A sack of post

Today was just like Xmas, with a sack of post from friends and (literary) family of Five Leaves. The biggest box comprised returns from the bookstall at the Jewish studies Xmas Limmud conference, which answers the question of what some Jews do for Xmas. They buy some Five Leaves' books in breaks from their conference. I also received the programme for Jewish Book Week (www.jewishbookweek.com), which I'm a bit grumpy about as JBW did not ask the biggest publisher of Jewish books outside London (that's Five Leaves) if we had anything new. But I'll get over it, and the programme has some good features, including our local Dickens' nut Michael Eaton on Fagin, and old Bernard Kops is there with his new David Paul book. One to avoid is Colin Shindler and Nick Cohen lashing themselves into an intellectual frenzy about how the left is anti-Semitic. But there is good stuff in the programme.
Colin Ward - no stranger to this blog - is the subject of a special issue of Anarchist Studies (in stock at Housmans). Anarchist Studies is a spined journal edited by Ruth Kinna, who has appeared at our States of Independence and Lowdham Book Festival. In the same post was was the "Wardist" journal The Land, which I hope is also on sale in Housmans. The last journal in the post was a recent issue of Tribune, which included a nice review of one of our Cable Street books. Trib has been struggling of late, so do buy it when you see it. A few days into the new year and I'm already behind with my reading, but it was kind of London Books (www.london-books.co.uk) to swap some of our London titles for their new reprints of John Sommerfield's May Day and Simon Blumenfeld's Jew Boy, the latter having an introduction from our friend and author Ken Worpole. I must say that London Editions produces some very attractively-designed, and affordable, hardbacks.
The final batch of post comprised booking forms for stalls at our next States of Independence day event in Leicester, on March 17. I'll post about this soon, but stalls are booking nicely and the programme is coming together.