Issue 28 Spring 2000 Fire and Ice: Children's Literature in the New Millennium Philip Pullman >>>>>>>>>> Next Conference Item	Collections under which this       article appears:       Reading       Y L G Related Articles or Resources

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

So said Robert Frost. I'll come back to him later.

When I was asked to speak about children's literature in the new millennium, I thought, well, all right; it was a long time away; no doubt I'd be both wiser and better informed by the time September 26 came along, and I'd know what to say.

But as the time got closer I found myself aghast at my own nerve. How dare I stand up on my hind legs and talk about something that hadn't happened yet? Anybody who makes predictions is chancing his arm, but I'm not a politician, and I won't be able to blame anyone else if my predictions fail to come about. I won't be able to say "Oh, it was all the fault of the last government," or "Events overtook us," or even that old standby, that catch-all excuse, that phrase that comes ready-printed on every blank sheet of government information, "We blame the teachers."

But at least you can get rid of politicians by voting them out of office. Nobody voted for me, so you're stuck with me till I fall off the twig. Which means that if I make a prediction and get it wrong, I'll still be around to be pointed out as the twit who said that so-and-so would happen, and it never did, and very silly I shall look.

So I'm not going to predict anything, exactly. Instead I shall employ those two traditional clowns, that music hall double-act whose origins go back to the dawn of the world, namely Hope and Fear. Or Fear and Hope.

So I'm going to speculate a bit and be in turn pessimistic and optimistic about the future of children's literature.

And I'll start from where I live: in Oxford. I've lived there for most of my life, and one of the reasons I live there is the bookshops, principally Blackwell's. Those who know Oxford might remember that Broad Street is largely inhabited by branches of Blackwell's: the main shop, the travel bookshop, the art bookshop, the paperback shop, the children's bookshop, the music shop just around the corner. If you wanted to buy a book, you went to Blackwell's. They're very proud of their tradition of not pestering customers: you're allowed to browse as long as you like, and when I was an undergraduate I read several books from cover to cover, standing unmolested at the shelves. They also had a generous account system: you just turned up at the counter, said you belonged to this college or that one, and without even checking they let you buy a whole stack of books at once and charge it to the shiny new account you had just opened. Eventually, you paid what you owed them, though in my case they had to wait a couple of years after I graduated before I finally paid my account off.

Anyway, Blackwell's seemed to be part of the structure of the university, along with the Examination Schools and the Bodleian Library.

But some time back in the eighties, an old family-owned department store that had occupied a big shop at the other end of Broad Street, right on the busiest corner, closed down. And in a weekend, it filled up with books. Four floors of books! Carpets! Attractive shelving! Assistants wearing T-shirts! The name on the outside of the shop was Dillons. Blackwell's had some competition. Well, I viewed this with grave suspicion. If they could fill a shop with books in a weekend, I thought, then they could decide equally suddenly that books weren't profitable enough, and clear them all out and replace them with four floors of shoes instead. So I didn't buy any books from Dillons, I always bought them from Blackwell's - though I might browse in Dillons if I thought no one was looking.

And meanwhile things were changing in the book world more widely. The Net Book Agreement vanished, for example. No one knew what that would mean; several of us thought it would wipe out the local independent bookseller altogether.

But after a few years, something happened to Dillons: it was taken over, and the name on the shop front changed to Waterstone's. So now in Broad Street there are all the branches of Blackwell's, and Waterstone's. I do buy from Waterstone's, because they've been very good about selling my books. And things seemed to be settling down.

However, nothing remains still. Opposite Waterstone's, on the other corner of this very busy intersection, there was a branch of Debenham's. It had been there for years. But recently they emptied it and began a massive rebuilding and refitting. Cranes tower into the sky; the pavement is blocked by scaffolding; it's taking eighteen months. And when it opens again, so I was told by one of the few independent booksellers in Oxford, the entire ground floor, an immense amount of space, will be occupied by - Borders.

