26 Fruits

My favourite quotation is “Only connect” (EM Forster), as you might have read in 26 ways of looking at a blackberry.  I chose the quote to go on the first carrier bag Newell and Sorrell designed for Waterstone’s, in about 1990, introducing the idea of quotations from books on bags. It doesn’t seem revolutionary now but it was at the time.

We were talking then about books and nothing but books. We followed the quotation with the line “Books to make connections at Waterstone’s”. I still believe books remain the best way to make connections between minds, but what has happened along since is the Internet. And the Internet gives even greater resonance to the “Only connect” idea. It’s just so much easier now to make links between people and ideas, and to encourage the random connections of serendipity (if that’s not against the whole spirit of serendipity).

On this site you might not have made the link to the 27th Way – try clicking on those words on the top right. You’ll find yourself linked to new versions of Rilke, Jay-Z, Jane Austen and others. Or you can connect to another useful blog for writers at  http://writersandartists.wordpress.com/. Or dip into the blog of another writer friend, Mark Griffiths, who should have been one of the 26 fruits but was away in Japan at the time http://idealword.blogspot.com/.   Perhaps he’d have been a Japanese quince.

The connection I’d make, though, in this chainmail of links, is that all businesses are now publishers. They might not produce or sell books, but they do publish words. It would help them, and all of us, if they made that connection and took a publisher’s pride in their role.