Saturday 2 March 2024

2 pence


Alan Brownjohn died on 23 February. A fine poet and a lovely, genial, generous man. Wonderfully colourful Romanian suits. Decades ago, long before the internet, one of the newspapers, possibly even the Torygraph, though Alan would have hated it, used one of his books as an example in a piece that parsed the economics of publishing. I am almost certainly the only person who remembers that long-ago page. That says something about me: that there’s always been a nation-of-shopkeepers aspect to my interest in publishing. Let’s go again.

Say the cover price is £10. Bookshops which have set up their own account with the distributor (in CBe’s case, Central Books) buy in books at a negotiated discount off the cover price. Most independent bookshops buy not direct from Central but from the wholesaler Gardners, which has a monopoly on this, and Gardners (quote from their website) ‘normally ask for 60% discount off the RRP’. Sometimes more. So in most bookshops a CBe book with a cover price of £10 will have been bought by Gardners from Central for £4 in order to reach the bookshop. Before passing on that £4 to CBe, Central will deduct their own fee (15% + VAT) and the sales agent’s fee (10% + VAT), which brings the amount payable to CBe down to £2.80. That’s my net income per copy, and I pay 10% royalties on that (I’ve already paid the author an advance on royalties when taking on the book, often £500). So CBe’s take is now down to £2.52. The printing cost is, say, £2.50 per copy. Which leaves CBe with 2 pence.

Could I print cheaper? For large print runs the cost per unit comes down, but CBe books are short-run books. And if I’m putting a book into the world – adding to the world’s sheer stuff – I want, obviously, this book to be a decent thing, so I’m going to add in from the extras on offer, as I think right for each book: endsheets, flaps, inside-cover printing. I’m currently paying around £3 per copy, which dunks that 2-pence profit into the red.

CBe has no Arts Council funding and I haven’t even mentioned design, typesetting or time, because if I costed those in this would make even less financial sense. So not a business model. More a declaration that it can’t be done without privilege (I’m 73, no mortgage, pension, know-how picked up in previous employment: kill me) and luck; but with those it can be done. For sixteen years and still running. So yes, a model of sorts. An anti-business model. And if the whole thing feels about to collapse, every day, that feels right.

The photo above: Jean Follain, Paris 1935, translated by Kathleen Shields. One of the books I was just waiting for: the first English translation of a prose book by a French poet (1903–1971) I am not a little obsessed with. And have written about. An old-style brown-cover book with gold endsheets, it had to be (though the retro brown covers come from a printer who charges artisanal-bread prices), but I wanted a photo too, so had that (by Dora Maar, 1935) printed separately and every copy will have that photo stuck on, one by one, by me. No mainstream publisher would do this. Paris 1935 will be published in April but is available from the website now for pre-order.

Meanwhile, Gardners: they basically don’t care, because I don’t make them enough money. A book I published early in February was listed on their website until yesterday as ‘Not available to order’, despite the book being in stock at Central since before Christmas – which means that anyone asking for that book in a bookshop supplied by Gardners in the month of publication was told Sorry, can’t get it. A ‘problem with a spreadsheet’, I was told. I doubt they will have that problem with the new Sally Rooney.

The predicament I’m describing here is that of many small presses. CBe is far from alone.

And the usual: please buy the books. The difference to CBe between a book bought in a shop and a book bought from the website is, even after postage (up again in April, the fourth rise in two years), the difference between 2 pence and the cost of a flat white. And the Season Tickets: the whole backlist (the ones still in print) at your mercy.

Sunday 4 February 2024

Two months, two books


Second month of the year and the second CBe book of the year is published this coming week. Katy Evans-Bush’s Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle is, according to an early review (by Rupert Loydell in Tears in the Fence) a ‘persuasive, personal, original and revolutionary collection’. No ‘pallid depoliticised reservoirs of poetic sentiment,’ writes Fran Lock on the back of the book: ‘None of that here. But a humour and an honesty that persist despite it all. No little dramas of abjection, but real life. We cannot look away.’ For starters, go to the book’s website page, where you can download an excerpt that includes K E-B’s preface – in which she spells out the presence in the book of the US poet Kenneth Patchen (subject of a CBe blog post a couple of weeks ago) – and a note on Joe Hill. And then press the ‘Add to cart’ button.

