Ten years, WMP & the Small Publishers' Book Fair

The first CBe books were published ten years ago this month. At the time – I’ve written about this before – I had no plans (or money) to publish more books, and no distributor and no sales agent and no social media presence, but it turned out to be more fun than any work I’d done in offices and so I stumbled on.

I was lucky in the timing. Ten years ago the small-press scene was a bit more Wild West than it is now, which meant I could make things up as I went along, trusting that everything could be held together with bits of string and packing tape. I’ve still never made a spreadsheet. Today, the good small presses do have to be a little more – well – organised. Not least because they have become an accepted part of the system; condescended to, but not as ignorable as before. They win prizes.

Another difference between now and ten years ago has been the expansion of opportunities for writers who, because of where they are coming from, even a short time ago would rarely have got a look-in. I can’t claim that CBe has a terrific record here. The list has included a fair number of foreign writers in translation, and writers who had not published before and even older writers (one year the average age of the authors was 83), but just one non-white writer.

I sometimes think that institutions in which degrees of sexism and racism have been embedded from the start can never really be ‘institutionally’ free of those elements without starting again from scratch. I sometimes feel I’m a sort of institution myself – white, male, in my mid-sixties, a life of privilege. (I write about this in Robinson, in which the character Robinson himself asks why my children do not ‘rise up and smite me’.) Traditional mainstream publishing is also an institution.

A Good Thing about the small presses over the past decade and longer is that, operating from outside the given publishing-industry structure, many of them have been able to choose to start from scratch. Not completely, because to get their books noticed and sold they are still largely dependent on the established mechanisms. But enough to loosen things up, to mix up the categories, to reach out to new readers. This is work in progress. (There is still resistance. White male privilege, bedded in for so long, isn’t going to simply say sorry and walk out the room. Earlier this year a Tory MP made a formal complaint to the Equality and Human Rights Commission about the Jhalak Prize, founded to ‘celebrate the achievements of British writers of colour’, on the grounds that it ‘unlawfully discriminated against white writers’. According to his Wiki entry, the same MP attempted in late 2016 to derail a Bill protecting women against violence on the grounds that it was ‘sexist against men’, and has declared that ‘by definition’ those with disabilities are less productive: there’s a pattern.) But the progress is worth celebrating, and taking forward. Come to the Small Publishers’ Book Fair in the Conway Hall, London WC1R 4RL, on 10/11 November.

Chasing

Now that CBe is slowing down, foot on the brake, here’s a thing I’m so, so happy to be doing less of: chasing.

I don’t mean the big things, such as love and happiness and the surefire bestseller, but all the little daily things: chasing unpaid invoices, chasing attachments that were not attached and the stuff that was promised for Wednesday but didn’t arrive, chasing reviews and quotes and potential readers (marketing is chasing) and a glimpse of a shortlisting and discounts smaller by 2% and sums of money so tiny that in the end you just shrug. Chasing myself. You know when you walk by an office and look into those open-plan spaces of infinite dread and decorum and you wonder what everyone at their desks is actually doing? They are chasing. ‘I’m wondering if you got my email of last week (month/year/century).’ ‘Just following up …’ ‘I don’t want to hassle but …’ ‘So sorry to hear that you’re ill/ engulfed by marking/ have forgotten you ever said you were interested/ your father-in-law broke his leg, but maybe we could rearrange …’

Being chased by others, not uncommonly. Chasing is circular and has somehow contrived to be the prime economic activity of our time. Big people employ little people to do their chasing for them, and then chase them, all the way down the line, because they themselves are being chased. A link to my all-time favourite piece of academic research – entitled ‘Environmental Effects on Compulsive Tail Chasing in Dogs’, based on a sample of 368 dogs and co-written by eight authors based in Finland, France and Canada – is here.

The hook on which I’ll hang this post is the Small Publishers Book Fair (we all have to be under 6 foot, seriously), taking place in the Conway Hall, London (WC1R 4RL) on 10/11 November, a Friday and a Saturday. I love this book fair. For two days I’ll be stuck behind a table, static, and I can’t chase and I can’t run away. No responsibility, except for what’s on the table. This is a humdrum form of bliss. Please come.

Flappers

1
CBe has a new thing. It’s not a book and not a poster and not a postcard, but something of all three. Two of these new things, actually, and I’m calling them flappers. (Is there a proper name for them? Someone must have done this before.)

Flappers (besides being, as Wiki puts it, young Western women in the 1920s who ‘flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior‘) are A3 sheets (297 x 420mm), printed in colour both sides on 150gsm paper with images and text. Folded down to postcard size and closed with a peel-off sticker, they can be addressed, stamped and posted as postcards. (Or put in an envelope and posted as a letter. They come with their own envelopes – and in transparent display sleeves: see above – like greetings cards and Christmas cards do in gift shops. Very much like that. Except that these are reasonably priced, for what they are. The Inevitable Gift Shop: I’ve arrived there.)

The images in these two flappers come from early 20th-century postcard concertina booklets (also in the photo above): Genova: 15 vedute a colori and Bruxelles: 12 cartes postales en Photochrom. The texts are written in the voices of a 10-year-old child (Genova) and a confused Englishman in 1914 (Bruxelles).

The flappers are available from the website: here. Exclusively, as they say. They are not in shops.

I once wrote that CBe as a whole is ‘a little machine for reading aloud to strangers’ (I’d forgotten that, until it was quoted back to me). The flappers are themselves little machines in which the cogs of image and text interact to produce an odd new form of narrative.

2
The flappers came out of me staring at early colourised postcards and wondering about their slightly strange colours. Originally, I was going to do a 32-page booklet of the Genova postcards with a dual text: the child writing the postcards, me going off at a tangent, largely an autobiographical one. The latter part got left behind when I decided not to do the thing as a book and is now homeless. Here it is (you don’t have to read it) – an offcut, a companion text to that in Genova.
---------------------

When we went on holiday, I wrote postcards. Back home, we went to see Granny in her hotel in Harrogate. Once, she held up the postcard I had written to her and asked, How do they get the colours in the right places?

*

I used to stamp and splash in puddles and now I don’t, I step around them.

*

The postcards arrive out of the blue: tiny people crossing wide roads between enormous buildings in muted sunlight. I never really knew my granny, nor my father, who died when I was five, but they are there, somewhere. 

*

‘How do they get the colours in the right places?’ 

Early colourised photographs were tinted by hand (as a child might fill in a colouring book). In the 1880s a Swiss inventor developed a printing process he called Photochrom: multiple exposures of a negative were made on a lithographic limestone tablets coated with a light-sensitive solvent (bitumen, benzene), one tablet for each colour, with solvents brushed on to adjust tones. The process was commercially licensed; by the early 1900s the Detroit Publishing Company  was producing several million colourised postcards a year. Just two decades later this process was redundant. For the colours, the printers worked from notes made by the photographer on the spot; in the absence of any notes they guessed.

