Da da da da da da da da - Bagman!

A local author visited The Bookshop today, and asked us if his publisher's sales representative had advised us of the former's new book.  This encounter tipped over a fence in my past experiences enclosure and caused a stampede of memories - relating to when I carried out this role for various publishers - to trample over the plains of my consciousness, until they were rounded up by the lassos of (you're quite right, this metaphor has overstretched itself already, and needs urgent physiotherapy).

This strangely persistent species - (Venditionesque Repraesentativum Publica, as it's technically known in Google Latin) - continues to flourish, despite having in recent years come under increasing threat from a number of factors, including centralised buying, the closure of bookshops, diminishing sales budgets and a peculiar mutated virus whose sole target is large black pilot bags.  Still these brave crusaders for literature stride forward by car, train and on foot, undaunted by the thousand rebuffs that their profession is heir to, their eyes glowing with the quenchless  desire to sell that burns deep within their souls.  One of the most formidable types of sales rep. is The Freelance, who often works on a commission-only basis, representing a myriad small publishers and wielding almost as many black pilot bags. The distinguishing features of this creature include hideously lengthened arms and a basilisk-like stare from which, once it is met by a hapless bookseller, there is no escape.  Before the victim fully realises what is happening, they have sat down with the rep., gone through fifteen folders of badly-produced information sheets and ordered books on modelling historical figures with tapioca and epic poems on the history of snuff.

One of the fondest memories I have of sales repping is visiting thriving, intelligently-run independent bookshops, and (these being generally staffed by fewer people) meeting the challenge of performing one's duty on the shop floor.  At Newham Bookshop (hello Viv, hello Jon), I would often find myself balancing a sales folder in one hand, stroking one of the shop's cats that had decided to perch on my shoulder with another, and wishing I had a third to fill in my order form, all this while Viv served customers, answered the 'phone and arranged one of the phenomenally successful author events for which the shop is renowned.

Another experience that comes readily to mind is selling in a particular title from Zed Books on the Taliban, during one of the early modern Middle East conflagrations.  As this book was then the best intelligent short introduction to the subject, I was kept very busy with stock-checking and taking orders from many of the bookshops in my patch, and could often be found in a quiet corner of such an establishment saying, with great intensity - 'Hello, this is David - I have some urgent orders for The Taliban'.  I was never once even slightly arrested.

I could speak of hiding behind pillars in Foyle's, wearing deep camouflage and waiting to ambush elusive buyers, or the many happy hours spent turning my publishers' books face-out on shelves (although, need I add, never, at all, on any occasion whatsoever, concealing those from rival houses) - but I will save these and their ilk for another time.

Yule blog (part the first)

Today's blog launches a short but reasonably well-formed series of Christmas book recommendations, which will comprise a mixture of overtly festive titles and those which, through their beauty, shininess or similar qualities, qualify as gifts.

Many years ago, (before the Internet was discovered in a laboratory accident, and we had to discover information by asking the village elder, who would, before divulging anything, recite advertisements from the blacksmith and local shop, unless you'd paid for the Premium Service) I was a rosy-cheeked schoolboy, possessing an interest in writing poetry and a friend who was similarly inclined, (apart from lacking both rosy cheeks and boyness).  The school which we attended, being then a particularly good example of the comprehensive variety, recognised this enthusiasm and encouraged it by arranging our subsidised attendance at a residential course run by the estimable Arvon Foundation.  There are various forms of Arvon course, centred around many different creative endeavours and genres, but ours was one in which, enfolded by the bucolic tranquility of Totleigh Barton in Devon, we wrote and discussed poetry and received feedback and guidance from two professional poets.  The social aspect of these weeks is an integral and important element, although cooking (usually in pairs) for the entire ensemble can be more of a challenge for some students than the writing, and leads to many a stubborn case of Caterers Block.

Both of the tutors for this course, namely Lawrence Sail and John Mole, aside from performing their didactic duties to a very high standard, and in a winning and diplomatic fashion, went on to make positive contributions to my professional life.  John Mole would enliven the bookshop in St. Albans where I worked for many years through various events (he lived in the city and taught in one of its schools), while Lawrence Sail co-edited the subject of this blog, around to which I am finally getting, namely Light Unlocked, an anthology of poems which the writers had enclosed in Christmas cards to their friends or families.  The publisher - Enitharmon Press - was one of many whose books my then employer represented to the book trade, and handling the book would also bring me into contact with the other co-editor, Kevin Crossley-Holland, who reaffirmed my experience that not even the best-known literary figures are immune to being charming and thoroughly nice people.