Now Borders is one of the huge American chain bookstores, the other being Barnes and Noble. I visited the corporate headquarters of Borders Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a couple of years ago. It was absolutely vast. And I learned on that same American trip what the big chains do. They have people going round from state to state looking for a small or middle-sized town that has an independent bookstore in it. They know from that that the town can support book buying, that people already have the habit; and they set out to destroy the independent store. They buy not a store but a block, or they build a vast new store just opposite the site of the independent one in the out-of-town mall; they fill it with books, and they discount wildly; and before you know it, the independent store is dead. I've seen this happening time and time again all over the United States.

And my first fear for the millennium is that this will continue. Bookselling will come to be dominated in this country, as it already is in the United States, by vast chains which are motivated by one consideration alone: money. Now I'm not decrying honest business, and I'm not so daft as to think any shop can survive without making a profit. But it's a different kind of profit-making culture going on here, and I don't like the look of it, and I fear it'll get worse. It's a little less civilised, a little more stupid.

So while I'm on the subject, how might it get worse? What else is there to fear?

Well, it's not only booksellers that are merging. It's been a common experience among authors for some time to find that the publisher you've been with for the last few books has been sold, and now belongs to some other corporation, further away, much bigger, much more mysterious.

In itself this might not much matter. I never met the owners anyway. But the further away from the book-creating process the owners are, the less literary the decisions they are called on to make. The questions the real bosses have to address are not ones like "Is this a good book? Will this make a real contribution to literature? Will it help to build the author's career, and can I see it on our backlist still doing well for everyone in ten or fifteen years' time? Will I feel proud to see it on bookshop shelves under our imprint?" and even, the most basic of all, you might think: "Did I personally enjoy reading it?"

Instead, the questions they have to ask are: "Will this make money for our shareholders? Which market should we target? Can we guarantee a return on our investment? How quickly will we go into profit on this title?"

Now these anonymous bosses are not wicked people, and many of them might truly enjoy reading. But simply because of where they're placed, because of the distance between them and the place where the books are made, those are the questions they have to ask, those are the concerns they have to address. Money questions, not book questions.

And because the top people are the money people, and because the shareowners often don't know they own shares in companies that publish books, because what they buy are shares in a big holding corporation - or probably PEPs or whatever they're called now, unit trusts or pension funds or some such thing, which themselves invest in the large corporations which own the smaller companies which themselves own parts of one of the groups which came about when a few small publishers merged years ago. Because the people at the top are so remote from the book-creating process, by which I mean the whole business of nurturing talent and editing manuscripts and knowing about stories - then it's easy for the people at the top to make what they usually call efficiency savings, and rationalisations, and tighten up what looks like waste and duplication and inefficiency, and get rid of editors, and cut down on copy-editing, and thus the whole process becomes coarsened and rushed, and books get put out before they're ready, and talents that are a little out of the usual are dispensed with, and children's books in particular, which used to have slightly longer lifetimes than adult books, will vanish from the shelves within six weeks if they don't sell a lot at once. It's happening already.

And the kind of books that can be published at all becomes determined not by the sort of readers we are, not by our society now, but in order to fit a larger market, which inevitably means some kind of imitation America. I get sent a lot of books for review, and it's striking how many of them recently, especially the sort that weren't the work of a single mind with an original idea but the sort where the writer came into the process rather late on when the concept was already invented and discussed and laid out by some committee, are set in a kind of would-be American never-land which may ostensibly be Britain but where the kids go to a high school, not a comprehensive, and play basketball, and talk about soccer, not football, and where anything distinctly English or Scottish or Welsh is discreetly air-brushed out of existence.

What does worry me is that this isn't something you can pin on a single individual. You can't say that this media mogul, or that conglomerate, are responsible for dragging the world in that direction. It seems to be institutional. It seems to be built in to the way we have moved as a society, as a world, in the past twenty years. Everything has had to surrender to the power of the market. Profit rules every single aspect of our lives.

So little by little everything gets worse. Everything gets a little less truthful, a little more stupid.

