Posting books since 2007

I first posted CBe books from this post office in November 2007. Between then and now, I’ve made more than 1,700 trips to the same post office.

The books posted are those ordered by individual readers from the website. Orders from bookshops are despatched from the distributor, Central Books, but I’m not good at getting the books into bookshops: out of 72 titles published since 2007, 23 – almost a third – have sold fewer than a hundred copies out of Central Books (and 14 of those, fewer than 50).

Postage costs have increased, year on year; the cover price of the books (most of them are £8.99) has not. CBe gets no Arts Council funding. I’m not quite sure how CBe is still alive: something to do, perhaps, with the momentum generated by walking to the post office. I commend to you the Lockdown Subscription offer, available from the website: 10 books of your choice for £65, free UK delivery. Every subscription keeps me posting.

Lockdown again

It won’t unlock lockdown, but week by week the CBe Lockdown Subscription will give you something to look forward to: 10 books for £65, posted over 10 weeks. Free UK delivery. Available on the website home page. A subscription now will take you into Christmas and beyond, and what are you going to give to the aunts and the uncles?

The CBe Lockdown Subscription (first offered at the start of the Lockdown 1 in March this year) differs from other subscription models, and also from those ‘curated bundles’, in several ways:
· You choose (if you want to) which books to receive.
· Occasional extras (books, pamphlets, etc.) are thrown in for free.
· You don’t give me your bank details.

Most subscriptions rely on customer inertia. On subscription, the London Review of Books is currently £1 per issue for six months. Shop price is £4.75 per issue. That’s enticing, if you want to read the LRB, or even if you don’t, but then the small print: ‘Then pay just £26.55 per quarter’. And you’ve given them your bank details. This explains, in part, the piles of unread copies of the LRB still in their eco-friendly mailing envelopes in bookish homes: ‘We enjoy intelligent debate; we lead such busy lives we haven’t time to read all that.’

A subscription taken out now will include, if you want, Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs, a book of this year whether or not anyone chooses it as such: written in instalments between March and late August, modelled on and responding to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, itself a response to the public events and the mood on the streets in the latter months of 1938. Spring Journal is an act of witness: angry, desperately sad, sceptical about what writing is for even as it is written.

Also included (again, only if you want), Will Eaves’s Broken Consort, reviewed in this week’s TLS: ‘Broken Consort is that rare book of criticism: one that tells the truth about the limitations of both reading and writing.’

Spring Journal is available now but is included in the flyer for next year’s books (photo above). I’m getting ahead of myself. Pause: I want to thank all those who have clicked the Lockdown Subscription button during the past months. It’s a way of moving books around and is keeping this small boat afloat.

Journals: MacNeice 1938, Gibbs 2020

Stop press. Actually, the complete opposite: start press. Jonathan Gibbs’s Spring Journal, written between March and late August in the Year of Covid 2020 – and modelled on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, itself written August to December 1938, an immediate personal response to the public events of those months and the mood on the streets as Fascism gripped Europe and war loomed – will be published by CBe in November/December. At any rate, before Christmas. The point of a small press is that it can turn on a sixpence.

Above: London rent strike, 1938; London, 2019 (from Good Morning, Mr Crusoe).

Spring Journal is an honest, angry, sad, thoughtful, appalled, urgent act of witness to this lousy year. Why would anyone want to be reminded? Those who have followed the week-by-week reading-aloud of the poem by Michael Hughes on David Collard’s Leaps-in-the-Dark on Zoom know that this is not a statistical summary or an op-ed piece; that something cumulative has been building, and that its sharing has been important. The poem itself is deeply sceptical of exaggerated or romantic notions of what poetry can do, or is for; it feels nevertheless, in part because of this scepticism, a necessary work.

It also feels to be not just coincidence that another book I’ve been preparing for print (to be published next year with a foreword by Michael Rosen) is a re-issue of Leila Berg’s classic autobiography, Flickerbook – which in present-tense observations and vignettes records the author’s childhood and early youth in the 1920s and 1930s, and her growing political engagement. The book ends with the sound of an air-raid siren in London in September 1939: ‘Something new is beginning, and we fumble because we don’t know what it is.’

Plus (this isn’t an add-on: it’s survival) – CBe’s Lockdown Subscription is still running: for £65, a book each week for 10 weeks (free delivery in the UK). Sign up on the website home page. As mentioned in a previous post, sales of CBe books to bookshops April to July this year were just 3% of what they were in the previous two years. The subscription offer keeps books moving around and me busy. Subscribers can choose which titles on the CBe list they want to receive. These can include, if wanted, the 2020 new titles – Will Eaves’s Broken Consort, Gert Hofmann’s Veilchenfeld, Todd McEwen’s Who Sleeps with Katz and Stephen Knight’s Drizzle Mizzle Downpour Deluge – and the new reprint of Andrzej Bursa’s Killing Auntie. And, when copies are in from the printer, Jonathan Gibbs’s Spring Journal.

