Late news about Trent Bookshop has just come in

Geraldine Monk has edited a book of "recollections of poetry in transition" called Cusp (Shearsman), something she describes as a collective autobiography  of those involved in writing and publishing poetry between WWII and the advent of the world wide web. Clearly Geraldine sees the web as - hit me for using the phrase - a game changer - but the strength of the book is in the articles by people who are mostly in their seventies discussing their golden age. And, from here, it looked golden, with a tremendous flourishing of small presses  and reading series. The same names crop up again and again in the articles - Morden Tower, Tom Pickard, Jon Silkin, Basil Bunting, David Tipton, the Liverpool Poets, the Oriel Bookshop in Wales, Poetmeat, Poetry Information... This from a time not only before the internet but at a time when not everyone had a telephone. How did people organise then?
The best writer of the little press world is included - Jim Burns with the wonderfully titled chapter "The Left Bank of the Ribble" and this is followed by Hannah Neate on the Trent Book Shop in Nottingham. What? I had to sit down...
When I came to Nottingham in 1979 there was one very strong radical bookshop, opened in 1972, the remnants of a Communist Party shop and a soon to close Pathfinder (Trotskyist) Bookshop, but several people had mentioned Bux, an avant garde shop that had got into financial difficulties and closed in 1972. Actually, few people mentioned it. And here it was in its earlier, more successful life as the Trent Book Shop, by the Nottingham Forest ground, specialising in small press books from all over the UK, America and elsewhere. In all it ran from 1964-1972. Hannah Neate has written a superb description of the bookshop's life, its holdings, its own publishing and its reading. And I never knew a thing about it, despite working in bookselling and publishing in the city since I arrived.
I immediately rang my friend John Lucas from Shoestring, who both knows Hannah and was a regular customer of the shop - saying that the Trent bookshop was often packed on match days with Forest supporters calling in to pick up the latest poetry. Somehow he - and all the other veterans who must have used the shop - had never mentioned it.
And what of Poetry 66 - the shop's poetry festival? Here's the line up: Adrian Mitchell, Robert Garioch, Alan Brownjohn, Hugh MacDiarmid, Edward Lucie-Smith, Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Tom Pickard, George Macbeth, Edwin Morgan, Jon Silkin, Roy Fisher, Anselm Hollo, Ed Dorn, Michael Shayer, Ron Johnson, Gael Turnbull, Jonathan Williams, Jeff Nuttall, John Furnival, Cavan McCarthy, John James, Nick Wayte, Peter Armstrong, Andrew Crozier, Tom Clark, Pete Brown, Tom McGrath, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, Michael Horovitz, Spike Hawkins, Nathanial Tarn, Vernon Scannell, GS Fraser and Jim Burns.
Crikey, one small bomb would have wiped out almost the entire small press scene of the time. Apart from women. There were of course fewer women involved in the small press scene then than now, but a festival with this sort of line up and NO women? I asked John Lucas who said this was noticed and he organised a sort of protest reading with a fine woman poet from Nottingham of that period, Madge Hales. But even so, this was some line up and indicative of the national and international contacts Trent had.
This was the period of Ultima Thule in Newcastle, Better Books and Indica in London, the Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh (where I was a regular customer), Unicorn in Brighton - all of which I knew of, and all of which I'd read about. Yet somehow the news of this shop, down the road from me, was news.
And the rest of the book is fascinating too.

A hundred years of radical bookselling in 800 words

“A huge comrade called Boris...” 

Radical bookselling has a long history. In Nottingham there was a freethought bookshop in 1826. It had to fight for its survival against a daily picket, during which the shop was broken open and attempts were made to drag out the proprietor, Mrs Susannah Wright. So successful was the shop, in seeing off the local Committee for the Suppression of Vice, that the rather brave Mrs Wright was able to move to larger premises.

The early days of radical booksellers did not have it easy but although there were physical bookshops, such as The Advanced Bookstore in Liverpool which, in 1906, advertised “socialistic, labour, trade union and freethought” books, most sales were hand to hand. Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists describes the Clarion socialists coming to Mugsborough (Hastings) by cycle and by van “and selling penny pamphlets, of which they managed to dispose of about three dozen” having initially been run out of town. Fortunately other places were more receptive and socialist paperbacks (in circulation long before Allen Lane invented Penguin in 1935) sold by the tens of thousands.

The first bookshop chains in the UK were started by the Communist Party, with their Modern Books, People's Bookshops, Thames Bookshops and others. These shops spread way beyond the CP's industrial heartlands to market towns such as King's Lynn and Gloucester. The CP did know how to sell - in 1946 Key Books in Birmingham wrote that in the previous five years they had distributed over two million pamphlets and periodicals, with a sale of £50,000, then a huge sum of money. Looking back, it is easy to mock the books that CP shops actually sold, as Nancy Mitford did in The Pursuit of Love, where “...Linda worked in a Red bookshop... run by a huge, perfectly silent comrade called Boris” as she gradually changed the stock, replacing Whither British Airways with Round the World in 40 Days. 

