Underground Classics: A Good Read on the Tube

Move over, tabloids, Alexander Waugh has a scoop: A good short story never goes out of style.

Waugh, the grandson of “Scoop” author Evelyn, believes that commuters are tired of the dumbing down of popular culture and, given the chance, will read a classic on the train instead of a newspaper feature about, say, short stories.

Waugh is giving them a chance.

His new company, Travelman Publishing, is putting out classic, crime, comedy and adventure short stories in pocket-sized editions that fold like maps for easy reading on the subway. Stories by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce and a host of other authors sell for a pound each--about $1.65--and soon will also be available in vending machines.

“Intelligent and educated people are getting more and more despairing with the junk that is thrust upon them,” Waugh said. “The short story is a woefully under-exploited genre. . . . I want to give it a kick-start.”

The idea is novel, but not unique. Rudyard Kipling sold his two-penny short stories on the Indian railways quite successfully last century. Charles Dickens made a name for himself from the serialized publication of his books in installments that could be read on a short journey. Right now, the French are reading detective novellas in their Metro.

Waugh, a slightly disheveled 35-year-old, said his idea grew out of a conversation with author William Trevor in which the two were lamenting the fact that short stories are almost always packaged in huge anthologies and don’t stand on their own.

“With anthologies, you’re always looking over your shoulder to see if you’re reading the best one in the book,” he said. “Short stories are meant to be read alone.”

He gathered together a highbrow editorial board that includes Trevor, authors Martin Amis (“London Fields”), Muriel Spark (“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) Beryl Bainbridge (“The Dressmaker”) and his father, Auberon, editor of the Literary Review.

Their criteria for publication: “It’s got to have a good plot. It’s got to have conflict, something happening. And it has to be well-written,” Waugh said. People are tired after work--he figures they’ll still read newspapers in the morning--and “don’t want to be bogged down with something too mystical, too complicated.”

So far, Waugh is publishing only established authors, including his grandfather. He hopes eventually to promote new talent. “I’d love to come through with a brilliant new young author and give him a crack because the magazines only want people who are known,” he said.

The plan is to publish eight stories each week and to remove titles from the shelf as new ones come out, much as a magazine appears and then disappears soon after.

“We want to encourage people to buy them in the belief that if they don’t, they won’t have a chance to buy later,” Waugh said. “We also want to be sure that when people go in and out of the news agent, they will be assured of fresh titles.

“Of course, that means we will be in the unique position of withdrawing someone like Arthur Conan Doyle [creator of Sherlock Holmes] when there is no reason he wouldn’t sell as well three months from now.”

Waugh admits to some concern that his compatriots might be suspicious of the new format. “English people are very tense about new things,” he said. “They’re very frightened of making a fool of themselves.”

But he tried to make the stories attractive--no fool, he--on beautiful cream-colored paper and with lovely pen-and-ink cover illustrations. The company logo is a classy prewar illustration of a man in tails carrying a stack of books.

Waugh has shipped 80,000 copies since launching the project two weeks ago, and they appear to be selling well. Twelve hundred sold at the large Waterloo train station alone one week, and new orders are coming in by the day.

He touts his venture as “the most revolutionary concept in book publishing since the invention of the paperback.” Not exactly, but he just might be accurately gauging the mood of the reading public.

The Guardian newspaper reported Thursday that popular novelists have new competition on the bestseller list--from James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which topped a recent list of best English-language novels of the 20th century. Just the sort of literary classic, albeit a bit longer, that Waugh is peddling.

“It does seem perfectly possible that Waugh, a moment or two ahead of the rest of us, has caught the scent of an approaching fashion,” wrote a reviewer in the Daily Telegraph.