Does size matter?

On the Forward Prize shortlists, The Bookseller noted that ‘Independent publishers including CB editions, Doire Press and Smokestack Press have all won nominations, alongside established poetry publishers and imprints such as Faber, Picador and Jonathan Cape.’

Well, I know what they mean, but the adjectives usually used to distinguish one kind of publisher from another are rarely helpful. Faber is independent – and keeps on telling us, as if independent is an especially virtuous thing to be. I’m not sure it is; it doesn’t automatically follow that they publish better books than, say, Jonathan Cape or Harvill Secker, who are both part of Random House. And if Picador (founded 1972) is established, what does this make, say, Peter Owen (founded 1951)?

Compared to Picador, Peter Owen is small. Compared to CBe, Peter Owen is big, or at least bigger. When does a ‘small press’ cease to be small? And how next might it be described (‘medium-sized’)? Enitharmon? Five Leaves? Carcanet? Bloodaxe? Salt? Faber and Cape are generally reckoned to be big poetry publishers, even though they publish fewer poetry books each year than many publishers generally reckoned to be small. So number of titles published per year is not the determining factor: it’s more about the clout (or marketing muscle) behind them.

Given that 50+ poetry publishers will be showing and selling their books at the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in September, ranging from the likes of Faber and Picador to the likes of Cultured Llama and Worple, we could use this occasion to gather statistics (titles per year, backlist, sales figures) and translate these into some form of league table. This, I think, is the kind of thing the Arts Council might spend money on, and it is deeply boring. The writing: this I am interested in, from whoever, and this only. I just get mildly annoyed whenever I read in a newspaper or online the adjectives small, independent, alternative, established (oh, the list goes on: innovative, cutting-edge, experimental) attached to a publisher as if they mean something precise. They don’t. And the more they are used imprecisely, to suggest rather than accurately describe, the more they are drained of all meaning.

Oh look, there’s a small press on a shortlist – this is where we are now at. In the way that, a decade or so ago, and often still occurs: Oh look, there’s a woman / black person / very old or very young or not-Oxbridge-educated person on a shortlist. This is a news story? There’s a time lag between what is actually happening and how it is reported, the ways of reporting it, there always is. They don't have even the vocabulary.

Forward Prize shortlist strike rate

CBe has now published three first collections of poetry. Not many. But all three have been on the Forward First Collection Prize shortlist; and the first two, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road, both went on to win the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. (The third, Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter, is not eligible for this year’s Aldeburgh prize, its official publication date being outside their limit.)

CBe poetry titles were also on the main Forward shortlist last year and the year before (Beverley Bie Brahic’s White Sheets, D. Nurkse’s Voices over Water).

They help, these shortlistings, these prizes – I mean, for an outfit that barely knows what marketing is and can’t afford to pay someone who does, and which the Arts Council has three times decided not to support, they help sell some books and so keep the thing afloat. I’m indecently proud to have published Morgan, Gaffield, O’Brien, Brahic, Nurkse. I’m no less proud to have published, say, Andrew Elliot’s Mortality Rate.

PS [September 2013]: After I printed War Reporter early in order to give copies to Dan O'Brien when he came to London in June, the distributor Central Books changed the publication date to the date they received copies - and this change was picked up by Nielsen bookdata and by Amazon. So, with a June publication date, War Reporter was eligible for the Aldeburgh prize after all, and was duly submitted.

CBe 2013 6 / Dan O'Brien, War Reporter

A year ago, on my first day in at Betterton Street as a guest editor of Poetry Review, I opened an envelope among the submissions pile with a US postmark. (With a US envelope, always a tiny thrill: a different shape, the US letter paper size being wider and shorter than A4, and it having travelled, this frail thing, so far.) I took two of Dan O’Brien’s poems and placed them first in the issue I was editing. I emailed him. CBe’s publishing of War Reporter is a result of this. (In the US it’s being published by Hanging Loose Press.)

