Absolute Beginners

Rereading Colin Macinnes's Absolute Beginners, I was reminded just how exciting the book is. Jerry White has a good chapter on it in our London Fictions and it is one London novel I would dearly love to have on our New London Editions list, not least because of the book's other Five Leaves connections, Unfortunately for us, Allison and Busby, under a series of owners, keeps the book on their list.
It was first published in 1959 by - who else? - MacGibbon and Key, my favourite publisher of the era but remains completely fresh.
Rather than rehearse the full story of the book - you can read a version of Jerry's introduction on the London Fictions website at http://www.londonfictions.com/colin-macinnes-absolute-beginners.html.
There he mentions that Manny and Miriam Katz is based on Bernard and Erica Kops (we've published a couple of books by Bernard) and reading the book you can hear Bernard's voice has not changed since Macinnes used him as a character in the 1950s to today. Bernard has told me a few stories about Macinnes's visits to his house. Having read a lot about Macinnes I was not surprised he was often drunk, rude and dominating. Not someone to forget, but not always someone to dislike. Bernard is more tolerant than me, I should say.
The second Five Leaves connection is that the anonymous teenage narrator of the book - a photographer who deals in fashion and porno photography (or what passed as porno at the time, about as pornographic as the side bars of the Daily Mail website) is based on Terry Taylor whose one published book, Baron's Court, All Change is a steady seller on our New London Editions list. That too was originally published by MacGibbon and Key.

Ida Kar exhibition

"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.

Call the Kops

Just had a long, catch up call with our writer Bernard Kops. Bernard is currently working on a novel, getting up at 5.00am (5.30 at weekends) to write for a few hours. If you read his Five Leaves' autobiography, The World is a Wedding, he seems to be an unlikely prospect to still be working at 84, or even alive. He managed to avoid being bombed in the Blitz, but it was close, but it was getting bombed with the other meaning that almost saw him off. His career has been up and down, to say the least. Bernard's conversation is always good value. One minute he's off on Colin MacInnes (Bernard and Erica Kops appeared, thinly disguised, in Absolute Beginners), the next he's describing his April visit to the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies to read his poem on Yuri Gagarin, which he presented to Gagarin in 1961, at their recent celebration of 50 years since Gagarin's space flight. Bernard said he was astonished to be invited as he had not thought of the poem for fifty years.
Bernard has the knack of being everywhere and knowing everyone, for example the cover of The World Is a Wedding is a portrait of him by Ida Kar (currently being exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery). Kops fans can book the date of Monday 28 November to celebrate his 85th birthday at the Jewish Museum in London, but he's usually out and about, reading. He rarely turns down an invitation!