Terry Taylor, author and counterculture figure

In 2010 - when Five Leaves was building a reputation for its New London Editions series - we were regularly approached by people suggesting new titles. Within a three month period three people suggested Baron's Court, All Change by Terry Taylor, a London novel first published in 1961 by the late, great MacGibbon & Kee. The book became our eighth New London Edition title, coming out in 2011 to great reviews in the TLS and elsewhere.
One of those who approached us was the author and performance artist Stewart Home. He told us that so desperate was he at one stage to have the book republished he'd photocopied 200 copies of the original and passed them around, hoping for an impact. In due course Stewart wrote the introduction to Terry's novel and spoke at our one meeting on the book, the meeting at which Terry slipped in quietly at the back, his only public appearance (if it can be called that) about Baron's Court. I wasn't at the event and never met Terry, though we had an amiable correspondence. He was very comfortable with the book but had moved on since it was first written. His life was different and he'd become, happily, a sandwich-maker in Rhyl, where he lived quietly with his "favourite gym instructor", his wife Wendy, as the dedication said in our edition. At one time an important paper - was it The Times? - was interested in interviewing him. Was he worried that his cover would be broken? No, he said, nobody in Rhyl reads The Times.
There was a personal connection between Stewart and Terry. Terry had helped out Stewart's mother when she was in difficulties, but primarily Stewart thought that Baron's Court was the best book of the British beatnik era. And it might well be.
The book documents one summer in the life of an unnamed sixteen year old narrator. He leaves his suburban home and boring job as a shop assistant for a "pad" in central London, paid for after he moves into dealing dope. Along the way he dabbles in spiritualism and has an affair with an older woman. There's a lot of dope in the book, which was also the first novel to mention LSD.
Terry was born in 1933 and was the inspiration for Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners. He was the assistant to the photographer Ida Kar, and her lover, despite the difference in age. Kar was the photographer of that era, that scene, and photographs of Terry are in the National Portrait Gallery. They can be seen here - http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp83304/terry-taylor. As you can see, he was not averse to a bit of dope himself.
A second novel was turned down by MacGibbon & Kee as being too experimental. It has not survived. Terry, however, wrote a third novel The Run, which is still unpublished. I read the manuscript and, with some editing and rewrites, it would be worth publishing. The book explores the drug scene/drug dealing among British people in North Africa. It is racier than Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky and, of course, the parts of the story that don't quite ring true are based on real things that happened! Terry and I talked about publishing the book, making the necessary changes, but we never took the discussion to any conclusion.
Terry retained an interest in North Africa but also spent a lot of time in Goa, sending cheery emails to say he was there again.
Terry Taylor died a few days ago, after a short illness. He is survived by his favourite gym instructor and their daughters Amy and Zoe and an older daughter, Tracy, from a previous relationship.
Ross Bradshaw

Campaign for Real Plebs

We are eagerly waiting an order for this book from Andrew Mitchell. 

The Plebs League and the Labour College Movement were at the forefront of adult education in the North East of England as previously self-educated shipyard workers and miners came together to create an adult education movement that they could control... a movement that sought to explain the political conditions in which they found themselves.

This short book celebrates the achievements of this long forgotten group of autodidacts.

The title reflects the choices faced by working class people at the time - the pit or the shipyards, then the major sources of employment in the region.

81 pages, illustrated, 9781910170076, £6.99

Available - post free - from Five Leaves Bookshop. Also in stock at Cogito (Hexham), Housmans (London) and elsewhere.

A Modern Don Juan - subscription offer

Lowdham Book Festival at fifteen

Way back when the world was younger and more innocent, Jane Streeter from The Bookcase in Lowdham and Ross Bradshaw, then of Nottinghamshire County Council, met for the first time in Jane's bookshop. By the end of the meeting we'd agreed to do a dummy run event, and if that worked, we'd run a full scale book festival. It worked, and we did. Neither of us had run a book festival before, though both had organised readings and other events. We learned on the job and the festival grew - and grew and grew. In its tenth year there were sixty events, a winter themed weekend, a weekend long film festival, irregular launches and readings. We started up Lowdham Book Festival on Tour. I'll write up a fuller history sometime, but Lowdham led us in other directions too - Jane became President of the Booksellers Association, Southwell Poetry Festival developed in tandem, both of us are trustees of the East Midlands Book Award... and now Five Leaves has its own bookshop and is heavily involved in the radical bookshop revival.
In consequence - and as it should be - Jane is now the main organiser of Lowdham while I run the traditional "last Saturday", which is approaching like a train...New partnerships have been formed, such as that between the Festival and Nottingham Playhouse. We never wanted the Festival to be static, but we also wanted to keep some traditions - the last Saturday, the reading group day, the cricket night, the technician bringing out that awful yellow staff T-shirt that seemed like such a good idea fourteen years ago.
Fifteen years in literature is a long time but it still gets you. Even just hearing about Bonnie Greer at Lowdham last night (I could not attend) - one of the country's leading Black intellectuals captivating the audience in St Mary's Church in the village made me excited. And on Saturday morning, at 6.30am I'll turn up to set up the bookstalls for our book fair and be castigated, as every year, by the first arrival for my amateurish lateness but that bookseller knows that he will get exactly the spot he wants, the best one on site, as he has every year at that time in the morning. I'l looking forward to it.
www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk

Wild paddling

Spending a short break in the Lake District enabled me to engage in a little Wild Paddling, in solidarity with the Wild Swimmers who seemed all over the place. But more importantly it enabled me to visit Fred Holdsworth Bookshop in Ambleside for the first time in twenty years and Sam Read Bookseller in Grasmere for the first time ever.
Fred's shop has been going for 50+ years though Fred himself retired a few years back. I'd remembered it as being more political, more alternative and more literary than it is now, but there are reasons. At one time there were 500 teacher training students in the small town, plus staff, and their presence - and those of quite a few other alternative types drove the bookshop. Nowadays the stock is orientated more towards tourists. Still a shop worth visiting - well, I was a tourist - but it feels like the last few years have been a struggle.
Holdsworth's longevity is nothing compared to that of Sam Read, which opened in 1887. The current owner has been there fourteen years and while Grasmere had the feel of a theme park, the bookshop lifted my heart a bit as their walking book display was led by Rebecca Solnit and a cohort of other important and thoughtful walking writers. There was depth there.
But like all the outposts of bookselling, the hours are long. Both shops are open seven days a week and while the weather this week has been beautiful in the Lakes, I suspect there are long periods of rain outside and ennui at the counter.
I'd definitely visit both shops again but a visit in person is better, neither have spectacular websites.