And as for bookselling, once Borders has seen off Waterstone's, or Waterstone's has seen off Borders, then there won't be a variety of bookshops in our towns. There won't be any little independent ones; there will be one branch of one huge chain. And for the sake of efficiency, the books they stock in Darlington will be exactly the same as the ones they stock in Penzance, and the local manager will have no say in choosing them, because what's on the shelves will be determined solely by the sale figures for the group overall. That's already beginning to happen. A little less individual: a little more stupid.

Competition is fine, up to a point. But the trouble with this accelerating tendency towards conglomeration and merger, in every field of life, is that once it gets to a certain size, the people in charge forget what the whole thing's for, they forget what the nature of the business is. And furthermore, all markets tend towards monopolies. It's as if a billionaire bought a football club, and applied the principles of business to the Premiership, and set about merging and acquiring and asset stripping and putting his rival clubs out of business, aiming for a monopoly. He'd end up owning the one club that was left, with no one to play, no league to play in, no rivals, no sport, no fans, no money, no future. All by applying the principles of sound business to a field where those principles made no sense and didn't work.

There's another aspect of the publishing world that intrigues me, and although it hasn't quite reached this country yet, it's certainly the case in America. It's the growing separation of the publishing world, the world of books in general, and books themselves, from the rest of society, for a simple reason: it's too expensive to live in New York. This is how it works: a big publisher, whose offices are in Manhattan, takes on a young editor. The young editor has to live within commuting distance, but it's harder and harder to find somewhere reasonably close that they can afford. Salaries for young editors can't cover it. So now the young editors - and the person who told me this is a senior editor, and knows of some personal examples - the young editors can only take on the jobs if they have parents who can subsidise their first couple of years of working in publishing New York. What does that mean? It means that editors are increasingly drawn from a narrower and narrower social circle, and consequently they have less and less knowledge of the wider world. This came up, incidentally, in a conversation about why there are so few literary novels about deer hunting - that being an occupation of poorer people in rural areas, apparently. The young editors who have to be subsidised by their parents to work at all are less likely to commission or publish or understand the worth of books that deal with aspects of life that aren't familiar to them; and so the kind of books published grows narrower and narrower, and books are seen as being of less and less relevance to the life of ordinary people. When you add in the ethnic differences - on the whole, people who can afford to subsidise their grown-up graduate sons and daughters' first years at work tend to be white rather than black - then you can see the way things are going. A little less varied, a little more stupid.

Well, that's the future I fear for the commercial side of the world of books in the new millennium. But there's a non-commercial aspect to our world as well, and it's one that the libraries are very much part of, so I'll address that next.

Nearly thirty years ago, when I'd come down from Oxford and I was drifting about London doing all kinds of different jobs, I thought it would be nice to work in a library, so I applied for a job at Westminster City Libraries and went along to an interview. It wasn't a very serious interview, because jobs weren't hard to get in those days, more of a chat, really. The man who interviewed me said, among other things, that one of the joys of working in the library service was that there were no nasty things like profit and competition to worry about; it was entirely insulated from the world of markets and money and so on. I remember thinking at the time that he was a bit smug about it, and that it probably wasn't altogether a good thing to be quite so insulated from the world, but there it was, he said it because it was true. I've often remembered that remark since then, and thought of the convulsion that must have overtaken his comfortable nest in the years that followed 1979.

Well, I don't need to tell you of the gale-force winds of change that have swept through public services in the past twenty years. Those of you who are my age will remember things as they used to be, and they were a bit cosy and a bit smug, perhaps, but you might remember - and those of you who are younger will find it strange, but it's true - you might remember a time when the overriding concern was not to make cuts and savings, but to offer a service. When it was not unusual for your local library to have quite a few of the new books as soon as they were published. When there was time for staff to chase up books that you didn't have in stock, for special request, and maybe even buy them, or at least order them through the Inter-Library Loan service - I sat on the enquiry desk at Charing Cross Road Library for two years or so at the beginning of the Seventies, and every lunchtime the library would fill up and there'd be a pile of request forms for new books or old books or out-of-the-way-and-hard-to-find books for me to chase up. I became a complete whiz at zipping through bibliographies as I twirled about on my revolving chair - I can still reach for the London Library catalogue, which was down there, and the Booksellers, which were across there - and when I'd found a bibliographical reference, I'd take them through to Thelma the Deputy Librarian in the back office, and she'd send off for them.

