Radical bookselling update and prospects

The big debate in the general booktrade - featured heavily in the Guardian - is about whether the day of the celebrity biography has finally come to an end or is simply slowing down. At the other end of the spectrum even commercial publishers have started noticing that left wing books sell, and sell well, with Allen Lane publishing The Establishment by Owen Jones. This book topped the Christmas best-seller charts at Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop and at News from Nowhere in Liverpool, coming second at Housmans in London only to Housmans' own annual Peace Diary, despite it being a £16.99 hardback. Allen Lane, the top end of the Penguin empire, also published Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, the one book that really might have an impact on climate change and a book which places the blame for climate change right where it belongs - with capitalism.

Five Leaves has just completed its first full year trading as an independent and radical bookshop. Looking at our December best-sellers, ten of the top fifteen were political books. The only novel was John Harvey's Darkness, Darkness which was set during the miners' strike of thirty years ago and in modern times. Indeed, three of the fifteen were related to the miners' strike. The strike remains a defining part of our common history. We're pleased with our first year, but just as pleased that News from Nowhere had a record Yuletide and a record year. The publicity around their fortieth birthday helped as did the unfortunate closure of a Waterstones' branch in the same street. Many people, in person and online prefer to "shop with the real Amazons" at this women-run bookshop. The radical book-trade is nothing if not tenacious! News From Nowhere, London's Gay's the Word and Housmans are positively venerable; Wordpower in Edinburgh and the two anarchist distributors Active Distribution and AK Distribution have passed out of their teenage years but there is a range of younger projects that seem to be sustaining themselves. All strive to be part of their local community, working with campaign and other groups. It can only be positive that members of the Alliance of Radical Booksllers are sprinkled around the country - it's not a London-centric membership. 

AK Distribution report that their best selling titles includes books on feminism and economics and in Scotland Wordpower had large sales for books related to the Scottish referendum. Another trend is the renewed interest in "people's history". In Nottingham Chris Richardson's City of Light, a book about radical life in the city in the year of 1844 has sold over 500 copies while Spokesman Books and Merlin Press offer a different history of World War One that that pursued by our Government. For those of us keen on pamphlets it is s good to see Stop the War Coalition's pamphlet on WWI, No Glory. People will read pamphlets if they are stocked by bookshops - something commercial bookshops are loathe to do. Five Leaves is a publisher turned bookseller and having a shop has enabled us to return to being a pamphleteer too. Our first two titles will be available shortly, one being a forgotten essay by Edward Said on Jerusalem, sadly as appropriate now as when first written, the second on the Communist Doctor Who writer, Malcolm Hulke, whose existence we came across in the Morning Star!

Radical bookshops are not the only side of the business with claims to venerability. Merlin Press will shortly be sixty and its publishing arm is run in tandem with Global Book Marketing, representing many publishers from home and abroad while the main distributor of radical publishers and magazines, Central Books, has been in business since 1939. Nobody rests on their laurels though, and the Russell Press (set up in the heady days of 1968) has been at the forefront of digital printing and reports more and more groups using this affordable technology to publish local and people's histories.

Bookshops, publishers, distributors, printers... and prizes and bookfairs. The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing is four in 2015 and will be funded by the General Federation of Trade Unions while in Nottingham the mini-festival of the same name was established in November also with trade union support. The number of local anarchist bookfairs continues to grow while the London Radical Bookfair is now the major date for the whole radical booktrade to come together. This year the Bookfair will again be at the Bishopsgate Institute, on 9th May.

So what are the big radical titles going to be for 2015? We too are finding a lot of interest in feminism, especially from young women, but the publishers are a bit slow to catch up. An exception is the short book We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Green MP Caroline Lucas should get a lot of attention in March with her Honorouble Friends? discussing her work inside and outside of Parliament while Paul Mason's Post Capitalism will be a summer best seller. Looking at the lists of dedicated left wing publishers, Pluto is bringing out David Rosenberg's Rebel Footprints, a walking guide to the capital for lefties, due in March (the author first got to know he byways of London as Central Books' van driver) while the Verso paperback of A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros might enable us to think about walking without, you know, actually doing it.

