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I wonder though what happened to Littlewood? Some of my old Arc books were published by "Littlewood Arc" rather than Arc alone. And what of the related printing firm, Arc & Throstle Press, now no longer? Have Mr Littlewood and Mrs Throstle finally got together leaving Mr Arc on his own? The catalogue tells us about the books, but we want to know the gossip.
Yesterday I mentioned Ivor Cutler. I once wanted to include Ivor Cutler in an anthology of Jewish writers - Passionate Renewal. His publisher, Arc, was keen, but left it to us to contact him. Fortunately the editor bumped into the author in question. Unfortunately Cutler said he had no interest at all in poetry any more, such a standpoint being understandable if only slightly unbelievable as the chance meeting happened to be in the Poetry Library in the South Bank Centre. Afterwards we received a letter in spindly blue writing, saying that Ivor Cutler had no desire to be in any anthologies whatsoever. And that was that. Too much time in his early years "in a Scotch sitting-room" perhaps to sit easily with others.
The Internalionist poetry party
After writing a note about Anvil (see Wednesday 3 September blog) I had a look through the Arc Publications catalogue and I was overtaken by pleasure, again, at how internationalist the poetry party is, at least up in Todmorden where Arc lives.
There's six Basque poets, in a bi-lingual edition and - oh, look - there's six Lithuanians. Over in the corner are a handful of North East poets chatting to some of their Bulgarian colleagues, and if their joint editor Bill Herbert is talking in his broad Scots none of them will understand a word he says. John Kinsella - no surprise there - is introducing a raft of Australian poets. Unfortunately the late great Julia Darling is not be at the party, sending (to use the title of her second and last collection)
"Apologies for Absence". Ivor Cutler, sadly, has also not replied to his invitation - but his books are there, collectable little square things. Michelene Wandor, on the other hand - who used to be one of our writers - has climbed aboard the Arc and is happily conversing with Indians, Algerians and an Austrian about something interesting that happened in 1656. Arc spans the world and the centuries.
Throwing oneself off a cliff
The Guardian (4th September) featured two huge adverts for forthcoming books, from WH Smith and Waterstone’s. Both featured the autobiographies of that most interesting man Bill Oddie and someone called “Lorraine” who is so well known she needs no second name. I presume that is revealed in the book (“Between Me and You”, yuk) for those of us who were previously ignorant of her existence.
And Cliff Richard. This is Cliff Richard’s third autobiography. I’ve checked that for you on Wikipedia, to save you the trouble.
But why do they do it? Mad enough that both chains think Guardian readers are desperate for another Cliff Richard autobiography, but why does the more literary chain go head to head with Smiths over such drek? And lose too. You can find out everything you need to know about Cliff, until his next autobiography, for a tenner in Smiths but it will cost you £14 in Waterstone’s.
At least Waterstone’s holds back from featuring the autobiography of one of Thatcher’s children, which WH Smith thinks is right up Guardian readers’ street.
All must have prizes
Five Leaves has just been short-listed for the Nottingham Creative Business Awards in the “writing and publishing” section. This new scheme to promote local arty types was started last year but I did not apply the first year, wondering whether Five Leaves was a Creative Business, as opposed to, meh, a creative business.
So the small press banner will be proudly waving at the ceremony at Nottingham City Council on October 1st. I would invite you along but extra places cost £60 a head and the Arts Council might have something to say about that if you all came.
But win or lose, it is the taking part that matters, as the Tibetans say about their long match with China. If I win this will be my first prize since I won a runners-up medal at the Hawick Boys Brigade 7-a-side rugby competition forty-something years ago. I hate rugby, and disliked it even then but the team was one short and I was press-ganged. Someone remarked after seeing me play that they did not know I could run so fast. Before the competition I did not know I could run at all, but what else can you do if you pick up that weird shaped ball and seven big vicious looking youths start running towards you shouting. We might even have won the final if I had not dropped the ball at a crucial point. Well, it was covered in mud.
I hope that October 1st is a more demure affair. At least I won’t have to wear shorts during it and endure a communal bath after the event.
Anvil Press
Inpress member Anvil Press (not to be confused with Anvil Books in Ireland) is forty this autumn. There will of course be national street parties, or at the very least some articles in the broadsheets.
My own favourite Anvil book is a version of The Song of Songs translated by Peter Jay, where he makes more lyrical and erotic that bunch of poems that peeks out excitedly from the Bible. The standard King James version is good, but Jay’s is better.
Peter Jay founded Anvil in that year of revolutions, 1968. It would seem wrong to pick out more from their available backlist of 300 books, out of the 400 they have published, but I can remember a terrific reading by the Irish poet Martina Evans a few years ago so she can represent the rest as a recommendation.
It is hard to think, though that their best selling poet is other than Carol Ann Duffy, whose first four collections came from Anvil – all still available.
I suspect though, that in the poetry world Anvil is best regarded for its translation, which occupies about a third of its berths. There can’t be many publishers in the UK whose list includes five Nobel Prize winners but Anvil has Odysseus Elytis, Octavio Paz, Salvatore Quasimodo, George Seferis and Rabindranath Tagore.