I really do not rate books according to their subject matter – I’ll take Hampstead adultery or deprived northern childhoods or even office politics, as long as the writing is good – but there’s stuff going on in the world, in most of the world, that is beyond the experience of us first-world readers, and us first-world writers too, though not beyond our attention, and taking account of this is a thing that writing is for.

I felt that O’Brien’s poems had stumbled upon an honest and difficult way of doing this. (There are very few soldier-poets, these days; Brian Turner, whose work is published in the UK by Bloodaxe, is an exception.) O’Brien, a playwright, at some hard time in his own life made contact with a war reporter, Paul Watson, whose photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu had won a Pulitzer prize. They emailed, they talked, in ways perhaps eased by their distance. They met – weirdly, in the Canadian High Arctic, where Watson was taking time out from the war zones. Before going back: the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan and now, as I write and you read and people flee or die and often both, Syria.

The poems derive from the correspondence between O’Brien and Watson and from transcripts, recordings and Watson’s own published memoir. What’s in these poems is what you don’t see on TV. Shit happens, again and again and again, the kind of shit that war is: oh-so-casual killings, by both sides and by the so-called peace-keepers too, and worse. There is also engagement with some very brave people – doctors, teachers, translators, women asking for basic rights, other war reporters – and with the family of the dead soldier whose photograph the reporter has professionally profited by. The poem titles formalise the distinct roles of the two people involved in the making of this book (‘The War Reporter’, ‘The Poet’); the ‘I’ of the poems themselves migrates between the two.

Dan O’Brien’s play The Body of an American, derived from the same material, was joint winner earlier this year of the inaugural ($100,000) Edward Kennedy Drama Award in the US, and a London production is scheduled for early next year. Meanwhile, War Reporter. It is shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize 2013. It comes with endorsements from Fergal Keane and Andrew Motion and others, and at £8.99 (free postage) for 134 pages, in a format larger than most of the CBe books, it’s a steal.

CBe doesn’t do author photos, certainly not on the books, but here’s Dan O’Brien in a pub garden in London on 14 June:

Pop-down

First pic shows the shop this morning at 9.30; second pic, how the blue and orange colours of the shop posters chime so well with the RBKC rubbish bags.

We’re out of the shop now, and the next lot (shoes, dresses) are already in. The pic below shows Laura Del Rivo and Michael Horovitz, who separately came by this afternoon to say goodbye. Many thanks to Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves and Tony Ward of Arc for trusting us with their books. We – that is, Todd Swift, Nii Parkes and I – would like to give huge thanks to the following poets and writers and singer (in no particular order) who, in addition to Laura and Michael, came to the shop to give readings or performances or whatever during the week: Mark Ford, Keith Jarrett, Leah Fritz, Kimberly Campanello, Christopher Reid, Astrid Alben, Liane Straus, Tim Dooley, Tim Wells, John Stiles, Fiona Curran, Andrew Motion, Sandeep Parmar, James Byrne, Sarah Westcott, Denise Saul, Jacob Sam La Rose, Anthony Howell, Harry Man, Cathi Unsworth, Tamar Yoseloff, John Greening, Steven Fowler, Vanessa Vie …

To any I’ve missed, apologies. I’m tired, the edges are blurring. Thanks to all who came by, too. I’ve mentioned on Facebook but I’ll mention here again the woman from abroad, in London for a few days only, who happened to be passing the shop when Andrew Motion’s reading was about to start, and who came in. Andrew Motion prefaced one of his poems with a story, a very funny one, about Larkin and the Irish poet Richard Murphy. The woman who had happened to be passing by happened also to be Richard Murphy’s daughter.

I’ve no idea who the girl is in the photo below. If we’d taken 10p for every photo taken with the gorilla outside the shop – hundreds each day – we’d be rich. We’re not rich; we’re writers, small-press publishers, etc. It was a great week.

