Bookshops in Jerusalem # 3

In the last couple of postings I have mentioned (the Arab) Educational Bookshop and (the Jewish) Ludwig Mayer Bookshop. I've been writing only about shops selling English language books, and covering the few independents in the City. Most people though will come across one of the three chains, Steimatzky, Tzomet or Tamir, with modest English language sections. Steimatzky feels like a WH Smith, with an interesting exchange rate. At Ben Gurion airport I bought the second volume of the Stieg Larsson series, in the US Vintage edition, not realising it was all over the UK already. The US price was $7.99, and at Steimatzky it was the equivalent of £10. Tzomet - correct me if I am wrong - was set up by Israeli publishers concerned about the previous stranglehold Steimatzky held. This sustains in importing with Tamir buying all their English language books from Steimatzky.

Meanwhile, one further indie worth mentioning is the excellent bookshop (also with a high conversion rate) at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. The Colony is the starting point for all journalists and politicians preferring to stay on the Arab side of the divide, and it is a very luxurious hotel with high quality fiction, poetry and biography from the US, UK and the Middle East and a pretty comprehensive selection of books on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It packs a huge amount of books into a very small space and is open long hours, and open to non-hotel residents.

Bookshops in Jerusalem # 2

In the last posting I talked about the newest English-language Jerusalem bookshop, the Arab-owned Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem. The oldest is the Jewish-owned Ludwig Mayer Bookshop on Jaffa Street (http://www.mayerbooks.com/). Whereas the new Educational Bookshop is bright, open and comes with a cafe, Ludwig Mayer looks not dissimilar to what it probably looked like in 1908 or when it moved to these premises in 1935. It's dusty, dark, has a multi-lingual stock and caters for the academic market. The stock includes the kind of expensive academic books on the Middle East and on Jewish history that you might see in reviews, but rarely in bookshops. Come with your credit card, but without a wheelchair as the shelves crowd in on you. This is the sort of shop to disappear into and come out a few years later, older, greyer, but wiser.

They do mail order, and a quick look at their catalogue included gems such as Hebrew Literature in North Africa Since 1381 and Development of Jewish Book Publishing in Lithuania (in Russian) and The Historical Prologue of the Hittite Vassal Treaties. No, I don't know what they are either.

Bookshops in Jerusalem #1

Congratulations to the owners of the Educational Bookshop in (Arab) East Jerusalem. For 35 years the owners have run an Arab language bookshop on Salah Ad-Din Street with a growing English language section. Now they have made the bold step of opening an entirely English language shop and cafe opposite the old premises, which will itself be renovated, reverting to Arab books and stationery only.

The shop is attractive, very "Western" in a Middle Eastern Street, but clearly Arabist. The stock concentrates on the Middle East conflict and Arab fiction but also includes English magazines as diverse as the People's Friend and the New York Review of Books. The cafe is a hybrid of West and East. The new premises opened six weeks ago, and is already busy. I asked Iyad Muna, who runs the place together with his brother Imad, who they see as their market. He said that he expects only 10-20% of the customers to be local Arabs, English students and academics, with the majority of the custom coming from the many Non-Governmental Organisations based in the area, ex-pats and tourists. The books are expensive by local standards - or indeed for us right now because of the exchange rate. Israel also charges vat on books, and there is carriage, but the Muna brothers hold down prices by ordering in quantity and getting good discounts. They've spent four or five years planning the project and deserve to succeed.

Thought the bookshop is clear on its views it also stocks books by Israeli novelists like Amos Oz and David Grossman and even books from a Zionist perspective. Given the lack of good English language bookshops "on the other side", did they expect many Jewish Jerusalemites to shop there? Iyad felt that would not happen, citing a psychological barrier preventing even liberal academics coming over. I was reminded of the late Anwar Sadat's 1977 speech to the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, where he referred to "... a psychological barrier between us. A barrier of suspicion. A barrier of rejection. ... A barrier of hallucination around any deed and decision." Iyad also said that most Jewish Israeli English language readers will order through the Internet, but in East Jerusalem postcodes and in some cases street names are absent making it impossible to order on line.

I left with a substantial order for our handful of books on the Middle East, including our two Jonathan Wilson novels, and the advice from Iyad to publish more Middle Eastern books.

You can find something on the Educational Bookshop on www.educationalbookshop.com, but at the moment the site only shows the old shop. An updated site is planned.

Messiah still late shock, but the band plays on

On 22/11 I wrote that this long awaited book was due, betting though that it would come still before the Messiah. Well, the Messiah may be late, but the book was early. Dropping into the office today just to check the post before going away for a few days I had to climb over mounds of Jazz Jews, with no time to do anything other than send the author a few copies. The dispatch note with the books was dated 4th January so they must have arrived by time travel as well as carrier.
If you are one of those waiting, that the book has arrived early will do you no good whatsoever, and copies will still be sent out in the second week of January. Sorry.

In that earlier blog I wrote that the earliest emails about this book were from sometime in 2003. Mike tells me that we actually started discussing it in 2001, which means we really can say this book was ten years in the making. It's big, it's heavy, it's hardback, it has 7,000 names in the index and it's £24.99.

