Five Leaves Blog

World Book Night

2012-01-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Writing on Facebook, our writer J. David Simons said about the forthcoming World Book Night: I'm not sure what to think of World Book Night. Of course, it is a noble cause to get great books out there into the hands of readers. I wonder what kind of deals these already well-known writers have with their publishers - is there anything in at all for the writers apart from the proliferation of their books? [I know a couple of the writers on the list- I must ask them]. If it's all for free, could we have other such nights of free services for other noble causes? A World Boiler-Fixing Night, A World Car-Servicing Night, A World Free Banking Night, A World Free Bottle of Wine Night, A World Free Cinema Night, A World Free Insurance Night. Why does it always have to be the writers that give away their work for free?!

My own experience of WBN is limited. Last year I was a "giver" but rather than send the books to my appointed pick up point, a bookshop, WBN sent them to a library miles from where I live and work. Two buses away in fact (I don't drive). I was not keen on carrying 48 copies of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold on the buses, but I did not need to as the books never actually arrived. They are out there somewhere. I did, however, make up part of a panel at an arts association in deepest rural Leicestershire, with a writer, a librarian and a bookseller. Several of the association were givers. We had a very good discussion on all things bookish, and WBN was the trigger.

I can see David's point, but I know that he and most other writers do want to create a reading culture whereas I doubt the bloke who comes to mend our boiler wants to put boilers at the heart of public life. And, locally, some people have from time to time organised free cinema showings on giant screens for all to see. Certainly we give away some overstocks from time to time - usually anthologies lest any individual author gets upset - as freebies in, for example, Library Reading Day goodie bags.

My main concern about WBN is that as that it relies on well known writers giving their work away free (I presume it is free) it will perpetuate the dominance of those big name writers. Wouldn't it be grand if WBN also had some dosh to pay deserving writers, and deserving small publishers to enable, well, us to give away 25,000 books to help draw the reading public's attention towards, say, J. David Simons?

WBN givers often do try hard to get books into the hands of those who don't read very much, but I confess that over the last year I've got my hands on several of last year's list, introducing me to writers I'd been meaning to read. We all like freebies. I mentioned recently to Robert Chandler, the translator of Life and Fate, that I'd recently found a copy of his book in goodie bag at a Vintage event, having already bought two copies. He said that he was recently at a similar event and on leaving found his goodie bag had that book in it too.

Some bookshops have been concerned about books being devalued by being free, or taking up people's reading time to the exclusion of bought books. I don't accept that. Most book readers read from all sorts of sources, bookshops, second hand bookshops, libraries, book sales at summer fetes, borrowing from friends. But I'm interested to see how this argument develops.

August 12 1952 commemoration

2012-01-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

Advance notice
From Revolution to Repression: commemorating the Soviet Yiddish writers executed on August 12th 1952
Five Leaves Publications and Jewish Music Institute are holding an international event to mark the 60th anniversary of the executions
Sunday 12th August 2012
2.00pm to 5.00pm
School of Oriental and African Studies, lecture theatre G2, Russell Square campus, London (Russell Square tube)
Speakers: Gennady Estraikh, Associate Professor New York University on the Soviet Yiddish writers; Robert Chandler, translator of Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, on Vasily Grossman and Isaak Babel
Music from the Soviet Jewish world: Polina and Merlin Shepherd
This event will also launch From Revolution to Repression: Soviet Yiddish writers 1917-1952, edited by the late Joseph Sherman, published by Five Leaves
Admission free
Light refreshments will be available
RSVP and further information mailto:myra@fiveleaves.co.uk
www.fiveleaves.co.uk
The illustration here is by Chagall, the cover of a small volume of poetry "Troyer" (Grief) published in Yiddish by the Kulture Lige in Kiev in 1922, as a fundraiser for a Jewish orphanage. The poems are by Dovid Hofshteyn, one of the poets killed on August 12 1952, and will appear in translation in From Revolution to Repression.

Laure Del-Rivo and Michael Horovitz in conversation

2012-01-22T02:10:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, 31st January 6.30 for 7pm LAURA DEL-RIVO and MICHAEL HOROVITZ In Conversation with Julian Mash, formerly of the Travel Bookshop
Ladbroke Grove Underground
This event brings together two local writers to discuss their work, and the lives and times that influenced them.
Laura Del-Rivo's debut novel The Furnished Room was published in 1961, and filmed in 1963 by Michael Winner as West 11. Recently re-published, the novel was described in the Guardian as "an evocative taste of black-coffee blues". She was part of a loose collective of writers and artists including Colin Wilson and Alexander Trocchi, and was photographed by Ida Kar. In addition to writing, Del-Rivo had a series of jobs, including working as a bookseller, a Lyons' counter hand and an art-school model before she started running a market stall in Portobello Road, where she is still a regular stall-holder.
Michael Horovitz is an internationalist polymath. He has edited and published New Departures and coordinated the Poetry Olympics festivals for 50 years (poetryolympics.com). He was described by Allen Ginsberg as a "Popular, Experienced, Experimental, Jazz Generation, New Jerusalem, Sensitive Bard", and his magnum opus, A New Waste Land, was selected as Book of the Year by D.J. Taylor in the Independent as "A deeply felt clarion call from the radical underground". He has been a Notting Hill resident for most of his adult life, his artworks and picture-poems continue to be exhibited locally and internationally, and he currently performs in a jazz poetry duo with Stan Tracey as well as with the ebullient William Blake Klezmatrix band.
All events cost £5, include wine and take place at the Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop, 21 Kensington Park Road, London W11 2EU

We are a small venue and our events sell out quickly so please purchase a ticket to guarantee a seat. Tickets can be bought in-store or by contacting bookshop@lutyensrubinstein.co.uk or calling 020 7229 1010.

Here comes trouble!

2012-01-20T06:03:00.000-08:00

Here comes trouble! The radicals of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire is our next book by David Bell, author of the successful book on the Leicestershire miners' strike Dirty Thirty. Trouble will be written for a general audience (I almost used the word popular, but that might be pushing it) and include radicals of all types - political, of course, but also religious - think George Fox of the Quakers, trade union, literary, lesbian and gay... whatever we come up with. David and Five Leaves are keen to spread our net widely to include well known radicals (Byron) as well as people who should be better known, or whose work was or is (cliche alert) ground-breaking. Any ideas are welcome, either here or to info@fiveleaves.co.uk.

The UK Beat Scene

2012-01-20T04:22:00.000-08:00

Our recent series of reprints, Beats, Bums and Bohemians, has started us thinking... why not do more than those three? We're also in discussion with one of our regular writers about a book on the British Beat Scene, a structured anthology, with a linking narrative. But we need to know more than we do. Any suggestions or ideas on this would be very welcome. Please contact Five Leaves on info@fiveleaves.co.uk or add a comment with suggestions - even just names to check out. Free polo-necked sweater to anyone coming up with ideas. (Note: this gift can also be declined.)

Jaba juntz

2012-01-20T02:58:00.000-08:00

Well, the Times Literary Supplement likes our recent set of New London Editions' books. That will do our reputation a power of good, even if the headline was "Drugs, murder and books", thereby destroying our respectability at the same time. For seventeen years I worked at Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham which, when I started, sold scales and skins as well as high quality literature. The shop was also raided by the police under the Obscene Publications Act - for drugs books, not sex books* - and although we won costs against the police and most of the books back (the magistrate impounded the Child's Garden of Grass joke book lest any unwary child bought it instead of the Child's Garden of Verse) the shop was forever linked in the public mind with drugs. The name did not help. I've mentioned of course that Five Leaves is unwittingly also a drugs reference, which shows my innocence rather than guilt, but most people don't know that, and here we are again, on the drugs front. Still, I knew that when we published Terry Taylor's book so I can hardly complain. Here's the TLS review: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article858510.ece. The reviewer draws attention to the contemporary language in the books, all first published in 1961, asking though if anyone remembers the phrase "jaba juntz" which failed the google test. The team of linguists working in the Five Leaves undercroft has never heard the phrase either. So let's get it into circulation. What does it mean? With a very vague memory of the drug era I would say: whatever you want it to mean.

* The police haul did include one sex book, a manual on female masturbation. This was eventually returned to the shop by the police. But whereas it left in mint condition it was returned very dog-eared and unsaleable. How did that happen?

Catching up on our writers

2012-01-14T03:15:00.000-08:00

Many, if not most, Five Leaves writers have written for other publishers, before or after we have published them. That's fine. Maxine Linnell and Dan Tunstall, for example, were first published by us but their third young adult fiction novels have gone to bigger publishers. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes books we have turned down have gone on to other publishers - that's fine too. Horses for courses and all that. By chance the first three books I read this year were all by Five Leaves' writers, but published elsewhere. The earliest of them was by Bernard Kops - his Awake for Mourning was published by the great MacGibbon and Kee in 1958. The book is of its era, with a good story of the entwined lives of two ex-prisoners, one of who is taken up by a far-right adventurer. The opening story of the prisoners' entwined lives works, but the ending doesn't. There are good cameos - of the party which included a visit by "The Group", of whom "Two are playwrights, one is a novelist, and one is a philosopher, playwright and novelist. All very up and coming. All genuine geniuses. I hate them." I wonder who they were based on. Just so you knew what you were getting into, the cover had a sort of teddy boy on it, with a miserable looking pregnant woman in the background.
Dominic Reeve is hardly a spring chicken either, though his Green Lanes and Kettle Cranes was only published in 2010 (Lamorna, £9.99). Reeve's classic of Romani life, Smoke in the Lanes, is out now with Abacus, a major publisher that has published or republished Romani books. Our revised edition of Reeve's Beneath the Blue Sky has been a bit delayed but will be out soon. The first edition was a steady seller for us, and while Smoke in the Lanes described the "waggon years" Blue Sky covered the 60s, when Anglo-Romanies were moving fully into mechanised transport. In Green Lanes Reeve wittily has a go at those who think that these people were not "real Gypsies", as they should still be travelling with horses and trailers, selling clothes pegs door to door, comparing that attitude to thinking that farm workers should still be wearing smocks and ploughing with oxen. The main thrust of his book though is to describe how, though there is strong evidence of the author being of partial Romani descent, he ran away to join the Gypsies. He fell in with Romanies local to him as a boy and gradually moved into their circle and way of life. His pleasure in finding he was the only gadje (non-Romani) at a big family gathering still appeals, though he is describing the late 1940s. Dominic has always been rather secretive about his life and his real name (still not mentioned here) so this is probably as close to the truth as we will get. The book could have done with a bit of editing, and is repetitive in places but it is a good insight into Romani life in the late 40s in southern England. Dominic still sells compost door to door, and still travels.
The youngest of the three writers mentioned here, being merely in his 70s, is John Lucas, the critic and poet. Several of his books are published by Five Leaves but his first novel, yes, a novel, is published by Greenwich Exchange. The book is called Waterdrops (£9.99) but due to a Greenwich glitch it is not on their website, nor is it on Amazon or listed yet with any booktrade bibliographic information. The book does exist though, the evidence is in front of me, and anyone trying to find it should know that Central Books has it in stock. I'm sure that it will officially exist soon. Waterdrops is a story of World War 2, and if you can get over the awful cover and don't mind a few typos (yes, yes, "pot" here) and stick with it you will find a rather good novel. It is a little hard to get into, but worth it. The novel is based round "letters home" from a soldier then serving in Malta, his life there, the life of his wife and children back in blighty (there is a lot of WW2 language in the book) and the impact of something major on their later lives. I'm not going to give it away, but the hook is a misunderstood passage in Troilus and Cressida. The whole subject is "the terrible things that happen in war, and not only on the battlefield."

A sack of post

2012-01-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

Today was just like Xmas, with a sack of post from friends and (literary) family of Five Leaves. The biggest box comprised returns from the bookstall at the Jewish studies Xmas Limmud conference, which answers the question of what some Jews do for Xmas. They buy some Five Leaves' books in breaks from their conference. I also received the programme for Jewish Book Week (www.jewishbookweek.com), which I'm a bit grumpy about as JBW did not ask the biggest publisher of Jewish books outside London (that's Five Leaves) if we had anything new. But I'll get over it, and the programme has some good features, including our local Dickens' nut Michael Eaton on Fagin, and old Bernard Kops is there with his new David Paul book. One to avoid is Colin Shindler and Nick Cohen lashing themselves into an intellectual frenzy about how the left is anti-Semitic. But there is good stuff in the programme.
Colin Ward - no stranger to this blog - is the subject of a special issue of Anarchist Studies (in stock at Housmans). Anarchist Studies is a spined journal edited by Ruth Kinna, who has appeared at our States of Independence and Lowdham Book Festival. In the same post was was the "Wardist" journal The Land, which I hope is also on sale in Housmans. The last journal in the post was a recent issue of Tribune, which included a nice review of one of our Cable Street books. Trib has been struggling of late, so do buy it when you see it. A few days into the new year and I'm already behind with my reading, but it was kind of London Books (www.london-books.co.uk) to swap some of our London titles for their new reprints of John Sommerfield's May Day and Simon Blumenfeld's Jew Boy, the latter having an introduction from our friend and author Ken Worpole. I must say that London Editions produces some very attractively-designed, and affordable, hardbacks.
The final batch of post comprised booking forms for stalls at our next States of Independence day event in Leicester, on March 17. I'll post about this soon, but stalls are booking nicely and the programme is coming together.

Stop what you're doing and read this!...

2012-01-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

... is a new title from Vintage, published to encourage reading. So I did stop what I was doing, which was reading, to read this book, on the train today. And mostly it was very worthwhile. The opening chapter, the best in the book, was by Zadie Smith entitled "Library Life". There was no mention of previous publication but I thought I had read a version of the chapter elsewhere. No matter, her article was one of the best pieces of advocacy for public libraries I've read. Tory Government Minsters should be strapped to chairs and made to read it. They'd still hate people reading books "on the rates" but at least they might be marginally ashamed. Might.

Zadie Smith described her own family's reading history, and the importance of public libraries in opening up the possibility of other libraries for her - the university libraries she frequents now. But she does not want to pull up the drawbridge behind her. She also sees that even with the university libraries and her private library in her private house that there is the call of spending an afternoon with a toddler in a public library, or the need to research your street in 1894.

Jeanette Winterson reminds us of other things the working class has lost - the brass band, the choir, telling stories down the pub, mending kit, walking - to force-fed adverts and consumerism. Nicholas Carr draws attention to what is on offer to the modern reader of Kerouac's On the Road - apps that come with maps, audio, video clips, slideshows, touchscreen interface. Great, "but I doubt it would have rattled my soul in the way my tattered paperback did." Finally I could have kissed Mark Haddon when he wrote that he often could not remember what happens even in some of my favourite novels, mentioning that he was halfway through the third volume of Proust before coming across marginal notes in his hand showing he had "read it before and forgotten everything". I'm pretty sure I haven't read Proust, but was so pleased to find that another reader just, well, forgets important books while still loving them. And he's younger than me.

I doubt whether any non-reader will be turned on to reading by picking up this book. But we need to remind ourselves of the importance and joy of reading, and this books is good reading and good company. Awful cover though, which is not illustrated here.

ps Five Leaves is a voice in the crowd in this book. Michael Rosen, in an article that was also published in the Guardian, talks about his father Harold Rosen reading aloud to his family, Dickens especially, and from his own memoir Are You Still Circumcised? - which we published, and reprinted, and foolishly allowed to slip out of print.

How not to approach a publisher # 1

2012-01-08T02:58:00.000-08:00

I would not normally mock poets but I've just had another submission from someone offering their new book who had politely been told before that we were not reading submissions and asked not to send more... So I think he is fair game and it's a good email. My previous rejection is not referred to but my eager correspondent does refer to his previous email in which he attached 607 pages of poems as an attachment. He writes that as he hasn't heard from us he is optimistically sending the new collection. I like an optimist. This time he has gone for a more modest 210 pages as an attachment. It's a good job he did not send his collected works as he boasts that he has nearly 7,000 pages of poetry available. Not bad for someone aged 34. There is nothing to suggest his poetry which is "unique and has never ever been written before or experimented on the mortal planet by any mortal" is targeted at Five Leaves (whose poetry output last year was one small pamphlet) so I imagine there are many small publishers whose inboxes are blocked up. Nor do I imagine the person knows anything about poetry since he is asking for "an author advance and uninhibited distribution of my book via earth's major bookstores". But why stop at the earth for his books which are also on line so that we can "witness the extent of the spread of (his) poetry on the Internet"? After all, he has God on his side - heaven's best known literary critic has bestowed on my correspondent his, ie God's, "invincibly astounding grace on (him)". Good old God. Well, our list is full, but our correspondent suggests I could forward the email, with attachments, to "any of (my) esteemed contacts in the publishing industry." Now, what was the name of that editor at Faber?

