Radical bookselling update and prospects

The big debate in the general booktrade - featured heavily in the Guardian - is about whether the day of the celebrity biography has finally come to an end or is simply slowing down. At the other end of the spectrum even commercial publishers have started noticing that left wing books sell, and sell well, with Allen Lane publishing The Establishment by Owen Jones. This book topped the Christmas best-seller charts at Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop and at News from Nowhere in Liverpool, coming second at Housmans in London only to Housmans' own annual Peace Diary, despite it being a £16.99 hardback. Allen Lane, the top end of the Penguin empire, also published Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, the one book that really might have an impact on climate change and a book which places the blame for climate change right where it belongs - with capitalism.

Five Leaves has just completed its first full year trading as an independent and radical bookshop. Looking at our December best-sellers, ten of the top fifteen were political books. The only novel was John Harvey's Darkness, Darkness which was set during the miners' strike of thirty years ago and in modern times. Indeed, three of the fifteen were related to the miners' strike. The strike remains a defining part of our common history. We're pleased with our first year, but just as pleased that News from Nowhere had a record Yuletide and a record year. The publicity around their fortieth birthday helped as did the unfortunate closure of a Waterstones' branch in the same street. Many people, in person and online prefer to "shop with the real Amazons" at this women-run bookshop. The radical book-trade is nothing if not tenacious! News From Nowhere, London's Gay's the Word and Housmans are positively venerable; Wordpower in Edinburgh and the two anarchist distributors Active Distribution and AK Distribution have passed out of their teenage years but there is a range of younger projects that seem to be sustaining themselves. All strive to be part of their local community, working with campaign and other groups. It can only be positive that members of the Alliance of Radical Booksllers are sprinkled around the country - it's not a London-centric membership. 

AK Distribution report that their best selling titles includes books on feminism and economics and in Scotland Wordpower had large sales for books related to the Scottish referendum. Another trend is the renewed interest in "people's history". In Nottingham Chris Richardson's City of Light, a book about radical life in the city in the year of 1844 has sold over 500 copies while Spokesman Books and Merlin Press offer a different history of World War One that that pursued by our Government. For those of us keen on pamphlets it is s good to see Stop the War Coalition's pamphlet on WWI, No Glory. People will read pamphlets if they are stocked by bookshops - something commercial bookshops are loathe to do. Five Leaves is a publisher turned bookseller and having a shop has enabled us to return to being a pamphleteer too. Our first two titles will be available shortly, one being a forgotten essay by Edward Said on Jerusalem, sadly as appropriate now as when first written, the second on the Communist Doctor Who writer, Malcolm Hulke, whose existence we came across in the Morning Star!

Radical bookshops are not the only side of the business with claims to venerability. Merlin Press will shortly be sixty and its publishing arm is run in tandem with Global Book Marketing, representing many publishers from home and abroad while the main distributor of radical publishers and magazines, Central Books, has been in business since 1939. Nobody rests on their laurels though, and the Russell Press (set up in the heady days of 1968) has been at the forefront of digital printing and reports more and more groups using this affordable technology to publish local and people's histories.

Bookshops, publishers, distributors, printers... and prizes and bookfairs. The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing is four in 2015 and will be funded by the General Federation of Trade Unions while in Nottingham the mini-festival of the same name was established in November also with trade union support. The number of local anarchist bookfairs continues to grow while the London Radical Bookfair is now the major date for the whole radical booktrade to come together. This year the Bookfair will again be at the Bishopsgate Institute, on 9th May.

So what are the big radical titles going to be for 2015? We too are finding a lot of interest in feminism, especially from young women, but the publishers are a bit slow to catch up. An exception is the short book We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Green MP Caroline Lucas should get a lot of attention in March with her Honorouble Friends? discussing her work inside and outside of Parliament while Paul Mason's Post Capitalism will be a summer best seller. Looking at the lists of dedicated left wing publishers, Pluto is bringing out David Rosenberg's Rebel Footprints, a walking guide to the capital for lefties, due in March (the author first got to know he byways of London as Central Books' van driver) while the Verso paperback of A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros might enable us to think about walking without, you know, actually doing it.

And Five Leaves? Well, there is the small matter of an election coming. One of our big books in 2014 was Harry Paterson writing on Nottinghamshire during the miners' strike where, among other things he discussed the UDM. In 2015 we are letting him loose on the the political equivalent of a scab union, UKIP, with We Need to Talk About Nigel. We could hardly not.

