KEY POINTS:
It was hardly a vintage year for books, but 2007 was certainly the year of one book. From the moment J.K. Rowling announced the title of HP7 (as it was known to the trade), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows shot to the top of Amazon's listings and
sucked the oxygen out of the literary ecosystem.
In a Darwinian struggle for shelf space, only rough, tough Conn Iggulden could compete. In January, Iggulden became the first person to achieve the fiction and non-fiction double with simultaneous No 1 bestsellers: Wolf of the Plains alongside The Dangerous Book for Boys.
In April, the international book trade descended on the London Book Fair intent on making the landmark discovery that remains the holy grail of the business.
Dozens of contracts changed hands and there was plenty of feverish talk about "sparkling debuts", but only a few deals made news.
Peter Ackroyd secured a six-figure deal for a six-volume history of England. Dawn French was paid around £2 million ($5.2 million) for her memoirs - at that price she will have to confess to a nameless vice or at least dish the dirt on Lenny Henry and friends.
Ian McEwan's novella On Chesil Beach was published last May, accompanied by predictable harrumphing from some critics who felt the book too slight for the fuss it generated.
Never mind: McEwan now holds that very rare position in English letters of being both a highbrow critical favourite and a popular bestseller, a combination that will continue to give him tax problems and, no doubt, envious comments from less favoured competitors.
As the countdown to the launch of Deathly Hallows continued, there was a brief moment of sanity in June when two impressive African novelists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chinua Achebe - were awarded, respectively, the Orange Prize and the Man Booker International. In retrospect, Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun was probably the book of the year for many serious readers.
Shortly after, the London Observer's poll to determine the "most overlooked" writer in English identified the work of Elizabeth Taylor, especially her novel Angel and her masterpiece, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
Elsewhere in the world of classics, Faber & Faber finally reached an agreement with maverick independent publisher John Calder to take over the licences for significant parts of Samuel Beckett's backlist, notably Malone Dies, Molloy and Watt. For the first time in 50 years, all Beckett's titles will be under one roof.
If the boy from Hogwarts had a rival, it was that other public schoolboy with death-defying powers, retiring British Prime Minister Charles Anthony Lynton Blair, whose decade at the top was celebrated last July with the publication of his former press spokesman Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years.
This carefully contrived compilation of ugly rumours from No 10 Downing St became a Rorschach test for the political class as it adjusted to the realities of the Gordon Brown premiership.
Then, at the beginning of the school holidays, it was Rowling Night at last, the launch of Harry Potter's final encounter with Voldemort.
Who can say what subsequent generations will make of the Rowling phenomenon? Comparisons with Tolkien, Lewis et al are really beside the point. This was a series that comprehensively transcended its genre in the most unprecedented way.
Ultimately, hers was as much of a craze as Blairism, and spanned the same decade, 1997-2007, but Rowling's achievement (whatever you think of the books) was that she set out to write a heptology and pulled it off with no loss of narrative brio or imagination.
Truly, Rowling and her work define a decade as no other writer has done. What else can you say about a book that sells 11 million copies worldwide within 24 hours of publication?
Increasingly, August is being taken over by competing book festivals, especially Edinburgh, and the pre-publicity surrounding the Booker Prize longlist.
In 2007, the main story from the longlist was the success of two feisty independent publishers, the Tindal Street Press and Myrmidon, with, respectively, Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain.
A little later in the season, the revelation that the latest novel, Crystal, from Katie Price aka Jordan (actually the work of a superb ghostwriter named Rebecca Farnworth) had outsold the entire Booker Prize shortlist inspired a spasm of cultural panic.
New fiction is in the doldrums and there's not a thing anyone can do about it. From some points of view, "literary fiction" is becoming as much a genre as science fiction.
This year, indeed, fact trumped fiction with a real-life literary drama that far outran the imagination of most British novelists - a rare cocktail of celebrity, schadenfreude, treachery, greed, vanity and opportunism.
I refer, of course, to the saga of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, three humble surnames that, as PFD, became code for the juiciest industry gossip of the year.
It is probably too soon to evaluate the full implications of Caroline Michel's dramatic move to the management of the troubled blue-chip literary agency. Suffice to say that for the first time in living memory, a group of authors' representatives briefly commanded more attention than their clients, who include Nick Hornby, Ricky Gervais, Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett.
The PFD saga was an apt reminder that literary London really is a village.
The same lesson might be drawn from the publication of Robert Harris' brilliant political thriller The Ghost, in which the former political editor of the Observer satirised the foibles of New Labour, in particular the reputation of a newly retired Prime Minister, Adam Lang.
The novel was also a reminder of the speed with which the Blairs had become airbrushed from Britain's political consciousness. They were soon back in the news, however, with memoirs to offer. Cherie sold her story to Little, Brown for about £1 million, while Tony landed a multi-million-dollar contract with Random House after a low-key "bidding war" in which the big imprints apparently fell over themselves not to write a cheque.
Bloomsbury celebrated 21 years of successful publishing by demonstrating it was rather less independent and rather more in hock to the City than it might like to admit. How else to explain the firing of several staff and the hiring of celebrated "contrarian" Richard Charkin, former chief executive of publishers Macmillan?
The book world is on the brink of seismic change: Sony launched the electronic Sony Reader and almost everyone agrees that the next 10 years will see a revolution in the way publishers deliver "content", through print on demand or ebooks.
As the Visigoths of IT assemble, the ancien regime continues its stately minuet. The Nobel committee, meeting in 18th-century splendour, awarded its annual prize to Doris Lessing, a popular choice. The laureate's first words, on hearing the news, were: "Oh, Christ!"
Harold Pinter, who already has the Nobel, sold his archive to the British Library in a fine gesture of loyalty to English culture.
The Booker concluded a mixed year with the most embarrassing chairman's speech, from Howard Davies, in living memory. At least the prize panel redeemed itself: the choice of Anne Enright's The Gathering was not commercially popular, but it is a good novel.
Enright's explanation of her art had a refreshing frankness. She told the literary press: "All families are the same. I just multiplied them by three. There's always a drunk, there's always someone who has been interfered with as a child, there's always someone who is a colossal success."
All this was too much for Robert Harris, who merrily denounced the whole business as "a monstrous boil" on the face of literature.
And finally, J.K. Rowling sold a handwritten copy of her book The Tales of Beedle the Bard at auction for £1.95 million. It turned out that Amazon placed the winning bid. The money will go to charity.
- Observer
