‘a Penguin Book’

Romek Marber, born in Poland in 1925, was deported at the age of 14 to the Jewish ghetto of Bochnia. Marber’s grandparents, mother and sister were sent to the death camps, along with almost the entire Jewish community. Marber himself and around 200 others were saved by a German officer, Gerhard Kurzbach, who was in charge of a workshop employing forced Jewish labour. On a night in August 1942 Kurzbach required his workers to do overtime and locked the workshop gates; the following morning, when the labourers were let out, they found the ghetto empty.

(In 2012 Marber spoke at a ceremony honouring Kurzbach as one of Yad Vashem’s Righteous among the Gentiles – that is, non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, at risk of their own lives. [In 2002 my wife’s father and his wife were also so honoured.])

Marber came to the UK in 1946. He applied for a grant, studied at St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art, and became a graphic designer. In the early 1960s Marber was hired by the art director of Penguin Books, Germano Facetti, to give the Penguin crime series a new design. Marber recalls: ‘At the time Penguin cover design was in a muddle, drifting from one design to another, diluting Penguin Books’ identity, reputation and goodwill. I came to the conclusion that the cover design must unite the titles in the Penguin Crime series. This would be achieved by uniformity of all or some of the components that make up a cover …’

The photo above, top, shows some of the crime covers in the gallery of the University of Brighton, where last week I stumbled across a small exhibition devoted to Marber (but which made no mention of his background). Below the covers is the ‘Marber grid’, which was also applied to the non-fiction Pelicans and to fiction. The first three fiction covers below date from the early 1960s; the second two are from the 1970s, after the Marber grid was sidelined. I clearly remember seeing the new covers for the first time – a Saturday afternoon in the 1970s in WH Smiths in Harrogate. It felt like the end of civilisation as I knew it (it wasn’t). Thank you, Romek Marber, for furnishing a good part of my reading life so distinctively.



Footnote: Germano Facetti, the Italian-born Penguin art director who hired Marber, was himself arrested by the Germans in 1943 and survived the forced-labour camp of Mauthausen. Jan Tschichold, who was born in Leipzig in 1902 and came to Penguin in 1946 and set the text design rules for the following decades, was arrested by the Nazis in March 1933 and managed to escape to Switzerland the following August.

The cut-price Faber poetry books

For two years I’ve been buying the occasional Faber poetry book from Judd Books in Bloomsbury, where they are priced at £2.95 or £3.95. There’s a shop in Oxford where the same books can be bought for £2. It’s not far from the Albion Beatnik bookshop, run by Dennis Harrison, who is hugely supportive of poetry and runs regular readings and is annoyed, to put it mildly, that many of the same titles he has to order in at regular prices are available down the road for a song.

When one of my own in-print titles (Paleface, 1996) started turning up in Judd Books and the Oxford shop, I asked Faber what was going on. Matthew Hollis told me that he had ‘instituted an inquiry’; I suggested it might be simpler to just ask the sales manager, or walk up to Judd Books and ask where they got their stock from. The Faber Sales and Marketing Director eventually explained that ‘from time to time, we do modest stock reductions in order to control inventory and therefore costs. This is very much standard practice in the industry as I am sure you are aware. We pay royalties of 10% of net receipts on these sales.’

‘Modest stock reductions in order to control inventory’ is partial remaindering. One obvious effect is to aggravate regular booksellers who wish to keep even single titles of backlist poetry in stock.

Last November Faber sold off 50 copies of Paleface for £13.50 (that is, 27p per copy, less than half the price of a first-class stamp). I am due to receive royalties of £1.35.

Did it not occur to Faber to offer those copies to me, the author, at the same price? I’d have certainly taken some; Faber would have achieved their desired stock reduction and no booksellers would have been aggravated in the process. This seems to me a pretty obvious way to go.

(But I suspect this option wasn’t even considered. In my own experience, Faber’s communication with its authors is not good. For example, two years ago a man who taught me at university wanted to get in touch, so wrote to me c/o Faber, the publisher of my poetry and a place where I worked for 14 years, asking them to forward the letter; his letter was returned to him with the message that they didn’t know who I was. While working freelance for Faber in recent years, the publication date of a book I was project managing was postponed for a year without anyone telling either the author or myself; in another instance no one at Faber could give me the author’s contact details (I had to find them myself on the internet); for other books I worked on drafts that were not final, so had to redo the work; etc.)

