Steerforth’s true life bus shocker

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Recently-sprung Waterstones manager Steerforth, over at The Age of Uncertainty, is already getting nostalgic for his bookselling days. Picture him sitting on the pickle barrel, regaling the youngsters with the bookselling trends he’s seen come and go. I bet they can’t believe it – day before footballers’ wives’ memoirs! Go check it out, but here’s my favourite.

“5. True Crime. This genre ticked along quietly until Sun columnist-turned-publisher, John Blake, released The Guv’nor. This memoir of a ‘hard bastard’ was a publishing phenomenon and launched a whole new sub-genre of criminal memoirs. The jacket design usually consisted of a grainy, close-up mugshot of a criminal with a tagline something along the lines of I’m completely mental and violent. If you don’t like me, I’ll pull your ears off, slowly. These memoirs were lucrative for publishers, but less so for booksellers as the titles were usually stolen by aspiring hard bastards. These memoirs were also inexplicably popular with women. (I remember seeing a young women with a black eye, sitting on a bus with her five-year-old daughter. In her lap she had a copy of The Guv’nor, which was open at the photo section. She pointed to various figures, saying to her daughter ‘That’s yer Uncle Kenny, that’s Uncle Ron, that’s Uncle Mick…)”

Note: I was going to entertain you with a picture of The Guvnor, but it’s just too scary.

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