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‘I don’t know. What about phase two?’ I asked him. ‘If these things do well—’

‘No plans for phase two yet, Eddie.’

‘But if these do well?’

I heard a quiet sigh of exasperation at this point. He said, ‘I suppose there could be a phase two.’ There was a pause, and then a polite, ‘Any suggestions?’

I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I was anxious to have another project on hand, so cradling the receiver on my shoulder I cast an eye over the bookshelves in my living-room and started reeling off some ideas. ‘How about, let me see …’ I was staring at the spine of a large grey volume on a shelf above the stereo now, something Melissa’d given me after a visit to a photography thing at MoMA, and a fight. ‘How about one on great news photos? You could start with that amazing shot of Halley’s Comet. From 1910. Or the Bruno Hauptmann picture – remember … at the execution? Or the train crash in Kansas in 1928?’ I had a sudden flash of the mangled railway carriages, the dark billowing clouds of smoke and dust. ‘Also … what else? … there’s Adolf Hitler sitting with Hindenburg and Hermann Goering at the Tannenberg Monument.’ Another flash, this time of a distracted Hermann Goering holding something in his hands, gazing down at it, something that looks curiously like a laptop computer. ‘And then you’ve got … stick bombs over Paris. The D-Day landings. The kitchen debate in Moscow, with Khrushchev and Nixon. The napalm kid in Vietnam. The Ayatollah’s funeral.’ Still staring directly at the book’s spine, I could literally see these images now, and vividly, one after the other, scrolling down as they would on a microfiche. I shook my head and said, ‘There must be thousands of others.’ I looked away from the bookshelves and paused. ‘Or, I don’t know, you could do anything, you could do movie posters, advertisements, twentieth-century gadgets like the can opener or the calculator or the camcorder. You could do automobiles.’

As I threw out these suggestions – reaching over to the desk at the same time to steady myself – I also became aware of a second tier of ideas forming in my mind. Up until that point I’d only ever been concerned about my own book. I hadn’t thought about the series as a whole, but it struck me now that Kerr & Dexter were really being quite slapdash about it. Their twentieth-century series was probably only a response to a similar project that was being done by a rival publishing house – something they’d gotten wind of and didn’t want to be trounced on. But it was as if once they’d decided to do it, they felt that was it – they’d done the work. To survive in the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, K & D’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but off-loading a project like this on to Mark’s division was just paying lip-service to the idea. Mark didn’t have the resources, but Artie knew he’d take it anyway, because Mark Sutton, who was incapable of ever saying no, took everything. Then Artie could forget about it until the time came to apportion blame after the series had flopped.

What Artie was missing out on here, however, was the fact that the series was actually a good idea. OK, others would be doing similar stuff, but that was always going to be the case. The thing was to do it first, and better. The material – the iconography of the twentieth century – was there, after all, ready-made and waiting to be window-dressed, but as far as I could see Sutton had only managed to put together half a package, at best. His ideas lacked any focus or structure.

‘Then you’ve got, I don’t know, great sporting moments. Babe Ruth. Tiger Woods. Fuck, the space programme. There’s no end to it.’

‘Hhmm.’

‘And shouldn’t all of these books have similar titles?’ I went on. ‘Something identifiable – mine for instance is Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley, so Dean’s could be, instead of just Venus, it could be … Shooting Venus: From … Pickford to Paltrow, or From Garbo to Spencer, something along those lines. Clare’s, if she confined it to boys, could be … Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. I don’t know. Give it a formula, make it easier to sell.’

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then, ‘What do you want me to say, Eddie? It’s Friday afternoon. I’ve got deadlines today.’

I could picture Mark in his office now, lean and geeky, struggling to stay on top of his workload, an un- or half-eaten cheeseburger on his desk, a secretary he was in love with ritually humiliating him every time their eyes met. He had a windowless office on the twelfth floor of the old Port Authority Building on Eighth Avenue, and spent most of his life there – including evenings, weekends and days off. I felt a wave of contempt for him.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘Look Mark, I’ll talk to you on Monday.’