Seeking the family of Walter Gregory

Some years ago Five Leaves published The Shallow Grave, a Spanish Civil War memoir by Walter Gregory, who later died. We would like to reprint the book but have no contact for Walter's family or Estate. A similar note on this blog has produced contacts for two other families of deceased authors whose books we went on to publish, so here's hoping...

On listening to Versions of the North

I was unable to attend the launch of our Versions of the North: contemporary Yorkshire poetry last week in Leeds at the wonderful Flux Gallery. I think about 23 of the poets in the book read, which is not a record but is a lot of poets. Last night the editor, Ian Parks, and three of the contributors - Steve Ely, Becky Cherriman and Elizabeth Barrett - read at Beeston Poets, and I was impressed. Ian remarked that among other things he wanted the book to represent the work of  some dead poets whose work was in danger of being forgotten and to present the work of a new generation of young Yorkshire poets (represented at this reading by Becky). Becky read well, with some of her poems being read from memory but I was particularly impressed with Ian's reading of poets no longer with us, and of a poem by Milner Place, who wrote his first poem at 65.
But what interested me most were the references to the miners' strike of 1984/85. There is material on this in the book, but it was by chance that the platform included two poets whose Yorkshire fathers were on strike the whole year and Elizabeth, Liz, whose brother was on strike throughout but whose father was one of the few Yorkshire colliers who returned to work. Liz herself was involved in strike support in London where she was then living. Ian read his "Strikebreakers" poem which includes the verse:
They weren't there when the brass bands played / and the banners were unfurled, / When the men marched to the pit gate / as if they'd won the day.  / They weren't there when the promises were made.
The whole poem is worth reading.
Steve went further back to the years prior to the great strike when "Arthur Scargill" (the title of the poem) raised miners' wages and respect, those who had previously been:
The lowest of the low and low-paid / the primary men; farmhands, quarrymen, colliers
 - a poem that ends
You brought them health and Palma de Majorca, / Cortinas on the drive and kids in college / reading Marx and Mao and The Wealth of Nations.
This set the stage for Liz - whose poems were mostly about other things - to find a poem from an early collection, a poem she described as a bit creaky (I regret I did not note its name) but which described the situation she found herself in, becoming estranged from her father as she was there the four o'clock morning he joined the strikebreakers, with a policeman posted in his drive. The estrangement is only now receding.
Ian, in his introduction, had remarked about the Yorkshire facility for direct speech, and that the collection was direct in what the writers had to say. And here we were, back in 1984, every emotion clear. Direct all right.
And I could not help feel, in listening to Ian's last brilliant reading of the late Mabel Ferrett's "Atherton Moor, 1643" and the late Stanley Cook's "Towton",  that these bloody battles were somehow connected to Cortonwood, to Orgreave, where skirmishes took place and our modern history was changed.

This has nothing to do with horses

In a shock move, Horses-4-U  has closed one of its two smithies in Leicester and announced that as leases come to an end they will close further smithies in towns where they have more than one branch. Earlier news indicated further a decline in independently-owned smithies for the tenth year in a row. A spokesperson for Horses-4-U said "Our business is still very healthy, especially as some branches are now selling automobiles. Our in-store Ford dealership will have no impact on our commitment to horses." In a related story, published in the Foalbreeder, it was reported that H4U had closed many smithies at veterinary colleges saying that students were no longer interested in farrying any more.
Nobody is completely sure why the public is no longer interested in horses, and horseriding circles are popular. Many local authorities are selling off their horse stock despite a huge demand for ponies.  The one growth area is rodeos, with something like 140 rodeos now operating each year in Britain. For many people going to a rodeo is the only time they see horses in the flesh, together with their riders.
Meanwhile, courses in horseriding, horse maintenance, blacksmithery and advanced equestrian studies continue to proliferate. Within an hour of where I live there are universities with equestrian courses at the University of Nottingham (two courses), Nottingham Trent University, De Montfort University, Derby University, Sheffield Hallam, Bishop Grosseteste (Lincoln) as well as a voluntary college of horse riding in Leicester and an overall agency for the area called Riding East Midlands which helps aspiring jockeys and those already involved in horseracing.
Manufacturers of saddles and horse blankets are reporting declining sales, leading to mergers and a reduction in employment for riders and a slowdown in sales of horseshoes. The industry is increasingly dependent on unpaid labour from stablelads and lasses.