The Sales and Marketing Director has offered to sell me further copies of Paleface according to the ‘same arrangement’ by which they sold off 50 copies in November (so presumably 27p per copy). The other poetry books that have been subject to ‘modest stock reductions’ include titles by Auden, Ford, Francis, Harsent, Heaney, Hofmann, Imlah, McKendrick, Muldoon, Paterson, Paulin, Riordan, Walcott, Williams. I’ve asked him if the same offer will be made to these other authors (or, if deceased, their estates), and also to poets published by Bloodaxe, whose sales are handled by Faber Factory Plus.

Partial remaindering of in-print books may well be, as the Faber S&M Director has said, ‘standard practice’. I doubt most authors or book-buyers are aware of this. I’d rashly assumed that if a publisher wanted to reduce stock (to save on warehouse costs), then as a matter of natural courtesy the books would be offered first to the author, before the remainder merchants. Apparently this doesn’t happen. So a new clause covering this needs to be added into the contracts.

CBe: next

After CBe’s lie-down this spring – that, at least, is the plan, and a space has been cleared for this by my having taking on no new titles beyond the four new ones just published – I may well be at a loose end. Except that there’s an itch that won’t go away, and I keep scratching it.

A magazine. I know the title, I know the overall look of the thing. Prose, poetry. But not, as in almost all current poetry magazines, a poem by X followed by another by Y and maybe two by Z. Sequences, series, long poems: at least, say, 10 pages per contributor. Prose (fiction, non-fiction, and all stops between) of up to, say, 7,500 words – which might comprise a single piece, or a series of short pieces, or an extract from a longer work in progress. (Any of which CBe might, or might not, take forward to book publication.) Probably no more than half a dozen contributors per issue. Probably no more than two issues per year (I can’t imagine finding enough material I feel strongly about for more than that). Reviews, no. A single initial print run for each each issue, and no faffing with reprints. Print-based, but an online/ebook presence. Quality printing, and payment for the contributors (and for rights for work in translation).

Funding, ah. I’m reluctant to knock again at the door of the Arts Council, having been turned away three times and having thereby built up a kind of perverse pride in CBe having made it through six years without any external funding. Crowd-funding: I’ve heard of both good and bad experiences. So part-funding through taking advertising is what I’m thinking of – probably not from other like-minded presses, which have no budget for this; possibly from university creative writing departments; ideally from outside the box: wine, food, shoes.

Suggestions, comments, welcome, here or to info@cbeditions.com. Especially if they’re about conjuring a bit of money out of nothing. A bit of collaboration – cohabiting with a university, sponsorship from Glenmorangie – would be good for me.

Place-holder

For a while, not a long one, I wrote reports on manuscripts for the Literary Consultancy. For a novel I’d write maybe 3,000 words, usually under suggested headings such as ‘structure’, ‘plot’, ‘characterisation’ – which were useful pegs but really had very little to do with whether I took to the book I was reading or not.

One of the stories I haven’t written involves meticulously building up a character, a ‘rounded’ character, in the usual ways, I guess – description, socio-economic background, habits, fears, desires, all tested out and demonstrated in how they behave in given situations – and then having that character act out of character.

I’ve just re-read the story ‘A Singular Occurrence’ by Machado de Assis – in which a polite, obliging woman becomes mistress to a married lawyer/politician, and they are ‘madly in love’ and he teaches her how to read and he decides to buy her a house and everything, allowing for a bit of bourgeois hypocrisy, is hunky-dory – until one night she goes out into the street and picks up a stranger (a self-confessed ‘good-for-nothing’) and has sex with him. And the lawyer/politician finds out.

Actually that’s not strictly an example of acting out of character, because the woman (‘she had quiet manners and never swore’) is presented entirely through a male narrator in conversation with another male, neither of whom is the author, so a distance is established and the reader hasn’t a direct hold on her character at all. But still, bafflement as to her motivation – ‘accident, God and devil rolled into one … Well, who knows?’ – is at the centre of the story.

