Slow publishing, yes – see this post from last February – but sometimes fast too. Back in 2009, feeling angry at what the bankers were getting away with, I put together a short book in March/April and published it in May (Recessional by Jack Robinson, priced at £7.50 o.n.o.; now available only as a free pdf from this page). Today, a new Jack Robinson thing.
Earlier this month I left a book on a café table and a waiter came running after me. A week or ten days later, I’d scribbled around 40 paragraphs featuring the supposed author of the book on the café table, the waiter (‘Eric’) and ‘I’. It might be ‘short story’; I don’t think it is, but have no idea what else it might be. I was wary of pushing the thing further or killing it by over-revising. It’s now a small 48-page book – by the same author, by Jack – for sale on the website.
On the back cover there’s a quotation from Coleridge, nothing else. The blurb on the website page reads: ‘A book left on a café table, a waiter chasing after the customer to return it – so begins a series of riffs on the relationship between reader and writer, taking in biographies, shoplifting, launch parties, queues for the toilet at literary festivals, cover designs, endings, re-reading, dog-walking and bonfires.’
by the same author will be published properly (I mean, available to bookshops from Central Books) in January. But it’s available on the website right now, and if you’re going to spend a fiver on anyone for Christmas – half the price of a Pantone mug – consider this. (I’m perfectly aware that I’m indulging here in the processing-of-books narrative that bothers me on page 41 of the book.)
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