The others glanced at one another, waiting for him to speak, and Tommy offered cigarettes from a smart leather case. Only Ursula accepted, and as Alice watched him light it for her, she desperately hoped the smoke wouldn’t nauseate her now as it had started to. She’d been lucky with her pregnancy so far, only developing a deep distaste for fish and eggs, and since they were both difficult to get hold of, it hadn’t been too much of an inconvenience—but most of her co-workers smoked.

George turned to face them. “The public’s appetite for books is still growing across all genres, but we don’t have the resources to try anything new, that’s the maddening thing. Tell them, Tommy.”

“Our paper ration has been reduced again.” He waited for their collective groan to end. “And since it takes one ton of paper to produce three thousand books—”

“Only if they’re two hundred and fifty pages long.” Emily clearly wasn’t willing to be outdone.

“Well, yes, that’s right,” he said. “But it still means we can’t publish as many titles as in previous years. We’ll be lucky if we get five nonfiction and ten fiction books out of our paper stocks this quarter, and that means we can only produce two new titles.”

“It’s difficult to take risks with only two new titles,” Ursula said, with the trace of her eastern European accent.

“Precisely,” George agreed.

The knot in Alice’s stomach tightened; this really wasn’t the day to be telling them that she was leaving, when what they needed were winning new ideas. The public was reading more than ever in shelters and in their homes during blackouts, as were the troops and voluntary services as they waited, and yet here was the publishing industry without the means to produce more books.

Tommy said, “You all know the new rules, that we don’t get the paper ration next year unless we get the book sales this year. So, we can’t really afford to take risks. We need certainty, and to give booksellers titles they can sell.”

“Well, that means more crime and romance, then,” Emily said confidently.

“If we want to play it safe, it does,” Ursula replied.

The Bookseller published a weekly chart of the bestsellers and the most borrowed books, and they included Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene and Victor Gollancz, as well as the propaganda bestsellers that the Ministry of Information produced.

“What about children’s books?” Alice suggested. “Apparently Five on a Treasure Island is proving popular.”

“It’s just novelty,” Emily scoffed. “It’s not going to last. Do you seriously think anyone is going to be interested in reading about what four children and their dog get up to in the school holidays?”

“I don’t know,” George said thoughtfully. “I really don’t, but we need to try something.”