Come the 1960s and 70s the Communist Party shops were in decline, replaced by a new generation of radical outfits. The politics were avant garde, libertarian, utopian and while the life of some, like Beautiful Stranger in Rochdale, was short, News from Nowhere in Liverpool will be celebrating its 39^th birthday on May 1^st.

Many of these shops were run collectively, influenced by feminism and black liberation, and by personal growth movements. Notice boards – find one of them in Waterstones! - were as likely to advertise a circle dance group as a demonstration against the National Front. Some shops saw Henry Miller as radical, drawing inspiration from the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco but by and large feminism kept the boys in check.

In 1982, The Other Branch in Leamington brought out a pamphlet describing its first ten years during which the shop moved from being a hippie haunt, complete with the late 60s paraphernalia of king-size Rizla papers, to being a serious bookshop. The best sellers during those years were The Herb Book; The Golden Notebook (fiction by Doris Lessing); The Bean Book (vegetarian cooking); The Massage Book; Protest and Survive (anti-nuclear); The Very Hungry Caterpillar (children's book); Woman on the Edge of Time (feminist fiction by Marge Piercy); The Prophet by Kahil Gibran); Guide to Growing Marijuana; and Guide to British Psylocybin Mushrooms. It is easy to mock these idealist days too but this – fairly representative – example of one bookshop's sales prefigured the interest in healthy living and green concerns. These shops were influential within the biggest protest movement since the 1930s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and survived under constant pressure from the far right and occasional raids from the police over political or gay books. Some shops were firebombed, staff members were attacked and, just as Mrs Wright found in 1826, lots of people did not like radical bookshops but many people did.

In 1991 I wrote an article for Tribune expressing concern that the number of radical bookshops had fallen to 114, never thinking that the number would shrink drastically. There were often obvious reasons for closures – SisterWrite and Silver Moon did not survive the waning of the feminist movement; in Norwich Freewheel was left isolated by traffic changes; in Manchester Grassroots developed a reputation of being “holier than thou”. High rents saw off others. But what changed was that there were few openings, fewer people prepared to work long hours for fairly low pay. The wheel is now turning. There are a few new shops, the London anarchist bookfair is attracting record numbers and on May 11^th there will be a radical bookfair in London, associated with the new Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.

About Five Leaves

We had to write this for another purpose, but in case you wondered, here's 400 words describing what we do.

Five Leaves Publications (www.fiveleaves.co.uk) is a small publishing house in Nottingham, active since 1996, with roots in the radical and literary worlds.

Five Leaves publishes social history (writers include Colin Ward, William J Fishman, Gillian Darley), crime fiction (Stephen Booth, Russel McLean, Danuta Reah), young adult fiction (Bali Rai, David Belbin, Alan Gibbons), fiction (Rod Madocks, Jonathan Wilson, J. David Simons) and a wide range of books of secular Jewish interest including books on Jewish involvement in rock and jazz music. Our poetry list includes a number of anthologies, including the new Versions of the North: contemporary Yorkshire poetry, and individual collections by, for example, Andy Croft and Joanne Limburg.

Five Leaves lead title this spring is London Fictions, a set of essays on important London novels from the days of George Gissing to modern times with Zadie Smith. Essayists include Ken Worpole, Sarah Wise, Cathi Unsworth and Jerry White. This collection complements our New London Editions imprint, which reprints forgotten “London” novels including books by Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton.

Five Leaves is an activist press, jointly running the long-standing Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire and States of Independence in Leicester, promoting independent publishing. In 2011 we worked with the Cable Street Group celebrating the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, publishing five books for the occasion. In 2012 we organised an international event in London commemorating the 60^th anniversary of Stalin's murder of most of the leadership of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, publishing a collection of translations of the Soviet Yiddish writers who were executed. This year we organised a dayschool on Nottinghamshire working class writing tying in with a photographic exhibition based on Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This followed a day event in 2010 a few months after Alan Sillitoe died. Together with Derbyshire Libraries we also organised a day event with young adult writers.

With such diverse interests and a diverse range of writers, we now bring out an annual journal written by our regular and irregular writers as well as others who publish elsewhere but are close to the press. These book length collections include Maps and Utopia, with Crime following this summer and Rock in 2014.

Join our email list via info@fiveleaves.co.uk or follow us on Facebook or read http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.co.uk

Beeston Poets spring season

Beeston Poets announces Spring Season. Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Beeston Poets Press Release, March 2013 For immediate release

