Bloomsbury Publishing: The wizardry of words
Despite persistent rumours of the death of the publishing industry at the hands of the attention span of the TikTok generation, Bloomsbury is showing that the good old dead tree book is refusing to hoist the white flag.
The publishing house has now recorded five straight years of double-digit growth in the first half with record pretax profits of £22.1m on revenues of £179.8m. The company said continuing strong sales mean the full-year results will be ahead of market consensus, and its share price has responded accordingly with a 90% rise in a year.
Much of Bloomsbury’s success can be credited to two of its authors, JK Rowling and Sarah J Maas. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has remained on the bestseller lists a healthy 27 years after its first publication, and it is likely to stay there as its first devotees will now be spawning a new generation to jump on the Hogwarts Express and thrill to the adventures of the boy wizard and his trusty sidekicks. There is also an expectation that an upcoming TV series will bring Potterworld to a broader global audience.
Maas is a publishing phenomenon in the genre of romantasy, a heady mixture of romance and fantasy that allows an author to come up with a title like Crescent City: House of Flame and Shadow with a straight face. While they may be unlikely to trouble the judges of the more literary awards, the 16 books she has churned out since 2010 have sold about 55-million copies, and that legion of readers can’t be wrong.
McDonald’s: Drive through, throw up
Despite a ringing endorsement from none other than the great Warren Buffett, who has startled longevity experts by reaching the grand age of 94 by eating breakfast beneath the golden arches every day, it has been a bad week for devotees of the company’s quarter pounder.
The fresh slivered onions and fresh beef patties that contribute to this stalwart crowd pleaser have been named as prime suspects in a fatal E. coli outbreak that has affected 10 states in the US, leaving 10 people in hospital and one elderly customer dead.
Shares in the company dropped almost 10% in a day as it scrambled to remove the item from the menu, and it is working with its suppliers to get back on top of the food safety standards needed to allow its fans to order with confidence.
The American icon has also been dragged into the cut and thrust of the presidential election, with Donald Trump spending a useful half-hour behind the fry station of a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, then claiming that 29,000 supporters had surrounded the restaurant, quite a high turnout for a town with a population of 24,657.
This was apparently staged to back up his claims that Kamala Harris was lying when she claimed to have worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda in 1983, and it was followed by a post on his Truth Social platform claiming that when he becomes president “THE MCDONALDS ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN”.
This Ciceronian level of oratory sums up a bewildering campaign that may yet put him in the most powerful role in the free world.
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