A very young child might also ask, ‘How do they get the words in the right places?’ By the time children are old enough to articulate that question in language they are already getting the hang of it – words in their right places, or near enough – so they have no need to ask. But it’s still a good question, and one that might also be asked by many old people when the words start slipping away, deserting their places.

*

The French poet Jean Follain was sent to Leeds in England in 1919 at the age of sixteen to learn a new language. He resisted. To name un arbre ‘a tree’, for example, or to call pain ‘bread’, was to assign to them completely the wrong colours.

Two figures on a street in Leeds in 1919: Follain and my father, just two years younger. That was the year my father left school and started work in an iron foundry where his own father had married the boss’s daughter, so easing the way for my own eventual appearance as a member of the bourgeoisie. 

*

‘The afternoons here go on for ages.’

The same number of hours before sunset, surely. Relative to time spent on Earth, an afternoon in the life of a child is longer than an afternoon in the life of an adult – but that’s not it. Nor is boredom: boredom is a large part of childhood but is different from adult boredom. Few young children wear watches. Long-term prisoners and very old people may also experience boredom in a different way.

They look longer, those afternoons, because of the alchemy of the colourising process, the slow light and particular tints according to which the sun is fixed for ever at an exact spot above the horizon. It’s a form of embalming.

*

Follain has a poem in which children hold hands and pose near a statue ‘for a photographer from the postcard company’. The branch of a rosebush shaken by the wind will come out as a blur, but not the children. ‘Their faces have a modest look, suspicious, already cruel, the town cynic might say.’

My brother, roughly the same age as me, remembers that I tried to kill him by pushing him off a wall. Or so I remember him saying. I have no memory of any such incident. 

*

Postcards are advertisements: beggars and litter cleared off the streets as if before a visit by royalty.

Just as the colours in a colourised postcard were limited to the number of lithographic stones beyond which the process would not be commercially viable – up to fifteen, often – so too their essential vocabulary, the range of their subject matter: castles, town halls, statues, natural wonders, peasants in folkloric costume, bridges, ships, parks with flower beds. Keep off the grass.

*

After my father died, my mother took up gardening, and when I think of my mother now she is often in the garden, weeping, no, weeding. There was a special tool with dark red handles for clipping the edges of the lawn where it abutted a flower bed. It hung upside down on two nails in the garage. My uncle and aunt came for supper and at seven o’clock we stood in the garden under a clear blue sky and my aunt remarked how often this happens, a grey day of drizzle and then quite suddenly at seven in the evening the sun comes out.

*

For period of several weeks or maybe months in the late 1970s I believed that the world around me was on a lease about to expire, and the streets I walked along were a film set just waiting to be to be struck. Everyone was going to die, so there’d be no one around even to see the film. The story was over; no retakes, no director’s cut, no sequels. This was going to happen. A form of clinical depression, perhaps. To the me then there was no possibility of the me now, writing this.

Also in the 1970s – I was in my twenties – there was a day, an hour, when it occurred to me that however long I lived it was very possible that I would never be more happy than I was, right then. Over the door to the room, some fancy wrought-iron scrollwork.

*

Another question, this one asked by me and addressed to my other granny (she was coming down the stairs, the ones with the rust-red carpet): Is it better to be a man or a woman?

I had a notion that one’s gender was provisional up to one’s 21st (or was it 18th?) birthday, when one had to decide for keeps, and surely old people had wisdom to impart. I don’t remember her reply. (She was quite deaf, anyway, my granny. Or deaf when it suited her, my mother said.)

*

Dream: I am at a party in a bookshop. I am handed a letter addressed to me, c/o the bookshop, and I recognise the handwriting on the envelope. I have to push through people holding glasses of wine to find a quiet corner. The letter is from my mother, who died in 2004 – except that she didn’t: the letter explains that she had fallen in love with another woman, and because the conservative village in which she lived was unlikely to welcome this relationship she had faked her death and gone to live with Gertrud in Germany. She is happy, and she hopes that I will forgive her and she knows I must be busy but I am welcome to visit at any time. 

*

Wanting to dance – waiting to dance – is already one half of a dance.

*

Today, I walked past a house in east London where I once claimed that I had never experienced grief, and the woman I was talking to looked at me as if she had opened the front door and found a slug on the doorstep. I can remember her name. I can’t remember which number in the street, which door, which colour the door was painted.

*

Driving my children down to Cornwall for holidays, there was a point on the A303 where I came over the brow of a hill and spread out before me was my mother’s England – wide, smooth, endless, but also domesticated, tidy, kempt: the fields patchwork-quilted, the villages within their parish bounds, the little roads tucked in. And the traffic was swishing, swishing past me, the big lorries rocking the car.

*

Follain spoke about writing poems in terms of making paintings: ‘I may say to myself, looking at a text: I need some red there, or some grey . . .’ Not a bowl of raspberries, not blood, but rather ‘a pronoun or some syllable of a word which, for me, is a stroke of red’. 

Jean Follain was born in 1903 in a village in Normandy. His childhood coincided with the last decade of a way of life that was obliterated by the 1914–18 war, and his poems are a coalescence of memory and imagination. A boy bends to tie his shoelaces on a country road at sunset, a widow leads a red-haired child to school, a man slices off two fingers to avoid military service, a drunk mumbles to a hedgerow, a wasp buzzes in a curtain’s fold, a daughter sews by a window, ‘nimbée à la couleur du jour’: a largely pre-industrial world, framed by wars past and to come, but there is nothing either innocent or antiquarian here. The poetry is analogous, perhaps, to the early photographic process of salt printing in which a negative is pressed against paper coated with light-sensitive substances (memory, imagination) and exposed to sunlight – today’s sunlight, the light that pours from the sky at the time that the writer writes (and the reader reads). Follain’s true concern, his translator W. S. Merwin insists, is ‘the mystery of the present – the mystery which gives the recalled concrete details their form, at once luminous and removed, when they are seen at last in their places.’

Photography (3)

The credits for this book cover include a picture library and then someone else for ‘photo colorizing’.

Here’s a colourised postcard I bought (50p) in a market last week:



Just as the range of colour in painting was for centuries limited to the particular pigments available to artists, so also colour in photography and film was determined by the available technologies. The birth of photography is generally dated to 1839, when the daguerreotype process was introduced; colour photography wasn’t commercially introduced until 1907 (the Autochrome process, developed by the Lumière brothers); Photochrom, a printing process developed by a Swiss inventor in the 1880s and then commercially licensed, allowed the mass-production of many millions of colourised postcards in the early 1900s; but colour wasn’t generally available to amateur photographers until the mid-20th century. Colour was largely ignored by fine-art photographers (but not commercial ones: fashion, advertising) until the 1970s; it took until William Eggleston and Saul Leiter (both of whose photos are now often used on book covers) and certain others arrived.

