Alexander Baron goes electric

http://tinyurl.com/kingdido-ebook andhttp://tinyurl.com/rosiehogarth-ebookFive Leaves two Alexander Baron books are now available as ebooks, details below:

http://tinyurl.com/kingdido-ebook and http://tinyurl.com/rosiehogarth-ebook

Baron in the news again

Alexander Baron continues to rise. Here's Iain Sinclair on Alaxander Baron on Open Book, for as long as it lasts on Play it again, Sam, while Tribune has included an interview with me, about London books including Baron. The actual Trib page is not on line, but the article appears complete on the magazine's author's blog: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011tw7z#synopsis, http://benbrill.tumblr.com/post/6182121621/interview-with-ross-bradshaw-five-leaves-publishing

Books of the year, from indie presses

Deciding to put my money where my mouth was, in 2010 I only read books from independent presses. Excluding thin volumes of poetry, and children's picture books, I read 61 books. This is down on a normal year - Five Leaves' annual report (see last posting) makes it clear why. The year is not quite over but I know that the books I am due to read by the end of the year will not make it into my top ten, as they are for background research. I should confess the number does include three books from conglomerates - a William Trevor book I read to settle an argument (don't ask), a Stanley Middleton novel, because I wanted to remind myself what he was like and The Time Traveller's Wife, because I had to lead a discussion on it. There are some very big independents here - Bloomsbury being the most obvious, but they are members of the Independent Publishers' Guild, and Quercus. But I did say indies, not small indies. Here's my top ten - in no particular order. Not all were published in 2010.
* Bringing it all back home - Ian Clayton (Route) - a memoir of music, and working class life in Featherstone
* Just my type: a book about fonts - Simon Garfield (Profile) - stories about typesetting
* Once upon a country - Sari Nusseibeh (Halban) - Israel and Palestine, Nussebeibeh lives in East Jerusalem, and I read his book while staying down the road from his mother
* Even the dogs - Jon McGregor (Bloomsbury) - a novel, by the best fiction writer in the East Midlands
* The lowlife - Alexander Baron (Black Spring) - Hackney Jewish life in the 1960s, round the dog track
* Before the earthquake - Maria Allen (Tindall Street) - another Nottingham novelist. Her first novel, set in rural Italy a century ago
* A bookman's tale - Ronald Blythe (Canterbury) - not his best set of essays but many are still excellent
* Millennium Trilogy - Steig Larsson (Quercus) - cheating I know, but I read them one after another
* Common Cause - Francis Combes trans. Alan Dent (Smokestack) - the story of communism, in verse, on the basis that next time we'll do it better
* Depresso - Brick (Knockabout) - a graphic novel on depression; read it twice to spot the visual gags scattered throughout
runner up - White Tiger - Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)

Did I feel that I missed out by only reading books by indie presses for a year? Not really. But I would have read, and will soon start Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet, Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and Stanley Middleton's posthumous A Cautious Approach. And, gritting my teeth, I'd better read The Finkler Question.

Hackney Limmud

Limmuds (or more correctly limmudim, I suppose) are something-for-everyone Jewish study days. Sessions can be academic, religious, political, controversial or about puppets (though I can't actually recall anything about puppets, but you get the picture). There is a big national one held over the Christmas break - what else are Jews supposed to do for Christmas? - and local ones all over the country now. I'm just back from Hackney, one of my favourites as the attendance tends to be a bit more alternative, a bit poorer, a bit more varied, a bit more working class and a lot more secular - though our stall was next to Lubavitch, which we and they found amusing. Our stall had the new print of the great Hackney Jewish novel Rain on the Pavements and Ken Worpole was talking again about Alexander Baron, that great Hackney novelist, so we did a bit more than cover the train fare. I've never been to a big Jewish event without seeing Janel Levin from Jewish Renaissance, who must be the hardest working magazine editor ever.
Sadly our little green "truck" - veteran of many a bookstall - is off to landfill. Overloaded as always, dropping it off a bus did not help. I blame Boris Johnson.

When Rosie met Roland

This autumn's crop of New London Editions' titles has arrived and is being sent out even as we speak. Just in time - thank goodness - for tomorrow's sold out event at Bishopsgate Library. We changed the cover of Rosie Hogarth at the last minute as our earlier version looked like a 20s' flapper rather than a post-war modern woman which we think we now have. This is our second Alexander Baron. Our first, King Dido, is still getting reviews - the latest being in Stone Stories, the newsletter of Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. Howard Jacobson must be shaking with jealousy.
The other New London Editions titles are both by Roland Camberton - the long awaited reprints of Scamp and Rain on the Pavements.
I've mentioned before that Camberton (Henry Cohen in real life) was one of the mysteries of British publishing. Iain Sinclair introduces Scamp by describing his decades' long search for information on this mysterious writer. But we have trumped him by including an image of Camberton, and here it is. The painting is by Julia Rushbury and the photograph is by her son, Dominic Ramos. Thanks to both.

Not forgotten after all

Anyone reading this tempted to go to the Five Leaves/Newham Bookshop event on 21st October at the Bishopsgate Institute about "Forgotten London Writers" need to know that the writers in question - Alexander Baron, Roland Camberton, John Henry Mackay and George Gissing - are less than forgotten, as the event is sold out already. Or it might be the attractive line up of speakers, Iain Sinclair, Andrew Whitehead, Sarah Wise and Ken Worpole. Either way a sell out is a sell out and we are pleased with that. As people are still trying to book - my copy of the Bishopsgate programme only arrived this morning - we are trying to persuade the speakers to go for a rerun. We'll post information on that if it goes ahead, but meantime you might want to put your name on a list at Bishopsgate or better still get on their mailing list for their excellent programme of events, www.bishopsgate.org.uk

The Year of Alexander Baron

We are very pleased to see that Black Spring has published two classic Alexander Baron books, From the City, From the Plough and The Lowlife. Both were high on our wants list for New London Editions but we are not complaining, and wish Black Spring the best for these editions. From the City... is generally regarded as being one of the best novels about WWII, while The Lowlife is a great book about one of the Jewish characters who did not take the north west passage, continuing to live in Hackney, still gambling down the dog tracks. Black Spring also promise the release of Baron's book of war short stories, The Human Kind, next spring. A tremendous book. Meanwhile we have just received Andrew Whitehead's introduction to Alaxander Baron's Rosie Hogarth, due out in October from Five Leaves, to add to our King Dido. More on that one later.

King Dido book launch

Bethnall Green Library had a pretty full house for the launch of a new edition of Alexander Baron's King Dido, the first of the Five Leaves' grand(iose) sounding New London Editions. We were pleased that Alexander Baron's widow, Dolores, was present. The evening was introduced by Nick Baron, his son (and occasionally interrupted by the author's six week old grandson, attending his first book launch) and Ken Worpole, who wrote the introduction to the book. Ken did a lot to bring attention back to Alexander Baron by writing about him in Dockers and Detectives -also now published by Five Leaves. Nick and Ken are pictured.

Ken read a short extract from King Dido, but his talk also included part of a home recording of Alexander Baron being interviewed by Ken some years back.

There is a modest renewal of interest in Baron, once one of this country's best-selling writers. Five Leaves is publishing Rosie Hogarth next year in New London Editions, with an introduction by Andrew Whitehead while Black Spring is due to republish From the City, From the Plough and The Lowlife.

Many people there were curious to see wall carvings in the library of William Morris, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and... Richard Wagner. But nobody knew why the unlikely composer was included. Maybe the chair of the then library committee was a fan?

Bethnal Green - since you ask - was the setting for King Dido, the story taking place in the criminal underworld of 1911 in "Rabbit Marsh".