World Book Night

Writing on Facebook, our writer J. David Simons said about the forthcoming World Book Night: I'm not sure what to think of World Book Night. Of course, it is a noble cause to get great books out there into the hands of readers. I wonder what kind of deals these already well-known writers have with their publishers - is there anything in at all for the writers apart from the proliferation of their books? [I know a couple of the writers on the list- I must ask them]. If it's all for free, could we have other such nights of free services for other noble causes? A World Boiler-Fixing Night, A World Car-Servicing Night, A World Free Banking Night, A World Free Bottle of Wine Night, A World Free Cinema Night, A World Free Insurance Night. Why does it always have to be the writers that give away their work for free?!

My own experience of WBN is limited. Last year I was a "giver" but rather than send the books to my appointed pick up point, a bookshop, WBN sent them to a library miles from where I live and work. Two buses away in fact (I don't drive). I was not keen on carrying 48 copies of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold on the buses, but I did not need to as the books never actually arrived. They are out there somewhere. I did, however, make up part of a panel at an arts association in deepest rural Leicestershire, with a writer, a librarian and a bookseller. Several of the association were givers. We had a very good discussion on all things bookish, and WBN was the trigger.

I can see David's point, but I know that he and most other writers do want to create a reading culture whereas I doubt the bloke who comes to mend our boiler wants to put boilers at the heart of public life. And, locally, some people have from time to time organised free cinema showings on giant screens for all to see. Certainly we give away some overstocks from time to time - usually anthologies lest any individual author gets upset - as freebies in, for example, Library Reading Day goodie bags.

My main concern about WBN is that as that it relies on well known writers giving their work away free (I presume it is free) it will perpetuate the dominance of those big name writers. Wouldn't it be grand if WBN also had some dosh to pay deserving writers, and deserving small publishers to enable, well, us to give away 25,000 books to help draw the reading public's attention towards, say, J. David Simons?

WBN givers often do try hard to get books into the hands of those who don't read very much, but I confess that over the last year I've got my hands on several of last year's list, introducing me to writers I'd been meaning to read. We all like freebies. I mentioned recently to Robert Chandler, the translator of Life and Fate, that I'd recently found a copy of his book in goodie bag at a Vintage event, having already bought two copies. He said that he was recently at a similar event and on leaving found his goodie bag had that book in it too.

Some bookshops have been concerned about books being devalued by being free, or taking up people's reading time to the exclusion of bought books. I don't accept that. Most book readers read from all sorts of sources, bookshops, second hand bookshops, libraries, book sales at summer fetes, borrowing from friends. But I'm interested to see how this argument develops.

August 12 1952 commemoration

Advance notice
From Revolution to Repression: commemorating the Soviet Yiddish writers executed on August 12th 1952
Five Leaves Publications and Jewish Music Institute are holding an international event to mark the 60th anniversary of the executions
Sunday 12th August 2012
2.00pm to 5.00pm
School of Oriental and African Studies, lecture theatre G2, Russell Square campus, London (Russell Square tube)
Speakers: Gennady Estraikh, Associate Professor New York University on the Soviet Yiddish writers; Robert Chandler, translator of Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, on Vasily Grossman and Isaak Babel
Music from the Soviet Jewish world: Polina and Merlin Shepherd
This event will also launch From Revolution to Repression: Soviet Yiddish writers 1917-1952, edited by the late Joseph Sherman, published by Five Leaves
Admission free
Light refreshments will be available
RSVP and further information mailto:myra@fiveleaves.co.uk
www.fiveleaves.co.uk
The illustration here is by Chagall, the cover of a small volume of poetry "Troyer" (Grief) published in Yiddish by the Kulture Lige in Kiev in 1922, as a fundraiser for a Jewish orphanage. The poems are by Dovid Hofshteyn, one of the poets killed on August 12 1952, and will appear in translation in From Revolution to Repression.

Laure Del-Rivo and Michael Horovitz in conversation

Tuesday, 31st January 6.30 for 7pm LAURA DEL-RIVO and MICHAEL HOROVITZ In Conversation with Julian Mash, formerly of the Travel Bookshop
Ladbroke Grove Underground
This event brings together two local writers to discuss their work, and the lives and times that influenced them.
Laura Del-Rivo's debut novel The Furnished Room was published in 1961, and filmed in 1963 by Michael Winner as West 11. Recently re-published, the novel was described in the Guardian as "an evocative taste of black-coffee blues". She was part of a loose collective of writers and artists including Colin Wilson and Alexander Trocchi, and was photographed by Ida Kar. In addition to writing, Del-Rivo had a series of jobs, including working as a bookseller, a Lyons' counter hand and an art-school model before she started running a market stall in Portobello Road, where she is still a regular stall-holder.
Michael Horovitz is an internationalist polymath. He has edited and published New Departures and coordinated the Poetry Olympics festivals for 50 years (poetryolympics.com). He was described by Allen Ginsberg as a "Popular, Experienced, Experimental, Jazz Generation, New Jerusalem, Sensitive Bard", and his magnum opus, A New Waste Land, was selected as Book of the Year by D.J. Taylor in the Independent as "A deeply felt clarion call from the radical underground". He has been a Notting Hill resident for most of his adult life, his artworks and picture-poems continue to be exhibited locally and internationally, and he currently performs in a jazz poetry duo with Stan Tracey as well as with the ebullient William Blake Klezmatrix band.
All events cost £5, include wine and take place at the Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop, 21 Kensington Park Road, London W11 2EU

We are a small venue and our events sell out quickly so please purchase a ticket to guarantee a seat. Tickets can be bought in-store or by contacting bookshop@lutyensrubinstein.co.uk or calling 020 7229 1010.

Here comes trouble!

