In every place where books are for sale, this is the season of the “launch”. In New York and London it is the time for publishers to shout out out what we should all be buying for Christmas. At the Frankfurt Book Fair the literary agents are selling the books that will sail into the shops in 2010 and beyond – every trade made to the traditional accompaniment of wines and foods. As Henry Power describes this week, in the 1690s the entrepreneurial publisher and bookseller Jacob Tonson offered his mutton pies called Kit-Cats to buyers and sellers – not only for their sustenance but as a reminder that the lining of a pie dish was where worthless pages would end. Regulars at his Kit-Cat Club consumed much “Oven-Trumpery and wine” and also had their portraits painted in oils in a cost-saving, half-sized format.

Keen promoters of books, we can reliably expect, will be offering us ever more on the subject of conflict in Iraq. The latest books on the current troubles are to be reviewed in a future edition. This week Eleanor Robson describes the torture and decapitation techniques of earlier Mesopotamian wars, reminding us how human bodies were seen as “signs and embedded messages” 2,500 years ago.

A book by an Archbishop of Canterbury is not perhaps the publishing sensation that once it would have been. The present holder of that office, and longtime reviewer for the TLS, Rowan Williams, has, however, written a study of Dostoevsky that is much admired by A. N. Wilson – not least for its analysis of Russian Orthodoxy’s power. If this year there were to be the “Christmas surprise” that booksellers always seek for the months ahead, this is the choice of the TLS.

Frankfurt week seems also a suitable time for us to review a favourite poet Michael Hofmann, whose English life and German roots inform, in Stephen Knight’s words, “one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half century”.

Peter Stothard

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