The year just ended - annual report

2012-01-05T02:50:00.000-08:00

Given the current Dickens' craze, we shall report Five Leaves' 2011 as the best of times, the worst of times. On the positive note, we published more books than ever, and, save for an historic reprint and a new edition of an old Five Leaves' title which were held over, managed to bring out 28 new books this last year. These included new young adult fiction from David Belbin, Maxine Linnell and Dan Tunstall, all of whom have we have published before; the relaunched Crime Express series; five books for the Battle of Cable Street 75th anniversary; two Catalan interest titles; a new Bromley House editions historic reprint; new and old fiction by J. David Simons; a new art book by Anita Klein; one poetry pamphlet; a very creative book on Roman Nottinghamshire (which went to reprint within weeks); a memorial anthology for our writer Colin Ward; the first issue of an annual journal; three books in our New London Editions series, fifty years after first publication - much to the pleasure of the writers, all of whom are still with us. Such output is challenging, but it was possible with the first full year of Five Leaves no longer being a one person business - with Pippa Hennessy picking up an increasing range of work.
Of these, some performed much better than expected - Roman Nottinghamshire has already been mentioned. Others needing reprinting within their first year included the new edition of our Crime Express title Claws, which keeps on selling, the New London Editions' book Baron's Court, All Change and - twice - our journal. The first edition was called Maps, the second, Utopia is coming along nicely. We also reprinted one of the Cable Street books, The Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s thanks to the author running a long series of meetings on the subject of the book. Others - and here is the bad news - did not perform well, primarily our more commercial titles that depended on Waterstone's. Anybody reading this will know that bookselling has had a rough year, and unfortunately we published our commercial titles at exactly the time Waterstone's was up for sale, then sorting itself out. It is no great surprise that the book trade does not see small press publications as their saviour... but on the other hand competing on 50% off, 80% off does nobody any favours either, leading only to books being seen as cheap, while holding less and less specialist stock drives people to Amazon. There is good news from the radical sector, with the formation of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, where we remain strong, and from many good stockholding independents, or those with a great programme of readings and events.
Overall our sales slipped slightly during 2011 - a few percent down in terms of money banked, but the latter part of the year picked up very well meaning we go into 2012 without a lot of cash, but with a lot owing on trade sales for the last three months which will underpin our trading this year. We are happy with that.
Being very small we have little spare capacity but, a bit late, we are turning many of our books into eBooks, with thirteen of our backlist now available as eBooks, with many more moving into that format in the New Year. By summer it should be standard practice to publish eBooks at the same time as our real books, if it seems appropriate. We don't think eBook sales will replace sales of standard books, on our list, or even form a very significant part of trading income, but we could be wrong.
It has not been an easy year financially (since we are not hedge fund pillagers) but careful control of stock and the use of digital printing to keep our live backlist working has helped a lot and stopped books going out of print when there was still a small but regular demand for them. This compensates for the steady drift to wholesaler buying by shops and chains (where we need to give larger discount). With some reluctance we are now supplying Amazon direct (at 60% discount!) but increased availability of and information on our titles there should lead to increased sales. Do feel free to add customer reviews to Amazon - it does help.
Five Leaves is known for its projects and events. Our second Leicester States of Independence day event for small publishers was well attended, and Lowdham Book Festival continued to thrive. We have set up the Bread and Roses prize for radical publishing which will see its first award this year (and Ross Bradshaw is one of the trustees, in an individual capacity, of the East Midlands Book Award). We were particularly pleased to be involved in the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street - for its own sake, and to publish five books (a novel, a young adult fiction book, an oral history of the Street and an academic title). We had about 350 people at our joint book launch and about half that at our seminar on the literature of the 1930s. We were also involved in local campaign against library cuts leading to a 500 strong read out and mass borrow at one Nottinghamshire library and a letter signed by 100 local writers in protest against the cuts.
Our review coverage this year ranged from international (Romani, Gujarati) to parochial (Nottingham Post, Camden New Journal) to national (two recent reviews in the Guardian) to specialist, in print and online. Modesty forbids repeating the Time Out review of Maps but that aside, this is our most recent review - covering the three new New London Editions titles http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/going-underground, which we rather like.
We have have lost some friends this last year, Peter Preston passing away recently. These deaths are a reminder that publishing is never just about the books.
We ended the year, however, in celebratory mood, in Nottingham, with a knees up attended by regional writers, friends, a couple of writers from London, one from Coventry, trades union activists and a surprising amount of people who form the wider Five Leaves' team.
We posted our plans for this year a few days ago. In summary, it was a busy and difficult year but we got through it, and we are looking ahead with a degree of confidence.
Thanks to those who support Five Leaves by organising events, helping with particular books, by writing and editing, by doing practical things and by buying our books.

Celebrating the book in Stroud

2011-12-31T10:59:00.000-08:00

There has been some recent discussion about celebrating the book as a thing of beauty... James Daunt (of Waterstone's) pitched in about his love of hardbacks, Julian Barnes (in winning the Booker) remarked that whatever you think of his book, it is a beautiful object. Having recently attended a presentation from Random House which included the graphic story of making that particular cover I could see what he meant. At Five Leaves Towers we can rarely afford such time and costly graphic designers, but we do like to see people celebrating the book in all its forms. Over in the People's Republic of Stroud, our friends Dennis Gould and Jeff Cloves, with others, are planning a big local celebration of the book, based on an exhibition by 75 local people of their ten favourite books, displayed in any way they like. We're happy to give that event a lot of notice, and like our Stroud chums, hope that the idea catches on. Don't complain about lack of notice as the event is November 17 - December 8 2012. You can find out more on http://bookcelebration.org/.

Books of the Year (not published by Five Leaves) - #2

2011-12-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

This time from second Five Leaves worker, Pippa Hennessy:
These are the best books I've read in 2011. I tried to keep it to a 'top 10', I really did, but I've read so many good books this year...
Forcing myself to leave Five Leaves books out of the mix helped. We publish so many fantastic books (I am proud to be able to say 'we'), it would be impossible to select a top 10 from those I've read this year. I will mention though one book that's due out in the New Year – This Bed Thy Centre by Pamela Hansford Johnson. First published in 1935 and out of print for years, it's a biting social commentary, an acutely observed depiction of normal people dealing with a rapidly-changing world, and above all, a rip-roaring yarn. When it comes out, buy it and read it!
So. Here is my top 16 (which includes two trilogies and one book I've read before, so it's really a top 11).
I read The Planiverse by AK Dewdney decades ago. It's inspired by Edwin Abbott's Flatland, published in 1884, and tells the story of A Square. Square lives in Flatland, a two-dimensional universe, and is blind to the social repression and discrimination of his land until he discovers Lineland, Spaceland and Pointland. I've been meaning to read Flatland for ages, and I'm so glad I finally got round to it this year – it's social satire at its best. The Planiverse takes a geeky angle on the story, examining the implications of life in two dimensions in exhaustive detail while describing Yendred's great journey across the Planiverse. Both are brilliant, and should be read one after the other.
Letter Fountain by Joep Pohlen is a beautiful book, and speaks to the typography geek in me. Originally published in Dutch (in several editions), Taschen published an English language edition this year, and although it's quite expensive I couldn't resist. Its design is exactly what a book should be – clear and restful – and the attention to detail makes it a joy to behold and hold. The contents are a geek's delight, divided into three sections which tell you all you need to know about how type works, display specimen types in exhaustive detail, and tell the history of typography. I want to make books like this.
Another book which is a beautiful object in itself is Nox by Anne Carson. This is a printed version of an elegy she created for her brother. Originally put together in a notebook, the book is printed on one long strip of paper which is concertinaed into folds and presented in a sturdy and gorgeous box. Nox takes Catullus's "poem 101" (an elegy for his brother) as its starting point, and gradually translates it through the document. At the same time she remembers her brother, questions why she needs to memorialise him, and tries to work out how to do it. The words, the pictures, the presentation, everything about this book is stunning.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is yet another desirable object. This book caught my attention because of the associated online game (http://www.nightcircus.co.uk/) – a great publicity stunt. I wouldn't have noticed or bought the book if I hadn't been following Alison Hennessey from Random House on twitter (@vintagebooks)... just goes to show, this social networking thingy does work sometimes. The story is told out of chronological order, and to my mind that's the only downside. It's fantastical and strange and gripping and uplifting all at the same time, and the book itself is an example of how innovative design can lift a story from the very good to the extraordinary.
Conversely, the 1Q84 trilogy by Haruki Murakami shows how design is totally irrelevant when the words are extraordinary in themselves. I read it on a Kindle and was completely drawn in right from the start. This is a perfect example of speculative fiction – what would happen if there were a parallel universe where past events had happened slightly differently, and two people were somehow transferred there, after which everything becomes gradually more complex and surreal. The main characters are totally engaging and it's a beautiful story beautifully told. I've ordered the real books, as I will definitely be reading these again and I want to do it properly next time.
I'll read anything Neal Stephenson writes – he's so clever, and his novels are BIG in size and scope. Reamde is a departure from his usual speculative fiction in that it's a thriller, but it is still satisfyingly BIG. It's based on the possibilities for fraud and extortion presented by online gaming, rapidly descending from geek-talk into seemingly endless violence and mayhem. Somehow Stephenson manages to maintain an element of fun amongst all the destruction, and although it's over 900 pages it rattles along right to the end.
Adam Roberts is another speculative fiction author I read obsessively. He's not as well-known as Stephenson, which I think is unfair. Both have BIG ideas... Anyway, Yellow Blue Tibia is delightfully bonkers. In 1945 Stalin corrals a group of science fiction writers and orders them to develop an alien invasion scenario which will provide him with a 'common enemy' to replace the weakening USA and unite the USSR. He changes his mind after a while and orders the writers to forget about the project on pain of death. Things aren't that simple though...
The Night of the Mi'raj by Zoe Ferraris was recommended to me by a friend as an interesting study of women's life in Saudi Arabia. I knew the Saudi society is repressive but I find it hard to understand how women can accept living that way. It's also a well-written mystery thriller with fascinating characters and a twisting plot that kept me guessing.
I've been meaning to read The Killing Jar by Nicola Monaghan for a while (Niki is the course leader for the degree I'm doing, and occasional Five Leaves' author). As well as being a shocking yet strangely endearing story, it too describes a life I find it difficult to comprehend – this time that of a girl growing up on one of Nottingham's roughest estates.
Peter F Hamilton's Void trilogy (The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void and The Evolutionary Void) is grand space opera at its very best. Hamilton is one of the best SF authors around; he's capable of building entire universes in his head and putting them down on paper in a completely believable way. The scope of this trilogy is not just BIG, it's ENORMOUS. I listened to it as an audiobook (in the car and while cooking) at the same time as reading Reamde then 1Q84, which almost resulted in a mental implosion as I tried to keep two bundles of storylines straight in my head. I'm not even going to try and summarise the stories of the Void – just go and read the books.
Finally, one of my fondest memories of 2011 is the Nottingham Stanza reading of TS Eliot's Four Quartets from start to finish in one go at Southwell Poetry Festival. I hadn't read the Quartets before this, which was a shocking omission on my part... but taking part in that reading was an almost spiritual experience, and in a way I'm glad that was my first real experience of the whole group of poems. I have read the book since, and will do again many times, I'm sure.

Books of the Year (those not published by Five Leaves)

2011-12-25T04:25:00.000-08:00

It's been a decent year for reading, with two or three let downs by some favourite writers. Solar by Ian McEwan did not excite me, but was not as dull as the Booker-winning The Story of an Ending by Julian Barnes, which ending came mercifully soon. The year started off well though, with Colm Tobin's novel of migration, Brooklyn (Penguin), which I'd been looking forward to, followed immediately by the late Tony Judt's book of essays/memories Memory Chalet (Heinemann). One week of January gone and I knew these two would be in my top ten reads of the year. I'm a big fan of essays, or occasional pieces, which brought Ian Hamilton's The Troubles with Money and Other Essays (Bloomsbury) and Damn Fools and Utopia by the late Nicolas Walter (PM Press) into my top ten. I'll ignore that part of Hamilton's book which is about football. The last essay in Walter's book (thinking of Judt) was written while he was dying, and is about dying, and is worth the cover price alone, the rest are about the 1960s. Four of this year's top ten are related to East Europe. I re-read John LeCarre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - probably for the third or fourth time - and it remains outstanding. This year's Booker longlist included two East European-based novels. Snowdrops by AD Miller (Atlantic) is set in the mafia state of modern Russia and is terrifying. This made the shortlist, while The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuiness (Seren) dropped out at the longlist stage, though I think it is a better book. The last hundred days are those of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, with the narrator being a young English lecturer living there. The publicity made a huge difference to the sales of this previously ignored book from an indie press, which is good news. The only East European book by an East European that made this chart was not new, the Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Norton). At 1,000+ large format pages this is not something for a quiet evening at home but it is complete, with different versions of some of his short stories. His murder, in 1940, makes me impotently angry.
The last two of the top ten, which is, by the way, in random order, includes that "travel writing" classic Naples '44 by Norman Lewis (Eland), which I'll re-read soon. It reminds me very much of Alexander Baron's writing on the British occupation of Italy. Finally, one large photographic book, Ida Kar: bohemian photographer (National Portrait Gallery) - the only book here with a Five Leaves' connection, as her subjects included our writers Laura Del-Rivo, Bernard Kops and Terry Taylor. Their images also appeared in a terrific Kar retrospective at the NPG.
I'd also like to give an honourable mention to Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs by DD Johnson (AK Press), a rollicking novel of life in the international anarchist direct action movement.
Seven of this year's top ten, plus the runner up, were from independent presses (hurrah!) but only one by a woman (shame). Most, but not all, were published this year.

Five Leaves - the year ahead

2011-12-17T03:05:00.000-08:00

We have not done our "annual report" yet, but as we have been working on next year's programme to meet our repping schedule dates, we do know most of what next year will bring. Apart from peace on earth and all that stuff.

With 2011 being such a busy year - 29 titles, was it? - there were bound to be a couple of delays, so apologies to the Estate of Pamela Hansford Johnson that her This Bed Thy Centre (New London Editions) will not now come out until January 2012, as will the new edition of Dominic Reeve's Romani memoir Beneath the Blue Sky, which we should get out at the end of January. The main change will be the addition of illustrations by the Romani artist Beshlie.

We'll be publishing little in the first half of next year. There are two reasons - firstly we're turning more of our backlist into eBooks and need the time to do that, but more importantly, with the ups and downs of the book trade we think we need to allow more lead-in time for our books to organise more events. I don't think we'll reach the heights of the Cable Street combined book launch this year, attended by 350 people, but events and talks do sell books, and we need to do more of them. And to find more ways of publicising our books.

That means our first really new book of the year will be in May, Andy Croft's 1948 - a crime fantasy novel in verse, about that year, about George Orwell, illustrated by Martin Rowson. Maybe a little earlier we'll be publishing our only poetry pamphlet of the year - Joanne Limburg's The Oxygen Man. In June Michael J. Malone joins our list with his first crime novel, one of a series. Michael is normally a poet, but this is Scottish noir, set in Glasgow, the title being Blood Tears. Actually, it's in a sub-genre, Catholic Scottish noir, though Russel D. Mclean's third novel for us, Father Confessor, sounds as if it should be, but isn't. It is noir though. This is our third great Dundee crime novel, which comes out in September. That's it for crime next year. Other regular Five Leaves' writers with a book next year include the late Colin Ward, a series of lectures entitled Talking Green and Peter Mortimer, who returns to his home in Nottingham after fifty years away to tell us what he finds in Made in Nottingham. Given that his previous books include "extreme travel" in Yemen and Shatila refugee camp, we hope this does not cast aspersions on this city. You can find out in June.

We have three young adult fiction books out in 2012. Regular writer David Belbin (who also writes for other publishers, big and small) has written Student a crossover novel about, um, a student. There is not much about studying though. Student appears in August. Our other two young adult books are Five Leaves' editions of books by East Midlands' writers, previously published elsewhere. These are Dark Thread by Pauline Chandler, a time slip story set in Derbyshire (July) and What's Your Problem? a short novel on racism - set in Nottinghamshire as it happens - for reluctant readers, by Bali Rai (October).

Our annual journal appears in August - following the success of Maps this year. The theme is Utopia and it looks like it will be 50% bigger than Maps. We've already got some material in hand for Crime in 2013. Utopia is a mixture of material "from the vaults", from work in progress and new work, again with a mixture of Five Leaves regulars and irregulars, and other writers friendly to the press. Also in August will be From Revolution to Repression: Soviet Yiddish writing from 1917-1952, edited by Joseph Sherman. This was previously announced as From Pogrom to Purge but never published, due to the untimely death of the editor. We did not have the heart to continue the book for some time, then put it back to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the murder by Stalin of all the Yiddish writers in the book. It will be launched at an international gathering in London on August 12th next year, with speakers including Robert Chandler, translator of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate.

Moving to September, our one-title jazz list will triple in size with Red Groove by Chris Searle, someone long in our orbit, and Mixed Messages: American Jazz Stories by Peter Vacher. Both Chris and Peter were previously published by our friends at Northway, and we are pleased to ensure publication of their new titles. In Chris's case the book is a selection of reviews published over fifteen years in the Morning Star and in Peter's case, interviews with American jazz men and women going back to the 1950s.

In October we'll be bringing out more books, the first a New London Editions title - London E1 by Robert Poole, introduced by Rachel Lichtenstein. This novel is set in Brick Lane at the end of WWII, one of the first, if not the first, novel to include many Asian characters, then moving in to the area. The second is by David Bell, author of The Dirty Thirty. His new book has the working title of East Midlands Rebels and is a popularly written book about suffragettes, Quakers, football managers, poets, trade unionists and others who have tried to stir things up a bit round here.

Finally, we'll be publishing a new Bromley House Editions book in November - not sure what yet, other than it will be in this series of hardback editions of forgotten Nottinghamshire books.

On projects.... Lowdham Book Festival will be thirteen next year, States of Independence three. Lowdham will run for roughly ten days up to June 30th, while the Leicester celebration of indie presses will be in Leicester on March 17. We are in discussion with people in Newcastle about a similar event to States there, and with people in London about the return of a socialist book fair, though it might not be in 2012. More news on that as we have it. The first Bread and Roses Prize for radical publishing (see http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/) will also be launched.

All in all, a fairly busy year, but not as frantic as this year has been, and with our programme already settled, and most of the books written, if not yet edited, I think we are more organised than some previous years. Quite looking forward to it really.

What else can you do with a book apart from read it?

2011-12-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

One encouraging development has been people taking their Five Leaves' books onwards and outwards in different ways. Jazz Jews by Mike Gerber has turned into a monthly radio show, Kosher Jam, on UK Jazz Radio http://ukjazzradio.com/presenters-mikegerber.htm), Dave Bell encouraged Alun Parry to turn his book Dirty Thirty into a song, http://parrysongs.co.uk/go/2011/02/new-song-the-dirty-thirty/, and here we have Rod Madocks who has made a short film - seven minutes or so - from his book, No Way To Sat Goodbye:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcUlu_6oeE&feature=share. A challenge then to our other writers... just skip any ballet, please. I was particularly pleased with Rod making this short film as his book first came out in 2007. It did pretty well at the time, being shortlisted for the ITV 3 Crime and Thriller Awards, but like most five year old fiction, there is a tendency to slumber. This is a nice piece of work.

Fry's German Delight

2011-12-11T07:40:00.001-08:00

To many modern readers, a surprising element of David Rosenberg's Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s was the degree of support for the British Union of Fascists by British big business, especially Rothermere's Daily Mail. Why should we be surprised? Whether it be Germany, France, Italy or Britain, some parts of big business felt that a fascist government would keep the unions in check and and bring a bit of order. Rothermere and his allies faded away as it became obvious that the BUF were a bunch of violent thugs, but you could sense their disappointment. The degree of upper class support for the far right in the 30s is not really news though, however much it is kept quiet. My friend Ron Morris has just sent me a photocopied section of the rather pompous autobiography Life Worth Living by that polymath and sportsman CB Fry, who represented England at cricket and football. Fry thought it would be a good idea, in 1934, to forge stronger links between the uniformed British youth organisations, the Boy Scouts for example, and the Hitler Youth, so that both groups could learn from each other. He travelled in Germany, met, and was impressed by Hitler, Hess and Ribbentrop. In his conversation with Hitler they discussed the "Jewish question", the dangers of Communism and the need for friendship with Britain. Fry was happy to greet Hitler with a straight armed salute and to leave with the same, before spending more time with the smart and elegant ladies of Berlin. Indeed most of the people he met seemed to be attractive, and full of vitality or extraordinarily nice. At first I thought that Fry was simply another gullible upper class twit who would have come to his senses before realising that the book was first published in 1939, by the respectable publishing house of Eyre and Spottiswoode (which would eventually become part of Methuen). 1939? Wasn't there that little trouble with Hitler around then? Worse, the book ran to a second impression in January 1940 and a third in July 1941. And the book still carried Fry's sycophantic notes about Adolf Hitler and the ending "Such were my impressions and my conclusions when last I saw Adolf Hitler. Whatever may have happened since, I see no reason to withdraw any of them."

