Dig for Plenty

Back in 1995, having been too mean or too poor to buy the hardback of David Crouch and Colin Ward's The Allotment: its landscape and culture when it first came out, I got fed up with Faber never bringing out the paperback, the hardback being out of print, so rang them up and asked if I could buy the rights to the book. They asked for, I think, £200 and I said yes. Goodness, so that's how you become a publisher. The paperback duly appeared and, in due course, ran to a second edition and many reprints, but became steadily out of date. Even history dates. We kept it in print because there was still a demand, publishing some other allotment books and other books by Colin Ward (and one by David Crouch) along the way. Sales waxed and waned as interest in allotments waxed and waned but over the last period we began to feel a bit uncomfortable keeping it going; the book was, after all, first published in 1988. But there was never an alternative - for us or the public. Now, at last, we've put The Allotment out to grass (as it were) and commissioned Lesley Acton to write a new social history of allotments, called Dig for plenty: a social history of the allotment movement. Lesley's previous books were on ceramics, but she has spent the last five years researching allotments, their social history also being the subject of her Ph.D. There will be a gap, as Lesley's book is not out until 2013, but we can wait. Meantime, Lesley is limbering up with a succession of articles on her blog at http://www.newsgrape.com/u/Lesleyacton/popular/.

Peter Preston

I was sorry to hear that Peter Preston died yesterday morning, after a period of indifferent health, followed by a short but serious illness. He was a very popular adult education literature lecturer locally (which we put to good use from time to time at Lowdham Book Festival). He was also nationally important in DH Lawrence studies and in the William Morris Society, having been editor of the Society Journal for many years. Lawrence and Morris comprised the main subjects of his published books. He was also chair of the board at Writing East Midlands. Before illness got the better of him, Peter was working on "Reading with mother" - rereading in modern times those books important to his mother in her day, as representative of what the intelligent woman reader read. He mentioned so many books that should be revisited.
Peter was a good friend to Five Leaves. He was particularly keen on our New London Editions series - in fact he liked our emphases on London, on Jewish literature, and on Nottingham - all of which were important to him, representing his upbringing and his home the last few decades. Our condolences to Barbara and the family.
There will be a celebration of Peter's life at the Derek Randall suite at Trent Bridge at 3.00pm on Friday November 4th, which is open to all those who knew him.

Bread and Roses Radical Book Publishing Award

Five Leaves Publications is proud to be working with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers to initiate the Bread and Roses Radical Book Publishing Award. The award seeks to reward outstanding works of non-fiction published in 2011 that engage with socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change. The name Bread and Roses is taken from the slogan attributed to the many thousands of textile workers who struck in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912, who, in the song commemorating the event, struck "for bread, and for roses" too. The Award was launched on the 13th October in Liverpool, followed by the Liverpool Socialist Singers singing "Bread and Roses". We have not got that on tape, but here's Mimi Farina and Joan Baez filling in for them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYRcCa-ddOo

The Bread and Roses Award will be judged by the children's poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen, the feminist writer Nina Power and the Festival Director of Liverpool's annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan. A shortlist will be announced in the New Year with the overall winner receiving a cheque for £1000 at an awards ceremony at, appropriately, the Bread and Roses pub in London - an ideal venue, not just because of its name but because it was founded by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Council.

Nominations (from publishers and agents) are now open and fuller details can be found on www.bread-and-roses.co.uk. Sadly, there is one publisher excluded! As the founder, organiser and trustee...

Five Leaves and the Arts Council

In a one-star-out-of-five review of one of our books, The Battle for the East End, on Amazon, the reviewer remarks that the book looks "at the events of the 1930s from a pro-Communist viewpoint" rather than being "objective", noting that the book is supported by the Arts Council. The reviewer asks whether the Arts Council would "stump up cash to fund a pro-fascist book". I think the latter unlikely, as the Arts Council has an equal opportunities policy, but it does, for example, support Faber which publishes Ezra Pound, who was an active fascist, and TS Eliot, who wrote anti-Semitic verse. ACE also supports Carcanet which publishes Wyndham Lewis, who was, for a long time, a supporter of Hitler. So the situation is not so clear cut. I'd also argue that the author, David Rosenberg, who is not a Communist, reports favourably on Communist Party actions against the British Union of Fascists because they were the right actions, against the quietude of the Labour establishment and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
But that is to perhaps miss the point. Why should the Arts Council fund those of our books that are not what you might call creative non-fiction or fiction, and have a left-wing stance? Any reader of this blog will have realised that Five Leaves is hardly a contributor to the Adam Werrity Travel Fund.
The Arts Council currently funds Five Leaves through its Grants for the Arts scheme, a competitive scheme, where we submit a programme of activity for, in our case, three years. We receive a modest annual grant towards that modest programme ("Year One - bring down the Tory Government; Year Two - elect a Labour Government; Year Three - oversee the withering away of the state"??) but it can be rather difficult to ascertain how many square feet of our office are devoted to, say, social history, and how many to introducing new young adult fiction writers, or organising States of Independence, so rather than applying title by title, event by event, we apply for the press as a whole. The irony is of course that our social history titles in general do better than the "creative" stuff, so rather than the Arts Council subsidising social history, it is the other way round as our successful social history books enable us to put in smaller bids than would otherwise be the case. This is also a hedge against the day the Arts Council can no longer fund us, or does not wish to fund us. We intend to survive, which would be less possible if our backlist comprised poetry, young adult fiction and other slower selling items. We can see how an Arts Council logo on a book of clearly left-wing provenance might be a red rag to a right wing bull. But wouldn't taking the logo off such books indicate subterfuge on our part?
Finally - a reasonable test of our "objectivity" - would Five Leaves publish writers from the right? Yes, I am sure we do already. In general I would not ask someone's politics before publishing them, but I know that, for example, Colin Wilson, whose second novel we republish next month is hardly a foaming lefty. Would we publish, say, some pastoral poems about the deserts of Dubai by Liam Fox (who will now have some time on his hands to write a sonnet or two). Probably not, but if Ken Clarke ever offers us a book of his writing about jazz (an area we are moving further into next year)? Now you're talking.