The charm of early colour photographs and colourised postcards has to do with the lack of glare and oppressive shadows and the softness of the colours. Ian Jeffrey (in Photography: A Concise History; 1981, but still a lovely book) notes that the Autochrome process allowed Lartigue ‘to make photographs of great serenity. This seems to have been the strength of colour and also its flaw. Polychrome worlds are both radiant and genial. They easily imply atmosphere and suggest ready access to the place and its weather.’ Feeding on this – life used to be more simple, surely – are nostalgia and its seductions, which include the temptation to believe that the ways in which a past era represented itself to itself, ways determined by the available technology, actually showed how it was.

The past is a different country, but chiefly in its mindsets; its sunlight was no less bright, its skies no less blue and its fire engines and blood no less red than they are now. To reproduce the look of early colour photography – a look achieved by technology now redundant, a look that sways into fashion – involves effortful reconstruction (and in film the use of filters, I guess, after watching a 2008 film last night that is set in the 1920s and had its colour tones very managed), but is frequently used as a form of shorthand – because of its seductions, and because of claims to something that gets called authenticity. A colourised photograph on a book cover indicates that the book is set in the early 20th century. A book about the First World War will have a black-and-white or a colourised photograph, as above (unless there has been a recent film of the book, in which case there may be a still from the film, itself colour-manipulated). (Sepia and similar – those effects you can get at a click on the cheapest photo-editing programs – are used for the same purpose; the cover of a 2007 Penguin edition of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party has a sepia photograph and a brownish-yellow sticker: ‘The book that inspired Downton Abbey’.) In fact, the subject matter of colourised photographs is shown not as the people of the time saw it but more as the cats, dogs and rabbits saw it (the picture below is from a website explaining colour to children). Our visual understanding of the past is cat-eyed.

Photography (2)

Henri Le Secq (1818–82) doesn’t feature in concise histories of photography because he wasn’t a game-changing artist. Possibly his best-known photograph is that of men (and one woman?) in a public baths in Paris:



It is monumental, informal, theatrical, narrative, and plays on binaries (light, no light; dress, undress; above, below; stillness, movement). This is not ‘typical’ Le Secq; he very rarely includes human figures. It’s a wonderful photograph, but it’s not the one that haunts me.

Le Secq was one of five photographers commissioned (by Prosper Mérimée) to compile a documentary record of French architecture; Le Secq covered the north and east. His churches and ecclesiastical statuary are dull (rightly so; it wasn’t part of his commission to be anything more). His bridges hold me for longer, the water beneath them as solid as the stone of the arches. Also dutiful, but to today’s eye moving out from the mere documentary, are his photographs of Paris buildings in the process of demolition in the early 1850s, making way for expansion and modernisation: their ruination – exposed chimneys, gaps, piles of rubble – appears as a form of deliberate architecture, the buildings and their destruction in complete harmony.

He moves out of the city. This:



Three massive waves tumbling forward: the bleak escarpments of quarries on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris; the buildings of the city are relegated to the upper left corner, in a dusty haze. This unregulated edge-land, neither urban nor rural, turns up often in literature and films, and maybe dreams too. Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film Taste of Cherry follows a man driving around all day in a very similar landscape (outside Tehran), asking people to bury him. He’s going to take a stack of pills and lie down in a hole beside a tree, and he needs someone to come at dawn and call his name and fill in the hole if he doesn’t reply. He is offering good money for just twenty spadefuls of earth, but the labourer threatens to smash his face in. The soldier runs away. The theology student listens but is bound to refuse. The Turkish man who works as a taxidermist agrees, but not before he has told the story of how he once climbed a tree with a rope to hang himself but the mulberries were in season and they tasted delicious.

For several centuries on the site photographed by Le Secq there was a gibbet on which the bodies of executed criminals were placed on public view. After 1760 the site became a dump for refuse and sewage, and a place for butchering horses. Limestone and gypsum from the quarries were exported to America. In the 1860s, after the 19th arrondissement was annexed to Paris, the area was transformed (gentrified) into a public park with terraces, a lake and a mock-Roman temple. Then they started making postcards.

Le Secq moved out further. Photographing trees, he’s interested in tangles and knots and limbs at odd angles; and just as he was drawn to buildings in the process of demolition, so too in his studies of terrain he looked to muddle and obstruction, disarray, things coming loose. This – below – is the one that haunts me. Below a cropped-off row of spindly trees, the champ des Cosaques in the forest of Montmirail has suffered flooding or subsidence: beneath a gash in its smooth, taut surface, the land has excavated itself, exposing a jumble of roots, soil and stone. I think this is what memory is: a hollowing out, a collapse. It’s not pretty.

Photography (1)

This is the first of three, maybe more, very different posts about old photographs. And memory. (All writers call in here at some point, I know; I have nothing original to add; but I’ve been doing a lot of gazing.)



First, one of those tucked-away little exhibitions in London of the sort that one stumbles into by accident: Usakos – Photographs beyond Ruins: The Old Location Albums 1920s to 1960s, in the basement of the Brunei Gallery at SOAS. Until 23 September.

Usakos is a small town in Namibia. According to Wikipedia, ‘Europeans’ (unspecified) bought the land around 1900, resold it to a railway company, and it is now ‘just a drive-through’, ‘riddled with poverty and alcohol abuse’. Ah, Wiki.

People live there. Among them, four particular women who collected things, those things including photographs taken (often by itinerant photographers) of parties, weddings, games, new babies. It was a thing that women did: keep, not throw away. Because the record was worth preserving, and handing down.

The other people who kept a record were the administrators of the apartheid regime of South Africa, who in the early 1960s decided that the blacks were living too close to the whites, so bulldozed the ‘old location’ and rehoused those who lived there in a basic, soulless new township in a separate location. The show at the Brunei gallery, chiefly drawn from the women’s collections, also includes the typewritten lists of the 700+ names of those who were compulsorily rehoused.

This is not a photography exhibition in the fine-art sense. The photographs are enlarged from their original size and I doubt the quality of their reproduction would win any prizes. That is not, of course, the point.









(Upstairs at the Brunei Gallery, running at the same time as the Usakos exhibition, are photographs of the extraordinary indigenous architecture of Yemen, a heritage that is currently being bombed to dust.)

Fergus Allen, 1921–2017

Fergus Allen – CBe's most senior author – died on 22 July, aged 95. His funeral was today.

‘To Be Read Before Being Born’:

No time is allowed for practice or rehearsal.
There are no retakes and there isn’t a prompter.
There’s only moving water, dimpled by turbulence –
And no clambering out on to the bank
To think things over, as there is no bank.

Fergus Allen: born 1921; father Irish, mother English; of a generation that largely subscribed to the view that the primary responsibility of a man, if that man chose to have family, was to work for the security and future of that family. (I may be assuming things here; but even if I am, I don’t think it’s a bad view.) He worked as a civil engineer, and when he retired from employment he was a first civil service commissioner; I too have difficulty in knowing from job titles what people actually do, but google it and you’ll find that no one gets to this job without a track record of long experience and deep integrity.

