We all feel like embittered orphans from time to time.

Last night I went to a book launch for an orphan book.

In the picture library world, grappling with abstracts of copyright and ownership, there has recently been much talk of ‘orphan works’ — images which cannot be readily traced to the original owner. This isn’t helped by social networking sites routinely stripping images of all metadata, but that’s not what I want to talk about on this blog, that’s a subject for the fotoLibra Pro Blog.

I want to talk about Orphan Books. By my definition, an Orphan Book is one that has been commissioned by an editor in a publishing house who has then left before the book has been published.

It has happened to five of my books.

1. Follies — A National Trust Guide: Robin Wright, Publishing Director of the National Trust, died. Then Liz Calder, Editor at Jonathan Cape, left to co-found Bloomsbury.

2. Architectural Follies in America: Buckley Jeppson, CEO of the Preservation Press, left when the company was acquired by John Wiley & Sons Inc.

3. Follies Grottoes & Garden Buildings: Sheila Murphy, Editorial Director of Aurum Press, quit the company before the book was published.

4. The Encyclopaedia of Fonts: Jane Lloyd-Ellis left Cassell a year before the book was published.

5. Follies — Fabulous, Fanciful & Frivolous Buildings: Margaret Willes, Publishing Director of the National Trust, retired. The book was published eight years later by the National Trust.

What this means is that there is no one within the publishers to root for the book. No one to stand up at a sales conference and say “This guy is pretty good. He writes like a dream, looks like a Greek god and has a 36DD bust” — all the attributes the modern publisher demands from its authors. Instead they probably pictured some fat old git slumped over his keyboard and relegated the title (and any attendant publicity) to the ‘Also published this year’ pile.

It’s not enough to be published. The publisher has to back his judgement, even the judgement of former staff, and promote the hell out of the book. Of course, we don’t always know the reason the former staff left, and their departure may have rankled. In which case the publisher should be honest enough to tell the PBA (poor bloody author) that he doesn’t want his crappy book any more and please keep the advance.

It doesn’t happen. The book goes through the due publishing process, minus any marketing, and is released into the community rather than being published. In the case of my Encyclopaedia of Fonts the publisher issued it on December 15th, so unopened parcels of it sat in the back corridors of the bookshops before being returned in January with all the other Christmas books that didn’t sell.

Penguin Books, now the world’s largest publisher, are publishing ‘The Wretched’, by Victor Hugo, perhaps more familar to you as Les Misérables, in a new translation by Christine Donougher. Now I haven’t read it yet (1,304 pages — give us a chance) but knowing Christine’s earlier work it will be stupendous. It will in all probability become the definitive English translation of the work.

And what is Penguin doing with it? The person who commissioned the translation left some time ago, and as a result the answer is what you might expect. Nothing. Christine has produced an Orphan Book.

What if these Very Large Publishers created an Author Liasion Director, someone not directly involved in any part of the publishing process, whose job it was to comfort and reassure all the authors and translators who feel they are being trampled underfoot? It wouldn’t cost a lot, and the goodwill generated would be incalculable.

Incidentally at the party last night I met the Art Critic of The Lancet. What a benign employment.

November 22nd, 1963.

Was it really 50 years ago?

It’s said that everyone of a certain age (that means over 60 now) can remember what they were doing on the day President Kennedy was shot. I certainly can. It was my first date.

I passed my driving test first time out on October 16th, 1963. I was just 17 — you know what I mean — and every possible minute I cruised the Chelsea streets in my father’s red-and-white ’56 Chevy (it never occurred to me to put petrol in it). And a month later I plucked up the courage to ask Caroline Bennett out for a date.

Caroline had a beaky nose, was dark-haired, pale-skinned, slim and pretty. She wore white lipstick, which I thought was the sexiest thing I had ever seen, although I wasn’t really sure what ‘sexy’ meant. She was the same age as me. Three or four years earlier I had asked her to come out and play, and she just stared at me for 30 seconds before bursting into laughter.

She was the younger daughter of General Sir Somebody Bennett, who was the doctor at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, where we both lived at the time. Her elder sister Johanna was even more beautiful, and had married the American film star Aldo Ray (yes, I had to look him up on Wikipedia for this, but we were told he was an American film star and that was good enough for us).

And Caroline agreed to go on a date with me! I can’t remember where we were going to go — probably a film, as I wouldn’t have been able to afford anything else. This of course was some months before the Sloane Squares bought us unimaginable fame, fortune and riches.

Even more exciting than the prospect of a date with Caroline is that my father had agreed to lend me the Chevrolet. General Bennett had an assistant, a newly qualified doctor, who also had eyes for Caroline. But he only had an old blue banger which he kept in the garage next to the Chevy, and we used to roar with laughter every time he managed to start it up and pootle around the block. Caroline used to split her sides. “I wouldn’t be seen dead in that thing,” she spluttered. “Your car [OK, my father’s] is SO much nicer!” So I got the girl. And I hope the young doctor kept sa vieille bagnole bleue. It was a Type 35A Bugatti.

I creamed up outside the house. I rang the doorbell. Lady Bennett answered, her face a mask of horror. “Oh Gwyn,” she said, “President Kennedy’s been shot!” We piled into the drawing room, our date forgotten, and Caroline and I sat on hard chairs next to each other watching the 17″ Alba television. We watched, and watched, and watched, and Lady Bennett made tea, and we watched some more, until it was time for me to go home. We were appalled. He was so vital, so handsome, so virile, so debonair, so much more exciting than the grey, anonymous suits who ran Britain and the USSR. Why would anyone want to shoot him?

A couple of weeks later I took Caroline to a party at Paul Anstey’s house, where she got off with Stephen Gardiner (who played Mosca in the school play, Ben Jonson’s Volpone) snogging endlessly with him on the sofa while I helplessly watched, incapable and paralysed with horror. I got drunk for the first time, maudlin drunk. And I drunkenly drove her home in tears.

We never had another date. We were near neighbours but I can’t recall we ever spoke again. Caroline was horse-mad and went to work in some stables in Sweden. Later I heard she’d killed herself. I never found out why.

All this remains clear. But I can’t remember what I was doing when I heard that John Lennon had been murdered. Lennon meant so much more to me than Kennedy. Lennon meant music and life and fun and passion. In October 1962 Kennedy scared the shit out of me with the Cuban missile crisis. I was convinced we were all going to die.

Whom would you prefer to remember?

That’s how my American friend Mike pronounces Humiliation, and that’s how I feel about Wales’s latest exploits on the rugby field.

We have been knocked out of the World Cup, after successive losses to rugby giants Italy and the USA.

However it’s not as bad as it seems, and I haven’t slumped into a black depression, because of one little word — this is League, not Union. Rugby League is barely played in Wales, where the Union code is dominant, so a loss at a sport I know little about and don’t follow at all doesn’t affect me much.

So why am I Yoomiliated? Because like 99.999% of Americans, I wasn’t even aware that the USA had a Rugby League team. And Wales is quite well known for rugby. So I think we should have won, whatever the code.

But they yoomiliated us. Apparently only one of their team was actually American, the rest being journeymen Pacific Islanders and Ozzie emigrants, but that’s not the point any longer. Once we start picking people on the grounds that their grandparents may once have visited Wales then to my mind it ceases to be a Welsh team and becomes a Wales team.

Oh, hang on — that’s how they’re described nowadays.