[As I wrote this, the Guardian put up a piece on Hanif Kureishi, professor of creative writing at Kingston University, who apparently said on Sunday that creative writing courses are a ‘waste of time’; the Guardian piece recycled the quotes from the Independent piece of yesterday, added some soundbites from other writers opposing that view (‘Oh no it isn’t’) or defending it (‘Oh yes it is’), and threw it open to comment. This is one of the standard conventions of media coverage of bookish matters: seize upon something perceived to be a tad controversial and make out of it a binary yes/no conflict (and profit from any reduction of the issue to personalities). Character-stuff. Meanwhile, there are books to be read, and life.]

On Mavis Gallant

I had a memory of a Donald Barthelme story cast in the form of an author interview and went looking but couldn’t find it. (Perhaps I was thinking of ‘How I Write My Songs’, which reads like a parody of the kind of ‘helpful tips’ sometimes offered to would-be writers.) But I did find Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2009 interview with Mavis Gallant (published in Granta), which in places itself reads like a story – a story in which the efforts of keen young writer to extract wisdom from acclaimed older writer are continuously thwarted, but always politely, by the older writer’s refusal to analyse. Examples:

JL: Chronologically, it [MG’s first novel] goes back and forth. Why did you decide to do that?
MG: I can’t tell you. It’s what I wanted.
[…]
JL: Can you talk about what inspired the story [‘The Remission’)?
MG: I don’t know. I just had an image of them getting down from the train, which I didn’t use in the story.
[…]
JL: This is one of many examples in your stories where at some point or another we’re in every character’s head. It’s an amalgam of points of view … Was this something that came easily?
MG: It must have, or I wouldn’t have done it.
[…]
JL: Was there any reason, when you were working on these stories, why you were going back to Montreal in your mind?
MG: I couldn’t tell you. If I knew that I’d stop writing.
JL: Why?
MG: Because it has to come from something unknown in you. If I knew that I wouldn’t bother writing. I’d be something else. I’d be a champion cricket player. Maybe I am a champion cricket player, in another life.
[…]
JL: Did you ever work in cafes?
MG: As a waitress?

The effect is comic. But JL’s questions are understandable. In the preface to the interview she remembers reading her first Mavis Gallant story, ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’: ‘at once dense and nimble, urgent and orderly, light-hearted and dark; about experience both predstrian and profound … It seemed to have been written in a radically different way than any story I’d read before’ – which is often how one feels when discovering a new writer, and one wants to know how it’s done. Mavis Gallant died ten days ago, aged ninety-one. Her stories are remarkable, wonderful, and they keep their writerly secrets. They were the subject of one of the earliest pieces, in 2007, in Chris Power’s online ‘Brief Survey of the Short Story’. Rather than get elbow strain from the Bloomsbury Selected Stories, which has more than 900 pages, I suggest the two NYRB books, Paris Stories (selected by Michael Ondaatje) and Varieties of Exile (selected by Russell Banks).

A short history of CBe in 41 bites

Off-cuts, paper cuts, 2007 to now:

1 After months of batting cover try-outs back and forth, one of the books still had a name spelt wrong on the cover. The mis-spelt editor had noticed this on the proofs but had assumed it was a joke. My fault.

2 Natural Mechanical by J. O. Morgan was an editor’s dream: 40 lines arriving out of the blue as an attachment to an email asking if I’d like to read more, from an author who had never before had anything published, and the book going on to win a literary prize. The title tells it true: this is Rocky’s workshop when I visited him in 2009 in Inverness-shire, during the early stages of his complete restoration of a 1929 Brooklands Riley from a rusted chassis:


3 I did a short print run of J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts with a colour cover for a shop which said that trying to sell the standard edition was like trying to sell a brown paper bag. Some of those are still in a box – free to anyone who orders any other title from the website and asks for one.

4 Naive early error: to assume that a fair few of the people I’d worked with in publishing would buy a book or two. In fact most people who work in the trade expect to get books for free. There have been honourable exceptions.