A perennial reader of others, he waited until his retirement to give his own writing the time and attention that it required. Fergus published his first poetry collection at the age of 72 with Faber; two more Faber collections followed before he was made, as he put it, to ‘walk the plank’; his next collection was published by Dedalus in Ireland, and then, from CBe, Before Troy (2010) and New & Selected Poems (2013). The latter has a foreword by Christopher Reid, who took on Fergus at Faber:

“… each new poem, each succeeding book, a fresh adventure. The vocabulary and diction have uncommon breadth, from the elaborately mandarin to the colloquial and slangy, and the range of voices extends from what we may – sometimes riskily – assume is the poet’s own voice to those of surprising personae.”

He liked Auden. He wasn’t far off being a contemporary of Auden. He spoke on Auden at the 2011 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and read his own poems (photo above) and was interviewed: they worked you hard at Aldeburgh, even if you were their first 90-year-old poet. In 2013 he read from his New & Selected to a packed audience in a café/bar in Brighton. Among others, he read the poem that begins ‘Annie’s pubic hair was beyond a joke’, and he read the early poem that retells the Fall as the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Guinness brewery in Dublin.

He was a poet acutely aware of pleasure and menace and mystery; a bracing tone, yes, but he laughed easily and well. Why is he not more widely known? Perhaps in part because he didn’t make a career out of literature; and when he did get noticed, there was too much attention to his age at the expense of the sheer excellence of the poetry.

Properly, 'Fergus Allen, CB, FRSL'. Establishment? He came to London for a lunch to celebrate his New & Selected; after the lunch, he and Joan, his wife, both in their nineties, scoffed at the idea of getting a taxi to the train station and insisted on getting the Tube.

Recordings of Fergus reading his poems are at the Poetry Archive.

Nicholas Lezard, October 4004 BC – July 2017

Bishop Ussher calculated that the world began on 23 October 4004 BC. Somewhere between 5 billion years ago and then, anyway.

As I understand it, Nicholas Lezard is out of contract with the Guardian from the end of this month. Lezard has written a ‘paperback of the week’ column in the Guardian Review for the past, what? – 20? – 25 years? Neither his Guardian profile (‘Nicholas Lezard is a literary critic for the Guardian’) nor his (perfunctory) Wiki entry mentions the start date and this feels right, because for those of us who have been reading regularly, or just dipping in and out, it has just been there, a part of the world as we know it.

It’s very simple: allow an intelligent, widely-read, cricket-loving person to choose from among the books that thud through their door and enthuse about their choices regularly, weekly. (I do mean enthuse: Lezard doesn’t do hatchet-jobs, though god knows he must have been tempted.) No meetings, no marketing, no form-filling for grants. No faff about whether a book comes from Big People publishing or small presses, no faff at all. I have no idea why other journals haven’t copied. Except for the brain you need to start with, it’s a no-brainer: the newspaper has benefited (from a steadily increasing number of readers attracted to this column because they have learned to trust it); the sales of good writing have benefited; a good man has had enough cash in his pocket to buy his round.

And it has worked. Lezard’s last paperback-of-the-week column (here) has 70+ comments (it is now 'closed for comments'), many of those with multiple recommendations. There’s been something Reithian about the whole enterprise: people should be informed as well as entertained. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest that this column has changed lives.

(A woman I knew who died last year aged 101, mother ‘in service’, father illiterate, could recite whole poems. I’m fairly convinced that the most influential, life-enhancing book in the last century in the UK was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury – first published 1861 and then on and on, into the lives of people who might never otherwise have encountered the writing it celebrated. Week by week, without any pretension, without any dire ‘literature is good for you’ agenda, Lezard’s column has been performing a similar job.)

Disclosure of interest: Lezard has written about and recommended at least seven of the roughly 50 books I’ve published during the last decade. In 2011 I made a little shrine (above) to the patron saint of small presses in the street where he once lived. He has been the only broadsheet reviewer whose say-so has made any difference to sales. Without Lezard, I wouldn’t have continued to publish. I guess now that I’ll have to add an R.I.P. plaque.

Last week, the BBC reversed its decision to axe the Radio 4 Saturday Review programme (without which I would not be publishing J. O. Morgan). Can the Guardian do likewise for the Lezard column? If not, more fule they.

Robinson: appendix 2 – Graham Greene

[These appendices add Robinsons to those already in the book (Robinson) or glance again at Crusoe. See also previous post, 'Robinson: appendix 1'.]

‘Gloom was apt to descend on all of them as soon as the taxi entered the deep shade of the laurel drive which led to the high-gabled Edwardian house that his father had bought for his retirement because it was near a golf course.’ Well, yes.

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor (recommended for its Robinson link by TH: thank you) is to me a disappointment, all the more so because I remember a time when I enjoyed reading Greene. Maurice Castle is a low-level member of the intelligence services working in a London office. He has a black South African wife and a son; his wife worries about the son going to prep school but Castle reassures her: ‘He’s a good runner. In England there’s no trouble if you are good at any sort of games.’ So many stereotypes are in play here that I can't be bothered to begin. Games-playing is how Castle’s colleagues think of their intelligence work: ‘We are playing games, Daintry, games, all of us. It’s important not to take a game too seriously or we may lose it.’

(How important is it not to take games ‘too seriously’? Seriously important. Careers and livelihoods depend upon just the right degree of non-seriousness. It’s a British code.)

Women in The Human Factor are off to the side: secretaries, ‘tarts’, wives who are remote. Even Sarah, Castle’s wife, a character essential to the book, which has to do with how love rather than ideology can be reason for betrayal, is a blank. Much alcohol is drunk in these pages, mainly whisky and port. Lunch at the Reform Club is steak-and-kidney pudding followed by treacle tart. At the Travellers Club, roast beef (‘Perhaps a little overdone?’). The English stodginess is compounded, for most of the book, by the clunky, writing-by-numbers way the plot is advanced.

At the end of the novel Castle – whose interpretation of the rules of the game has been naïve – is alone, marooned in a bleak apartment in Moscow. ‘In the evening he would warm some soup and sit huddled near the radiator, with the dusty disconnected telephone at his elbow, and read Robinson Crusoe.’ Another marooned Englishman comes across Castle reading Crusoe: ‘Ah ha, the great Daniel. He was one of us.’ ‘One of us?’ ‘Well, Defoe perhaps was more an MI5 type.’

Castle’s reading matter is appropriate. The other books available to Castle include ‘school editions’ of Shakespeare and a couple of Dickens novels: these school editions are what he grew up with (along with Rider Haggard: Allan Quatermain was his ‘childhood hero’). Throughout Greene’s novel, all the men playing the game of running the world and sworn to an official Secrets Act, married or not, are lonely and have difficulty in relating to others. Robinson argues that this state of affairs is the inevitable result of elevating Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to the status of a kind of national set text. And though in obvious ways Greene's novel feels dated (it’s pre-internet), the gloom of the high-gabled Edwardian house and the adjacent golf course feels horribly familiar.

