Bonjour, Tetris

Met the lovely Simon Barraclough for a coffee and a chat yesterday morning.  I've been so busy lately that I haven't made it out to all the events I've wanted to, one of which was the launch of Simon's new pamphlet, Bonjour Tetris. 

Aside from the fact that this may be the best ever name for a published volume of poetry, the physical object is itself a thing of marvellous beauty.  Though I'm a staunch fan of Barraclough, you'll have to buy the pamphlet (or his excellent first collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour) and judge his poems for yourself.

Given that I work in academia as well as in print media, I get rather cross when I read/hear the phrase, 'print is dead'.  Take all the hype over the iPad. I got to play about with one at work a few days ago and it's pretty and nice, but ultimately useless. This is classic advertising: create a problem where previously none existed in order to solve said problem with a brilliantly marketed and totally superfluous gadget.  Why do people need printed books/magazines, so the naysayers cry, when they can carry around hundreds of them on an iPad.

The physicality of books, magazines and newspapers is one of the best things about them.  Reading a newspaper on the internet is rubbish (cried the petulant little child).  The thought of toting an iPad with me to Saturday morning brunch to read the weekend FT makes me feel like a robot, not a chilled-out, eggs-florentine eating human being. Besides, when people like Tom Chivers at Penned in the Margins are taking care to produce such marvellous pamphlets and then packaging them so that you feel like you're opening a birthday present instead of a slim volume of poetry, why would you prefer screen to stamped, limited edition, sand-coloured boxes. Exactly. Glad we're on the same page.

Salt & Just One Book

I should have blogged about this before, but here I am - better late than never, eh?

For those of you in the know about poetry Salt will be old hat, but newbies to poetry publishing will be less well informed.

Salt has been around for the better part of 10 years and publishes an astonishing number of debut collections from some seriously talented writers. Shirley Dent, writing in the Guardian, said something that really resonated with me: while the poetry community was lapping up the gossip pages drama that was the battle of the Oxford poetry dons, a far more serious issue was receiving little to certainly not enough attention in the 'other place'. Salt, more the victim of bad luck than bad business, was faced with a chunk of debt and an industry smacked by recession.

What's so brilliant about Salt is that instead of letting blind panic drive them further into debt, trying to borrow their way out of a bad situation, they came up with a clever viral marketing campaign that perfectly appealed to the literary community.

The 'Just One Book' campaign is just that: buy one book. Anyone can afford one book and if lots of anyones each by one book, Salt will at the very least buy itself time with suppliers and creditors. But this isn't just a 'please give us money to save us' campaign - Salt is a genuinely important independent publishing house. They support and encourage new authors, publishing fantastic new work by writers who deserve to have their work out in the big wide world. Especially in the web 2.0 age when so many seem to think everything should be online and free, there's something immensely important about supporting a publishing house so clearly committed to produced beautiful works of literature. While every author likes to be published - if it's online, we'll take it - I don't know a single one who doesn't have 'being published' as their ultimate goal. There's still something special about the printed word. Help Salt keep this magic alive.

So. Go. Buy. Just. One. Book.

PS Salt is offering 33% of ALL books until the end of June. Use the promotional code G3SRT453 in the checkout to benefit. And if you spend �30 or $30 you get free shipping. Hey! Go mad! Buy two!