Books As Buses

Buses come together, in gangs, like good films, like great nights out, like the men in the poet Wendy Cope’s life. But books, they roll and roll, in an ever rising tide. Of the making of books, as it says in Ecclesiastes, there is no end. Take a look, for example, at the lot of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year Prize. Back in the nineteen-nineties they would need to consider a hundred books and then make their choice. Today that number has doubled. This is the result of technological advance, an improved economy, a desire by funding bodies to see these things professionally hit market and a much enlarged producer base. The literature industry has been teaching creative writers how to do it in increasing numbers since the pale and dark nineteen-fifties. The consequence is more books.

There is evidence out there that, as a leisure activity, reading is on the increase. Book publishing, if not vibrant is certainly a viable activity. TV has not reduced us all to pulp. We turn it off sometimes and spend a few hours with a favourite author, thrilled, excited, enthralled, uplifted. Society has discovered that reading and writing can be acceptable alternatives to wrecking bus shelters, and can help combat depression by aiding feelings of self-worth. I write therefore I am. I read and I improve. The old adages return.

It’s the book prize season again. A time when the best books, or those the judges think might be, rise to the top. The Roland Mathias Prize has just been awarded while the Wales Book of the Year soon will be.

Bowing to pressure from readers who felt it inequitable that poetry should compete against fiction and non-fiction against verse, this year will be the last where that situation prevails. From 2012 Literature Wales will offer category prizes to the best work of fiction, the best book of poetry and the best work of creative non-fiction. From these three winners an overall Book of the Year will be selected. There’ll be a Welsh-medium award as well as one for works published in English. In keeping with these straightened times ceremonials will be minimized.

This year’s award, decided from the bumper crop of works that came out during the past twelve months, will be announced simultaneously in Cardiff and in Bangor.

Who might be in the running? Despite my current job I write I have absolutely no insider knowledge here. But it’s been a good year. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this posting appeared in The Western Mail as The Insider. #193

Dusty Things That get In The Way

My mother always had a deep dislike of books. They were dusty things that got in the way. They had to be stuffed from sight into the backs of cupboards. In the front room bookcase was a set of china dancing ladies, a carriage clock and a fruit bowl with no fruit. My books were upstairs, under my bed, in a box. How reading became my lifetime’s obsession I’ll never know. It could have been my uncle, who each Christmas gave me books about Poland. Or my father who’d offer me Dickens when no one was looking. Or maybe it was the local library where out of nowhere I found choice and freedom and endless science fiction.

Once this road had been embarked on there was, of course, no end. It was never a battle between reading or not reading but always one of what to select next. The massively politically incorrect Henry Miller, when I discovered him, offered a panoply of directions. Barely a chapter of any of his books went by without the author coming up with long lists of recommended works and the names of great authors that readers should follow.

In a dark corner I found the great fantasist John Cowper Powys’s 100 Best Books which offered a sort of road map. Better was Philip Ward’s mind-bending A Lifetime’s Reading in which a game plan for the next fifty years was delineated. This offered the reader an enthralling education through the consumption of five hundred books. Did I manage it, all 500? Certainly not. But I had a go.

How you decide on what to read next is, of course, a matter of enormous interest to publishers. Do you pick your reading matter by reputation of the author, because you’ve read about the book in the papers, heard about it on TV, liked the sound of title, or seen it in the hands of others, intently being read on the train? “I can’t understand why anyone would want to write a novel when you can pick one up for just a few cents” said an American journalist. And he was right. The market is glutted. The choice goes on forever.

Bookclubs offer one way out. Here you gather among friends, all having consumed the same title, to praise, destroy and discuss. Once that’s done you collectively select the next month’s read and off you go, a mandated title to explore.

Sometimes there’s a surprise waiting. At a club I attended I had the author secretly wait in the kitchen while the discussion rolled and then brought her out when all was done. Luckily the book had gone down well. But it might not have.

Book clubs are booming. Check your library for information about the nearest one to you.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #173

The End of Bookselling

In the days when I was a bookseller February was like the grave. Who would have thought that six short weeks before the store had been a bedlam of buyers. People who never normally visited the shopping centres of cities suddenly there buying everything in sight. The last minute shopping rush was a joy to behold. Boxed sets, slab-sized coffee table tomes, multi-volume hardbacks, anthologies, books in slip cases with attached pens, maps, driving gloves, diaries or garden secateurs. They all went. Buy now or don’t buy at all. The world ends tomorrow.

