Freedom Bookshop

When I saw this picture I started shaking. It's Freedom Bookshop in  London, reported as being firebombed at 5.30 this morning. There was nobody injured and tomorrow, Saturday, people are going to help start with the clean up. I have yet to make contact with Andy or any of the others at Freedom but this picture and others have been whizzing round the globe and offers of support, solidarity and money are being posted and, I hope, being sent in. Whatever the insurance position the shop will need the support of radicals of every hue. Freedom Bookshop has been the main anarchist bookshop in London for as long as I can remember. I've read the magazine Freedom off and on since the early 1970s. For a period I used to sell it, and Peace News, on demonstrations and have written for it from time to time. I subscribed to its sister journal Raven and have most copies of its earlier sister journal, Anarchy, which was edited by my late friend and colleague Colin Ward, many of whose books we have published over the years. Five Leaves has also published a book of essays by Nicolas Walter, who, like Colin, was an editor of Freedom and I've bought many Freedom-published books over the years.
Naturally, over the years, politics change and the people around the Freedom empire change. I know the worker Andy Meikle a bit and accept that the shop has priorities other than "Colin Wardism" but any political differences we or anyone else on the left might have with Freedom have to be put to one side. Five Leaves will be offering what support we can, money and stock. It is almost not worth saying that an attack on Freedom Bookshop is an attack on us all.
And the other reason is that I was at Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham when it was physically attacked by fascists and have many friends who have withstood similar attacks in other bookshops, including attempted arson attacks. The only arson attack at Mushroom was when someone put burning rags into the letterbox on the overnight gate (the letterbox was not on the shop for security reasons), it burned but fell outwards into the street and little damage was done. Others were less lucky.
At the moment there is no word of any signature attached to the incident but whatever the reason or background we will be expressing our solidarity with Freedom in every way we can.

Inpress publishing day

So you want to be a rock and roll star? No, Rachael Ogden, who is moving on from Inpress, is not changing careers to be a lead singer in a rock'n'roll band but here she is introducing The Bookshop Band, the last event of a packed Inpress Festival of Publishing (and AGM of the group that represents 40+ small publishers) at the Free Word centre in London. The day was a new step for Inpress, drawing in many other small publishers, writers and students for a day of presentations and panels on aspects of small press publishing. It is hard to pick out a highlight but Martin Rowson set the scene with his journey from small presses to the major league and back again (to our chums at Smokestack). Along the way big publishers abandoned books when they were selling well, refused to supply books known to be in their warehouse when people were crying out for them or, in one case, having given him a rather large advance suggested that the book in question was seen as one suitable for word of mouth publicity... Martin of course knows how to fulminate. He also took part in a discussion on book jackets, with the designer Sally Castle and Chris Keith-Wright from Waterstones. Waterstones?  What were they doing there? Well, Chris does not hate us and had some very useful discussions with various publishers. He introduced a Five Leaves bay for three months when he was in Nottingham, and now in Picadilly - the company's flagship store - he has introduced a section for indie presses.
Helen Jeffrey from the London Review of Books, though interesting, perhaps did not quite understand how small publishers are forever looking down the back of the sofa for old tanners as she talked about a £35,000  online project based on a Will Self essay. She advised that we should use our technical teams more creatively and outsource our day to day technical requirements. Something to bear in mind... Though actually our own technical team, Pippa Hennessy, gave the next talk, an introduction to how ebooks work for the trade. Five Leaves is, unusually perhaps, ahead of the game for our sector with half the ebooks produced by Inpress publishers being ours. The girl done well and Pippa is now freelancing for Inpress publishers needing support with ebook conversion.
There is not room here to describe all the contributions, but if we could we'd be off to Bath simply to become customers of Mr. B's Emporium of Reading Delights - a completely inspiring bookshop that spawned The Bookshop Band, pictured above, which create songs based on the work of the visiting authors to Mr B's. Nic Bottomley, the Mr B in question, was inspiring.
I know it's not all about me but I was on the interview panel that appointed Rachel to Inpress and was chair of the group as she got her feet under the table. Since then she has coped with various crises in the trade, brought in some publishers to Inpress and seen others leave. The organisation is now more solid, better funded, more secure than before and she leaves at the end of the month with Inpress in a much better condition than could be expected, given recent developments in the trade.
This day Festival of Publishing was a good send off. Well done Rachael.