The City of Westminster, Heaven knows, was never a rabid hothouse of socialist over-spending, but the assumption was that that was the service, and it was a valuable one, and the borough ought to have a service it could be proud of, and if this was the money it needed, then there it was. Well, then it all changed.

But I'm supposed to be talking about the future, so here goes: I fear it will continue to be pared back. You'll remember those Tory backbenchers who used to get up regularly and say they saw no need for a publicly funded library service at all, that if people wanted books they should buy them, that it was a waste of taxpayers' money to fund the idle reading habits of the middle-class, and so on. I fear that that's rather the cast of mind that characterises our present government. The great thrust now is towards reading, not because it's an enlargement of the human personality, or because it gives us access to an intimate connection with the greatest minds and the richest treasures of human thought: no, reading is good precisely because it's good for business. You might have heard the Prime Minister going on about e-commerce the other day at the TUC. (And did you notice that Freudian slip a week or two before, when he was being interviewed about hospitals? He caught himself saying customers and then corrected it to patients).

No, business, enterprise - those are the things that matter, apparently. And if the public libraries can further the cause of business, then they are probably safe for a few years yet. Oxford Central Library now has a huge block of space carved out of the main floor, which used to have bookshelves on it: now it's called the Business Information Centre. It's shouldered the books out of the way, and it sits there like a great big cuckoo. And no doubt it behaves just as cuckoo chicks behave, and opens its fat beak to gobble up all the meagre little worms the mummy and daddy birds bring home to feed their own chicks with.

Well, that'll get worse. In the new millennium, the main function of the public libraries will be to serve the business community, as it's called - as if we're not all part of a whole community which of course includes business, but of which business is only a part, and not the most important either. And, of course, you'll have to make a profit. Every part of the library service will be scrutinised to see whether it can make money, and if it can, it'll be hived off and told to get on with it and earn its own living, and if it can't ... The end. Curtains.

As for books, for example, in a few years' time someone at some level will decide that the statutory requirement to provide a public library service is a relic, an intolerable and unnecessary burden on the forward-looking, enterprising, business-oriented council-tax payers, and there'll be a law quietly passed to remove it. It will be interesting to see how many local authorities will wind up their libraries at once, with cheers of joy, and how many elected members will rub their hands as they think of the prime-site city centre premises they can sell, the stock they can auction off, the staff they can make redundant and the salaries they can save. A little less humane: a little more stupid.

That will happen. And a curtain of darkness will go down over one of the most valuable beacons of light our society has ever lit.

Meanwhile, in the schools, other revolutions are under way.

I used to be a teacher, after I stopped working in a library. And many other writers of children's books used to be teachers as well. I'm sure you can think of many names. Well, a couple of years ago in a lecture I made a prediction. I said that wherever the future writers of children's books will come from, they won't come from the ranks of the teachers. It's still too early to say whether that is coming true, but I hold to it, for the same reason that made me think it then: teachers now have no leisure time. Staff are now worn ragged, and subjected to a thousand and one restrictions and requirements that never existed in my day - principally that abomination, the National Curriculum. And when they do finally manage to stop thinking about school, they are too worn out by the wretched administration and form-filling and testing and marking and assessing and reporting to do anything other than slump into oblivion.

So they don't have time for the things that make life more interesting, for the hobbies and the pastimes and the pleasures that make your life and your personality and your knowledge of the world so much richer than they would otherwise be. When I was a boy, the teachers in my secondary school in North Wales were people of intellectual and moral substance. Their lives were not limited by school; they had the time and the opportunities to do things outside it - to write poetry and win prizes at the Eisteddfod, to study astronomy, to read widely and deeply and think about what they read, to take part in politics. So when they came into school, the place, and our lives, were enriched by them because they were rich people - mentally rich. Could that happen now? No, it could not. No one can live properly, no one can acquire any real depth of knowledge and wisdom and understanding if they have to work as teachers work now. You might almost think the system was designed on purpose to produce stunted, narrow-minded people too tired to rebel and too ignorant to be aware of other possibilities. I respect and admire enormously the good teachers who still exist, but they don't last into their sixties any more. They're burned out twenty years before that; simply in order to stay alive they have to get out and do something else.