A shorter version of this article will appear in the Morning Star

Nairn's London by Routemaster

That's Ross Bradshaw, posing as if he was Ian Nairn on the front cover of Nairn's London, just re-issued by Penguin Books. Five Leaves basks in the glow of this as our Ian Nairn: Words in Place helped launch Nairnmania on November 10th 2013, which led to a TV programme and the release of the Penguin book. Indeed, we planned to release it at one stage before discovering that Penguin still owned the rights.
On 30th November fifty Nairnites boarded this bus - the same one that Nairn pretended to drive in 1966 - though with a different driver than Ross, for a guided tour round places dear to Ian Nairn.
The tour started on the Mile End Road in the Foxcroft & Ginger trendy cafe (two coffees - £6.19) which had been carved out of Wickham's department store of 1920. The building still has its doric columns interrupted by the remains of Spiegelhalter's the jeweller. How annoyed Wickham's must have been to have to have built round the little jewellery shop. By the way, if you ever go down the Mile End Road stop off at the 1695 alms houses for decayed ships' captains.
The next stop was The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, established in 1570 which, well, founds bells. The current founder in chief is a woman, the first in 450 years, striking a blow for women bell founders everywhere. Whitechapel made the bells of Big Ben, one small example of their work.
We then moved to the Bevis Marks synagogue "[A] great luminous room, compassionate light streaming in through big clear glass windows on to a set of curly brass chandeliers from Amsterdam that are almost at eye level. Nothing has fretted it or worried it for two hundred and fifty years... " said Nairn.
On further into the city to Leadenhall Market where once it was "... a riot of fish and fowl with row after row of turkeys and chickens on hooks right up to the cornice and the glass roof". Nowadays the fish and fowl have all gone, being replaced by bankers, plotting evil financial deeds in their wine bars as Leadenhall is next to the Lloyds building, which, I was pleased to see, is starting to look tatty.
Onwards to the Hill & Evans vinegar warehouse "Victorian wildness... demonaic" but now looking quite cuddly in front of the scary "cheesegrater" building that looks like it is going to flatten us all in its collapse.
Cheapside... West Smithfield... St Bartholemew-the-less... and a baked potato in a Chinese cafe that caters to taxi drivers. Past St Pauls, and off at Hawksmoor's Christ Church,. Spitalfields, looking naked without its pews. Up Fournier Street to see the Huguenots houses. The Five Leaves author Bill Fishman was once offered one for a thousand pounds. He did not have a thousand pounds. The buildings are now worth a couple of million each.
Back from the East End to the back of Kings Cross for talks and films. The panels included Gillian Darley, co-editor of our Ian Nairn book and Gavin Stamp, a contributor who also wrote the intro to the new Nairn's London. Our venue was The Cock Tavern in Somers Town, an Irish pub with a real fire, hanging on against the developers. The highlight for me was the talk by Travis Elborough on the Routemaster, which included some great film clips including the most ghastly performance by Tom Jones.
It was here that the event organiser David Collard sat on the bookstall table, and went through it, his Guinness doing a perfect parabola to go splat on twelve copies of our book. It somehow seemed appropriate that drink would provide a final focus, given the impact of the stuff on Ian Nairn. His death certificate was referred to in one of the discussions. People can imagine it. The table in question, now also deceased, is, Michael Rosen tells me, the very same table at which the executive committee of the Communist Party of Britain would sit round while plotting their revolution. I won the prize for the most battered copy of an original Nairn's London, the prize included a now drink-sodden copy of our own book, a new edition of London, a bottle of London Pride (declined) and a fine box of Nairn's Oatcakes. David was unharmed and is planning a rerun for all those who tried to get on the bus but will have to wait for the next one coming along in a year's time.

Sonofabook

This note from David Collard, one of the contributors to Sonofabook. I'll echo that It's a Good Thing. And it will be on sale at Five Leaves Bookshop.

Please excuse this impersonal email. 

I'm sending this to everyone I know who is likely to be interested in Sonofabook, a new literary magazine launching in March 2015. This includes you, my anonymised friend.

Sonofabook assembles an illustrious roster of contributors living and dead, yet also finds room for an essay by myself. Click on this link to see the striking cover. Go on. 

http://www.cbeditions.com/magazine.html

Subscribe now and you'll not only get the first three numbers but can choose a free book from CB editions, including their forthcoming reissue of Agota Kristof's novels The Proof and The Third Lie.

(If you haven't yet discovered Kristof you're in for a big and beneficial shock. The main obstacle to British readers is her name - but a writer more unlike the creator of Hercule Poirot is impossible to imagine.)

Do spread the word about Sonofabook. It's a Good Thing.

A brace of launches for Curious Kentish Town at Owl Bookshop

Announcing another launch event for Curious Kentish Town on Monday 24th November at 6.30pm The launch of Curious Kentish Town on Monday 17th November 2014 at 6.30pm is now fully booked. Please email owlbookshop@gmail.com if you would like to attend the 24th November event. Entry is free but is by ticket only. Owl Bookshop 209 Kentish Town Rd London NW5 2JU Tel 020 7485 7793

Curious Kentish Town Martin Plaut & Andrew Whitehead Book Launch Monday 24th November 6.30pm Please join us to celebrate the publication of a new book about Kentish Town Where did Oswald Mosley first lead his fascists after the Battle of Cable Street? Which Kentish Town rent strike inspired a Peggy Seeger song? Where does the long lost Fleet river break cover? Or followed, quite literally, in the tracks of the piano industry? Do you know about the horse tunnels at Camden Lock...the ghost sign advertising maids’ caps and aprons in Dartmouth Park... the African revolutionary who made his home near Tufnell Park? Curious Kentish Town explores more than thirty locations across this part of north London and brings to life the remarkable stories attached to them, with the help of a wealth of photographs and illustrations. An artist-designed map will help you follow in the authors’ footsteps. Martin and Andrew, both journalists who have lived in the area for decades and love it, will discuss the book, followed by questions and answers.