Brick Lane stories

Readers of this blog and friends of the press might remember that we'd posted a "Desperately seeking Robert Poole" note, hoping that someone would help us find any living relatives of the late Robert Poole. We'd wanted to publish his London E1 - the old edition is pictured, with the new edition below, with two family pictures attached (and in the background my rather fetching purple cardie). Two of his family - Lisa Watson and Debbie Towns - got in touch with us. They'd googled their great uncle Robert and were astonished to discover our search. It was all to the good and we moved forward with publication. The book launch was held last week - Lisa spoke on behalf of the family, the broadcaster Alan Dein read from the book and discussed the content with Rachel Lichtenstein. Her introduction to the book is here - http://www.londonfictions.com/robert-poole-london-e1.html - together with some maps and photos of Brick Lane, the setting for Robert's - Bob's - only published novel.

Fittingly the launch was at the Brick Lane Bookshop, hosted by Kalina and Denise, who told me the shop was doing very well at the moment. It is, by the way, one of the few shops that started out as a community bookshop (THAP), became a radical bookshop (Eastside) and is now a local, community and commercial bookshop - which stocks a lot of our books.

But the real surprise was John Charlton, who came along - as did other members of Robert Poole's family. John was his nephew and knew him well, but also lived locally to Brick Lane and was able to confirm or reveal some of the real sites of events mentioned in the book, and reveal some of the real people who crop up in the novel. Among the strong points in the book - read out by Alan Dein - was a description of how local children used to jump onto the speeding brewery dray carts for illicit and dangerous rides. John was one of those children! He described some of the East End pub singalongs when Robert would bring down his showbiz friends, top pianists (Robert himself was an excellent self-taught pianist), to play for the hell of it. Sadly he was unable to identify "Pinkie" the mixed race girl the main character, based on Robert himself, was in love with and did not know whether Pinkie was real or fictional. But John did describe how he would regularly go to an Asian household, with his pot, to pick up a curry made in the back kitchen - that family would later open the first Asian restaurant on Brick Lane.

John was also a "shabbes goy" when he was a child - a gentile who would perform "work" tasks for Orthodox Jews living in the area, such as lighting candles or getting fires going, as Orthodox people cannot work on shabbes (this was long before time switches or central heating). Another Five Leaves writer, Roger Mills, who still lives in the East End, emailed later to say that his mother and aunt were also shabbes goys in the area between the wars. 

The launch was one of those where fact and fiction, East End history and family legends began to blur as the family remembered more of their past and others remembered more of their East End.

A class act

On Saturday in Nottingham there was a Five Leaves' event in support of the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning photographic exhibition in Nottingham. Over 100 people attended the half day discussion on "Alan Sillitoe, then and now" which focussed on issues of class. Six locally born working class writers - Peter Mortimer, Derrick Buttress, Elain Harwood, Nicola Monaghan, Alan Fletcher and Matthew Welton - discussed issues raised by the exhibition, working class culture in Nottingham, Alan Sillitoe's legacy and the influence of Alan's work, and Nottingham, on their own writing. Peter Mortimer set the scene in describing his own upbringing, among other things describing how his father tried to modify his accent as he moved from factory floor to golf club membership, trying to become middle-class. Derrick Buttress, now in his eighties, talked primarily about the first twenty-five years of his adult life during which he worked in a total of twenty factories, turning up at WEA evening classes in his boiler suit to find he was the only Worker there. Until then class gradations were within his class - those who had cars, those who worked in the pits - not between the working class and  middle class people ("We didn't know any - apart from teachers, doctors and factory owners - who we had nothing to with"). At school he'd been told that he'd never make anything of himself as was the case with Nicola, brought up on the same Broxtowe Estate. Except in her case this was in the 70s and 80s. She took great pleasure in sending the teacher who told her this a signed copy of her first novel. More astonishing was the story of Elain Harwood. Though she was there to show architectural slides about places of working class culture - football grounds, pubs, cinemas - she said that at her workplace (English Heritage) someone had suggested she take elocution lessons.
Returning to Sillitoe, Alan Fletcher drew out the similarities between Arthur Seaton and Mod culture, the subject of his three novels, when there was full employment and young people had money in their pocket, to be spent on dressing up well and on having a good time at the weekends. Alan and Peter Mortimer both have two pictures in the exhibition - Alan of Mods, of course, and Peter of a lads' day out in the Nottingham-on-sea resort of Skegness.
Matthew Welton concentrated on Alan Sillitoe's poetry and in the subsequent discussion began to raise issues of how the publishing industry is changing, allowing more and more people to write, in different ways, without the filter of publishers. He remarked that writers might get much smaller advances, but more people can now be writers.
A speaker from the audience - in discussing the future of working class writing - said that it was not working class writing that has vanished, but writing from the point of view of the industrial working class. Nicola agreed, saying that we still live in a world where some people control the means of production and others work for them and there is no reason why there can't be a great call centre novel. Peter Mortimer - ultimately agreeing with Alan Sillitoe's view that there is no working class writing, there is simply writing - argued that the writing that is important, and any subject can provide material.
The Saturday Night and Sunday Morning exhibition continues until February 10th. So far over 80,000 people have attended, a fantastic achievement for the Lakeside gallery.
I was pleased to organise this event, and to chair it. For me class - and the discussions around it - sit at the heart of my politics, my response to my reading and much of my thinking yet I rarely hear issues of class debated at book festivals and the like, but when the issue does arise it is rare to see a line up entirely made up of working class writers. Not that people all agreed with each other, but it was good to feel on home territory. 

