The Ledger (and Stretto)

I’m going to make a lectern and give readings. It’s sort of a holy book.

When the first four CBe books came out in November 2007 I had no plans to publish more, so I kept track of sales and expenses on scraps of paper, but between September 2008 and March 2022 all the basic accounting has been done by hand in this ledger. It records (in handwriting; I don’t do spreadsheets) more than 3,700 individual orders from the website. Plus direct sales to bookshops, at book fairs, etc. And against those, printing costs, advances, royalties, couriers, prize entry fees, stationery, website costs, proofreading, publicity (hah), review copies, etc. And post: receipts recorded from 1,883 trips to the post office (which, thankfully, is very close, but that still adds up to a few miles). It doesn’t record typesetting or design costs because there are no costs, I just do it.

Also recorded are 150 trips to the distributor, Central Books, with boxes of books. These used to be by car but I gave up the car a while ago so now they are by Tube and then train to Essex with a very big bag. I can do that, go and return, and have tea with Bill if he’s in, and be home by lunchtime.

To do the end-of-tax-year figures I add in figures from other sources: income from sales through the distributor to bookshops (less their own cut and that of the sales agent + VAT, which I’m not registered for so can’t reclaim), PayPal fees, etc. But the basic day-to-day running numbers are all here, in the ledger, handwritten. And it’s full, so at the beginning of April this year I started a new one.

The old ledger and I have shared a desk for 14 years. I’m a scrivener, basically, and writing figures in columns gives me the illusion that I’m in control. I still don’t quite trust digital, and the internet.

There’s something nerdy here, obviously. Some people do crosswords, daily. I once worked with a Faber poet who claimed he read every word in his page proofs backwards. The narrator of Stretto writes about his ytiliba ot klat, sey, sdrawkcab – his ability to talk, yes, backwards. He puts it down ‘to my being left-handed, and not predisposed to treat left-to-right as the natural order of things other people take it to be’. I’m left-handed too. There are more of us than you think and we are all a little sceptical about ‘the natural order of things’. Stretto, a first novel by a writer already known as a poet and critic, is a novel that interests itself in this.

If you’d like your name in the new ledger – below, with an advance proof of Stretto – please buy a book. Finished copies of David Wheatley’s Stretto will be here in a couple of weeks, and it’s available for pre-order; copies of Ágota Kristóf’s Trilogy and The Illiterate are now in. Or buy, even, a Season Ticket – available from the website home page – which nets you 10 books of your own choice for £70, post free.

Ágota Kristóf: the books, not the blurbs

The blurb on the back of the 2014 CBe edition of Kristóf’s The Notebook declared that Kristof distils the experience of occupation and ‘liberation’ in Europe during World War II into a ‘stark fable of timeless relevance’. Did I really mean that, or was it just a fancy piece of blurbspeak?

Leaders in ‘the West’, no less than Putin,* have for decades been speaking in blurbspeak: ‘defending democracy’, ‘standing up against dictators’, the UK’s ‘generosity’ to refugees, other ritual phrases (‘of timeless relevance’) that tick boxes but whose idiotic repetition has so drained them of meaning they’ve become as divorced from reality as mission statements on white vans delivering dogfood. Deliberately so, after reducing the practice of democracy to selling stuff and getting/staying rich.

When the children in Kristóf’s The Notebook are left with their grandmother by their mother, they mockingly repeat ‘the old words’ their mother used to say to them: ‘“My darlings! My loves! I love you … I shall never leave you …’” – ‘By repeating them we make these words gradually lose their meaning.’ In their own writing they reject words like nice and beautiful and love – ‘because the word “love” is not a definite word, it lacks precision and objectivity’. They have one rule: ‘the composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do.’

Another sentence from the early pages of The Notebook: ‘We smell of a mixture of manure, fish, grass, mushrooms, smoke, milk, cheese, mud, clay, earth, sweat, urine and mould.’ And from the first page of Kristóf’s brief memoir, The Illiterate, about her childhood and refugee-hood:

‘My father’s classroom smells of chalk, ink, paper, calm, silence and snow, even in summer. My mother’s kitchen smells of slaughtered animals, boiled meat, milk, jam, bread, wet laundry, baby’s pee, agitation, noise, and summer heat, even in winter.’