But Feb was a different story. Hours of silence. A visit by a traffic warden stepping in out of the cold. An out of town visitor asking directions. Someone with a dictionary they’d been given ten years ago asking if they could exchange it for cash. Publishing dried up too. This might be a new year but nothing fresh was appearing. Who would be interested during the winter dark?

Today, however ,the digital revolution has seen an end to that. Bookshops barely exist in the way they once did. Stock is at a minimum and usually only titles that sales databases say will shift. Pulp bestsellers go at half price from the shelves of supermarkets. Customers no longer come in to ask for that book they heard about on TV the other night, not sure of the author’s name but he had a beard.

If punters really want a book they go for it online. Paper copies via Amazon, downloaded versions next. Goodbye Borders, Lears, Dillon’s, Menzies, Fopp. Hello Appleshop, Gameszone, Abercrombie and Fitch.

But, ever hopeful, the new breed of small independent one-person publishers continues to blossom. Their stock sells hand to hand, via Facebook, Twitter, over the counter in the local coffee shop and among the fake flowers and calendars at Greetingcards-Are-Us. The brand new Cardiff-based Mulfran Press has brought out Lynda Nash’s Ashes of a Valleys Childhood – poems and photographs that recall the 1960s Rhymney Valley and do so with a welcome lack of cloying sentiment. The Abbey on Caldy Island publish Echoes From A Far Shore, a book of reflective verse by the Cistercian monk David Hodges. God celebrated in seascape, prayer and the glory of the skies.

Dave Lewis’s excellently named Pont Press brings out Layer Cake, twenty-five years of vernacular, edge-walking and thoroughly entertaining verse. Antony Rowe helps Stuart Warner self-publish Echoes of the First Song, a set of West Wales poetry and explanation where the discussion often outguns the actual verse.

Chris Kinsey’s Cure for a Crooked Smile from Ragged Raven continues to enhance her reputation as a wildlife poet of the first order. Top of the pile is Philip Gross’s set of cracklingly brilliant retakes of Simon Denison’s pinhole camera photographs. Cinnamon Press. Rush for your copy now.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday February 20th, 2010. Who on earth reads this stuff, I wonder.

Huge Breakfasts of Kippers

Does the idea of spending a weekend in a great house somewhere surrounded by writers fill you with dread? How about facing up to a long lecture on the meaning of apricot sponge in the work of John Tripp at 9.00 am after a night in the bouncing bar? Maybe an open forum on the way the publishing industry works? Or a discussion on the work of one of our literary greats. Welcome to the literary conference. How they used to be. We love these things in Wales.

You sign up and spend three days in a shared room somewhere deep in the greenness. Fellow delegates, for this is what you are now, join you for huge breakfasts of kippers, muesli and fried eggs. You study your day programme. There’s a choice first off – women in the nineteenth century industrial novel or a lecture on the works of the folk poets of Gwynedd. You choose and slumber. After an hour there is gentle applause.

At coffee you fill up on biscuits and discuss with your fellow travellers the fate of short fiction in an age of television and the power of poetry on the internet. There is a bookstall run by someone you’ve seen somewhere before, you are sure, a man with a beard. He stocks books by delegates and a stack of second hand stuff you’d never look at anywhere else. With nothing else to spend your cash on you find yourself buying. Get your copies signed. Why not.

Mid afternoon there’s a literary walk through the local woodlands. Appropriate poems are recited by the walk leader. Half way along it starts softly to rain. At 6.30 there’s the keynote speech. A London novelist driven in by limo to talk about her latest book. Copies cost £25. You don’t bother. Dinner is chicken with lumpy mashed potato. There is pudding but so sticky you can’t get it out of the bowl.

In the bar later is a poems and pints session. The poems flutter and drone. Almost every delegate appears to have brought something with them. Folded sheets are produced from back pockets. Files are unbagged. Pamphlets taken from under arms. The pints make things bearable. You drink far too many.