There’ll be a party for the book on 14 February. Katy will be reading from the book at the Faversham Festival on 24 February.

This follows Lara Pawson’s Spent Light, which was launched at the London Review bookshop on 24 January and in less than a week had four reviews (Guardian, Financial Times, Irish Times, Spectator) and sold out its first print run. Phew. This is not how things usually work around here. I’m more used to staring out of the window and hoping the sun will come out. The reprint will be in the warehouse in the next day or so. Meanwhile, I have copies here to fulfil orders from the website page.

If you do order from the website, think about the Season Tickets on the home page: 6 books of your choice for £45 or 12 for £80 (UK only; free postage). This is ridiculously generous. If Joe Hill or Spent Light is one of your choices, you’ll be saving £3.49 (or £4.33) off the cover price.

Thursday 1 February 2024

TLS / Royal Society of Literature

Really odd piece in the TLS this week by MC about the RSL. Are you with me? Don’t worry if not, it’s an ingrown toenail in the long-running series about writers and status that no one cares about except writers. RSL = Royal Society of Literature. First two paras in the TLS are starter waffle, which is what this column does, with added pepper, and there’s a place for this and I read it.

Get to the point. Which he does in para 3: ‘According to Private Eye, the society is currently trapped in an “ideological purity spiral”’. And so it continues, lots of quotes wthin quotes, gossip, who said what to who, which is how anything bookish becomes news and gets a Guardian piece – posh people bitching.

So much of MC’s piece is in quote marks. MC himself is in quote marks: ‘We’. A couple of things I pick him up on: ‘senior RSL members’: you just mean older, don’t you? Older and whiter. You imply the new members are junior. All RSL fellows are equal, or they are not. MC’s mockery (fair enough: all selection is invidious) of the ‘specially selected’ panel that will nominate candidates for new fellowships – ‘Who selects the selectors?’ – slides comfortably past the previous old-boys club way of nominating: they selected themselves. And please, please, do not say ‘august institution’, irony is over; when Marina Warner bemoans a ‘lack of respect for older members and a loss of institutional history, which was something members cherished’, she is talking about an institution first given royal patronage by the particular King George, I forget which, there were several, who declared: ‘We do hereby declare and make known, That the Slave Population in Our said Colonies and Possessions will be undeserving of Our Protection if they shall fail to render entire Submission to the Laws, as well as dutiful Obedience to their Masters.’ That is a part of the RSL’s institutional history; I think a big part; to bemoan lack of respect for it is at the very least complacent. Why, seriously, does the RLS not ditch the Royal bit?

Sunday 21 January 2024

Kenneth Patchen rides again


Kenneth Patchen (1911–72) is not a writer familiar to many British readers, even obsessive poetry readers, but he was important to Katy Evans-Bush in her teens – which is an age at which writers can be very important – and he was important to her again during that recent period of Covid lockdowns, lock-outs, lock-ups, cock-ups. The above photo (courtesy K E-B) shows in a nutshell, or a sweetie-box, the kindling process that led to her new collection, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle. For that process spelled out, go to the page for her book on the CBe website and download the extract that gives you K E-B’s preface, and a note on Joe Hill, and a couple of the poems; and then, having got that far, buy the book. Which is officially published early in February.

Kenneth Patchen didn’t just write. Writers don’t just write. Politics were important, and music and love and coffee and bluebells, and he drew and painted. Below are some of Patchen’s book covers and his poems as artworks. (Thank you, Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre, a hugely important resource.)



