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

London Radical Bookfair interim report

In 1991 I wrote an article for Tribune. concerned that the number of radical bookshops in Britain had fallen to close to a hundred. Innocent that I was, not thinking that the next decade would wipe out most of those shops - the economic and political impact of Thatcherism bringing radical bookselling and publishing to a low ebb.
About three years ago a group of us associated with Housmans Bookshop in London noticed that sales had picked up and that there was a new interest in radical books, particularly those trying to explain the economic crisis. There was a spring in the step of radical publishing not seen for a while, and attendances were picking up at events. Out of those discussions came the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, the first organisation for many years, operating on a light touch basis. We discussed, and set up the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. We - the Trustees being Nik Gorecki at Housmans and Mandy Vere at News from Nowhere in Liverpool - wanted to encourage radical publishers, to encourage radical writers and to encourage the commercial sector to value radical writing. Following the prize-giving social at the first year, the idea developed that it would be useful to provide a forum for the shortlisted writers to discuss their work in front of an audience... some events... and why not have a small bookfair around that discussion?
By now other publishers were becoming interested, though nothing yet was firm. Various cheap and unsuitable premises were discussed. We were keen not to be in competition with the longstanding  London Anarchist Bookfair held every autumn. The Anarchist Bookfair had weathered the downturn and - more than that - had flourished to become  major event, but we wanted a bookfair that would appeal to a wider audience - socialists, greens, radicals of all sorts - including anarchists. The London Radical Bookfair idea was developing... Suddenly one of the group discussing the project indicated he knew of a Trust that might help, a bigger venue was found, Conway Hall, and the idea took off.
At this stage difficult family commitments got in my way, Andrew Burgin became overwhelmed by the growth of his and his partner Kate Hudson's Left Unity initiative and Nik Gorecki at Housmans found himself with a looming bookfair on his hands. With Zen-like calm, and the support of Michael Gilligan, also from Housmans, stalls were booked and publicity started. Around this time the Bread and Roses Award changed to include the Little Rebels Award, organised by the Letterbox Library. There would now be a bookfair, events and two awards. But would people turn up, with next to no advertising budget, no dedicated staff, half the expected organisers gone AWOL? On Saturday the answer was a resounding YES.
Here's the evidence:

This is only a partial view of the main hall. Elsewhere there were meetings with the Bread and Roses shortlisted writers, the food area and the bar... and the usual milling about and conversations outside the main area.
There were stalls from the London radical bookshops, Housmans, Newham Bookshop, Bookmarks and others; distributors including Turnaround and Active; publishers including Pluto, Merlin, Verso down to smaller outfits like Five Leaves; trendy young things whose books I could not understand and wizened veterans selling heavy duty texts. Fifty stalls in all - including the one below, offering hundred year old copies of Arbeiter Fraynt, the Yiddish anarchist periodical banned by the British Government during WWI.

What was encouraging was the level of interest and the absence of sectarianism. There was a collection at the end with half the proceeds going towards a radical bookfair next year and half to the anarchist Freedom Bookshop, rebuilding after an arson attack. People warmly welcomed the speaker from Freedom at the plenary closing event as much as they did the children's writers from the Little Rebels prize. I was MCing the plenary and got a big ovation for the main organiser Nik Gorecki, who was of course busy on some practical thing elsewhere in the building so never heard it. But he and his colleagues at Housmans deserve all our thanks. Radical bookselling is on the move again. And I'm pleased to say that Housmans itself is doing well.
I'll shortly post a report on the Bread and Roses/Little Rebel award winners, and put down some thoughts on how the radical bookfair might continue. It is many years since the old socialist bookfairs, and the third world and black bookfairs so we have a fairly clean slate. This is exciting.

A hundred years of radical bookselling in 800 words

“A huge comrade called Boris...” 

Radical bookselling has a long history. In Nottingham there was a freethought bookshop in 1826. It had to fight for its survival against a daily picket, during which the shop was broken open and attempts were made to drag out the proprietor, Mrs Susannah Wright. So successful was the shop, in seeing off the local Committee for the Suppression of Vice, that the rather brave Mrs Wright was able to move to larger premises.

The early days of radical booksellers did not have it easy but although there were physical bookshops, such as The Advanced Bookstore in Liverpool which, in 1906, advertised “socialistic, labour, trade union and freethought” books, most sales were hand to hand. Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists describes the Clarion socialists coming to Mugsborough (Hastings) by cycle and by van “and selling penny pamphlets, of which they managed to dispose of about three dozen” having initially been run out of town. Fortunately other places were more receptive and socialist paperbacks (in circulation long before Allen Lane invented Penguin in 1935) sold by the tens of thousands.

The first bookshop chains in the UK were started by the Communist Party, with their Modern Books, People's Bookshops, Thames Bookshops and others. These shops spread way beyond the CP's industrial heartlands to market towns such as King's Lynn and Gloucester. The CP did know how to sell - in 1946 Key Books in Birmingham wrote that in the previous five years they had distributed over two million pamphlets and periodicals, with a sale of £50,000, then a huge sum of money. Looking back, it is easy to mock the books that CP shops actually sold, as Nancy Mitford did in The Pursuit of Love, where “...Linda worked in a Red bookshop... run by a huge, perfectly silent comrade called Boris” as she gradually changed the stock, replacing Whither British Airways with Round the World in 40 Days. 

Come the 1960s and 70s the Communist Party shops were in decline, replaced by a new generation of radical outfits. The politics were avant garde, libertarian, utopian and while the life of some, like Beautiful Stranger in Rochdale, was short, News from Nowhere in Liverpool will be celebrating its 39^th birthday on May 1^st.

Many of these shops were run collectively, influenced by feminism and black liberation, and by personal growth movements. Notice boards – find one of them in Waterstones! - were as likely to advertise a circle dance group as a demonstration against the National Front. Some shops saw Henry Miller as radical, drawing inspiration from the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco but by and large feminism kept the boys in check.

In 1982, The Other Branch in Leamington brought out a pamphlet describing its first ten years during which the shop moved from being a hippie haunt, complete with the late 60s paraphernalia of king-size Rizla papers, to being a serious bookshop. The best sellers during those years were The Herb Book; The Golden Notebook (fiction by Doris Lessing); The Bean Book (vegetarian cooking); The Massage Book; Protest and Survive (anti-nuclear); The Very Hungry Caterpillar (children's book); Woman on the Edge of Time (feminist fiction by Marge Piercy); The Prophet by Kahil Gibran); Guide to Growing Marijuana; and Guide to British Psylocybin Mushrooms. It is easy to mock these idealist days too but this – fairly representative – example of one bookshop's sales prefigured the interest in healthy living and green concerns. These shops were influential within the biggest protest movement since the 1930s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and survived under constant pressure from the far right and occasional raids from the police over political or gay books. Some shops were firebombed, staff members were attacked and, just as Mrs Wright found in 1826, lots of people did not like radical bookshops but many people did.

In 1991 I wrote an article for Tribune expressing concern that the number of radical bookshops had fallen to 114, never thinking that the number would shrink drastically. There were often obvious reasons for closures – SisterWrite and Silver Moon did not survive the waning of the feminist movement; in Norwich Freewheel was left isolated by traffic changes; in Manchester Grassroots developed a reputation of being “holier than thou”. High rents saw off others. But what changed was that there were few openings, fewer people prepared to work long hours for fairly low pay. The wheel is now turning. There are a few new shops, the London anarchist bookfair is attracting record numbers and on May 11^th there will be a radical bookfair in London, associated with the new Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.