Chris Searle on Mixed Messages: American Jazz Stories

Every note a jazz artist plays is an endless story and Peter Vacher's collection of interviews with US jazz musicians is ample testimony of this. He's been posing questions to star names of the music along with its journeymen and women since the 1950s. With tape recorder and camera at the ready he'd seek them out - often in seedy London hotels on Sunday mornings - and his dedicated labours have resulted in this precious work of social and cultural history.

The 21 musicians who tell their story in these pages range from veteran New Orleans trombonist Louis Nelson, with his memories of Mississippi steamboat bands, to bassist Norman "Dewey" Keenan who played with Count Basie. He remembers boyhood beatings by his churchgoing mother for playing the "sacrilegious" Saint Louis Blues on a Sunday. Bandleader Gerald Wilson describes Louis Armstrong's case full of laundered handkerchiefs to mop up the saliva that poured from the side of his moth as he blew his horn using the "skeet" technique.
There are stories too of a people's constant struggle for racial justice. Tenor saxophonist Houston Person recalls that "we woke up every day and survived and still managed to get our education and fight for equality."
But the longest and most powerful story in this collection is the life of tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield, renowned for his huge tone, who died in 2005. A sideman of Charles Mingus and, after the great bassist's death, a stellar soloist in the Mingus Big Band, he was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1945. He remembers his father warning him when he approached a water fountain that he shouldn't drink from it because it's "for whites only."
His experiences with Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams and Gil Evans among many others make for riveting reading and show again how much the history of jazz reflects the mainstream story of the US. Vacher's fine book portrays all this with humour, drama and a cogent sense of realism throughout.
This review by Chris Searle first appeared in the Morning Star on 24/1/13

On the need for a poetry bookshop

Every Saturday afternoon from the early 1960s onwards, the diminutive, genial [Bernard] Stone would dispense free glasses of wine to a boozy, bohemian crowd. This included not only Horowitz, but also Alan Brownjohn, Christopher Logue, Lawrence Durrell, Alan Sillitoe and Sir John Waller, the last invariably squiring a tough-looking, semi-literate, gay pick-up whom he would introduce as "a wonderful new poet". Another colourful regular at these Saturday afternoon parties was the hellraising, drug-addicted novelist, Alexander Trocchi.

Stone went on to create Cafe Books, which specialised in pamphlets by young poets such as Roger McGough and Brian Patten. The Turret Bookshop also provided the base for both Turret Books and the Steam Press, which was run in partnership with Stone's friend, the cartoonist Ralph Steadman, whose illustrations adorned two of Stone's children's books. Under the Steam Press and Turret Books imprints, a range of publications by the likes of Alan Brownjohn and Ted Hughes were released in limited editions.

Obituary of Bernard Stone in the Guardian

As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Camden became a magnet for the world's teenagers and Compendium underwent a facelift. Mike [Hart] formalised its literary scene by initiating regular readings in the bookshop, something of an innovation at the time. Visiting Americans, from old beat heroes like Lawrence Ferlinghetti to new literary lions like Walter Mosley, read there; so too did the London writers Iain Sinclair, Martin Millar and Derek Raymond.

Obituary of Mike Hart in the Guardian

And I’d love to see a modern version of the late Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop, a poetry bookshop that ran from the 50s to the 70s in London. But that is a job for someone else. And what a great use of Arts Council funding that would be.

Ross Bradshaw in Staple

After writing the above coda to an article about bookselling in Staple (where, by the way, I under-represented the longevity of Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop) several people mentioned the absence of a dedicated poetry bookshop in London.