5 Best CBe-related headline (relates to Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3, McKitterick Prize 2008, one of the first four CBe books in 2007 and now published by Bloomsbury):


6 Number of trips to Blissetts in Acton, who print most of the books, in 2013: not logged, but around 20 at a guess. Chris the printer once house-sat my cats; during that period he was side-swiped by a fork-lift truck and sent to hospital; bandaged, patched up, he bypassed the queue for painkillers at the hospital pharmacy and instead came back to the house, fed the cats, drank the malt whisky I’d left him and went back to work.

7 Speediest printing turnarounds: ordering a reprint from Blissetts one afternoon and collecting the books the next day. Sending files of a new book to the other printer, ImprintDigital in Devon, and receiving a proof copy for approval next day in the post.

8 Number of trips over to the distributor Central Books in Hackney Wick with boxes of books in 2013: 16. Regine in the upstairs office once asked me to sign copies of my own old poetry books; a warehouseman in the downstairs delivery space comments on my very occasional TLS pieces. These people read books and they care. Below, Central Books, a very fine building:


9 A box of a given size holds more slim books of poetry than 200-page novels; the slim books are also cheaper to post. On the other hand, all boxes of books, whether containing poetry or fiction, are heavy. A large proportion of peasants’ work used to consist of carrying things; this manual-labour aspect of the job is something I enjoy (which explains in part my dilly-dallying about ebooks).

10 It’s pouring with rain as I lug boxes of books from a Tube station for a book launch at Waterstones Piccadilly (it was going to be in an art college, but the author had been having a hard time and she really did need a place where she could wear a dress), and I’m running late and I’m thinking, this is OK, this is publishing, and I’m saving money. At another book launch I’m drinking in the Colony Room in Soho and because I’m happy I sign a fat cheque for membership and the club closes a few months later and this is OK too. But I could have saved a little money there.

11 Number of trips to the post office in 2013: 139. Best conversation overheard while standing with CBe book packages in the queue: woman in front of me, very loudly, to man standing in doorway: ‘And you shagged that bitch down the Askew Road and you didn’t even wear a rubber.’ Man moves forward, I think he’s going to hit her to I step between them. Man to me, quietly: ‘Fuck off. I’m having a private conversation with my wife.’

12 Highest sales out of Central Books to date (i.e., not counting sales from the website, and people/bookshops I’ve talked into buying direct) for titles published before the end of 2013: just under 1,000. Lowest: just over 10. I look at these numbers, look hard, as if they’re trying to tell me something. It’s a kind of staring competition, who blinks first.

13 Is there any other trade in which shops can order the wares and then, if they can’t sell them, return them and get their money back? With books this is standard. Except on the occasion on which I sold several hundred copies of a title to a chain of bookshops, which several months later wanted to return most of them and have their money refunded. No, I said. And because I’d sold them direct, and there was nothing about returns on my basic invoice, they were stumped. A tiny and incidental victory.

14 Most over-qualified book-carrier: Anthony Thwaite, OBE, born 1930, carrying bundles of Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew on his trial shift as a warehouseman in 2009:


15 I’m not sure that Shakespeare & Co in Paris, where the CBe authors Beverley Bie Brahic, Gabriel Josipovici and Wiesiek Powaga read on an evening in November 2010, ever paid for the books sold but it was fun. This is Sylvia Whitman, brandishing:


16 Built in 2011, a roadside shrine to St Nicholas Lezard, patron saint of small presses, whose ‘paperback of the week’ columns in the Guardian have featured seven CBe books:


17 The man in the rear-view driving mirror on the website home page is my father, 1940s I think. (He wasn’t a reader. When he was courting my mum he took her to a wrestling match; she, then working as a librarian at the Brotherton in Leeds, took him to the first play he’d seen. He died aged 51.) The children on page 70 of Nights and Days in W12 are my own, many years ago; the writer in the café on page 107 of the same book is a man I’m vaguely related to (son of a cousin) and he wasn’t just idling: his first novel will be published this year.

18 The man who was in prison for 22 years and sent me his writing from there, and then we met in a café in Shepherds Bush market. The woman who called round with her portfolio of poems and modelling photos: this one, she said, pausing at a photo in which she’s lying on a sofa and wearing about 3 millimetres of clothing, would be good for the cover? Her mother had doubts. What did I think?

19 The manuscript of Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue really was found in a drawer of his office desk on the day after his death: this is not a literary conceit.

