Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair report, now with added Brum

Going to book fairs with a stall involves a succession of targets:
1) Come back with less books than taken. This is not easy as although Five Leaves provides my living, book fairs are where you see a lot of books rarely seen in bookshops, published by colleagues and friends of yours.
2) Make enough money to pay for your stall hire and train fare. Exposure and a nice time is one thing, but the office budgie needs its seeds.
3a) Make enough money to pay for the early morning taxi to the station, the cup of coffee at the station, the sandwich bought from Pret a Manger at dinner time, the coffee and sandwich on the way home, the late night bus, the two books that got damaged over the day, the ones that now need pensioned off because after a few stalls nothing looks pristine...
If there was a 3b) it would be to pay something towards the time involved in a day long trip plus packing and unpacking, and the general overheads of the press but somehow that never happens.
4) Get some exposure and have a nice time.
A day out at yesterday's Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in London organised by CB Editions certainly achieved many of these aims. I caught up with old friends, met some new and interesting people and sold 16 books. It didn't reach the giddy heights of 3b but I'd have gone anyway and though the day is long it is hardly working down a coal mine. With 54 stalls - probably, as Charles said in the programme, the biggest gathering of poetry publishers ever there was a lot of competition for sales so I'm pretty pleased with 16 books. I know some people did worse, I know some people did better. And it was busy. There were a few readings, including Andy Croft having six minutes to represent the whole of Five Leaves output in a joint session with Smokestack and Hearing Eye (a set of poetry's left wing) but the emphasis was on books, books, books. What was hugely encouraging was the wide age range of those present, with many, many young people, diligently working their way round the stalls. Impressive.
The stalls themselves ranged from the serious and professional (think Carcanet) through to hand-crafted pamphlets in a cardboard box set (http://www.likethispress.co.uk/about) but mostly somewhere in the middle. One stall was giving away slices of freshly cooked ham, carved off the bone, with a small glass of red, with every purchase. The smell put me off, so I never found out who they were*, but made me think that next year the veggies need to fight back. Free peanut butter sandwiches with every purchase from the Five Leaves stall? Yup that'll do it.
There was of course time for old hands to have a ritual moan about the Arts Council, it's what we do, but this was seriously undercut by the Arts Council support for the day, which enabled CB Editions to pay the fares of out of London presses. And this meant many presses that could not have afforded a train fare and stall hire were represented. So as well as being the biggest gathering of presses, this was probably the most representative, with people from Manchester, Norwich, Edinburgh, Hastings, Bristol, Bridgend - everywhere, really, including three from Nottingham. This reflected the thought that had gone into creating a great day by Charles and Chrissy at CB Editions. I am sure 54 publishers and many hundreds of people are grateful to them.
PS - returning to my first point, I rather meanly only came home with two new books - Notebook in Hand, new and selected poems by John Rety (Stonewood) and Still Life by Gordon Hodgeon (Smokestack). I'll post about them both later.
* Later - it was the Scottish publisher Happenstance, chums of ours!
PS - Charles Boyle has written his own blog about the day, on http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/

And the next day the indie presses of Birmingham had their second book fair. Pippa from Five Leaves was there:

"The Five Leaves Elf put on her Five Leaves T-shirt and toddled off to Birmingham yesterday, armed with three boxes of books and a float composed almost entirely of pound coins and coppers (thanks boss!)... After navigating the strange streets almost successfully, she berthed the Thunderbug in a car park which has no lifts. Oops.
Last year’s Birmingham Independent Book Fair took place in the depths of Digbeth, and didn’t attract a huge number of punters. This year, in contrast, we were in the Council House, right in the city centre. There were various Olympic celebrations going on in the square, and I think in the building itself, so there were plenty of people trickling through the lushly carpeted room packed with publishers and booksellers. At some points the room was so full I couldn’t see the stalls opposite.
There may have been related events going on throughout the day, but I didn’t get to go to any as I was flying our stall solo – the pressure! the responsibility! I sold 22 books, which Ross tells me is a good number. This included several books I hadn’t expected to sell (Cotters & Squatters, Jazz Jews, Rock'n'Roll Jews) and all four copies of Maps that I’d taken with me. Interesting... I’d thought fiction would sell better than non-fiction at such events, but I’m not sure that it did. Several people showed interest in our Palestine-related books, and I had a long chat with a young woman who’d done a Jewish Studies degree at Southampton University ‘just because she found it interesting’. As far as I could tell she wasn’t Jewish, and had no connection with the Jewish community.
All in all it was a worthwhile day for Five Leaves, and we look forward to next year’s Fair. Congratulations to Jane Commane of Nine Arches and everyone else involved for making it a success."