That’s a blurb, right there. And rather than blurbing that Kristóf’s books are ‘about the after-effects of trauma and the nature of storytelling’ – which I have done, those words are on the covers, I’m trying to sell stuff too within a system in which the unsubscribe-to-blurbspeak button is blocked – it might be more honest to simply ask: What do the classroom and the kitchen smell of after they’ve been hit by bombs?**

In 2014 CBe published The IIliterate (translated into English for the first time by Nina Bogin) alongside The Notebook, and in 2015 the two sequels to The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie. Under license (I didn’t, and don’t, have money to pay for more): UK rights for 5 years only and limited print runs, so in around 2019 these books fell off the list. Damn. They are now back, officially published in June but I’ve sent them to print and they’re on the website for pre-order: the three novels in a single volume, Trilogy (the biggest book CBe has published: 338 pages),*** and The Illiterate (skinny: 54 pages) in a white-cover A-format edition (there’ll be more of these).

Kristóf fled Hungary in 1956, aged 21, smuggled over the border with her 4-month-old baby and her husband during the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising. No time to say goodbye to her parents and brothers. Two bags: kid-stuff and dictionaries. Writing in a language she began to learn during cigarette breaks in the factory in Switzerland where she worked as a refugee, for Kristóf blurbspeak was never an option because she didn’t have that vocab. From The Illiterate: ‘I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don’t know it. I don’t speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries.’ What words mean is important. I simply cannot imagine Kristóf using a phrase such as ‘defending democracy’.

Kristóf was a reader and then a writer and her books are shocking but her status as a refugee was and is not special. There are thousands of Kristófs living around the corner from me in London, each of them wondering every day ‘What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left my country?’ and many of them answering as Kristóf does: ‘More difficult, poorer, I think, but also less solitary, less torn. Happy, maybe.’

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* The present UK government is Putin-lite: get rich, suppress protest and information, despise women and foreigners, drown refugees, rewrite history to suit your agenda. Carried out under cover of the convenient elision of capitalism and democracy. They didn’t know he’d actually bomb hospitals? Rather than just underfund them and then sell them off cheap to oligarchs (we have plenty of our own)? He’s gone a little too far? The Tory party and Putin are different in degree but not kind.

** That is not a rhetorical question. I live in an off-shore island that for several hundred years has had no experience of being invaded and occupied but instead has actively invaded and occupied other countries and by what right do we lecture Putin? Again, not a rhetorical question. It can be answered, it needs to be answered, but not in blurbspeak.

*** At £14 Kristóf’s Trilogy is not just the longest but the priciest CBe book to date. Gas and electricity, also printing costs (rising for the past several months) and (rising again this week) postage costs … But if you choose it as one of your 10 books-for-£70 Season Ticket – see the website home page – you’ll be getting it at a more than Amazonian half price. I make deals, with myself and others.

Putinesque in the Cotswolds

Paul Bailey’s Joie de vivre was celebrated at Daunts in Holland Park on Wednesday last week. It was joyful, there was joie de vivre, and I could post photos to illustrate that but not now. This is not the right week.

Among the poems Paul read was one from the Kurdish, starting: ‘When the first people were fleeing, I fled. / When the first fires were started, I was burnt.’ The Kurdish man he had the original from, not a poet at all, was there.

Another poem for the book, about the body of a migrant child washed up on a beach, didn’t make the cut. How to write that poem better? How to live better? ‘“There’s no one to say,” she said flatly.’ That’s the reply given by a woman in a novel I’m currently reading to a man who has just said, in the course of a desultory domestic argument, ‘I wish someone would tell me how I can live.’

There I go again, back into books. I’m bookish. Books are important but they are not that important. Instead of a photo of a book launch, here’s a picture of a Putinesque building designed ‘for an estate in the Cotswolds near the village of Chipping Norton, UK’. If the owners run out of milk, they can pop next door to David Cameron. I’m sure his fridge is well stocked. ‘Named St John's House, the 6,692-square-metre home has been drafted for a 60-acre site that is currently being sold by Sotheby’s International Realty.’ After 24 February there may be fewer shell companies owned by Russian oligarchs in the bidding queue but there are still plenty others this government of shopkeepers kowtows to. What's happening in Ukraine is happening not least because of the continued greed, corruption and complicity with Putin this country has consistently voted into power.

