Polyamory, polyfidelity and non-monogamy: new approaches to multiple relationships...

...is certainly the most cumbersome sub-title of any Five Leaves book, and the cover of Breaking the Barriers to Desire: new approaches to multiple relationships would certainly be in our top three of worst covers (so bad I'm not putting it on here). In our defence, it was published in 1995 when we were still learning about covers. And typing 1995 makes me realise that yes, Five Leaves is a year older than we normally advertise. Have to bring forward our twentieth birthday bash.
Anyway... every two or three years I wince, when polyamory and all that is back in the press again. There's been a telly programme, which I did not watch, and today Laura Penny (who else?) is in the Guardian advocating non-monogamy.
Just to be clear, polyamory is not something that the Five Leaves batallions get up to in the office when proof-reading gets all too much. We'd never publish such a book now, but several of our early books - commissioned in our pre-flight year as Mushroom Bookshop Publications - were about sexual politics. Not that we've got anything against sexual politics, or polyamory for that matter, but our areas of publication quickly changed once the link with the Bookshop had gone. The book itself, edited by Kevin Lano and Claire Parry, sold reasonably, with the still-extant American magazine Loving More buying the last 150 copies. And that was that. Except it wasn't.
Twice, late in the life of the book, the Guardian and the Sunday Mirror featured the book through no effort our our part. In both cases we got loads of phone calls (in those pre-email days), from journalists wanting copies for further features and reviews. The second time the book was featured thirteen journalists rang, including one desperate journo at The Sun who called several times. Like we would talk to The Sun. And the number of calls from the public or people wanting to order the book? In each case, next to none. The second time it was three calls and bookshops worldwide were scarcely troubled by as many people ordering the book. By then we had no copies to give out to journalists anyway.
All we could conclude from this was that journalists were (and perhaps are) REALLY interested in non-monogamy and that the public was (and perhaps is) not, other than maybe those involved in responsible polyamory who had already bought the book. We still get occasional calls, but the book is long gone and we have lost touch with the editors and contributors.

Advance notice of Five Leaves key events in 2014

Saturday March 15: 11.00-5.00

States of Independence V

A day of talks, book launches, panels and discussion on books, industry matters and writing

Supporting independent presses and independent thinking.

Full programme to be announced

Organised jointly by De Montfort University Creative Writing Team and Five Leaves Publications

Supported by Creative Leicestershire

De Montfort University, Leicester

Free

Info:info@fiveleaves.co.uk

 

Saturday May 10: 10.00-5.00

London Radical Bookfair

An all day bookfair involving 100 publishers and bookshops from across the radical sector, and radical books from the commercial sector

Panel discussions on the shortlisted books for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and Little Rebels Award for children's books together with the announcement of award winners

Supporting programme of talks (and walks) leading up to the bookfair and throughout the day

Organised by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, Five Leaves Publications and Bishopsgate Institute

Advance programme events ticketed, talks on the day and the bookfair free

Bishopsgate Institute, www.bishopsgate.org.uk

Info: info@fiveleaves.co.uk

Reasons not to date a small press publisher

Note: this list refers to the traditional male small press publisher. In the case of the new generation of female small press publishers, change He to She and delete preliminary point.

He will have a beard

1. He will be broke
2. He will not want to go on holiday
3. When he goes on holiday he will visit every bookshop within fifty miles
4. He will already have a partner, better off than himself
5. He will talk non-stop about how terrible Waterstones is
6. Apart from when complaining about Amazon
7. Or moaning about the Arts Council
8. He will have friends who are poets
9. He might be a poet
10. At launch parties everyone will ignore you unless you are a writer
11. He will start work at 6.30am
12. His idea of fun is a book launch 200 miles away
13. His idea of nice wine is Kwiksave BOGOFF, left over from a book launch
14. He will not own a car, and can't drive
15. He will ask for lifts in your car, without knowing he is doing it
16. His office will be very untidy, spilling over with unsaleable books
17. It will not be clean
18. On principle he will only publish books that lose money
19. He believes in the creative economy while contributing nothing to it
20. He resents successful small presses
21. He will not have a pension plan
22. Other than you are his pension plan
23. He will never retire
24. His share of the phone bill will be 80%, but he will pay only 50%
25. He will have authors staying who have travelled 250 miles to read for twenty minutes to an audience of seventeen
26. You will have seen the same seventeen people at every reading for thirty years
27. 50% of his income will go on buying books
28. He will talk to you at length about the book he is editing
29. He will ignore your advice when you suggest changes or wonder who would buy such a book
    30. He knows the names of every book reviewer in the UK. None of them know his name
    31. He anxiously scans the review pages of the Guardian every Saturday even though his last book review in any broadsheet was in 1992
    32. He will give you a copy of his own published novel, which did not get the attention it deserved
    33. He mutters