This week in books

It has been a busy seven days at Five Leaves Towers. On the Saturday we did a bit of basking in the glory of a big Guardian review of our 1948. I've already mentioned it on this site so instead I'll suggest you read this blog, by Charles Boyle, about Nicholas Lezard: http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/patron-saint-of-small-presses.html.
The same day we had a book launch in Nottingham for Joanne Limburg's collection, The Oxygen Man. This was the first in an occasional series of joint events with Nottingham Poetry Society. I was up in Scotland at the time but our Pippa Hennessy(who is, handily, secretary of NPS) struggled through without me. The event was well attended and Joanne read well from a rather difficult book - difficult because it is about the suicide of her brother, a scientist and the "man" of the title.
Another good launch this week, which I was able to attend, was that of our writer and occasional editor David Belbin who, promiscuously, is published by other publishers too. In this case the launch was for his second "Bone and Cane" book with our friends at Tindal Street. What You Don't Know is, I think, the better of the two books - indeed, I think it is excellent, and the author is clearly getting into his stride in this series. Meantime, time to do some work on his Student, coming out from Five Leaves later this year. More on that to follow.
On Tuesday the first Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing took place. I'll post about this fully, soon. Suffice to say that my fellow trustees also managed to struggle through without me on the night. Maybe I don't need to actually go to anything ever again.
Just as well though that I did turn up at Lowdham Book Festival's First Friday event with the Nottingham writer AR Dance (the man who proves that some self published books are worth reading, as I introduced the session and did the tea for 60 people. These First Friday events have rather taken off. For family reasons I can't do much of the organising of Lowdham events this year, but my Lowdham colleague Jane Streeter looks quite calm about having the programme out in a couple of weeks for our summer events. One date I have set up though is the "Lowdham Lecture" on September 20th, with Alan Gibbons talking about "Libraries, Education and Literacy". More on that nearer the time.
Meanwhile, the proof for Michael Malone's novel Blood Tears has landed on my desk. We should have finished copies next week and, so far, it looks like it will get a lot of coverage in Waterstones branches in Scotland. We had some fun proof-reading the book as our internal and external proof-reader kept trying to change Scottish rhythms into standard English. No, kiddos, they really do speak like that in the West of Scotland.
We are carrying on turning backlist into e-books and this week - announcement imminent - we have turned our out of print travel title After the Gold Rush by John Stuart Clark into an e-book, which will please the mad cyclists of America who keep asking for it.
Finally, a couple  of pieces to read. Fresh from his geographically challenging pair of readings in Inverness and Berwick, J. David Simons has been interviewed by Scottish TV about his writing. Read that here:
http://local.stv.tv/glasgow/magazine/98186-theres-no-place-like-home-for-author-j-david-simons/
And, finally, in this weekly round up, here's a set of reviews in the Newcastle Journal that brings together reviews of poetry publications by three Nottingham presses, Candlestick, Shoestring and Five Leaves, together with books published by our  friends in the north, Iron Press and Smokestack whose editors are regularly published by Five Leaves. Long live this Midlands/North East twinning! Read them here: http://tinyurl.com/cgve3ag

Charles Boyle on small press publishing, and Boris

No disrespect to Hugo Williams, who usually occupies the Freelance column in the TLS, but I'm rather enjoying the articles by Charles Boyle, writer, poet and, most importantly, the publisher at CB Editions. In the issue of TLS out today he describes how he got into small press publishing, and describes the laughable economics of running such a press. The article's short enough to read in Smiths, and I mention that because he refers to writers and small publishers being broke. Meantime, here's a related article from a couple of weeks back. The Bill referred to is Bill Norris, and Central Books is our own distributor.