PLEASE READ IF YOU HAVE REQUESTED TICKETS FOR THE EVENT ON THE 17TH NOVEMBER. The event on the 17th November is fully booked and will be very busy with limited seating. If your email request has been acknowledged and you would prefer to attend the second event on the 24th please let us know and we will move your reservation.

New from Five Leaves - Curious Kentish Town

We are pleased to announce Five Leaves' latest title, Curious Kentish Town by Martin Plaut and Andrew Whitehead. Andrew previously edited our London Fictions book, and runs the website of the same name. There is also a website for Curious Kentish Town, which will be updated as more curiousities emerge. The book will tell you which Kentish Town rent strike inspired a Peggy Seeger song, what happened to the Fleet river and all you need to know about the horse tunnels at Camden Lock. Lots of curious stories, and lots of photographs.
The Curious website is at
http://www.curiouskentishtown.com/, which includes a big feature on the book in this week's Camden New Journal.
Kentish Town area residents can buy the book at The Owl and other nearby bookshops as well as the usual outlets like Housmans and, post free, from Five Leaves on 0115 8373097.
Curious Kentish Town
9781910170069, 92 pages, £7.95.

The Bookshop will be 1 soon

Since we're adding some reviews... Things of Substance by Liz Cashdan in Orbis

A LIFE WELL-LIVED: REVIEW BY CLAIRE O’CONNOR

Things of Substance: New and Selected Poems by Liz Cashdan, 156pp, £8.99, Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG 9AW  www.fiveleaves.co.uk

At the heart of this collection is a deep need to teach the next generation about the past. Reading this volume is to be invited into a long-lived life, with its own texture and significance. Objects carry the sense of an era as well as a family history, as in ‘Bakelite Telephone’, 'square and squat with joined / ear and mouthpiece, balanced nicely / on the crossbar of the telephone frog', bringing life-changing news: ‘From Barts it relayed my father’s death, / sealed the selling of the family house.’
   The poet swings through her own past, from object to object, and brings back to the reader a world where a child could have her tonsils removed on the table where she does her homework. There are Wordsworthian moments, as in ‘Lost Time,’ we are recollecting in tranquillity, drawing back from 'years ago' the sound and feel of trekking in the Lake District, where the one-inch map 'is all / I've had to keep the singing beck in tune, to keep / the dizziness of the mountain spinning in my head'. A beautiful image, 'look where the beck slips its stony collars' brings this world with a rush to the mind's eye.
   The new work bring us up to date with the author’s present life, and the predominantly ‘plain style’ conveys the energy with which she relishes the good times and the stoicism of her acceptance of life's inevitable losses - illness, stiff joints, broken bones - she's 'not bovvered.'
   The lived life is there on every page.  There is joy in new experiences, new tastes, the first time she eats an avocado, ice-cream 'slithering' down a sore throat, physical life is embraced and everywhere her celebration of the tangible substance of the natural world.
   Adventurous and educational travel inform us of the poet’s concern for politics and the conditions people endure in diverse cultures and we see many curious things en route, such as Gagarin’s appendix in Moscow. We are invited to the ancient past in ‘The Tyre-Cairo Letters’ sequence. We identify with the fractured relationship between Sadaka and his father in 1090. The poet teases out politics, religious differences and the problems with arranged marriages in this part of the world through epistolatory poems.
   The third section is ‘A Guide to Hospitals.’ It deals with health setbacks, of the poet and others and contemplates the selfless life of Henrietta Lacks, 'She dies but her cancer cells keep / growing’, the black American woman who had her cells removed by the medical profession without her permission and who has unknowingly advanced the study of cancer.
   This collection celebrates a life well-lived: poet, teacher, mother, grandmother, Liz Cashdan reaches out to all of us to urge us not only to get on with things but, despite the obstacles we encounter, to do it with gusto.

The Long Poem Magazine on 1948, by Andy Croft

Timothy Adès on Andy Croft 1948 A Novel in Verse (Five Leaves £7.99.)

A book called 1948,

made of some eighty Pushkin stanzas,

by Martin Rowson illustrate,

riots of rhyme, extravaganzas.

The cover's ruddy bloody garish

and Rowson's drawings quite nightmarish,

obsessive as the text, but still, full

of telling detail, very skilful. 

London Olympics, shocks galore:

spies and political skulduggery,       

trade unions, left-wing mags and thuggery

and Orwell's 1984.

'A, b, a, b, cc, dd,'

it rhymes; 'e, f, f, e, gg.'

Alberti, Attlee, Blandish, Blunden, 

Brecht, Bulldog Drummond, Helen Gahagan,

Greene, Harlow, Marlowe, Lorre, London,

Sartre, Frank Waxman, Ronald Reagan,

Thirkell, not Churchill, Harry Truman,

all rhymed! - it's almost superhuman.

