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While Christina Foyle ruled Foyles Bookshop, ‘the World’s Greatest’, the fiction department, which sprawled across several rooms of the ground floor, was shelved, perhaps uniquely, by publisher. Like any great incomprehensible catalogue, the pleasure of the Foyle’s system was looking and getting lost and finding something altogether different. I remember finding Burroughs’ Wild Boys that way, on the low John Calder shelves by the side door, when I was fifteen. And Cocteau’s Le Livre blanc a year or two later.
Even more than the writers, the publishers, named but strangely silent within their books, and the sophisticated urban addresses from which they operated, lived in a world apart from mine: Peter Owen of 73 Kenway Road, SW5; John Calder at 18 Brewer St, W1; Marion Boyars, first with Calder in Brewer St and then on her own at 24 Lacy Road, SW15; Virago in North London; The Grove Press in New York; City Lights of San Francisco. Browsing those publishers’ shelves in Foyles I started to discover writers outside the mainstream: Genet, Robbe–Grillet, Rimbaud, Julia Kristeva, Wyndham Lewis, Cocteau, Nathalie Sarraute, Verlaine, Hubert Selby Jr, Sade, Radiguet, Marguerite Duras, Burroughs — writers whose books for me were so incendiary that even opening them on the train home was a thrill. The smaller publishers seemed driven by a heady mix of high motives — a love of experimental aesthetics or radical politics, a regard for freedom of expression, an internationalist outlook and a most un-English taste for the theoretical, incomprehensible and possibly pretentious. Even more exciting were the low and dark impulses — to shock, degrade, be pornographic, subvert or destroy. The sheer obscurity of much of what they published suggested a dandified freedom from sensible business practice and profit.
The internet has withered the unique awe of such lists. Seeking freedom now I would be looking online for texts and blogs and answers. Free publishing is a great and remarkable freedom. Books are expensive to buy and to make, hard to get distributed and awkward to store. But they are good to hold, and to hold onto, easy to deface and difficult to throw away. They linger and with them stay the ideas that were so carefully put between their covers.
Where Foyles would have placed solitary titles from publishers who were starting out I don’t remember discovering. But I miss the old arrangements because nowhere else, outside of the publishers’ and small press fairs, has there been such an exhibition, celebration and examination of the publisher’s list. |