Five Leaves' next... invitation to the book launch

Going, going, gone - title update

Update on some of our titles:
The Liberation of Celia Kahn is now out of print in paperback, though the ebook is still available for the moment. Together with its companion volume, The Credit Draper, which will also fall out of print, J. David Simons' titles are passing to another publisher. This is Saraband in Glasgow. The two titles will appear from them with the third in the loose trilogy - The Land Agent. I've read the third and it is very good indeed. I'm sorry to see the books go, but they will have a great new home with Saraband and it makes sense for the three books to be available from the one source.
Less satisfying is that two of our announced titles will not appear at all. The first is Under the Surface: mining poetry. Unfortunately the editor was unable to complete the book and it has had to be abandoned. A further title, Comrade Marilyn, ran into copyright issues and has also had to be cancelled.
It's rare that we have abandoned titles after announcing them - these might be the first - but there's nothing we can do. Perhaps sometime these titles will come back to life.

Not sure if I am a radical booktrade historian, but happy to support this event

RED DWARF’S ROBERT LLEWELLYN JOINS NEWS FROM NOWHERE IN DISSENT

News from Nowhere, Liverpool’s unique Radical & Community Bookshop continues its 40^th Birthday celebrations with a one-off

WeBe40 Radical Bookfair & Spaces of Dissent

Sunday 1^st June at the Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool 1 from 11am to 6pm

There will be three Spaces of Dissent throughout the day:

• Poetry as Dissent at 12noon features Steph Pike & Clare Shaw, both powerful and uncompromising wordsmiths, who have audiences laughing, crying, enraged … and often all three.

• Radical Bookselling, Radical Times at 2pm features Ross Bradshaw, radical booktrade historian and Bob Dent, News from Nowhere’s founder, enlightening us on the way in which radical bookshops have interacted with and reflected the politics of the times.

• Fiction as Dissent at 4pm will feature Robert Llewellyn. Robert played Kryten in Red Dwarf and was the presenter of Scrapheap Challenge, but is now also the author of an eco-utopian trilogy, “News from Gardenia” inspired by William Morris’s “News from Nowhere” from which we took our name. In addition we have Desiree Reynolds, a Black British novelist whose stunning debut novel, “Seduce”, will amuse, challenge and delight with its Caribbean setting and wonderful patois language.

We also have Subversive Children’s Storytelling sessions in the Garden at 12.30pm and 2.30pm with Andy Johnson & Jennifer Verson.

Along with Liverpool Socialist Singers at 1.30pm, Sense of Sound Singers at 3.30pm, Stan the Harp and various theatrical interventions, a great day is guaranteed for all lovers of literature, culture and freedom.

In addition, the current Bluecoat display of News from Nowhere’s archives continues throughout the day, we will have projections from our Live Reportage artist Sam Galbraith, an interactive Memories of News from Nowhere game, and our famous Bolshie Bargain Bookstall will tempt the crowds in via the front courtyard.

Expect special offers, a cornucopia of words and plenty of dissent!

The whole day is free, but (free) tickets are required from the Bluecoat for the three Spaces of Dissent sessions.

Mandy Vere says:

“Central to Bold Street’s revival and a major tourist attraction with national and international visitors citing it as a crucial destination, News from Nowhere is proud to be a space of dissent in arguably the most dissenting city in the country. We will continue to assert that there is no glory ever in war, that the 99% should not be made to pay for the greed of the 1%, and will always stand firmly on the side of the marginalized and the oppressed, while celebrating the human and cultural riches of our proud city of immigrants.”

Further info: Mandy Vere, News from Nowhere Bookshop, 96 Bold St, Liverpool L1 4HY