Pop-up shop Monday

In at 9, not out till after 10. Some of the day: quiet afternoon in the jungle; Keith Jarrett performs; Mark Ford reads; later; later still. Continuing for all – but only – this week. You might want to come.

Some reading habits

In novels with with multiple plot strands – one set in the past, say; one in the present; one involving a dog – I find myself skim-reading one strand because I’m more engaged by another. And then something interesting happens in the strand I’ve been almost skipping, and I have to weigh up whether it’s going be worth going back and reading that strand again with proper attention.

With some novels – the big Russian ones are obvious examples – I can get to the end and still not know how to pronounce the names of some of the main characters.

Early in a reading, maybe even when browsing, I check the last page. Not always, but sometimes. Suspense I can take or leave. With any book I take pleasure in reading, knowing how it ends doesn’t spoil that pleasure.

In a poetry book that includes certain poems that I’ve read before in magazines and liked very much, I find myself favouring those poems over the others, at least in part because of a sense of familiarity.

Submissions: the work I get sent by writers who’d like to publish with CBe. Usually I look at these immediately, and I know within a few sentences or lines whether I want to read on. If I don’t, I try to delay my reply for at least a few days, so that the sender can preserve the illusion that I’ve read the whole book, on which they may have laboured for years.

Literature allows its audience more freedom in how they engage than any other art form. And most of the options offered by new technology – now/later, fast-forward, rewind, pause, select, highlight, portability and choice of location – have for centuries been afforded by the printed book: everything else is just catching up.

(PS. If you happen to be in or near London, come to the CBe/Eyewear Publishing pop-up shop at 201 Portobello Road: open every day from tomorrow morning, 1 July, to next Sunday, and selling our own books and those of Arc, Five Leaves, Flipped Eye and some extras. They’re not even expensive, these things called books; around the price of pack of cigarettes.)

Pop-up shop (2): Ken Garland

A while ago, between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on an autumn Thursday, Ken Garland gathered leaves from the street outside his London terraced house. Then he photographed them. The result was a book – a book of leaves.

This was one of the first of the (to date) nine books in the ‘Close Look At’ series published by Ken under the imprint Pudkin Books. Other titles focus on fire hydrants; Bangladeshi rickshas; Mexican windows; pebbles; Brighton street graphics (graffiti, shop fascias); landscape sequences; etc. A part of the wonder of these books is their modesty – that though the photographs might have been published large format, glossy, at a price to match, they are not. They are small (105 x 150 mm), and they cost the same as a text-only novel or poetry book.

A selection of these books will be among the wares for sale at the CBe/Eyewear Pop-up Shop (201 Portobello road, London W11, 1st–7th July, 10 a.m. till late). And on the walls – (how can you have a bookshop without wall-to-wall shelving? Come and see; you can even turn this to advantage) – there’ll be around 30 of Ken’s photographs, available for order as unframed prints (approx. 290 x 390 mm).

Ken Garland, now in his eighties, worked as art editor of Design magazine from 1956 to 1962, when he formed his own design studio. ‘Whether producing posters for CND marches or shaping the face of the Labour Party in more leftist times, designing the identity of Galt Toys and creating sleeves for RCA Records, Ken and his studio consistently pushed the boundaries of graphic design and united the practice with ethical values at the same time’ (James Cartwright). His 1960s ‘First Things First’ manifesto (‘We have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think that there are other things more worth using our skill and experience on …’) was updated in 2000 and signed by 33 designers from around the world. He still teaches; this year alone he has lectured in Berlin, Australia, Mexico …

From the fly-leaf of a monograph on his work published last year, KG in interview: ‘I’ve always thought it important to be able to say to someone: “You don’t need this – you can do without this symbol or you can do without that sign.” I think graphic design will only come of age when it can take on these sorts of questions, and sometimes answer them by saying, what you need here isn’t graphic design, it’s whatever else. Or maybe nothing.’