New titles, and some ridiculous numbers

Two new titles this month. Veilchenfeld, the first English translation of a novel by Gert Hofmann (Germany, 1930s: ‘It has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her’). Broken Consort, essays (on many different things under the sun) and reviews by Will Eaves, characterised by inquiry and generosity (‘We are taught by what we find … And what we find, we have to give away’).

These books will be noticed, god willing, and find readers. Sales of CBe books out of the distributor, Central Books, April to July 2018: 1,358 books. Same period, 2019: 1,472 books. Same period, 2020: 46 books. Between last year and this, that’s a drop of 97%.

Veilchenfeld will be a slow burner, perhaps: staying around, finding a few new readers year by year. Killing Auntie by Andrzej Bursa has been this: one of the very early CBe books, the original print run picked off over a decade in single figures. Some of the early CBe titles are now out of print, but this one is currently reprinting (re-set and with new cover, because the original files have given up the ghost). Sample spread here (the book also includes a short novel):

In the 1950s Bursa worked in Krakow with Tadeusz Kantor – who provides the epigraph (‘An object exists between eternity and the rubbish heap’) for Present Tense, an exhibition opening this week at Studio Expurgamento, with whom CBe co-published Blush – free entry but for social-distancing reasons you need to book a time.

One Good Thing over the past few months – both for me and, I hope, for those who have taken up the offer – has been the Lockdown Subscription: 10 books for £65, posted over 10 weeks. The first books were posted off on 31 March; anyone who subscribed in July is still receiving. New subscribers welcome – because lockdown isn’t really over until the fat lady sings, and that ain’t happening yet. Details on the website home page (you can specify which books you’d like; new titles included in the offer; UK only).

Next year’s programme is looking like this: poetry, memoir, memoir, essays. A novel will turn up, I’m betting on it. Thank you for your support.

Out of Lockdown: new titles

The two CBe September titles – the first English translation of Veilchenfeld by Gert Hofmann, published in Germany in 1986, and Will Eaves’s Broken Consort, subtitled Essays, reviews, and other writings – are now available for pre-order on the website.

‘People don’t read books of essays.’ Oh no? Along with ‘No one reads short stories’, that’s one of those pronouncements carved into the tablet of Publishing Wisdom that get muttered at high table as the port is passed round. Of course no one reads them if no one publishes them. On the other hand, aren’t we living through a new Golden Age of the Essay? I’m as suspicious of Golden Age declarations as of ‘People don’t read …’ statements. It’s not as if good essays haven’t been written continually, all the time. The Contents page of Will Eaves’s book – which is similar in length to the Contents page of many poetry collections: another genre subject to the ‘no one reads’/Golden Age, whore/Madonna split, as if readers can’t be trusted to take books on their merit, whatever their genre – can be viewed from the book’s page on the website.

‘People don’t read Gert Hofmann these days’ – there’s some truth in that, because most of the English translations of his work are now out of print. During lockdown I re-read his The Parable of the Blind and Balzac’s Horse and Other Stories and have decided that he is an even funnier, more lugubrious, more essential writer than I remembered. I’d love to be able to bring some of the vanished editions back into print with CBe.

I won’t be doing that, because CBe isn’t big enough: just two books last year, four this year (and another four, maybe even five, coming along next year). And it’s not as if I’m a wizard at selling them. Many of the titles are listed on Amazon as ‘out of stock’. Your best bet is still the website – where the Lockdown Subscription, 10 books + extras posted over 10 weeks for £65, is still available (and can include the new September titles, if you wish).

Bunk as history: 'Our Island Story'

‘People’. ‘People had been in the habit’. ‘People had been in the habit of stealing black people’. ‘People had been in the habit of stealing black people from their homes in Africa, and selling them as slaves in the colonies.’

David Cameron – remember him? The man so desperate for the followers of Nigel Farage to vote Tory that he promised them a referendum on the EU. And when that didn’t go the way he wanted, he ran off to a ‘shepherd’s hut’ in the back garden of his Cotswolds home to write a self-justifying memoir while buoyed by ‘a portfolio career of charitable positions, business roles and lucrative speaking engagements’ (Guardian, 17 January 2019).

I discussed Cameron in Good Morning, Mr Crusoe (2019), in particular his kinship with the far-right activist Tommy Robinson: both members of gangs distinguished by a dress code, much alcohol and formulaic violence; both contemptuous of migrants (Cameron: ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean’); both cultivating a ‘man of the people’ image; both pressing the patriotism button and both pointing to a toxic, white-supremacist version of UK history.