The following morning almost half the delegates fail to get to the first lecture. There’s a summing up after coffee at 11.00 am. You spot people leaving at 10.45. It’s been a great few days. You’ve met and mingled and got a hold on how the world works. Money well spent. In your car boot are copies of signed poetry booklets you’ll never have otherwise bought. You are replete. The sun comes up. You drive to meet it.

Watch out for the Academi’s next conference. It won’t be anything like this.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 12 December, 2009

Library of Wales

Did Alun Pugh leave us a legacy? In his time at the helm of Wales’ culture ministry the Clwyd West AM certainly maintained a high profile. His decision in 2005 to spend many thousands reviving the fortunes of the Welsh book trade was seen by some as clinging to the past. His centrepiece was the Library of Wales – a uniform series of inexpensive, edited reprints of Welsh classics. Editions would be uniform and would be distributed free to schools. They would concentrate exclusively on Welsh writing in English and would revive the fortunes of the lost Anglo-Welsh. The past would be shifted back into the present. Our heritage, and in particular our industrial working-class heritage would not be lost amid a welter of soft latter-day Bay-side living.

Leighton Andrews AM had been hunting in his local bookstore for a Rhondda novel by Jack Jones and was dismayed to learn that the great man had been out of print for years. How could Welsh valley communities be understood if their history and literary heritage was invisible? He argued the case in a piece for the Western Mail. Alun Pugh shared this view. A fiscal correction needed to be applied. Resource was found. Prof Dai Smith was appointed as series editor. History was back. A world was rediscovered.

Initial scepticism from some quarters soon vanished. The idea that reviving the past might reduce opportunities in the present proved to be a paper tiger. Dai Smith recruited some of our best contemporary authors to write forwards to each volume. Ron Berry, Gwyn Thomas, Lewis Jones, Alun Richards, Alun Lewis, Rhys Davies, Dorothy Edwards, Raymond Williams, Emyr Humphreys and Dannie Abse rode again. So too did some more unexpected voices. Indeed some of whom many of us had not heard: Jeremy Brooks, Howell Davies, Stuart Evans. Add to all that a pair of heavy-weight century-busting door-stop anthologies – Meic Stephens’s Poetry 1900-2000 and Gareth Williams’s Sport (a 2008 best-seller) and you have a list to be envied. It was the making of Parthian Books - a solid back list of unquestionable value with guaranteed upfront sales. People out there even began to collect them.

The latest crop continues Dai’s mix of predictable eclecticism. Another Gwyn Thomas, a Brenda Chamberlain, a not unexpected Geraint Goodwin and then, right out of left field, the wild and wilful The Caves of Alienation from Stuart Evans.

There’s a myth around that Wales never quite got its head around modernism and ended up refusing to join in. No James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein for us. We had Dylan Thomas. For many he was regarded as edgy enough. But out in the Welsh back rooms where David Jones and others lived new ways of looking at the world were in operation. Stuart Evans’s multi-faceted, many voiced approach was one. Ignored when it first appeared but justly celebrated now. The Library of Wales scores again.

A version of this blog appeared in the Western Mail on saturday 31 January, 2009

The Book Future

If Dickens had been alive today then he would have been writing for television. How many times have we heard that? Dickens bringing the Cybermen to the London workhouse. Little Nell the new companion of Dr Who. If Russell T had been alive in the ninetieth century then he would have written vast, wordy novels and they would be issued in serial parts. It’s possible.

Books themselves, of course, change their form. In the nineteen-eighties publishers were convinced that the paperback as we know it was finished. CD-Roms were the future. Or if not those then electric books. Hand-held readers the size of boxes of washing powder were predicted to be in the briefcases of the entire population before the decade was out. Hasn’t happened yet.

Books do, however, have fashions in the way they look. The nineties saw super-glossy covers with lots of reflective silver. Paperbacks were throw-away. Hardbacks were the Rolls Royce you kept on the front room shelf. But not forever. “Set of hardback books, excellent condition, unread. £10.” That was a For Sale card I saw in a local shop window. Does anyone ever respond?

Innovative publishers have tried almost everything to make their products move. Books appear with CDs as inserts (soundtrack of the book, while you read hear what Nick Hornby heard while he wrote). A while back a London small press published titles with coat hangers bound into the spines. “Solve your storage problems overnight. Hang your books in the wardrobe with your shirts.”