Safe socks

2011-12-10T04:10:00.000-08:00

We were pleased to see the review of our New London Editions' title The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo in today's Guardian. The reviewer, Cathi Unsworth, is one of the younger "London writing" fans and, as it happens, buys socks from Laura's market stall on Portobello Road. I doubt the commissioning editor of the Guardian knew that when she asked Cathi to write the review - this is not sock-gate. Of the reviews in this issue of the paper, twenty were of books from small and large independent publishers, four only were from conglomerates. I'm not sure where to place Cambridge University Press, but I think a score of 4-1 in favour of the indies is good enough. In addition, the lead story in the Guardian Review, on Marilyn Monroe, was by Sarah Churchwell, whose book on Monroe was published by an indie; the "a life in..." profile this time was of Simon Armitage who is mostly published by indies; the poem of the week is from a Carcanet collection. It would be nice of this kind of coverage was reflected in bookshops... anyway, here's the review of Laura's book: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/06/furnished-room-del-rivo-review.

I'm told that Patrick McGuiness - speaking at the Inpress group of small publishers AGM - said that when his book The Last Hundred Days came out, it sold 64 copies in the first three months, with no mentions in the press. Once it was on the Booker longlist all the papers that had ignored the book wanted another review copy. His book was also on the Costa shortlist and has now sold 12,000. This is great news for Seren, the small Welsh publisher, and for Inpress. Indeed, the Booker turned up several books from groundling publishers. But wait... the book that sold 64 in three months and 12,000 in the next three is the same book. Unless the critics review such books, and bookshops stock them how are we supposed to know of their existence? So well done Guardian.

Another year

2011-12-05T00:23:00.000-08:00

Five Leaves is well known as being a serious political and literary publisher, as this picture from our end of year event shows. With so many of our writers present, it would have been invidious to have picked out particular writers to promote their own books, so a mixture of writers, readers and friends read from the Five Leaves' backlist, from absent friends as it were. These included politico David Rosenberg reading from Roland Camberton's humorous novel; retired solicitor Barrie Ward reading a section from Baron's Court, All Change about smoking dope for the first time; Deirdre O'Byrne coming over all celtic; publisher John Lucas reading from Swimmer in the Secret Sea; playwright Michael Eaton channelling Ray Gosling; journalist Julia Bard reading Bernard Kops' poem Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East in support of libraries (the subject of a local Five Leaves/UNISON campaign this year). Oh, and the anarchist tattooed biker Heather Nelson reading a poem about fairies, joined by me, fresh from flower arranging classes. And Myra Woolfson made 180 pieces of cake.
It was a good opportunity to thank - and to repeat that thanks here - to those who keep Five Leaves going. The gathering included writers, editors, those from the technical side, other publishers, UNISON stewards, local press, librarians and a small group of people (you know who you are) to whom Pippa and I turn for advice, or, in my case, to moan about trade matters. There'll be a more formal annual report later.

New from Five Leaves - Penny Lace

2011-11-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

This year's Bromley House Editions' hardback - publishing important but forgotten Nottinghamshire books - is Penny Lace by Hilda Lewis. This novel of "men, machines and money" is about a factory hand, Mr Penny, who despises the bosses and his fellows, learns the trade, sets up as a master himself and brings in new types of machines, modern lace patterns and non-union labour to try to smash the old-fashioned lace manufacturing business in Nottingham. Does he succeed? Does he also marry the boss's daughter? The late Hilda Lewis is most remembered for her mainstream historical novels, but this one is different to her others and has been forgotten since first publication in 1946. The book is a neatly produced 326 page £11.99 hardback and is available post free from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/penny_lace_hilda_lewis_i022085.aspx

Amazon problems

2011-11-16T01:18:00.000-08:00

Books are so much cheaper at Amazon! Order today, get them tomorrow! You need never leave the house again! With Amazon for postal goods and a Tesco on every corner the consumer is king - these colossal firms really like us! Over at Housmans (http://www.housmans.com/boycottamazon.php) you can find many reasons never to use Amazon. But wait... just suppose you have been tempted to buy our best seller - Maps - from Amazon (though no doubt feeling guilty about it). You might begin to think "Where's my stuff?". Out of stock is where it is. Not too great having your best seller being out of stock at Amazon for at least a couple of weeks now. Are we boycotting supplying them? Nope. Like everyone else we confess to being hypocrites - we sometimes buy second hand books via Amazon (how else can we find them?) or ABE (owned by Amazon). We encourage mail order customers from overseas to use Book Depository to save on postage (Book Depository is owned by Amazon). We buy toner from Amazon (as nobody in Nottingham stocks the toner we use). But since Amazon began the powers that be in this firm thought if we pretend that Amazon as a bookseller doesn't exist it will go away. We don't supply them direct. If Amazon wants our books it will have to use a wholesaler. Actually there are practical reasons for that - Amazon takes 60% discount for starters (so that's why books are cheap). Direct supply means keeping all our titles in Nottingham - our trade warehouse is in London - and doing a lot more packing. If you saw our tiny office you'd realise why that was not welcome. But the system is not working. Not for the first time the wholesaler Amazon uses is being very slow to supply them. There's a hold up in the wholesaler's goods-in department - could it be that Christmas has arrived unexpectedly again? At the Alliance of Radical Booksellers there was quite a debate on Amazon - with some publisher members saying that Amazon is their main shop window now. Certainly we get the impression that more and more of our books are being sold by Amazon. So, we will be moving to direct supply. We expect availability of our titles to improve markedly. In the meantime, our apologies for our best seller and other goods being out of stock at Amazon. But we do offer 20% discount on ALL our books ordered direct to us, by cheque, with the books being posted out the same day. Or support your local indie.

New from Five Leaves - Adrift in Soho

2011-11-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

Colin Wilson might at first sight appear to be an unlikely writer to appear on Five Leaves' roster, as he is not particularly known as being a raving lefty. But being a fully paid up member of the revolutionary classes has never been a prerequisite for being published by us. Though it probably helps. In this case though, we are pleased to republish Colin's second novel - his most autobiographical, and the third in our "Beats, bums and bohemians" series, as it is a good novel about growing up in the provinces - Leicester in fact - moving to the big city and then moving further into the drifting world of bed-sitterdom. In many ways it is a companion novel to The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo and it is no secret they were close. The three books in the series were all first published in 1961 and reflect the search for something new, something Mod(ern), something less conformist, something sexual. I'm grateful to Colin Stanley of Paupers' Press who drew this book to our attention and provided an introduction to Colin and Joy Wilson, and to Pablo Behrens for allowing us to use his illustration. Pablo is trying to raise the money to film Adrift in Soho for Burning Films (http://www.adriftinsoho.com/). Any film funding angels reading this should beat a path to his door. Adrift in Soho will be in shops and Amazon shortly, but is available meantime from our office via http://tinyurl.com/adriftinsoho.

Sohemian Society

2011-11-15T00:55:00.000-08:00

I'm grateful to the Sohemian Society (http://www.sohemians.com/) for putting on a talk about our mysterious Roland Camberton/Henry Cohen last night for several reasons. The first reason was to finally meet Iain Sinclair who wrote the introduction to this edition, who was the speaker. Iain looks remarkably like the man on the cover of Scamp, though presciently painted by John Minton some decades ago. His talk was of great interest, particularly in referring to the cover of Rain on the Pavements where, in the original you can see a group of political demonstrators heading down towards the source of local power, the Hackney Town Hall, but during the recent riots the rioters went up that road to the phone and sports good shops. How times change. Iain also talked about the connections between, the drift from, the East End to Soho by working class Jews leaving their origins in search of something more exciting, citing Bernard Kops in The World is a Wedding and Camberton, who, unusually, returned home to Hackney for his second book. Camberton only published two books but there is evidence of a third completed novel which vanished, as did the author himself.

The second reason is that the Sohemians meet in the Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place, the "Corney Arms" of Scamp where "Angus Sternforth Simms" (in reality the writer Julian MacLaren Ross) held forth and "Panjitawarelam" (in reality the poet and publisher Tambimuttu) looked mystical. Both characters from Scamp were wonderfully brought to life by the actor Terence Frisch, who gave a reading from the book. The Sohemians have a very good lecture programme, and I was keen to meet their organiser David Fogarty and the others. There are further Five Leaves/New London Editions events planned there.

New from Five Leaves: The Furnished Room

2011-11-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

The second of our "Beats, bums and bohemians" series is now in our office - though not yet in shops or Amazon. It can be ordered for immediate supply though on

http://tinyurl.com/furnishedroom. Laura Del-Rivo's classic bed-sitter novel was first published 50 years ago - as were the others in the series, see the post below and wait patiently for a posting about Colin Wilson's Adrift in Soho. This was turned into the film West 11 by, um, Michael Winner starring Alfred Lynch as the main male character Joe and Kathleen Breck as the good-time girl Isla. The cast also included Dianna Dors. I imagine this is the only Five Leaves connection we'll ever have to Dors or Winner! The Joe in question lives in the wasteland between Notting Hill and Earl's Court, when not hanging around all-night cafes and other seedy joints. While doing so he stumbles across the opportunity to commit a murder.

Laura Del-Rivo has worked the markets at Portobello Road for decades now and, like Terry Taylor - mentioned below - had a portrait in the recent Ida Kar exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

New from Five Leaves: Baron's Court, All Change

2011-11-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

We're publishing a set of Soho/Boho novels that first came out in 1961 - the first is now in our office and can be ordered here: http://tinyurl.com/taylor-barons. It's not yet in the shops or Amazon, but will be very soon. This is Terry Taylor's only published novel. We've mentioned him before - the young lover of Ida Kar, the inspiration for a character in Absolute Beginners... This is a novel about being a young person in and around the drug scene - indeed this was the first UK novel to mention LSD, a subject Terry knew quite a lot about. You can find out a lot more about the book on http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sex/baronscourt.htm. Indeed, Stewart Home has written the introduction to the book. We're grateful to Pablo Behrens for the cover image, which does reflect the book very well. Terry is alive, fit and well, living in Rhyll as he has been for some decades now, slightly bemused that after fifty years his days in the early Beat scene have resurfaced. Actually Terry had the most interesting life, hanging round in Tangiers with William Burroughs, as you do. My guess is that this will be the best-selling book we publish this year, once word gets round, as it has only been available online, and rarely that, for a few hundred pounds. The holy grail of Beatnik literature.

Next Year Will Be Better - now in paperback

2011-11-13T09:03:00.001-08:00

"Only a dedicated sourpuss could fail to be swept along by Lucas's zest and intelligence" said John de Falbe in the Spectator, so here's an opportunity for dedicated sourpusses everywhere to have another go at remaining static. Next Year Will Be Better featured in Blake Morrison's Guardian Books of the Year last year because it "recalls in astonishing and celebratory details the sounds, tastes and smells of England in the 1950s, with particular attention paid to poetry and jazz." Andy, by the way, to being kissed by Allen Ginsberg, Soho, Eel Pie Island and hearing Louis Armstrong. The paperback edition weighs in at 417 pages, a bargain at £9.99, from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/next_year_will_be_better_john_lucas_i020900.aspx

Inside Outsider

2011-11-13T02:26:00.000-08:00

Planning to attend the Sohemians tomorrow night (Iain Sinclair is talking about Roland Camberton, whose books we publish), reading Tony Gould's Inside Outsider: the life and times of Colin MacInnes is useful for getting into the mood. Faber Finds re-issued the book in 2009 - pity, I would have liked that one - but I picked up a library sale version on Saturday for the bargain price of £1. MacInnes' life is well known. He was a man related to Kipling and Stanley Baldwin and the son of the novelist Angela Thirkell (making him, as Bernard Kops said, "one of the inner Thirkells") yet who lived his life on the edge. Gay, broke, attracted to the rough and tough black culture (and rough and tough black men), yet turning in copy for middle-class magazines and some essential novels. Reading the book was a bit of a wander through Five Leaves' own list of authors. Tony Gould was the books editor of New Society (edited by Paul Barker, who edited a selection of New Society essays for us; designed by Richard Hollis, who runs an autonomous imprint within Five Leaves). The book is dedicated to Ray Gosling, who also appears regularly in the text - Ray's Personal Copy slumbers on our backlist. Bernard and Erica Kops put in regular appearances, not least because they became "Mannie and Miriam Katz" in MacInnes' Absolute Beginners. We publish a couple of Kops' books. Terry Taylor, author of Baron's Court, All Change, is quoted - though he deserved more space as he was the inspiration for one of the characters in Absolute Beginners. The photographer Terry Taylor's then interests being "jazz, soft drugs and hustling" were shared with MacInnes so it is hardly surprising their paths crossed. Terry's book has just arrived in our office, and we'll return to him soon. Even Colin Ward puts in a cameo appearance. Mind you, I imagine any publisher with books out concerning Soho, London in the 1950s or early black culture in Britain could post a similar blog, as MacInnes knew everyone.

Nigel Pickard

2011-11-11T13:18:00.000-08:00

Nottinghamshire writer Nigel Pickard died earlier this week at the terribly young age of 45. Nigel was first published locally as a poet - his Making Sense appearing from Shoestring in 2004 (some of which would appear later in the Five Leaves' Poetry: the Nottingham collection). Nigel was also one of two poets in residence at Lowdham Book Festival one year, together with Rosie Garner. At the time he lived in Lowdham and his first novel, One, was published by Bookcase Editions from the village in 2005. One sold a surprising number of copies, many though organisations concerned with autism, a core part of the book. His second novel, Attention Deficit, was published by the Nottingham small press Weathervane, with Nigel appeared at many readings to promote the book. In his work as a local headmaster he developed his students' interest in creative writing in conjunction with First Story. His early death was a great shock to those he taught and those he knew on the local literature scene, including fellow members of Nottingham Writers' Studio. Our condolences to his family.
A fuller obituary appears on LeftLion: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/nigel-pickard-rip/id/4072

Five Leaves' end of term knees up

2011-11-11T04:41:00.000-08:00

Radical bookshops' history

2011-11-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

Some parts of one's past keep creeping back... After seventeen years hard labour in a radical bookshop, together with a couple of years on the board of another shop, and thousands of pounds spent on the written works of utopian dreamers and other such reprobates, it is hard to get away. Dave Cope, of Left on the Shelf - the second hand specialists - and I have put together an incomplete listing of radical bookshops in history, together with a bibliography of books, and even passing mentions in fiction, of radical bookshops. You can find the current listings on http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/. We are now trying to make that list as complete as we can, so any information would be welcome.

To accompany the site, I've started work on a more narrative history of radical bookshops, which will appear as a printed booklet sometime next year. With the Five Leaves Ship of State to run this will not be the last word on radical bookselling history, but it might encourage others to write something more substantial. I'd appreciate contact with anyone who has worked in radical bookselling in the past, any sources of records, any customer tales, photographs. Anything. Please send direct to me on info@fiveleaves.co.uk.

The new 2011 edition of North West Labour History Journal includes an article on the history of News from Nowhere in Liverpool, written by Mandy Vere, the matriarch of the shop. Copies are available from News from Nowhere. The bookshop pictured here is Radish, in Leeds, one of the new generation of radical shops. Both News from Nowhere and Radish, by the way, have excellent sections devoted to world music, as well as books.

Nottinghamshire Readers' Day

2011-11-06T05:31:00.000-08:00

Pippa Hennesy writes: This year's Nottinghamshire/Nottingham Libraries Readers' Day was the first to be sponsored by a publisher (Vintage), which could have been a problem but as it turned out gave the day an interesting slant. The publisher's representatives were keen to engage with readers, as was demonstrated by the two parallel sessions I attended. In the morning, we were taken through the process of designing a book cover. It's very different from the Five Leaves process - it involves editorial and design teams and sales teams and (eventually) the author... we brief a designer and comment on what they come back with, and try to involve the author at all stages, the occasional book cover even being designed by the author. Interestingly, Vintage don't consult readers as a rule. Until yesterday, that is. They showed us seven possible covers for a set of crime fiction books by one of their writers and asked our opinions. The reaction (widely varying opinions, with the majority saying 'we don't like any of them') might have discouraged them from doing so again. Still, we at Five Leaves Towers learned a lot - expect more stunning cover designs from now on.
In the afternoon I went to a session with Alison Hennessey from Random House and one of their authors about 'The Future of Publishing'. Fascinating stuff, lots of discussion and debate. The answer is, of course, 'nobody knows'. If you ask me, there is a future for both books and e-books, but they have different futures. At the moment there isn't much to tell between them - effectively they're both containers for words. I think printed books will become 'beautiful objects' in their own right, and e-books will make much more use of the possibilities of the technology... whatever those might be. Watch this space.
Apart from that, we listened to David Lodge and a trio of historical fiction authors, talked to lots of lovely people and even sold quite a few books. We sold TWO copies of Rose Fyleman's Fairy Book (hoorah!) and two of Swimmers in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle - a sadly-neglected but absolutely beautiful novella which is currently our worst-selling book. It is my mission to change that status - buy it! you won't regret it!
Many thanks to the indomitable Sheelagh Gallagher and the invincible Jane Brierley, and the folks at Vintage, for a fantastic day.
Meanwhile, up in Fife, our J. David Simons was on the frontline at another Readers' Day.

A curious rattle bag

2011-10-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

It was encouraging to have a nice review in the Guardian for our Maps. They got it in one by describing the book as a "curious rattle bag" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/18/maps-ross-bradshaw-review). But Chris Moss, Time Out's travel and books editor, writing in the current issue, after describing some general faults in modern travel writing said: "It's liberating... to read the essays, portraits, memoirs and travelogues gathered in this compendium. Featuring contributions from seasoned journalists and writers, including Chris Arnot, David McKie, Robert MacFarlane, John Payne and Iain Sinclair, it loosely binds 18 pieces about place that all have a cartographic element - mapping thoughts, mapping walks, mapping history - and through which ripple forms and tones not often found in the modern travel feature, such as the homage, the homily, literary criticism, social and sport history and reportage." There's more, including some particular chapters picked out, then: "All maps are palimpsests to some degree and reading Ross Bradshaw's selection is akin to peeling back layers, deciphering faded contours and, occasionally, redrawing an entire geography. If travel journalism wants to adapt to the recession, here's a direction it might follow." Reading between the lines, all things considered, I get the impression Chris Moss thinks Maps is OK really. Blush.