Following the success of our inaugural season in 2012, Beeston Poets is back with another season of some of the most interesting poetry that is happening now. All events take place at Beeston Library, Foster Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 1AW. Versions of the North, Friday April 26th 2013, 7.30pm Featuring Ian Parks, Elizabeth Barrett, Steve Ely and Becky Cherriman Tickets £7.50, £5.50 concessions Yorkshire has a vibrant and diverse range of poets and poetry, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Andrew Marvell, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Versions of the North, edited by Ian Parks and published by Five Leaves in April 2013, is the first anthology of modern Yorkshire poetry since Vernon Scannell's 1984 Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry. Parks has created a collection that showcases sixty-two of the best of today’s Yorkshire poets. Pippa Hennessy of Five Leaves says, ‘Ian has put together a stunning collection of contemporary poems that all have a quintessential seam of pure Yorkshire running through their hearts." Ophelia's Sistas, Friday May 24th 2013, 7.30pm Featuring Char March and Valerie Laws Tickets £7.50, £5.50 concessions Last July acclaimed poets Char March and Valerie Laws wowed the audience at Southwell Library Poetry Festival. It is impossible to describe how good it was to those who missed it, so now here’s another chance to hear these two very different voices. Char March’s ‘The Thousand Natural Shocks’ and Valerie Laws’ ‘All that Lives’ come together and take their audiences on an exploration of pathology, wild sex, dementia, lost pigeons, flirting at funerals, dogs in space, insanity – and more! Their poetry is deeply moving and side-splittingly funny. Sheelagh Gallagher, Nottinghamshire’s Literature and Reading Development Officer, says, ‘It was more like a firework display than a collaboration!’ Whistle, by Martin Figura, Friday July 5th 2013 A multimedia performance produced by Martin Figura and Apples & Snakes Tickets £7.50, £5.50 concessions At the centre of Martin Figura’s Whistle is his mother’s death at the hands of his father when he was nine years old. The work goes beyond this shocking central event to present us with a tender, beautiful, funny and moving coming-of-age story. Figura uses gentle humour and insight to give the reader and audience a profound and uplifting experience. The book was published by Arrowhead Press in 2010. The poem ‘Victor’ was awarded the Poetry Society’s 2010 Hamish Canham Prize, and the book together with the show was short-listed for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Cathy Grindrod, on behalf of Nottingham Poetry Society, says, ‘I will never forget seeing Whistle for the first time. Moving, powerful, memorable and highly recommended.’ “Profoundly honest and at the same time joyfully entertaining” – Independent on Sunday About Beeston Poets Beeston Poets is a joint venture between Nottinghamshire Library Services, Nottingham Poetry Society and Five Leaves Publications. The aim of the project is to bring top-quality poetry to a local audience of both readers and writers of poetry. Further Information For further information please contact Pippa Hennessy, beestonpoets@gmail.com, 07970 274321. Our website is http://beestonpoets.wordpress.com/

Why was this journey to London different from all others?

Anyone who has been to a Pesach/Passover will recognise this mangling of one of the "four questions" asked at the seder/Passover meal. This year I spent the second night of Passover at the London Jewish Socialists' Group seder organised largely by one of our writers, David Rosenberg, and his partner, Julia Bard (who contributed to our book on Jewish motherhood) and tied in a couple of side trips to some older Jewish socialist friends also associated with Five Leaves, and the Group for that matter.
First call was Esther Brunstein, the widow of the painter Stanislaw Brunstein whose paintings of pre-war Poland we published in 1999. The Vanished Shtetl is unfortunately out of print now. Esther was a member of SKIF, the pre-war socialist organisation for young people, affiliated to the Bund, whose idea inform the JSG's policies today. Esther was in Lodz ghetto and survived Auschwitz. On her arrival in Sweden, after a time in a Displaced Persons camp she was in touch with the American Jewish Labor Committee. Her request to them was not for clothes or money but to ask if they could shikt bicher - send books. Not surprisingly, she is still surrounded by bicher and some of the paintings that appeared in her husband's book.
At the seder itself, during the cultural contributions and readings, one person read Bernard Kops' best-known poem, Whitechapel Library - Aldgate East (which appears in our Bernard Kops' East End). The poem includes the lines: "And Rosenberg also came to get out of the cold / To write poems of fire, but he never grew old". The Rosenberg in question was of course the poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg... no relation to our Dave Rosenberg, but his first cousin was there, the veteran socialist Chanie Rosenberg, aged ninety. Chanie sketched the life of her cousin, who rose out of East End Jewish poverty but whose life was cut short during WWI. I knew of Chanie but it never occurred to me that she could have been a cousin of someone whose poetry has meant so much, and of course was written so long ago.

The day after the seder I visited William - Bill - and Doris Fishman (pictured). Bill is 92 now, Doris 91. He is rather proud that his last guided tour of the Jewish East End was only five years ago, but frustrated that he can no longer get out and about. Bill and Doris also rose out of East End poverty. Bill is still amused that a "Yiddisher boy" from the East End became a visiting professor at Balliol. I must have bought his book  The Streets of East London soon after first publication in 1979, but in the mid-2000s Five Leaves took over publication of Bill's books from Duckworth, publishing Streets..., East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1915 and East End 1888. Later we republished his first book, The Insurrectionists. They still sell, steadily, and are still borrowed from libraries. Bill was pleased that he'd had a good Public Lending Right payment recently - not for the money but because it showed his books are still being used.
It is no co-incidence that the organiser of East End radical walking tours now is... David Rosenberg, which comes in handy for sales of our Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s, by Dave. Now that the walking season is at least in the offing you might want to check out www.eastendwalks.com.

Ship of Fools, Nottingham book launch

London Fictions book launch

You would be very welcome, but even if you can't come, check out the venue...http://www.phoenixartistclub.com/, because we will have other launches there.