Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing

Five Leaves is pleased to announce the winner of the first Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing - Debt: the first 5000 years  by David Graeber (Melville House). Appropriately, the award was given on Mayday at the trade union owned Bread and Roses pub in Battersea. The author was working abroad at the time, so Bill Godber, from Melville House's UK distributor, accepted the award on David's behalf. It must have felt like a journey into the past for Bill Godber, something of a veteran in radical publishing. The runner up was Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Island: tax havens and the men who stole the world (Bodley Head).
The award was presented by the author Nina Power, one of the judges, who described Graeber's book as "brilliantly researched, motivated by a clear political will and utterly indispensable, not only for understanding the terms of the world we live in, where we came from, but also for what we can do about changing them."
David Graeber wins a trophy and a cheque for £1000.

The Bread and Roses Award was funded and initiated by Five Leaves with the Alliance of Radical Bookseller and the support of Red Pepper, Peace News and the Morning Star.
The trustees of the award are Nik Gorecki (Housmans Bookshop), Mandy Vere (News from Nowhere Bookshop) and Ross Bradshaw (Five Leaves).
Five Leaves provided the prize money to establish the award and will continue to support Bread and Roses for two further years. We would welcome others as sponsors for this year's award, for books published in 2012.
I would like to thank Nik at Housmans for carrying through most of the work on the award when I had to drop out in the last few weeks.
Debt will be published in paperback on 12 June at £14.99 and carries the ISBN 9781612191812.
http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/

Pamela Hansford Johnson exhibition

Five Leaves latest ebook - After the Gold Rush: a bycicle journey through American history

John Stuart Clark's After the Gold Rush has been unavailable for a while, so, hip to the times, we have re-issued it as an ebook, but only as an ebook, with new maps added since the print edition. John - otherwise known as the illustrator Brick - decided to cycle across America, following the path of the gold rush. He met some unusual and interesting people, visited half deserted townships, cycled through areas nobody ever goes by bike and, in short, had the sort of crazed adventures you'd expect to find in an endurance based travel book. His book gave an insight into America that was so insightful he lost his original American publishers! He also took the photo on the cover, and, indeed, designed it.
http://tinyurl.com/cde9o2s

This week in books

It has been a busy seven days at Five Leaves Towers. On the Saturday we did a bit of basking in the glory of a big Guardian review of our 1948. I've already mentioned it on this site so instead I'll suggest you read this blog, by Charles Boyle, about Nicholas Lezard: http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/patron-saint-of-small-presses.html.
The same day we had a book launch in Nottingham for Joanne Limburg's collection, The Oxygen Man. This was the first in an occasional series of joint events with Nottingham Poetry Society. I was up in Scotland at the time but our Pippa Hennessy(who is, handily, secretary of NPS) struggled through without me. The event was well attended and Joanne read well from a rather difficult book - difficult because it is about the suicide of her brother, a scientist and the "man" of the title.
Another good launch this week, which I was able to attend, was that of our writer and occasional editor David Belbin who, promiscuously, is published by other publishers too. In this case the launch was for his second "Bone and Cane" book with our friends at Tindal Street. What You Don't Know is, I think, the better of the two books - indeed, I think it is excellent, and the author is clearly getting into his stride in this series. Meantime, time to do some work on his Student, coming out from Five Leaves later this year. More on that to follow.
On Tuesday the first Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing took place. I'll post about this fully, soon. Suffice to say that my fellow trustees also managed to struggle through without me on the night. Maybe I don't need to actually go to anything ever again.
Just as well though that I did turn up at Lowdham Book Festival's First Friday event with the Nottingham writer AR Dance (the man who proves that some self published books are worth reading, as I introduced the session and did the tea for 60 people. These First Friday events have rather taken off. For family reasons I can't do much of the organising of Lowdham events this year, but my Lowdham colleague Jane Streeter looks quite calm about having the programme out in a couple of weeks for our summer events. One date I have set up though is the "Lowdham Lecture" on September 20th, with Alan Gibbons talking about "Libraries, Education and Literacy". More on that nearer the time.
Meanwhile, the proof for Michael Malone's novel Blood Tears has landed on my desk. We should have finished copies next week and, so far, it looks like it will get a lot of coverage in Waterstones branches in Scotland. We had some fun proof-reading the book as our internal and external proof-reader kept trying to change Scottish rhythms into standard English. No, kiddos, they really do speak like that in the West of Scotland.
We are carrying on turning backlist into e-books and this week - announcement imminent - we have turned our out of print travel title After the Gold Rush by John Stuart Clark into an e-book, which will please the mad cyclists of America who keep asking for it.
Finally, a couple  of pieces to read. Fresh from his geographically challenging pair of readings in Inverness and Berwick, J. David Simons has been interviewed by Scottish TV about his writing. Read that here:
http://local.stv.tv/glasgow/magazine/98186-theres-no-place-like-home-for-author-j-david-simons/
And, finally, in this weekly round up, here's a set of reviews in the Newcastle Journal that brings together reviews of poetry publications by three Nottingham presses, Candlestick, Shoestring and Five Leaves, together with books published by our  friends in the north, Iron Press and Smokestack whose editors are regularly published by Five Leaves. Long live this Midlands/North East twinning! Read them here: http://tinyurl.com/cgve3ag