London anarchist bookfair 2011

2011-10-23T01:35:00.000-07:00

Because of the vagaries of train ticket pricing, it was again cheaper to travel first class to the London for the Anarchist Bookfair, but nothing's too good for the working class. Despite the competing attraction of camping outside St Paul's, the Bookfair was mobbed. Estimates for last year suggested around 4,000 people over the day. Were there more this year? The Five Leaves meeting - part of David Rosenberg's Cable Street marathon - was in the first set of sixty talks and discussion. Despite an early start 30+ people listened in respectful silence while Dave outlined the history and detail of The Battle of Cable Street - an event largely involving people from other political traditions (Communist Party, Labour League of Youth, Independent Labour Party). The only other session I attended, however, was a packed meeting on writing and reading anarchist fiction, which perhaps suffered too much from people being respectful when there were good arguments to be had. That session benefited, as did the day itself, from the increasing international presence, with writers from Sweden and Spain taking part. After last year's appearances by John Pilger and Paul Mason, this year's "outside" speakers included the Black activist Darcus Howe and Donnacha DeLong, President of the National Union of Journalists, which again indicates that the anarchist movement is starting to be taken seriously. [Later note - but read Donnacha's comment below - no outsider she!] I suspect, however, Darcus Howe attracted more people than the two hour session on "Tenants' movements in Poland - social resistance to neo-liberal housing policy", however important the latter is.

I squatted on the Housmans stall for most of the day, which did very good trade, especially with Verso books. People were taking their politics seriously. But not too seriously. The speaker at the anarchist fiction session, DD Johnston, read a hilarious piece from his novel, about the anarchist bookfair, seeming to prove the opposite of the quote from The Poverty of Student Life that "since the anarchists will tolerate each other, they will tolerate anything".

As I left at 6.30 - the fair still in full swing - I watched the wonderful French brass band Les Judas playing in the courtyard. Emma Goldman famously said* "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution" and the band had many people dancing. What she didn't say was that you had to dance well!

* Actually, she didn't say that at all - see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Features/dances_shulman.html

Dig for Plenty

2011-10-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

Back in 1995, having been too mean or too poor to buy the hardback of David Crouch and Colin Ward's The Allotment: its landscape and culture when it first came out, I got fed up with Faber never bringing out the paperback, the hardback being out of print, so rang them up and asked if I could buy the rights to the book. They asked for, I think, £200 and I said yes. Goodness, so that's how you become a publisher. The paperback duly appeared and, in due course, ran to a second edition and many reprints, but became steadily out of date. Even history dates. We kept it in print because there was still a demand, publishing some other allotment books and other books by Colin Ward (and one by David Crouch) along the way. Sales waxed and waned as interest in allotments waxed and waned but over the last period we began to feel a bit uncomfortable keeping it going; the book was, after all, first published in 1988. But there was never an alternative - for us or the public. Now, at last, we've put The Allotment out to grass (as it were) and commissioned Lesley Acton to write a new social history of allotments, called Dig for plenty: a social history of the allotment movement. Lesley's previous books were on ceramics, but she has spent the last five years researching allotments, their social history also being the subject of her Ph.D. There will be a gap, as Lesley's book is not out until 2013, but we can wait. Meantime, Lesley is limbering up with a succession of articles on her blog at http://www.newsgrape.com/u/Lesleyacton/popular/.

Peter Preston

2011-10-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

I was sorry to hear that Peter Preston died yesterday morning, after a period of indifferent health, followed by a short but serious illness. He was a very popular adult education literature lecturer locally (which we put to good use from time to time at Lowdham Book Festival). He was also nationally important in DH Lawrence studies and in the William Morris Society, having been editor of the Society Journal for many years. Lawrence and Morris comprised the main subjects of his published books. He was also chair of the board at Writing East Midlands. Before illness got the better of him, Peter was working on "Reading with mother" - rereading in modern times those books important to his mother in her day, as representative of what the intelligent woman reader read. He mentioned so many books that should be revisited.
Peter was a good friend to Five Leaves. He was particularly keen on our New London Editions series - in fact he liked our emphases on London, on Jewish literature, and on Nottingham - all of which were important to him, representing his upbringing and his home the last few decades. Our condolences to Barbara and the family.
There will be a celebration of Peter's life at the Derek Randall suite at Trent Bridge at 3.00pm on Friday November 4th, which is open to all those who knew him.

Bread and Roses Radical Book Publishing Award

2011-10-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

Five Leaves Publications is proud to be working with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers to initiate the Bread and Roses Radical Book Publishing Award. The award seeks to reward outstanding works of non-fiction published in 2011 that engage with socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change. The name Bread and Roses is taken from the slogan attributed to the many thousands of textile workers who struck in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912, who, in the song commemorating the event, struck "for bread, and for roses" too. The Award was launched on the 13th October in Liverpool, followed by the Liverpool Socialist Singers singing "Bread and Roses". We have not got that on tape, but here's Mimi Farina and Joan Baez filling in for them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYRcCa-ddOo

The Bread and Roses Award will be judged by the children's poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen, the feminist writer Nina Power and the Festival Director of Liverpool's annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan. A shortlist will be announced in the New Year with the overall winner receiving a cheque for £1000 at an awards ceremony at, appropriately, the Bread and Roses pub in London - an ideal venue, not just because of its name but because it was founded by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Council.

Nominations (from publishers and agents) are now open and fuller details can be found on www.bread-and-roses.co.uk. Sadly, there is one publisher excluded! As the founder, organiser and trustee...

Five Leaves and the Arts Council

2011-10-17T01:13:00.000-07:00

In a one-star-out-of-five review of one of our books, The Battle for the East End, on Amazon, the reviewer remarks that the book looks "at the events of the 1930s from a pro-Communist viewpoint" rather than being "objective", noting that the book is supported by the Arts Council. The reviewer asks whether the Arts Council would "stump up cash to fund a pro-fascist book". I think the latter unlikely, as the Arts Council has an equal opportunities policy, but it does, for example, support Faber which publishes Ezra Pound, who was an active fascist, and TS Eliot, who wrote anti-Semitic verse. ACE also supports Carcanet which publishes Wyndham Lewis, who was, for a long time, a supporter of Hitler. So the situation is not so clear cut. I'd also argue that the author, David Rosenberg, who is not a Communist, reports favourably on Communist Party actions against the British Union of Fascists because they were the right actions, against the quietude of the Labour establishment and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
But that is to perhaps miss the point. Why should the Arts Council fund those of our books that are not what you might call creative non-fiction or fiction, and have a left-wing stance? Any reader of this blog will have realised that Five Leaves is hardly a contributor to the Adam Werrity Travel Fund.
The Arts Council currently funds Five Leaves through its Grants for the Arts scheme, a competitive scheme, where we submit a programme of activity for, in our case, three years. We receive a modest annual grant towards that modest programme ("Year One - bring down the Tory Government; Year Two - elect a Labour Government; Year Three - oversee the withering away of the state"??) but it can be rather difficult to ascertain how many square feet of our office are devoted to, say, social history, and how many to introducing new young adult fiction writers, or organising States of Independence, so rather than applying title by title, event by event, we apply for the press as a whole. The irony is of course that our social history titles in general do better than the "creative" stuff, so rather than the Arts Council subsidising social history, it is the other way round as our successful social history books enable us to put in smaller bids than would otherwise be the case. This is also a hedge against the day the Arts Council can no longer fund us, or does not wish to fund us. We intend to survive, which would be less possible if our backlist comprised poetry, young adult fiction and other slower selling items. We can see how an Arts Council logo on a book of clearly left-wing provenance might be a red rag to a right wing bull. But wouldn't taking the logo off such books indicate subterfuge on our part?
Finally - a reasonable test of our "objectivity" - would Five Leaves publish writers from the right? Yes, I am sure we do already. In general I would not ask someone's politics before publishing them, but I know that, for example, Colin Wilson, whose second novel we republish next month is hardly a foaming lefty. Would we publish, say, some pastoral poems about the deserts of Dubai by Liam Fox (who will now have some time on his hands to write a sonnet or two). Probably not, but if Ken Clarke ever offers us a book of his writing about jazz (an area we are moving further into next year)? Now you're talking.

History is not quite bunk

2011-10-15T10:33:00.000-07:00

An email arrives from one Nick Murray, asking to be put in touch with our Bill Fishman, author of East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, one of those steady backlist sellers that is so nice to have on the list. Nick had found a reference to his paternal grandfather, Otto Shreiber in the book. Otto was an emigre friend of Rudolph Rocker, the (gentile, Yiddish-speaking) leader of the Jewish anarchist movement. Both had been living in London for years. With the usual logic of governments, Otto and Rocker were arrested as German nationals when the war broke out. That Otto was in Britain to escape the Kaiser was ironic, but no defence, and he was interned on the Isle of Man, where he died, details unknown. His Irish companion (many people in the anarchist movement did not marry) was Kathleen "Dolly" Murray who had two children. Dolly was unable to cope with the children in Otto's absence and Nick's father was put in the care of Edward and Constance Garnett. Edward was a writer, editor and critic (instrumental in getting DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers published), while Constance was one of the first translators of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. The decades roll on, Nick having been born in 1940. His father - Otto's son - moved in the 1970s to St Ives to a house once occupied by the author and naturalist William Henry Hudson, by then long dead, but whose published letters included some to Edward Garnett way back when Otto's son was living with him.
I'm not sure if there is a moral in this rounded tale other than we are connected to history by very small steps. Which we all know.

Reasons to be cheerful

2011-10-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

Just when you think things can't get much worse, they get a bit better. It was a great pleasure to attend (and speak at) the Chapter and Verse book festival seminar on radical bookselling. Some of the old lags were there - Mandy Vere, the matriarch of Liverpool's News from Nowhere; Dave Cope veteran of the old Communist Party shops Progressive Books in Liverpool and Central Books in London, still on the board of the distributor Central Books and owner of Left on the Shelf, an Internet supplier of second hand socialist books. But there were also new arrivals, from the exciting new People's Bookshop in Durham, which mixes second hand and new, from the Book Bloc, whose shop will open in New Cross and some older and younger activists from Bristol Radical History Group who are moving up from bookstalls to open a shop to be called Hydra.

The day consisted of four parts. Firstly, Mandy from News from Nowhere, Sally from the publishing wing of Bookmarks and Alexis from the anarchist distributor AK Press formed a generally upbeat panel discussing the current state of radical bookselling. All said that you have to do everything nowadays, a bit of publishing, bookselling, outside stalls, in store events - working harder and longer hours to reach the market, but the market is there. There was a sense of unity of purpose, of feeling that we are all in this together (who said that?) and a complete absence of sectarian interests.

The second section was by me, on the history of radical bookselling, concentrating on the days when there were 130 radical bookshops and 450 radical publishers, focusing on the pivotal year of 1984, the year of the miners' great strike and great defeat. I thoroughly enjoyed the research, trawling through old files and back issues of the Radical Bookseller. For years, Dave Cope, something of an expert on the earlier years of the Communist Party orientated shops, and I have planned a book on radical bookselling. The idea lives meantime on his website, http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/, as an incomplete listing of every radical bookshop we have been able to find, together with a bibliography covering mentions of radical bookshops. Any help in adding to this will be welcome.

The third section was the national launch of the Bread and Roses prize, initiated by Five Leaves in conjunction with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. There will be more on the prize and launch shortly, meantime check out http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/.

The final session was a closed session for members of ARB to meet, though also attended by me and a representative of Zed Books. There are now twenty member groups, with Housmans in London administering the project. The general view was that the group will largely operate by networking, providing assistance to publishers keen to reach out to radical booksellers and to tour their authors, but to avoid making controversial public statements. An example of this is over Amazon where some members actively campaign against Amazon while others take advantage of it. Again, the main feature was a keenness to discuss issues but to operate by consensus.

One interesting feature was the presence of second hand dealers, never a feature of the old days. As one pointed out, "An old book is a new book to someone who has not read it before". Indeed, People's Bookshop, the first radical bookshop in Durham since the days of Alleycat, has found that they are selling a lot of backlist material (Paul Foot's Red Shelley was exampled) to people who had simply not had access to this kind of material before.

Everyone was aware of the sector's tiny size and fragility, but felt more positive about radical bookselling than for some time. Would that I was young again!

The ARB's provisional is at http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/ . Meantime, let's leave the last word to one Councillor Jeremy Richardson (Conservative) who remarked in the Sheffield Star in 1986 in the following terms about the Sheffield Radical Bookfair "I put in an appearance at the Radical Book Fair at the Town Hall. Anarchists, feminists and every conceivable variety of ragbag lefty was present peddling their wares. For my part I saw no ordinary Sheffielders, just a bunch of grim-faced souls trying to look interested in some rather dull books. Is this really the right use for the Town Hall on a Saturday?" To which we grim-faced souls (illustrated above, for clarity) can only answer, yes.

Kicking and screaming into the 21st century

2011-10-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

Five Leaves has just published its first three e-books, each at £2.99. All three titles were previously published in paperback. J. David Simons' novels are set within the Jewish community in Scotland and though connected can be happily read as stand alone novels. The Pretender is a novel about literary forgery. This is new territory for us, and we are still learning. More of our backlist titles will follow. Click on the links below to find out more about the books. In due course they will appear on every platform, but at the moment they are only on kindle.

http://tinyurl.com/liberationofceliakahn, http://tinyurl.com/creditdraper, http://tinyurl.com/belbinpretender

Poets

2011-10-12T02:38:00.000-07:00

I'd previously posted about Nottingham Poetry Society at seventy and last night attended the book launch of their anthology, Seventy, which was concluded by the editor CJ Allen reading one of his own poems, Poets, published below, by kind permission of the author.

Poets
You don’t have to admire them, but you might as well;
they receive so little attention. They are causing a ruckus
at The Oblivion Tea-Rooms. They are steadfast
in their uncertainty. They believe they are following
an ancient set of instructions found in a cave.

The instructions are badly translated and partially eaten
by sheep. They have seen the darkness. Their desires
are works in progress. They have no sense of sin.
They bathe in metaphorical waterfalls.
They meet in private and read each other to sleep.

Like everyone else, they stand at the edge of the water
and watch for a sail. They make a noise like an animal
trapped in a sack. They make a noise like a library
in the very early morning. They look like lanterns
swung in an underground cavern. They sit on benches,

saying the light is quite like beaten gold.
They try but they can’t help being slightly annoying.
They are not terrorists or Apollos or aircraft carriers.
They are frequently humbled by the need to earn a living.
They will make a fuss over nothing. They join hands and dance

like ceiling-fans. They love rivers and hares and hatstands.
They climb ladders of grammar to find the perfect view.
Their exaggerations are indistinguishable
from the truth. They feast on thoughts and air
left over from the previous century.

They harvest thunder. They wander. They smell of tarpaulins
and adhesive corners. They know how to pull the wool.
They luxuriate in epigraphs. They miss the point.
They dream about wolf-whistling the Furies.
They have no idea what they’re doing. This is their secret.

CJ Allen, 2010
Poets was first published in Assent 64/3 and will appear in Clive Allen's next collection, At the Oblivion Tea-Rooms from Nine Arches Press in summer of 2012.

Doomed, we are all doomed...

2011-10-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

It is always easy to tell a Scotsman from a ray of sunshine, but two interesting statistics came up in discussion at the, sadly not very well attended, States of Independence (West) event in Birmingham on Saturday. The first was talking with a medium sized independent. They told me that they'd had some problems, including big returns, with a well known chain bookseller but they are now getting orders - a fraction of what they used to get, but now have to give 59% discount on standard stock. 59%? Add in the costs of representation, distribution and author royalties and the publisher is left with about £2.20 on a £9.99 book. Of course not every book printed sells, so allowing for returns and unsolds, the publisher is probably getting £1.50 a book. Now this is OK if you are printing tens of thousands and have the books typeset in India and printed in China, and can sell foreign rights. But that was not the case with this publisher. Looks like their business model is cracked.

But they have done pretty well with e-books... Later a writer announced that it is perfectly easy to crack the encryption in e-books that prevents the equivalent of file sharing. He said that as an experiment, he downloaded the complete text of the Booker prize longlist in half an minute, for free. So... soon all e-books will be free. Can't make money by printing books, can't make money by making e-books. There's not a lot left. But still, it was not such a bad day, the number of book sales was slightly higher than the number of manuscripts offered to us.... I rather fear that when the last publisher in the UK closes, attending the closing sale of the last bookshop, those attending the party will be mostly made up of people waving an unpublished manuscript, quite oblivious to everything else. Happy Monday.

Radical bookshop seminar

2011-10-06T02:52:00.000-07:00

The Chapter and Verse book festival in Liverpool at the Bluecoat is the venue for a free seminar about radical bookselling. Mandy Vere from the local News from Nowhere bookshop chairs a discussion about the current state of radical bookselling and its prospects, while I give a talk on the history of radical bookselling, delving into the past waves of libertarian, hippy, Communist and freethought shops.
The event is free, on October 13. Full details on:
http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1131

A long weekend on the left

2011-10-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

In the last posting, about the big Cable Street day on Sunday, I mentioned some of the groups on the demonstration. I should also have mentioned the Clarion cyclists. That particular group had cycled hundreds of miles to attend - I think I heard one say he had cycled 741 miles. They had a point, public transport in London that weekend was awful, with the DLR not running and various other lines or part lines having the weekend off. The Clarion people had arrived on Saturday to mark the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. The International Brigades Memorial Trust and Philosophy Football were not to know it would be the hottest day of the year, which meant the evening gig in a packed hall was rather sweaty. The only person who looked cool was Victoria Hislop. I had my doubts about her, though I'd read and enjoyed her book The Return, but she won me over explaining her general and specific Daily Telegraph background and lifestyle and how things changed when she started writing the novel that the book became. She immersed herself in Spanish Civil War stories and what she found shocked her, being a woman whose family had happily holidayed in Spain under Franco. This resulted in a rather unhappy two years of deep immersion in the civil war and its aftermath as she wrote the book. The IBMT is of course an organisation of fairly longstanding and knowledgable left-wingers so I was impressed that she wanted to be on a panel at the event. She in turn was quite impressed to be called, for the first time in her life, "comrade" by one of the trade union speakers.

I was a little surprised by one of the other speakers (and I don't mean our Andy Croft) who wondered whether there would have been so much interest had it been the "Norwegian Civil War" because of the romantic nature of Spain and the Spanish people. Would 2,500 British people have travelled to fight in Norway? Yes, actually, had the situation and times been the same. Anti-fascism is not determined by the number of fjords a country has.

International Brigade... Cable Street... There are a number of good reports and photos on line. A good place to start is http://stevesilver.org.uk/blog/battle-of-cable-street-75-anniversary/. And then back home in time to pack for a Leicester Trades Council event celebrating the Dirty Thirty, with David Bell speaking to the Five Leaves' book of the same name and Alan Parry singing, including the song he has written about the group. Eight or so of the Dirty Thirty were present including Malcolm Pinnegar and Darren Moore who spoke, and Johnny Gamble, who got his own special cheer for being the only man in his pit to have gone on strike. Jane Bruton, a nurse, who used to be involved in the women's support group also spoke, reading out old minutes and letters from back in the day. This was the second evening in a row that ended with the Internationale - though in this case not the Billy Bragg version, but the full strength original version, standing, with clenched fists aloft.