Anvil's first title in 1968 was the Venetian Aldo Vianello's Time of a
Flower, translated by Richard Burns. For their birthday they are publishing
a specially commissioned new selection of Vianello's poetry.
National Year of Reading
Here are some interesting statistics, courtesy of Camden New Journal. Library stock in Camden Libraries 1978/79 = 981,166, 1998/99 = 566,394, 2006/07 = 388,836. According to Alan Templeton, from Camden Public Library Users Group, Camden will by the end of the year have succeeded in removing two thirds of its book stock in 30 years.
Meantime, this time according to the Evening Standard, the University of London has had a £700,000 cut in its library budget for Senate House, a library that includes two early editions of Shakespeare's First Folio.
And meantime again, the local history library and archives in Stepney are under threat as the Tower Hamlets Council has sold the building to Queen Mary College for £1.2 million. Queen Mary College, by happy symmetry is part of the University of London.
Meanwhile for the third time, as a result of library refurbishments and events, library membership in Nottinghamshire is soaring. In June the monthly new joiners list was up by more than 50%, in the City of Nottingham the new joiners list was up by more than 70%.
Stats can mean anything, but this is the Government initiated National Year of Reading. Clearly, Camden residents need not apply.
Publishing, 20 years on... ?
I was catching up on some TV viewing through the BBC's iPlayer recently, during my time off, and happened across 'Doctors To Be: Twenty Years On'. I only just remember (honest) the first programmes, I think (or repeats of them, perhaps). These follow-ups, charting 20 years of serious change in the National Health Service and looking at how the group of young med students ended up, got me wondering, idle... what will publishing look like, 20 years on... ?
So, I got thinking back to the TOC08 conference that I sent myself to, through Egg Box, as part of the Escalator Leadership Scheme run by Arts Council England, East... (and which I'll be off to again next year, because it was great)... and, to be honest, I'm not sure! I don't think anyone is. Many things are a-foot and a-changing... so, here's some wild speculation...
(And before I get going, here are some good places to look for what's going on, although many of you will know of them. And there are many more things to click through to from them...
future of the book
tools of change for publishing
publishing talk
now, onwards... )
With the decline in book reading, despite resilient sales figures for now, and the behaviours of the more screen-burned, less book-interested younger generation, what is likely to happen? And as the older business models start to crumble, or at least show their age, what will a future publishing house look like -- anything like they do today?
Well, I'm not an expert, but don't completely buy in to the doomsday 'complete death of the book as we know it' theory -- I doubt many do, deep down. Although forms of eBook do seem set to take over, or already have taken over, wherever convenience is a key factor in a purchase decision (e.g. one handy book reader device with multiple digital book files versus a sack full of a tonne of text books to take to school or court = no-brainer), I think there will always be a market for the 'traditional book'. Especially while the digital equipment set to replace it does not measure up in terms of reading pleasure...
But will it always be so? Will people always want to stock up their ever-smaller houses with piles and piles of old fashioned, pleasantly vellum-smelling books? Whether decorative, or as a testament (or reassurance for the less secure) of learning and accrued knowledge -- or aspirations towards it, at least -- will anyone see the point in bothering in the future... and what of environmental/waste concerns?
Perhaps books will become a more luxury, antique/decorative buy -- people may cling on to their very favourites, or bibles, say, as special purchases or lavish gifts, delicately put together for the mantlepiece, bookcase, other, but with newer purchases made digitally, as a tester? Or maybe books will feature more as commemorative purchases for content you enjoyed, or interacted with first, online... whichever way I look at it, a decline, in various ways, seems likely, but a retro 'real thing' fanbase seems likely to continue, as it has done elsewhere.
But will books be replaced by, say, the Kindle or Sony Reader? I actually think this is very unlikely. These devices seem attached to the, for me, rather quaint notion that there needs to be a 'separate' device through which to consume a digital version of the traditional 'book' -- that is, I see the Kindle and Sony Reader as rather too linear an idea; rather than a likely replacement, they feel like an almost nostalgic dead end.
What I mean is, in the long term, a barrier for these devices is the fact that they are 'one more device' -- it is far more likely that people are going to own more and more powerful, and smaller, portable PCs (or mobile 'phones?); single devices on which they will download and view all sorts of content: portable multi-media devices for journeying around with that will allow games, emailing, video phoning, music, books, films -- everything. Why, therefore, in the long run, would you want separate devices for each? So, the eBook as a digital software format, becoming more and more versatile and cross-media, yes, but hardware 'replacement' digital e-readers in their current imagining? No. They remind me of the older electronic word-processor machines: inevitably subsumed into a comparatively more versatile device -- the home computer. And look what is happening with mobile phones: the trend is towards further integrated single devices, not proliferation.