This is one of those few books which, since first seeing or reading them, I have more or less continuously and with a kind of idiotic intensity and persistence evangelised about to anyone who would or - for that matter - would not listen.  Its heavy gold end-papers, exquisite restraint of design (including elegant and playful engravings by John Lawrence) and selection of poems combine into the perfect anthology.  Buy it now, in bulk, and solve your Christmas present problems....at a stroke!  If any of your recipients don't immediately swoon with gratitude, they are not, in any case,  deserving of your acquaintance, so the book will serve a useful secondary function as a friend filter.

The poets range from very well-known literary names to Rowan Willams, and the poetic styles vary accordingly.  I'll leave you with a droll piece of UA Fanthorpe.

Christmas In Envelopes

Monks are at it again, quaffing, carousing;

And stage-coaches, cantering out of Merrie England,

In a flurry of whips and fetlocks, sacks and Santas.

Raphael has been roped in, and Botticelli;

Experts predict a vintage year for Virgins.

From the theologically challenged, Richmond Bridge, 

Giverny, a lugger by moonlight, doves. Ours

Costs less than these in money, more in time;

Like them, is hopelessly irrelevant, 

But brings, like them, the essential message

love

A day in the death

Christmas, like an entity being beamed aboard the starship Enterprise, is shimmering into ever greater definition at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City.  When last we visited this jewel of literacy in the Home Counties, customers were occasionally brandishing lists; now these pieces of paper are near universal, with children's books, and enquiries about children's books, being the most popular subjects.  Luckily, we as a team are pretty darned clued-up on this subject and - if I had ever felt that the hours I've spent reading junior fiction were misplaced (which I haven't) - being flung back into the front line of Christmas book retailing would have reversed this opinion.  It's heartening to witness that, as our customers pursue their individual quests for the Christmas shopping completion grail, they remain - despite their arms being encumbered by several gaily-bedaubed carrier bags and their ears likewise by the Howard Centre's incessant pop music soundtrack - of good cheer in their dealings with us.

My first task each morning has to do with a serious overflow of crime in our neighbourhood.  A large influx of new titles meant that some copies of books which were multiply stocked had to be rested on a trolley until sufficient spaces appear to re-shelve them.  Thus, ironically, this person, who finds the genre eminently resistible (see this post), is obliged each day to scan carefully each single title on the criminal trolley** and correlate it with those on the shelves, replacing stock where able.  It's a peculiar way to start the day, as if with some dark, perverted catechism, as I look along the rows of titles and murmur: Death in the Morning, Death in the Evening, Death a bit Later, Deathly Death, Look at all the Dead People, etc.

My colleagues and I have devised a devious stratagem to hasten the acquisition of crime fiction by our customers; in a simplified version of subliminal advertising, we hold up a piece of paper with appropriate novelists' names written on it (in a seductive font) and then lower it again, really, really quickly.  It's working a treat.As an antidote to this ritual, I was today imagining a new genre - crime blanc - in which concerned citizens report apparent minor misdemeanours to honest, emotionally stable police officers and are reassured that, in each case, there was a perfectly simple explanation and that no infringements had actually occurred.  Mightily relieved, all the protagonists, gather after the working day and share excellent home-made cakes and a variety of delicious hot beverages.  Each book should start: 

'Down these well-maintained streets - admire in particular the imaginative use of tree varieties - a man or indeed woman must go. To do some shopping, probably. Or just potter about'.

**You're right - it doesn't squeal.

Karel for Christmas

I've just finished reading May by Karel Hynek Mácha, a long narrative poem translated from the Czech by Marcela Sulak and published in a beautiful edition by Twisted Spoon Press.  This book is so attractive a physical object, in fact, that you will spend at least as much time gazing at and fondling it as you will reading the text.  Be careful, however, not to drool, as this may be injurious both to your social standing and the fabric of the book.

As the very useful introduction explains, the poem, first published in 1836, marked a watershed in Czech letters as it ruptured the absolutism of patriotism and nationalism as dominant themes, and embraced many of the Romantic ideas, themes and techniques which had already pervaded other European literatures and cultures.  May also broke new metrical ground, and saw the author introducing the iamb into his country.  I can picture the scene now, as Mácha pads around the quieter districts of Prague and the outlying countryside, stealthily crouching to open the door of a small but comfortable cage to usher out another flock of iambs into the wild.  Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM resound their tiny feet as they scatter abroad, giddy with the excitement of freedom and relishing the prospect of befriending the native dactyls.