Finally, today I attended a meeting of local UNISON members who were taking up the Six Book Challenge as part of their Union Learning. It became a Seven Book Challenge as they were presented with copies of the Five Leaves' Nottingham anthology Sunday Night and Monday Morning. A printer we had dealings with found 400 copies of the book in their warehouse which we had not accounted for and we have been steadily finding ways of giving them away to good homes. Why is reading so important to trade unionists? Apart from its intrinsic value, and the value of building a reading culture in the workplace, as the number of veterans of the Spanish Civil War and Cable Street - and even the 84/85 NUM pass on - we can find out what they thought at the time, what they believed in, find their stories, their tall tales, and find what they can teach us through books. Reading allows us to meet remarkable people doing remarkable things. UNISON is doing a great job working with the Reading Agency to promote reading in the workplace.

The Cable Street Day

2011-10-02T20:20:00.000-07:00

The Cable Street day started early, bumping into the already tired looking march organiser Steve Silver on his own, mooching round the Cable Street Mural, waiting on the stage to turn up. He wandered off to show me where his grandparents used to live on Cable Street itself and to talk through some of the detailed history of the day, which he is still finding more about. Down at Wilton's Music Hall the stalls were starting to be set up, volunteers from the Cable Street Group were already busy. Pippa Hennessy and Blake Griffiths (together with me and Myra Woolfson making up the Five Leaves team) were there before me, having left Nottingham at 6.30am - they would not get back until 1.30am the next day. Don't mention the European Working Time Directive.
Among the first people to visit our stall was a man with a photo of his father treating one of the injured at Cable Street. Crikey - all the publications about the day recycle the same images. This was completely new to me. He was one of many people sharing family memories of the day, though the number of actual Cable Street veterans able to attend is now limited. At our later book launch I was pleased to see Max Levitas (who spoke at the rally), Beatty Orwell and our own Bill Fishman. There were many stalls including from our friends at Brick Lane Bookshop, Housmans and Freedom and we were well entertained by street theatre and music, including by strolling actors in period costumes rallying the crowds "to Aldgate".
The march - initiated late - passed by. It was led by a number of Bangladeshi groups and our friends from the Jewish Socialists' Group. The Indian Workers Association was strongly represented, as were local trade union branches, the Woodcraft Folk with a brilliant hand made Cable Street banner, and the Connelly Association contingent was a reminder that so many of those at Cable Street were London Irish dockers, who used their work tools to prize up paving slabs to make barricades in 1936. The stall was too busy to leave to see the young musicians of the very multicultural Grand Union Youth Orchestra though I'd sneaked in for their rehearsals.
The next event was the book launch of our five Cable Street books. Maggie Pinhorn of Alternative Arts, the main organiser of the day, had said it would be busy and perhaps 300 people attended. Jil Cove of the Cable Street Group spoke first, followed by Andy Croft who had written the introduction to the late Frank Griffin's October Day. He was followed by Frank's daughter, Josephine Clark, who read from the book. David Rosenberg, who is doing more events based on his book Battle for the East End than anyone thought possible, read next. Alan Gibbons was unable to attend because of family reasons, so I read a little from his young adult fiction book Street of Tall People. Fittingly, Roger Mills ended the launch by reading from his Everything Happens in Cable Street. By now our piles of books - over two stalls - was going down fast. This was the best day of bookselling we have had. Period (as Americans say).
Astonishingly, about 125 people came to our panel discussion on rebel writers from the 1930s, to hear Mary Joannou, Andy Croft and Ken Worpole have a friendly disagreement of the impact of the literature of the 1930s. There was no time for audience participation, though Stephen Watts managed to chip in. Stephen was one of those reading (from our AN Stencl book All My Young Years at the previous night's Cable Street party organised by Jewdas. Leon Rosselson had the next set - I was on stall duty but I got his latest four CD collection and agreed to put on a Rosselson gig sometime in Nottingham. We used to talk about publishing a Leon Rosselson songbook, but somehow that never happened. My fault, not Leon's.
At six we turned into pumpkins and the stall was packed away, or what remained of it. It was time to be civilians, and attend the evening gig. The excellent compere was Ivor Dembina followed by Michael Rosen (one of whose poems had its first book outing many years ago in a Five Leaves/Jewish Socialists' Group book). I can't list the whole cast of those appearing on the magical old music hall stage at Wilton's but the people who stood out for me were the comedian Shappi Khorsandi, the band The Men They Could Not Hang and, finally, on great form, in front of a packed and appreciative hall, Billy Bragg. All of the artists performed gratis, all events were free, and the bucket collection will be used to shore up Wilton's and to pay for all the publicity and other costs. Anything left over will be used to further honour those who fought to defend their area on that extraordinary day on 4th October 1936 under the slogan of No Pasaran! They shall not pass! Five Leaves was thrilled to be part of such an extraordinary day, marking the 75th anniversary of such an extraordinary event.
Map by John Wallett

Emanuel Litvinoff - 1915-2011

2011-09-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

I was sorry to hear of the death of Emanuel Litvinoff, who has died peacefully at the age of 96. He was a novelist, an editor, a poet. I particularly admired his Journey Through a Small Planet, his memoir of the Jewish East End. Emanuel Litvinoff was one of twenty poets included in the Five Leaves' anthology Passionate Renewal: Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945. At the launch, a decade ago, by then an old man, Litvinoff described, to a new generation of readers, how in 1952 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts he read his poem "To TS Eliot". He had written it following buying Eliot's Penguin Selected Poems, finding that Eliot's anti-Semitic poems from the 1920s were still included; poems like "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar". Litvinoff's poem is a blistering attack on Eliot:
"I am not one accepted in your parish. / Bleistein is my relative..." and, after describing the horrors of "walking with Cohen" at Treblinka he finishes one stanza "I thought what an angry poem / you would have made of it, given the pity."
Just as Litvinoff was about to begin, in walked TS Eliot with his entourage. Litvinoff said "I nearly died", but he read the poem "and it absolutely stunned everybody". There was uproar. To his credit - reported by another Jewish poet, Dannie Abse, sitting close, Eliot put his head down and muttered "It's a good poem; it's a very good poem."
One poem in the anthology "Earth and Eden", includes the lines "When time and memory intersect the sun / there is happiness..." I hope there will be a memorial gathering and reading from Emanuel Litvinoff's work.

20% off all Five Leaves books

2011-09-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

Other than the odd quid off at a launch, we're usually too mean to discount our books. We did offer three for two once at our tenth anniversary party, but someone came up with twelve books ie twelve for eight. How do you work out what to charge? That put us off for a few years, but here we are, until the end of the year , with 20% off on all our books, post free (UK only). With more than 200 titles to chose from there might just be something... Why are we doing it? Because you're worth it. No, because we've never done it before, and thought it would be worth trying to see what happens. But just to make life complicated (and to avoid credit card charges) we're saying cheques only, or cash at any of our forthcoming bookstalls. Yes, you do still have a chequebook somewhere. Our full list is on http://www.fiveleaves.co.uk/, and keep checking back as this offer includes books that are not yet published, and there will be more of them online later in the year.

A spectre is haunting Europe...

2011-09-22T02:56:00.000-07:00

.... well, not quite, but we are pleased to see the formation of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. The number of radical bookshops is a fraction of what it used to be - soaring high street rents, the abolition of the Net Book Agreement and changing political times all conspired to see off many shops, while Thatcher's Children preferred to open clothes shops and cafes instead. But radical bookshops have never vanished, and several have a longer life under workers' control or benevolent boards or committed individual ownership than most bookshops in the UK. There's something of a spring in their step these days, and the formation of the Alliance is part of that. There's a couple of new shops on their way too, and, with the hefty involvement of Five Leaves, a new national radical book prize being launched in October as is, formally, the Alliance itself. There's a provisional website at http://radicalbooksellers.co.uk/.

And, yes, the old Maoist images on the site are ironic, in the same way that they were in News from Neasden: a catalogue of new radical publications which appeared in the 1970s. Anyone with a run of that... do contact me.

Power in the union

2011-09-22T02:23:00.000-07:00

If you plonk "Union" and "Book" into Google you quickly get The London Cabinet Makers' Union Book of Prices available for £480 through Abe books. But there is a lot more to unions and books than that. Last year we were campaigning with UNISON against library cuts. This October we're somewhat more celebratory. On the 2nd October Five Leaves is one of the sponsors of the Cable Street march, together with the RMT and the South East Region of the TUC, both of which have slightly more members than the Amalgamated Union of Five Leaves Operatives (AUFLO). The next day it's over to Leicester where friends in Leicester Trades Council have a big do based on our book Dirty Thirty, celebrating the striking miners of Leicestershire. And the day after that I'll be speaking with David Kendall of the Reading Agency at the launch of Nottingham City UNISON's Six Book Challenge, organised by the union's learning team. We're going to make it a Seven Book Challenge by giving people copies of our Sunday Night and Monday Morning anthology of Nottingham writers.

Five Leaves new journal - Maps

2011-09-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

We've been planning to issue a journal for some time, and here it is. Maps - a selection of essays on the loose theme of maps - by some regular and irregular Five Leaves writers, plus others from our periphery who usually write for other presses and publishers. This is our first annual journal - the theme of next year's is "Utopia". As well as the text only essays, Sara Jane Palmer has contributed an photographic essay of her ceramics based on rock formations in Morocco, all in colour. I'm grateful to all of the authors who contributed - some "from the vaults", others from work in progress, and some work commissioned for this collection. Richard Hollis has provided a typical Hollis cover.
The journal brings together many of our concerns under the one cover - social history, Romans, London fiction, Nottingham, poetry, travel writing. Maps is 150 pages, including some illustrations (some being maps...), some being colour. The book sells at £7.99 and can be ordered here: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/maps_ross_bradshaw_i022678.aspx

Nottingham Poetry Society at 70

2011-09-14T00:06:00.000-07:00

Traditional poetry societies sometimes get a bad press, compared to the trendy (and often transient) stand and deliver/open mic elements of the poetry scene. But, as Clive Allen says in the foreword to Nottingham Poetry Society's Seventy anthology, "Along with the Arts Council, the universities, poetry magazine editors, small press publishers and organisers of literature festivals, they make up a sort of Poetry Welfare State." He goes on: "The modesty of poetry societies belies their enormous importance. They gather in out-of-the-way arts centres, WEA buildings, church halls.... [existing] on members' subs, minuscule (and rapidly disappearing) council grants. They depend on the generosity of people who willingly and consistently give of their time and energy... I owe much of my poetry life to poetry societies..." In the contributors' notes to this collection Adrian Buckner (a Five Leaves' poet) writes that he "owes his most enduring friendships in poetry to people he encountered at his first meetings" [20 years ago].

Nottingham Poetry Society has had its ups and downs, but its membership includes several fine poets. Adrian Buckner, one of ours, who is also editor of Assent magazine; Cathy Grindrod (one of ours sometimes), who has been the Derbyshire Poet Laureate; CJ Allen himself, who knows how to win poetry competitions as no other; Derrick Buttress, a poet who could have achieved more but loves the small press scene. I could mention others.

The NPS' secretary, in charge of production of Seventy, is Five Leaves' Pippa Hennessy (we obviously don't give her enough work to do here that she has free time interests) and there is a modest influx of new members. Happy birthday, Nottingham Poetry Society.

Cable Street good, Cable Street bad

2011-09-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

People will have to forgive me for returning to Cable Street again and again this month. If you look at our events listing http://www.fiveleaves.co.uk/events.html you will see that Cable Street has become rather significant at Five Leaves Mansions at the moment. The purpose of this brief posting is to draw attention to the new Philosophy Football T-shirt, based on the old street sign. Copies cost £22.99, which seems expensive at first until you realise that a) they are of good quality b) they are made by people who are paid proper wages c) they are a fashion item (did I really mention fashion?). Find them at www.philosophyfootball.com/view_item.php?pid=739.
Mark Perryman, the leftie who runs Philosophy Football, will certainly not be attending one Cable Street event - the one organised by the Stalin Society. It would be nice to think nobody would attend, but there is such a group: "The aim of the Stalin Society is to defend Stalin and his work..." and it has a meeting on Cable Street. I'm not going to say where or when it is, but google will tell you if need be. The Society only costs a fiver to join, £2.50 for the unemployed. A great bargain if you are an unemployed Stalinist.
As far as I know Stalin was not at Cable Street, but 1936 was a busy year for him, what with the first Moscow Show Trial (which resulted in the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev and others) and the start of the Great Purge. It is hard to see what such a Society could offer us.

Saved by the post

2011-09-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was not the best of days. You don't need to know why, but it was saved by the post. You know, that old fashioned stuff that comes through a hole in your door. Top of the charts here was the Searchlight Education Trust special publication on the 75th anniversary of Cable Street. Never mind that it drew on and gave great coverage to our five new books on the subject, Steve Silver has put together a very attractive and readable pamphlet, which included his own family stories of the Battle. You can get hold of Steve's pamphlet on http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/shop/cablest for four pounds. On the same subject, the latest of the dozens of Cable Street events is a party by Jewdas in Brick Lane on 1st October. "Party like it's 1936" they say. Kids, eh? Also in the post was a tenth anniversary compilation from Jewish Renaissance, a magazine that regularly reviews our books, features the occasional article by me and whose poetry editor is Liz Cashdan (currently waiting patiently for Five Leaves to publish her "New and Selected" in 2013). Janet Levine, editor of JR, said that people doubted the journal would last two years (or even two issues) when it started. Congrats to her and her team for JR's success.

Back to Cable Street - we now have a bundle of brochures advertising Cable Street 75 March and Rally on 2nd October, which we are sponsoring. The speakers at the rally include Maurice Levitas, aged 96, a Cable Street veteran, who will also be at our collective book launch the same afternoon.

Sticking to the labour movement, I also received Voices of Wortley Hall: the story of Labour's Home, 1951-2011 by John Cornwell. Some years ago I was one vote in the crowd at Wortley, a stately home near Sheffield (pictured) owned by the labour movement, taking part in a bitter inter-union dispute about the level of modernisation necessary at Wortley. I can't remember now whether I voted for the FBU or the AUEW slate, but I was in favour of en-suite bedrooms for all. Nothing is too good for the working class. Wortley has continued to modernise - it is a major wedding venue - and keep its links with the trade union movement. The best stories are of course those of the early years when strong characters, and passing strangers, achieved the impossible. In passing, one of the descendants of the Earl of Wharncliffe (whose family originally owned the building) trying to join as a member. He was turned down as he did not have a trade union card. He promptly joined the Musicians Union so he could, presumably, buy the odd pint in the bar in his old family home. The book does not have an ISBN but can be ordered over the phone for £10 plus £2.50 postage from Wortley Hall on 0114 2882100.

Cable Street book offer

2011-09-05T23:56:00.001-07:00

Just as Waterstone's announces its abolition of three for two, Five Leaves catches up with the abolition of the Net Book Agreement* to offer 20% off our Cable Street books. Mail order only, cheques only. This offer will also apply at our book launch where cash will never be refused.
* This 1997 decision was the most stupid decision ever for the UK book trade, leading to large scale closures of independent bookshops. It is still being played out by Waterstone's (which campaigned for its abolition) being undercut by supermarkets.

Dirtry Thirty Tribute Evening

2011-09-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Leicester Trades Council/Everybody's Reading/Leicester Social Forum/Five Leaves event - this will sell out. Get your ticket now.

Cable Street, ready to roll

2011-09-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

We put in the final corrections to the last of our five Cable Street books tomorrow... two are back from the printers, two are in press, the promo leaflet is ready to print, the demo is on and the seven page colour programme featuring ALL the events can be downloaded from: http://www.battleofcablestreet.org.uk/anniversary.html. If you are coming to any of the events around the launch of our books - the launch itself, the lunchtime gig and the evening event with Billy Bragg, Michael Rosen and Shappi Khorsandi let us know as it will be rather busy on the day. Our books can now be ordered from www.fiveleaves.co.uk but very soon we'll post a special offer, 20% off for mail order paid with by old-fashioned cheques (that way we can avoid paying the credit card companies). The nice picture of a previous event is by Dan Jones.

Damned fools in utopia

2011-09-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

Or to give the new book of Nicolas Walter's essays its full title, Damned Fools in Utopia and Other Writings on Anarchism and War Resistance edited by David Goodway. Nicolas Walter died in 2000, having been one of the most consistent writers for Freedom and its offshoots Anarchy and The Raven, as well as the atheist/freethought press. He was famed as a fierce reviewer and a stickler for details (he was, after all, the chief sub-ed at the TLS for a period). He also wrote a stream of letters the broadsheet press. His published output beyond the many magazines he contributed to was, however, sadly limited. On his death it was widely assumed that Freedom Press would publish a selection of his essays but they had "moved on". Other attempts to secure a publisher in the mainstream of the anarchist movement failed. Five Leaves stepped in eventually and a book of his historic essays, The Anarchist Past, appeared in 2007, edited by David Goodway. Too late, sadly, as, perhaps, there had been something of a generational change in the anarchist movement and Nicolas - perhaps also because he had little book-published work - was no longer well known. How quickly people forget. There were always two volumes of essays planned by David Goodway. I cannot now remember why I did not simply announce the second volume to appear under Five Leaves, especially as the content of that volume held more interest for me personally. Perhaps there were some issues, perhaps I was just too busy. Checking past emails I find that the editor asked our friends at PM Press in the USA to bring out an edition there. We discussed a joint edition but when PM opened a London office using the same trade reps as Five Leaves it seemed easier to leave the field to them with one edition for both countries. We're not short of books to publish.
Now that Damned Fools in Utopia has finally appeared with PM I regret not doing the sensible thing which was to have brought it out in 2008 or 2009 and let PM have American rights. It is - as it was then - a very good selection of essays, the heart being about Nicolas' work within the peace movement, and in particular the Spies for Peace. There are also very good essays on libertarian individuals - Orwell, Alan Sillitoe (who was an occasional contributor to the anarchist press), Herbert Read, the largely forgotten Guy Aldred and the "crank" publisher CW Daniel, the UK publisher of Tolstoy and health books (whose imprint ended up being owned by Random House!).
The selection ends with the short essay by Nicolas, "Facing Death" which was first heard on the World Service. Nicolas was, by then, indeed facing death, knowing, as an atheist, that there was nothing beyond. A fine essay which deserves a wide circulation.
Had we published the book I'd have argued with David Goodway about the title - I never liked it - but would probably have accepted defeat. But though I hope the volume is widely read I do regret that PM has set the price at £16.99 and used a white cover which is, after a brief skim through, already grubby. I've read the essays before, some in their original form and all in David Goodway's selection but there are many I will return to again and again, by which time the cover will be as grubby as the content shines.

