Don't judge a book by its author (From Times Series)

Don't judge a book by its author

9:16am Monday 2nd June 2008

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I always liked the story about the fellow who went to see a Shakespeare production at Stratford and rose to his feet at the final curtain hollering: "Author, author".

There's possibly nowt so funny either as folk who read football books. When I wrote my first Tottenham Hotspur book in 1967 I proudly stood outside the club shop on the Saturday of publication — then at the entrance to the ground off the High Street — where a display of my work was on show.

A couple of punters went into the shop and emerged with copies. Finally, a supporter I knew came across and said: "I've seen your book".

"Oh yes?" I replied, leaving the way clear for a bit of anticipated flattery.

"Yep", he grunted. "The pictures were good".

I am reminded of my days as a football author by the news that my next literary effort, a hardback entitled Forgive us our Press Passes, is due to be published at the end of August.

To be fair, I am only a co-author ... 64 members of the Football Writers Association have contributed to the book to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital children's charities. My chapter is about the birth of the Footballer of the Year award in 1948.

I guess they'll have to call "Author, author" 64 times at the launch of the project.

I have known the highs and lows of being an author. My Pictorial History of Soccer, written and researched in Hendon Reference Library, was a prestigious Christmas best-seller in the Sixties, with a foreword by George Best, and was reprinted for several years afterwards.

When the English football writers gathered in an hotel in Guadalehara for the World Cup in Mexico they were confronted by a display of Signy volumes in a showcase — Jack Dunnet, the former Labour MP who was my chairman at Brentford FC, returned from a trip to the USA with a seven dollar copy he bought on Fifth Avenue. Glory, glory days.

A year after my first book on Spurs I was invited to do one on West Ham United. The formula was the same, picture of yours truly with a star name player who I paid £50 for me to provide a foreword in his name.

The only difference was that the publisher decided that the same person could not eulogise about different teams in different books — so my West Ham books were under the name Dennis Irving.

Three years later the Sunday Mirror twigged and published photographs of Signy and Irving with two star players from the two clubs in a diary piece and commented on the remarkable likeness between the two authors.

That was before Terry Venables decided I was a lookalike for Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis. So it was probably just as well I wasn't doing Villa books. That would have confused everybody. I often wonder if people go up to Doug and ask him if he is Dennis Signy.

Also confused would have been the little gatekeeper at Tottenham at the time. He called me 'Mr Compton', thinking I was the Middlesex and England cricketer and Arsenal footballer. I could understand his confusion; we both came from Hendon, but I have two 'n's in my name!

I wrote a book with Chelsea skipper Ronnie 'Chopper' Harris, which earned me the princely sum of £21 when we had to rewrite and edit in publication week because his agent had not told Chelsea he was doing the book and they objected to a chapter or two. Most of my fee went on reprinting costs.

I wrote a book with Ronnie's England goalkeeper team-mate Peter Bonetti that sold less than 3,000 copies and did not earn a penny in royalties and, best of all, my History of QPR in 1968 broke some sort of world record by being published three managers out of date.

Alec Stock, the manager when I wrote the book, was replaced by Bill Dodgin. A month later he gave way to Tommy Docherty, who lasted a whirlwind 28 days. Les Allen was the manager when the book came out -- and there wasn't a mention of him.

I don't know how Shakespeare felt, but being an author was far from a glamorous ego trip most of the time for me.

The late Les Yates, who wrote the Tottenham Hotspur programme, cautiously waited four years before he bought my first Spurs book.

"Got it in Enfield Market for three quid", he triumphantly announced. He didn't say what he thought of the pictures!