I'm bound to ask: what rhymes with Pushkin?

Stravinsky's violinist Dushkin.

(No triple rhymes, no terza rima:

I could have added Ariane

Mnouchkine, but that must be foregone:

no flagpole on this Iwo Jima.)

Pro-Russian Proms 'have picked The Nose

to bring the season to a close.'

       

So here's my chance to rhyme Onegin,

since these are called 'Onegin sonnets',

with Fagin, or Menachem Begin - 

a donnish jest - quiet flows the Donets! -

He won't be pleased, so please don't tell 'im:

he's miles less mild than Bassa Selim, 

the liberal enlightened Turk

in Mozart's oriental work.

Anyway, as I said before, well-

constructed pacey period thriller -

Winston and Spiller thwart the killer! -

all based on Eric Blair (George Orwell).

Drain down that draught! Hurl hats aloft!

Hail, handicraft of Andy Croft!

Nicholas Lezard on A Modern Don Juan, in the Guardian

I love the way we can’t get shot of Juan; 
Byron’s roaming lad appeals so much 
That even now we think that he is due an 
Update, or a rebrand, or some such. 
He charms us still: each conquest is a new one, 
But you always know that he’ll be back in touch. 
(And there’s something nice about ottava rima; 
It seems to suit a brash romantic schemer.

Lord Byron’s original poem stops abruptly in its 17th canto, after enough words to fill a fat novel, before his death in 1824. A couple of years ago, I read a modern continuation, and it worked very well: you could see how Byron’s structure, the beat of his rhymes and rhythms, obliged the modern poet to think like him, become possessed by him. Because the Byron of Don Juan is so likable, as is the Don Juan of Don Juan, this isn’t a bad thing.

In this collection we have 15 contemporary poets shoehorning their inspiration into the tight but not uncomfortable rhyme scheme. I wasn’t familiar with them all. I’ve written about Andy Croft before, when he reimagined Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the style of Pushkin’s sonnets. George Szirtes and Sinéad Morrissey are TS Eliot prize winners (2004 and 2013 respectively) and Ian Duhig has been shortlisted for the award; the others are all distinguished as either poets or teachers of poetry. Amit Majmudar is apparently “a novelist, poet, essayist and diagnostic nuclear radiologist”, so should his poetic gift desert him, he has a few fall-back positions.

So these are all trustworthy voices, and they have a lot of fun hauling Juan into the modern age (his name is not pronounced in the Spanish fashion, by the way; lines one and three of my doggerel above, an attempt not so much to walk a mile in Byron’s moccasins as to walk 40 feet, have at least the virtue of showing how to get it right). He is called Donny Johnson, or something similar, in a few of the poems here, and is more than once imagined as a DJ (geddit?). He is also rather more of a bounder than I remember Byron making him. In fact, the whole point of Byron’s Juan was to make him more hapless seducee than seducer, but never mind.

Everyone here has put in a lot of hard work, and most of it pays off, some of it handsomely. Croft’s rhymes in particular are laugh-out-loud funny (“Minerva’s Owl”/ “Simon Cowell”; and, the narrator being a prisoner, we get “lecture” to rhyme with “Norman Stanley Fletcher”). And he has a sneer at Guardian critics, which is a poem’s invariable hallmark of purity and authenticity.

So this is really a continuation, or extrapolation, of Byron’s work, which was already, in a way, modern. Byron, in the original Don Juan, was at times almost ridiculously digressive, given over to pontification and moralisation as well as to the occasional outrageous rhyme or enjambement, but his poem was also a way of poking pomposity in the eye and standing up for the oppressed, or the victims of injustice (we find Juan in contemporary austerity Greece in the updated version). And here’s the clever thing: even though the poets are using the same scheme, you get more than a glimpse of how their individual voices sound; of what goes on in their heads. This was always Byron’s great trick: to teach you something when all you think you are doing is having a good time.

A Modern Don Juan is in the shops now...

Crime Scene - the first review

I received a review copy the other day of a new book published by Five Leaves, and written by John Martin. Described as "a reader's guide",and titled Crime Scene: Britain and Ireland, it aims to discuss crime writers past and present on a geographic basis, 'where the setting of the book is crucial, giving the story context and local relevance.' I began by dipping into it rather casually, because reference books like this, even relatively compact ones, can't sensibly be read from cover to cover in a sitting, but I soon found myself absorbed in the wealth of information supplied.

I've never met John Martin, but a biographical note on the cover explains that he is a former librarian, and past judge for the CWA Dagger in the Library. One thing is for sure - he knows a great deal about the genre. Putting a book like this together is not a task for the faint-hearted, not the poorly read. He mentions a great many novels, and my impression is that he has read them, rather than relying on potted summaries by others, because there is a personal 'feel' to the commentary that I find appealing.

I should add that there is an entry about my work which is extremely positive and generous, and this blog also earns a credit, so (being only human) I'm naturally inclined to applaud the excellence of John Martin's judgment! But even if I wasn't mentioned, I'd find a book like this a must-read. It's not dissimilar in some ways from a book published back in 2002, Scene of the Crime, by Julian Earwaker and Katherine Becker. I met Julian and Katherine when they were researching that book, and found them very pleasant company. I can recommend their book too, but of course much has happened in the genre in the past twelve years, and in the absence of a new edition, John Martin has not only spotted a gap in the market, but filled it admirably.