Happy Birthday, The Bookcase

2011-09-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

The Bookcase in Lowdham is 15 tomorrow. The shop is a village bookshop, about eight miles from Nottingham, the village having about 2,000 residents. It was a brave move to start a shop there but the owner, Jane Streeter, had worked in legal bookselling in London before moving back to Nottinghamshire where she had three children. She kept up her subscription to The Bookseller, with the long term aim of setting up her own shop. The rumour is that her accountant husband, Andy Streeter, worked out it would be financially better to open a shop than to have another child and a shop was duly opened. The first shop was very small. If too many customers came in, others would have to leave. But it thrived. A couple of years later - at our first meeting - we decided to start a book festival in the village. Book festivals were not as trendy or as numerous as they are now. We wanted to have a festival that combined the notion of a high quality book festival with the life and rhythms of the village - using venues like the Primitive Methodist Chapel and the WI. It worked, and continues, with some events attracting up to 450 people.

Meantime the shop moved to bigger premises, developed a school supply side and uses every opportunity to sell books. It is, and will always be, a shop orientated to the needs of the village, selling gifts, and tickets for any local shows. but it is a village that has retained its pubs, its post office, a butcher and a co-op, a very busy village hall and a great cultural life. Jane Streeter has engaged with the wider literature community, launching books by local writers, developing a dedicated local books website (http://www.nottinghambooks.co.uk/), running bookstalls and the shop now provides jobs for several other booksellers. Always active in the booktrade, Jane became one of only two or three women to become President of the Booksellers Association, and the first person from a village bookshop to have held the post. She is one year in with another to go, and she is involved nationally (and internationally) in every aspect of bookselling. The slogan "think global, act local" has been turned on its head to be "think local, act global". Congrats to the whole Bookcase team. http://www.thebookcase.co.uk/

Spitalfields Life

2011-09-01T01:13:00.000-07:00

Our writer Gillian Darley tried to post a note on this blog about Spitalfields Life (http://www.spitalfieldslife.com/) following our last posting on the Brick Lane bookshop. She failed to do so, so I have. And can I say that the website is a must. The article from today is about one of the old Huguenot houses in Fournier Street, where the occupant found wallpapers going back to 1690 in various parts of the house, plus a treasure trove of found objects under the floorboards, and a sealed up medicine cabinet with poison in it. Anyone interested in the East End will immediately log it as a favourite. Thanks Gillian

Brick Lane Bookshop

2011-08-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to our friends at Brick Lane Bookshop, formerly Eastside, on its new makeover physically and online (at http://www.bricklanebookshop.com/). The new look and name make much more sense in the heartland of trendiness that is the modern Brick Lane. Anyone visiting would also be advised to go to the end of the Lane - fighting your way through jugglers, fly-pitchers and crowds - to the bagel bakeries. The Brick Lane shop is particularly good on East End history, carrying most of our books in that field, and will of course be stocking our Cable Street books. It seems a long way from the old THAP bookshop of 30 years ago - in pre-Eastside days.

Cable Street march goes ahead - update

2011-08-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

Five Leaves is one of 42 (no, this is not connected to Douglas Adams) organisations backing http://www.cablestreet75.org.uk/ in organising a commemorative demonstration in London on Sunday October 2nd remembering The Battle of Cable Street in 1936. Other organisations range from trade unions to the Jewish Socialists' Group to the Bangladeshi Youth Group. Regular readers will know we have five Cable Street books being launched that day as part of the general celebrations, of which more anon, as well as a general interest in the issue. As I write, the Government has banned an EDL demonstration in Tower Hamlets on September 3rd following petitions and appeals from those in the borough. It is worth noting that there was a great attempt to have the 1936 march by Oswald Mosley banned. The then government refused, leading to the mass turnout of people to prevent Mosley's Blackshirts marching through, which led to the Battle. The point of this post is to note that the EDL banning also includes all other marches in Tower Hamlets for the subsequent 30 days. It does, however, appear that the march celebrating the famous anti-fascist victory (October 2) is going ahead as planned, with police permission. All the other events planned around that day will happen as planned. I'll post a complete listing of all the other events soon.

Doomed, we are all doomed

2011-08-25T02:34:00.000-07:00

Pritchard's of Formby, The Travel Bookshop of Notting Hill fame, the Harbour Bookshop of Dartmouth and Derwent Bookshop in Workington - all due to close shortly, all had their closures announced this week. All good bookshops, all doing the right thing with author events, all locally popular, and all, at least occasionally, stockists of Five Leaves' books. Who do they blame? Supermarkets, taking away the mass market; WH Smith undercutting them on price for mid-list books; Amazon; eBooks; greedy landlords (don't they know a recession is on?). Add to that library closures, cutbacks in school buying, the closure of Borders and whatever is happening at Waterstone's and we have to conclude that we can't continue as we have been doing. The staff at Five Leaves Towers will shortly be having a summit meeting to go through our future plans. The office cat has been warned that Whiskas will be changed to Kit-e-Kat or a Kwiksave own brand. It really is that serious.
Meanwhile, the number of people doing creative writing classes proliferates. Who is going to publish them? Who will sell their books?

What the papers say

2011-08-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

Time for a round up of some recent press Five Leaves press coverage... The Thomas Hardy Society gives some nice coverage to our CD of C. Day-Lewis poems read by Jill Balcon. Both were vice-presidents of the Society. Indeed, both CDL and Jill are buried in Stinsford churchyard as is Hardy. Jill read the poems of both her late husband and Hardy at meetings of the Society and CDL read at the first Thomas Hardy Festival in 1968. Danuta Reah is picking up some coverage online for her Not Safe, the latest being at www.overmydeadbody.com/notsafe.htm. Her crime novella is based round the Sheffield refugee community, while David Belbin (who edited the book) has been interviewed in the Nottingham Post about his Five Leaves' refugee book Secret Gardens. You can read the interview at http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Contemporary-tale-kids-run-tackles-reluctance/story-13185924-detail/story.html. The North issue 47 includes reviews of both the John Lucas' books we published last year as well as a rare review of our Hull anthology, Old City, New Rumours. Several other occasional Five Leaves' writers appear in that issue but it is worth seeking out (from www.inpressbooks.co.uk) for the articles on "reflections on 25 years of poetry" by some movers and shakers and, especially, Jeremy Pointing on 25 years of Peepal Tree press. Our book that is getting most coverage at the moment though is Roman Nottinghamshire, with a lot more to come. This is also our best selling book too, with its own dedicated website on http://romannottinghamshire.wordpress.com/. Naturally, the best headline is found in LeftLion, which has an interview with the author Mark Patterson announced as "Venneh, viddeh, vicceh", translated as "I came, I saw, I went shopping". LeftLion also includes a piece from Five Leaves' worker Pippa Hennessy about her first year at Five Leaves Towers which includes: "You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve learned about working class life in Stratford (London), Butlins in the 1950s, being Jewish in Glasgow during and after World War I, the life and times of Ray Gosling, and sodding fairies..." http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/the-five-leaves-diary/id/3864

East Midlands Book Award

2011-08-18T10:50:00.001-07:00

Anyone living in the East Midlands with a book out this year should know about the East Midlands Book Award. Submissions are now open and the judges - the composer Gavin Bryars, retired academic Marion Shaw and bookseller Debbie James, from the Kibworth bookshop, should be hard at work on the early entries. Books have to be published for the first time this year, with the award being given at the end of May at Derbyshire Literature Festival. The winner gets £1000 but the shortlist will also be promoted to bookshops and libraries in the region. Any genre is acceptable including fiction, poetry and "creative non-fiction" eg biography and travel. Books for adults and children go into the same pot. Entries must be submitted by publishers or agents and, as suggested by this, self-publishing is excluded. Last year, the first year, 42 books were submitted. The winner, as mentioned previously on this blog, came from one of the smallest publishers and an astonishing six out of eight books on the shortlist came from the independent sector. Books don't have to be set in the East Midlands. Full details are on www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk/awards/

The return of radical bookselling?

2011-08-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

Radical bookselling has been in the doldrums for years, patiently waiting for the return of a Tory Government (as one friend said). But now the existing bookshops appear to be doing quite well, and there is a new People's Bookshop in Durham, a new radical bookshop opening in London in the autumn and a mixed radical/general shop opening in deepest Suffolk sometime soon. To mark this revival there is a modest seminar in Liverpool on Thursday 13 October, at the Bluecoat, as part of the Chapter and Verse Festival. Mandy Vere from News from Nowhere will look at the current state of radical bookselling, and one Ross Bradshaw will be delving into radical bookselling history over the last century or so. More importantly, the seminar will be promoting the (you read it here first) new annual radical book prize, Bread and Roses, with £1000 going to the best radical book published in 2011. More details to follow.

August 12 1952

2011-08-14T02:29:00.001-07:00

One of the saddest literary memorial dates is August 12, 1952, the day when Stalin murdered many of the leading Soviet Yiddish writers, together with other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The writers included Dovid Bergelson, Peretz Markish, David Hofstein, Leib Kvitko and Itzik Fefer. Others had already been killed, including the novelist Der Nister and the theatre director and actor Solomon Mikhoels, but it was this event that closed the era of left-wing Soviet Yiddish literature, and, together with the Czech Slansky trials, indicated Stalin's late anti-Semitic turn.

Five Leaves' f0llowers might recall an earlier announcement that we would be publishing a book of fiction and poems, From Pogrom to Purge, by the murdered writers, edited and mostly translated by Joseph Sherman. This book was near publication when Joseph became very ill and then died, with some minor parts of the translation incomplete. The book was put back, naturally, and for some time I did not have the heart to return to Joseph's book, yet wanted it to appear as a memorial to his scholarship and in memory of the writers. We were planning to finally complete the book this year when we realised that next year is 60th anniversary of the trial and execution, so it made sense to postpone the book yet again, but bring it out for the 60th and organise a suitable event around it. This is acceptable to Joseph's family and we will announce the details of publication in due course. Meantime, apologies to those waiting on the book. I am sure you would agree that it should appear for the 60th anniversary.

Playtime with Mortimer

2011-08-10T10:11:00.001-07:00

Five Leaves has never been too fussed if our writers, even our regular writers, bring out books with other publishers. Let a thousand flowers bloom, or something like that. I was pleased then when Playtime: eight plays for and with young people by Peter Mortimer (Flambard, £8.99 via www.inpressbooks.co.uk) popped through the post. Peter has written several books for Five Leaves and is currently working on a commission for a book about Nottingham but he also works with other publishers, particularly in the North East. The book is what it claims to be, eight playscripts mostly written with and by children and then performed. There is a Five Leaves connection in that one of the plays is the revised Croak, the King & a change in the weather written in Shatila, as part of his stay chronicled in our Camp Shatila. I spend my life avoiding children in practice while interested in education in theory, and found Peter's introduction interesting, basing his work in schools on ideas popularised in his adopted North East by Dorothy Heathcote. who "showed teachers how to use drama as a creative, holistic experience that widened the framework of the curriculum". He combined this theory with the practice of going into schools with an entirely and nerve challenging blank slate, not even thinking of what play might be created until he started talking to the children. Peter ends his introduction by saying that schools are welcome, at no charge, to use the playscripts and "If I'm around, I'll come and see the production."

Chain reaction

2011-08-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

It can be interesting - well, OK, only marginally interesting, to come across stray connections in books. I've just read Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. I'd dissent somewhat from the 100% glowing reviews, though I'm glad I read the book. The lives of the swinish rich rarely appeal, and the Ephrussi banking dynasty, whose story this covered, behaved badly at times. The next book I read (yes, I have been on holiday) was the Complete Works of Isaac Babel, which included a short piece about when Babel was bounced as a child in pre-Revolution Russia when only 5% of the Jewish children in his school could go on to the next level of education because of anti-Semitic quotas. There were forty Jewish children and Babel was determined and successful in becoming one of the top two. He succeeded, but lost his place when an Ephrussi bribed some official to ensure that his child was promoted instead of Babel. No doubt this is a useful model for Conservative policies in higher education. Moving on, the next book was Stalin Ate My Homework, an autobiographical memoir of Alexei Sayle's childhood. Alexei was so named in honour of Maxim Gorky, born Alexei Pehkov, by his Communist parents. Gorky was a mentor of Isaac Babel and published some of his early work in Novaya Zhizn. I am sure that there are greater connections in this world than these three books, picked up by chance, but there you go.

On holiday again

2011-08-07T05:48:00.000-07:00

One of the great advantages of living in a world of books is that wherever you go there will be something of interest. Two weeks in Youlgreave/Youlgrave (people spell it different ways) then. The old Co-op building, now the YHA, was used in the filming of The Virgin and the Gypsy, as was the unfortunately-named Raper's Lodge. The village also has a Reading Room though is nothing on display (or on line) giving its origins other than being listed with the village's four dissenting chapels in the 1870s. I just missed a performance night from the local writing group in the village. A short walk up Lathkill Dale brings you to Over Haddon, the former home and burial place of Maurice Oldfield, the proto-type for Le Carre's Smiley. The nearest bookshop is the excellent indie in Bakewell (http://www.bakewellbooks.co.uk/) which manages to have an excellent local stock for visitors, and a wide stock for the eclectic book buyer. That it stocks our three books set in Derbyshire (Claws by Stephen Booth, A Beautiful Place for a Murder by Berlie Doherty, The Naming of William Rutherford by Linda Kempton) was noted.

But the main book connection for me was a visit to my old friend David Lane in Bakewell. David was once a stalwart of Nottingham CND, Nottingham Veggie Soc. and an astonishing amount of national organisations concerned with peace and animal rights. He'd cut his teeth as a conscientious objector and as a member of the old Pacifist Youth Action Group. When I moved to Nottingham his Concord Bookshop (one of the astonishing number of five radical bookshops in the city at the time) had just closed. The shop reflected his main concerns but was in the way of developers. David continued his involvement with the book trade wholesaling vegetarian, environment and peace books, mostly to wholefood shops. Though David never made much money (capitalism was never his forte) he did chomp his way through a lot of books and cheap pamphlets, especially at Christmas. I know this as I was a volunteer packer from time to time: anything for a good veggie meal. David would often surprise far flung accounts sending in big orders by turning up the next day with a trolley, having worked out it was cheaper to take the goods by train than use a carrier, giving himself a day out for the hell of it. Even better if he could take in some petitioning or demonstrating while he was at it. Sadly, with the closure of some key accounts and others moving to more commercial suppliers Concord had to close, having a useful half-life selling books at stalls and festivals. It was good to see David again, not least to hear his standard opening remark... "Did you see that article in Saturday's Guardian..."

States goes west

2011-07-22T08:22:00.001-07:00

Advance notice that States of Independence, our free, day-long event promoting indie publishers, has developed a sibling, with States of Independence (West) due in Birmingham on 8th October. The day will include stalls from many publishers from the West Midlands, and some from elsewhere (including Five Leaves and Shoestring from Nottingham and Happenstance from Edinburgh), readings, panels, talks and "flash fiction". The venue is Eastside Projects gallery, in Birmingham's creative quarter and forms part of Birmingham Book Festival. The main organiser is Jane Commane, of the energetic Nine Arches Press in Rugby, and Writing West Midlands. We'll include material on the day in a later blog posting, but meantime anyone from those parts interested in indie publishing should note the date.

Jewish Socialist mag

2011-07-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a shout for the new issue of Jewish Socialist magazine (issue 62). The issue includes a couple of pages by J David Simons on the background to his two Five Leaves' historical fiction books set in Jewish Glasgow, The Credit Draper and The Liberation of Celia Kahn. The former stemmed from stories of members of his own family selling drapery on credit door to door, or more exactly croft to croft in the Highlands; the latter stemming from a meeting with me at Jewish Book Week when I talked about one of the characters in his first novel (the Celia Kahn character) "as if she was a real person" and that not enough had been written about Jews and socialism in Scotland, which "simple remark heralded the birth of a novel". I'm now worried that he was thinking I could not tell the difference between characters in novels and real people. (And that was before I mentioned my imaginary friend...). But he did write the second novel.

Elsewhere in the magazine our Jazz Jews writer Mike Gerber explores the connection between Jews and boxing, while the writer of our forthcoming Battle for the East End book on Cable Street, David Rosenberg argues with David Cameron about multi-culturalism. The other stand out pieces in a very good issue of the mag includes a long report of a speech by Afif Safieh, the PLO's Roving Ambassador for Special Missions (an old friend of the Jewish Socialists' Group) and an article by Paul Collins on Victor Gollancz, founder of War on Want, the Left Book Club and the once influential publishing house that carried his name. The current issue costs £2.50 including postage from Jewish Socialist, BM 3725, London WC1N 3XX and a four issue subscription costs £10 from the same address.

Academy?

2011-07-19T23:42:00.000-07:00

You know all those glitzy awards on television for films - BAFTAs and the like. Have you every wondered who is in the various "Academies" that select them? No? Nor had I until I discovered that I had become a member of the Academy of British Crime Writing (Publishing, Film & Television), or at least I will be when I cast my vote for the shortlist of the Specsavers/ITV Crime Thriller Awards to be held on ITV 3. The invitation to vote comes with no mention of why I have been chosen to join this prestigious Academy, though I can guess it is because a couple of years ago one of our titles was short-listed for the book section of the Awards. But I've not been invited to vote on books, but on film and television. Do I really care who wins the Best Actress Award for a television crime/thriller programme? I don't even watch television but here I am, a member of the Academy. I hope I am given a casting couch.

Virtual book launch

2011-07-18T10:58:00.001-07:00

We'd like to have given all you some cake and let you explore Sue Dymoke and David Belbin's allotment yesterday, at the launch of Dave's Secret Gardens, but we could not get you all in their neighbouring house if it rained, and it did, but here's the start of the event: http://bit.ly/6efz0J.

The book is partially set in the ancient Hungerhill gardens in Nottingham, where I used to have a couple of allotments at one time. Hungerhill gardens are very secret - high hedges, mysterious winding paths, old brick sheds. You could hide there, and Aazim does, for a while. He is a refugee child. At one stage in the story he is asked "Why did you come here? Were you escaping something? Or did you come for a better life" [Aazim thinks} She doesn't want me to tell a story that will make her feel bad. I can tell. She doesn't really want to know. "Everyone wants a better life," I reply. "Don't you?"

I don't like Murdoch either

2011-07-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

... not that anyone does, of course, now. But there are reasons beyond the phone hacking. Rupert Murdoch owns HarperCollins, one of the UK's major publishers. HarperCollins publishes some great books, including - great irony here - Naomi Klein's No Label. It also publishes some terrible books, like the great unsold autobiography of John Major which netted Major a £400,000 advance. If you look at the HarperCollins list you will find that Murdoch has used his publishing firm as a kind of outdoor relief for politicians heading past their sell-by-date. Add in the serialisation of such memoirs in the Sunday Times and you can see that many politicians have had sizable contributions this way. In 2004 Ian Jack, in the Guardian, referred to Robin Cook getting an advance against royalties plus serialisation fee that topped £400,000 for a book that did not even earn 10% of the advance alone. And there is David Blunkett writing for the Sun. Now, why would any media mogul chose to give politicians far more money than their words could possibly be worth?

There is one exception. Chris Patten, an honest man among Conservatives, wrote a book about being the last Governor of Hong Kong, on a realistic £50k advance from HarperCollins. The book was however never published as it included some of Patten's comments on the Chinese government. Murdoch was at the time getting into bed with the Chinese government on some business deal and did not want to publish anything critical of that Government. So Patten was dumped, and his book went on to be published, successfully, by MacMillan. I can only hope, as the Murdoch empire fades, that the excellent Times Literary Supplement survives, under new ownership.

Sometimes a book only tells half the story

2011-07-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week we launched Maxine Linnell's second book, Closer, at Knighton Library in Leicester, with many of her friends and with colleagues from Leicester Writers' Club out in force. Probably most people knew that Maxine had a personal tragedy in the period leading up to the book's publication. The adage "the show must go on" is not always true but sometimes it is better if the show does go on. I'm sure Maxine would not want the loss of her son Ben to define her completely but we need to recognise it. She was asked to write the article below on a book blog, and we are linking to that with her permission.
http://notesfromtheslushpile.blogspot.com/2011/07/writings-struggle-and-then-life-gets-in.html

Desperately seeking... Robert Poole

2011-07-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

Robert Poole wrote one book only, as far as I can tell - London E1, published by Secker in 1961. There are more recent writers called Robert Poole, but the one in question was born in 1923 and appears to have vanished without trace. Secker - now part of Random House - still hold the rights. We have been in touch with them about republishing the book in our New London Editions series, but would like to contact him, if he is still alive, or his Estate and know more about the man. In the book he describes his career in somewhat racy terms. He was born fifty yards from Brick Lane, held various jobs, jumped ship in New Zealand, was jailed there for a month then deported. He sold clothes in Oxford Street, and in 1958 moved to Margate and ran the Bingo stall at Dreamland. And after that? We know nothing. And Google knows nothing either. A similar blog for another writer in the series turned up a daughter, so we step forward in faith again. The book itself is set in Brick Lane during the blitz and is of particular interest as it describes, in what must be true to life fiction, the relationship between the host community and the Asians then starting to settle in the area.

New young adult fiction book from David Belbin

2011-07-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

Secret Gardens by David Belbin is Five Leaves' first book for "reluctant readers", a book that should also be of interest to anyone working with or interested in refugees, or allotments. Secret Gardens starts in the famous Hungerhill allotments in Nottingham, where all sorts of mysteries can happen behind the high hedges. In this book a refugee child meets a trafficked child and both go on the run, seeking work wherever they can find it. The book is illustrated by Brick AKA John Stuart Clark.
In earlier years Five Leaves published several books by refugees and about allotments. And here's these subjects brought together: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/secret_gardens_david_belbin_i022641.aspx

Southwell Poetry Festival

2011-07-06T02:02:00.000-07:00

It is strange returning to Southwell Poetry Festival. The festival was conceived as a one off event as part of the local council millennium celebrations in 2000, but proved to be so popular money was raised to return in 2002. This time the festival was to run for three years only, but at the end the local paper ran a "Poetry Festival Cancelled" front page where local traders and others talked about the economic and cultural impact of the festival on the town, so money was raised again and after a year the festival was back. I have to say that, save for the first year, it was one of those festivals that never quite succeeded and never quite failed, but eventually ownership passed to Southwell Library and having that as a base made the event finally reach its potential in terms of local attendance, with lots of specialist events boosted to big numbers by Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion and, this year, by Simon Armitage.

Southwell Library is one of those libraries you dream about - great stock, committed staff, room to move books to one side to set up a stage and create a hall for 120, a drinks license and a year-round programme. The Minster and the Minster School are to hand for really big events - 400 came from Carol Ann Duffy in my last year of involvement. In the same year I persuaded the library to open all night, with a night-long arts programme as part of the National Year of Reading. The staff did not take much persuading and again the library was the talk of the town.

It is good to see the Council continuing to support the festival, though the library has lost four workers in the recent round of library cuts. Nevertheless, the library does what it can with less staff than it should have and the festival is a major part of Nottinghamshire's literary calendar. Everyone is pleased that the Council continues to organise the event.

And me? Well, Five Leaves had an Adrian Buckner pamphlet launch at the Festival and our writer Andy Croft gave a good reading (with Tom Warner) last night, together with a fascinating talk on "the common music of poetry", which brought in football chants, his work that day in a special school, the work songs of slave and the Odyssey. I hope the lecture is published. The festival continues until 9 July (www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/poetryfestival). But I have to get used to buying tickets rather than swanning around pretending to be important.

Anyone coming to the festival can be sure it will succeed. At the opening event, in the wonderful soaring Minster building, standing below a gold Christ figure (pictured) suspended from the roof as if he was going to fly (or go SPLAT) the Dean of the Minster said a prayer for the arts. We have God on our side. We cannot fail.

Romans go digital

2011-07-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

Five Leaves' current best-selling book is Roman Nottinghamshire. Four weeks in and we are planning a reprint. It is also quite obvious that at some stage there will have to be a second edition. A talk in Retford alone produced some gold dust. Meantime we have set up a dedicated microsite to gather all the latest Roman Nottinghamshire news. Who knew this was such a big area? We have also heard a rumour of someone else writing a book on Roman Notts. Typical, you wait 1600 years and two books come along at once. Here's the microsite.

http://romannottinghamshire.wordpress.com/

New Adrian Buckner pamphlet from Five Leaves

2011-07-04T03:27:00.000-07:00

Bed Time Reading by Adrian Buckner is our first poetry pamphlet since 2007, though Adrian is no stranger to our list as his full collection, Contains Mild Peril, was published by us the same year. I've long been an admirer of Adrian's slow, thoughtful poems, since being on the appointment panel for when he was Nottinghamshire's one and only local Poet Laureate. He had a very successful year but the project funding could not be continued so he must remain a difficult answer to a question in some local literary quiz of the future. This pamphlet - in true Adrian style - comprises a second look at the books he first read in youth - Anna Karenina, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Auden, Primo Levi and others including, not surprisingly knowing his love of cricket, John Arlott's Test Match Diary 1953. This was a book written some years before Adrian's birth, but Arlott can only have had a reader like Adrian Buckner in mind while writing it. You can order via: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/bed_time_reading_adrian_buckner_i022640.aspx

New Maxine Linnell book from Five Leaves

2011-07-03T02:18:00.000-07:00

Maxine Linnell's time travel young adult novel Vintage was well received. In her new Five Leaves book, now available, Maxine turns to a more difficult issue - what happens when a father gets too close. This was an difficult book to edit as we were keen that the father in question was understood, not demonised, yet we had to be clear on the impact of his behaviour on the whole family. It is a book about love, about families, and about teenage friendship and trust as well. Maxine has taken on a difficult issue and dealt with it sensitively. Copies are available on:

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/closer_maxine_linnell_i022633.aspx

New Anita Klein book from Five Leaves

2011-07-03T02:02:00.000-07:00

Anita Klein is one of my favourite artists. We used a few of her illustrations as book covers in the past, then moved on to publishing/distributing her exhibition catalogues. Her new book - Through the Looking Glass - is her best yet, mostly because it is a very large format, which brings out the best in her images. The book includes paintings from her two lives - in London and Italy, and her Italian paintings definitely move into the sensual. You can find examples of her work at www.anitaklein.com. The new book is £24.95, and the production reflects its price. More on:

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/anita_klein_through_the_looking_glass_i022634.aspx

Lowdham - a round up

2011-06-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

"I love Lowdham, mostly because it is a village festival and isn’t suffocating. There is always something I want to go to, somebody I want to hear... Anyway, who can fault a book festival that one year featured cartoonists Posy Simmons, Steve Bell and the irascible Martin Rowson." This from an interview with the cartoonist "Brick" in LeftLion, online. Brick has spoken at the Festival a few times. Over on www.dumbles.co.uk there's a nice flavour of the Festival as well. There have been many other comments, but I like this website because we've always tried to create a quality book festival, but with the atmosphere of a village fete and that comes across. These days we also have events in other local villages, Caythorpe and Woodborough, but the heart of the Festival (for me) is the "last Saturday" in Lowdham, where we have a complete day of free events, a book fair, a cafe, a children's programme. We joke that my fellow organiser Jane Streeter's job is to bring in some big names over the Festival to make a profit, which I blow on marquees in one day. The biggest name this year was Stella Rimington (stepping in at the last minute for John Simpson - Lowdham must have been too scary for him). Stella is a spy novelist who used to head up MI5. Not so much the spy who came in from the cold as the spy who came in from Nottingham Girls' High School. She was certainly one of the best speakers we've had in our twelve years. There is some irony that the profits from her event, attended by 450 people, enabled us to put on an introduction to anarchism, held in the heartland of rural revolution, the Lowdham WI. Except it is not irony. We love and need "big names" at the Festival but have no time for Festivals that are only that. Equally important to us has been a range of smaller events - this time, for example, we included a talk on Buddhism and a friend of the Festival organised a Byron bike ride. But even small events are not that small - about 50 people came to the intro. to anarchism and a talk on the Moomins and philosophy was packed out. We also do our best to give platforms to East Midlands' writers - this year being particularly pleased that Stephen Edden (AKA Steve Hill) is now the second person in the village to become a professional writer (the other being the children's writer Elizabeth Baguley). The Festival also hosted the first East Midlands Book Award, with two of the Festival team and two others close to the Festival making up the Trustees.

The "last Saturday" started off with four full houses - talks on Roman Nottinghamshire, on England in the 1950s, on Shelley as punk rocker and on letter-writing in Jane Austen's novels. Meanwhile the children's marquee got going, which, later in the day, included appearances by the local Catfoot Theatre and children's writers Tom Palmer and Helena Pielichaty. By four the cafe was down to teabags - it was one of those days. But it was not the real last Saturday and we continued the next day with the Ian McMillan Orchestra in Nottingham (Lowdham Book Festival on Tour) and carry on, in fits and starts, until July 14th. The shape of this year's Festival is like a python that has swallowed a large meal - long and thin with a big bump in the middle.

One minor problem is money. After an exhausting tenth year (65 events in one week, plus a school's programme and a total attendance of about 6,000) the Festival was unable to secure Arts Council funding. We've had to scale back our schools' and outreach programme somewhat but still manage some work in nurseries, schools and care homes - calling in favours or drawing on our resources to pay for this important part of our work.

What does the future hold? Next year we enter our early teenage years. I hope we do more than sit in a corner and grunt or spend all our time staring at our mobiles, waiting from incoming texts. We'd like to revive our former schools' work, work with prisoners and excluded pupils, and we hope to put on the "green weekend" that we've been talking about for a few years but never got round to. All it takes is money and time... time and money. Meantime, there's a Five Leaves backlog to take care of.

East Midlands Book Award - a result

2011-06-20T23:31:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that that Shod, by Mark Goodwin, published by the small press Nine Arches, was the surprise - but unanimous - choice of the judges Ian McMillan, BBC man John Holmes and newly-retired Derbyshire Chief Librarian Jaci Brumwell at a well-attended awards ceremony last night. Mark said afterwards "I'm delighted to receive this award especially because it highlights poetry in the East Midlands, an area that is rich in poets". It was also a triumph for Nine Arches and their very active publisher Jane Commanne who edited this book. Mark lifted a cheque for £1000 and a trophy which Ian McMillan thought looked like that flame thing that British Gas used to use as their logo (I think he thought we bought it cheap), querying whether there really should be two "D"s in East Midlands and saying he was sure there was an "e" in East. Had people known I'd organised the trophy and proof-read the engraving some might have thought it was not a joke.

Ian talked through the whole list before returning to the winner saying that the judges found it hard to compare "apples to trombones" as they had to chose from entries across a range of genres. They agreed that the way to do it was not to try to compare in this way but to ask which book most clearly addressed its own genre, stood out from it, and said something new in that genre. The answer was Shod.

The local magazine LeftLion features reviews of all of the shortlisted books, as well as interviews with all the shortlisted writers. Read it here: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/id/3742.

It's been an interesting project to work on for this last year. The founders and Trustees of the award are Jane Streeter (from Lowdham Book Festival), John Lucas (Five Leaves' writer and publisher at Shoestring Press), David Belbin (another writer at Five Leaves, but currently best known for his Tindal Street novel) and me. The project has been supported and administered by Aimee Wilkinson and Antonia Bell at Writing East Midlands. We have secured private funding to guarantee running the award for ten years but local legal firm Nelson's ensured a more comfortable budget for this first year. Hart's Restaurant provided a lovely reception for the shortlisted writers, the judges and Trustees, and Gardner's, the book wholesalers, printed attractive point of sale material.

Nominations are already open at Writing East Midlands for books published by East Midlands' writers in 2011 (www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk/awards). The new set of judges are Marion Shaw, former Professor of English at Loughborough, Debbie James from the bookshop in Kibworth in Leicestershire and the Rutland composer - our celeb judge - Gavin Bryars. Now that the project is established we expect more than the 46 entries of this year, so lots of reading for them. None of the judges live in Notts and as we push on to ensure that the EMBA is truly an East Midlands project the award ceremony will also be outside of Nottinghamshire.

Hopefully in this first year we have cleared up a lot of small details - what do we do if people live part-time in the East Midlands only? What about the writer who lives here but is published in the USA? How big should the shortlist be (next year it will be six maximum - easier for bookshops)?

What pleased us all was the enthusiasm from publishers, big and small, from well-published and less well-published writers. We found writers in the area we did not know lived here and are pleased that the East Midlands as a place to be a writer is just that little bit better than we were when we started.

Talking with Mark afterwards he said that he'd been pleased to get onto the shortlist, feeling that it was job done. The judges had been charged, however, with only shortlisting books that they would be comfortable with as winner so no book was shortlisted as a make weight or to appease particular constituencies. This year there were eight novels, and two poetry books. Next year the shortlist might only be children's and history books, or the same again. I'm looking forward to seeing the shortlist.

Well done Mark Goodwin. And well done to the shortlisted writers, who at least took a bottle of something nice home with them to drown their sorrows.

Ladino review

2011-06-18T04:40:00.000-07:00

I mentioned here a few days ago that one of our books had been reviewed in a Catalan and Romani journal. Collectors of small languages will be pleased that our The Chaste Wife is reviewed in the current issue of Aki Yerushalayim, revista kulturala Djudeo-Espanyola. I can't help but feel that Elia Karmona's book (translated by Michael Alpert) should have had more attention as there are barely a handful of Ladino-related books published in Britain. The book includes a long introduction by the translator on Ladino literature. Ladino? The language spoken by the descendants of those Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, just holding on in Turkey and Israel and a few other places, spoken mostly by an ageing and decreasing number of people. Despite that the journal lists six other periodicals in Ladino, five dedicated websites, thirteen organisations and two radio programmes. Not bad for a language spoken by, what?, 20,000 people. As outlined in the introduction, Ladino has a weak literature tradition with books mostly being translated into Ladino rather than originating in the language. This is in marked contrast to the song writing tradition - as Ladino music is listened to all over the world.

The review itself is written in Roman script (as is the Ladino part of our book) rather than Hebrew or the Rashi script that Ladino was more traditionally written in - now that was a good way of securing its difficulties in continuity. Anyway, here's a section of the review:

The Chaste Wife... La Mujer Onesta es un livro ke puede ser meldado kon plazer i intereso no solo mar la majen ke mos da de este kampo del la kreation en ladino sino ke tambien por los komentarios del Dr Alpert sovre el estilo i el nivel literatario de este roman i las razones ke se topan al la baza sus karakteristikas, o sea la mizura en la kuala estos romanes bushkavan a responder a la demanda del publiko de lektores djudeo-espanyoles de fin del siglo 12 - prinsipios del siglo 20.

Baron in the news again

2011-06-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

Alexander Baron continues to rise. Here's Iain Sinclair on Alaxander Baron on Open Book, for as long as it lasts on Play it again, Sam, while Tribune has included an interview with me, about London books including Baron. The actual Trib page is not on line, but the article appears complete on the magazine's author's blog: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011tw7z#synopsis, http://benbrill.tumblr.com/post/6182121621/interview-with-ross-bradshaw-five-leaves-publishing

Out of Towners - new from Five Leaves

2011-06-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

Dan Tunstall's second young adult novel is now available. Out of Towners is about a group of lads who, GCSEs over, go away for their first weekend without parental supervision. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it would be a very short novel if nothing went wrong so I think you can assume that things happen. At the book launch earlier this week in Leicester a mate of the author was nervously looking through the book since the basics of the story were of Dan and his chums' own first weekend away, some twenty or so years back (though the novel is set in modern time). He seemed to be concerned that it might not be such a fictional story. He has nothing to worry about; writers make things up. I think.
Dan's writing career is taking off. His first Five Leaves' novel, Big and Clever, was shortlisted for the Branford Boase award for first novels for children and young adults, he has a story in a new big-league anthology about being a boy and he also has a young adult novel for reluctant readers on its way, also from a big publisher. His school visit programme is building up, including a lot of return visits. Dan has been ably supported by Penny Luithlen of the Jennifer Luithlen Agency, and fellow Leicester writer Bali Rai has given him a lot of support as well. Bali too will be joining our roster next year, albeit with a new edition of one of his early books. You can find out more about Dan's book, maybe even buy it, here:
http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/out_of_towners_dan_tunstall_i022635.aspx

The West Dumbartonshire Question

2011-06-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

On the 1st of the month I posted about the storm concerning West Dumbartonshire Libraries not banning Israeli books. It is a manufactured storm. The situation has got more laughable with the front page of the Jewish Chronicle running a front cover saying "Israeli books banned... but look what I found" with one Scottish Friend of Israel member posing with copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf. The implication being that those nasty anti-Semites at the library won't let their readers near the latest Amos Oz, but there's plenty ugly stuff out on their shelves. Apart from no Israeli writers have been banned, and most significant Israeli writers are still on their shelves, these books were not "found", they were specifically ordered by that Scottish Friend of Israel and the library had to buy the books in. His pose reminds me of the Daily Mail - "Ban this disgusting filth - see pages 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9". Staff at West Dumbartonshire Libraries might be well advised to sit down with a cup of coffee and a Kafka novel to try to understand this. And Mr Vallance, if you want to read Israeli novelists, why not just borrow them from your library and stop wasting public money by ordering Nazi books?
Of course, before Mr Vallance "found" the offending books, West Dumbartonshire Libraries did not stock them. They do now. Well done that man.