Robots without insight

Regular readers will know I'm not keen on Amazon, for all the usual reasons. A minor reason to dislike them is - from a publisher's point of view - the firm's unwillingness to allow you to communicate directly with a human being. There is no phone number. There is no account executive. No staff list. All you can do is send an email on a form, choosing between a range of subject headings which often do not describe your problem. If you are lucky, someone will deal with the matter promptly. If you are unlucky, you end up in robot hell where - it appears - your email is scanned for a key word or two and you receive a standard email which does not answer your question. Email again, you get the same response.
For half a year Amazon kept asking us for permission to return some damaged books, saying that if we did not reply they would simply send the books. We did not reply, so next month they sent an email asking for permission to return some damaged books, saying that if we did not reply they would simply send the books. We did not reply, so... you get the message. For another half year we got emails threatening to suspend our account if we did not fill in a CARP form, though we could never find out what this CARP form was. Eventually a human did reply to tell us to just ignore those emails because CARP (easy to rearrange those letters, don't you think?) refers to firms delivering container loads at their depots.
Recently, in response to a query on our behalf about the Amazon Daily Deal a robotic reply came, telling us nothing we wanted to know but answering a different question robotically. A follow-up email got the reply "We'll be sure to consider your interest for this feature as we plan further improvements. I"m sorry we haven't been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. We will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters."

Two cheers for Utopia

One day last week, reviews of the Five Leaves Utopia issue of our annual journal turned up in Anarchist Studies and the Communist Party's Communist Review. I imagine it would be hard to find two journals further apart but still on the left. Communist Review (CR) is still debating what went wrong in the former Soviet Union (though it has a good poetry section) while Anarchist Studies' (AS)  lead article is "Toward a Peak Everything Postanarchism and Technology Evaluation Schema for Communities in Crisis". Yes, it can be that kind of academic journal. Both took Utopia seriously, devoting a lot of space to it.
AS would perhaps be expected to review favourably as many of the writers - as the CR was quick to pick up - were from a libertarian background and the reviewer Diogo Duarte finds that many of the shorter pieces "written like chronicles, often starting from personal experience or a biographical episode of the author that could be as different as a coastal walk... a journey to Patagonia" which "offer us uncommon approaches to the topic or reflections on how utopia can be found in banal actions or habits" are the most entertaining reads but at the same time "utopia is used in such a broad way that it becomes impossible to discern what the criterion was behind the inclusion of the text." As editor of the work, I am not sure what my criterion was either, so the point was fairly made. I suppose that I wanted exactly that - well written pieces including those AS described as having "historical depth" as well as the more personal approach.
Over at CR Steve Johnson finds the book very readable and you can tell in his review that he found the book a pleasurable read, yet noticed that what was not on offer was any idea or strategy on how to reach utopia. I'm still looking for those. Steve also cleverly picks up that much of the utopian language of the libertarian left has been picked up by the right "with its talk of free schools and alternative education" suggesting that "anti-statism without a wider political strategy can have deeply reactionary consequences. Big Society anyone?
As editor, the pieces that bookended Utopia were, for me, the most important. The first was by Mike Marqusee (a Marxist), a piece which AS described as making "a short but strong claim on the importance of utopian thought and the consequences of its absence". The last was the picture, reprinted here from the (Marxist) Country Standard where, prefiguring the work of the anarchist illustrator Cliff Harper's famous sequence of illustrations in Undercurrents and elsewhere (which should have been included in the journal!), the unknown illustrator imagines how we will live in a better society. Good to see the reading room there.
Does this mean that there is more in common between anarchist academics and members of the Communist Party than we thought? Maybe. Just don't mention Kronstadt.