To write a book of this kind, I think you have to be a real enthusiast for the genre. In the entries I've read, Martin's enthusiasm shines through. The emphasis, inevitably, is on relatively modern books, but there is also material that dates back much longer - discussion of Charles Felix's The Notting Hill Mystery from 1865, for example. This book is definitely my cup of tea, and I hope that John Martin's hard work is rewarded by excellent sales. I shall continue to dip into it regularly.

Martin Edwards

http://www.doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.co.uk/

Reprinted from Lipstick Socialist - the best name for a blog!

Left for the Rising Sun, Right for Swan Hunter. The Plebs League in the North East of England 1908/1926 £6.99.

Mark Twain said; I've never let my schooling interfere with my education.
In 2014 all the educational doors that I managed to get through are rapidly closing to the new immigrants and the poor working class in this country. And it is not just that access to education has a hefty price tag, it is also the downgrading of many jobs that working class people could get into. In this I include many public service jobs and professions that are melting away in the government's agenda to make the poor pay for the austerity.

But for me education is not just about the collection of a series of certificates and the race to get a middle class job. Brought up in an Irish family my political education was as important as my father teaching us to write our name before we went to primary school. Like many people who were denied an education he got his on his travels across this country, in his experiences at the bottom heap of society and in his constant battles for respect and equality for himself, his family and his community.

In this very important book, Left for the Rising Sun; Right for Swan Hunter; The Plebs League in the North East of England 1908/1926, historian and communist (a winning combination) Robert Turnbull tells the exciting story of how this amazing organisation played an important role in the political education of working class people.

The Plebs League started in 1908 when a group of students challenged the teaching at Ruskin College which until then was a major player in labour and trade union history. Their aim was to "bring about a more satisfactory relationship between Ruskin and the wider labour movement". Their slogan was;"Educate, agitate, organise".

This led to a the creation of the Central Labour College (CLC). The divide being between the reformists and the revolutionaries with very differing views of what the purpose of education is. Should it be solely to equip people to get better jobs or should it be part of a political education to turn society upside down?

Central to this story is the north-east of England and the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham which fed the shipbuilding, heavy engineering, chemicals, railways and glassmaking industry. Waves of immigrants from Ireland and Scotland went there to find work, becoming part of a community that sought to educate itself and build a strong trade union movement. The Plebs League responded to this;
"Education is and must always be a means to an end. To some it is a means to personal satisfaction, to others a means to a living; to us it is a means to the Great End, the emancipation of the workers."

Robert shows how this was not that straightforward and that there were to be battles, not just with the capitalist class but also with organisations such as the WEA which had the support of the political and educational establishment.

This new independent working class education was quite different from the liberal curriculum of the WEA. It was "about workers equipping themselves with the necessary intellectual and cognitive skills so that they could meet the capitalist class on their own terms for the showdown that was coming."

The Plebs League were following in a tradition of working class education that had its roots in the creation of the Mechanics Institutes in the late 1840s. Robert shows how radicals such as Joseph Cowen believed in the emancipation of working class people through education. He founded the Wincanton Literary and Mechanics Institute in 1847 which offered both men and women (very progressive in its day) classes in politics, science and technology. As Robert says; "Without the pioneering work of the Mechanics Institutes it is doubtful if the Independent Working Class Education movement in the North East would ever have got off the ground".

Central to the story of the IWCE across the country was the political atmosphere with the growth of organisations such as the Independent Labour Party, the Social and Democratic Federation, and newspapers such as the Clarion. Political unrest from 1910-14 was reflected in industrial unrest, the ongoing suffragette campaign and the Home Rule for Ireland movement.

The IWCE thrived in the revolutionary era of 1908-1920 but then declined, partly as it became a more centralised organisation and partly because of events such as the defeat of the General Strike of 1926 led to the shattering of ideas of unity across the labour movement and a sense of hopelessness in their ability to challenge the capitalist class.

Today it is hard to find the hope and political committment that drove the IWCE in the early part of the 20 Century. In response to the privatisation agenda of both past Labour governments and the present Con/Dem government there has been the growth of many new organisations such as the Peoples Assembly, UK Uncut as well as many single issue campaigns against fracking, NHS privatisation and so on. But what is missing from most of these organisations is any sense of class consciousness. There is a growing sense of anger at the inequalities of society but this hasn't been transferred into a politicised view of society. One of the reasons I believe that these organisations fail to sustain themselves beyond organising meetings and marches is that few, if any, offer their members a political education, something that the Communist Party was very good at. Across the country there has been attempts to set up an IWCE network but without working class people at its heart I am not sure that this will address the importance of giving people back a sense of their own worth and a respect for their own political heritage.

I have been involved in the Mary Quaile Club, an informal group trying to make working class history more accessible through talks, films and music. Each event has an element of history and a link to present day activism. We hold our events across the Greater Manchester area and try to engage with people and communities that do not normally go to history events.