No, schools have changed enormously, even more than libraries, in the years since I stopped teaching, which was about thirteen years ago. I'm not being in the least original in saying this, but our present Secretary of State for Education - the government as a whole - seems to have embraced wholeheartedly a culture of blaming and shaming, of suspicion and hostility, of mistrust and central control and uniformity and regulation that would not be out of place in Stalin's Russia. I would hate to be a teacher now; I'd sooner go out in the rain and the mud and dig potatoes for a living.

And since I'm now predicting the future of books, here are my fears as to how the educational system will affect it. I think there will be a much greater reliance on approved lists of books for study, and less time to read them properly, so there will be more and more superficial testing on the aspects of literature that can be tested. I think novels and poetry will be seen less and less as things to study and enjoy for their own sake, and more and more as ways to support the National Curriculum history or geography syllabus, for example. Instead of the essay, there will be the multiple-choice test, because that's easier to mark and quantify. Instead of a wide variety of novels there will be half a dozen; instead of books read and enjoyed because one teacher has a passion for them, and knows them and loves them and communicates this knowledge and love, there will be books chosen by a committee in order to reflect the social concerns that prevail at the time, and to reinforce the prejudices that the government deems to be socially useful. A little less challenging, a little more stupid.

I haven't finished with the gloom yet. There are a couple more things I want to mention. The first has to do with writers themselves. We don't know enough. We're satisfied with ignorance. I saw a performance recently by a young poet who was in every way engaging, talented, charming, charismatic, entertaining. He had even won an award for his performance poetry. He invited questions, and someone asked him who his favourite poets were, and he had to think a moment or two before coming up with the names of Roger McGough and Benjamin Zephaniah. He liked them because they were funny. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but subsequent questions made it clear that he hadn't read anyone else. He knew nothing about Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Milton, Blake, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Auden, Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop; he had not one line of poetry in his head. I haven't read Sophie's World, but apparently Jostein Gaarder quotes Goethe as saying that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth. Well, here was an example of living from hand to mouth. And he was very keen on respect, in fact he read a poem about it, which said that you had to respect other people if you want them to respect you, but he seemed to be strikingly lacking in respect for the history of his own art.

If that's the way things are going, and I've had a feeling for some time that it is, then it's worrying. We become a little less knowledgeable: a little more stupid.

There's one final aspect of the present that makes me worry for the future, but I won't take very long with it. I mean intolerance and bigotry. Narrow-minded fanaticism of every sort: political, cultural, ethnic, religious. There's more of it about, and it's getting worse. There are tales we hear about publishers being afraid to produce picture books featuring pigs, for instance, because they might offend the sensibilities of Muslim readers. I take that one with a pinch of salt, and I haven't noticed that the world of picture books is an entirely pig-free zone; but the fact that there can be nervous jokes about it indicates that at some level, people are worried. The slightest prospect of offending anyone is bound to make the money people agitated, and if there's any doubt, publishers will play safe rather than take a risk. And there was a piece in the Guardian this week about the vigorous growth in fundamentalist Christian groups, of a far right-wing sort, in our universities. And you must have noticed that one American state - was it Kansas? - has now removed the need to teach evolution from its biology syllabus, because of pressure from the Creationists. This is dangerous. We've had a couple of centuries of reason, after centuries of superstition and darkness; I hope we're not heading back that way. But I fear that in the new millennium things will be a little less enlightened, a little more stupid.

In short, I see a future of stupidity. Stupidity enthroned, stupidity enshrined, stupidity made one of the central principles of life.

Well, I'll come back to Robert Frost now, as I said I would. If you remember, his poem was about the different ways the world might end, whether in a conflagration brought about by desire or in a frigid wasteland brought about by hate. Not much optimism there, not much hope; it's going to end one-way or the other, and the only choice is how.

