Next: the travelling circus

Above: a mobile library for sale. (One careful lady owner.) There are others.

One of the many enthusiastic online responses to last Saturday’s book fair ends thus: ‘Here’s hoping CB Editions will take their fair around the UK.’

Well. Given this: that in recent years hundreds of independent bookshops across the UK have closed; that in many towns a bricks-&-mortar bookshop is not now sustainable; that most (there are valiant exceptions) of the bookshops that do survive stock little other than the usual tedious and predictable titles –

Then why not this: a mobile bookshop. With a core stock of good books, which can be supplemented with books from local presses according to where the bookshop parks itself (Inverness, Aberystwyth, Land’s End, wherever). Doesn’t have to be a van like the above: a bus, a caravan, something smaller with a yurt packed in (I’ve always wanted a yurt). Its arrival would be a publicity event in itself. Can do the festivals as well as the bookless towns.

It takes just five days (I’ve checked) to train for an HGV license.

Seems to me a flippin’ obvious idea. So did the book fair, honestly, but no one was doing it. Comments?

More post-bookfair: ‘Health is infectious’*

Whether by accident or not, and it hardly matters, we got some things right:

The timing. This has been, since the ACE cuts in late March, a mess of a year for the public profile of poetry: the cuts themselves; the Poetry Society fiasco (and it’s not put to bed yet); the rolling-of-eyes at the shortlists for the Forward prize, in some quarters now termed the Backward prize. If people needed to feel better about themselves, to come together in a cooperative way rather than with an adversarial agenda, to be assured that what they’re doing is worth the doing, the occasion may have enabled this.

The work on display.
(1) When judged by the amount of new poetry they put out each year, the poetry publishers no one ever calls ‘small’ – Faber, Cape, Picador – are, in fact, small; and most of their publishing slots are taken up by new work from writers already on their list.
(2) Whatever you think of creative writing courses and the professionalisation of writing, they’ve contributed to an increasing amount of quality writing seeking publication.
(3) It’s the presses that people do call ‘small’ who publish most of this work.
(4) There is no gap in quality between much of the work published by the small presses and the work put out by the Big People. There is no gap in the dedication and professional skill with which the books are produced; if anything, the small presses, in their attention to the design of each specific book, score more highly here. There is a gap between the marketing and publicity resources of the Big People and those of the small presses; that is, in their ability to get their books to readers. Which is why a book fair ain’t such a daft idea.**

And then, the selling. Mostly only anecdotal evidence so far, but there was more actual buying going on than I – or, I guess, many of the presses – had dared to expect. It’s possible this was influenced by the way in which the fair was presented in the publicity: as something put on without public funding, and needing support. More likely, I think, it was an infectious thing: if you’re standing next to someone who’s shelling out, you think, hey, so it’s OK to buy, I can do this too (and if I don’t get that book that’s teasing me now, it may be gone when I come back). Special thanks to the buyers who set this going.

* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99); quoted in the programme to the book fair.
** This isn’t brain surgery. But it does seem, as Chris Hamilton-Emery argues in his post on the book fair, to be beyond the Arts Council.

Post-bookfair: I spy something beginning with . . .

My sons turned up to the Free Verse poetry book fair in Exmouth Market on Saturday, and did shifts on the table outside with the programmes. A decade ago, maybe longer, we were sitting in a pizza restaurant in Cornwall and during the fidgety wait between ordering and the arrival of food we were playing I-Spy. ‘Something beginning with C,’ said one son. We gave up when the food arrived. Smugly, he gave us the answer: civilisation.

Something of the sort was happening on Saturday. Put together on a wing and a prayer, the event became what it was because of the support and good humour and generosity of everyone who turned up: the publishers, many of whom I’d guess were expecting a bit more space to display their books, shifting along a bit and making the best of what space they had; people saying yes, no problem, to an unscheduled reader getting time; and the visitors, whether friends of friends or just curious passers-by, not just mingling and talking but getting out their cash. (A few months ago one of the publishers had been doubtful whether the effort and time put into into book fairs were ever repaid in sales; late on Saturday, after selling far more than he’d expected, he said he took that all back.) Especial thanks to Chrissy Williams, Anna Selby, Michael Horovitz. Three early blog reports are here and here and here.

All planned events need an injection of the unplanned, the unpredictable. For me on Saturday this was the woman who happened to be busking nearby on the street outside. We’ve got a book fair going on in the hall, I said, and – Oh, she said, sorry, am I too loud?, I’ll move along. No, I didn’t mean that; would she like to step up on stage? She came in about halfway through the day and did a set of three songs. I loved them. Her website (from which you can buy her music) is here.

Sometime soon Chrissy and I will go to a pizza place, not necessarily in Cornwall, and discuss the future of civilisation. We’ll get some feedback from the publishers who took part on Saturday but anyone else who wants to chip in – visitors, presses we didn’t have room for on Saturday, whoever – please do. Things can be different. That’s the point.

Eve of the book fair

There are now a few more trestle tables in the hall, and some books and string and miscellaneous. My son, delivering the tables with me, approved the street; a few doors along there’s a café/bar with three full size table-football tables. The only tricky bit tomorrow will be the setting up: there are now easily enough tables to fill the space, but not necessarily enough to accommodate all the presses in comfort. Meanwhile, the man who rented the trestle tables to me told me I looked like Lee Marvin (first pic). I still think more like Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn’t There (second pic, with James Gandolfini). Just in case you arrive and are trying to work out which one is me.

The book fair: reasons to delight

Selected reasons for coming along on Saturday to Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE: the poetry book fair, from 10 a.m.

1: It’s free, and the cricket season is over so what else are you going to do on a Saturday? The shopping?

13: There hasn’t been such a gathering of poetry presses in London for too long, and without your presence to show that it’s a worthwhile assembly there won’t be another for another long time.

14: Exmouth Market itself: cafés, bars, outdoor stalls and a fine independent bookshop (Clerkenwell Tales) next door to the book fair. Joseph Grimaldi, celebrated English clown, lived here between 1818 and 1828.

29: Madame Rosa, after reading your palm, has foreseen that at the book fair you will meet someone ‘who could be important in your life, / the future tells me / he could be the one.’ Or she. (I’m quoting from a Bill Manhire poem, so it must be true.)

33: There’ll be poets there from planet mainstream and poets from planets that do exist but whose discovery has never been recognised by the Royal Astronomical Society. The Poetry Wars: think of this event as the equivalent of that Christmas 1914 occasion when when the Tommies and the Boches clambered out of their trenches, dropped their rifles and played football.

34: There is no VAT on books. Yet.

41: To hear an early-autumn chorus of 30 poets reading from their work throughout the day.

57: If you think any event larger than than a one-off book launch has to have corporate resources and/or Arts Council money behind it but would like to believe otherwise, then come and believe.

99, 100 and 101: Michael Horovitz. From even before the 1965 Albert Hall reading (Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs, Logue, Horovitz et al, and an audience of 7,000), he has carried the New Departures and Poetry Olympics torch through to today. Legend. On stage at 11 a.m.

293, 408 and 666: Because there’ll be books at the fair you won’t come across elsewhere. Because a book in the hand at the fair is worth six in the post from a rainforest in South America. Because you’re worth it.

Twinkle, twinkle

This week the online Guardian carried a review not of one of the books, but of CBe – here. ‘A brilliantly idiosyncratic operation . . . some truly dazzling books’ – that, from the come-on line at the top, may have been written by the sub-ed rather than John Self, who wrote the piece itself, but you get the flavour. Do I read reviews of my own work? Of course I don’t. Do I let them go to my head? Of course I do.

A new online review of D. Nurkse’s Voices over Water – ‘this excellent book, being full of startling images and crisp language . . . one of the most consistently satisfying collections I have read this year’.

On editing (or not)

‘Impeccably researched, written in an accessible, lively and lucid style, with useful appendices, notes, and bibliography, this is a gem of a book which will delight the scholar and the general reader alike’ – that’s from the most recent review of the book by Tony Lurcock that CBe published late last year.

CBe doesn’t, as a rule, publish non-fiction. The main reason why this one got through is because I like Tony Lurcock’s writing: lucid, yes, and with wit. A large number of non-fiction books aren’t written nearly so well, because their authors are not, primarily, writers – they are, first, academics, or TV presenters or whatever. And they need editing. Not just the line-by-line stuff but the major structural work too.

Once upon a time (the 1980s) I worked for Time-Life Books, which published up-market, heavily illustrated non-fiction. Each chapter in each book was commissioned from a freelance writer (and generously paid for: more money for a few thousand words than many novelists now get paid as an advance for a whole book), whose research was guided by a specialist academic consultant. When the copy came in, it was edited by the volume editor; and then by the series editor; and then by the European editor-in-chief; and then by an editor in America. Each of those editors could, and often did, ask for re-writes. The final text may have been a bit flattened out, but editing, however expensive, was a clearly recognised priority (there were others; I had a drinks cabinet in my office, restocked every week).

That amount of editing doesn’t exist now, anywhere. There are exceptions, there are fine editors who work with authors through draft after draft, but there are many books from whose opening paragraphs you can deduce the background scenario: the book is announced to the trade with a fixed publication date, the manuscript comes in late and the time factor reduces editing to a cosmetic process, not an organic part of the making of the book. (On my desk I have a book, not a CBe one, whose Word file came in on 7 September and that has to be copy-edited, typeset, proofread, corrected and sent to the printer on 20 September. It will happen.)

And the point? Not nostalgia for any golden age. (The Time-Life routine was over-egged, a bureaucracy, each editor editing for the next one above.) But no sympathy for publishers complaining about poor sales unless they’ve put everything they can not just into the packaging but into the words too.