We're happy to send it to anyone in the UK post free, but anyone wanting to order from overseas would be best to go via http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ as it will be post free internationally from there.

Thanks to Darius Hinks, by the way, for this wonderful wrap round Blue Note inspired cover.

Books of the year

Everyone else does it, so here's ten books I read this year I would recommend... I wouldn't say they were my favourite books of the year (I published those ones) and they are in no particular order. Just ones that come to mind.

Deer Hunting with Jesus: guns, votes, debt and delusions in Redneck America by Joe Bargean (Portobello). Anyone reading this would have known the sub-prime market would collapse. See? One book could have saved the world's economy. Read this and weep. Yup, fucked over, heavily armed, anti-union... this lot will vote Palin for President if they get the chance.

Edward Carpenter: a life of liberty and love by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso). The big biography of the most interesting of sandal wearers, a socialist, a vegetarian, an adult education lecturer, a believer in “dress reform” and feminism who lived in an openly gay relationship near Chesterfield at a time when such things were considered impossible.

Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War by Daniel Gray (Luath). This is the book that told me that in my home town workers took over a knitwear factory to make clothes for Spanish people and ran it as a co-op. Didn't learn that in school.

Every Secret Thing: my family, my country by Gillian Slovo (Virago). A re-read here, in prep for interviewing the author at Lowdham Book Festival. The family in question were Joe Slovo, who became a cabinet member in Mandela's government and Ruth First, assassinated by the apartheid regime.

Who was Sophie? by Celia Robertson (Virago). Celia's search to find out what had happened to “Sophie”, her grandmother, once a poet published by the Hogarth Press, who became a bag lady on the streets of Nottingham.

Cello by Frances Thimann (Pewter Rose). A book of short stories by a new press in Nottingham. Delightful cover, elegiac short stories about old age.

Writers on Islands edited by James Knox Whittett (Iron Press). An anthology by mostly well known writers about the islands around the coast of Britain and Ireland, including Kathleen Jamie, JM Synge, George MacKay Brown and many more. Lots of good short pieces.

Cold Granite by Stuart Macbride (Harper Collins). McBride's first tartan noire book, set in Aberdeen. Mentions many of my old haunts and it is good to know that police still feel unsafe visiting the Fersands estate where I used to live!

The One That Got Away by Zoe Wicomb (The New Press, USA). Internet only for this one for the moment, short stories set in South Africa and Glasgow, mostly with South African characters. One story, “N2” is near perfect.

Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair (Hamish Hamilton, but due out in paperback in February). A rag bag, mishmash, rattle bag of Sinclair's usual concerns featuring a cast of the missing, the eccentric, the fictional, the even more unlikely factual.

There are probably others that would have been top tenners that I've forgotten, loaned out, returned to libraries, misplaced, but this seems a good enough selection. It was a good reading year, despite the misery in the book trade. Five of the ten were written by women and (phew) six were from independent presses.

Diary dates

We have some dates for some of Five Leaves' bigger events in 2010. All we need now is a diary, but most people are better organised...

Saturday March 20: 10am-4pm. "States of Independence" - an independent publishers' fair, with events, readings, launches.
De Montfort University, Leicester

Wednesday June 16: 7.30 (time tbc). "Old City, New Rumours" - launching our major anthology of Hull related poets, in support of Larkin 25. Andrew Motion, a contributor, will be reading and talking about Hull and Larkin. University of Hull

Friday 18 June - Saturday 27 June Lowdham Book Festival - the East Midlands biggest book event, jointly organised by Five Leaves and The Bookcase in Lowdham, Nottinghamshire.

Fuller details of all of these will appear in due course, and on our events listing at http://www.fiveleaves.co.uk/.


Meanwhile, congratulations to Richard Bolt and the team organising the Tower Hamlets Festival of Reading. Five Leaves were represented by John Harvey (OK, he does have another publisher too) and John Bennett (author of E1). The Festival was conceived and organised at short notice, but worked, and will reappear in the second week of November 2010.

Editorial dilemmas

A forthcoming Five Leaves' poetry anthology has to lose some material, because of the cost of republishing rights. Famous dead writers often seem the greediest. We have often winced at paying out to a wealthy estate run by a great niece or nephew of someone long dead, at the literal expense of paying some tyro poet starving in her garret. Anybody publishing DH Lawrence in the past had to pay out to the wealthy sons of the man DHL widow married after his death. There's plenty such examples of the undeserving and unrelated benefiting from the 70 years people's work remains in copyright after their death. But if you need the material, what can you do?

In this case we had to decide from among a group of living and dead poets which included one who was an anti-Semite, a Rexist, an admirer of Italian Fascism, an elitist and, according to one of the editorial team, "a baleful influence on British poetry for too long. Also a dull poet." Another editor, Jewish, disagreed that he should be excluded because he was an anti-Semite (the poem in question was not anti-Semitic) quoting in support that Daniel Barenboim can conduct Wagner, so chuck him out for poetic or financial reasons (and we did) but not on grounds of alleged anti-Semitism.



Should we always just go by the work, not the person? And what if the poet under discussion had been living? We would never - I imagine - publish the work of a living fascist supporter, even if they could turn out the most excellent sonnet. What if they were a wife-beater? A charlatan? A vivesector? A homophobe?