In 2014 Cameron wrote an article for the Mail on Sunday on ‘British values’, which he defined as ‘a belief in freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law’. These values are also ‘vital to other people in other countries’, he concedes, ‘But what sets Britain apart are the traditions and history that anchors them and allows them to continue to flourish and develop.’

Cameron’s favourite book, he declared in the ‘British values’ article, was – and presumably still is – Our Island Story. The book was first published in 1905. From the back cover of a recent re-issue: ‘The book was a bestseller, was printed in numerous editions, and for fifty years was the standard and much-loved book by which children learned the history of England … In 2005, an alliance of the Civitas think-tank and various national newspapers brought the book back into print, with the aim of sending a free copy to each of the UK's primary schools. Readers of The Daily Telegraph contributed £25,000 to the cost of the reprint.’

Here is Our Island Story on Captain Cook: ‘It was in April 1770 A.D. that Captain Cook first landed in Australia, in a bay which he called Botany Bay, because there were so many plants of all kinds there. At that time the island was inhabited only by wild, black savages, and Captain Cook took possession of the whole eastern coast in the name of King George.’ Here is the sum total of Our Island Story’s discussion of slavery:

Another great thing which happened during the reign of William IV was the freeing of slaves.

For many years people had been in the habit of stealing black people from their homes in Africa, and selling them as slaves in the colonies. People had grown so used to it that they did not see how wicked and cruel this was. These poor black people were taken to market and sold like cattle, they were branded like cattle, and beaten like cattle. They had to work very hard, were paid no wages, and were often very cruelly treated. All masters, of course, were not cruel, some of them were even kind to their poor slaves, but still they had very unhappy lives. They had no rights whatever, their children might be taken from them and sold, sometimes even husbands and wives were sold to different masters, and never saw each other again. A master might treat his slaves as badly as he chose, and no one could punish him.

In the old, rough, wild days no one cared about the sufferings of these poor black people. They were only niggers, and made for work and suffering, and nothing was thought about it. But, as time went on, people became less rough and more kind-hearted, and good men began to try to make people see the wickedness of slavery. For some years, a man called Wilberforce had been doing his best, and now he was joined by others, among whom was Macaulay, the father of the great writer. Mr. Macaulay had himself been a manager of a sugar plantation in the West Indies where slaves worked. But he gave up his post because he could not bear to see the misery and unhappiness of the slaves, and came home to try to do something for them.

It was not a very easy thing to do, because all the work on the sugar and coffee plantations in the West Indies was done by slaves. The planters said they would be ruined if the slaves were made free, as the black people would not work unless they were forced to do so. Besides, they had paid a great deal of money for their slaves, and it seemed unfair that they should be made to lose it all.

But, at last, all difficulties were smoothed away. The British Parliament said they would give twenty millions of money to the planters to make up for what they would lose in freeing their slaves, and, in the year 1834 A.D., most of them were set free.

‘People’? ‘People had been in the habit’? White people. British white people.

This is the version of history that I (aged 69) was taught at school and that is embedded in the worldviews of Cameron, Johnson, et al: slavery is a bad thing; some masters were kind; ‘a man called Wilberforce’ and the noble and generous British Parliament abolished slavery; zero acknowledgement of Britain’s active participation in the slave trade or that the whole enterprise of empire was built upon slavery.

The Our Island Story version of history has produced a bizarre British sense of exceptionalism ('what sets Britain apart ...'): Brexit, and now the muddle and murderous incompetence of this government’s response to Covid-19. It has also embedded beliefs in white supremacy. ‘This seems very absurd,’ Our Island Story notes of the electoral system in Britain before the 1832 Reform Bill, but those whose power and privilege depended on the absurdity ‘were pleased with things as they were, and very angry with those who tried to alter them.’

Johanneson

In the late 1960s, early 70s, I went to Leeds Utd games. Albert Johanneson, the first black footballer to play in an FA Cup final, was a regular, and got monkey chants every game. He died alone in a Leeds council flat in 1995, his body not discovered for a week.

Same period, 1960s, I was at school and being taught history to A-level: Henry VIII and his plenty wives, Empire, maybe a mention of William Wilberforce but no mention at all of Britain’s complicity in and profits from slavery. I got an A-star. It helped get me into Cambridge.

The UK voted in an Eton and Oxford-educated buffoon PM with no intelligence or expertise in anything, not even Latin, who is very deliberately promoting unnecessary deaths of people whose protection is his job, and the US has a perfect idiot who is responding with blind violence to protest. Same story.

Todd McEwen’s Who Sleeps with Katz, deeply humane and funny and angry, is actually not published today, there’s a mistake out there, but on the 18th of this month. Two publication dates, why not. This book, every day: Who Sleeps with Katz.