0151 708 7270 07732 983477 mandy@newsfromnowhere.org.uk

London Radical Bookfair - past, present and future

A few years ago three grizzled veterans of the radical book trade, Andrew Burgin (ex-Compendium, ex-Canary Press, dealer in second hand radical books), Tony Zurbrugg (Merlin Press, ex-Africa Book Centre, ex-York Community Books) and me (Ross Bradshaw, Five Leaves Publications, ex-Mushroom Bookshop) and the not-yet-but-soon-to-be grizzled Nik Gorecki of Housmans Bookshop started discussing how to stabilise or revive the remnants of the radical book trade. The discussion was inconclusive, but some time afterwards the Housmans Board (which I was then on) decided to set up what became the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. Our discussions were joined by Mandy Vere, who has been involved with News from Nowhere for the best part of forty years and other bookshops responded enthusiastically.
The ARB was formed at a meeting in Liverpool, as a light-touch organisation co-ordinated by Nik, at a day event which included a presentation on the history of radical bookselling. We also launched the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. By this time there had been a couple of new shops opening and existing shops were reporting increased trade. Five Leaves did not yet have a bookshop but Ross from Five Leaves, Mandy and Nik formed the Trustees of Bread and Roses and the initial three years of the Award were underwritten by this firm.
David Graeber duly won the first Bread and Roses Award, presented at a social in a trade-union owned pub in London with his book on the debt crisis (published by Melville House). By the next year we were thinking of how to move things forward. It seemed obvious that with a captive group of speakers - those on the B & R shortlist - we had the core of a day event rather than simply a reception to hand over the cheque. Maybe we could add a few stalls? Six? Ten?
We'd noticed how the annual poetry book fair was developing and were aware of the longstanding, and very successful, London Anarchist Bookfair. Suddenly we were talking about a modest London Radical Bookfair, a bit like the Anarchist Bookfair but operating on a wider canvas. Andrew Burgin organised a decent room hire rate for Conway Hall and things were getting more serious. The organising group was to be Andrew, Nik and Ross. Andrew quickly found that he had to drop out as his small Left Unity project turned into a national political party of the same name. Ross had to drop out due to family issues, leaving Nik to organise the first London Radical Book Festival almost on his own, during which he realised that he could go into a zen-like trance and NOT panic about all the things that needed done... For a period it was not looking good. We were wondering whether many people would come, and, if they did, would we reach out to a wider radical community than we were used to. We did not want a radical re-enactment society. A last minute push (particularly a mass email from New Internationalist and Occupy London) brought in the people, lots of them. There were fifty stalls. Conway Hall was packed. Every meeting based on the shortlisted Bread and Roses Award was packed.
By now the Bread and Roses Award had produced an offspring, the Little Rebels Prize for the best radical children's book, organised by ARB member Letterbox Library. The winning adult book was Scattered Sand by Hsiao-Hung Pai (Verso), a book on Chinese internal-migrant labour. The first Little Rebel prize went to Sarah Garland for her graphic novel Azzi in Between (Frances Lincoln).
Looking down from the stage it was obvious the Bookfair had attracted a younger crowd, a wide range of radical people. Stalls reported good business. But it was too small. At its peak you could not get down the aisles. It was obvious there was a demand, and it was obvious we would have to move to bigger premises. The only, small, problem was an expected disagreement between some anarchists and the Socialist Workers Party.
Those bigger premises turned out to be Bishopsgate Institute, a radical library and continuing education establishment that faces into the City and backs on to Shoreditch. From our first approach, to Bishopsgate librarian Stefan Dickers, this was obviously the best choice. They had the space, they had their own mailing list and they wanted to bookend the bookfair with some radical talks and courses of their own. Perfect.
Except why stop at simply radical booksellers and publishers? Housmans had a good relationship with the Alternative Press Fair, an annual event run by artists, DIY publishers, zine producers. And there were three floors...
So now we had a big annual bookfair, a bookfair partner, links with the (younger and trendier!) Alternative Press Fair, a successful adult radical publishing prize and a new children's award. No money, no time, no staff... and while my family commitments had ceased I had a new bookshop to run on top of a publishing programme. Andrew Burgin was still off building a party. So that left Nik again,with the support of his colleagues at Housmans. At least it put the oldest radical bookshop in the UK, now well into its buspass years, at the heart of what is starting to be a thriving radical bookshop scene.
There were 130 stalls, attendance was up. Attendance was younger again. As well as the (packed) meetings about the shortlisted B & R books and a children's panel there were other events, including some aimed at the Alternative Press world, and a big event on the history of Black and Asian radical publishing and bookselling in Britain. The only, small, problem was another expected disagreement between some anarchists and the Socialist Workers Party. But that aside, Greens and alternative types happily rubbed shoulders with Marxists, anarchists with their other Trotskyist cousins, socialist historians chatted merrily to socialists who were too young to have any history. And, despite forgetting to bring the pop-up banner announcing our existence, Five Leaves Bookshop had its first London outing. All the shops did very well. I hope the publishers did too.
Bishopsgate people seemed very pleased as we spread over three floors. Nik looked Zen-like...
The winner of the Bread and Roses Award was Joe Glenton with his Soldier Box (Verso - winning for a second year). The award was accepted on his behalf by his organisation, Veterans for Peace, who reminded us that books should lead to action. Nobody would disagree. The Little Rebel prize went to After Tomorrow by Gillian Cross (OUP) which imagined a time when British people would have to seek refugee status, a book for 9-12 year olds.
So here we are. Little money, no staff, no infrastructure and a hit on our hands.
In concluding the bookfair Mandy Vere said that whilst bookselling was in crisis, the radical publishing and bookselling section was thriving and expanding. Indeed.
What next? I hope that we can return to Bishopsgate. I hope that the Alternative Press people liked the tie-up. We will aim to be repeat the whole exercise on the first Saturday after the May bank holiday next year. I hope we can pull in some funding to underwrite the prizes and the event. I hope that Nik has a day off next week and that Housmans will continue to be at the heart of this project. Small points? I'd like to see a take away brochure, like the one at the Anarchist Bookfair, though am aware of the work involved. I'd like to see the Bread and Roses and Little Rebels shortlist promoted more. I'd like to see... oh, all those things that involve more time and more money.
But when the grizzly ones had their initial discussions a few years ago we had little idea what would be the outcome. Steady as she goes.
http://littlerebelsaward.wordpress.com/
http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/
http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/
http://londonradicalbookfair.wordpress.com/

"We were all medium size once"