Robinson: appendix 1 – Elizabeth Bowen

As Tom Sabine suggests in his kind note on Robinson (here; and then here), once Robinson is on the radar he keeps cropping up.

Following up Tom Sabine’s suggestion, here’s Robinson in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Summer Night’, the final story in her 1941 collection Look at All the Roses: ‘Robinson did not frequent drawing rooms … When he was met, his imperturbable male personality stood out to the women unpleasingly, and stood out most of all in that married society in which women aspire to break the male in a man … When Robinson showed up, late, at the tennis club, his manner with women was easy and teasing, but abstract and perfectly automatic. From this had probably come the legend that he liked women “only in one way” … Robinson had on him the touch of some foreign sun.’

Did Bowen name this character knowingly? I doubt it. Still, he is in the club (whose other members, as surveyed in Robinson, include the Robinsons of Céline, Kafka, Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit, Sherwood Anderson, Muriel Spark, et al), even if less for his own awkwardness than for the disconcerting effect he has on others. Justin, in company with Robinson, becomes ‘prone, like a perverse person in love, to expose all his own piques, crotchets and weaknesses’. The woman who at the start of the story is driving to Robinson to spend the night with him becomes, when at last she is alone with him, stranded: ‘The adventure (even, the pilgrimage) died at its root, in the childish part of her mind.’ Only Justin’s sister, completely deaf, is at ease with him (‘She does not hear with her ears, he does not hear with his mind. No wonder they can communicate.’).

It’s a fine story: a late summer light, three generations (including a child dancing naked on her parents’ bed with snakes chalked on her skin), inconvenient guests, urgency and ennui, wartime (‘Now that there’s enough death to challenge being alive we’re facing it that, anyhow, we don’t live. We’re confronted by the impossibility of living’). Nothing, really, happens. Elizabeth Bowen is to me a touchstone, but I hadn’t read this story before: thank you for the cue.

Robinson in this story is the outsider. He’s a ‘factory manager’. He has been in this town for three years, which sounds a reasonable length of time but, in a small town, isn’t. He ‘had at first been taken to be a bachelor’ but he’s not; he’s living apart from his wife and children (three, one dead). The woman who is driving to him is also married, also has children. Victoria Glendinning, in her biography of Bowen (which I’d forgotten I had; I found it while perched on a stool looking for another book entirely), says that ‘the starting point’ for Robinson was a man named Jim Gates, ‘the manager of a creamery in Kildorrey’: ‘completely non-intellectual, genial, a life-and-souller’. With Jim Gates, Glendinning writes, Bowen ‘had, simply, a good time, with lots of drinks and lots of cigarettes and easy laughter … His company was a liberation not only from the excessive sensibility of others but from her own – that sensibility which was at the centre of her talent and also, some have thought, its limitation’. Bowen, Glendinning writes, ‘needed men like Jim Gates: extrovert, practical, a little coarse.’ I’m very uncomfortable with literary biographers telling me what their subjects needed, or didn’t need, but I think I know a Robinson when he turns up.

Robinson: an update

A nice note on Robinson’s Robinson is here (courtesy The Brooknerian). The book itself is here. Thank you to those who have alerted me to other members of the family.

I’m not sure that Robinson even voted in the EU referendum in June last year, and I haven’t asked. Sometimes a dank torpor seems to settle over him. If he didn't vote, it may well have been because the referendum campaigns were a shoddy advertisement for democracy: ill-prepared, poorly delivered, cheap rhetoric displacing valid information. Very few people – including the politicians – had any realistic notion of the consequences of a vote to leave the EU. Many still don't. Robinson believes that many who voted to leave were not voting specifically about the EU; rather, they were sticking up a finger to a political establishment that didn’t appear to listen to anyone outside the London, the media and its own woodworm-infested corridors. They were saying: we exist, and we’re fed up with being taken for granted, a plague on both your houses, and we’re not going to vote X just because you tell us we should.

There is no clear mandate for Brexit. The difference between the leave vote (51.9%) and the remain vote (48.1%) was just over 1.25 million. Nearly 13 million of the electorate chose not to vote at all. Out of a total electorate of 46.5 million, just 17.4 million voted to leave. Anyone declaring that Brexit is ‘the people’s will’ is unfit for office. Anyone declaring that ‘getting on with the job’ of Brexit is ‘in the national interest’ – as May does, May who herself believed before the referendum that Brexit was not in the national interest at all – needs their head looking at.

Robinson once hated rhubarb, now he likes it. Robinson once married an heiress, thinking it would solve all his problems, and it didn’t, and now he is not married. The whole point of having a mind is that one can change it. In general, British democracy allows for this: we vote a government in and if we decide we’ve made a mistake, we can vote it out. Brexit is different. To press ahead with a decision recklessly based on such a narrow vote, with consequences that will affect people's lives for generations, without a fail-safe mechanism – whoops, we may have pressed the wrong button there – maybe rhubarb isn’t so bad after all – is just daft. Even Robinson can see that.

The word ‘funny’

The prizes tend to go to books about grief, or dystopias. Or oppression. Or sexual abuse, or any kind of sexual dysfunction.

‘Light verse’ – about as dispiriting a two-word combination as, for example, ‘conference centre’ or ‘sanitary solutions’ (the latter a sign on a local factory that made toilets, now demolished, making way for luxury flats, add that in, 'luxury flats').

Can I send you my book, please? It will, I promise, be (quote from a recent submission, standing in for many) ‘bleak, confused, disturbing, harrowing’.

I’ll pass. I’ll also pass, of course, on submissions that promise to be uplifting, redeeming, or (another quote) ‘celebrating our common humanity’. Or funny.

‘Funny’ is a word that on the dating sites might well be algorithmically matched up with ‘silly’. There’s a vocab problem here. Funny = makes you laugh. Funny = comedy. And there’s an obvious problem with writers who get labelled, or marketed, as ‘comic’ writers, which is this: I feel I’m being manipulated, I feel buttons are being pushed to make me laugh. So I resist. I’ll decide what I find funny, thank you. Don’t tell me when to laugh.

Pitching a book is one of the more absurd activities that humans engage in. It requires a skill that has nothing to do with the writing of the book and an impossible degree of tact and is almost bound to fail, even though the book itself may not, and awareness of this engenders a kind of daft desperation which often ends up as being, yes, funny.

For the record: misery, dystopia, ‘bleak’, no. Don’t even try. I’m in my sixties, not my twenties. I prefer Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies. Tragedy can include comedy but only as a bit part; comedy relishes tragedy because comedy is more inclusive, more generous, more silly, and is about life going on, not ending, and comedy, so far, is winning out, though it knows it’s as doomed as any other way of taking on the world, it takes no pride in this, it despairs, and that is its essence, as comedy. Comedy is stupid heroism.

