The power of one and the power of many

Sometime over the Christmas break, Five Leaves towers received an email from Alan Gibbons, children's author and organiser of the Campaign for the Book. I don't have it to hand but to precis it said, look, I know you are still munching mince pies, but what do people feel about a day of action around threatened libraries, let's say Feb 5th. We were not picked out, the email was sent to heaps of people and organisations in contact with the Campaign for the Book. And lo! (as folks say around Christmas) the people said yes. The Campaign is not something you can join, send off £20 and sleep better at night. It is not a campaign with local branches, nor is it a campaign that produces print, guidelines, or has Hon. Vice Presidents. There is an annual conference with speakers, but unless I have misunderstood, it is Alan Gibbons stirring us up and encouraging us to do what is right in our own area. On Feb 5th there is action in many parts of the UK - you can read about some of them at Alan's blog, and enter more in the Guardian's map of protest http://alangibbons.net/?paged=2.

If you are in Nottinghamshire come and join the Five Leaves' staff from 11.00am at Beeston Library in Nottinghamshire (there are also events in Sneinton and Stapleford). We'll be "reading-in" and "reading-out". Bring your library card (returns can be made at any Nottingham City or County Library) for a mass borrow or bring along something to read out. The event has the support of UNISON and will in turn support the staff, not get in their way. Do protests work? You can see on Alan's blog stories of local authorities backing off from library cuts. Not all, but some. And here the Council has put back £400,000 into its book fund and £70,000 back into staffing for 22 of the smaller libraries. The fund and the opening hours for these libraries will now only be cut by 50% not 75% - which takes us from catastrophic to bad. But it does save the jobs of many part-time low paid women and make the service viable if diminished. That those libraries will be returned to viability is the direct result of protest, including a letter signed by 100 local writers. So on Saturday we celebrate a minor victory and read in support of our local staff and library workers and users all over the country.

Self-publishing ups and downs

A friend of mine, Roy Bainton, sent me his new book Crazy Horse and the Coalman, which he has self-published. Roy is not someone to rush into self-publishing out of desperation to see his name in print. He is a jobbing writer who has made a precarious full time living for decades, writing sleeve notes, programmes - you name it - as well as books for mainstream publishers like Mainstream, Crowood and Constable & Robinson. But it's tough out there and he has dipped his toes into self-publishing from time to time. Those who know me will be aware of my general disregard for self-publishing, and Roy (who I hope will still be a friend after this posting) is aware of the pitfalls, particularly over being your own editor. This book in one volume shows the upside and downside of self-publishing. Firstly a description of the book. This is an autobiography of Roy's early years, his childhood up to the start of the rock'n'roll period and his joining the Merchant Navy. If categorised beyond autobiography it falls into the genre of "we was poor but we was miserable". His family struggled to survive economically in the roughest parts of Hull, adversity made worse by some daft decisions of his father who blew his war-wound compo on a smallholding that could never be made to work. Ere long the family were trawling round relatives to find anyone who had a spare room, however insanitary. Running alongside the direct narrative is the author's early obsession with the Native American, Crazy Horse, whose life he wished to emulate. The upside is that the book exists. Roy can write well, and wittily, but since the demise of the "people's autobiography" movement it is hard to see any publisher taking a punt on this story. Yet he tells so much about post-war life for the people at the scrag-end and the way his family did, just, survive adversity. Some parts are laugh out loud funny - such as when he was stopped by the police cycling home at midnight on Christmas Eve with some freshly-slaughtered ducks for the family Christmas dinner. Only afterwards did he discover which particular public pond was a couple of ducks short on Christmas Day. (It was funny the way Roy told it.) The downside is the book cries out for an editor and the author's continued use of the Crazy Horse storyline becomes increasingly forced as the author moves into early adulthood. And of course poor Roy has to sell the bloomin' books, which will hardly be reviewed and not stocked by bookshops. That's a downside. I wish there had been a Hull community publisher to take this book up, bash it around a bit and sell it throughout the City. Even so, anybody who knows Hessle Road should get a copy, available from lulu on http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/crazy-horse-and-the-coalman/13848424

Half a loaf is better than no bread

After some effort, by many people and groups including Five Leaves, our local County Council has reduced some of their cuts in library services. We organised 100 East Midlands writers in sending a letter of protest about the cuts - clearly a good letter as Councillor John Cottee is still mulling over his reply... The cuts have been changed from catastrophic to simply really bad. For example the book fund will now only be cut by 50%, not 75%. That is still really bad, but the protests have had £400,000 returned to the book fund. For example 22 of the 28 smaller libraries whose opening hours were being reduced by 75% will have their hours reduced by 50%. That is still really bad but £70,000 has been returned to library staffing, which will keep some low paid part-time women workers in jobs and allow just enough opening time for those libraries to survive and dispense with some of the stupidity of them being run by volunteers. Philip Pullman tackles this issue well in his essay on http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/philip-pullman/this-is-big-society-you-see-it-must-be-big-to-contain-so-many-volunteers.
We should not stop campaigning - here, or in Doncaster or in Oxford or anywhere else libraries are under threat. Phillip Pullman has his own personal library story, mentioned in his article. Here's mine:
My home town library opened in 1904. There is a wonderful photograph of people thronging the streets, as far as the eye can see, to welcome this new library. My grandfather borrowed books from that library. He loved Westerns and pulp crime fiction. He usually asked my mother to go and collect his books - and, family legend has it, she was always late home as she became the leading eight year old expert on Westerns and pulp crime. Like her father she did not stay on at school, leaving for factory work aged fourteen, but she had a love of reading. Many years after I left home I discovered she was still using library tickets, renewed annually, in my name, in the name of her late mother and in the name of a woman I'd had time to marry and divorce. Only when that library changed to allow readers to borrow more than three books did she lay her mother to rest, admit my marriage had failed and stop pretending that I was still living at home in my 30s. Her proudest day had been when I started work in that same library, my first job, which led me to a life as a qualified librarian, a bookseller and publisher. And the last time my home town library was under threat I was pleased to find that my mother was one of hundreds of people attending a protest meeting and one of the leading hecklers of the Councillors. We all have library stories and they are not all of some Hovis-and-butcher-boy-on-a-bicycle past. Two or three years ago I helped edit a short video on library use locally, which included an interview with some witty female teenagers who were in a Manga reading group, an interview with a single parent who'd used her local library as an office and training centre - developing her computer skills until she found work. Her library had also been done up resulting in a big increase in issues. Libraries can be, should be and in many places are as relevant now as they were in 1904.
So I welcome this partial change of heart shown by Nottinghamshire County Library. It is half a loaf, better than none. But we still want the whole bloody bakery.