Anyhoo - the poem remains massively popular in its native land, with new editions disappearing rapidly from bookshops and schoolchildren being able to recite - presumably before they can be restrained - huge chunks of it verbatim. Learning this made me feel somewhat bereft of a poem with similar status in the home life of our own dear nation; I'm not sure Morte D'Arthur quite passes muster in this capacity, and there doesn't seem to be the same unselfconscious interest in and embracing of poetry nationally and across all classes as there would seem to exist in Slovavakia and (in my experience, for example,) Wales.  Discuss.

The poem itself is a rich mixture of melodrama, romanticism and lyricism, and is structured around the last hours and execution of a 'forest lord' who has led a gang of criminals and who has been arrested and convicted for killing the man who ravished his (the forest lord's) lover, this man happening to be his (ditto) father. Meanwhile, his (you know whose) lover languishes and pines by a lake, waiting in vain for her paramour's return.  This rather stark framework is decorated with unusual and arresting imagery, particularly of nature, and the poem is particularly good at weaving together natural description with the portrayal of psychological states and ruminations on mortality.  There is excellent and dramatic use of repetition and an extraordinary interlude in which the spirits, landscape, flora and fauna of and around the graveyard sing a chorus to explain how they will lay the condemned man to rest:

       WASTELAND

"Then I will breathe a pleasant fragrance."

      SETTING CLOUD

"I'll sprinkle on the coffin rain."

    FALLING FLOWER

"I'll make the wreaths for it."

   LIGHT WINDS

"We will take them to the coffin."

   FIREFLIES

"Little candles we will bring."

   STORM FROM THE DEEP

"I will awake the hollow bells."

There is also a very powerful and moving scene in which the surviving outlaws sit on the ground an intone a dirge for their fallen leader, and the very opening of the poem is evocative and compelling:

It was late evening - first of May -

was evening May - the time for love.

The turtledove invited love

to where the pine grove's fragrance lay.

The silent moss murmured of love,

the flowering tree belied love's woe.

I've enjoyed everything I've read from Twisted Spoon, a publisher as interesting as it sounds, and recommend that you buy their entire list as Christmas presents for your legions of pals.

Bog standard, or How was it for you?

As the days grow shorter, so the shortlists lengthen.  Having just been presented with the Specsavers National Book Awards (see my incisive socio-critical deconstruction of same here), publishers, wholesalers, bookshops and booksellers throughout the country are frantically coming to grips with the Costa finalists.  The two most obviously newsworthy aspects of the Costa are the inclusion of Bring up the Bodies (they should simply rename all the fiction prizes 'The Hilary' and save time) and that of a brace of illustrated prose (see this blog post and marvel at how on the pulse is my digital finger (can fingers be anything other than digital?)). I'm sorry - I think I've been hopelessly seduced by nested brackets.  The graphic works, interestingly, are divided between the Novel and Biography division, with Days of the Bagnold Summer and Dotter of her Father's Eyes respectively waving the flag for books with pictures, the former from a major traditional publishing house, the latter from a respected independent comics publisher.

Which, preamblingly, brings me to the peak of the prize-giving season, The Bad Sex Award, which has excited most comment over two exclusions, namely J.K. Rowling (no, not for Hairy Porter) and EL James.  The list of non-excludees, together with the appropriate extracts, can be found in the link.  I applaud the aims and sentiments of this award: 

"to draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel – and to discourage it"

and have often found that perfectly reasonable novels are rendered unpalatable by such scenes, especially where a male author has created a female participant whose listed personal and physical attributes, along with the degree of unbearable ecstasy she is able to precipitate, smack of a rather grubby kind of wish-fulfilment rather than literary creation.

'But what' I hear you ask, with your typical perspicacity and intelligence, 'about the good sex?'.  Perhaps bizarrely, one of my favourite descriptions of physical conjugation takes place within a graphic novel (can this get more intertwined?) and involves a human communing with a plant elemental in a kind of physical and mental union that allows them to share each other's consciousness and embrace the universe in a single vision.  I speak of none other than a creature who has gurgled his way into these posts on a few previous occasions, the enigmatic Swamp Thing and his lover, Abby, who perform this union in volume 4 of the collected Saga of the Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore, when Abby (as you do) eats a particular plant that constitutes part of Swampie's physical form.