Writers who do make me laugh include, obviously, Chekhov, Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, Beckett, Cioran, Pinter. They make me laugh, out loud, but how to say this without using the word ‘funny’. Adding in ‘deeply’ or ‘seriously’ gestures, but doesn’t do it. Is there a word in another language – I’m asking translators here – for this? To describe the way in which, for example, the above writers manage being true to human fatuity and at the same time hilarious? Because in English we are not capable. Is an English Hrabal impossible? (There are English Hrabals, but no one attends.)

Bleak. A badge: we’re doomed. A whole aesthetic of this, a very pretty aesthetic, lovely composition, an aesthetic of doom and desolation and decay and ruins and rust and rot. Decomposition. Failure: of, not least, how males and females relate to each other, who populate this planet roughly equally but who very few of them of them have any idea how to sort this.

Failure: authentic. Doom, apocalypse, misery: click-bait, reinforcing.

Pollsters, hucksters

After starting as the most boring ever, this election has become seriously interesting, not least because of the polls. The Cameron-led Conservatives (Tories, from here on) were pretty sure, largely because of the polls, they were going to win the Brexit vote (I mean, so sure that the UK would vote to remain, as was in the manifesto, he won on that, and the polls) and they lost. The May-led Tories (May herself a remainer, now U-turned, and the U-turning become her signature) were then sure, because of the polls, that calling this coming election would deliver a surefire landslide victory, barely any need (again) to campaign, certainly no need for the PM to bother debating one-to-one with the leader of the opposition, and now no one is so pretty pretty sure. Long before this, the polls had it so wrong on Corbyn getting Labour leadership.

There’s a fun article on the BBC website titled ‘How do opinion polls work?’, January 2016, which begins, hilariously: ‘The 2015 general election result took political pollsters by surprise and a of experts panel has now said that, put simply, their predictions were wrong because they spoke to the wrong people.’(I wasn’t among the wrong people, by the way; I’ve never been polled in my life. Maybe they just make it all up and take the money.) Which implies that the pollsters just got in with the wrong crowd, as any intelligent teenager does. And implies that the pollsters, though they may be experts – people pay them, they make a living from this – are always going to be ?smaller experts than the bigger experts, this other ‘panel of experts’: who they, and who pays them?

It’s fun, that BBC article, because it includes sentences such as: ‘Tory voters in general are also said by pollsters to be more likely to put the phone down [Ed: but how do they know the phone-slammers are Tory if they can’t even ask them?] or be ex-directory, and less likely to answer the door.’ Because the person knocking on the door might be one of those ex-offenders who want sell you severely overpriced tea-towels? But the knocking-on-the-door may be delivery of that thing you’ve ordered off the net, that thing that will make your life a little smarter ... And you sign with a scriggle on their pad. Dilemma. Tory dilemma.

Just open the door, ffs.

Polls are not cheap; someone is paying; who?; there’s very little transparency on this, or on their methodology. Meanwhile, the polls (‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ A pollster?) do influence how people vote. People, on the whole, follow other people. That's the only reason why polls are even vaguely interesting, and then not. They were why Cameron took in the EU referendum to get elected, and then had to resign. They were why May called this election. The polls work in mysterious ways.

Fierce and beautiful world

I wrote most of this post last night, shortly before the unspeakable mass murder in Manchester of young people “without any protection against all the sudden, hostile forces loose in our fierce and beautiful world” (Andrei Platonov), and today I couldn’t decide whether to post it. The juxtaposition of joy and horror is not to be borne. I’m posting it.

On the wall in Ken Garland’s house there’s a black-and-white photograph of some people sitting around a table in the middle of a field on a summer day – I’ve no idea who the people are or how they or the food and the wine and the tablecloth came to the table, or how the table itself got to the middle of the field, but when I first happened to glance at that photo I immediately recognised what it was showing. It’s a picture of heaven.

Last Sunday, something too close for comfort. I went into town to meet David Collard in Holborn, where we were going to pick up his wife and go back to his home for lunch. David called his wife: she’d finished her work early, we’d meet her in the pub. The pub was the Seven Stars, also known as Roxy’s, in Carey Street, and there – no? really? – was Christopher Reid. Well, Christopher likes a good pub, so not a total surprise. An hour before, on the Tube on the way into town from Shepherds Bush, I’d been sitting next to the one vacant seat in the carriage and Nicholas Lezard had dropped into that seat – these things happen. Oh, hold on – there is Lezard again, in the pub. And Lara Pawson. And Will Eaves. And Patrick Mackie and Nancy Gaffield and Nicky Singer and Julian Stannard and Tony Lurcock and Tony White and Gabriel Josipovici and Alba Arikha and Stephen Knight and David Henningham and who … this is Paulette Jonguitud, who I have not met before but who has come from Mexico to be here today. As one might catch a bus to see a friend down the road. And it was a sunny day in May and there was a feast, plate upon plate of home-cooked food, and wine, and though it said 'No pudding' on the proper printed menu (with its list of all CBe titles and its quotation from Stendhal) there was of course a cake, a Lara-cake. And over the course of the afternoon, Cécile, Natalia, Michael, Houman, others …

In the New Statesman this week, which happens to feature a poem by Patrick Mackie ('A nasty, grotesque, impatient year ended,/ and the new one will be bitter, tired,/ opaque'), there’s a photo of a unicorn. Very, very rare, and bringing all the elements together in conditions of secrecy takes months of planning, but they do exist.

Two years ago Matthew Siegel (San Francisco) came over from the US and he and I and May-Lan Tan (born Hong Kong, then US before London, currently Berlin) took a bus to Oxford, where Matthew was going to read, and we walked around and went to a pub before the reading and he pretty well wept for strange joy, then me too. And here’s a photo from a few years back of Miha Mazzini (Slovenia) and Beverley Bie Brahic (California/Paris) in that tiny bookshop-in-a-greenhouse that used to be in Wapping:



A number of other CBe writers were unable to gather round the table on Sunday – Fergus Allen, Nina Bogin, Andrew Elliott, Todd McEwen, J. O. Morgan, D. Nurkse (but he’ll be over from Brooklyn at the end of this week and reading at the Troubadour on Monday), Dan O’Brien, Wiesiek Powaga, Marjorie-Ann Watts, Diane Williams – but actually they were there (and others too who, though not published by CBe, are part of the gang) in the form of words or drawings assembled in a box-of-a-book (like a custom-made Anne Carson) designed and made by the Henningham Family Press:



What’s been going on for the past few years has been partly to do with books but mainly to do with a group of people finding one another out and bringing one another to the table. Christopher (who is a very good finder indeed) found Beverley who found Paulette; Gabriel and Nina found Kristof, who was also found by May-Lan, a finding which led to me finding her, and May-Lan found Matthew and Diane, or was that the other way round, and there are many more of these links. I understand this, and I don’t understand it at all. There was Sunday, and then there was Monday.