History is not quite bunk

An email arrives from one Nick Murray, asking to be put in touch with our Bill Fishman, author of East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, one of those steady backlist sellers that is so nice to have on the list. Nick had found a reference to his paternal grandfather, Otto Shreiber in the book. Otto was an emigre friend of Rudolph Rocker, the (gentile, Yiddish-speaking) leader of the Jewish anarchist movement. Both had been living in London for years. With the usual logic of governments, Otto and Rocker were arrested as German nationals when the war broke out. That Otto was in Britain to escape the Kaiser was ironic, but no defence, and he was interned on the Isle of Man, where he died, details unknown. His Irish companion (many people in the anarchist movement did not marry) was Kathleen "Dolly" Murray who had two children. Dolly was unable to cope with the children in Otto's absence and Nick's father was put in the care of Edward and Constance Garnett. Edward was a writer, editor and critic (instrumental in getting DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers published), while Constance was one of the first translators of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. The decades roll on, Nick having been born in 1940. His father - Otto's son - moved in the 1970s to St Ives to a house once occupied by the author and naturalist William Henry Hudson, by then long dead, but whose published letters included some to Edward Garnett way back when Otto's son was living with him.
I'm not sure if there is a moral in this rounded tale other than we are connected to history by very small steps. Which we all know.

Reasons to be cheerful

Just when you think things can't get much worse, they get a bit better. It was a great pleasure to attend (and speak at) the Chapter and Verse book festival seminar on radical bookselling. Some of the old lags were there - Mandy Vere, the matriarch of Liverpool's News from Nowhere; Dave Cope veteran of the old Communist Party shops Progressive Books in Liverpool and Central Books in London, still on the board of the distributor Central Books and owner of Left on the Shelf, an Internet supplier of second hand socialist books. But there were also new arrivals, from the exciting new People's Bookshop in Durham, which mixes second hand and new, from the Book Bloc, whose shop will open in New Cross and some older and younger activists from Bristol Radical History Group who are moving up from bookstalls to open a shop to be called Hydra.

The day consisted of four parts. Firstly, Mandy from News from Nowhere, Sally from the publishing wing of Bookmarks and Alexis from the anarchist distributor AK Press formed a generally upbeat panel discussing the current state of radical bookselling. All said that you have to do everything nowadays, a bit of publishing, bookselling, outside stalls, in store events - working harder and longer hours to reach the market, but the market is there. There was a sense of unity of purpose, of feeling that we are all in this together (who said that?) and a complete absence of sectarian interests.

The second section was by me, on the history of radical bookselling, concentrating on the days when there were 130 radical bookshops and 450 radical publishers, focusing on the pivotal year of 1984, the year of the miners' great strike and great defeat. I thoroughly enjoyed the research, trawling through old files and back issues of the Radical Bookseller. For years, Dave Cope, something of an expert on the earlier years of the Communist Party orientated shops, and I have planned a book on radical bookselling. The idea lives meantime on his website, http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/, as an incomplete listing of every radical bookshop we have been able to find, together with a bibliography covering mentions of radical bookshops. Any help in adding to this will be welcome.

The third section was the national launch of the Bread and Roses prize, initiated by Five Leaves in conjunction with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. There will be more on the prize and launch shortly, meantime check out http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/.

The final session was a closed session for members of ARB to meet, though also attended by me and a representative of Zed Books. There are now twenty member groups, with Housmans in London administering the project. The general view was that the group will largely operate by networking, providing assistance to publishers keen to reach out to radical booksellers and to tour their authors, but to avoid making controversial public statements. An example of this is over Amazon where some members actively campaign against Amazon while others take advantage of it. Again, the main feature was a keenness to discuss issues but to operate by consensus.

One interesting feature was the presence of second hand dealers, never a feature of the old days. As one pointed out, "An old book is a new book to someone who has not read it before". Indeed, People's Bookshop, the first radical bookshop in Durham since the days of Alleycat, has found that they are selling a lot of backlist material (Paul Foot's Red Shelley was exampled) to people who had simply not had access to this kind of material before.

Everyone was aware of the sector's tiny size and fragility, but felt more positive about radical bookselling than for some time. Would that I was young again!

The ARB's provisional is at http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/ . Meantime, let's leave the last word to one Councillor Jeremy Richardson (Conservative) who remarked in the Sheffield Star in 1986 in the following terms about the Sheffield Radical Bookfair "I put in an appearance at the Radical Book Fair at the Town Hall. Anarchists, feminists and every conceivable variety of ragbag lefty was present peddling their wares. For my part I saw no ordinary Sheffielders, just a bunch of grim-faced souls trying to look interested in some rather dull books. Is this really the right use for the Town Hall on a Saturday?" To which we grim-faced souls (illustrated above, for clarity) can only answer, yes.

Kicking and screaming into the 21st century

Five Leaves has just published its first three e-books, each at £2.99. All three titles were previously published in paperback. J. David Simons' novels are set within the Jewish community in Scotland and though connected can be happily read as stand alone novels. The Pretender is a novel about literary forgery. This is new territory for us, and we are still learning. More of our backlist titles will follow. Click on the links below to find out more about the books. In due course they will appear on every platform, but at the moment they are only on kindle.

http://tinyurl.com/liberationofceliakahn, http://tinyurl.com/creditdraper, http://tinyurl.com/belbinpretender