I could stop there and leave us all miserable. But my temperament won't let me; I'm like that man who tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness was always breaking in. I haven't got on to the hope yet.

But I'm not going to simply contradict everything I've said so far. I do believe that things will go as I've described, and I do believe that the great god Stupidity will become more and more powerful in the new millennium. But here's where I part company with Robert Frost: I don't believe the world is going to end. I think it's going to go on, and that we shall have to find some way of sabotaging the worst aspects of Stupidity, if not defeating it outright. As a matter of fact I don't think we can ever defeat it outright: according to the poet Schiller, "Against Stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain."

But we can subvert it. We can wage a guerrilla war. We can join the resistance. We can be secret agents working against the army of the stupid, the occupying power.

The first thing to do is determine that we shall not become more stupid ourselves. Most of us use only a tiny fraction of our powers, physical or mental. Most of us aren't called on to do more than live on automatic pilot. And habit, especially when you're getting on in middle age, as I am, is a comforting thing, like an old armchair; you can sink into it and snooze; you can live very agreeably by running in the same grooves that you ran in yesterday and last year and ten years ago. However, habit is a good servant but a bad master. It takes such good care of the things that don't matter that it soon begins to extend its domain over the things that do. That's when stupidity begins to creep up on us. That's when we should begin to resist.

So we should keep our minds active. We should do things that we haven't done before. We should take up that musical instrument we always meant to learn. We should join that amateur dramatics group we never got round to. We should use parts of our brain that are lying fast asleep. Learn poems by heart: that's a wonderful exercise for the mind, and it costs nothing at all, and you can do it sitting down, and they fold up very flat, poems, you can get a large number of them on the shelf at the back of your head. When you begin to exercise this memory-muscle, you'll be surprised at how much work it can do, and how exhilarating it is. And so one more little area of stupidity is beaten back.

And we should read. I'm talking to librarians, and I don't have to tell you this, but I'm going to anyway: we should read more widely than we do, and we should read older books, not just the latest ones, because our knowledge is shallower than it need be. We should read the classics that we never did when we were young. Actually, in some ways it's better to wait till you're a bit older before you tackle Middlemarch and A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. You see so much more in them, and you know more about the subject, so you can see how wise George Eliot is on the subject of marriage, for example, which means very little to you when you're seventeen or eighteen.

And when we've read a great book, we should read it again.

And we should read books from other countries, and I don't mean America: I mean we should actively seek out books by Egyptian, Turkish, Indian, African, Chinese writers, and see what people in other parts of the world are reading and thinking and feeling. So the realm of stupidity gets pushed back a little further again. Every poem memorised, every book read and thought about is an act of sabotage in the resistance against the occupying forces of stupidity.

And when we've read, we should find people to talk about our reading with. One of the great hopes of the past few years has been the growth in these local reading groups, where a dozen or so people - friends, or strangers, who soon become friends - get together once a month or so and discuss a book they've been reading. I think reading groups of that sort are doing what the Irish monasteries did in the Dark Ages, and keeping little lamps of thought and learning alive in a howling wilderness. If it seems odd to think of our world, so brilliantly lit, filled with a thousand radio and TV channels, full of shops where you can buy asparagus from Spain and beans from Kenya and avocados from Mexico and seventeen kinds of olive oil, as a howling wilderness like the Dark Ages, remember: one of the greatest powers of Stupidity is to make the Stupid immensely pleased with themselves and satisfied with their low expectations. Seventeen kinds of olive oil are nothing to be pleased about if you can't remember the last book you read. Reading groups are a treasure. If you don't belong to one, seek one out; if you can't find one, start one up.

One powerful way of sabotaging Stupidity is to learn to use the language more precisely. Luckily, this is not something that you can ever quite master; there's always something new to learn. Only the other day, for example, I learned the original meaning of the word fruition. I was looking up something quite different, but in the way one does, I found my eye wandering over the page, and I read a definition of that word which was quite different from what I'd thought it was. I had thought it meant something to do with ripeness. But in fact it means enjoyment, attainment of thing desired, realisation of hopes (COD). It shares a common origin with the word fruit, but that root originally meant not fruit but enjoy. Now I don't know what I'll do immediately with that knowledge, but I bet the next time I'm tempted to write fruition I'll think again and see if I'm sure I know what I want to say, and whether that's the best way of saying it.

