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.
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