Left for the Rising Sun is an important contribution to the present day movement to revive a sense of history and political commitment to those people who really need it, the working classes. Books like this, I think are inspiring and are crucial to working class people taking back their history and redefining it for the 21 Century.

Buy it from Five Leaves Bookshop, an independent bookshop in Nottingham. see

Robert Turnbull is speaking at the WCML in Salford on 29 October see

lipstick socialist | October 2, 2014 at 10:31 am | Tags: Five Leaves Bookshop

Left for the Rising Sun, review from the Morning Star

Left for the Rising Sun, Right for Swan Hunter

The Plebs League in the North East of England 1908/1926

by Robert Turnbull

Pubs. Five Leaves Publications

Pbck, £6.99

This slim booklet is a gem of historical research and provides a fascinating, if frustratingly short, insight into the role of worker education not only in the North East but in the country as whole during the latter half of the 19th into the 20th century.

As Turnbull explains in his introduction, ‘I hope this book is a contribution to our history…but also a reminder that education is a right and not a privilege and that the struggle for liberty and equality by previous generations are built on and renewed. In the North East region… we have seen libraries closed, the bedroom tax imposed…cuts to benefits, the disabled and unemployed scapegoated…in some of the most vindictive and cruel attacks by a ruling elite, certainly in my lifetime’.

So how can we fight back in the face of such ruling class onslaughts and how can examining our history help? There are no easy answers, but such books as this can still offer inspiration and unique insight.

Turnbull concentrates on the emergence of the Plebs League and a number of other working class self-education initiatives which were established by working people in order to provide them with the intellectual tools to better understand and change their own lives. Such education was instrumental in helping large sections of the working class break their ties with a paternalistic Liberalism and led to the foundation of real socialist organisations like the ILP,  the Labour and Communist parties. While the dreams and hopes of that generation were not realised, those organisations did play a key role in educating a whole generation of working class leaders and underlined the vital role of education as a means of liberation and enlightenment. And those aims are still valid, as the recent autobiography of the comedian Paul Merton reveals. Education is still today key to liberating working class children from often low self-esteem and being categorised as ‘low achievers’. Children learn social scripts early on and these can be more inhibiting than even material disadvantages, as he shows.

The author and Five Leaves should be congratulated on making this unique history once again available to us today, both as a necessary reminder and a challenge.

John Green

Dannie Abse

I am sorry to hear about the death of Dannie Abse, at the age of 91. I last  saw him at a memorable reading in Southwell Cathedral as part of Southwell Poetry Festival. I can't remember though if it was that reading when he told the joke about being introduced in his native Wales as Dannie Abs. He nudged the chair and said "call me Abse" and the chair replied saying "Yes, and you can call me Jonesy".
Dannie appeared in two Five Leaves' books. He had a couple of poems in our early anthology Poetry for the Beekeeper, celebrating fifteen years of Beeston Poets, where he had read. But we published thirty pages of his poems in Passionate Renewal: Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945, and he also read at the book launch. Was Dannie ambivalent about his Jewishness? Memory, and many of his poems say not, but his 'White Balloon" starts 'Dear love, Auschwitz made me / more of a Jew than Moses did.' He certain knew his Yiddish from his Hebrew which he wrote about in 'Of Two Languages'. The poem that remains most in my mind, however, is 'Case History' describing dealing with a rank anti-Semitic patient - Dannie was a doctor as well as a poet - who did not know he was a Jew, treating him and prescribing for him as if he was his brother.
Dannie's poetry was always intelligent, sometimes playful, but always accessible and stood repeated reading. His publisher was Hutchinson yet he was equally happy in the small press world, bringing out pamphlets with John Rety's Hearing Eye and giving an annual reading at John's Torriano Meeting House. There will be full obituaries in all the broadsheets.

Reprinted from Parkview blog, with permission, because we are not without vanity

Towns in Britain by Adrian Jones & Chris Matthews, 2014, Five Leaves Publications, B6, 324pp, illus, index, ISBN: 978 1907869822, £16.99, from Five Leaves Bookshop, 14A Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH, www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk.

This wonderful book, full of delights, is the work of two Nottingham residents (if you include West Bridgford in the city’s orbit), Adrian Jones, a former city planner (has a very good website called Jones the Planner), and Chris Matthews, a Nottingham local historian and graphic designer (see his excellent website, local history and art), offer readers their take on over twenty British towns and cities, from both contemporary and historical perspectives, including Nottingham (‘neither Northern nor Midland’) and much maligned Newport  (‘home of the Mole Wrench’) in Wales. I would have liked chapters on Basingstoke and Milton Keynes, if only to help with my own education, but I am pleased to say they write fondly about Coventry (‘an underrated masterpiece') and sing the praises of garden cities and some new towns.

Their chapter on Leicester (‘a totally uninteresting Midland city?') begins ‘Leicester has a bit of a problem with its image — it hasn’t really got one… it does its best to hide the fact that it is one of England’s most historic cities’. The authors then provide any would-be visitor with the most perfect of guides and all this before Richard III became the city’s crowning historical glory.