That sort of thing happens all the time. If you develop a sense for the precision of language, and every time you write a letter or a memo or put up a notice you make sure you're writing precisely, then another little stronghold of Stupidity tumbles. Stupidity has been making an advance recently in the language by trying to prevent the use of the word might. Even well respected journalists now seem to write sentences like: "Without the development of radar, Britain may well have lost the Second World War." Well, there's no may about it: we damn well did win the Second World War. The word is might, which is the past tense of may. But more and more people, under the influence of Stupidity, forget that, and write may in contexts where they clearly mean might.

There's a familiar argument against this point, which goes like this: if most people don't know the difference between may and might, then why bother?

But that argument only goes to show how truly stupid Stupidity is. Here's how to counter it: if most people don't know the difference, then they won't object if you use the right word. And the few people who do know the difference will notice, and will be pleased that you've got it right. So by getting it right you please everyone. Who but the stupid would do otherwise?

Language needs looking after. Let's look after it.

My final rule for sabotaging Stupidity is this: be cheerful. One of the cardinal virtues, after all, is Hope. Calling it a virtue means that it isn't only a matter of temperament: it's a duty. So here I shall put on the filter of Hope, and see what it reveals.

And as I survey the very same landscape I looked at in the first part of this talk, the commercial world, I can see some interesting things happening in publishing. As the great mega-corporations and media empires swallow each other and merge, they leave gaps: parts of the market which are too small for them to bother with, but which are profitable for a small enterprise. For example, I know of two new ventures each devoted to bringing back books that were once popular but which have gone out of print. Jane Nissen is running one, and Ann Jungman another. Excellent! The big boys couldn't do that, because it wouldn't be worth their while; but a small publisher can.

And these days, with the growth of desktop publishing and laser printing and so on, it's not that hard to set up as a publisher in the first place. In Tanzania they even have a phenomenon called briefcase publishers: you just need a laptop computer and a briefcase - you don't even need an office. And they're finding and editing and publishing children's books.

Something else I heard of recently: a proposal to set up a national Academy of Writing. The aim is to offer talented young people guidance and encouragement in a setting comparable to that of the leading drama and music schools. They've got seed funding from the Society of Authors, they've got money from the Lottery and the offer of a building in Birmingham at a peppercorn rent. Things are happening.

Then there's the Centre for the Children's Book, in Newcastle. This too is busily setting itself up, gradually becoming more and more firmly a part of the children's book scene; they have begun to collect manuscripts and original artwork that otherwise would have been sold abroad, they've mounted two very exciting exhibitions, one on Tintin and the other on the work of Colin McNaughton, and so another voice is there to speak up on behalf of our world.

And I'm cheered, too, by the attention that children's books are getting in the press. Of course, the big example is Harry Potter, but other books too have been mentioned occasionally - even including mine. There's a sense now, as there wasn't five or six or ten years ago, that children's books tell powerful stories about important things, and that people who have a hunger for that sort of literature can find what they want more easily among children's books than among the fashionable ones that get shortlisted for the big grown-up prizes. And I don't think I'm being too vain when I say that my Carnegie speech three years ago might have contributed to setting that particular ball rolling.

And some of the good publishers are getting more confident, and they're prepared to back ambitious work. Macmillan with Peter Dickinson's The Kin, Scholastic with Jan Mark's The Eclipse of the Century - very big books, physically large and intellectually spacious, are finding their way into the shops.

So there is a duty to be cheerful, but in the words of the great Ian Dury, there are reasons to be cheerful too.

