Publishing folk were relieved to be in Earls Court for the London Book Fair this week, after the disastrous move to Docklands last year. “Spacious, well-lit and comfortable”, and “much nicer” were among the comments. Translation: the postcode has a “W” in it.

There was the usual rash of acquisitions at the fair. HarperCollins has bought the tennis star Andre Agassi’s memoirs (June 2009). Jamie Oliver is to write an autobiography for Michael Joseph (autumn 2008). Peter Ackroyd has signed a deal for six nonfiction books with Macmillan. The author of books about Shakespeare, Dickens and London seems to be aiming even higher, describing the sequence as “no less than the biography of England in six volumes”. Publication is five years away.

In other deals Faber is to publish (in early 2008) Hanif Kureishi’s first novel since 2001; Arcadia has paid its “largest ever advance”, for a biography of Ken Livingstone; and the new Michael Chabon novel, Gentlemen of the Road, has gone to Sceptre.

Several white knights rode to the rescue of John Calder, the veteran publisher whose travails featured in Books on March 3. Alma Books, run by Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini, with its publishing partner Oneworld Classics, will keep in print Calder’s backlist, retaining the Calder imprint for authors such as Marguerite Duras. The deal will also keep open the Calder Bookshop in The Cut, Waterloo. But still no new about John Calder’s Samuel Beckett list, which he was hoping to sell to Faber.

This summer you’ll be mostly reading Black Swan Green by David Mitchell if Sceptre has its way. It has got 80 library authorities to promote the novel to reading groups, and claims that their participation will be “the biggest ever community read in Britain”.

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