Newsletter November 2024

Paul Bailey, who published his first novel in 1967 and was twice Booker-shortlisted, has died. Guardian obituary here. He lived local: generous, funny, incisive company. And book-swapping. And gossip. His last two books were collections of poems: Inheritance and Joie de vivre, both published by CBe (above). I’m clean out of stock but more copies will arrive next week and can be ordered now and I know that sounds cheap and Paul, frankly, is laughing.

Lara Pawson’s Spent Light did not win the Goldsmiths Prize on 6 November but we had fun on the shortlist and congratulations to Rachel Cusk and there are two mentions in the TLS Books of the Year for Spent Light – which ‘has burnt through the months’ (Paul Griffiths) and ‘which is very dark and has great love for the world and its inhabitants’ (Sarah Moss). Special mention to Kirkdale Books in Sydenham, which has sold more copies of Spent Light than any other novel this year – individual booksellers enthusing about specific books still works, who knew?

Spent Light has a recent review – ‘so brilliant it touches the sublime’ – in the Telegraph, and so does Invisible Dogs: ‘Boyle has created something dread-making, with real elegance.’ This is new territory: I cannot recall any other CBe title being reviewed there.

Will Eaves will be reading from Invasion of the Polyhedrons and Charles Boyle from Invisible Dogs at Bookseller Crow, SE19 3AF, on 28 November - more details here.

Above, Cate Blanchett outside Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in Notting Hill in the Apple TV series Disclaimer, looking a bit lost (with reason: the script is not good). She goes in to ask if the books she has ordered have arrived and is told: ‘I think we’re still waiting for the Agota Kristof.’ I’m not sure which Kristof she wanted but Cate, if you are reading, the day after watching I took in both Trilogy and The Illiterate and they are there for you to collect.

CBe is still on X, for now, but as of yesterday is also on Bluesky, here. To any new readers, welcome. This newsletter and previous are archived here on the CBe blog, Sonofabook, which has been running since 2007 and also has occasional rants. And there’s this, on the website (Season Tickets): 6 CBe books entirely of your own choice for £50 (or 10 for £75), post free in the UK.

Disclaimer: Waiting for Kristof

‘You stop at your local bookshop. You want to kill some time in a place where you’re admired.’ This is voice-over in episode 4 of Disclaimer, an Apple TV series starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline which is bad in very many ways – the writing and acting for starters – but let’s focus in here because it’s hilarious. The Cate Blanchett character goes into the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in Notting Hill and asks if the books she has ordered have come in and is told: ‘I think we’re still waiting for the Agota Kristof.’

Many months ago I was emailed by a film production company who wanted to have the CBe edition of Kristof’s The Notebook on the set of a series starring Blanchett and Kline. Yes, go for it, and it was nice of them to ask. There must have been a lot of emails because every inch of every shelf is meticulously curated: jars, plants, fruit bowls, pots and pans. The sex is curated too. Not the cooking – the Guardian review of episode 1 ends: ‘What kind of idiot starts frying sole meunière when it’s already obvious her husband is going to be late?’

I think we are meant to be impressed by the Cate Blanchett character in Disclaimer wanting to buy a book by Agota Kristof; I think it’s intended to signal sophisticated intelligence. (Kafka would have been too obvious; if she’s asking for Kristof, she has already read Kafka.) This is lazy and silly. My bookshelves are not evidence of my intelligence; nor is there any simple correlation between the making of good art and the betterment of society. By the end of next week the new president of the US will be either a women-hating racist or Harris, who needs the votes of everyone who wants to avoid Trump but is in hoc to a colonialist lobby that’s OK with genocide in Gaza.

The US election is next Tuesday, 5 November. Which happens to be publication date of Invisible Dogs, by me, with a nice review in the Telegraph already up, and on Wednesday a lot of good-hearted people will gather to learn which book on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize, Lara Pawson’s Spent Light from CBe being one of them, gets the cash and the pats on the back. It will be a strange week.

In case Cate Blanchett is still waiting for her Kristof, I took Trilogy, The Illiterate and The Notebook into Lutyens and Rubinstein today. (The man I gave them to said yes, there had been filming in the shop for Disclosure but he hadn’t watched it himself and Agota who?) The single edition of The Notebook is out of print – it’s now included in Trilogy – but that’s the one the film company asked for (and there’s a tiny number of copies still around). The two others are available from the website; if you go to the Special Offers on the Books page, you can save yourself £7 by buying both for £16.