The writing in this scene, as is often the case with Moore, is high-flown and florid, but - taken in context - is entirely appropriate, and the passage is typical of the intelligence, wit and range of cultural and literary references that this writer brings to his work.  The whole Saga is an incredible tour de force, embracing a dizzying range of subjects (vampires, misogyny, pollution, God and the afterlife, garden furniture), themes and perspectives, and makes the average Superbloke story seem like something scrawled in crayon by a very young child.

I'd love to hear your examples of good sex (fiction and poetry only, please).

Do not go gentle into those good shelves

Herein are found further meandering remarks occasioned by the delightful experience of being a born-again bookseller in The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City, (winner of the Doughty Tradespersons' Least Deceptively-Named Retail Outlet Award, 2011) (yes, there was a statuette).

The Shredded Wheat Factory; from Audrey  Bassingthorpe's Book:
Buildings of Welwyn Garden that are not  The Bookshop

There has been a certain amount of shuffling and creating of sections within our word emporium, with one of my intrepid colleagues causing to exist - by means of arcane ritual, esoteric incantations and - most importantly, a good, sturdy trolley - a Dark Romance department within Horror.  Unfortunately, because of a delay to the re-supply of our blank shelf labels (which has transcended epic proportions), we are unable to indicate this new area overtly, so we have drafted a new rota ensuring each of us in turn stands near the appropriate area looking pale and sensitive, with a faint aura of supernatural menace.  I dare not tell you how we're flagging up the new Erotica section.

Booksellers tend to have favourite sections within shops, (usually, but not always determined by personal interest) and the bond that subsequently develops is usually of a fiercely parental nature; a mixture of unconditional love, concern and jealousy whenever a threat to the size or position of the section is perceived, or - in pathological cases - whenever another bookseller attempts to shelve some stock in it, tidy it up or even approach within fifty yards of it.  An amusing consequence of this custodial relationship is the inappropriate championing of books to customers. When you hear a phrase such as:

'Yes, Sir or Madam, that 4-volume Oxford Latin Dictionary would be a perfect christening present...it's never too early....'

you know that someone has become a little too keen to boost the Language department takings.

Conversely and, so to speak, on the other hand, I have known booksellers who would tremble with apprehension when they were required to enter certain subject territories, the usual suspect here being 'Mind, Body, Spirit' or - as its known by its less spiritually-inclined detractors - the Miscellaneous Books Section.  This fear tended to be based on the difficulty of organising and therefore navigating the section (arranging it in ascending order of strangeness, for example, seldom works well) and of the subjects contained therein.  Often this led to the pitiful scenario of the bookseller who ran MBS being dragged out of their tea break by a whimpering colleague who would be told by the former, not for the first time, that 

'Astral Phenomena comes straight after Alien Encounters; it's obvious, for goodness' sake'.

My own spookiest experience in this category occurred many years ago when I telephoned an esoteric publisher to enquire for a customer about the availability of a certain title.  I was informed that the person who dealt with that particular series would be out of the office for some time.  There then followed an unconventionally long pause, which terminated in the revelation:

'He is a student of the Fourth Way'.

I confess, dear reader, that I was too discomfited to ascertain if and how these two statements were related.

Left writes

As awareness rises of how some well-known large corporations are organised to obviate the necessity of paying UK taxes, my mind has turned to writing about the global economic system, and in particular Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater. This novel has an arresting opening line:

 A Sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

and concerns the attempts of one Eliot Rosewater to use his massive inherited fortune to perform public good works and improve the lot of the disenfranchised and unfortunate, a campaign to which his family responds by attempting to declare him legally insane. As with all Vonnegut's work, much of which is concerned with questions of economic and social equality, this broad satirical canvas is decirated with brush-strokes of irony which undermine any attempt to see the work as a simple declaration or manifesto, but there is some very astute writing about capitalism, especially - in the context of tax behaviour, in this well-known passage, in which Eliot's father is attempting to fathom his son's perspective: 

'"You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?"

"The what?"

"The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it - and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently."

"Slurping lessons?"

"From lawyers! From tax consultants! From customers' men! We're born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes' screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping."'

"I wasn't aware that I slurped."

This is Vonnegut at his best in terms of dialogue, imagery and humour, and the book is one to which I return frequently.

In the same vein, my dear wife kindly alerted me to a new children's graphic novel from an American labour organisation - Union Communication Services, inc. - which explains the violent circumstances under which the classic protest song 'Which Side are you on?' was penned.

In the interests of proper balance and objectivity, I will of course be posting a marginally slightly less left-wing article tomorrow.