20 Two things that give Gabriel Josipovici’s Only Joking a slight period feel: you can’t now smoke in restaurants and cafés, and the classified football results on radio at five o’clock on Saturdays are no longer spoken by James Alexander Gordon.

21 The average age of the authors published by CBe in 2010 was 80-something. I tried and failed to sell a story on this to The Oldie and Saga magazine.

22 The causes of death of over 500 writers, composers, etc, are listed in This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, who himself is one of three authors who have died since their books were published by CBe. (The youngest was Erik Houston, at the age of 37. His novel The White Room was one of the first four titles; it’s now out of print but I still stand by it. He was a concert violinist who played around the world, then teacher. He had one of those very rare afflictions. In hospital, there was a day when he was technically dead for something ridiculous like ten minutes, and then was alive again. And then, later, not. I think about Erik a lot.)

23 In the flat of Dai Vaughan – who died in June 2012; whose Sister of the artist CBe published in February 2012, a month and a bit after he’d sent me the manuscript – there were tiny sculptures that he’d made out of Edam cheese. Last year I made things out of crushed beer cans; before all this started there was a period when I made ships (and a mermaid) in bottles.

24 The CB of CBe was not intended to be just me. Long story. (Nor, at the time of the first four books, were there any plans to do more.)

25 There is a customer who has bought one copy of every single CBe book direct from the website and I have no idea who this person is.

26 Entering a book for a prize that required an author photo, I sent a photograph of the author’s poem titled ‘Self-Portrait in Shades’ because I had no other visual evidence to offer, and nor did he and nor did the internet. Offered readings, the author responded: ‘I’d prefer not to.’ I can understand this. I can understand it very well.

27 When one of the books wins a prize – to date, a fiction prize (McKitterick, best first novel by a writer aged over 40), a translation prize (Scott Moncrieff), and the really freaky thing of each of the three first poetry collections from CBe winning the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (and each of them also being Forward shortlisted) – I feel like a parent watching their child in the school nativity play: pride, even though one knows it’s just a play, and next year there’ll be a different Mary and Joseph.

28 That some agents are willing to accept my minuscule offers for rights to publish fiction is due to the extreme generosity of larger publishers who wish to buy rights to cookery books and the memoirs of footballers.

29 The agent who accepted my offer for UK rights and then spent what must surely have been more than my offer on getting the contract checked by their legal department, which suggested I add in something about second serial rights, which I did, though I still don’t know what second serial rights are.

30 The big-name agents who simply don’t reply to emails, and the mainstream publishers too, and others. It may be company policy. More likely, in any company over a certain size there’s an assumption that receiving and opening an email or envelope is a sufficient task in itself. If anything else needs to be done, there are servants for that.

31 Or if they do reply, they do so with same degree of attention as a former literary editor of the Observer who, after I’d sent him the first four books, all prose fiction, and then followed up by sending again, assured me that he’d passed on the books to the poetry editor.

32 There is a clause in the standard contract that basically states that if after signing the author gets an offer from someone richer and better-looking, altogether more eligible, then the author is free to go off with them, as long as I can have the first four months. It’s a sort of prenuptial.

33 I’ve turned down books and seen them published elsewhere and thought, good for them, I was wrong. On the other hand, I’ve turned down books and seen them published elsewhere, by publishers posher than me, and thought, I was still right. On the third hand, I’ve turned down a book and two years later changed my mind and emailed the author at 5 a.m. in the morning to ask whether it has been placed elsewhere and by lunchtime the book was on track.

34 February 2013, letter from Arts Council England: ‘I am sorry to tell you …’ Three in a row. Ho-hum. (Can one apply to the Arts Council for cigarette money, for alcohol money? Without those two legal drugs there’d have been nothing.) The three stages of reaction: (1) slump; (2) shrug; (3) a light-headed sense of freedom.

35 What continues to surprise is how much can be done without any funding at all, and with small amounts of money. Back in 2007, £2,500 covered the printing & binding of 250 copies each of the first four books, author advances, a basic one-page website and a couple of lunches for proofreaders. CBe has been, roughly, self-sustaining ever since but only because editing, design, typesetting, time, etc, are not costed in.