Last night I ran a bookstall at the Nottinghamshire NUM 30th anniversary commemoration of the 1984/1985 miners' strike. The shop was particularly promoting Harry Paterson's book on the strike, published by Five Leaves. We sold a bucket load, particularly after Henry Richardson, former general secretary of the Nottinghamshire NUM (sacked by the working miners) said in his speech "This is your story. Every striking miner should have a copy of the book in their house to tell your children and grandchildren what you did."
I'd felt that the Nottinghamshire story had never previously been fully told. Keith Stanley from the NUM published a short memoir of the strike, Jonathan Symcox published his grandfather's diaries, Canary Press published some books at the time - all worth reading - but no book had looked at the background, the detail and the aftermath of the strike and explained why Nottinghamshire was so important to the Government, told the full story of the 1,800 men who stuck it out to the end out of 32,000 in the Notts coalfield, the secret dealings leading to the formation of the UDM and their ultimate downfall. That was the aim of the book, and I think we have mostly succeeded. I say mostly as since the book came out people who Harry interviewed, or others in casual conversation, have told us the most astonishing personal stories of the strike year. We're proud of the book, but will perhaps publish a later edition including more of these stories - of the picket line staffed, by agreement, one day only by women where the only men who turned up were police infiltrators who'd not heard it was going to be women only; of the Manton miner who was charged with attempted murder, sacked of course, only for the charges to be dropped later; of the local "major" picket set up by six people, and only for six people, to draw police away from Orgreave (which also proved that phones were tapped as the police turned up in droves thinking it was to be a major event)... I could go on. There were so many stories.
It was an honour to be there last night with the men and women of the strike year. All of us thirty years older, and some of us thirty years wider than before - XXL T-shirts ran out quickly (hence this posting's title). Most of those present were NUM or from women's support groups from the period, but we were joined by many from the Clarion Choir and friends from the Trades Council and UNISON. It was sometimes hard to hear the speakers or the choir as people had some catching up to do. There were a fair few Scottish notes in the bookstall takings as a number of ex-Notts people had travelled back for the occasion. Nobby Lawton came back from London and managed, the night before, to get a lifetime ban from his old Blidworth Miners' Welfare when he took over the mike to celebrate his fellow strikers! I think he might have been exaggerating to say he went down fighting, still clutching the mike and singing the Red Flag... but there is still ill-feeling in the coalfields between those who supported the Tory Government and those who supported their national union. In Harry's book he analyses the voting figures in Nottinghamshire, indicating just how many miners actually voted Conservative. Of course they were thrown on the scrapheap too.
Of those who spoke, I was pleased that Margaret Nesbit from the women's group in Ollerton spoke about Liz Hollis, who killed herself after the strike. So many people from the coalfields remember Liz with love and affection. Ian Lavery MP reminded us of the beatings people took at Orgreave, but demanded a wider inquiry into the state of siege that took place in Nottinghamshire. The very youthful looking Owen Jones provided the best crack of the evening, referring to himself as looking more like a minor than a miner. Owen was given a standing ovation and, interesting, given the ethnic make up of the coalfields, got most applause in his speech when he referred to the scapegoating of migrants and the National Front-style lorry touring immigrant areas telling people to go home.
The meeting opened with a minute's silence, for Davy Jones - killed on the picket line at Ollerton - and for other NUM members who did not make it through to the 30th, and supporters of the NUM like Bob Crow and Tony Benn.
At the time of the strike my main focus had been CND. I am proud that the day we held the biggest ever Nottingham Peace Festival we shared speakers and ran buses between our event and a major NUM rally elsewhere in the city. Our causes were one. Perhaps because of that most of those I knew personally from the strike days were women who'd been involved in the peace movement - Ida Hackett from Mansfield, Joan Witham from Newark, both now dead, and Pat Paris, now living abroad.
I think it was Henry Richardson who remarked that the NUM never lost, as the Big Meeting in Durham attracts more and more people every year to celebrate the NUM and the working class communities which it created and here, in Kirkby, in the heartland of the strike-breaking miners, it is the NUM that lives, not the UDM.
The evening was very ably organised by Eric Eaton and Alan Spencer from the Notts NUM Ex and Retired Miners Assocation.
Nottingham readers might want to attend the Five Leaves Bookshop commemoration on 25th April with speakers being Seamas Milne (Guardian associate editor), Harry Paterson, Keith Stanley (NUM), Bianca Todd (Left Unity) and Joyce Sheppard (Women Against Pit Closures). Full details on www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/events).

Dan Tunstall

One of the pleasures of being a small publisher is that you often get to know your authors well, sometimes making long-term friendships, sharing in their individual joys and pain as they do in yours. Sometimes the relationship is brief but intense, going quiet once the book or books in question are out of the way. Sometimes your authors die. Five Leaves has lost several writers and editors over the years. In no particular order these include Adrian Mitchell, Ray Gosling, Stanley Middleton, Walter Gregory, Richard Boston, Michael Hyde, Daniel Weissbort and Colin Ward. Leaving aside that they are all men, what they have in common is that even though some died before their time, and all are missed, none were young.
It was a shock this morning though when the agent Penny Luithlen rang to say that our author Dan Tunstall had died yesterday, it seems by his own hand. Dan had been troubled for some time, but we all hoped that he would pull through. He was only in his forties. It was a difficult conversation with Penny, who had done so much to try to help Dan. Agents, perhaps more than publishers, can get very involved with their clients.
Penny came to me some years ago about Dan. I knew her slightly. She wanted me to take a risk on a young, new writer with a challenging book about football hooliganism. I doubted we would sell a lot of copies but Penny persuaded me to take the book on on its value, but as a great agent she wanted to get Dan's career going and he needed that book to do that. In fact the sales were pretty good.
Being a book on football hooliganism it required careful editing and the three of us had great fun in a cafe counting each individual swearword and working out whether they were necessary. ("I'll trade you one XXXX for one XXXXXX."). We had to get this book right as it was his first book and because it was a difficult subject. That we did so was marked by Dan's Big and Clever being shortlisted for the Bradford Boase Award for first young adult novels. Joined by Carey, Dan's wife, we had a tremendous night out in London, which included Jacqueline Wilson being photographed with Dan, or was it the other way round? It was a real publishing highlight for us, though we did not win.
Dan's second book was Out of Towners, a young adult novel about a group of lads on their first holiday away. It was another great editing experience. We could not get the cover right, and eventually it was designed by Dan and Carey - Dan providing possibly hundreds of versions of the agreed artwork! By now Dan was doing school visits. He was particularly popular with teenage boys who could identify with his characters, and with Dan himself as Dan could with them. We were not surprised when his next book was for a bigger publisher and he then contributed to a four-author anthology with Alan Gibbons and others. Our job was done.
Though Dan continued to write, he ran into personal problems which he could not overcome, with the result we know.
Dan was great company, a talented writer and is a great loss. He was mentored by Bali Rai and had a number of other writer friends who tried, as much as they could, to support him through his difficulties which we all knew. Dan and Carey also designed the cover of Bali's book with us and Bali and Dan were close.
Most of the Five Leaves writers in the East Midlands knew Dan of course, and will join with Pippa and I in sending our condolences to Carey and the girls. This has been a sad day.

