More books, less food

From April 2020 to February 2021 sales of CBe books out of Central Books, the distributor, were 75% down on the same period last year. I imagine that if CBe was a very big publisher, dependent on volume of sales, this would be disastrous. Given that the actual numbers are pretty small we’ll muddle through, but during Covid selling books direct from the website has been the main means of survival – especially the Lockdown Subscription offer of 10 books (plus extras) for £70 (UK only, free postage). This is still available: see the website home page. Some subscribers come back for second helpings.

The new books so far this year are Roy Watkins’s Simple Annals, a memoir (or re-living) of childhood in Lancashire in the 1940s; and Dan O’Brien’s A Story that Happens: On playwriting, childhood, and other traumas, four essays written (one per year) during the Trump presidency, with an introduction written during the US elections last November.

A few days before the first UK lockdown took effect in March last year, Jonathan Gibbs began writing what became Spring Journal, a week-by-week record (based on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal) of a bad, exhausting year. We are still looking for ways in which to articulate the experience of living with Covid: this fluent, urgent, angry book helps.

All the new books can be included in the Lockdown Subscription: you choose.

The last several newsletters have featured recipes from CBe writers. With this, just one plate of food, below. This is the 22nd recipe; previous ones are still available on this Sonofabook blog.

22 Sort-of Tagine from Patrick McGuinness (essays next year from CBe). ‘This is from the place of my birth and first childhood, Tunisia … The recipe was never written down, and was always more of a freeform around three fixed motifs: ras el hanout powder, harissa powder or paste, and preserved lemons (the ones in jars are better than the home-made hipster-shop ones because of the large amounts of sour juice which goes into the tagine and tastes delicious in a cocktail too – add it to gin or vodka martini).’ I overdid the lemons but do not regret it.