A New Shelf Life Begins

Cart laughs.

"Not too well yet," he says. "That's a big problem. Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories." His question for publishers: "Why don't they do simultaneous editions?"

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The answer, he thinks, is that "it's a territorial matter." If you're the head of an imprint, whether adult or juvenile, you want to control the latest Hornby because it will improve your bottom line.

Ask Hornby and his YA publishers what the difference is between Nick Hornby, fledgling YA novelist, and Nick Hornby, best-selling adult writer, and they'll make a number of points:

¿ The main characters in "Slam," as is true in almost every YA title, are teens themselves.

¿ Hornby reined in his use of profanity somewhat.

¿ "Slam" includes sequences in which Sam is projected into the future, the sort of "Twilight Zone, graphic novely type of idea," Hornby says, that he might not have tried in an adult book.

Ask Hornby's adult publishers, however, and they'll tell you that there are way more similarities than differences between Adult Nick and YA Nick -- and that Adult Nick sells more books.

Riverhead's Geoff Kloske, who publishes the adult Hornbys in the United States, is relatively circumspect. "There's no reason 'Slam' couldn't have been published as an adult book," Kloske says, but he and his colleagues agreed that "it was not a problem" to market it as YA. Still, "a certain segment of Nick's fans just are not going to be in that part of the bookstore."

Lacey, the English editor, is more blunt.

"I would like to have done this as an adult book," he says. "I think it would have done really well." As it is, "we've got out about 40,000 in hardback," great for most authors but not close to what an adult Nick Hornby would have done.

Even Hornby -- who bought into the idea of YA publication because he really wanted to reach teens -- admits to some doubts.

"I go into bookstores," as he put it in an e-mail, "and see 'Slam' next to board books and (if I'm lucky) Harry Potter, and I know the kind of kids I was aiming for wouldn't look twice at a book kept in the kids' section of a bookstore."

Still, everyone involved expresses confidence that "Slam" will be around for a while.

And hey: The paperback will be marketed to both young people and adults, just as Cart suggests.

'A Blank Sheet of Paper'

Both young and adult: It sounds like shorthand for Hornby himself.

One minute he'll be describing the insanity of the grown-up work world, including a day job he once had with the Korean electronics firm Samsung. Mostly he helped managers negotiate the mysteries of England, especially when Samsung's impatient chairman phoned in a request.

"I'd go in at 10, they'd say, 'We need to buy an equestrian center!' " he says, cracking up. "And then at lunchtime they'd say, 'Have you bought the equestrian center?' "

A minute later, you'll find him musing that after "a long process of ironing out kinks," his life feels "pretty straightforward now." You could use a word like "mature" to describe this second Nick Hornby, and you wouldn't be wrong.

You'd still be missing something essential, though.

To understand what, it helps to see Hornby onstage with the members of the Philadelphia rock band Marah, whom he befriended a few years back. "Youth is a quality not unlike health: It's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it," he once wrote in an essay explaining why he'd been so drawn to Marah's throwback exuberance.

Now here he is, courtesy of YouTube, warming up the crowd at a joint Hornby/Marah gig last year in London.

He tells them about the 1972 Rory Gallagher concert that turned him into a live music fan; evokes the bygone ear-bleed era when "if you had been to a show on Saturday and you could still hear the feedback the following Wednesday, then you were the envy of your friends"; and explains why nostalgia is not really the point.

He knows he can't top the mind-altering impact of that 1972 concert, because "I was a blank sheet of paper that year, and I was being written on for the first time."

And yet . . .

There may not be much room left on that once-blank page -- but that doesn't mean he never wants to be written on again.

"Okay, Marah," the young, adult Hornby says. "Make some noise."