VAT may be levied on books in the Spring Budget. Writers and publishers suddenly speak with one voice: outrage, shock at the prospect of a 'tax on knowledge'. Deplorable though such a tax would be, in the last five years some publishers and authors have themselves pointed Mr Lawson's way.

Books and magazines have been happily anomalous commodities in the past. Glamour used to attach to writers and their product; there was a superstition that knowledge should circulate freely; and there were the public libraries, those democratic institutions in which books were stripped of their jackets and went in search, not of a market, but of a readership. A book was something to own; it was also something to share. Even when protected by copyright, it was always near the public domain. Readers innocently violated copyright whenever they stored the actual words of texts in the 'retrieval system' of memory. Any moment now Miss Brophy may launch a campaign for a memorisation fee-'Public Learning Right'-to be paid to every author whose work is deemed memorable.

"I do not greatly blame those who cry out upon the connection of literature with trade," wrote Walter Besant in 1893; "they are jealous, and rightly jealous, for the honour of letters." It is in part the residue of this jealousy which insists that 'literature' and its traditional vehicle, the book, are sui generis, set apart from commonplace forms of manufacture, and governed by other than 'open market' conventions.

Besant helped to found the Society of Authors which celebrates its centenary this year, and The Author, the Society's trade journal, now in its 94th year and under only its fifth editor, Richard Findlater. To mark the Society's centenary, Findlater has assembled Author! Author! (Faber, £2.95), a wonderful anthology of extracts from The Author's reservoir of information, polemic, pomposity and wit. He has put it together in such a way as to summarize the concerns and changes of a century-in just over 300 pages.

Findlater preserves what seems to me a healthy ambivalence on major issues. It emerges that, since the war, writers have generally 'got their way'-but their 'status' and their living standards have declined. Thirty-odd years (and endless skirmishes) after John Brophy's Open Letter to The Author, something remotely like the Author's Fee he advocated-Public Lending Right-is a reality. In that period writers' and publishers' sense of contracts and terms has increased in precision; standard agreements exist; new media and the new technology have brought complications and compensations; the Society and newer associations have burgeoning memberships. Writers are 'intellectual or creative workers', V.S.Pritchett said in 1978, 'born non-strikers' who suffer 'overtime', 'productivity without bonus', etc. They can give paid public readings, lectures and workshops, become academics, receive bursaries and substantial awards if they are lucky, broadcast and be televized. A further triumph is in store: photo-copying copyright will now be charged to teachers, lecturers, students, researchers, school-children and institutions of learning-and the writer will get a tiny rake-off from what used to count as Fair Dealing.

Yes-writers get their way. It's not surprising that-as far as people in the street and their elected representatives are concerned-a romantic aura no longer hands about their heads. They are 'producers' who negotiate with 'employers'. Their case against VAT on books is no better than that of any other commercial interest group. Only a part of the book trade can plausibly claim educational exemption. When publishers unreasonably exploit subsidiary rights on behalf of their acquiescing authors and against the traditional privileges granted for education, scholarship and criticism, and at the same time fail to produce or to keep in print the texts required by teachers and students, they are doing just what they claim VAT on books will do: taxing knowledge, projecting market forces on the area worst hit by the market mentality that dominates this government even in its approach to education. Mr Lawson will note how a publisher charges £70 for the right to include a thirty line poem in a book, £3 for the right to photocopy it for ten students, £40 for the right to quote it in a critical essay. When distinguished authors chide him, he can refer them to the beam in their publishers' eyes. Publishers will be done unto as they do.

Rights have never been so costly as now for the anthologist. Choice dwindles for the reader and will dwindle further. Students will be served for a long time to come with books distorted in their content by considerations not of literary or educational merit but of rights cost. If there were principles above those of the balance sheet still generally at work in the world of literary publishing and writing, a campaign to fix copyright and permission fees and procedures which are fair both to the 'producer' and to the 'consumer' could be mounted. The enemy to the circulation of knowledge and information at this time is not the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He may well become the enemy. If so, then many of those who oppose his principles will have assumed them in their own practice.