If you haven’t had enough of CBe, come to Vout-O-Reenees (30 Prescot Steet, E1 8BB) this Thursday, the 25th, from 6.30, to hear Will Eaves, M John Harrison, Lara Pawson and Jack Robinson (launching his book Robinson). I was at Vouts last July on the night 86 people were killed by a truck driver in Nice, and we will go to Vouts again and again and again.

The Robinson diptych

About the two CBe titles this year, both by me under a previously established pen-name, here’s a little background.

1
An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. was several years in the making. I read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black in my teens, but it wasn’t until I bought a copy of an English translation of Memoirs of an Egotist in a second-hand bookshop (long gone) in Hammersmith in, I think, the 1980s, that a switch clicked fully on. There are poems featuring Stendhal in the collections I published between around 1990 and 2001. That translation of Memoirs of an Egotist, by the way, was published by D. J. Enright at Chatto. In Cairo in the late 1970s I bought a copy of Enright’s first poetry collection, published in Alexandria in 1948, for the original cover price, 5 piastres, and I wrote to him; and then I met him regularly on the Tube – he travelling in daily from Wimbledon to Chatto, me on the same line from Fulham Broadway to a job near Green Park. We talked, strap-hanging, awkwardly. I also met him on a train from Kings Cross to Leeds; I’d just bought his OUP Collected Poems, 1981, and as I was unpacking it to read I noticed Enright himself in the seat behind me, lighting his pipe. This is one of the few books I possess that’s signed by the author (a convention I don’t really understand). Enright wrote to me that the Stendhal book and another were the end of his ‘career as a whizz-kid publisher’: co-publishers went bankrupt, warehouses burnt down. He – Enright – quotes my son’s school homework in one of the riffs on quasi-literary matters that featured in his last three books, this one in Injury Time: What’s the name we give to the period between the ages of around 11 and 14 when the body rapidly develops and the mind too gets a little excited and confused? ‘Purgatory.’

I seem to have wandered. (But I miss Enright. He was a very fine writer, enormously well-read and often funny, without selling anything short.) Digression is a part of what An Overcoat is about. To get back to Stendhal, you’ll need the book. Review here.

2
Having stuck with Jack Robinson as a pen-name, and having re-watched one of the Patrick Keiller Robinson films, I thought I’d send Robinson into the family archives: Defoe, obviously, but then a whole mad sequence of offspring, interestingly dysfunctional. (Having a new project was of course also a way of putting Stendhal finally, perhaps, to bed.) I thought this little hobby might keep me occupied for a year at least, ticking along in the background – like one of those unfinishable PhDs that people embark on and I can see why – but given that I started on this soon after the Brexit vote in June of last year, and given that in June this year the UK is being asked make a decision (though only a part of the electorate will bother) about what kind of country it is, or wants to be, the book began to feel more foreground than background.

Bits of Robinson are cooked, bits are raw. If the book had an index, its entries would include (along with Céline, Coetzee, Defoe, Kafka, Keiller, Rimbaud, et al): author’s mother; books read by author at age 12; Colonel Fawcett; English public schools; First World War; housing crisis; male duos (Holmes and Watson, Jeeves and Wooster, Vladimir and Estragon, a host of others); migrants; the Sixties; smoking; time-share apartments; trees; Trump; Uxbridge Road; Volkswagen camper vans.

3
You – or I – may well ask, what am I doing self-publishing these books. The basic answer is simply, because I can. (I have an imprint, I have a cache of available ISBNs.) And because of a degree of megalomania: for better or worse, I enjoy having complete control over design, cover, the setting, etc. Though of course if any other publisher I respected wanted the rights to publish the books and offered me a large sum of money to do that, I’d say yes. I did send An Overcoat to three other publishers; all declined. Robinson is a little different: it feels, to me, topical, of its moment. And in general, the publishing trade works very slowly; the gap between a publisher taking on a book and putting it out into the world is usually nine months or longer. (It doesn’t have to be this way. In 1992 I worked on a Faber book about the general election campaigns that was printed and in the shops 24 hours after the results were declared. But that was an exception; as a rule, the lighter, more flexible small presses are better at getting things done fast.)

Robinson will be launched on Thursday of next week, 25 May, at Vout-O-Reenees, 30 Prescot Street, London E1 8BB, from 6.30 pm. There will be other writers with something to say, directly or indirectly, about the coming election: Will Eaves, M. John Harrison, Lara Pawson. All are welcome. (Is that a sentence anyone has ever heard spoken by Theresa May?)

1997

Sometime in March 1950, I was conceived. For various reasons, my parents’ sense of timing was pretty wonderful. Here’s a brief quote from Robinson (to be published on 8 June) – Robinson has just asked a question (‘Why are there not more crazy people running amok with machetes or second-hand Kalashnikovs?’) and now he wants to ask another:

‘And here is Robinson’s supplementary question; or rather, it’s the same question but framed more specifically. To get the frame in place, he needs me to confirm certain data. Yes, I own the house that I live in, and it was bought for a fraction of the price it’s now supposedly worth. Yes, I am white male. Yes, I went to university on a grant, the government actually paid me to go to university. Yes, I have had a number of not-bad jobs and a couple of them had the kind of pension schemes that are now pie in the sky and my health has been well attended to by the NHS – who only this week have sent me a fun-looking bowel-cancer screening kit – and I now have a state pension and a free bus pass. No, I have never had to fight in a war. That is not a small thing. And then his question: why do my children not rise up and smite me?’

May 1st 1997 – twenty years ago today – was a sunny day in London. Our children’s birthday party was held in the back garden. It was polling day in the general election; the atmosphere was expectant and became celebratory as what began in the afternoon as a children’s party continued into the night and the early hours of the following day as a party for the grown-ups. Some of the other parents stayed very late, barely believing what we were seeing on the TV screen as the election results came in. Children were sprawled asleep on cushions around the room. They were going to be safe, they were going to live in a good place. Everything was going to be hunky-dory.

Arrigo Beyle

‘Semi-retired’ is like that crop-rotation thing that farmers do: no harm in leaving a field fallow for a year, not forcing it.

This year, zero + 2. Two by me, under the Jack pen-name and riding upon the privilege of having under another hat an imprint to publish them with. The first is available now, from the website and from Central Books, the second in the autumn.

Today I posted off 50 copies of the first book to friends and it took a little time, because the post office has reconfigured the software: before, I was able to say this envelope and ten the same, please, and they’d rattle out the labels, but now they have to record the postcode for every label. Early afternoon, no one fuming behind me in the queue, it was OK, but we do, we Brits, at least 52% of us, insist on making life difficult for ourselves.

Out of those 50 I posted off to friends maybe two or three were to people in the trade, who write reviews or are similarly engaged. No more. And I have not solicited quotes for the covers, and I have sent them to no literary editors on the newspapers, the magazines, and they are not in any catalogues and there is no sales agent or publicist and I will not be entering these books for any prizes. (I don’t think they’re eligible for any, but that’s by the by, and makes it easier.)

