intelligent film supernumerary on the BBC's Lost World). There were blank faces on the television quiz programme University Challenge not long ago when a question involved the author of The Woman in White. Even high-profile novelists can receive blows to the ego. One much photographed female bestseller tells how, seeing a woman reading one of her titles, she couldn't help revealing that she wrote the book. 'Of course you did, dear' came the pitying response. There are people to whom the names of renowned and successful authors are as obscure as Premier League soccer players to your editors. Even passionate readers aren't necessarily fascinated by authors per se. As a bookseller told one of us: 'I enjoy detective stories but don't like reading about detective stories.' And how many devotees of the exploits of Richard Hannay, Dr Fu Manchu, Sam Spade and James Bond know much about the lives of John Buchan, Sax Rohmer, Dashiell Hammett and Ian Fleming? -- bestsellers all.
A survey recently showed that only seven per cent of Britons are aware that John Milton wrote Paradise Lost. In a poll of the most unromantic occupations a few years ago the profession of author figured ('ornithologist', we recall, topped the list and 'dentist' was in there somewhere). In another vox pop around the same time, only a small proportion -- six or seven per cent -- said they thought writers had any importance. (Who do people think churn out their beloved soap operas? Machines perhaps.) These figures roughly equate to that percentage of the nation said to buy most of the books. Nor are those working in publishing immune from ignorance. In recent years the celebrated story has done the rounds of the US publisher who, on encountering a poem by Christina Rossetti in an anthology, requested her telephone and fax numbers. (This anecdote, with a name change, was immortalized in a British hit comedy film a few years ago.) And so we will continue examining the work of the 'famous' as well as the lost literary generations . . .
From Issue 4 we will introduce a 'Readers Recommend' section. All readers are invited to submit a few paragraphs or pages on any books and authors they think deserve to be better known. This may become the journal's most informative feature. So do get to work with those styluses, pens, typewriters and word processors.
THE EDITORS