To mark themselves out from the pack publishers have bound their books between pieces of wood, samples of carpet and metal sheets. None of these innovations have ever proved effective. Paper stays best. Flexible, manipulable, light-weight, cheap.

But now that bookshops themselves are under threat publishers are casting around for ways to mark their products out. Free gifts. Coupons in the back that win you holidays. Entire editions published only on the web. iTune iBooks read by the author. But most see the future as involving downloading. And once the reading machine problem has been solved then this will all be upon us. Bought your reader yet?

Meanwhile expect to see print on demand machines appearing in your local store. Books will be ordered up from a central database containing everything in the known universe, printed and bound in shop and then sold to you five minutes later. This is not tomorrow, this is today. The implications for small, niche and minority publishers are enormous. Nothing will ever go out of print. Everything will be always totally available. Books will be as vast as they need to be. Editing will end. Editors will become as passé as lamplighters. I’m not inventing this. This is round the corner.

The above first appeared in an earlier form as an Insider column in the saturday Western Mail (#56)

Real Wales Launches

Real Wales, the new book, will be launched at the Cardiff Visitor's Centre, The Hayes, Cardiff. The Visitor Centre is the Old Library. The event will run from 6.30 pm. There'll be wine and readings and Peter Finch will be in conversation with the journalist, author and broadcaster, Patrick Hannan. The book is published by Seren at £9.99. expect it to hit the shops in the last week of November.

This has been a long haul, this one. Books are never instant things. But expect to be informed, stretched, wound up, entertained, taken palces and amused. Some places in Wales will never want to see the author again.

The Old Book Destock Trick

Convinced that my Institute of Welsh Affairs blog entry (http://www.iwa.org.uk/blog/) on a subject that is heating things up among academics and librarians (if not quite yet the larger reading public) could do with some personal pushing I repeat it here.

Is the decision by Cardiff Council to auction off some of its ancient and valuable book stock a harbinger of larger change to come? I think so. If the book trade hasn’t yet hit the sort of hurricane season that the world of finance has then it is only a matter of time. The digitisation of everything from bestsellers to the documents which define your personal identity are not just around the corner but actually upon us.

Recently the National Library of Wales announced its ten-year plan to digitise a large section of its holdings and to make the results instantly and universally accessible online: books, artworks, documents, letters, maps. Its previous plan to digitise entire runs of twentieth century Welsh periodicals is almost complete. This has been managed despite storms of protest from original authors. These have yet to abate.

All this poses the big question: Do we need original manuscripts when virtual ones allow the world and its uncle slick and searchable access at will?Old books, and in particular those from the dawn of print, cannot simply be put onto a shelf and called up from the stacks for any casual visitor to handle. They need to be preserved with care, viewed under controlled conditions, repaired, conserved, de-foxed, cleaned, pressed, boxed, have their rot excised and their bindings mended. All that takes money. Cardiff says it is already overstretched and simply cannot find the resource to care for the 18,000 antiquarian volumes, maps and original manuscripts it has decided put up for sale.

The yard sale it proposed has been replicated at libraries elsewhere and not just in the UK either. Libraries, once eternal guardians and repositories of our cultural heritage, can now be seen engaging in Fahrenheit 451 style stock clearances. Get rid of these dirty things. They are mere containers. Their content is that which matters.

It’s a point of view. Many don’t share it.

What troubles me is that conservation and research are developing arts. Who’s to say what the future may be able to extract from an original document actually handled by its original author. More than could be got from a digital replica that’s for sure.

Cardiff Council has since backtracked slightly and are in discussions with Cardiff University about the preservation of at least some of the Welsh-interest component of its soon to be flogged-off holdings. All will not be gone. Just a lot of it.

How much of the past should we preserve? Certainly not everything. How do we make choices? Not that Cardiff were intending to make choices. There were no proposals to digitise and thus release the original as surplus. This was shelf clearance. And it’s not that this kind of thing hasn’t happened before. Check the stacks at Bute’s once great library at Cardiff Castle. Empty. Did you spot the stock leaving? Me neither.