In memory of Walter Gregory

Tomorrow, in Nottinghamshire, trades unionists, members of the International Brigades Memorial Trust and others will rededicate the memorial to those Nottinghamshire men who fought in the Spanish Civil War. The Labour Party, swept back into power in May, is making good on a promise to replace the memorial taken down by the outgoing Tory regime. In a act that left a nasty taste in the mouth the Tories - during their one disastrous term - almost immediately got rid of the memorial at County Hall to those who had gone to fight fascism in 1936-1939. One really wonders what side the Tory leadership had been on.
The old memorial was a little inaccurate - it listed sixteen who fought, but recent research has brought the number to twenty-two. Because of the illegality of journeying to fight in Spain, confusion over people's names (some used pseudonyms) and over where people lived prior to the war the inaccuracy is understandable, but Barry Johnson and others have now produced what will remain the list of record.
Among those who fought was Walter Gregory. Five Leaves published his book, The Shallow Grave, in 1996. The book has long since sold out, but I think it likely we'll do a new edition next year. Walter's book was edited by David Morris and Anthony Peters and is thought to be one of the best memoirs of the period.
Walter was a mild-mannered man who spent most of his life working in the Co-op after service in WWII. After he retired he moved to be near his family in Grantham, and took up bell-ringing! At his funeral, the vicar - having talked about Walter's years in the labour movement and his time in Spain remarked that his enthusiasm for bell-ringing was only matched by his incompetence at it! Cue for hundreds of people to fall about laughing.
Walter came to write the book following an evening class on the Spanish Civil War that he attended, as a student. During one class, not having mentioned his own background previously, he brought out his old, battered mess-tin and a souvenir CNT (the Spanish anarchist trade union) flag - both now in the Imperial War Museum. The teacher asked him to take over the class!
Walter's book was first published in hardback by Gollancz and we published it in paper in 1996. It sold well and Walter started doing a few events to talk about the war. I was fairly new to publishing at the time and know we could have done more with the book, though it did sell out in good time. It was a great pleasure to have known Walter, who was good company. He was honest about the failings of the Republican side. As a weapons instructor he was sad that he was sending men out to fight not well enough armed, not well enough trained. He also knew that the graffittid answer to - "Dondo Nin?" (where is Nin? the leader of the POUM group) - "Ask the fascists" was a shocking lie. Nin had been murdered by the Communists. He was also a great admirer of the CNT, though critical of their discipline.
I won't go on. Read the book when it re-appears.
Of the others, I also knew Lionel Jacobs. Lionel had been a tailor in London prior to the Civil War but moved up here after the war, where he became active in the Trades Council and a fairly hard-line Communist. The last time I met him was in the Jewish care home here, whose workers were bemused at the steady stream of political people who visited Lionel. Shortly before his death Lionel said to me that "he would do it again if he had to!" and we parted, him giving me the clenched fist salute, and the word "Salud!" - the Republican greeting.
Appropriately, Walter's book was dedicated to Bernard Winfield of Nottingham, who was killed at Teruel on 20 January 1938.

What's the point of book launches?

Last night I was one of  thirty or forty people attending the book launch of my friend Michael Eaton's translation, The Priest of Nemi, by Ernest Renan. This philosophical drama was first published in 1886 and has not, according to Michael, been performed since then. The work - in its day - had a big influence on The Golden Bough, the study of magic and religion which once was seen on the shelves of every bibliophile of a certain age. This, then, is not a book likely to appear as a three-for-two. It's good though, with many colour illustrations, made possibly by the low print run!
At the end of Michael's introduction to the history of the play, and the Nemi remains currently on exhibition at Nottingham Castle after a generation hidden in their stores, he said - I paraphrase only slightly - "Right, lots of you are authors. I've come to your book launches and bought your bloody books. Now it's your turn, buy mine." And we did. Nobody minded Michael's exhortation and all the copies brought along by Shoestring Press, his publisher, were sold.
Over the evening I had a glass of orange juice and half a glass of rotten win (Shoestring, honestly!), had a long discussion with the publisher, a further long discussion with a Five Leaves writer about a forthcoming book, exchanged some trade gossip with another publisher, nagged someone to finish their contribution to one of our forthcoming books and passed briefer moments with people I'd known for years. The venue, Bromley House in Nottingham, is perfect for small launches - many of those present are members of this private library. So a pleasant couple of hours, including a stint washing the wine glasses at the end.
Michael's work was duly honoured, the publisher had (what Peter Mortimer of Iron Press described as the purpose of a launch) a financial lining on his stomach for bringing out the book and twenty or so people were a tenner poorer than when they arrived.
We will, I hope, all be pleased to see the book out. The author was probably well-known to most of those there, the remainder were either camp followers of Shoestring or the usual flotsam and jetsam of literary Nottingham reinforcing our friendships, seeing and being seen. At worst, no harm to it. At best, further reinforcement to our local literary culture.
But it means that twenty or so houses have yet another book, and we will all turn up next time to do what Michael said - we buy each other's books. Is this just an in-group ritual? Actually, no. For many of the books launched at such events it may be the only time the author gets to speak to a good crowd, books that we would never see on High Street bookshop shelves get an airing, and a selling. It does support the publisher financially to enable them to turn outwards. And it is part of the personal price we pay - a tax if you like - to be part of a literature scene. Anyway, a good night out for a tenner with a book to read afterwards is pretty good value. Meanwhile, over at Waterstones, 66 managers have had the boot, including many with long service to the trade. I can't work out the connections between our generally supportive literature scene and the hard commerce of the big boys. Perhaps there is none.