Those are things I see around me now. I'm going to end with some things I can't quite see yet with my eyes open, but I can if I close them. So applying the spyglass of hope to the mind's eye, I look ahead and see the following things come about:

I can see the broadsheet papers, and the grown-up magazines, begin to give more and more informed attention to children's books. I can see them taken seriously and given review space that matches the space given to adult books. I can see one or two children's authors featuring on short lists for the Booker prize. In time, I can see a children's author winning it. And is it utterly inconceivable to see, one day, a children's author winning the Nobel Prize? I think Tove Jansson should have won it years ago. I can see a real autonomy returning to schools. I can see the hideous whalebone corset of the National Curriculum being replaced by the liberty bodice of common sense. I can see teachers who go home in the evening still with a bit of energy, and who have a bit of spare time so that they can do the reading or the thinking, or the bell-ringing or the sport or the amateur operatics or whatever that gives them that vital hinterland, in Denis Healey's phrase. I can see changes happening in the library service. I can see the idea that everyone should be a generalist wither away, and the restoration of the proper dignity and importance of specialist children's librarianship. I can see the Schools Library Service looked at properly and made mandatory for all local authorities: no longer something that has to generate profits and sell itself to schools who themselves have to choose between repairing the toilet roof and having library books on the shelves, but something that all schools participate in with enthusiasm and gratitude, something that isn't contaminated by the toxic, time-destroying, energy-sapping wastefulness of the market-place, the culture of having to make bids and the glossy brochures and the senseless competition and the duplication of effort - all that; but something that's just there, as a decent properly planned clean and dependable public transport system used to be there, not to be made a fuss about but just there so you could use it and get on with life. I can see, through the spyglass of hope, the day when every library service has a properly funded branch that supplies schools as a matter of course. And I can see schools knowing about it and using it properly - something that didn't always happen when there was one, by the way.
The library picture is getting clearer as I look. I can see branch libraries in suburbs and small towns and villages that have been closed for months or years … And I can see people with ladders and pots of paint going into them, and I can see new shelving being put up, and I can see interviews being conducted at the library headquarters, and new staff being appointed.2		2. As a matter of fact, I was asked to go and speak at the opening of one such library only a month or two after giving this lecture. I was seeing more clearly than I thought.
And I can see the present staff being freed to do something quite radical - imagine this - I'm having to strain the glass to see this, but I think I can make it out: imagine that every couple of weeks a big pile of newly published or about-to-be-published books arrives at each library, and the staff have the time to look at them and pick them up and leaf through them and even take them away and read a few of them, and then come back and talk about them and decide how many of each one to buy, and how best to bring them to the attention of the readers. No skimming through a CD-ROM in a coffee-break and having to guess what the books are like, and then remembering that the book fund is so low that you can't buy anything till April anyway; no haste; no trying to do ten things at once; but time and space and resources enough to be enthusiastic again. And finally, through the spyglass of hope, I can see something quite new in the next millennium. I can see a body for which there's no name, but which might be called something like an Academy of Children's Literature. Not a teaching academy, but a body that has a membership including writers and illustrators, librarians and booksellers, publishers and academics: open to everyone, in fact, professionally concerned with children's books. A body that wouldn't replace the present societies and bodies that exist, such as yourselves, and the Society of Authors, and the Publishers' Association, and so on; they all have important jobs to do, and they each represent their own section of the world very well. They're all necessary, and they should all continue. But I mean a body that includes us all, and that acts as a powerful and influential voice for children's books in a way that none of us can do, separately - a voice that wouldn't be open to the accusation of sectional interest. An Academy of Children's Literature could promote lectures and discussions open to everyone; it could do all the public relations stuff that the organisers of the Children's Laureate initially hoped, mistakenly I think, that the Laureate would be able to do; it could award recognition to writers and illustrators who might have slipped out of the public eye, but whose work has been a source of joy and inspiration to many thousands of readers - there could be an annual medal, not for a particular book, but for a lifetime's achievement.

And so on. It could do all of that and more. But then we would be in the Golden Age, and the Golden Age, as we all know, is in the past, never in the future. So it's quite inconceivable that any of this could ever come about, and in a moment I shall stop fantasising.

But thank you for inviting me to present my thoughts, and let's keep hoping.