Here comes trouble! The radicals of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire is our next book by David Bell, author of the successful book on the Leicestershire miners' strike Dirty Thirty. Trouble will be written for a general audience (I almost used the word popular, but that might be pushing it) and include radicals of all types - political, of course, but also religious - think George Fox of the Quakers, trade union, literary, lesbian and gay... whatever we come up with. David and Five Leaves are keen to spread our net widely to include well known radicals (Byron) as well as people who should be better known, or whose work was or is (cliche alert) ground-breaking. Any ideas are welcome, either here or to info@fiveleaves.co.uk.

The UK Beat Scene

Our recent series of reprints, Beats, Bums and Bohemians, has started us thinking... why not do more than those three? We're also in discussion with one of our regular writers about a book on the British Beat Scene, a structured anthology, with a linking narrative. But we need to know more than we do. Any suggestions or ideas on this would be very welcome. Please contact Five Leaves on info@fiveleaves.co.uk or add a comment with suggestions - even just names to check out. Free polo-necked sweater to anyone coming up with ideas. (Note: this gift can also be declined.)

Jaba juntz

Well, the Times Literary Supplement likes our recent set of New London Editions' books. That will do our reputation a power of good, even if the headline was "Drugs, murder and books", thereby destroying our respectability at the same time. For seventeen years I worked at Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham which, when I started, sold scales and skins as well as high quality literature. The shop was also raided by the police under the Obscene Publications Act - for drugs books, not sex books* - and although we won costs against the police and most of the books back (the magistrate impounded the Child's Garden of Grass joke book lest any unwary child bought it instead of the Child's Garden of Verse) the shop was forever linked in the public mind with drugs. The name did not help. I've mentioned of course that Five Leaves is unwittingly also a drugs reference, which shows my innocence rather than guilt, but most people don't know that, and here we are again, on the drugs front. Still, I knew that when we published Terry Taylor's book so I can hardly complain. Here's the TLS review: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article858510.ece. The reviewer draws attention to the contemporary language in the books, all first published in 1961, asking though if anyone remembers the phrase "jaba juntz" which failed the google test. The team of linguists working in the Five Leaves undercroft has never heard the phrase either. So let's get it into circulation. What does it mean? With a very vague memory of the drug era I would say: whatever you want it to mean.

* The police haul did include one sex book, a manual on female masturbation. This was eventually returned to the shop by the police. But whereas it left in mint condition it was returned very dog-eared and unsaleable. How did that happen?

Catching up on our writers

Many, if not most, Five Leaves writers have written for other publishers, before or after we have published them. That's fine. Maxine Linnell and Dan Tunstall, for example, were first published by us but their third young adult fiction novels have gone to bigger publishers. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes books we have turned down have gone on to other publishers - that's fine too. Horses for courses and all that. By chance the first three books I read this year were all by Five Leaves' writers, but published elsewhere. The earliest of them was by Bernard Kops - his Awake for Mourning was published by the great MacGibbon and Kee in 1958. The book is of its era, with a good story of the entwined lives of two ex-prisoners, one of who is taken up by a far-right adventurer. The opening story of the prisoners' entwined lives works, but the ending doesn't. There are good cameos - of the party which included a visit by "The Group", of whom "Two are playwrights, one is a novelist, and one is a philosopher, playwright and novelist. All very up and coming. All genuine geniuses. I hate them." I wonder who they were based on. Just so you knew what you were getting into, the cover had a sort of teddy boy on it, with a miserable looking pregnant woman in the background.
Dominic Reeve is hardly a spring chicken either, though his Green Lanes and Kettle Cranes was only published in 2010 (Lamorna, £9.99). Reeve's classic of Romani life, Smoke in the Lanes, is out now with Abacus, a major publisher that has published or republished Romani books. Our revised edition of Reeve's Beneath the Blue Sky has been a bit delayed but will be out soon. The first edition was a steady seller for us, and while Smoke in the Lanes described the "waggon years" Blue Sky covered the 60s, when Anglo-Romanies were moving fully into mechanised transport. In Green Lanes Reeve wittily has a go at those who think that these people were not "real Gypsies", as they should still be travelling with horses and trailers, selling clothes pegs door to door, comparing that attitude to thinking that farm workers should still be wearing smocks and ploughing with oxen. The main thrust of his book though is to describe how, though there is strong evidence of the author being of partial Romani descent, he ran away to join the Gypsies. He fell in with Romanies local to him as a boy and gradually moved into their circle and way of life. His pleasure in finding he was the only gadje (non-Romani) at a big family gathering still appeals, though he is describing the late 1940s. Dominic has always been rather secretive about his life and his real name (still not mentioned here) so this is probably as close to the truth as we will get. The book could have done with a bit of editing, and is repetitive in places but it is a good insight into Romani life in the late 40s in southern England. Dominic still sells compost door to door, and still travels.
The youngest of the three writers mentioned here, being merely in his 70s, is John Lucas, the critic and poet. Several of his books are published by Five Leaves but his first novel, yes, a novel, is published by Greenwich Exchange. The book is called Waterdrops (£9.99) but due to a Greenwich glitch it is not on their website, nor is it on Amazon or listed yet with any booktrade bibliographic information. The book does exist though, the evidence is in front of me, and anyone trying to find it should know that Central Books has it in stock. I'm sure that it will officially exist soon. Waterdrops is a story of World War 2, and if you can get over the awful cover and don't mind a few typos (yes, yes, "pot" here) and stick with it you will find a rather good novel. It is a little hard to get into, but worth it. The novel is based round "letters home" from a soldier then serving in Malta, his life there, the life of his wife and children back in blighty (there is a lot of WW2 language in the book) and the impact of something major on their later lives. I'm not going to give it away, but the hook is a misunderstood passage in Troilus and Cressida. The whole subject is "the terrible things that happen in war, and not only on the battlefield."