Announcing a change of cover (now that is a boring subject heading)

At Lowdham Book Festival, one of the venues we use regularly is the Primitive Methodist Chapel, a lovely old Victorian building, little changed. On the main table is a carved block of wood. For years I wondered about it until I sat at the right angle and suddenly saw the letters JESUS in relief. Some people never see it, others immediately. Perhaps you see what you expect to see, or want to see, and it took a while before JESUS came into my life, as it were. I only mention this because of our new cover for London E1. I never really liked the old cover, not least as it did not express the joi de vivre of the novel (though, rest assured, not all the novel was full of joi de anything) and of the East End. Not that it put people off - the first printing sold out - but that gave us a chance to change the front. And here it is... When I first printed it out I could not see the "E1" thinking it looked more like an ill-fitting jigsaw and anyway the full title is "London E... oh, there it is". Now I can't see the jigsaw, and E1 is perfectly clear. I hope it is for readers.
The photos we used this time came from Robert Poole's nephew, John Charlton, who showed us a series of pictures of East End street life, including one of a charabanc trip. They all appeared on the Spitalfields Life website. Thanks, for these John.

Huddersfield Town in an away match

 London Fictions was launched last night at the Phoenix Artist Club in the West End, just off Charing Cross Road, once the heart, and still important in London's book land. An intrepid team of authors from the book had already done events at Housmans and at the Bishopsgate Institute and there are plenty more to follow, but this was the launch and quite a few of the contributors read from the books that inspired their chapters in London Fictions.
In introducing the evening I commented that although Five Leaves was based in Nottingham, and I hail from the land of the (vegetarian) haggis, we have a long interest in London fiction, London culture, London history, particularly of the old Jewish East End. I don't really know how to explain this interest, but I was followed by Andrew Whitehead - still a strong supporter of Huddersfield Town football club - who described how he came to London and fell in love with the place. If you check out his www.londonfictions.com and his own personal website www.andrewwhitehead.net you will see how this comes out. In the book, if you have not seen it, each chapter talks about one important London novel but is followed by a description of the setting now. Some are written by the chapter contributor, but many are written by Andrew, who dragged his teenage son round some unfamiliar streets of London to familiarise himself with the setting.
Others followed - fellow editor Jerry White, now living in the London suburb of Leamington Spa, Susie Thomas in London-on-sea ie Brighton and others who live in the city but all of whom find inspiration in the streets around them, and the literature of that most multi-cultural of cities.
Of course 26 books are not enough to fully give the flavour of the city. There are more essays on www.londonfictions.com and I think we will have a "More London Fictions" in due course.
Apart from contributors, the launch was attended by people from Housmans (which carries perhaps the best chosen London section of any bookshop) and Joseph's Bookstore, a couple of London fiction reading groups, people from History Workshop and www.eastendwalks.com.
Our New London Editions series and this book has tapped into a discrete group of readers and writers who know their city and know their literature. We'll continue to do this. Not dissing Nottingham, but I do so wish we could move Five Leaves to London.