And Five Leaves? Well, there is the small matter of an election coming. One of our big books in 2014 was Harry Paterson writing on Nottinghamshire during the miners' strike where, among other things he discussed the UDM. In 2015 we are letting him loose on the the political equivalent of a scab union, UKIP, with We Need to Talk About Nigel. We could hardly not.

A shorter version of this article will appear in the Morning Star

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

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

39 years of News from Nowhere

I was pleased to be part of the Liverpool radical bookshop News from Nowhere's 39th birthday party, where we had an evening session based on the Five Leaves' book Utopia. The book featured a long history of the bookshop by Mandy Vere, who has been at NfN for 37 of those years. I worked in a radical bookshop for seventeen years, indicating some lack of commitment issues compared to Mandy. Indeed, the other four paid staff at the bookshop look like they'll eventually get a gold watch too. Gillian Darley also spoke, on the utopian Moravian community (from her chapter in the book) and other self-organised utopian communities and the local philanthropically-built Port Sunlight. We were interested to hear, from the audience, about some local housing schemes in Liverpool that are being self-organised, particularly in areas of high Irish-background occupancy, as a counter to the desperate economic situation people are in.
The event was also supposed to have Alun Parry singing utopian songs, but a family illness kept him away, with the wonderful Tayo Aluko (from Call Mr Robeson) depping at the last moment.
My own contribution - aside from talking about the contents of the book - was to draw out some strands from major utopian novels. Attitudes to decision-making and money, for example, in Thomas More's Utopia (actually, if NfN is really utopian the workers would scorn gold watches when the time arrives, as in Utopia gold was considered worthless metal and used only for cheap jewelry and chamber pots). News from Nowhere itself was written in response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward - if socialism comes. Re-reading Bellamy I was impressed how many of his ideas came about. He predicted the credit card, that could be used internationally, and he called it "a credit card". His vision of retail was based on the model that Argos and, to some extent, Amazon use. He suggested a personal economic system which looked like the citizen's income idea popular in the Green Party, and some of the centralised services that did come about in the Soviet bloc.
News from Nowhere was, of course, more libertarian, more rural, more feminist, more child-centred... but re-reading the book I was aware it was written just a few years before William Morris died, after an exhausting political, artistic and personal life. The book opens with "William Guest" after an evening "Up at the [Socialist] League" wanting to know what would happen "on the Morrow of the Revolution". Guest remarks "If I could be see a day of it... If I could but see it". The book is Morris's attempt to envisage such a future, but re-reading it the repeated call of "If I could but see it" felt like a cry of pain from someone who knew he would not see the socialism he so worked for.
I mentioned in passing Marge Piercy's utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time, but Mandy remembered Piercy's Body of Glass where she wrote about something very close to the internet. Utopian novels have a habit of predicting the future.
What of course few would have predicted 39 years ago was that News from Nowhere would still be around, in a building owned by the workers-cooperative, a bit chaotic but buzzing with activity from groups as diverse as the Woodcraft Folk (meeting elsewhere in the building) and those running a vegan cafe on Saturdays.
Happy birthday, News from Nowhere

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.

Utopia, new from Five Leaves

One of 2012's forgotten anniversaries is that this is the year that the visitor goes to London, fifty years after the revolution and is led around by Old Hammond. The revolution in question being the one predicted in William Morris's News from Nowhere. Our collection of essays is never far away from this area - indeed Morris himself has a chapter, there is a history of News from Nowhere bookshop and we reprint the lyrics of Leon Rosselson's song about William Morris. The chapters on utopian fiction of course include a discussion of News from Nowhere and we mention the pubs named after William Morris in a revolutionary pub crawl. Utopia is dedicated to our friend Peter Preston, whose long essay on London utopian fiction is included. Peter will be missed by the adult education movement, the William Morris Society, the DH Lawrence Society and many individuals.