Freedom gives up on print

I haven't been a reader of Freedom since 1886, but it sometimes feels that, given there are samples of ancient back issues around the house and even some years of bound copies gathering dust. I started reading it in 1972, was an individual seller for a period and knew various contributors and editors including the late Colin Ward, Vernon Richards and Nicolas Walter, and the very much not late Dennis Gould. I particularly liked the magazine in the days when "Ian the Printer" from Margate would add his own column printed up the side of the back page, in those days when the late Arthur Moyes would also write incomprehensible art reviews. We go back a long way. I also own many Freedom Press books, one of which - Anarchy in Action - I refer people to in the bookshop if they want to read a primer on anarchism.

But all things must pass and Freedom is going online shortly. That one small magazine is going online is neither here not there in the grand scheme of things, but it is obvious from the bookshop that few people read the left press other than on line these days. I regret this immensely. I'm reprinting Freedom's statement. I guess it could easily be written by any small mag.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism first appeared in 1886 it has been in the form of a newspaper to be sold. Now the Freedom Collective has decided that we shall move content online accompanied by a freesheet after publication of the upcoming second issue of 2014. We have come to realise that a sold hardcopy newspaper is no longer a viable means of promoting the anarchist message. Despite a huge publicity boost to Freedom following the firebomb attack last year (shop sales rose 50%) there has not been a corresponding increase in distribution of the paper. Only 29 shops, social centres and individuals now sell it and the number of paying subscribers has fallen to 225. As a result annual losses now amount to £3,500, an unsustainable level for our shoestring budget.

Readers will have noticed that the paper has struggled to come out on time for some while. An underlying problem has been a lack of capacity to sustain it. We had hoped that Freedom would be adopted as THE paper of the anarchist movement. Despite a great deal of goodwill from anarchist groups and individuals over the years, sadly this has not been the case. Although Freedom Press has changed from a political group with a particular point of view to a resource for anarchism as a whole, we have not managed to shake the legacy of the past and get different groups to back it as a collective project. We hope an online version and freesheet will make that possible.

Subscribers will be offered a refund or book in lieu but we are happy to accept donations towards the costs of the new project. Charlotte Dingle will remain as editor and of course the shop, publishing and book distribution will continue as normal. As will the use of Angel Alley for meetings, events, offices, postal address and drop-in protest advice.

The print version could not have continues so long without the generosity of Aldgate Press, currently amounting to a subsidy of nearly £10,000 a year. They have very kindly agreed to print a regular freesheet/news compilation to enable us to keep in touch with our readers who don’t have the internet, and a special final edition, which will be released for the London Anarchist Bookfair in October.

Sinking Under the Surface

I know that some people have been waiting on copies of Under the Surface, our anthology of mining poetry, which was to have included work by Maria Taylor, Steve Ely, Helen Mort, Jonathan Taylor and many more including the great Idris Davies. Unfortunately we have had to abandon the book and a batch of associated readings. The editor went AWOL several months ago and we never received the text or even a final list of poems that were to be included. Apologies to contributors who have not heard from Five Leaves - we don't know what poems or poets were agreed, or what rights had been secured, other than the basic original list and chance conversations with poets at events. Had we received the text or a list of contributors we could have done something, but, despite effort, we have been left in the dark
We'll be cancelling all the shop orders and pulling the book from our lists.
Apologies

Ebook bargains!

Five Leaves produces an annual spined journal on a particular theme. They have sold well in the printed version, but only recently have we made them available as ebooks. Here's the offer:

The Maps and Utopia ebooks will be on special offer as countdown deals at Amazon's Kindle Store, at 99p each from midday on March 24^th, £1.99 from 3pm on March 26^th, then finally £2.99 from 6pm on March 28^th, reverting back to their original price of £4.99 at 10pm on 30^th March.

Alongside this special offer, the Crime ebook will be FREE at Amazon's Kindle Store for five days from midday on March 24th.

Links:

Maps: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Maps-Ross-Bradshaw-ebook/dp/B00GUNUG1O/ref=sr_1_1

Utopia: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Utopia-Ross-Bradshaw-ebook/dp/B00GUNUEBQ/ref=sr_1_2

Crime: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crime-Ross-Bradshaw-ebook/dp/B00FRMUO20/ref=sr_1_1

The "n" word

In 2006 Five Leaves republished Louis Golding's Magnolia Street, a novel of Jewish Manchester first published in 1932. The date is relevant. Ours was a straightforward - though newly typeset - reprint, with an introduction by Hugh Cecil. At the end of the introduction there is a discrete note which the layout indicates was a note from Hugh but was actually a publisher's note and should have been so described. It reads "Throughout this edition, the word 'nigger' has been changed to 'negro', 'black man' and (the Yiddish) 'schvartzer'. As used in the 1930s, the word was not so outrightly offensive as it has become in modern times. Otherwise, the original text, complete with some archaic spellings and punctuation, is unaltered."
Our edition remains in print, having occasional Manchester revivals, and will remain in print.
Today we received a complaint from a reader about the substitution. Our reader is no more a racist than Golding was at the time. Golding was simply using contemporary dialogue. Our reader - who is white, as I am - felt that it was inappropriate to alter the original text (though would have had no objection if we had included a note saying that Golding was using the language of the time). He was the first to comment on this issue out of the thousands who have read our edition, but nonetheless his views have validity. And I think they are wrong.
I accept that it would be foolish to muck around with older texts - I know that some of our reprinted novels of the 1960s include derogatory comment about "queers", I know that some of our reprinted novels used less than currently acceptable words about Travellers. I did not feel the need to change them - though would obviously think about the context and suggest appropriate changes if a modern novelist wanted to use inappropriate language as I would if someone wanted to use opaque, exclusive or academic language or, say, have working class people speaking in a stereotypical way. That is not to say that Five Leaves sets language police on our writers, these things are just everyday desk-editing.
I am not suggesting we go through Shakespeare with a fine tooth-comb, or ban Huck Finn from libraries. But there is something about the "n" word that makes me much more uncomfortable than, for example, casually racist comments about Gypsies (itself, now, a contested word) or Jews or gay people. In a previous job I dealt with - rejected - a complaint from someone about a poet referring (in a 1960s context) to the "Jewboys down the market" as she was writing in the argot of the period. Was it relevant that the poet's husband was one of the "Jewboys" in a Cardiff market? I don't know, but I rejected the complaint.
Having both Traveller and Irish and, by marriage, Jewish family connections I have heard, and challenged racists using anti-Gypsy and anti-Semitic language. I have never, personally, heard any anti-Irish comments though I know of them from family and friends. Hearing them is one thing, but would I change them in an old novel? No - I don't think so. But the "n" word trumps them all. I feel queasy typing it out earlier and I felt uncomfortable using it in a rational conversation about whether it should be used in text. And more uncomfortable that the discussion with our complainant, and another publisher (who does not share my view) was played out in the hearing of a Black person.
So, for now, while I accept the person who complained was doing so without malice, I'm standing by the original alteration. That word has blighted the lives of Black people, scarred people. I'll leave it out.

This year could be a bright one for the radical booktrade

One of the radical booktrade successes of  last year was the first London Radical Bookfair, which attracted fifty publishers and booksellers to London’s Conway Hall in May. To everyone’s surprise, and pleasure, the venue proved to be too small for the crowds and this year the Bookfair moves to Bishopsgate Institute on May 10th. There is already a longstanding Radical Bookfair in Edinburgh run by Word Power Books. In Nottingham Five Leaves Bookshop will be organising a one day event in the autumn in conjunction with the local People’s Assembly, but at the Bishopsgate event you’ll find more radical publishers and booksellers in one space than anywhere else over the year.

The Institute will also be hosting a series of radical talks leading up to the Bookfair but on the day itself the shortlisted authors for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing will be strutting their stuff. The Award itself is now in its third year and will be presented along with the Little Rebels prize for radical children’s books on the 10th. The Radical Bookfair complements the longstanding Anarchist Bookfair in October, which has consistently attracted up to 4,000 people, from a wider range of political traditions than you would expect.

The other date in the diary for leftie bibliophiles is June 1st, when one of the events celebrating the fortieth birthday of the News from Nowhere Bookshop in Liverpool is marked by a bookfair at the Bluecoat arts centre in the city.

For radical booksellers, publishers and readers the best present 2014 could bring is a general shift away from Amazon by book buyers. Last year’s Panorama programme, press reports on the firm’s employment practices, strike action in Germany and independent booksellers constantly mentioning tax dodging, all had an impact. But we still need a critical mass of people to buy their books elsewhere.

Ideally, I’d say to buy from a radical bookshop or at least an independent bookshop, but I hope 2014 will not see a further decline in the only big chain left standing, Waterstones. Last year the company sacked 200 or so managers and Christmas sales were down. I could argue about the business’s stocking policies, but at the moment the industry needs the chain to thrive and the publishing economy depends on it.

But what will radical readers read? Bookshops will be heaving with books on WW1 but I suspect most readers here will be more interested in that recent - if less bloody - war, the one between Margaret Thatcher and the National Union of Miners. There will be many books published, including our own book on Nottinghamshire, Look Back in Anger: Nottinghamshire and the Miners’ Strike - 30 years On but the one that is likely to have  the most national attention will be the new edition of Seamas Milne’s The Enemy Within (Verso).

A couple of years ago the book everyone was reading was Owen Jones’ Chavs, about the vilification of the working class by the Establishment. In September he will vilify The Establishment itself in his book to be published by Allen Lane.  There will be a lot of books out about the economy, but the one the left will read most is perhaps Richard Seymour’s Against Austerity (Pluto). Leftist readers should also look out for the paperback of The Village Against the World by Dan Hancox (Verso) about the Spanish village Marinaleda where residents have been trying to create a socialist oasis as an answer to the collapse of the Spanish economy.

As the big publishing conglomerates continue to merge, space continues to open up for smaller companies. One new company to look out for is Pimpernel, which expects to launch in the spring with a new edition of Nairn’s London. Another small independent to watch is Notting Hill Editions, dedicated to bringing back essay publishing. Their essay writers  range from right to left, but are intellectually challenging without being inaccessible. We could do with more of that.

The arts event I’m looking forward to locally, which has no specific book interest (though the exhibition catalogue and several other books by him are available at the Five Leaves Bookshop) is Jeremy Deller’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The exhibition has just ended at Manchester Arts Gallery before moving to Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery on 29th January, and then to Coventry and Newcastle. Deller’s exhibition explores industrialisation and its impact up to today, and he draws on working class culture in photography and film.

But if I could have one wish for 2014 it would be that library campaigners win, against this philistine government!