A form of arrogance, yes. It’s also publishing lite, cutting out the tedious stuff. I can do this with myself, I couldn’t do it – this refusenik thing – with any other writer I’d taken on.

The first Robinson book puts to bed, perhaps, an obsession with Stendhal, and above is a photo of his tomb in Montmartre in Paris taken last week on the anniversary of his death, 23 March. Below is a nice 1940s edition of Le Rouge et le Noir picked up on the same day for 5 euros, and the Robinson book.

David Storey, 1933–2017

I've been neglecting this blog. Only one post this year, before this. I've been busy (how did I ever find time to publish books?), but that's a poor excuse.

David Storey died today. His early novels, more than the plays, were formative for me. I mean that for a certain time they were the most important books in the world. When I was at university, and the exam system allowed me to write an extended essay, I wanted to do this on Storey, and I wrote to him and he wrote back saying, basically, good luck, but you're on your own.

Here's a paragraph from a blog post I wrote back in 2012:

"David Storey’s first three novels – This Sporting Life (1960), Flight into Camden (1961), Radcliffe (1963) – didn’t so much speak to me as grab me by the goolies. Northern, father a miner, wrestling with the inner life and the social codes, he was, in a rough way, Lawrence, but alive and writing now (then). After those, plays, and other, cooler novels (he won the Booker in 1976), and long silences. Sometime while I was working at Faber they published a book by his daughter, the fashion designer Helen Storey; there was a party at some extravagant venue to which I didn’t go, and when someone told me there was an older man there, on his own, not mixing, I wished I had."

From a newspaper interview in 1970, almost half a century ago: "I dislike the whole social context of the novel, and where it is, the conventional apparatus which has featured so largely for so long. The novel in England in this kind of society is passed art. The tradition wanders on in a desultory fashion ... The novel is no longer a reliable metaphor for what’s going on."

After that first surge of early novels, there was a backing away. Every so often, I've thought about Storey's silences. And now there is just one silence. If I had gone to that Faber party, what would I have said to him? Embarrassment all round. But still, I should have gone, if only to say thank you.

2007–2016

Since 2007 CBe has been a one-person freelance activity, easily the most enjoyable one I’ve ever had. But fifty-odd books in print is as far as that model can stretch, and I appear to be unsuited to any other, so CBe is going into semi-retirement. No new titles have been taken on for 2017.

In practice: the website stays up and all books in print will continue to be sold, both from the website and (for ‘the trade’) through the distributor, Central Books. Please do carry on buying. By semi-retirement, I mean that CBe is retreating into ‘hobbyist’ mode: I may well publish the occasional book (there’ll be a new Jack Robinson book this year, and maybe two), but without committing to the marketing and publicity that are necessary if the books are to reach as wide a readership as possible.

A part of the fun has been proving – to myself as much as anyone – what can be done with little money and no funding. Extracurricular activities have included a London book fair for poetry presses in 2011 (now an annual event, independent of CBe: website here) and a pop-up shop in Portobello Road for a week in 2013. Should I mention the gongs? CBe titles have won the McKitterick Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (three times), and have been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Forward main prize (twice) and the Forward first collection Prize (four times) and more. Well, I have done now, but the risk here is that it turns the whole thing into one of those feel-good small-press stories which reek of worthiness. That was never the point. Quite simply, I’ve had a ball, and met extraordinary people, and for every single purchase of every book I am truly grateful to readers.

I did suggest a couple of years ago that I was stopping, but on that occasion found that (as with smoking) stopping was actually harder than carrying on. This time it’s different.

For the record: 57 titles, rough count. Heinz Means Beans. Placed in a pile on the floor, the total run of these books comes to around 64 cm, just over 2 feet, not much above my knees. Around 30 authors. Some titles are now out of print, others may follow. Two titles first published by CBe are now with other UK publishers, and half a dozen are now available from publishers in other countries. Three of the authors have died since I published their books, one at the age of 37. The oldest author on the list is 95. I have stood in line at the post office 1,147 times.


2007
Erik Houston, The White Room
Jennie Walker, 24 for 3
Stefan Grabinski, In Sarah’s House, trans. Wiesiek Powaga
Jack Robinson, Days and Nights in W12

2008
Gert Hofmann, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, trans Michael Hofmann
Greg Loftin, Saxon
Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic
Elise Valmorbida, The TV President

2009
Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie and other work, trans. Wiesiek Powaga
Christopher Reid, The Song of Lunch
J. O. Morgan, Natural Mechanical
Nicky Singer, Knight Crew
Jack Robinson, Recessional

2010
Fergus Allen, Before Troy
Gabriel Josipovici, Only Joking
David Markson, This Is Not a Novel
Marjorie Ann Watts, Are they funny, are they dead?
Tony Lurcock, Not So Barren or Uncultivated

2011
D. Nurkse, Voices over Water
Nancy Gaffield, Tokaido Road
J. O. Morgan, Long Cuts
Jonathan Barrow, The Queue
Jack Robinson, Days and Nights in W12 (new edn)

2012
Apollinaire, The Little Auto, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic
Beverley Bie Brahic, White Sheets
Joaquin Giannuzzi, A Complicated Mammal, trans. Richard Gwyn
Stephen Knight, The Prince of Wails
Miha Mazzini, The German Lottery, trans. Urska Zupanec
Dai Vaughan, Sister of the artist

2013
Todd McEwen, The Five Simple Machines
Dan O’Brien, War Reporter
Fergus Allen, New & Selected Poems
Alba Arikha, Soon
Andrew Elliott, Mortality Rate
J. O. Morgan, At Maldon
D. Nurkse, A Night in Brooklyn
André Naffis Sahely and Julian Stannard, eds, The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann
Tony Lurcock, No Particular Hurry

2014
Will Eaves, The Absent Therapist
May-Lan Tan, Things to Make and Break
Agota Kristof, The Notebook, trans. Alan Sheridan
Agota Kristof, The Illiterate, trans. Nina Bogin
Dan O’Brien, Scarsdale

2015
Matthew Siegel, Blood Work
Agota Kristof, 2 Novels: The Proof, The Third Lie, trans. David Watson and Marc Romano
Paulette Jonguitud, Mildew
Dan O’Brien, New Life
Tony Lurcock, A Life of Extremes

2016
Beverley Bie Brahic, Hunting the Boar
Will Eaves, The Inevitable Gift Shop
Patrick Mackie, The Further Adventures Of The Lives Of The Saints
Julian Stannard, What were you thinking?
Jack Robinson, by the same author
David Collard, About a Girl: A Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
Diane Williams, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine
Lara Pawson, This Is the Place to Be
Ananda Devi, Eve out of Her Ruins, trans. Jeffey Zuckerman (co-published with Les Fugitives)