Pleased with Mr Postman

2011-06-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

Great post today, from the further reaches of Five Leaves' tentacles. Firstly there was Assent, the poetry magazine edited by our writer Adrian Buckner (whose new Five Leaves' pamphlet will be mentioned here shortly). Assent used to be Poetry Nottingham and, to show that those bitter football rivalries don't intrude on poetry, it is now published in association with the University of Derby. Links with Nottingham remain, with this issue, 64/3, featuring the winners of the Nottingham Open Poetry Competition. Surprisingly, there is no website for the mag.
The first issue of Mistress Quickly's Bed arrived, the direct successor to Penniless Press, mentioned here before as one of my favourite little mags. With many of the same contributors (Croft, Lykiard, a couple of Dents) and with even the fifth part of a translation from Victor Serge, it is not at all obvious why the mag. changed its name. Penniless, and its review section, The Northern Review of Books, continues on line at http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/.
Hearing Voices, a literary magazine from Crystal Clear Creators has reached its third issue under a rotating editorship, and I think this issue is the best yet, with a good cover. There were only three planned but a fourth is now announced. Many of the contributors are regulars from the burgeoning East Midlands small press scene. More on http://www.crystalclearcreators.org.uk/.
The Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month is now well established, and the National Association of Teachers of Travellers has produced an excellent magazine to go with the month. This is, I think, the first time NATT has produced the annual magazine and it has an orientation towards the classroom. Many aspects of Traveller life are covered, from Romani music to Romani language, from reminiscences of life on the road to Romani art. NATT has also produced a further excellent publication, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Resources Catalogue. Both would be useful in schools with and without Traveller children and are available free from http://www.natt.org.uk/.
The final piece of post was the Catalan Romani magazine O Tchatchipen which includes a late review of our young adult book of Romani short stories, Spokes, bu Janna Elliot. The magazine is in Catalan, with summaries of the major articles in English and Romanes. A Spanish version is also available. See http://www.unionromani.org/.

Lowdham Book Festival

2011-06-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

Regulars here, and anyone who knows Five Leaves will be aware that I jointly organise Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire, now entering its twelfth year - see http://www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk/ - with Jane Streeter from The Bookcase in Lowdham. This year's Festival runs from 14 June - 14 July and includes about 40 events featuring 60 or so writers. This year's stars include John Simpson, Kate Morton and Gervaise Phinn, but they are all sold out already - in Simpson's case that means selling out a 450 seater in one week. We programme late and quickly and, unlike most book festivals, we release the programme about four weeks in advance, finishing the programming sometimes about one day or even on the day the presses roll. Don't think I am kidding. Jane is busy running her bookshop (this year and next also being President of the Booksellers Association) and I'm busy with Five Leaves so it suits our schedules to work that way. Scary though. A couple of years ago, being our tenth year, we had 65 events over ten days and a full programme for children. Boy, that was fun. It really was. One year we postponed printing the programme, feeling we were not there yet, and one week later did the same again. On the absolute last weekend we could possibly have printed and distributed the programme we booked three major acts which were the making of the Festival and people got barely any notice. That year our attendance was the biggest to date.

John Simpson, Kate Morton and Gervaise Phinn are hardly Five Leaves' writers and we do keep a curtain between the press and the Festival to avoid being seen as too self-serving though naturally we use our contacts, as Jane uses hers, and if it feels appropriate we programme Five Leaves' writers about as much as we would similar writers from any local publisher. This year, for example, Mark Patterson gives his first proper talk on Roman Nottinghamshire, John Lucas dusts off his talk on England in the 1950s, Danuta Reah represents the Crime Express lot and some other writers - David Belbin especially - are published by us but are speaking to their work with other publishers. The Festival also provides the venue for the first East Midlands' Book Award which Jane and I (and John Lucas and David Belbin) have set up and act as trustees for, with Ian McMillan chairing the judging panel. The winner gets £1000 and the shortlist has been promoted as widely as we could. We're not the judges though, and no Five Leaves' or Shoestring (run by John Lucas) writers, Bookcase contacts or graduates of the MA in Creative Writing (run until recently by David Belbin) are on the shortlist. Honestly, you ask the judges to act completely independently without fear or favour and then they do! What sort of world are we living in?

If you can only make Lowdham on one day, come on 25th June. We have a huge book fair, an all day cafe, a full children's programme and 16 events for adults. That day, all events are free and a we put up a pile of marquees to host talks and stalls. Traditionally that is mostly one of my programming days so we have talks on the Moomins and philosophy, anarchism for beginners and on Shelley, but this year Jane has sneaked in talks on the footballer Tommy Lawton (he used to run a pub on Main Street) and invited Jasper Fforde whose auntie lives in the village. I'm not complaining. We also have some talks over the festival on music - Rob Young on visionary music, Graham Jones on the last of the record shops and Ian Clayton on "Bringing it all back home". With the local Warthog Promotions we have live music too - Barbara Dickson and The Demon Barber Roadshow. All part of the fun, and while Barbara Dickson has written a book we never worry too much about that, and the Festival has included early music, rock music, classical music and Indian music. Nobody ever asked why Kiki Dee has appeared twice at the Festival, with not a book in sight. What is important to us is that we provide a platform for our local talent as well as provide entertainment or inspiration from "national" figures. And we can be a bit cranky, hence a talk on Buddhist meditation and a Byron bicycle trip. I should point out that Jane booked the former! Our first step into "inner life".

All the fun of the fair

2011-06-03T00:28:00.001-07:00

Book fairs are nothing new. Those of us close to or well into the bus pass years will recall the annual Socialist Bookfair and the assorted international and third world and black book fairs. The only survivor from that era is the Anarchist Bookfair, mentioned here before, doing spectacularly well, and now being around twenty years old. The next is on 22nd October (http://www.anarchistbookfair.org.uk/). The advance leaflet for this year's fair says it is the London Anarchist Bookfair. Has it said that before? I am not sure but it now does seem pointed since May alone saw anarchist bookfairs in Sheffield and - particularly well attended - in Bristol. Our Lowdham Book Festival has always had a book fair on one day, with many talks and lectures (http://www.lowdhambookfestival/) which became the model for States of Independence in Leicester (http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/). This has become the model for an as yet unnamed fair likely to be on October 8th in Birmingham. Meanwhile the comic and artists book scene held a proletarian "International Alternative Press Fair" last weekend (http://www.alternativepress.org.uk/) and the Arnolfini in Bristol held a more middle-class, artist book, Bristol Artists Book Event (unfortunate acronym there). This advertised "prices starting from a few pounds" but on some exhibits you would have needed a mortgage. Up in Durham the date New Writing North is organising a Christmas Market over the first weekend in December. In short, as the high street struggles, independent publishers, from pamphleteers to purveyors of locked glass cabinet books are responding by organising a book fair near you. The more the merrier.

Banks of the Clyde

2011-06-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

On 11th May, on this blog, I discussed boycotts, based round a university boycotting Tony Kushner because of his views on Israel. Now there is a more serious issue. According to an article in the Jewish Chronicle on May 21st "books by Israeli writers could be removed from Scottish libraries" as a result of West Dumbartonshire Council (hands up all those who can list any town covered by WDC!) passing a "boycott" resolution. The paper was not exactly first with the news here since the Council passed the boycott resolution in 2009, but never mind. Following that article the Scottish Daily Express, owned by the pornographer Richard Desmond, quotes someone from the Israeli Embassy comparing the Council to Joseph Goebbels burning books by Jewish authors. Well, if true it would certainly make a change from the Royal Scottish Pipe Band Championship at the Council's Loch Lomond Festival. It gets worse; the Pipe Band lovers' plans became (Jerusalem Post) a wave of censorship that had spread all over Scotland while the Israel YNet News Service said bookshops too were subject to such censorship. The outgoing Israeli Ambassador, Ron Prosser, thought that a wave of book burning could erupt. Well, it could, though perhaps not immediately as the next activity on the WDC website is the Vale of Leven Fun Run so they will be a wee bit busy for a while. Prosser said that "A place that boycotts books isn't far from a place that burns them". Oddly enough he did not take issue with Jonathan Hoffman of the (British) Zionist Federation who called for a boycott of this year's entire Jewish Book Week because one of the many events featured one Israeli writer whose views he did not share.

Anyway, two and a half years after passing a policy saying the Council would not buy goods "made or grown in Israel", which presumably means you can't buy an Israeli date with your bottle of Irn Bru in the Council canteen, we're talking about book burning. Only, in that time no books have been withdrawn from stock; the Council continues to buy books written by Israeli or Jewish writers and bookshops are awash with The Hare with Amber Eyes. Libraries and bookshops will continue to stock books by Israeli and Jewish writers. Easy to check on that - that Council, for example, has its entire library catalogue on line. Perhaps the critics could have spent a minute on that interweb thing before getting overexcited. They could have found that WDC stocks 276 books of Jewish interest, including many by Israeli writers. Rather a healthy number I would have thought, given the tiny number of Jews and less Israelis likely to be living in the area. I should point out, because I have checked the catalogue, that my fellow deep-fried Mars Bar eaters from WDC do appear, however, to be boycotting (or, rather, not have many) Five Leaves' books by Jewish and non-Jewish writers. Now that is the serious issue.

Romans again

2011-05-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

Though Sainsbury's were out of dormice and garum sauce (you know the stuff, made from rotting fish) we successfully launched Roman Nottinghamshire at Nottingham University's nice little museum (www.nottingham.ac.uk/museum) which most people had not heard of, including some who had studied at the University. The good news is that the museum is moving to bigger and more public premises in the next year and a half and it might even have a retail facility. I'll vote for that. Residents of Southwell were there in numbers, not least supporters of the Save Roman Southwell campaign who think that the important remains recently discovered in the town would be best exploited other than by building more exceedingly expensive houses on top of them. The people vs. the developers again.

Many of the Roman exhibits on display at the museum turn up in the book, as do finds in several other local museums. There may not be much currently to see on the surface of Nottinghamshire from Roman times but there are beautiful objects of art, coin hoards, domestic equipment and rather a lot of pottery. The author, Mark Patterson, confessed a weariness about the pottery and wished that his 90,000 word book could have been longer if he had been allowed more space to talk about the interesting characters who spent so much of their lives digging up Roman Nottinghamshire, and, so often, completely misinterpreting what they found. He was at pains to say his book was a journalist's account of Roman Nottinghamshire not an archaeologist's account. What we wanted in other words. We wish he had more time on his hands so he could do Roman Derbyshire, Roman Leicestershire and gradually work his way to retirement and a shelf of books as good as his Nottinghamshire one. We are currently working with Mark to create a Roman Nottinghamshire website.

The Streets of East London

2011-05-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

This book was first published by Duckworth in 1979 and I must have bought what is now a very battered copy around then. A less battered copy by the same publisher shows that the book ran to nine impressions by 2000. Our 2006 edition has just been reprinted for the second or third time and is available here: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/the_streets_of_east_london_william_j_fishman_i017692.aspx When I first read Bill Fishman's book I was attracted by the fine archival photographs, contemporary photographs by Nicholas Breach and the wonderful essays by the author on poverty, philanthropy, immigrants, crime and radicals, especially radicals. I mentioned in a previous blog (4th of this month) that Bill Fishman is now ninety. At the afternoon tea in celebration at his old haunt of Queen Mary's on Mile End Road Professor Morag Shiach said: "Bill Fishman was appointed Barnet Shine Senior Research Fellow in the early 1970s. He had already established himself as a labour historian, having written his book The Insurrectionists [paperbacked a year back by Five Leaves] during the period of his Schoolmaster Fellowship at Balliol. Upon arrival at Queen Mary he was able to develop his specialisation in East End history. His scholarship, which was manifest in his prize-winning book, East End Jewish Radicals [yup, Five Leaves] and in his later volumes such as East End 1888 [that too] promoted the College as a place to which those who wished to learn about the East End could turn.
Bill's expertise in the filed of East London social and political history drew students from all over the world, but most particularly from America, where Bill had been a visiting professor in the late 1960s. Bill has always enriched the lives of his students, researchers and other academics with his walks around the East End, enhancing the drier elements of historical data with amusing and revealing political and social anecdotes. Bill retired as a full time academic in 1986, leaving a legacy that has encouraged those who have come after. The template Bill laid down at Queen Mary for researching and reporting on the East End and its people has ensured that the College remains at the centre of academic work on the immigrant population of East London and beyond and has been able to sustain and develop its commitment to the study of migration more broadly."
Then we had cake.

The mouse that roared

2011-05-23T12:55:00.000-07:00

Everyone who reads the quality press or who knows anything about bookselling will know that Waterstone's, like Chelsea football club, is now owned by the Russkies, and that James Daunt, the owner of an existing six-strong chain of high quality London bookshops has been appointed the CEO of the much bigger chain. He promises to rebuild Waterstone's as a stockholding bookshop - they have been "buying nothing" as some of their staff have said recently - and to build the 296 bookshops as "local bookshops" tailored to local needs. I won't rehash all the coverage. Everyone in publishing has welcomed the change, as has virtually everyone who works for the chain. Meanwhile we wait to see how much money the new owner will put into the business, which Daunt will now review. Previously industry insiders all seemed to agree that whoever took on the chain would have to close about 100 branches. Whether that is true or not is another matter but industry insiders have to say more than "dunno" when asked for comments by the press. Certainly James Daunt has indicated no desire to slash and burn.
BUT - just prior to the sale - the Bookseller reported Waterstone's as wanting to move their standard discount from small independent publishers from 45% to 53%. This would seem to fly in the face of Daunt's plans to have interesting, locally relevant shops if the chain prices independents out. Put crudely, we, and many others could not afford to give Waterstone's 53% discount. The implications of that are obvious.
The £53 million paid, however, divided by the number of shops (296) gives an average value of each shop as £179, 054 each, including stock, fixtures and fittings, the trading name and goodwill. £53 million does seem like a lot of money, but break it down this way and it is obvious that there is little current value in the firm. We wish James Daunt luck.

Ida Kar exhibition

2011-05-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

"Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, 1908-1974", an exhibition showing at the National Portrait Gallery until 19 June, is well worth visiting (www.npg.org.uk/kar). Kar's portraits are primarily of painters (including, for example, Man Ray) and writers (the young Iris Murdoch, for example) but some of her pictures from Armenia - where she was born - Cuba and elsewhere are included, together with some memorabilia. Five Leaves' interest is in her photographs of Bernard Kops, Terry Taylor and Laura Del-Rivo, pictured here, as well as others in their circle including Colin MacInnes. Kops has long been a Five Leaves' writer (and is the model for Mannie Katz in MacInnes' Absolute Beginners) while Terry Taylor's only book, Baron's Court, All Change, resurfaces on our New London Editions list later this year. Taylor, whose life MacInnes drew on in his fiction, appears twice in Kar's exhibition. In one he is shown as her assistant, in the background, in another solo portrait he appears listening to jazz records on what looks like a Dansette. The NPG holds many other portraits of Taylor, many showing him getting happily wrecked on what was in that era called "charge". Laura Del-Rivo's first novel, The Furnished Room, comes out later this year as well, also in New London Editions. It would have been nice to have had them around during Kar's exhibition. Both Taylor's and Del-Rivo's books included Kar's portraits on first publication, as they will in ours in November.

The Baron and the Bats

2011-05-20T00:13:00.000-07:00

Michael Baron is living proof that as you get older you (can) get better, or at least a lot more artistically productive. Michael edited two books for Five Leaves, On a Bat's Wing and, with Andy Croft and Jenny Swann, The Night Shift - two poetry anthologies about bats, and about the world of night, Michael contributing the section on the world of nature by night. Since then he's brought out a small collection of his own, put up poetry posters all over Cockermouth as part of the campaign to reinvigorate the town after its flood last year, and edited a big collection of poems by writers - more than you would think - associated with the place. He is currently also working on a long term project bringing poetry by Israeli and Palestinian poets together. All this, and more, come well into his retirement after 40 years in the law. All power to him. More details here: http://www.listenupnorth.com/writer-profile/253.
Michael and I launched the bat book some time ago at the AGM of the Bat Conservation Trust. I live in the world of literature and politics so was expecting to be met by badly-dressed obsessives, something like the worlds I know. Far from it, the majority attending were much younger than me, more female, worked in architecture, planning and science and certainly the females happily chatted at the break about what they were going to wear at the social that night. Then they went into their workshops to discuss bat "commuter routes" and what you can learn from studying the contents of bat poo. Hurrah! They were eccentrics after all. Michael donated his royalties for the book to the BCT. Good for him. You can order it here: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/on_a_bats_wing_poems_about_bats_baron_michael_editor_i019207.aspx

Looking ahead to the Battle of Cable Street weekend

2011-05-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

Things are moving on for the Battle of Cable Street anniversary, celebrating 75 years of the day in 1936 when the whole East End rose up to stop Mosley's fascists marching through the area. The weekend starts with a 75th anniversary gala evening commemorating the Spanish Civil War on October 1st, with a poetry reading by Jackie Kay and a performance of Call Me Robson. This is at the New Red Lion Theatre Pub. Tickets are already available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com/ (click on the events button).

On October 2nd the focus is entirely on the Battle of Cable Street, with events running from noon until 10pm at Wilton's Music Hall on Graces Alley in the East End. Here's a view of Wilton's http://www.sphericalimages.com/wiltonsmusichall/index.html There will be stalls during the day, with music by Lost Marbles and street theatre by La Columna. At 1.00pm the forty-strong Grand Union Youth Orchestra perform. At 3.00pm Five Leaves host a reception and book launch for our five Cable Street books - The Battle of Cable Street by the Cable Street Group; Everything Happens on Cable Street by Roger Mills; The Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s by David Rosenberg; October Day by Frank Griffin; Street of Tall People by Alan Gibbons. At 4.00pm we host a panel discussion on the literature of the 1930s with Andy Croft, Mary Joannou and Ken Worpole.

The evening events start at 6.pm with a variety show They Shall Not Pass with poets, singers, choirs and comics including Michael Rosen, Leon Rosselson and Sandra Kerr. And there is more to come - on Tuesday 4 October the film From Cable Street to Brick Lane will be previewed and on Wednesday 6 October there will be a Five Leaves event at Housmans Bookshop, with Dave Rosenberg, Roger Mills and others. Dave is also leading a Cable Street walk during the period.

Alternative Arts is co-ordinating all the activities and there will be a commemorative programme. More details soon.

Submissions

2011-05-16T03:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone wishing to submit material to publishers would be well advised to check publisher websites for submission policy. It is not often good news, but at least it saves postage and everyone's time. Unfortunately for putative writers Five Leaves has a no submissions policy. We mostly commission our books, we have a responsibility to our existing writers, and in any case we are sorted until 2014. There are reasons - too many writers chasing too few publishers chasing too few bookshops chasing too few readers. But simply saying we don't want submissions doesn't stop people. We receive about 300 submissions a year, despite a public policy of saying no submissions. This week our star supplicant offered a 607 page pdf of his latest poetry book. This follows a recent approach, by the same author, including a pdf of a 1,600 page poetry book. And he wanted a pre-publication advance and guaranteed shelf-space in bookshops worldwide. Please don't ask if the material was any good.

More small talk

2011-05-16T03:16:00.000-07:00

On 18 April I put up a link to Two Ravens' take on the current small indie press scene. This is about CB Editions, run by a refugee from Faber. Interesting stuff on covers and on small press economics
http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2010/02/human-comedy-of-publishing-world.html