2007–2022

I’m getting the ducks in a row for 2022. Paul Bailey’s Joie de vivre is already here and will be officially (by which I mean joyously) launched at Daunts, Holland Park, on 23 February. June: Stretto, a novel by David Wheatley, well-known as a poet but there are things you can do in prose you can’t do in poetry and here are some of them. Later in the year, say September, essays by the multi-tasking Patrick McGuinness (poet, novelist, translator, academic, critic; Tunisia, Belgium, Wales).

Also: a reissue of Agota Kristof’s trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), previously published by CBe in two volumes in 2014 and 2015, and her brief memoir, The Illiterate. And slim A-format books from Caroline Clark (after Sovetica last year) and me (after The Other Jack last year). Given the recent steep rise in printing costs, slim-and-small makes senses.

2022 is the fifteenth anniversary of the start date of CB editions, 2007. The photo above was taken outside the CBe pop-up shop in Portobello Road back in 2013. CBe has no Arts Council funding and relies entirely on sales to stay afloat. Huge thanks to those readers who have taken up the 10-books-for-£70 offer and welcome to new readers – see ‘Season Ticket’ on the website home page, from where a complete list of CBe publications, 2007–2022, can be downloaded.

CBe in 2022

As I come out of hibernation, CBe in 2022 is beginning to take shape.

First, a second poetry collection by Paul Bailey, who began publishing his distinguished fiction in 1967, has been Booker-Prize shortlisted twice, and has a new lease of life in poetry. Ali Smith on his first collection, Inheritance, from CBe in 2019: ‘Unsentimental, funny, affectionate, deeply moving, the poems read almost off-the-cuff but work at levels of exactness, kindness and observation that throw open a whole closed century of English class-shift and time-shift … A slim, calm volume whose resonance is huge.’ Joie de vivre, the new book, is here.

To follow … Stretto, a radical and audacious debut novel, as the blurbspeak has it, by the poet David Wheatley. It ‘takes its title from a musical term describing the effect when a fugue subject begins to duplicate and accompany itself before it has finished, causing a complex pile-up’. Later, essays by the polymath (poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, editor, translator) Patrick McGuinness. And maybe Andrew Elliott will resurface. And maybe the start of a new series of short A-format books (which I’d like to call ‘smalls’ but won’t).

And not least, a reissue of Agota Kristof’s trilogy: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie. The English translations were first published in 1986 and the early 1990s; CBe reissued them in 2014 and 2015; CBe’s license to publish lapsed but is now back in place. Possibly accompanied by a reissue of Kristof’s brief memoir The Illiterate, if only I can persuade the rights-holders that CBe can sell a serious number of copies.

Kristof was born Csikvánd, a village in Hungary, in 1935. ‘My father is the only schoolteacher in the village. He teaches all the grades, from the first to the sixth, in the same classroom …’ The above photo is how I imagine that classroom; for no apparent narrative reason, a falcon makes a brief appearance in The Proof. In 1956, aged 21, Kristof fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising with her husband and infant daughter and became a refugee in Switzerland. She wrote in French, a language ‘imposed on me by fate, by chance, by circumstance’, a language that ‘is killing my mother tongue’; her books are acts of resistance and their renewed presence on the CBe list is, to me, important.

For an interview with Kristof, see here. There’s a half-hour documentary on Kristof made in Switzerland in 2011 which I’d like to see but the app through which I need to pay to watch is unavailable in the UK. Any helpful suggestions will be welcome.

Parish notes: a gentle reminder that the Season Ticket available on the home page of the website – 10 books over 10 weeks for £70, post-free in the UK – has made all the difference over the Covid period. (Just 19 books were sold through the distributor this month. Neither paper costs nor heating costs are going down.)

Old year, new year

In 2021 CBe published eight books and paid its bills and made 215 trips to the post office. The financial adviser may differ but it was an excellent publishing year.

Also in 2021 I abandoned the pen-name Jack Robinson. The cover it originally served as (explained in The Other Jack) has long since been blown. But I’m still interested in the whole matter of Robinson (Good Morning, Mr Crusoe) and I’ve been reading and enjoying Peter Robinson’s learned, clever, funny, angry The Constitutionals – in which the narrator (nicknamed Crusoe in childhood) perambulates around the town of Reading, ‘hoping to trigger the end of neoliberalism by going for a walk’.