Flying Goose migration

The Shoestring Press readings at the Flying Goose in Beeston, Nottingham will finally draw to a close in March. This series of mostly, but not exclusively, poetry readings has been running for about seven or eight seasons. John Lucas, the organiser (and a Five Leaves' writer), has not kept the programmes, nor have I. Perhaps someone has. You may not have heard of the series - not surprising as a balance always had to be made between getting enough people along and too many since the venue holds 36 people. There was a famous occasion when 64 turned up, though when people breathed out at the half time break some attendees were propelled through the front door. Over the years the Goose has become a fixture on the small press scene - many, perhaps most, of those attending have been writers, publishers, teachers or organisers of literature, but new people have always been welcome. Most of the Five Leaves' writers from the region, and some from outside the region, have read there. The two last events in the current format are on Tuesday 15 February and 15th March at 7.30pm, the first with Five Leaves/Tindall Street writer David Belbin reading with fellow novelist Thomas Legendre, the series ending with readings by poets Ann Atkinson, a former editor of Staple, and Alan Baker, the founder/publisher of Leafe Press.

The Flying Goose readings will, however, continue in the hands of the poet Sarah Jackson (pictured), a Flying Goose regular since moving to Nottingham, but not under the Shoestring Press banner.

Thanks to John Lucas, and to all the writers who've produced some great nights over the years.

Creme de la Crime moves on

Fellow regional publisher Creme de la Crime will shortly be closing, but re-appearing as the crime imprint of Severn House which has bought the name. I'm sorry to lose Lynne Patrick from the local publishing scene as we would meet up regularly at festivals and book fairs. She will be doing some editorial work at Severn House but I'm sure she will be glad to shed the long hours she has put in at Creme de la Crime as publisher. She certainly worked hard and had a loyal stable of writers always willing to turn out for library and festival events. Some of her writers are going over to Severn House, some not. Her backlist is still available on http://www.cremedelacrime.com/home.htm but we'll have to wait to see what Severn House does with their new list as their website is under reconstruction.

The Return of the Slow Mirror

I mentioned a short film by Richard Zimler a posting or two back, being shown at Jewish Book Week... Back in 1996 Sonja Lyndon and Sylvia Paskin were editing a book of "New Fiction by Jewish Writers" for Five Leaves. Most of the short stories came in following a note round writers we knew, and the grapevine did the rest. Out of the blue though came a short story called "The Slow Mirror" by a writer none of us had heard of; Richard Zimler, an American living in Portugal. Immediately that became the title story of the collection. It was very good. Curious, we wrote to Richard asking who he was, what had he done... it did not feel like the work of a complete novice. He said he was, essentially, an unpublished writer and he had this novel which his ex-agent had failed to place... and he sent The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, which could be described as a kind of Jewish Name of the Rose. At Five Leaves towers we loved it... but what to do? If we had published it at the time we'd have printed 750 copies, sold 500 and had a review in a Jewish paper or two. And this was too good. At the time we knew someone in a fairly big indie publishing house in America and asked them to read it. They loved it, bought it, sold UK rights to Arcadia who sold 75,000 copies of the trade ie posh edition, followed by a mass market edition. It sold to many languages and Richard has never looked back. We were thrilled. Five Leaves could not have done that, nor could we now.

But what a collection that was... it contained a story by Zvi Jagendorf which was later turned into a Booker longlist title and one by Tamar Yellin that also became a novel. Contributors Jonathan Wilson and Shaun Levin joined our list with later books, and we published a "classic" by Frederic Raphael. Michelene Wandor has appeared in several parts of our list. One decade soon we'll finally publish a Jewish lesbian anthology edited by another contributor, our friend Ellen Galford who we see from time to time at the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society.

Now Richard Zimler has made a short film. It will be at Jewish Book Week on February 28, at the New North London Synagogue on February 26 and won the Best Dram Award at the New York Downtown Short Film Festival. Richard will also be speaking about his latest book The Warsaw Anagrams at Keats House in London on March 17 in an event organised by Daunt's.

The Gradgrinds of County Hall

Last night in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, a very articulate child received a sad political lesson. She was one of 100 people attending a protest/organising meeting about library cuts in her area. When she heard that the County Council book fund was to be cut by 75% she asked whether that included books for children. Sadly yes, and because the Library service is now told to stretch the life of a book from 5 years to 21 children's books will be even more at risk because children are more robust with their books than adults, so the books have to go out of commission earlier. Can't see her joining the Young Conservatives. The speakers' list comprised Mike Scott from UNISON, Gail Cooke from the UNISON group of library workers (there were many library workers there) and me, presumably to provide the odd literary reference. The outcome is a read-in at Beeston Library at 11.00am on Feb 5th, part of the national day of action on library cuts. Bring your library card. The meeting was organised by "Nottingham Save Our Services".