***

At the bottom of the escalator, I heaved the box of books off my shoulder and waited for Boris Johnson – whom I’d passed on the way down – to appear on the Tube platform. I was annoyed I didn’t have my London book, Days and Nights in W12, with me, but I did have sixty copies of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel.
“Are you David Markson?” Boris asked, as he took a copy. He seemed relieved that I wasn’t. Throughout the journey he read, engrossed, not looking up. His minders and I occasionally exchanged glances. Did they want copies too? But margins are tight, and there are only so many books I can give away free. At Chancery Lane, Boris got off the train, and as he paused to rearrange his backpack and cycle helmet he was approached by someone else. Another nutter, he must have been thinking. Another book.
Boris had been promoting the expansion of his blue bicycle scheme – the “Boris bikes” – to the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush. Larkin might have approved (“Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”), though I doubt if Larkin wore a crash helmet. The Mayor of London had been riding one of his bicycles for the press (they like snapping politicians doing something: kicking a ball about, playing table tennis), and if I’d had a camera myself I’d have liked to take a souvenir photograph of Boris reading one of the books I’ve published. But cycling for Boris is more than just an excuse for a man-of-the-people photo op, and if he hadn’t been so enthralled by the Markson book we might have discussed and compared my own preferred physical exercise, which is the lugging about of books in boxes.
When stock of a particular title in the warehouse is almost at zero, I call up Chris the printer, order another batch and go round to collect. I found Chris by googling “printer west london” in late 2007, and by now we have a history. Once he house-sat my five cats while I was away for a couple of weeks. He was side-swiped by a forklift truck during that period and sent to hospital; patched up, he bypassed the long queue at the pharmacy for his painkillers, came back to the house to check on the cats, drank the bottle of whisky I’d left him, and went back to work.
The building Chris works in is 1960s or later but still manages to be Dickensian: narrow passages, back stairs, areas on the print floor where you have to duck your head. There is no receptionist. The firm’s binding service ranges from a two-hour job for students’ theses to library and conservation work (they have a royal warrant as bookbinders to HM the Queen), and if the printing technology turns out to be just as appropriate to publishers of short novels translated from the Slovenian as it is to local restaurants wanting laminated menus, good for them and for me too.
The books could be couriered from Chris to the warehouse, but that way I’d be missing out on an away-day. At the eastern end of the trip, Central Books – originally set up to distribute the books of publishers associated with the Communist Party (and sell them too, from a bookshop in Gray’s Inn Road that closed in 1993) – looks after several hundred independent book and magazine publishers. Recently, the surrounding streets in Hackney Wick have had a brush-up – new paving, a quota of spindly urban saplings – because of their proximity to the Olympics wasteland. I stand with Bill, the distributor, in the open-plan top-floor office, looking out over the yellow-jacketed construction armies and the toing and froing of dumper trucks, then we shrug and boil the kettle.
If it’s around lunchtime and the kitchen is in use, Bill leads me through the bookstacks until we find a table in a clearing; surrounded by shelves of decades-old issues of New Marxist Quarterly we sip tea, swap trade gossip, and discuss the complicated life of a mutual friend. One of Bill’s colleagues recently asked me to sign copies of a couple of my own poetry books – these books, too, more than a decade old – for her partner, a fan. When I first signed up with Central, Bill sent me a long email explaining, among other things, the difference between a book wholesaler and a book distributor; I still don’t really understand this, but Bill is a big and patient man – a man who could shift boxes of books all week without tiring or complaining – and I trust him absolutely.
Central Books occupies a massive, fine brick building with large green-painted windows and cast-iron drainpipes, but the boxes of books and magazines pile up and storage has become a problem. Recently, I spent a day with Michael Horovitz lugging boxes of his New Departures books out of Central and into various other locations around town, most of them up four flights of stairs. (It’s a pity we couldn’t do this by Boris bike; Camden council sent me a photograph of my car in a place it shouldn’t have been, with a demand for £65.) By mid-afternoon my legs were jelly. If one of the things we like about books is their thingness, that they are physical objects in the world – as opposed to e-books – it’s worth remembering that they’re quite heavy things, especially en masse, and carting them about is a necessary part of the whole business. When is a book not a book? When you can’t put it on the scales and weigh it.
Books of new poetry tend to be short, which means you can fit more of them in a single box. But still. “Nothing”, sighs James Salter in one of his short stories, “is heavier than paper.” A couple of years ago the poet Anthony Thwaite happened to arrive at my house at the same time as a truck delivering 3,000 books (a wildly over-optimistic order). Anthony, then aged seventy-nine, rolled up his sleeves and joined the chain gang. Only after we’d got the books shifted could we sit down and start talking about Larkin’s Letters to Monica, which he was then editing.
I don’t have to keep risking my back. For example, there’s an out-of-town place that combines printing and distribution in the same location, and the two are cleverly linked: when stock of a title falls to a certain level, a reprint is automatically triggered, with the number of new copies determined by average sales over a given period. Or I could go wholly print-on-demand with one of the companies that print and distribute only when an order comes in, even for single book, and never leave my desk. But working up a sweat is no bad thing – Hemingway hunted and boxed, Nabokov chased butterflies, Yeats played croquet – and having this as part of one’s job is preferable to going to the gym.
Somewhere in the book I gave to Boris Johnson, David Markson mentions that every writer and artist in history – “until Writer’s own century” – knew how to ride a horse, and that Pindar reassured his readers there would be horses in heaven. If the new facility outside Westfield shopping centre turns out to be a stable rather than a bicycle docking station, you’ll know where Boris got the idea.