Among writers who died in 2021 was Michael Horovitz. He lived nearby and I was very fond of him. The photo above shows Michael arriving at Buckingham Palace for the poets’ jamboree a few years ago. Great jumper, but the pose is surely ironic: if he is proclaiming ‘To the barricades, citizens!’, he is also amused and even happy to be here, welcomed in to the heart of the establishment. He was invited, and he accepted. (As did I. I drove him there. There were checks under the car for bombs and checks under the car bonnet – which then refused to close, so we drove in through a very high archway with the bonnet clanging.) The contradiction here is often apparent in the national annual pantomime, the New Year’s ‘Honours List’.

As usual, getting the books into bookshops has been head-against-brick-wall. Roy Watkins’ Simple Annals was called ‘a masterpiece’ in the Literary Review and ‘an astonishing achievement’ in the TLS; on Leila Berg’s Flickerbook in the TLS, ‘Reading it is a joy; brutally honest depictions of childhood liberate the child within … This reissue is wholly welcome.’ Sales into bookshops: around 50 copies of each.

I liked the Republic of Consciousness tweet that said Carmel Doohan’s Seesaw was unlike even those other books that are unlike anything you’ve ever read. They meant it in a good way. And I liked the very recent review of Nuzhat Bukhari’s Brilliant Corners that had an informed argument and recognised the book’s context.

Small indie presses (and CBe is as small as they get) are often independent to the point of, when you dig down, loopiness. Titles that have sold in serious (to me) numbers – David Markson’s This Is not a Novel, Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, Will Eaves’ Murmur, May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break, Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch – are now not on the list because my license to publish ran out or someone with a faster car came along. That’s hardly a way to run a business. But publishing both is and isn’t a business, and it’s the isn’t bit that I enjoy more.

Looking back: click here to read a snapshot/bite-size history of CBe, 2007–2021. (If the link doesn’t work, you can download it as a pdf from the ‘About and News’ page of the website.) Despite the titles that have wandered off there are still around 70 in print and for the Season Ticket arrangement you can have 10 of these (you choose which) and usually a couple more for £70, post free. I am very, very grateful to everyone who has pressed that button – some of them three times, some four. CBe receives no Arts Council funding.

Looking forward: four or five new books in 2022. I can mention Paul Bailey’s Joie de vivre, which officially publishes in February, because finished copies are in, but I can’t spell out the others because I’m not that organised. Or I am organised but in a different way. Happy New Year.

Shopkeeping

This country is a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon may or may not have said, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Publishers whose rejections say ‘We think this is a wonderful book but sorry, no, we don’t think we can sell it’, politicians who decide what policies to adopt on the basis of how many people they think will vote for them … This is infantilising, and the attendant media embed this process.

But I happen to have a shop and it’s shopping season and I do want to sell more books. Not cupcakes. While thinking that four books a year might be about right for a one-person operation, CBe has published eight this year. I have failed better. In chronological order of publication: Roy Watkins, Simple Annals (‘an absorbing masterpiece’, Bernard O’Donoghue, The Literary Review; ‘an astonishing achievement’, Brian Morton, TLS); Dan O’Brien, A Story that Happens (‘a book for our times’, Alice Jolly, TLS); Nuzhat Bukhari, Brilliant Corners (‘Real-world violence juxtaposed against the page, the proximity of the singular self to the wider brutality of history’, Andrew McMillan, PBS Bulletin); Leila Berg, Flickerbook (‘Reading it is a joy; brutally honest depictions of childhood liberate the child within’, Norma Clarke, TLS); Charles Boyle, The Other Jack (‘Whatever a novel is, I feel this is what I want a novel now to be’, Jane Feaver); Tony Lurcock, Finish Off with Finland, the fourth book in his trilogy (‘entertaining, fascinating, astonishing’, Finland Forum); Carmel Doohan, Seesaw (‘an unexpected, novel challenge to binary thinking’, Laura Waddell, Scotsman); Caroline Clark, Sovetica (‘I was moved, in several directions: inwards, outwards, backwards in time and into my present’, Patrick McGuinness).

All orders from the website are welcome. Especially welcome are buyers who sign up to the Season Ticket, which works like a Book Token: 10 books of your choice for £70, post-free in the UK, for yourself or for Uncle Arthur. You’d pay the same for designer socks.

Below, the pop-up shop in Portobello Road run by CBe a few years ago: