Autonomy, book of the year

At the well-attended memorial meeting for our writer Colin Ward, Daniel Poyner approached me saying he was looking for a publisher for a collection of covers of the journal Anarchy, edited for a decade by Colin Ward from 1961-1970. To an outsider, the thought of a book comprising 118 covers of a long-defunct magazine that never sold more than 3,000 copies, that would have to be in full colour, might seem deranged even by the standards of small presses. I gave it serious consideration. I am not the only person who came to politics later than the life of the journal who has a near complete run of Anarchy. The journal had influence; Colin Ward brought in writers who were exploring new ideas on practical issues like adventure playgrounds, libertarian education.... Colin had no time for what he called "tittle tattle", the internecine squabbles endemic on the left. This was a journal of practical anarchy, described by the late Raphael Samuel as "...represent[ing] better than any other publication the cultural revolution of the 1960s; and it did so far earlier than anyone else and ... more thoughtfully".
I was tempted but was concerned that the cohort of sociologists, planners, educators and anarchists interested in the magazine was small and ageing. How could I sell enough copies to avoid terrible losses?
I am glad to say that Daniel Poyner found a better way, by publishing the book with the excellent design and typography specialist press Hyphen, with what is clearly heavy involvement by Hyphen's Robin Kinross - because there is the second market, which I did not think of, those who will cast a designer's eye over the covers, mostly by Rufus Segar. And what a job Hyphen has done with the book! Every cover is reprinted, in colour, front and back together with essays by Raphael Samuel on Anarchy, an interview with Rufus Segar and an essay by Richard Hollis (who runs a small part of the Five Leaves list) on the magazine's layout and typography. That essay alone is a masterful run through of how design, typography and printing worked in those days of hot metal. The work is completed by an index to the journal by Robin Kinross, which will certainly lead some readers to start looking around for old copies.
As it happens, I have a few spare, held back for swaps for my own missing numbers. Get in touch if you have any going spare yourself...
The book is called Autonomy, the title Colin originally wanted for the journal. He was, I think correctly, over-ruled by his colleagues at Freedom in favour of Anarchy (Freedom was in 1961 a weekly paper, which then moved to three times a month with Anarchy appearing on the fourth week). The book is not cheap - £25, but that is for a large format paperback with french flaps, 304 pages and 303 illustrations, all but ten in colour. It is worth it.
With a couple of months still to go, I can safely say that this will be my book of the year. Further information from http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/.
Though Autonomy is now available, it will be launched at Housmans Bookshop on Saturday 9th February at 6.30, together with the Five Leaves book (also already out)  Talking Green, twelve lectures by Colin Ward. Daniel Poyner will present his book and there will be contributions by Ken Worpole on Colin's life and work and Richard Hollis on Rufus Segar's design. Rufus will be there, as will Harriet Ward.

Penguin at 75

Allan Lane invented the paperback in 1935, as he saw the need for good books, published in paperback to reach a wide audience. Ere long you could buy Penguins for 6d in Woollies. Except the paperback book started the previous century. Nor was Penguin the first to sell serious paperbacks to a mass audience. I have a 1902 paperback of Britain for the British (which then meant something different from the current meaning) by Robert Blatchford. I don’t know how many copies that book sold but his Merrie England sold two million. The publisher was Clarion, a socialist movement which sold books off vans and at propaganda visits to small towns (the Flashmobs of a century ago). Among the paperbacks listed inside are The Art of Happiness by Robert’s brother Montague (under the attractive pen name Mont Blong) and the essential Does Municipal Management Pay? I suspect that hundreds of copies of the latter are still under someone's bed. But Penguin did bring serious paperbacks to a mass audience - colour coded books for different audiences. Many’s the home that still has a shelf of orange (fiction) and green (crime). Other related imprints developed - Puffin, Penguin Classics, Pelican.

Penguin took part in one of the most important trials of the last century related to censorship. DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the focus of the trial that heralded the changes of the 1960s, the prosecutors being shown to be out of date by asking if this was a book “you would want your want your wife or servants to read”. When I became a grown-up book buyer around 1970, Penguin had a reputation as being radical (ironically at around the same time it lost its independence) and what would now be called cool though my Penguin copy of The Kon-Tiki Expedition is only a few inches away from my Penguin Obsolete Communism: the left wing alternative by Danny Cohn-Bendit. Around that time Penguin, always good on design, was famed for the “Marber Grid”, the cover design thought up by Romek Marber. Five Leaves recently published Marber’s Holocaust memoir, No Return, under our Richard Hollis imprint. Hollis himself was a designer at Penguin, his books including Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The Cohn-Bendit book mentioned before was a Penguin Special as was Protest and Survive by EP Thompson (1980), perhaps the last book to have a symbiotic relationship with a mass movement.

In 1983 Penguin shocked the book trade by paying a million pounds for the sleepy old family firm of Frederick Warne, publishers of a lovely series of hardback Beatrix Potter books. But by then the Penguin Group was part of a conglomerate which owned Royal Doulton China as well as the Financial Times and it was the merchandising that interested them. Meantime there were other publishers moving into Penguin territory. Picador had Ian McEwan and a host of high quality fiction for the literati, with King Penguin struggling to keep up. On the other hand, Penguin published Satanic Verses, which brought the firm many problems, including an attempt to set fire to the then Penguin bookshop in Nottingham.