The Turret will never be built again, the rise of the internet cut away Compendium’s base of imported books but their absence – together with the much missed Poetry Society’s book room – has meant there is no dedicated place selling poetry over the counter in Britain, by which I mean London, the only place a poetry bookshop would be economic.

Not long after these specialist outlets ran out of steam or moved on, the main chain in the UK, Waterstones, took a much harder approach to what they stocked and what they returned. Now, in many major towns and cities, the only poetry books actually on sale are the popular anthologies, books by long dead poets and books by a handful of popular writers. It is near impossible to browse through the next level of poets beyond Cope, Duffy, Heaney… and to find who is on the up, who’s new. All poetry publishers have been affected by this. Of the major bookshops perhaps only Foyles has a good poetry section and one where a book sold to the shop remains sold.

The most significant outlets are Festivals, Ledbury, Stanza, Aldeburgh; the regular rounds of readings; the Poetry Book Society. None of these allow an easy way in to the casual buyer, the person who wants a present, the school librarian that wants to build up a section from books they have touched or seen. There is nowhere for the newly interested to browse, nowhere for the obscure to nestle next to the popular, nowhere that brings the wide range of magazines together (for sale), nowhere to provide the most natural background to launches and readings where one book leads to another, nowhere that displays a range of critical work next to material in translation, next to poetry cards, next to Candlestick’s poetry pamphlets, next to old and important anthologies, next to CDs of poetry being read, next to limited editions while behind the counter there is someone who knows what the customer is talking about. Digital has its limitations (though any poetry bookshop could also sell on line).

I emphasise for sale, as the Poetry Library and the Scottish Poetry Library does this for researchers and browsers, but poetry needs to sell. And by sale I mean over the counter to the passing stranger – not by subscription. The PBS does, but has a naturally limited constituency and the Scottish Poetry Library does, better, but with only a limited range of books.

The Arts Council provides funding for authors, for residencies, for training courses, for Festivals, for publishers, for Inpress to distribute publishers, for the Poetry Library, but not a bookshop…

Why not?

One, two, many Phil Cohens

Phil Cohen is the editor of a book that came out in the 90s called Children of the Revolution which comprises essays  by long-since-grown-up people who were children of Communist Party parents during the Cold War. Among those writing in the book were Jackie Kaye, Michael Rosen and Alexi Sayle (all of whom have mined that period for material elsewhere, and all of whom are still on the left). I've read the book more than once over the years and, though I've never met the author, I have met his sister Norma Cohen a few times - and heard her speak about her period in Unity Theatre. Two or three years ago I was in email discussion with Phil about a book marking a particular world anniversary. We discussed the format at some length but unfortunately work commitments at his end made the book impossible in time for the anniversary. We parted amicably, perhaps with a tacit agreement that at some stage it would be nice to work together on another project. I was vaguely aware of Phil's interest in East London, and had read some copies of the former print journal Rising East which he wrote for. In due course Phil approached me with a very different book, a memoir of reading, provisionally titled "Reading Room Only". The timescale wasn't ideal as he was working on a book about the impact of the Olympics on the East End (due out next month) from Lawrence & Wishart, which happened to be the publisher of Children of the Revolution, but we coped with that and his Reading Room Only comes out later this year. It is a memoir of all sorts of things, including his time as "Dr John" the squatters' leader, being the son of a Marxist, becoming an academic and his lonely bookish childhood. Lonely? Only in the third rewrite of the book - in a meditation on the implications of his very Jewish name - did Phil mention that he had a namesake working in a similar field... Ah. Bloody hell. I thought I was publishing the other Phil Cohen. There were so many things they had in common, and so many things not in common - not least one being a sole child and the other having a sister who I'd met - but somehow their areas in common had excluded their differences in my mind. I'll have to reread their email archive, but I can only assume I never said, for example "Give my love to Norma", which the second Phil Cohen might have thought a bit odd (though I do remember once sending out a mail-merged email to all the members of the Labour Party in Nottingham East which included a sentence congratulating the recipient on their new baby - and not one person later mentioned it).
What would have been stranger still if the first Phil Cohen had been able to write the book we discussed but had to abandon. I could easily have had the two Phil Cohens on my list thinking they were one... though I imagine at some stage it would have been obvious they were different (not least in crediting their past writing on the book covers). I do like the idea that we'd only have found out at the book launches when I met them both for the first time.