Dora Maar in (not yet) her own right

The same woman looking from the same window on the cover of (left) Paris 1935 by Jean Follain, translated by Kathleen Shields, published by CBe last April, and (right) The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger, published by Bloomsbury on 4 July.

The woman is Dora Maar and the photograph is a self-portrait. Dora Maar is currently receiving attention: as well as the book by Louisa Treger (‘a novel’), an exhibition of her photographs opens this week at the Amar Gallery in London, and a play titled Maar, Dora will be performed at the Camden Fringe in August.

Good. But let’s look how our attention is sought, and the language used. The headline to a piece in the Observer yesterday describes Maar as ‘Picasso’s tormented muse’; the first paragraph begins: ‘Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right.’ (The italics are mine.) The blurb for the Bloomsbury book begins: ‘“Living with him was like living at the centre of the universe. It was electrifying and humbling, blissful and destructive, all at the same time!!??”' (The exclam and query punctuation marks are my own.) And continues: 'Paris, 1936. When Dora Maar, a talented French photographer, painter and poet, is introduced to Pablo Picasso, she is mesmerized by his dark and intense stare. Drawn to his volcanic creativity, it isn’t long before she embarks on a passionate relationship with the Spanish artist that ultimately pushes her to the edge.’ The blurb for the play on the Camden Fringe website does better: ‘Dora Maar (1907–1997) was a prolific photographer and artist, developing her career in fashion photography, before hailing as one of the first women in the surrealist movement. She used her creations as a social commentary on beauty, gender and war. However in today’s conversations, her name only appears after a man’s: the infamous Pablo Picasso. He needs no introduction (and we are not inclined to give one, he'll do it for us anyway).’

In 2019 Dora Maar’s work was shown at the Tate in an exhibition jointly organised with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Guardian review was headlined: ‘Dora Maar: how Picasso’s weeping woman had the last laugh’. In 2022 an exhibition of her contact prints was shown at the Huxley Parlour gallery in London, trailed by a Guardian article headlined ‘Dora Maar: Hidden photos by the artist include intimate portraits of Picasso’. If a woman artist takes a lover who is, or becomes, more famous than she is, how many times does she need to be ‘rediscovered’ before she allowed to exist in her own right?

I understand the mechanism. Praise to the curators who do the rediscovering, but they do so within a cultural context (art history, journalism) that is still deeply sexist. (I don’t doubt that some people who go to the shows still believe that Maar’s work is being shown because of her connection with Picasso.) I am not immune. On the copyright page of Paris 1935 I describe Dora Maar as ‘photographer, painter, Surrealist, activist, and teacher and lover of Picasso’ – dragging in the big name when, I now think, I should have left him out. But it is a good photo, and please buy Paris 1935.

Newsletter June 2024: a balancing act

In 1631 an edition of the Bible was printed with a word missing from one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ The printer was fined and his license to print was revoked. It’s easily done. The most recent CBe book – Joshua Segun-Lean, Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers – was printed with a word missing (not ‘not’, in this case) from the title on the title page. My fault entirely. A short second print run has the title right but, annoyingly, the images printed not so well, and there are a lot of images: see the book’s page on the website. The first print run now has stickers on the title page.

My own license to publish has not (yet) been revoked but CBe’s continuing to publish depends entirely on readers buying the books. Putting out books with a niche appeal and that may sell only a hundred or so copies – Do Not Send Me Out is a case in point – carries the risk of not attracting enough readers. But there’s little point in publishing titles with a (perhaps) wider appeal, even if I liked them, if I’m bad at marketing and distribution. To become better I’d need to invest in outside help and even if I had the money to do that I’d be playing catch-up, having to sell a lot more to recoup the investment, a model to which I’m not suited. (I’m not going to the Arts Council. There’s an arrogance in my saying that, I know, but the point of the Arts Council is not to service old white geezers.)

The figures for the last financial year (and the year before, and before) show a net loss. A tolerable loss, for now; probably less than what my neighbours spend on their summer holidays. It’s a balancing act, and for 16 years CBe has kept its balance, but in this phoney summer CBe does need to sell some books.

Five new titles so far this year: Lara Pawson, Spent Light; Katy Evans-Bush, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle; Jean Follain, Paris 1935; Tadeusz Bradecki, The End of Ends; Joshua Segun-Lean, Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers. Two more will follow in October/November: Will Eaves, Invasion of the Polyhedrons; Charles Boyle, Invisible Dogs. (I don’t have to pay an advance on that one.) There is also the backlist of around 70 titles (there have been more but some original CBe titles are now with other, bigger publishers). Pick and choose: 12 books for £80, 6 for £45 – see the Season Tickets on the website home page.

Robert Barker, the printer of the Bible with the abbreviated Commandment, died in 1643 in a debtors’ prison.

Newsletter May 2024: voters, book-buying and stickers

In the elections this month more than half of the eligible voters in London, where I live, didn’t bother to vote. In the council elections across the UK, which so puffs itself as a model of democracy, the turn-out was even smaller. Even in General Elections around a third of eligible voters simply do not care. The lowest turn-outs are in places that would benefit most from political change.

Roughly the same proportion of the population who don’t vote also don’t buy books. Both mainstream politics and publishing appear to take that level of apathy as a given and devote all their resources to chasing returns from those who have signed up. Chasing their tails? (An academic paper on ‘Environmental Effects on Compulsive Tail Chasing in Dogs’ is here.) Media coverage doubles down on this, crunching numbers and ingrown toenails while not bothering to let me know that many other European countries have higher voter participation (Poland, last October) and book-buying numbers than the UK.

I don’t claim that CBe has any strategy for reaching out; I speak to the converted, because these are the channels. But because I don’t have to win an election or keep shareholders in clover I can publish, for example, this: Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers, by Joshua Segun-Lean. Sparse text, plenty pictures. As with a number of other CBe titles, there is no established readership for this kind of book. It will find its way, or it won’t; either way, the book is now here and I’m proud to have published it.

Some of the mistakes I make are plain stupid. The first print run of Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers was fine except for a word missing in the title on the title page, my fault entirely. And a bad typo. A corrected run is in train, but some of the books sent out will have stickers on the title page. Let me know if you’d prefer everything to be unstickered and perfect.

This coming Sunday, the 12th, I and Kathleen Shields, the translator, will be talking about Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 on a Zoom event hosted by the indefatigable David Collard. If you’d like to attend, please see here.

Tadeusz Bradecki’s The End of Ends, also published this month, arrives alongside a new annual prize which ‘crosses the borders between artistic disciplines, genres, subject matter and cultures. Put simply, it celebrates books in which story-telling fiction and non-fiction writing combine in an original way.’ Nothing tricky here; this is regular CBe territory. The website for the prize is now live.

Two reprints this month, at present available exclusively from the website: Fergus Allen, New and Selected Poems, which was first published by CBe in 2013, and Carmel Doohan, Seesaw, first published in 2021. I wrote about these and the practice of reprinting – and remaindering – more generally in a blog post last month.

The new CBe titles published so far this year are Lara Pawson, Spent Light; Katy-Evans-Bush, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle; Jean Follain, Paris 1935 (trans. Kathleen Shields); Tadeusz Bradecki, The End of Ends (trans. author and Kate Sinclair); and the Joshua Segun-Lean book. Total cover prices, £55.96. Or: the Season Tickets (UK only) on the website home page, those five plus another of your own choice for £45; or 12 books for £80, free UK postage. Have a look at the previous books. Here, for example, is a new review - online today – of Philip Hancock's House on the A34. You don’t even have to choose, you can let me do that, in which case Leila Berg’s Flickerbook is always going to be one of them. Please do vote, and do buy books.

On print runs and reprints

The number of copies I order when I send a book to print largely depends on which side of the bed I got out of in the morning. Sometimes I guess about right. Sometimes not: of certain titles whose print runs I ordered in buoyant, optimistic mood on a sunny day, I have many more copies than I realistically expect to sell.

When a book sells out, to reprint or not to reprint? This is hard. A number of titles first published by CBe are now with bigger publishers so this is their problem, not mine. Some titles, very few, I’ve let go out of print. Some titles sell only a handful of copies a year but feel core to the list, so I keep them in print. Each book is a special case.

Above, new reprints of Fergus Allen, New and Selected Poems (first published by CBe in 2013) and Carmel Doohan, Seesaw (first published in 2021). The original editions had brown card covers and endsheets; the reprints don’t, because the prices of the printer who offers the brown-card option have risen steeply. And the cover prices of these reprints are higher than for the original editions – because printing costs have increased generally, and because when I order a very short run (as for these reprints) the unit price goes up.(There are still some copies of Seesaw available from the website at the original price.)

Conversely, of course, the bigger the print run, the lower the unit cost. It’s tempting. And money being money, the risk of having to pay storage for unsold stock can be covered … The water gets murky here, but let’s say you are a poet who is published by Faber, who expect your book to sell well because they are Faber, but if it doesn’t here’s the get-out: remainder merchants. To whom, when a title stops selling, they will off-load copies, while still keeping some in stock. See, for example, the website of Pumpkin Wholesale, who currently offer 36 Faber poetry titles (including five by Christopher Reid and four by David Harsent, plus others by Muldoon and Hofmann and Paterson and Ishion Hutchinson et al) at knock-down prices.

Nothing illegal is going on here, but regular booksellers who want to stock those titles have to pay more to Faber to order them in than, for example, I can buy them for at second-hand shops who also stock remainders (such as the excellent Judd Books). Faber contracts used to promise, maybe still do, that if they remainder stock they will offer the books first to the author; but I’m pretty sure Reid and Harsent and Muldoon et al have no idea this is happening. When I last queried this practice with Faber they avoided the word remaindering altogether, talking instead of ‘modest stock reductions in order to control inventory’ and assuring me that this is ‘standard practice in the industry’.

Asking about stock levels takes you into Wild West territory. I’ve heard talk of boxes of books that have fallen off the back of a lorry. Sometimes it’s cheaper to pulp books rather than keep them on the warehouse shelves. Publishers are not known for being sentimental.

Newsletter April 2024

The Free Verse Poetry Book Fair has woken up and will be at St Columba's Church, Pont Street, London SW1X 0BD this coming Saturday, 20 April, 11.30 am to 6.30 pm, free entry. Full details here. CBe will have a table. We have history: the first Free Verse fair, held in September 2011, was organised by CBe. Above, the one remaining poster from that year. It was a response to Arts Council cuts in funding to a number of poetry presses that year: give them, at least, a chance to show their books to the general public.

While putting that book fair together, I talked with Katy Evans-Bush and she said, Oh, you mean a draughty church hall with bearded men and big-bosomed ladies standing behind trestle tables? Yes, exactly that. I’m a Seventies guy. It was in a church hall, with the remains of last year’s Christmas decorations still hanging from the rafters. Katy said: Some readings, at least. Chrissy Williams organised the readings. So we did it, without funding, and there was a tube strike that day but people came, lots of people, and it worked. We did it again the next year, and the next and the next, and Joey Connolly joined the gang and we got Arts Council funding to pay travel costs for small presses based outside London. The point being: no hierarchy, the big publishers (Faber, Cape, et al) getting just the same space as everyone else. More presses each year, it was hard work, and the fair is now run by the Poetry Society.

That was a good thing Katy Evans-Bush told me. Here’s another good thing from Katy: Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle, published in February this year. Copies on the table on Saturday, of course. And copies of the French poet Jean Follain’s prose book Paris 1935, published this month. And copies of the new issue – out this week – of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, which includes an essay by me on independent publishing. This issue (cover image below) is guest-edited by Nuzhat Bukhari – copies of her book will be on the table too, Brilliant Corners.

And copies of Caroline Thonger and Vivian Thonger’s Take Two, one of last year’s CBe titles, a joint excavation of childhood (and later) in a fractured family in London in the 1950s and 60s. An absorbing in-depth interview (70+ minutes) in which the authors speak to Stella Chrysostomou of the wonderful Volume books is here.

And copies of Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs. JG curates A Personal Anthology: since 2017 he has sent out a weekly email in which guest writers write about 12 short stories; their choices and the featured authors are archived on the Personal Anthology website. My own choice of stories – not my Desert Island selection, more a gathering that came together at the time I made the list – will be online on Friday of this week.

As always: 6 books of your own choice for £45, 12 for £80, free UK postage: Season Tickets on the home page of the CBe website.

Venus of the Hours

Lost for years, then found yesterday, and the place for it also found: Venus of the Hours, screenprint by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ron Costley, 1975. Anything that I know about designing books – and this is more to do with hunches and play within a pared-down aesthetic than anything you can pick up on a course – I learned from Ron Costley (1939–2015: obituary here: he lived in ‘book-strewn’ house), who is now back alongside some of the books he helped me put into the world.

Paris, spring

This month’s new CBe title – following Lara Pawson’s Spent Light in January and Katy Evans-Bush’s Joe Hill Makes his Way into the Castle in February – is Paris 1935 by Jean Follain (1903–71), a prose book by a French poet I deeply admire. The translation by Kathleen Shields is the first full version in English. I think I first knew of the book from August Kleinzahler’s poem ‘Follain’s Paris’ in Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow, 1995, which mines phrases and scenes from Follain’s book. Since the start of CBe I’ve always wanted to publish Follain – back in 2008 I wrote to Christopher Middleton, asking if I could publish the translations of Follain’s poems that he was working on, but he had promised them to Peter Jay at Anvil – and now I have and it has been worth the wait.

Publication date is officially in mid-April but I’ll start sending out the pre-ordered copies this this week. There’ll be launch party on 23 April at the Centre for Literary Translation at Trinity College, Dublin – email I if you’d like to come. The photo on the cover is by Dora Maar. A Sonofabook blogpost giving the flavour of the book is below this one, here.

Next month’s title, available for pre-order on the website, is The End of Ends by the Polish theatre director Tadeusz Bradecki. It is about, writes Francis Spufford on the back cover, ‘nothing less than everything … Anyone miserable at being marooned on this island of cynical banter and self-protective irony should read The End of Ends to be reminded of what it sounds like when art is taken seriously.’ Non-fiction, but includes an embedded novel.

All new titles can be included in the Season Tickets (6 books of your choice for £45, 12 for £80) available from the home page of the website.

CBe will have a table at the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair on Saturday, 20 April at St Columba’s Church, Pont Street, London SW1X 0BD.