The bookshop chain has gone, but Penguin is still with us, with a good list and a better backlist, though without its former cachet. There are times when a publisher catches the moment - Victor Gollancz did with his Left Book Club in the 30s and the 40s; City Lights with the Beat Poets and Virago with its feminist writers. All, interestingly, had immediately identifiable livery. But moments, like movements, pass and Penguin’s current best selling books include yet more Fry and Oliver. Whatever my current concerns, I’m grateful to Penguin editors for publishing so many of the books on my shelves. AS Neill’s Summerhill, Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, Lawrence’s The Rainbow, those old green Dashiell Hammetts…

Right, said Ted

Richard Hollis/Five Leaves has brought forward two Ted Hughes related books to have them in time for this week's conference (www.pem.ac.uk/conferences.ted_hughes) with Seamus Heaney and Jonathan Bate. The latter is writing a major biography of Hughes. Our books are Ted Hughes and Translation, by Daniel Weissbort and An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, by Lucas Myers. Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes were co-founders of Modern Poetry in Translation and Weissbort (whose own poetry appeared in Five Leaves' Passionate Renewal) also edited Ted Hughes: Selected Translations for Faber. Lucas Myers was one of Hughes' closest friends, Hughes staying with him during his courtship of Plath. This book is a memoir of that period and beyond.
Both books will be available at the conference and, for the moment, only available (at £10 each) by old fashioned cheques to Five Leaves, PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW. They will be officially published in the New Year and copies are not yet even on our website.
Be the first one on your block.

New Society not Big Society

The summer issue of the V&A Magazine reminds me that I've only got until the 26th September to go to the V&A exhibition of photos from New Society, of blessed memory. Paul Barker, who edited New Society from 68-86, revisits the magazine and its photographs with an essay for the V&A. If you go you can pick up a copy of his Arts in Society, a book of essays reprinted by Five Leaves a few years ago.
His article (and the book of essays) is a reminder of how important New Society was for leftish of centre people writing and reading in that era. Sadly it disappeared into the New Statesman in 1988. Even more sadly it would be hard to imagine a modern day New Society without the backing of local government and charity job ads, which must have kept the weekly afloat.
A surprising number of New Society regulars have found their way to the Five Leaves list - Richard Boston and Colin Ward, both now sadly deceased; Ray Gosling (our re-issue of his Personal Copy arrived today) and the art director Richard Hollis, now running his own imprint under the Five Leaves umbrella. Richard designed the cover for Paul Barker's book, illustrated here. We have, however, avoided Melanie Philips, however, who is busy ranting from the right in the Daily Mail and other places that should have more sense.

Memories of Ted Hughes

Today's Observer: "...an exceptional memoir, Memories of Ted Hughes, 1952-63 by his Cambridge friend Daniel Huws (Five Leaves, £5.99), published in an exquisite paperback edition by the contemporary designer Richard Hollis. Huws believes "Ted's character has been traduced" by the "highly distorted picture" derived from Sylvia's letters and journals. For him, Hughes is an enthusiastic, romantic figure, a young undergraduate "dressed in grey flannel trousers and a black corduroy jacket". This tantalising fragment will make any Hughes fan impatient for Jonathan Bate's projected biography. Letters, memoirs, a renewed sense of the poet's importance; the time is ripe for that life of Hughes."

Robert McCrum

Ricahrd Hollis joins Five Leaves

Richard Hollis has been in publishing, or on its fringes, for 50 years. He has worked as a printer, art editor, production manager, teacher and lecturer. His first complete book designs were for Weidenfeld and Andre Deutsch. This was in the early 1960s, a time when he went on to design a series of covers for Penguin and, after a year in Paris in Galeries Lafayette's publicity studio, became art editor of New Society. As well as teaching at the London College of Printing and at the Central School of Art and Design, he was art director of Pluto Press and for a short time design and production director at Faber and Faber. In the 1970s he worked with John Berger on several books, which began with his Booker-winning G and included his best-seller Ways of Seeing. Hollis has designed art catalogues for Bridget Riley and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. This summer he worked on a book for the British artist Steve McQueen at the Venice Biennale. For forty years Richard Hollis made the layout and covers for Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort’s quarterly Modern Poetry in Translation. He does the typesetting for his wife Posy Simmonds’s graphic novels including Tamara Drewe, now being filmed by Stephen Frears. His first three books appear under his own name, but under the umbrella of Five Leaves. Two are connected with Ted Hughes and with a single London house. The memoir of Ted Hughes is written by Daniel Huws, the tenant of the flat where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath stayed. Susan Alliston, the author of the second book, for which Ted Hughes wrote an introduction, at a later date, also lived in the house. The third book, a memoir of his experiences in the Holocaust is by Romek Marber, designer responsible for the basic style across most of the Penguin covers in the early 1960s and in the following twenty years.