A map of the world without utopia on it is not even worth glancing at...

New from Five Leaves, Ship of Fools by Rod Madocks

Some years ago I got an email from someone called Graham de Max, offering his new book, a novel. The subject sounded interesting, but I was not looking for new material. However I knew Graham de Max slightly, a housing officer in the town I live,  and didn't want to be rude, especially as my partner had worked with him on refugee matters. An email conversation ensued that soon began to make less and less sense. To cut a long story short, the approach had been by one Rod Madocks, wanting Five Leaves to publish his novel, but because of the sensitive nature of the novel he wanted to use a pseudonym. One of his favourite writers is Graham Greene, and the de Max came from the interesting character of Max de Winter in Rebecca - hence Graham de Max.
In due course Rod's real identity came out - I knew of him too, he was a mental health worker in Nottingham, who'd worked directly with my partner. He'd never heard of the real Graham de Max.
I thought I'd look at the manuscript to give a bit of friendly advice, which I normally try to avoid... But in the end we published the book, and it did well, being shortlisted for the ITV Thriller Award, enabling us to change the cover from a rather dire brown set of stairs to a moody secure hospital corridor.
I insisted Rod publish under his own name, as I wanted to set up readings for him, and in any case he was not the best picker of pseudonymous names. And so No Way To Say Goodbye appeared, a rather creepy novel about a mental health worker who obsessively tries to trace what happened to his murdered girlfriend among the ranks of his charges in mental health secure prisons. Well worth reading.
Last night we launched his second book, Ship of Fools - stories from the mental health front line. These stories comprise twenty in number, one for each year Rod spent in mental health. Though the stories are in the first person, they are fictional, but like his first book real places and real cases are mentioned to give the impression of personal experience. The narrator - as in the first book - is not necessarily a nice person, especially to his colleagues, and veers from being bored and sick of his charges through to the most tremendous empathy for them. In some stories the narrator just watches, reports and tries to be a reliable witness. The "ships of fools" - the narrenschiffe - were packed with the insane, and sailed off down the Rhine by Hanseatic cities five centuries ago, and aboard this ship are the narrator, his many charges and those whose lives intersect with those who are insane.
The book will be of interest to anyone working in mental health, or living with serious mental health problems, or people trying to understand mental health.
 

The Iron Age 1973-2013

If you are anywhere near the North East there is only one place to be between 15-19th May and that is at Cullercoats for "A seaside words and music festival" celebrating Iron Press's fortieth anniversary. Iron Press has been run since its inception by Peter Mortimer - he is also the author of five or six books published by Five Leaves. I well remember him in bookshop days in the '80s coming to Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham with copies of Iron Magazine. He had more hair back then but his fashion sense remains the same, lots of rings, lots of bright reds, yellows and oranges, a hat with a haiku on it...
His home in Cullercoats is no less vivid. At one time his Marden Terrace home had a neon haiku on its roof and the kitchen has a wall covered in panels painted individually by dozens of north east artists. And it is the connections to other types of writers, musicians and artists that will make the Iron weekend "not your average literary festival".
Where else can you put to sea in a boat to write haiku (an Iron specialism) or find most of the readings followed or interspersed with musicians from the north east? The sea - predictably - plays a major part with events at the RNLI, the local fish and chip shop and the fishermen's mission. Though Peter will be introducing some events the weekend is about Iron, not him, but we'll be there throughout the weekend with his books on a bookstall and take part as much as we can get away - though perhaps skipping the Iron Press Snooker Tournament.
I know I'll come back with a few publications but these will include Nesting, a set of short stories by David Almond, published for the anniversary - David Almond's first two books were published by Iron - and Through the Iron Age - an editor's forty year journey, a pamphlet by Peter. The other writers involved in the weekend include Melvyn Bragg - published by Iron in 1975 and the former assistant editor of Iron magazine, the shy and retiring Ian McMillan.
Apart from Peter Mortimer, other Five Leaves writers appearing include Andy Croft, in a short reprise of his Iron Press Great North, a collection written for The Great North Run. Participants in a two and a half mile run on the seafront will be given a signed copy of the book. Good job I bought mine years ago. There are also a few authors who have appeared in Five Leaves' anthologies.
But compared to Iron, Five Leaves is a young whippersnapper, twenty-two years younger. When Iron Press started Ted Heath was Prime Minister and Margaret Thatcher was quite unknown.
It is quite something to run a small press for forty years. Well done Iron Press! Well done Peter Mortimer!

New from Five Leaves, Things of Substance by Liz Cashdan

Liz Cashdan's Laughing All the Way was the third book to be published under the Five Leaves imprint, sometime in 1995 and Liz appeared in our collection of Jewish women's poetry - The Dybbuk of Delight, published in same year. We haven't been her only publisher, which is fine of course, but her most regular one. I'd known her from a previous collection shared with others, published by Smith/Doorstop. I was particularly taken by the "The Tyre/Cairo Letters" sequence that won the Wingate Award and which made up the back end of Laughing All the Way. It  re-appears in her newly published New and Selected collection, Things of Substance. Among the Selected there are "threads" that appeared in her 2009 Five Leaves pamphlet The Same Country, some of her other threads - South Africa, Israel, landscape, run throughout this book.
Liz - a resident of Sheffield - also appears in our new collection of contemporary Yorkshire poetry, Versions of the North, of which more soon, and it was good to see her again at the small press fair in Sheffield and to have been publishing her off and on for eighteen years.
This collection was organised, designed and typeset by Pippa, from the Five Leaves office, with external editing advice from Cathy Grindrod (who has graced Five Leaves anthologies and pamphlet series before). I came in only to say nice things about the cover and for a final proof-read. Of course if you are proof-reading you don't quite take in the text so I'll shortly have the pleasure of sitting down to read the book properly from cover to cover. Being something of a control freak it can be difficult to let Five Leaves' books appear without shaking my head wearily and saying "I woudn't do that personally" but when it happens I quite like it. Copies of Things of Substance are available from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/author/c/liz-cashdan-2397/things-of-substance-new-selected-poems/ or from bookshops.

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