North East literary history

Not for the first time do I find myself consumed by North East envy. Living in the East Midlands it is always hard to grasp our regional identity. Our patch covers Louth, in Lincolnshire  (try getting there by public transport) and King's Sutton, which is I think to the south of Oxfordshire but technically in Northamptonshire. I'll give a fiver to anyone who has every travelled between those two outposts.
The North East is easier to understand. In Fix This Moment: writers respond to North East literary history, joint editor Stevie Rennie remarks that the four areas making up the North East have in common their "industrial heritage, geographical isolation and the lilt to our voices". What the area also has is a strong independent publishing sector, reflected in this book from New Writing North (£6.99, 978 0 9558829 7 5) which is well worth reading by anyone interested in either the literature of the region or the small press scene. I would have liked to have seen a much bigger book, with more earlier  history and something about people's reading rather than the concentration on writing, but the book is still of great value. Michael Chaplin provides an personal record of his family's writing (he is the son of Sid Chaplin), Andy Croft (a Five Leaves regular) gives the history of writing in Middlesbrough, David Almond tells of the Panurge years, Ellen Phethean describes the women's writing scene, Neil Astley provides some material on Bloodaxe's history, Jackie Litherland goes through the exciting 35 years of the Colpitts poetry readings, another Five Leaves' regular Peter Mortimer describes his 40 years or so running Iron Press, Nolan Dalrymple provides an academic essay on David Almond and the book concludes with an essay on the Morden Tower venue by Stevie Rennie.
The other joint editor is Claire Malcolm, head of New Writing North, which is itself worthy of attention though I would not envy her going to work every day to their office in Holy Jesus Hospital in Newcastle.
The book could easily have had other chapters on, say, Jon Silkin and Stand and... so much more, but then I'd be really really jealous.

It was a bright cold day in April.

First there was Nicholas Lezard's great review in the Guardian - in print on Saturday, on line now at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/24/1948-andy-croft-review, and then there was the book launch last night at Bookmarks in London. 52 people crammed into the shop to hear Martin Rowson talk about political cartooning and to read from his Smokestack book The Limerickiad (volume one) and Andy Croft read from 1948. Martin had sent out an email to his friends reading "This is going to be in the form of a performance with me and Andy talking about the book, the Olympics and anything else that comes into our heads, rather than a piss-up. IT WILL INVOLVE THE READING OF POETRY OUT LOUD. This may well affect your decision. You have been warned!!!". Despite the absence of the piss-up, a whinge of cartoonists (Martin's collective noun) turned up as well as poetry fans, Orwellians, editors from Tribune, 3am and Red Pepper and a group of authors and editors from the Five Leaves stable, mostly those with forthcoming books, including Peter Vacher (his jazz book is due in the autumn), Andrew Whitehead and Cathi Unsworth (both involved in our book on London fiction) and Lesley Acton (currently writing a social history of allotments). It was also good to catch up with Peter Lawson who edited our Passionate Renewal anthology of Jewish poetry. The laughter at one of Rowson's rhymes ending in "shiksa" indicated that Peter had a lot in common with many of those in the room.

It was a good night for 1948 and there was a lot of networking too. Bookmarks flies the flag for socialist and trade union books in central London, and is well organised and friendly. I always enjoy our book launches there and the shop finds that new visitors often come back.

New from Five Leaves, Dark Thread by Pauline Chandler

Kate is a weaver, like her mother. When her mother is killed Kate is convinced it's her fault. Tiredness, grieving and guilt come together in a visit back in time to the mill, where Kate must learn to weave the dark thread in her life into the overall picture and make sense of her life. A moving time slip story, alternating life in the 18th century and today. The setting is Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, which is still standing, part of the Derwent Mills World Heritage Site.

Pauline Chandler has published several books set in different historical periods. These include Warrior Girl, set in the France of Joan of Arc, Viking Girl and The Mark of Edain, in which Aoife (Ee-fa) a Druid princess, kidnaps a Roman war elephant. She lives in Derbyshire, the setting for Dark Thread. Pauline was one of several East Midlands young adult fiction writers who appeared in our anthology In the Frame who have ended up with a book or two on our list.

Copies are available from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/dark-thread/ for £5.99/