Friday 12 January 2024

Dog days


Since Christmas the view down from my desk chair has been this – Reggie, a dachshund I am dog-sitting – and I have been a member of the club of dog-keeping small presses. Kevin Duffy of Bluemoose Books posts regular photos of Lottie. William Boyd recalls visiting the ‘small cramped offices’ of Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine and of the London Magazine editions (the model for CB editions): ‘Books everywhere, of course, but there were two dogs sprawled under his desk …’ Ross published Auden’s ‘Talking to Dogs’ in a 1971 issue of the London Magazine: ‘From us, of course, you want gristly bones/ and to be led through exciting odourscapes –/ their colours don’t matter – with the chance/ of a rabbit to chase or of meeting/ a fellow arse-hole to nuzzle at …’

2024 books: Lara Pawson’s Spent Light publishes on 23 January; she will be in conversation with Jennifer Hodgson at the London Review bookshop on 24 January. Katy Evans-Bush’s Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle will publish on 6 February – available from the website now (as is Spent Light).

Coming in April: the first English translation of Paris by Jean Follain (1903–71), a French poet I hugely admire and have written about. And The End of Ends by the renowned Polish theatre director Tadeusz Bradecki, written in the last year of his life: a non-fiction book about story-telling and everything else which happens to include an embedded novel.

There are birthdays galore in January and the 10th anniversary of Studio ExPurgamento (co-publisher with CBe of Blush and The Camden Town Hoard) to continue celebrating: party at the Horse Hospital on 23 January, free entry but reserve a ticket on Eventbrite. A not-bad birthday prsent for yourself or anyone else is a Season Ticket (6 books for £45, 12 for £80, post-free) from the website home page.

From the US-based organisation Pleasure Pie you can download 10 free zines about Palestine. Begin with Gazan Youth Manifesto: ‘Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community […] We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?’

Monday 4 December 2023

Lives. Books.

In the late 1970s I sat in Fulham town hall listening to Bruce Kent (CND) ask Richard Harries (who wrote on the ‘just war’ and later became Bishop of Oxford): Do the personal moral values and standards we ask of our friends also apply to politicians, or do they get a realpolitik get-out clause?

Palestine. Israel. I cannot speak on behalf of all the writers I publish, I am not their elected representative, but by definition a publisher operates in public so, for the record: damn the State of Israel’s apartheid and barbarous actions, and damn Hamas, whose own actions are those of a death cult. And damn, too, political leaders in my country and elsewhere who are prepared to accept indefinite killing and mutilation of women and children in the interests of what, precisely?

Books. A free copy of Leila Berg’s Flickerbook, which is one of CBe’s touchstone books, will be sent with the next 12 online orders. Berg: immigrant Jewish family, Manchester, defiantly left-wing and an activist for the welfare of children all her life.

Tony Lurcock’s Uncommon Places, a commonplace book by the author/compiler of a trilogy of books about Finland published by CBe that stretched to four volumes, was recommended in the TLS last week; it’s not a CBe book but is available from the website.

Books alone do not save lives. But they are voices too and my work is to get some of them heard. Either for yourself or as a present for others, see the Season Tickets on the website home page: 6 books of your own choice for £45, or 12 for £80.

Thursday 23 November 2023

More on public schools

(Earlier post here.)

Anyone who thinks that paying for a child to go to a public school will buy them a ‘good’ education needs to read the diary extracts supplied to the Covid Inquiry by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser (2018–23): Eton-educated Johnson was confused by graphs and data and watching him try to ‘get his head round stats is awful’. Johnson struggled to understand basic scientific concepts ‘and we did need to repeat them – often’.

And then read this: ‘Man claims £1m damages over Loretto boarding school “abuse”’: ‘For me, we're talking about thousands of assaults over more than 2,000 days.’ These are allegations of torture. In the 1990s. The current headmaster of the school has stated in an email that ‘the defence of the legal proceedings is being handled by our insurers and their lawyers’.

I was at that school in the 1960s. The normalisation of violence, bullying and abuse was already in place – see the 200-page report on the school published earlier this year by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. The SCAI is an ongoing inquiry into the care of children in Scottish boarding schools and other institutions. To date, the inquiry has announced 112 investigations and has completed 11 case studies. No such inquiry exists in England: it would be too expensive, it would never end.

The result of the case mentioned above will be important. Potentially, thousands of historic abuse claims for damages against public schools may follow. At the very least, the cost of the insurance policies taken out by the schools to protect themselves against such cases will rise steeply.