Dropping acid with RD Laing

This is Phil Cohen, which, if the heading is correct, indicates that ingesting a lot of LSD in your younger years keeps you youthful-looking but leaves you with an inability to keep your desk tidy. Actually, Phil - who is I think 69 - is very young looking, but the desk (what are all those bits of paper?) was where he was signing copies of his new Five Leaves book, Reading Room Only: memoir of a radical bibliophile and his new Lawrence & Wishart book, On the Wrong Side of the Track? East London and the Post Olympics at the book launch last night.
Both publishers are grateful to Jagdish Gundara of the International Centre for Intercultural Education and Toby Butler of the Raphael Samuel History Centre for hosting the launch and to the many people who attended.
It was something of an achievement for both small publishers to produce the books in time for the launch. The memoir was a complicated book, involving some changes in direction and emphases as we went along while Sally Davidson at L & W was dealing with the addition, at a late stage, of a 43,000 word chapter. Chapter! Fortunately, as Phil remarked, Sally is good at filleting but not gutting.
Reading Room Only will be in shops shortly - copies are still being bound, and we only had enough for the launch, but it is worth waiting for.
The book is in two, or perhaps, three parts. The shorter part is an account of Phil Cohen's bookish but lonely Bloomsbury childhood leading to an unsuccessful time at university, followed by him running away to sea. The second - eyecatching - section is of his involvement in the counterculture of the 1960s. He was "Dr John", the leader of the mass (1,000+) squat of 144 Piccadilly, meeting Allen Ginsburg and Michael X, taking LSD with RD Laing - his therapist, setting up Street Aid, a counterculture support system and - as a result of writing about the street scene - a gradual move into academia. Phil's eventual academic career is covered, though in highlight only, as the book turns into a memoir of reading.
The Reading Room at the British Museum had been his escape from the pressures of activism, and the remainder of the book is devoted to an exploration of the culture of the Reading Room, reading in general, the private library and the world of the book collector. The book runs to a close with a discussion of the ten books that changed the author's life.
In keeping with the subject, this is one book we are not turning into an ebook, and Reading Room Only is hardback only, but at an affordable, £14.99 price.
At the event, introducing Phil Cohen, I talked about how - until the third rewrite of the book, which introduced a discussion of the name - Cohen - and his namesake Phil Cohen I'd thought he was the other Phil Cohen, with whom I'd been discussing book projects by email but had never met. The two Phil Cohens lives and careers have overlapped, though they have never met. I said that this book was only published because I thought he was the other one, as we'd continued to discuss book projects. There were a few cheap laughs at my and Phil's expense about this confusion. Only afterwards did I find that my fellow publisher L & W was well into publishing the other Phil Cohen's Children of the Revolution when they found out he was not this one. As a result of the Olympics book (naturally, both Cohens have had an involvement in the Olympics, even if this one was in critiquing it) L & W have two Phil Cohens on their list, and I almost did at Five Leaves, and hope one day that I will.
If there is a third Phil Cohen out there writing books of interest to either publisher, please change your name.

A report from the London Book Fair I didn't quite get to this year

"See you at the book fair?" is a common greeting among us publishing types, the book fair in question being the London International Book Fair. The grown up part of the trade staggers from book fair to book fair, and occasionally kind-hearted but naive writers ask if I am going to Frankfurt this year. Why? To do what? Am I made of money? It costs £200, last I looked, to have a shelf at the London Book Fair on the Five Leaves distributor's stand, that's six books, face out, ie insignificant when some publishers hire spaces the size of a small city but it gives you a base to leave your bulging bag of catalogues, somewhere to sit and somewhere to arrange meetings in order to pretend you are doing business. To go to Frankfurt, the really big fair, would bankrupt us.

The London Book Fair is huge - over at CB Editions' blog (http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/jeffrey-archer-offers-me-slice-of-his.html) Charles Boyle gives the flavour of the place quite nicely. It is crammed with young women in little black numbers and important looking men and women all doing important deals with each other though you do wonder, in an electronic age, why it is all so necessary. Certainly as a bookseller it was good to see the advance books by publishers, and to think ahead, but mostly I find myself wandering around aimlessly, looking as lost as the occasional everyday writer or reader who has accidentally strayed into something almost, but not quite, to do with them.

Of course the days of the big deals are over and there is more going on now for the groundlings, otherwise attendance would drop off. There are more seminars, talks and meetings and, perhaps, the scale is a little more human.

There are plenty receptions. One year - gatecrashing a party I found my then partner in an animated discussion about Canadian literature with a rather distinguished-looking man. "Why did he start talking about Canadian literature, and who was he anyway?" she asked me on leaving... It was the Canadian publishing village and he was the Canadian ambassador, but somehow she had not noticed. Another year a colleague and I attended the Swedish publishing reception as the seats looked comfy, hoping that nobody would talk to us about Swedish writers, none of whom we could remember.

One year I decided to do the book fair properly. Fixed meetings, tried to sell rights, obtain distribution deals. Be a joiner. Be professional. I came away having sold nothing, but bought rights to two books from an American publisher I'd tried to sell some of our rights to. They saw me coming.

Sadly, the economy means there is less to pick up for free. One year I wrote an article for The Bookseller  about the freebies at the book fair. For years afterwards people in the trade would mention the article.

I'm sorry not to go this year. It is time, and I rather feel that I am somehow not being a publishing professional by missing the book fair. So, next year, I'll dust off my little black number. Meet me at the Canadian book trade reception. Time to catch up with that ambassador.