What I love about this critique cum guide is the fact that it is full of literary references. On the first page of the Nottingham chapter we get not only the obvious, D H Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe, but the blessed Ian Nairn and J B Priestley as well, all with something pertinent to say about the city in the 21st century. Somehow  Jones  and Matthews manage to throw in a good few references to housing, especially public, all too often forgotten. They do not shy away from the obvious: a truth that, in polite society, dare not speak its name. In Nottingham ‘like most cities, there is a lot of poverty alongside conspicuous wealth… (the) relentless alienation of the dispossessed is painfully captured in Shane Meadows’s films, so much so I can hardly bear to watch’.

Towns in Britain is up there with the best and will not disappoint. Ross Bradshaw hopes to eventually publish as an e-book. In the meantime buy the paperback and read at leisure. Once read you will want to keep it handy — it’s that kind of book.

By way of footnote. This year I have bought a couple of other history/planning/architecture books from Five Leaves Bookshop: Concretopia  by John Grindrod and Ian Nairn: Words in Place, a collection of essays relating to books and articles (which is also now available as an e-book). Be warned(!) Ross Bradshaw's bookshop is very difficult to leave without spending money. Also a book about mapping, which this has prompted me to write something about, so coming soon...

The North: a magazine of poems, articles, reviews and features

I know it's nearly October, but the spring issue of The North has just come through our letterbox, a voucher copy sent because the mag contains a review of our Things of Substance by Liz Cashdan. An excellent review at that, by John Killick, who remarks "One always knows where one is with Cashdan, she is a kind of verse journalist, and you can piece together most of her life, places she has been, persons she has known, interests she has pursued, by following through this collection. And she has the journalist's quality of clarity, concision and curiosity." Killick concludes by praising Liz's 'The Names of Wool', eleven verses of names of wool, when she "achieved a tour de force which should be in all the anthologies." That would be nice.
Five Leaves is only a part-time visitor to the poetry world, but this issue also includes an article by Mahendra Solanki about his life's reading of British, American and Indian poets. Robert Lowell comes out as most returned to, but Mahendra also introduces the work of AK Ramunujan and Arun Kolatkar, new to me at least and perhaps most Western readers of the journal. His article will be useful in preparing an intro for Mahendra's reading on October 1st at our bookshop.
There are quite a few poems in the issue from that loose group of "friends of Five Leaves" - Robert Hamberger, who we used to publish; Maria Taylor, due to read in the shop next year; John Harvey, one of our irregulars; David Cooke, who read at out place recently and shared the launch of Liz Cashdan's collection in Sheffield; Bill Herbert from our new A Modern Don Juan... as well as quite a few others who we've anthologised or with whom we have loose connections.
This issue of The North was guest edited by Jonathan Davidson and Jackie Wills and is well worth buying, not least for the longer, thoughtful articles about the craft and the business. My only criticism is that four of the reviewers - Malika Booker, David Cooke , Wendy Klein and Maria Jastrezbska also have books under review in the same.
The North is normally on sale at the Five Leaves Bookshop or from www.poetrybusiness.co.uk and costs £8.00.

October events at Five Leaves Bookshop

Free Verse 2014 report

This year's Free Verse poetry bookfair was - as always - a success, or so it appeared from the Five Leaves stall, one of 61 groups exhibiting this year. The number of stall holders was up slightly on last year, though I did think the number of attendees was marginally down. There was still a pile of the paperback style free programme left at the end, indicating a smaller take up than expected. On the other hand, the number of readings during the day seems to have doubled and the readings carried on well into the evening in a nearby hostelry. The event was also expertly organised by Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly with, for example, volunteers to cover stalls to allow publishers to wander a little or to support their authors at readings.
What was also interesting was the new appearance of some of the big boys - Faber and Picador - rubbing shoulders with the groundlings. And rub shoulders they have to do as one of the major features of the bookfair is that everyone gets the same space - one table. If TS Eliot was alive today he'd be sitting behind a Faber stall on a cranky plastic seat next to a metaphorical One Person and a Dog Press with five pamphlets to its name. And every publisher putting on a reading gets the same time. Democracy in action. Thanks to Arts Council funding Free Verse can pay travel expenses from out of London presses too, which means that northern publishers can take part without bankrupting themselves.
The Five Leaves stall did better than ever, after a slow start. We only had one new poetry book - our A Modern Don Juan, which people flocked to buy in their ones, but, thanks to our bookshop, we also took poetry stock from non-exhibiting presses which (sigh) attracted more attention and sales than our own.
We were next to a much busier stall, our chums at Happenstance Press, run by the enterprising Helena Nelson, whose new anthology of choc-lit poems was supplemented by free chocolate. A good stall to be next to. Many other "friends of Five Leaves" were around, including Cathy Galvin launching her first poetry pamphlet with Melos Press and Rosie Miles, whose first pamphlet will come from Happenstance next year. Our shop worker Leah was attending her first Free Verse and was interested in reported research showing that only 1% of published poets are Black. At the time we were discussing it, she was one of only two Black people among hundreds in the Conway Hall. As organisers of poetry readings that gave us some thought, and is a subject we'll be addressing in the New Year.
Leah got to readings, while I stayed behind the stall, greeting a lot of old friends including a delighted Michael Ezra - delighted, that is, because the People's March for the NHS was rallying in Red Lion Square outside the Free Verse venue. One poor bloke was, I heard, giving his biggest ever poetry reading in the Square when joined by hundreds of marchers, a samba band and a PA with speeches and Billy Bragg. Meh, could the two events not have been merged somehow?
I mentioned before that if we were to price our labour properly - travel time, time behind the stall, preparing and unpacking the stalls, giving readings - everyone would be losing money hand over fist, but that is not important. With luck you go back with fewer books than you came with. From a Bookshop point of view it did look like we were going to make a decent profit on the day - until we found the stock of etruscan books (their choice of lower case), a lot of which was taken for the shop. We'll be back next year.