Utopia is the second annual themed compendium of writing by Five Leaves’ authors and friends. 240 pages, £9.99. The first compendium, Maps, received positive reviews in the Guardian and Time Out.

Copies will be in the shops soon - Housmans, News from Nowhere, London Review Bookshop especially, or order, post free, from Inpress

Contents:

Mike Marqusee - Let's Talk Utopia
Ken Worpole - Tolstoy in Essex
Gillian Darley - Moravian Graveyards
John Payne - The Putney Debates
William Morris - A Factory as it Might Be
Colin Ward - The Factory We Never Had
Mandy Vere - News from Nowhere Bookshop
John Lucas - In New Zealand
Chris Moss - In Paraguay
Deirdre O'Byrne - Woman on the Edge of Time
Paul Barker - New Lanark
Marie Louise Berneri - Utopias of the Nineteenth Century
Dennis Hardy - Catching the Bus to Paradise
Paul Summers - The Shadow of Chimneys
Pippa Hennessy - Keeping it in the Family
Leon Rosselson - The World Turned Upside Down
Ian Parks - Welsh Utopia
David Rosenberg - Freedom Without Territory
J. David Simons - Kibbutz: The Golden Era
Will Buckingham - The Trouble with Happiness
Andy Rigby - Communes Revisited
Ross Bradshaw - Down the Pub
Jeff Cloves - Stroud and Whiteway
Ian Clayton - My Grandmother's Kitchen
Peter Preston - Dreaming London
Haywire Mac - The Big Rock Candy Mountain
240 pages, £9.99, from bookshops or, post free (UK) from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/utopia/

Radical bookshops' history

Some parts of one's past keep creeping back... After seventeen years hard labour in a radical bookshop, together with a couple of years on the board of another shop, and thousands of pounds spent on the written works of utopian dreamers and other such reprobates, it is hard to get away. Dave Cope, of Left on the Shelf - the second hand specialists - and I have put together an incomplete listing of radical bookshops in history, together with a bibliography of books, and even passing mentions in fiction, of radical bookshops. You can find the current listings on http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/. We are now trying to make that list as complete as we can, so any information would be welcome.

To accompany the site, I've started work on a more narrative history of radical bookshops, which will appear as a printed booklet sometime next year. With the Five Leaves Ship of State to run this will not be the last word on radical bookselling history, but it might encourage others to write something more substantial. I'd appreciate contact with anyone who has worked in radical bookselling in the past, any sources of records, any customer tales, photographs. Anything. Please send direct to me on info@fiveleaves.co.uk.

The new 2011 edition of North West Labour History Journal includes an article on the history of News from Nowhere in Liverpool, written by Mandy Vere, the matriarch of the shop. Copies are available from News from Nowhere. The bookshop pictured here is Radish, in Leeds, one of the new generation of radical shops. Both News from Nowhere and Radish, by the way, have excellent sections devoted to world music, as well as books.

Reasons to be cheerful

Just when you think things can't get much worse, they get a bit better. It was a great pleasure to attend (and speak at) the Chapter and Verse book festival seminar on radical bookselling. Some of the old lags were there - Mandy Vere, the matriarch of Liverpool's News from Nowhere; Dave Cope veteran of the old Communist Party shops Progressive Books in Liverpool and Central Books in London, still on the board of the distributor Central Books and owner of Left on the Shelf, an Internet supplier of second hand socialist books. But there were also new arrivals, from the exciting new People's Bookshop in Durham, which mixes second hand and new, from the Book Bloc, whose shop will open in New Cross and some older and younger activists from Bristol Radical History Group who are moving up from bookstalls to open a shop to be called Hydra.

The day consisted of four parts. Firstly, Mandy from News from Nowhere, Sally from the publishing wing of Bookmarks and Alexis from the anarchist distributor AK Press formed a generally upbeat panel discussing the current state of radical bookselling. All said that you have to do everything nowadays, a bit of publishing, bookselling, outside stalls, in store events - working harder and longer hours to reach the market, but the market is there. There was a sense of unity of purpose, of feeling that we are all in this together (who said that?) and a complete absence of sectarian interests.