A version of this article appeared in the Morning Star on 16 January

Once again on self-publishing

From time to time I've crossed swords with self-publishers. Just to repeat - my general view is that the editorial, marketing and structural support offered by proper publishers helps. But I would say that, wouldn't I? Five Leaves - as a publisher does not feel threatened by the rise of self-publishing. Let 1000 flowers bloom and all that. But it is - generally - much harder to get self-published books reviewed, stocked in libraries and stocked in bookshops. Of course, that does not stop the occasional self-published writer selling squillions of their books outside the booktrade. Fine. Nor does that mean the Five Leaves Bookshop will never take self-published books, ones that look like proper books, are printed like proper books, are proof-read, edited, designed and written like proper books. I could even give a list of self-published books I think are as good, if not better than mainstream titles.
Unfortunately that rules out a lot of self-published work. Two small examples... a self-published book by someone I know to be a good writer... but he's kinda old fashioned, in that after every full stop he puts in an extra space. Typists used to do that on their typewriters. But not for the last three decades (I used to be a secretary, though not a good one). So my good writer friend self-publishes the book and that extra space, when the text is justified, throws out a lot of bad breaks and words like May, after a full stop, wandering about at the end of a line like it wants to escape. Shame, but any publisher would have picked that up and it makes the book look amateur.
The second is a rather nice woman who came to the bookshop with a rather nice book about a teddy going to Buckingham Palace. Leaving aside that the Bookshop is not likely to stock a book with a front cover of a teddy waving a Union Flag (as opposed to a more acceptable union flag...) we got into discussion about children's books. A short discussion as the woman had never heard of Maurice Sendak or Michael Morpurgo. Now lots of people have never heard of these two, but lots of people are not trying to write or sell children's books.
I was reminded of those who want to write poetry but never read poetry. The equivalent of wanting to be a brain surgeon while skipping doing any medical training.
Until the revolution, our landlord wants to be paid, and our workers would be pleased to get their wages most months (that's a joke, guys) so down at the Bookshop we have to make business decisions. If I think a book won't sell I might stock it, what the hell, but that is a choice. I might like the writer's work or just think the book is so important that SOMEBODY out there might pick it up. But I can't fill the shop with books I don't think will sell or are inappropriate, however much they mean to the self-published author.
Cruel, eh?

Five Leaves and Traveller books

Five Leaves has, over the years, published a handful of books by or about Travellers, and the our new bookshop has a small section devoted to Roma and other Travellers. I'll come to the books in a minute.
There are a number of ethnic groups of Travellers in the UK. Historically this has included bargees (a more or less extinct group though I've met one or two of their descendants), showmen, Irish Travellers, Scottish Travellers and Romanichals, the latter being the mainstream "Gypsy" community in Britain. Romanichals have the same origins as the Roma from Eastern Europe that have been coming here in significant numbers in recent years. It is this final group who have become the latest threat-to-civilisation-as-we-know-it. For many years their culture was suppressed under Communism, but free-market capitalism brought to the surface both age-old fears and out and out racism. The British Romani community has long been cut off from its East European equivalent and, through a degree of assimilation, or partial assimilation, and intermarriage, has lost Romani as an inflected language but still use it as a pogadi jib ("broken tongue"). There are writers of Romani background, including the novelist Louise Doughty and the poet David Morley. These two draw on their origins and use Romani words in their work. There are even more with a partial Traveller background, including a number of young adult fiction writers I know who, perhaps, have inherited the Traveller storytelling tradition.
Recent scares include the renewal of the Romani "blood libel" equivalent, that Gypsies will steal your children. The most recent of these involved two Roma families in Ireland whose "white" children were stolen by the state only to find that DNA testing showed their parents were, well, their parents.
This trope is long standing. The Nottingham (ironically, Jewish) writer Rose Fyleman - whose poetry Five Leaves published - wrote a children's book, I forget which one, which had the heroine passing a Gypsy encampment, then coming across a baby in its cot, drawing the conclusion that the Gypsies must have stolen the baby and the girl took it to the police. That the culprit was a nursemaid dallying with her boyfriend is irrelevant - the issue is that this was natural to immediately suspect Gypsies of stealing babies. I can't find my copy, but don't remember them getting an apology when they were found to be uninvolved!
If you are new to this world perhaps the best book to read is Ian Hancock's We are the Romani People (University of Hertfordshire, 2002), a basic history of the diverse Romani world. Readers of Ian's book will note that it is usually Romani children who have been stolen, enslaved and in some cases transported.
Ian himself is a Romanischal. He was from a London family but lives in America where he is a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas, one of only two English-speaking Romani professors in the world. Interestingly, he is also fluent in Yiddish, and used to teach the language. He is also fluent in the major Romani dialects.
Ian wrote the introduction to the Five Leaves book Settela, translated from Dutch by the Romani Janna Eliot. The original book is by Aad Wagenaar. Aad wanted to trace the story of a well known Dutch Holocaust image, of a young girl looking back from a train heading towards Auschwitz. Who was she, what happened to her? Assuming she was Jewish initially, Aad discovered she had been Settela Steinbach, a Sinti girl (Sintis are a particular Romani "tribe" - excuse the shorthand description). She was murdered on 31st July 1944. Aad traced her story, and those of her surviving family and their attempts to trace her fate after the war.
Janna wrote a further book for Five Leaves, Spokes, a series of short stories fictionalising true stories of individuals across the entire Traveller world, including from her own Russian musical family.
The third book is the autobiographical Beneath the Blue Skies by Dominic Reeve, a partially Romani man who literally ran away to join the Gypsies to avoid conscription. He married the Romani artist Beshlie. This book is a memoir of the 1960s, when Romanies left behind the "wagon years" as stopping places began to be closed to them and traditional trades died out, turning to automated transport and other trades such as scrap-dealing and motor repair. Dominic, now at an advanced age, is still selling compost door to door.
Publishing these books - we should have done more - and having a Traveller section in the bookshop is important to me. My mother's family were Scottish Travellers in origin, at least in part. She was born in a hamlet next door to a Romani family and my childhood was full of "Gypsy" friends. Indeed, until the age of seventeen we always had a trailer, living part of the year in it. The links are long gone, but as a nod to that past I keep an interest in the Traveller world.
As someone living in the outside world I have come across, and challenged, people referring to pikeys, to gippoes. Scottish Travellers are not a Romani ethnic group (nor are the unrelated Irish Travellers) but to hear the current vile or veiled comments by politicians and the press is an invitation to solidarity. We saw this scapegoating in the press before over the Dale Farm eviction of Irish Travellers and see it now against Roma desperate to leave a world where education, employment and in some cases access to water and sanitation is impossible for them. Scottish Travellers, in recent times, have not been persecuted, are literate and form part of the diversity of Scotland. Now, more than ever, I am pleased that we published these books and have a small, but prominent Traveller section in the bookshop.

Dreaming the impossible: Ray Gosling 1939–2013, a guest post from Jeff Cloves

The broadcaster and, for one book only, Five Leaves writer Ray Gosling had a wake last week. I turned up with the after-work contingent just in time to miss Jeff Cloves, all the way from Stroud, who'd just left. Jeff writes a regular column for Peace News, a magazine that Ray used to write for. Jeff has written this column for a forthcoming edition of PN, printed here with thanks.