Free Verse Poetry Book Fair 2014

Ignore the numbers against the publisher name here - it relates to the floor plan at the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair this Saturday, 6th September at Conway Hall in London. There is also a reading programme throughout the day and into the evening. The list? Yes, simply to point out that this Saturday is an opportunity to browse through the stock of more poetry publishers than you might think exists in this country. The full programme and directions for the event are on http://www.poetrybookfair.com/. The readings and fair are free. Five Leaves will have copies of our new book A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for These Times by Divers Hands edited by Andy Croft and Nigel Thompson. It will arrive at Five Leaves Towers on Friday. That's about as near as hot off the press as you can get.

34 13 Pages
52 A Midsummer Night’s Press
6 Acumen Publications
7 Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers
8 Ambit
51 Annexe
9 Arc Publications
49 Blart
46 Bloodaxe Books
10 Burning Eye Books
11 Candlestick Press
12 Carcanet Press
37 CB editions
40 Cultured Llama
4 Emma Press
13 Etruscan Books
35 Eyewear Publishing
39 Five Leaves Publishing
46 Faber & Faber
14 Flarestack Poets
15 Gatehouse Press
52 Grey Hen Press
38 HappenStance
16 Hearing Eye
2 Henningham Family Press
51 Hercules Editions
17 Holland Park Press
49 if p then q
36 Isobar Press
47 Knives Forks and Spoons Press
18 Leafe Press
1 Melos Press
19 MIEL
30 New Departures
20 Nine Arches Press
21 Oystercatcher Press
3 Peepal Tree Press
50 Penned in the Margins
22 Picador Poetry
1 Rack Press
23 Reality Street
24 Roncadora Press
25 Seren Books
26 Shearsman Books
5 Sidekick Books
27 Smokestack Books
28 Templar Poetry
5 Tuba Press
36 Two Rivers Press
29 Valley Press
31 Veer Books
32 Ward Wood Publishing
48 West House Books
33 Worple Press
49 zimZalla
53 Forward Arts Foundation
54 Inpress Books
45 Poetry Library
42 Poetry School
44 Poetry Society
43 Poetry Translation Centre

Sunday 30 November - Ian Nairn Bus Tour of London

This event is now fully booked!

"The way to come on St Paul's is along Fleet Street, and the way to go along Fleet Street is on top of a bus."

- Ian Nairn

A Routemaster bus tour followed by a gathering to mark the reissue of Nairn's London and celebrate the life and work of Ian Nairn (1930-1983), Britain's greatest topographical writer.

We'll be travelling around the East End and the City on the very same Routemaster bus (CUV 217C) featured on the original cover of Nairn's London (Penguin Books, 1966) with the author pictured at the wheel.

Tickets will be available from 1st October

Adults £30 Family (2 adults + 2 children) £80

Concessions £20

Ticket price includes all admissions, perambulations and access to events at the final venue.

Assemble at Foxcroft & Ginger, 68 Mile End Road from

10 am (refreshments available). Bus leaves at 11 am.

The route will include:

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry The Barbican and Golden Square

Bevis Marks synagogue Leadenhall Market & Lloyds building

Hill & Evans vinegar warehouse Postman's Park

Cloth Fair and West Smithfield Bart's Hospital

Holborn Viaduct Chancery Lane

Fleet Street Ludgate Hill

St Paul's Cathedral Cheapside

Bank of England Royal Exchange

St Ethelburga's church Christ Church, Spitalfields

King's Cross and environs Surprise final destination!

The tour will end at around 4:30pm in a wonderful central London location and will feature:

* Professor Gavin Stamp, the distinguished architectural historian, who will talk about the author and his work.

* Gillian Darley and David McKie, co-authors of Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves Publications, 2013)

* Travis Elborough, author of The Bus We Loved: London's Affair With the Routemaster (Granta Books, 2005)

* Simon Okotie will be reading from Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? (Salt Publishing, 2013), an existential whodunnit set entirely on a bus.

Finally Ian Nairn himself will appear on screen in one of his BBC broadcasts from the 1970s.

Nairn's London (with a new introduction by Gavin Stamp) and other books by our speakers will be on sale.

Ends 6pm or later.