The second section was by me, on the history of radical bookselling, concentrating on the days when there were 130 radical bookshops and 450 radical publishers, focusing on the pivotal year of 1984, the year of the miners' great strike and great defeat. I thoroughly enjoyed the research, trawling through old files and back issues of the Radical Bookseller. For years, Dave Cope, something of an expert on the earlier years of the Communist Party orientated shops, and I have planned a book on radical bookselling. The idea lives meantime on his website, http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/, as an incomplete listing of every radical bookshop we have been able to find, together with a bibliography covering mentions of radical bookshops. Any help in adding to this will be welcome.

The third section was the national launch of the Bread and Roses prize, initiated by Five Leaves in conjunction with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. There will be more on the prize and launch shortly, meantime check out http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/.

The final session was a closed session for members of ARB to meet, though also attended by me and a representative of Zed Books. There are now twenty member groups, with Housmans in London administering the project. The general view was that the group will largely operate by networking, providing assistance to publishers keen to reach out to radical booksellers and to tour their authors, but to avoid making controversial public statements. An example of this is over Amazon where some members actively campaign against Amazon while others take advantage of it. Again, the main feature was a keenness to discuss issues but to operate by consensus.

One interesting feature was the presence of second hand dealers, never a feature of the old days. As one pointed out, "An old book is a new book to someone who has not read it before". Indeed, People's Bookshop, the first radical bookshop in Durham since the days of Alleycat, has found that they are selling a lot of backlist material (Paul Foot's Red Shelley was exampled) to people who had simply not had access to this kind of material before.

Everyone was aware of the sector's tiny size and fragility, but felt more positive about radical bookselling than for some time. Would that I was young again!

The ARB's provisional is at http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/ . Meantime, let's leave the last word to one Councillor Jeremy Richardson (Conservative) who remarked in the Sheffield Star in 1986 in the following terms about the Sheffield Radical Bookfair "I put in an appearance at the Radical Book Fair at the Town Hall. Anarchists, feminists and every conceivable variety of ragbag lefty was present peddling their wares. For my part I saw no ordinary Sheffielders, just a bunch of grim-faced souls trying to look interested in some rather dull books. Is this really the right use for the Town Hall on a Saturday?" To which we grim-faced souls (illustrated above, for clarity) can only answer, yes.

Radical bookshop seminar

The Chapter and Verse book festival in Liverpool at the Bluecoat is the venue for a free seminar about radical bookselling. Mandy Vere from the local News from Nowhere bookshop chairs a discussion about the current state of radical bookselling and its prospects, while I give a talk on the history of radical bookselling, delving into the past waves of libertarian, hippy, Communist and freethought shops.
The event is free, on October 13. Full details on:
http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1131

The return of radical bookselling?

Radical bookselling has been in the doldrums for years, patiently waiting for the return of a Tory Government (as one friend said). But now the existing bookshops appear to be doing quite well, and there is a new People's Bookshop in Durham, a new radical bookshop opening in London in the autumn and a mixed radical/general shop opening in deepest Suffolk sometime soon. To mark this revival there is a modest seminar in Liverpool on Thursday 13 October, at the Bluecoat, as part of the Chapter and Verse Festival. Mandy Vere from News from Nowhere will look at the current state of radical bookselling, and one Ross Bradshaw will be delving into radical bookselling history over the last century or so. More importantly, the seminar will be promoting the (you read it here first) new annual radical book prize, Bread and Roses, with £1000 going to the best radical book published in 2011. More details to follow.

Three dozen

Slightly advance congratulations to News from Nowhere bookshop in Liverpool , which will be 36 years old on 1st May (vegan truffles are promised). Mandy and the gals will be featured this Sunday in the Sunday Telegraph. (http://www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk/)