The last copies of Pomona's Sum Total were given away at the wake. Five Leaves Bookshop (bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk) has a few of the Personal Copy book left, but they won't last long either.

Ray’s precocious autobiography Sum Total – first published when he was 23 by Faber – has this quote on the cover of the Pomona paperback edition published in 2004: I am for the working classes, for the underdog, for the seedy and the left behind….and the England that seemed and still seems an impossible dream.  In a dim corner of Ray's home from home, the Hard-to-find Café in Nottingham, where I attended his wake, I misread this twice: firstly as for the weedy and then as for the needy. I am certain Ray would have hurrumphed his approval of both readings and, had he been there, drunk his way to a tearfully romantic endorsement of his own life.

 

The photographs displayed told their own story too: young good-looking Ray, slight of build with attempted Tony Curtis haircut and defiant cigarette. Old Ray ravaged by  events and raging against the dying of the light. The singer-songwriter, Dan Whitehouse, came and played a couple of very touching elegiac songs. The first, composed largely from Ray’s own words with a repeated lament for ‘little Ray’, and the second prompted by Ray’s advice to Dan: ‘don’t be scared’. Perfect. 

Peace News has always attracted very good writers to contribute to its pages and in the 60s and 70s these included Ray. His first contribution may have been his magnificent piece about the Cuban missile crisis and although he never had a regular column he was an irregular contributor. He also wrote for  New Society, New Left Review, Anarchy and any other publication with space for a freelancer with unpredictable opinions. One thing I particularly liked about Ray was that he was hard to place in the orthodox Left/Right spectrum and he shed light in rarely illuminated corners. Ray was a favourite Radio 4 broadcaster who spoke his mind without pandering to 'balance'. His programme about the Keeper of the Queen's Racing Pigeons was a gem among many gems. In the 70s he somehow arranged for the rock band I was in to play an open-air gig at a St Ann’s Community festival in Nottingham. He put us up in his rambling ramshackle home and took us all out to a club in the evening. To our unsophisticated surprise it turned out to be a gay club and we loved the music there. Ray was absolutely committed to the ideals of mutual aid, community, and Gay rights. He lived up to all of them. His voice belonged to what increasingly feels like a lost golden age of BBC radio.

Ray never answered letters but wrote to me once after reading a piece of mine in PN in which I mentioned, in passing, shopping in London for yellow socks. Like the pigeons, the socks caught his endless fancy. He was eternally interested in 'the left behind' and fought tirelessly to preserve the St Ann’s area of Nottingham from the worst of ruthless clearance. On the radio his unmistakable regional voice was a rare treat among the very few: John Arlott, Andy and Liz Kershaw, Pam Ayres. There are still too few. In 1980 Faber published his memoir of the sixties Personal Copy which Nottingham's excellent Five Leaves Publications published as a paperback edition in 2010. Like Sum Total it deserves to be widely read. Both books reveal that note of grumbling optimism which distinguished his radio broadcasts and how desperately we need that tone now.

I never got round to posting on that Sunday, but here's an event on Wednesday instead

Five Leaves presents:
‘Liberation in the 1960s?’
with Phil Cohen
Wednesday 4th December, 7pm, Housmans Bookshop, Kings Cross
Entry £3, redeemable against any purchase

Phil Cohen, author of ‘Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile’ (Five Leaves 2013) will talk about his involvement with various movements of the 1960s, including the mass squat of the Queen Mother's house at 144 Piccadilly with the London Street Commune, taking LSD with RD Laing, the early days of the Situationists, setting up Street Aid... and assorted run-ins with the police and gangsters.

In his memoir ‘Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile’, Phil Cohen, alias Dr John of the London Street Commune, and erstwhile Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London, re-traces his chequered career from blitz kid to public school dropout, from hippy squatter to cultural theorist, and from urban ethnographer to poet, through his obsession with books.

The first part of the memoir provides a vivid account of wt it was like to grow up in Bloomsbury in the late 1940s and ’50s and how its famous squares, buildings  and local characters  influenced  his imaginative life.  He describes  how he created  an alternative identity centred on his own  personal ‘reading room’ in counterpoint to the official  success story he was supposed to be,  as he rebels against the  ethos  of his  public school, with  its traditional emphasis on Classics and negotiates the  fraught identity politics of being a Jewish  ‘mitschling’.

The memoir goes on to detail the author’s  adventures as he goes up to Cambridge  to read History, runs away to sea  and then  becomes involved in the ‘underground’ counter culture  emerging in the London during the so called ‘swinging sixties’. Books were  at the forefront of his activities, whether ‘liberating’ them from bookshops, gluing them together in a situationist provocation against bourgeois culture,  or setting fire to them in an ‘event structure’  by artist John Latham.

The author relates how the British Museum Reading Room provided a much needed port in the political storm stirred up by his activities as a leader of the ‘hippy squatters’ at 144 Piccadilly in 1969,  helping him resume his  studies whilst continuing to  engage in radical  community politics over  the next decade.  Part One concludes with some observations about the culture of the reading room itself, discusses   ten books that shook the author’ world and  the impact of  new technologies of research linked to  the opening of the British Library at St Pancras.

The second half of the memoir  explores the  author’s life long love affair with books, and situates this consuming passion  in  relation to the issues   raised by  Walter Benjamin in his famous essay ‘On Unpacking a library’.  The author considers what books might have to say about how  they are  treated if they were allowed a voice; he goes on to  discuss  the place of collecting in a ‘throwaway society’ and  details   the strategies, both rational and irrational, that informed his  project of building a personal library. A concluding section  celebrates the pleasures of browsing, and  speculates about   what keeps bibliophiles acquiring books right up to the end.

Phil Cohen is also author of ‘On the Wrong Side of the Track? East London and the Post Olympics’ (Lawrence and Wishart, 2013)