October newsletter: stickers, Disclosure

Lara Pawson’s Spent Light, published by CBe early this year, is shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. There will readings by the six shortlisted writers – an awesome bunch: read these rather than the Booker shortlist – at Goldsmiths next Wednesday, 23 October. Free, but reserve a ticket here.

There were problems with the publicity stickers for the books so I had some printed myself and took stickered copies to the distributor, Central Books, on Friday. Over the past week or so I’ve done two more trips, each time with 100 copies. It gets me away from the desk. Meanwhile, Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Joshua Segun-Lean, published in May, had a kind blog review last week. I don’t expect to be lugging many hundreds of copies of this book over to the warehouse but it is still more than worth publishing.

Both books will be on the CB table at the annually wonderful Small Publishers Fair next week – Friday and Saturday, 25 and 26 October, Conway Hall, London. Please do come. They can also be bought individually from the website or as part of the six-books-for-£45 deal (or 12 for £80), free postage, available from the website home page.

Several months ago I had an email from a film company asking if it was OK by me to have a copy of the CBe edition of Agota Kristof’s The Notebook on show in a TV series starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline. Disclosure has now been released on Apple TV. That edition of Kristof's book is now officially out of print, replaced by Trilogy, but a free copy of The Notebook to anyone who sends me a screenshot of the book in the series; I’ve watched two and a half episodes myself but doubt I’ll be watching more.

Cheaper from Amazon: really?

Above: on the left, books by Julian Stannard and D. Nurkse selling from the CBe website at £8.99 each (free UK postage); on the right, the same books selling from Amazon (the Nurkse apparently published in 1838) at £37.87 and £46.38.

Students on Creative Writing courses, and other writers too, are sometimes invited to events at which they will meet ‘industry experts’ – literary agents advising on how to pitch your work, and editors advising on what kind of writing they are looking for, and marketing people advising on how to use social media to promote your work. This is helpful and good. But few literary agents, in my experience, know anything about how books are actually sold, and few editors in mainstream publishing: that's for the guys down the corridor or the IT crowd in the basement. Few editors of literary magazines, few reviewers, few authors, few journalists covering the 'arts'. Books simply appear – by magic – in bookshops or on online retail platforms. I don’t claim expertise here myself; I know a little more than I used to, but am a lot more confused.

I blame the public schools. Going back a bit, I blame the Greeks and the Romans, whose celebration of the life of the mind and disdain for manual labour – plenty of busts of emperors and philosophers, none of the engineers who designed the aqueducts (300 in the province of Gaul alone) or those that built them, mostly slaves – was incorporated into the English public schools. While claiming to instil self-reliance these schools turned out generations of men who couldn’t boil an egg or wash their own clothes (cooking and washing were work for their slaves: women), including a succession of prime ministers whose ability to quote a Latin tag was perceived as intelligence. The class division enshrined here still prevails in much of UK life, publishing included. The media run interviews with authors and sometimes editors, people from the sexy side of publishing, but not with sales managers and printers.

The above is prompted by CBe’s problems with the listing of its titles on Amazon. Some CBe titles are not listed at all on Amazon; some are listed but don’t appear when you type the author’s name in the search box; some are listed inaccurately (the Francis Ponge book is not a ‘French edition’); some are listed but only available from third-party sellers (though the books are available to Amazon if it chooses); some are listed but also not (search the author's name and a book with the same title as their CBe book appears but it's some other author's, some other publisher's, book); and some are listed but at vastly inflated prices: the Amazon mark-up on the cover price for 10 CBe titles is between 300 and 500%.

Most readers of this newsletter probably don’t buy CBe books from Amazon, but other potential buyers might. The authors would like to reach these people, as would I. I’ve been told that my problem is that I don’t have ‘control of the metadata’, and this is true. But even if I did have that control – transmitting data in a specific program standard to the various listing and selling parties – I’ve been told by ‘industry experts’ (them again, but here I do mean experts: people who know how this works or doesn’t) that there are interface problems between the several parties sending and taking the data (Nielsen, Gardners, distributors, Amazon and holders of vendor accounts with Amazon). If you are a bestselling author published by Penguin Random House then Amazon will probably work for you, because they will make it work; if neither, not. You are cannon fodder.

