Nothing concentrates the minds of publishers quite like the approach of Christmas.

Yuletide sales go a long way towards keeping the industry in champagne and canapés for the rest of the year, so a lot of marketing savvy goes into working out the best way of relieving punters of their money.

But does the reissue of Barbara Cartland’s Etiquette Handbook and the appearance of Debrett’s Guide for the Modern Gentleman really tell us anything about the much discussed state of the nation?

Are we pining for a long-lost age before hoodies and ASBOs, iPods and iPhones and Jordan and Jade? Perhaps the subtitle of Cartland’s 1962 classic A Guide to Good Behaviour from the Boudoir to the Boardroom offers a clue. Wouldn’t the world be a more pleasant place, we seem to be asking, if everyone knew how to hold a teacup, slice a cucumber sandwich and greet the vicar on the way to morning service?

On the face of it, Debrett’s may be on to more of a winner with their 21st-century update for the modern man. Armed with this, men will surely approach 2009 confident in the knowledge that will not make the catastrophic social gaffe of buying the wrong Plasma screen TV or turn up for that crucial board meeting in flip-flops and Bermuda shorts.

The truth is that publishers are always desperately seeking the next big thing. In June of 2006 no one paid much attention when HarperCollins published The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden. Yet, with its retro styling and appeal to a 1950s Famous Five version of childhood, it became an instant and enormous hit.

It has sold nearly one million copies and spawned dozens of imitators, some good, some just desperately chasing the same customer, and with the next trend not yet obvious, publishers are still mining the same nostalgic seam.

But with a third of book sales squeezed into December, publishers will go on producing “gift” books to place judiciously close to the checkouts for the festive season — millions of them to be discarded before Boxing Day morning.

They have started to arrive in the Books deparment of The Times only this week. A quick perusal of today’s postbag, for example, produces Do Bats Have Bollocks? That one is not by Barbara Cartland, though.