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

Books of the Year (those not published by Five Leaves)

It's been a decent year for reading, with two or three let downs by some favourite writers. Solar by Ian McEwan did not excite me, but was not as dull as the Booker-winning The Story of an Ending by Julian Barnes, which ending came mercifully soon. The year started off well though, with Colm Tobin's novel of migration, Brooklyn (Penguin), which I'd been looking forward to, followed immediately by the late Tony Judt's book of essays/memories Memory Chalet (Heinemann). One week of January gone and I knew these two would be in my top ten reads of the year. I'm a big fan of essays, or occasional pieces, which brought Ian Hamilton's The Troubles with Money and Other Essays (Bloomsbury) and Damn Fools and Utopia by the late Nicolas Walter (PM Press) into my top ten. I'll ignore that part of Hamilton's book which is about football. The last essay in Walter's book (thinking of Judt) was written while he was dying, and is about dying, and is worth the cover price alone, the rest are about the 1960s. Four of this year's top ten are related to East Europe. I re-read John LeCarre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - probably for the third or fourth time - and it remains outstanding. This year's Booker longlist included two East European-based novels. Snowdrops by AD Miller (Atlantic) is set in the mafia state of modern Russia and is terrifying. This made the shortlist, while The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuiness (Seren) dropped out at the longlist stage, though I think it is a better book. The last hundred days are those of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, with the narrator being a young English lecturer living there. The publicity made a huge difference to the sales of this previously ignored book from an indie press, which is good news. The only East European book by an East European that made this chart was not new, the Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Norton). At 1,000+ large format pages this is not something for a quiet evening at home but it is complete, with different versions of some of his short stories. His murder, in 1940, makes me impotently angry.
The last two of the top ten, which is, by the way, in random order, includes that "travel writing" classic Naples '44 by Norman Lewis (Eland), which I'll re-read soon. It reminds me very much of Alexander Baron's writing on the British occupation of Italy. Finally, one large photographic book, Ida Kar: bohemian photographer (National Portrait Gallery) - the only book here with a Five Leaves' connection, as her subjects included our writers Laura Del-Rivo, Bernard Kops and Terry Taylor. Their images also appeared in a terrific Kar retrospective at the NPG.
I'd also like to give an honourable mention to Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs by DD Johnson (AK Press), a rollicking novel of life in the international anarchist direct action movement.
Seven of this year's top ten, plus the runner up, were from independent presses (hurrah!) but only one by a woman (shame). Most, but not all, were published this year.

New from Five Leaves: The Furnished Room

The second of our "Beats, bums and bohemians" series is now in our office - though not yet in shops or Amazon. It can be ordered for immediate supply though on

http://tinyurl.com/furnishedroom. Laura Del-Rivo's classic bed-sitter novel was first published 50 years ago - as were the others in the series, see the post below and wait patiently for a posting about Colin Wilson's Adrift in Soho. This was turned into the film West 11 by, um, Michael Winner starring Alfred Lynch as the main male character Joe and Kathleen Breck as the good-time girl Isla. The cast also included Dianna Dors. I imagine this is the only Five Leaves connection we'll ever have to Dors or Winner! The Joe in question lives in the wasteland between Notting Hill and Earl's Court, when not hanging around all-night cafes and other seedy joints. While doing so he stumbles across the opportunity to commit a murder.

Laura Del-Rivo has worked the markets at Portobello Road for decades now and, like Terry Taylor - mentioned below - had a portrait in the recent Ida Kar exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Ida Kar exhibition

"Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, 1908-1974", an exhibition showing at the National Portrait Gallery until 19 June, is well worth visiting (www.npg.org.uk/kar). Kar's portraits are primarily of painters (including, for example, Man Ray) and writers (the young Iris Murdoch, for example) but some of her pictures from Armenia - where she was born - Cuba and elsewhere are included, together with some memorabilia. Five Leaves' interest is in her photographs of Bernard Kops, Terry Taylor and Laura Del-Rivo, pictured here, as well as others in their circle including Colin MacInnes. Kops has long been a Five Leaves' writer (and is the model for Mannie Katz in MacInnes' Absolute Beginners) while Terry Taylor's only book, Baron's Court, All Change, resurfaces on our New London Editions list later this year. Taylor, whose life MacInnes drew on in his fiction, appears twice in Kar's exhibition. In one he is shown as her assistant, in the background, in another solo portrait he appears listening to jazz records on what looks like a Dansette. The NPG holds many other portraits of Taylor, many showing him getting happily wrecked on what was in that era called "charge". Laura Del-Rivo's first novel, The Furnished Room, comes out later this year as well, also in New London Editions. It would have been nice to have had them around during Kar's exhibition. Both Taylor's and Del-Rivo's books included Kar's portraits on first publication, as they will in ours in November.

Call the Kops

Just had a long, catch up call with our writer Bernard Kops. Bernard is currently working on a novel, getting up at 5.00am (5.30 at weekends) to write for a few hours. If you read his Five Leaves' autobiography, The World is a Wedding, he seems to be an unlikely prospect to still be working at 84, or even alive. He managed to avoid being bombed in the Blitz, but it was close, but it was getting bombed with the other meaning that almost saw him off. His career has been up and down, to say the least. Bernard's conversation is always good value. One minute he's off on Colin MacInnes (Bernard and Erica Kops appeared, thinly disguised, in Absolute Beginners), the next he's describing his April visit to the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies to read his poem on Yuri Gagarin, which he presented to Gagarin in 1961, at their recent celebration of 50 years since Gagarin's space flight. Bernard said he was astonished to be invited as he had not thought of the poem for fifty years.
Bernard has the knack of being everywhere and knowing everyone, for example the cover of The World Is a Wedding is a portrait of him by Ida Kar (currently being exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery). Kops fans can book the date of Monday 28 November to celebrate his 85th birthday at the Jewish Museum in London, but he's usually out and about, reading. He rarely turns down an invitation!