36 Letters addressed to ‘The Accounts Department’ or to ‘The Reviews Manager’ or ‘The Art Director’ or ‘To whom it may concern’: the cat (one of five) who resides on my desk stirs, stretches, yawns, curls back on the low heap of manuscripts.

37 The emails asking for my ‘submission guidelines’. I honestly don’t care: email attachment or hard copy, double-spaced or single, margins wide or narrow, name on every page or not, whatever. If you write and want to send, then just do. It’s not for me to tell you how.

38 The Circulating Library – see here: the idea was to send off a bunch of free books, asking the recipients to pass on to others after reading, and so on (and thereby expand awareness of CBe and maybe generate a few sales from the curious) – was a drowned duck: no emails from happy strangers, not one (as far as I know) extra sale.

39 This desk in the living room, but also the in-town office: the café on the first floor of Foyles, Charing Cross Road. (Deals have been done there, on backs of envelopes. And all praise to that shop, which actually asked to stock the books, rather than me having to make the first move.) If it’s too busy, the Pillars of Hercules. Once, the place around the corner where you can get a bottle of wine for a fiver.

40 The two points in time at which I knew the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair was worth the effort: (1) when in 2011 I was being shown a church hall in Exmouth Market by the woman who was in charge of hiring it out and her labrador dog, chasing a ball, went skittering and scrabbling across the recently polished floor; (2) lunchtime on the day of the first fair when, out for a cigarette, I said to the busker in the street, Brooke Sharkey, there was a book fair going on, and she said she’d move on, and I suggested she come in and do a set onstage instead and she did. (The book fair was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over fifty presses participating; from 2014 CBe is ducking out, leaving it in the more than capable hands of Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly.)

41 The stuffed gorilla that sat outside the CBe/Eyewear pop-up shop in Portobello Road in July last year appears to be one of a limited edition made for the California zoo where Koko (born 1971) lives. How it came to a junk shop in the Askew Road, Shepherds Bush, I have no idea. (Below, Koko on the right; on the left, seated, Wiesiek Powaga, translator from the Polish of Stefan Grabinski’s In Sarah’s House and Andrzej Bursa’s Killing Auntie and other work.)

We need to talk about ‘the’

(Prompted by a Facebook post by Anne Berkeley: Ukraine / The Ukraine, etc.)

Two days a week I have a job in which I spend an unexpected amount of time reading essays by Chinese students for whom ‘the’ and ‘a’, these skimpy little things, appear to be optional extras, and usually they choose not. There are some grammatical rules; I try to explain them; they seem a bit wavery, as rules do when you try to spell them out.

Short digression here on book covers for books with titles like The Goldfinch, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Glass House, etc. Often the designers seem a little embarrassed by the ‘The’: they drag down the type-size, they de-bold it, they slip it in sideways. (One of the first CBe books was titled The White Room; I was dithering about the typography on the cover; I asked my go-to designer man and he told me bluntly that the ‘The’ is just as much a part of the title as the other words, and he was right.)

Back to close-focus nitty-gritty. Book covers often quote from reviews from The Times, The Economist, etc. There was once a copy-editor’s rule that those were the only two periodicals to have The thus, italic and upper-case T. I can guess in outline the cv of the man (I presume) who legislated. The current Oxford Hart’s Rules (subtitled ‘The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors’) loosens up a bit: ‘It is a common convention in referring to periodicals to include an initial capitalized and italicized The in titles which consist only of the definite article and one other word, but to exclude the definite article definitive article from longer titles.’ Examples given: The Economist, the New Yorker. For the latter, I’d disagree: The New Yorker. Which is how they have it on their website (though that’s hardly the deciding factor; the Guardian and the Spectator also both include ‘The’, though tucking it back or fading it; the Paris Review has it small and italic). The first book I pull down from my shelves has four quotes on the back cover: Spectator, Evening Standard, The Times, Daily Telegraph. I suspect that copy went through an old-school copy-editor; and copy-editors are, often, of an older generation than authors, and therefore working to older habits.

All pedantic, I know, and I’m more than happy to settle for consistency as opposed to correctness. Which doesn’t help the Chinese. We could go and discuss this in the The Eagle, or the Eagle, or the Red Lion.