Please buy from your local bookshop, or ask them to order in. Or from the CBe website. If you buy, for example, Dan O’Brien, War Reporter; D. Nurkse, Voices over Water; JO Morgan, Long Cuts; Julian Stannard, What were you thinking of?; Beverley Bie Brahic, Hunting the Boar; Andrew Elliott, Mortality Rate, from the CBe website, you’ll be paying £54.96, or £45 if you order them as a bundled Season Ticket; free UK postage. If you buy the same books from Amazon, famous for its discounts, you’ll be paying £241.02.

Below, the next books: Will Eaves, Invasion of the Polyhedrons, and Charles Boyle, Invisible Dogs. Publication dates in October and November (same date as the US election), but available now from the website. There’ll be a launch event for both on 8 October; if you’d like to come, please email me.

Amazon Idiocy

Jean Follain, Paris 1935, trans. Kathleen Shields, had an excellent half-page review in the TLS last month. On Amazon, the text accompanying the cover image reads as follows:

Immerse in captivating narratives and enrich mind with our latest book collection. Explore diverse genres, from thrilling mysterles to heartwarming romances, ensuring there's something for every reader. With engaging plots and vivid characters, these books promise to transport to new worlds and inspire imagination.

Similar bot-generated nonsense appears on pages for some other CBe titles.

Some CBe titles are not listed on Amazon at all. Some are listed in the wrong category (not Books). When a CBe title is listed, it can be hard to find: when I type an author’s name into the Amazon search box, their CBe titles often do not appear (but their titles from other publishers do); but when I type in the author’s name plus book title, a listing does sometimes appear. And here’s an odd one: I type in a CBe author’s name and a book with the same title as the one they have written appears but it is a completely different book, by another author; the book by the CBe author is not listed at all.

Random other idiocies: for example, the CBe edition of Leila Berg’s Flickerbook is not listed at all, but the cover image of the CBe book is being used to sell a Kindle edition of the book not published by CBe. And if you thought buying from Amazon means you get a book cheap, that is often not true: a CBe title with a cover price of £12 is selling from Amazon at £35.51; another with a cover price of £8.99 is selling from Amazon at £46.38, and another at £33.17.

If you do manage to find a CBe title on Amazon, the information is often inadequate or misleading. One reason for this is that I have only a basic account with Nielsen, the UK central book data place from which Amazon takes its info. But even if I upgrade my account with Nielsen, the formatting limitations on the way I can input information (e.g., review quotes) make the text barely readable when fed through to Amazon.

Many other small presses are treated by Amazon in the same way and CBe is far from alone in having these problems. Today I was told that “if you don’t have your own vendor account and are distributed by Gardners (and therefore operating through theirs), there is currently a known technical issue whereby the two systems aren’t aligned and it’s causing issues to certain publishers’ feeds, despite those feeds coming from third party Nielsen.”

A vendor account! That might give me (some) control of the contents of the listings! But that’s not going to happen because (a) you have to be invited, you can’t simply apply; and (b) even if they did invite me they wouldn’t let me in through the door because CBe is not a registered company and I couldn’t give them the legal and financial details they require.

Because Amazon treats the information on CBe titles supplied to it with utter contempt, and because Amazon is not fit for (my) purpose, I want out. But cannot get out, because for a book to have an ISBN I have to register it with Nielsen, and Amazon captures that info from Nielsen. Solutions … De-couple Nielsen and Amazon? Nationalise Amazon? Or should I simply not bother with ISBNs and not register with Nielsen? (Thereby making the books available only from the website.)

Polyhedrons and Dogs

Will Eaves, Invasion of the Polyhedrons (poems plus essays), and me, Invisible Dogs (fiction) – the two autumn CBe titles, with official publication dates in October and November but they are available now for pre-order from the website. Will Eaves has another new book, The Point of Distraction, from TLS Books.

These two new books complete a shelf, below. An flexible unit. Or a collective noun. Begun on the left with four books published in 2007, without any plan to do more, they have now reached the limit of space on the right, so a line break will be needed before next year’s titles. (The books on the shelf are ‘file copies’, in some cases the only ones I have. Some titles are now out of print, some are now with other publishers, some have been reprinted or re-issued with new covers. I could count them but no, let’s just say a shelf.)

Below, London Mole reading glasses. I ordered +3 lens power and they sent +1.5; I now have my +3 and they said not to bother returning the ones I can’t use, so if anyone wants those (just the one pair going) simply buy one of the Season Tickets (6 books of your own choice for £45, or 12 for £80) available from the website home page and tell me if you need +1.5 glasses to read the books and I’ll send them.

It has been a slow summer and this is fine but I do need to sell more books. Thank you.

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.