Can the tweedy genre survive the convergence of the celebrity tell-all with the rise of the self-reflexive blook? The answer may surprise you. If you could find it.

Colin Robinson has been in publishing since 1976. He has worked for fusty companies and radical ones, for earnest independents and empire-building corporations, for Britons and Americans: as an editor, always involved in the slightly precarious business of putting out serious books. But recently he started noticing something about the way books are treated that disturbed him. “Here in New York” – Robinson lives in a fairly intellectual part of Manhattan – “books are quite often left out in the street. If people are moving, they don’t take their books with them.”

There may be a harmless explanation. Manhattan apartments are small. Some people always get rid of books once they’ve read them. Yet Robinson has some cause to see the phenomenon as a symptom of something ominous. On 3 December last year, despite what he describes as an editorial list “filled with erudite, well-written books”, he abruptly lost his job at the American publisher Scribner.

So many other editors were sacked in New York that day, it almost instantly became known in the closely connected worlds of American and British publishing as “Black Wednesday”. In recent months, such culls have become grimly routine in many industries. But among those who write, publish and sell serious non-fiction – the biographies, histories, travel and science books researched and written with a degree of subtlety for a general audience – the bad news seems to have been building up since long before the current recession.