Autonomy: the cover designs of Anarchy 1961-1970 (Hyphen, £25)

January 1, 2014 12:09 pm No Comments

The bookshop stocks quite a few books that were turned down by the publishing wing of the Five Leaves empire, usually coming out from more appropriate publishers – some bigger, some smaller. This book is one of them. I loved the idea – colour images of Colin Ward’s Anarchy magazine, with supporting essays – I just could not see how it could be produced economically, 100+ full colour images and information about a long-dead magazine that never sold more than 2-3,000 copies. Anarchy was hugely influential though, taking up issues like adventure playgrounds long before anyone else, with lots of important writers cutting their teeth on the mag. The Rufus Segar covers were in advance of their time… but how to sell it?
Fortunately, Daniel Poyner found a much better publisher in Hyphen, which only publishes in the field of graphic design, and which can reach a market outside of political archaeologists.
And what a job they have made of it. £25 is a lot for a paperback book, but it is worth every penny. The supporting essays are by the late Raphael Samuel, who understood the importance of Anarchy and Colin Ward’s ideas, and Richard Hollis on Anarchy‘s design in relation to the 1960s. Ward and Hollis have, separately, had an involvement with the publishing side of Five Leaves but we had no role in putting this book, or the contributors together.
Last week someone came into the shop with a satchel full of library-borrowings, a sort of Wardist grab-bag. Did we know of any organisation locally or nationally that brought together those who followed Colin Ward’s constructive anarchism? I admitted failure on this. Ward remains influential – Lawrence and Wishart are bringing out a memorial volume for him this year, and Five Leaves is planning a final volume of his essays, but those who he influenced are scattered. This book – one of those shortlisted for the 2013 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing – will make him better known in the design world. But it is hard to think how a permanent organisation promoting Wardism (a term he would have disliked) could survive as his own generation fades out and the generation he influenced most slip into retirement. But the bookshop is here, in part, because of his influence!

Ross Bradshaw

The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt (Vintage)

December 26, 2013 11:49 am No Comments

If my own personal library (God, that sounds pretentious) could have only one type of book, it would be essays. Accessible essays on all sorts of subjects. You can see where the annual Five Leaves essay collection comes from. At the heart of the collection would be a group of books like this one. Excellent essays, fairly personal in orientation, but grounded in experience and an understanding of history and politics.
Reading The Memory Chalet is difficult though, because you are aware that the author was dying when he wrote them. In fact he did not write them, he dictated them as motor neuron disease made movement impossible. The reader is always conscious that these were the last writings by a major writer occupying his well-ordered mind in a productive way. What else could he have done?
The essays I am drawn back to are the more personal accounts – of early travels in Europe, of his disenchantment with Zionism born out of living on a kibbutz, of London bus routes, of manual labour on board a ship, alternating “between scrubbing diesel boilers and throwing up in the teeth of a North Sea blizzard”.
Judt was of the left, at home mostly in the pages of the London Review of Books, but was quite clear about the kind of socialism he wanted – in the 1960s supporting Havel, Michnik, Kis and other “outcast” intellectuals who he saw as the best hope in replacing the “dead dogma immured in a decaying society” that was Eastern Europe under communism, and which also helped him reconnect to his East European Jewish origins.
Judt finishes the book with a chalet – a cafe at a small train stop In Murren, Switzerland – with the mountains falling away into the valley below, with the sight of summer barns you can climb up to. You can wait for the next train “punctual, predictable” or just wait, in a place where nothing goes wrong. Judt was rootless, lived in many places, but he ends “We cannot choose where we start out in life, but we may finish where we will. I know where I shall be: going nowhere in particular on that little train, forever and ever.” And that’s when you cry.

Ross Bradshaw

Undercover: the true story of Britain’s secret police by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis (Faber)

December 22, 2013 1:59 pm No Comments

It’s not often I read a book with a raised cover – you know the sort, the title being a bit bumpy. Clearly Faber thought this book would reach the mass market – the sub-heads “They steal identities. They break the law. They sleep with the enemy.” are also a bit bumpy in another way. And then the cover image of that stupid Guy Fawkes mask, beloved of (some) protesters and (most) press photographers everywhere. But this book is sensational, and “they” did all of these things, in some cases not just sleeping with their enemy but fathering a child with that enemy. And a lot of the action was in Nottingham. If you were on another planet you might have missed the fuss about Nottingham’s Mr Mark Stone/Mark Kennedy, the copper who infiltrated and made himself central to local protest groups over many years. He also made himself central to the lives of the core individuals involved, and had several sexual relationships while undercover. He and the Special Demonstration Squad were eventually exposed. Almost all the policemen and one of the policewomen who were deep undercover, also mostly for many years, had sexual relations with members of the groups they infiltrated. In some case they became instigators of illegal action. It now appears that the famous McDonald’s/McLibel leaflet was written mainly by a policeman and that the tiny London Greenpeace Group who produced it had almost as many infiltrators as activists. Perhaps McDonald should sue the police. The story of the SDS is fascinating reading, though the question remains as to how, psychologically, these long-terms undercover police spies could live with, act with and sleep with people yet have “normal” lives too. What kind of person could do this?

Ross Bradshaw