Is it more likely that digital book software -- rather than hardware -- will develop instead into some form of narrative gaming hybrid artform, with ARGs becoming the dominant form of entertainment and way of consuming narrative... something akin to the books imagined in the Harry Potter universe, and on from there... ? Could be, I think...
But what will publishers become in the meantime?
I'm still not sure. No doubt there will remain book-publishing departments, but they may begin to look a little like the vestigial wings on an ostrich, or perhaps decorative plumage, or ceremonial uniform; or penguin wings -- still useful (for swimming, balance...), maybe even relevant, but not in the ways they used to be. Either way, I think publishing houses will likely shift severely in their focus and emphasis. I can see a decline in simply 'book publishers'; a decline in companies selling solely, or predominantly, traditional 'books' as deliverers of content/narrative...
Instead, perhaps they may morph as producers, merging along the way with a new breed of literary agency, into variants of 'creative narrative content' companies (or departments within companies), or more general 'intellectual property' companies, or some such -- producers and providers, with writers/authors, of quality narrative/characters for cross-platform, genre-bending, cross-media delivery, with perhaps small, remnant book 'wings'... using and trading their historical legacies -- popular books, familiar stories, characters -- and strong brands -- and therefore good search ratings -- and positioning themselves as a beacon or stamp of authority and quality in an otherwise confusing, murky fog of web-based content...
That is, I can see publishers and agencies moving forever closer... and also computer games manufacturers, book publishers, film/TV production companies, perhaps even advertising agencies -- anything that requires narrative, believable characterisation, or creative words in some form -- merging; that demands for decent words, narrative, story-telling, what have you, will increase in ever-more web-focussed gaming, TV, film, publishing/production companies, while consumption of books as a form of entertainment declines.
Consider film -- more and more, authors don't get the big pay day until a book is made into one, and many are perhaps even writing with this as a hoped-for end product. I can see the 'book writing' phase of this process reducing and it simply becoming a matter of writers or authors, attached to, say, 'narrative production companies' or departments as a new form of staff writer, perhaps, producing the stoires and characters to feed a multi-media machine... but this is a long way down the line yet, I think...
But is this flight of fancy a positive or bleak outlook for writers/publishers? This is difficult to call, but, given that the web offers the opportunity to reach a huge number of people almost immediately, given the right idea -- one that captures the imagination in the right way -- then there's every likelihood of the former. There'll always be a demand for good content; for good, well-crafted literature, narrative, characters -- and in potentially many different new forms. And there'll likely always be a need for all the various tools in place at the moment in terms of crafting it. And, with demand, there will naturally be a lucrative way to supply. The trick will be not to get stuck in primordial delivery mud; the trick will be new ideas and experimentation; protectionism is likely to induce failure -- as many wise sorts have said.
So, what of us small independent publishers? Well, perhaps lapsing again into a hackneyed analogy might be OK, in the interests of keeping this 'readably' short... Consider the destruction of the big, old, and slow to adapt dinosaurs: after the metorite hit, it was the smaller, wiley, rat-like, warm-blooded mammals, or the birds, or the tiny insects or even single-celled life-forms -- those better suited to a new world -- that survived, adapted, diversified and now dominate... if we forget certain sea-dwellers... but, if they were in the depths of the dark sea, we could argue that this was a different environment -- say... law?
So, good news or bad news? Potentially both. But, 20 years down the line, it seems likely, even given our conservative tendencies in this country, that books, or consumption of what books currently offer, is likely, in large part, to have significantly altered... but I may be wrong.
Oh, and if we're to make the back to the future deadline, we need hoverboards and hovercars within the next 7 years... and we've missed time travel by 23 years...
Anyway, back to the telly-watching and time off...
and the door opens again
Sometime last month I whinged on this blog that the Guardian seemed to have abolished its lettters page in the Saturday Review section. I'm tempted to be a meglomaniac and suggest as a result the Guardian had a rethink and brought it back. But that could never be true. Whoever made the decision to resume publishing letters last Saturday, congratulations. Even though I am sure such person is not an avid reader of the Inpress blog.
New Develolpments on the inpress Website
In the next two weeks (assuming all goes well), we'll be launching a new module for Independent Booksellers. This will enable retailers to download Book jackets, advance information and sample extracts from forthcoming titles.
I hope this means that we'll be able to spread new book information across a wider range of booksellers than we have bren able to reach until now. It will also mean that retailers can download sample chapters from books and offer them to customers in their shops as 'tasters' which may encourage discerning readers to buy books that they would otherwise have passed over.
For instance, I have just read Home to an Empty House by Alun Richards which is published as part of the Library of Wales series that aims to republish Welsh writers whose books may not be readily available or are out of print. It is an enthralling story of a marriage and its disintegration and explores as well, the effect the protagonists have on those around them. I can probably say with some degree of certainty, that apart from a range of booksellers in Wales, you'd be hard pressed to find a copy of Home to an Empty House in your local bookshop. However, if you do spot a copy in a bookshop near you, let me know and I'll congratulate the bookseller on his or her good taste and send them a free copy of another Library of Wales title as a 'thank you'.