To the barricades

Five Leaves has initiated an open letter to Nottinghamshire County Council about its proposed library cutbacks - see previous posting. The letter will be sent on Monday 25 October and 96 writers from the East Midlands have signed it over the weekend. Any local writers or anyone involved in the industry locally can contact me to add their name on info@fiveleaves.co.uk. The list includes Notts exiles Julie Myerson (who used to work in libraries) and John Harvey as well as a range of writers from Maria Allen, novelist of this parish, through to Gregory Woods, poet, literary critic and academic. The Nottingham Post is likely to run a story on Wednesday. They have already run a great editorial on http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/opinion/Post-Comment-Libraries-need-protection/article-2764721-detail/article.html
Update - the letter was sent with 100 names. East Midlands Today has done an interview for Tuesday.

What's John got against Arnold?

On Booker night, Arnold Library, outside Nottingham, (yes, it is nice to have a suburb called Arnold; buses going there look as if they are called that) hosted an event with local book folk advocating one of the shortlist. In a vote at the end of the session the overwhelming majority wanted to read The Finkler Question, but few voted for it as being the likely winner. Another good night out down the library.

The next day Nottinghamshire County Council (Conservative) announced major cuts in the library service - 83.4 full time equivalent jobs to go, the book budget cut by 75%, reduced opening hours, smaller libraries to become "community partnership libraries" (work that one out) and mobiles to visit only monthly. Books will have to last 21.5 years rather than the current 5.4 years. The Cabinet member for (getting rid of) culture at the Council, John Cottee, said "we are committed to libraries being at the heart of the community". Except he's just given the community a heart attack.

Thinking back to the Booker event - I wonder which of those staff will be on the dole next year, whether the remaining staff will have time to run such events, or whether there will be enough budget to even have the Booker list borrowable on the night.

This comes in the wake of a major programme of library refurbishments initiated by the previous administration, including Arnold Library itself. The illustration is an artist's impression of Arnold Library in a year's time.

The new girl visits an old library

Five Leaves' new worker Pippa Hennessy found a lot to interest her at our last book launch: the venue: "...Bromley House Library, in the centre of Nottingham, which I haven’t been to before but certainly intend to go to to again. It’s a subscription library (costs £75 per year, or £40 for full-time students), which is about the only down side. The entrance is easy to miss – a nondescript doorway next to Barnardos charity shop on Angel Row – but once you go inside it’s like the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. There are three floors of books, ranging from modern novels to Victorian novels, church history, economics, old issues of Punch…

"The first floor has a room with a ‘meridian line’ – a brass line on the floor running exactly North-South, which, in conjunction with a panel covering the window with a strategically placed hole, and a plumb-bob, enables you to determine exactly when midday is in Nottingham. According to engraved silver plates on a nearby grandfather clock, this is 4’33 later than midday at Greenwich, and 4’10 later than St Paul’s Cathedral.

"The second floor is reached via a rickety spiral staircase. Notices tied to the banisters at the top and bottom with red ribbon ask that only one person uses the staircase at any one time. A balcony runs round above one of the first floor rooms (crammed with books, of course), and there are many nooks and crannies where members can curl up with books and read quietly.

"A notice on the way up to the third floor warns that the same level of comfort is not to be found in the attics, and recommends wrapping up warm in the winter! Then you get to the top of the stairs and find a heavy duty torch placed strategically… there are lights, but I did wonder how reliable they are. I found some gorgeous maps of the city centre, showing how it had changed over the years. I didn’t spot a date, but it looked as if they showed an original draft sometime in the 1800s (did you know there used to be two skating rinks on Talbot Street?), with red outlines drawn over to show how the city looked at the time – probably around the middle of the century. I want to go back there just to look at those maps again..."

More on John Lucas, and Beeston International Poetry Festival

Sixty people came to the Nottingham Bromley House Library launch of John Lucas' Next Year Will Be Better and Things to Say (see postings passim). Two more events to go, London and Edinburgh. John Lucas and most of the guests are out of the picture, which is probably where he, at least, prefers to be. John is also the organiser of the Beeston International Poetry Festival, starting 16th of this month. That's Beeston in Nottingham, and yes, it is international, with Greek, Australian and various other international poets as well as home grown. The full programme is on http://tiny.cc/beestonpoetry, but you do need to scroll down to reach the programme, past a worryingly blank page. There is also a Facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=121458364576549#!/group.php?gid=129081423811358.

Those who know John will know that he is responsible for neither electronic medium!

National Poetry Day - Derby

Without an event of our own to go to, we wandered over to Derby to support our author Adrian Buckner (Contains Mild Peril) in relaunching his magazine Assent under its new arrangement "in partnership with Universtiy of Derby". (Are universities the new Medicis? Discuss.) Assent started life as Poetry Nottingham in 1959, and Nottingham connections are still strong with many of the 60 people in the audience from there. One of the readers, CJ Allen, is also from the 'hood. Allen is an excellent poet and reader, winner of more competitions than you can shake a stick at, and performs with wit and understated humour. The main reader was Bernard O'Donoghue, a Cork man long domiciled in Britain. He is the writer of small masterpieces which I wish he would turn into longer narrative poems, but another great reader.
Assent promises further such readings and launches, which is good, though they must talk with their sponsors about getting a website.
I was also pleased to see an old friend, Les Baynton, has started up a performance poetry night in the same venue - the fancy new Quad - free, every second Thursday of the month.

"There was an old woman who lived in a shoe"

Given that the current Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, seems to have disinterred the political philosophy of Thomas Malthus, we can probably look forward to Arts Council funding being determined by how many children applicants have. My failure to breed could come in handy here. Everyone and their granny has pitched in to point out that arts spending is a cultural and economic investment so there is little point in rehearsing it here. Five Leaves' official and, I think, moderate opinion is that this country will be a better place once the last hedge fund trader is strangled by the guts of the last Eton-educated Con/Dem cabinet minister though I suspect this reasoned opinion is not fully shared by Nicholas Serota.

Peters

On Five Leaves' young adult fiction side, Peters, the specialist library supplier of children's books is a great account. The Birmingham company orders in multiples, regularly, and rarely (if ever) does returns. It just sends in orders, receives them, pays up. No fuss. One of their staff approached us at our stall at the School Library Association, and again at the Branford Boase Award and invited us to visit. Yesterday a couple of people from Five Leaves did just that, and were met by managing director Carl McInerney and chief buyer Joe Chapman. They toured us round the place and sat down to discuss our young adult list, our covers, what they thought of us and how we could work better together. Five Leaves publishes 3-5 young adult books a year, and two senior staff in a multi-million pound business set aside a couple of hours of their time to talk to what must be one of the smallest accounts they have. Impressed.
Impressed at seeing their showroom, which brings together more books for young people than can be seen anywhere in Britain. Impressed at seeing the information their ten librarians send out to their public and school library accounts (this included seeing some of their non-public reviews of our books, which felt a bit like hearing someone talk about you further down the bus; like the bus passenger, they say what they think). Impressed at the firm's independence. Peters is an indie, and its selectors and librarians are encouraged to ignore discounts, ignore the reputation of the publisher, and to buy and recommend according to the value of the book in front of them.
The number of library suppliers in the UK has been falling steadily, mostly into the hands of book wholesalers, while local authorities move into buying consortia and competitive tendering. For all our sakes Peters deserves to keep winning the tenders, and building their direct sales to local authority School Library Services.
And we were impressed to see a big poster of the MD with Alan Gibbons under the banner of the Campaign for the Book.
www.peters-books.co.uk