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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSix years later, I wrote an article in Tribune, at the time a weekly Labour Movement newspaper, expressing concern about the number of bookshop closures, caused by political defeats of the Left during the 1980s, and radical territory having been co\u00adopted by the main chain, Waterstones, selling feminist and environmentalist books. I reported some bookshops having difficulty recruiting staff due to low pay for a job involving long hours, poor conditions and weekend working. There were some shops doing well, particularly those which had moved on from being the pole of attraction for \u2018a few lefties who have been buying obscure Trotskyist or anarchist material in dowdy premises for years might find it difficult to understand why bookshops had sold out by having carpets and books that people actually want to read\u2019. The remaining bookshops were leaving behind the \u2018assorted whiffs of squalor and self\u00adrighteousness\u2019 and widening their stock and reach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
In 1982, The Other Branch from Leamington had celebrated\nsome of the squalor of their earlier years: \u2018Gradually the hand knitted dolls\ngot mixed up with Marx and Lenin … the kids stole our takings … the tatty\nwire display rack changed daily according to the ideology of the volunteer on\nthe rota. Later additions to this confusion were live (and on a hot summer\u2019s\nday, dead) newts for sale, and all the late 60s paraphernalia of king size\ncigarette papers, pipes, ginseng. The \u201cimage\u201d of the shop was completed by two\ndark, never cleaned windows full of Legalise Cannabis stickers.\u2019 Despite this,\nbooks were sold in quantity. The Other Branch\u2019s all time best sellers were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Herb Book
\nThe Golden Notebook (novel by Doris Lessing)
\nThe Bean Book
\nThe Massage Book
\nProtest and Survive
\nThe Very Hungry Caterpillar (children\u2019s)
\n Woman on the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy)\n
\nThe Prophet (crap mysticism)
\nGuide to Growing Marijuana in the British Isles
\nGuide to Psilocybin Mushrooms<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The previous year, Days of Hope in Newcastle printed their\nbest seller list:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Protest and Survive Arguments for Socialism
\nSpare Rib (feminist) Diary
\nWoman on the Edge of Time
\n Marx for Beginners
\n Inglan is a Bitch (Black liberation\npoetry)
\nTowards a Citizens\u2019 Militia
\nRevolt Against the Age of Plenty
\n Hiroshima
\nState Intervention in Industry
\n
\nThese books were so familiar to me \u2014 I was then working in Mushroom Bookshop in\nNottingham \u2014 that I can remember the authors and publishers even now. Days of\nHope, by the way, produced two members of the UK Cabinet, Alan Milburn, once\nSecretary of State for Health, and the late Mo Mowlam, once Secretary of State\nfor Northern Ireland. I wonder what they thought of their days back in a\nradical bookshop known locally as Haze of Dope. Protest and Survive, which\nappears on both lists, was first published in Nottingham by Spokesman Books as\na pamphlet \u2014 Mushroom Bookshop alone sold over 1,000 copies of EP Thompson\u2019s\nresponse to the Government\u2019s Protect and Survive handout. It was later expanded\ninto a book and published by Penguin.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s easy to mock radical bookshops. The comedian Alexei\nSayle was once a Maoist. His group\u2019s bookshop, Bellman Books, he wrote \u2018was a\ndark and forbidding former bank … [in] a depressive Irish neighbourhood of\ngloomy pubs, grey rooming houses and cash butchers. There were at least two\nother Maoist bookshops in the area owned by competing sects … These other\nplaces had proper Marxist\u00adLeninist names such as the London Workers\u2019 Bookshop,\nbut bizarrely the Bellman was named after a character in Lewis Carroll\u2019s\nnonsense poem \u201cThe Hunting of the Snark\u201d who says, \u201cWhat I tell you three times\nmust be true\u201d and possesses a map of the ocean which is a blank piece of paper.\nWhat sort of message was that sending?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Up in Sheffield, following a very successful radical book fair in association with the library service attended by 1,700 people, one local (Conservative) city councillor was not happy. He wrote \u201cI put in an appearance at the Radical Book Fair at the Town Hall. Anarchists, feminists and every conceivable variety of ragbag lefty was present peddling their wares. For my part I saw no ordinary Sheffielders, just a bunch of grim\u00adfaced souls trying to look interested in some rather dull books. Is this the right use for the Town Hall on a Saturday?\u201d But those 1,700 people did not look grim nor found the books dull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was actually the Communist Party (CP) which first set up\nsocialist bookshops in Britain in a big way. Most of those mentioned so far\nwere libertarian, but the CP ran a number of chains, peaking in the 1940s. As\nwell as obvious places such as Glasgow (whose Clyde Books soldiered on until\n1993), they had shops in small towns in industrial areas such as Kirkcaldy in\nScotland, but also conservative market towns such as King\u2019s Lynne and\nGloucester. The CP even had a mobile library at one stage. Communist material\nsold well, with every branch having its own lit(erature) sec(retary). Key Books\nin Birmingham said in 1946 in How to Sell Literature that a mass pamphlet\nshould have a national sale of 150,000 and that in the previous five years they\nalone had distributed over two million pamphlets and periodicals. By modern\nstandards much of their material would not stand up … Stalin calendars for\nexample. Or the works of Georgi Plekhanov. And many of the writers once popular\nin Communist circles, such as Karl Radek, would not survive Stalin\u2019s purges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here and there were shops from other traditions, anarchist\nor, in Nottingham, Pat Jordan\u2019s International Bookshop, which sold an\nassortment of smut, second\u00adhand popular books, and books within the Trotskyist\ntradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the 1970s, the Communist bookshops were in terminal decline. Counterculture bookshops, not radical bookshops as such, filled some of the gap, selling avant garde literature. Strangely, I bought a number of avant garde books from an \u2018adult\u2019 bookshop (ie one specialising in pornography). These included Genet, Henry Miller and others from Aberdeen\u2019s adult bookshop, which had the unfortunate name of \u2018Willy\u2019s\u2019. I made a point of never going beyond the front racks. It was also the only place I knew that sold Private Eye, then banned from WH Smith. Countercultural bookshops such as Ultima Thule in Newcastle, Jim Haynes\u2019 Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh and Unicorn in Brighton were largely before my time, but Compendium in London (1968\u00ad2000) carried countercultural books, Beat material, anarchism, little magazines, feminism, spirituality and radical therapy. Whilst it was never radical as such \u2014 it was commercially owned and commercially successful \u2014 Compendium was a bridge between generations. Trent Books in Nottingham, which had similar literary tastes, lasted only a few years but imported a massive amount of American material. In 1966 it organised a large poetry festival. Every reader was male, something that would be impossible now. That shop closed in 1972. Amamus, in Blackburn, had a longer life; like Compendium, crossing the boundaries of counterculture, radical politics and feminism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Closures have always been inevitable \u2014 Proletarian Books in\nDoncaster and Beautiful Stranger in Rochdale were probably doomed to failure,\nbut people did their best. And at times it was not easy. I don\u2019t just mean\neconomically. The bookshop I worked in was raided by the police for stocking\nbooks on drugs, including well\u00adknown literary works. We won the ensuing court\ncase, with costs awarded against the police, though a couple of manuals were\nlost, as was the joke book A Child\u2019s Garden of Grass which, it was thought, an\nunwary child might buy in place of A Child\u2019s Garden of Verse. Others were\nprosecuted for selling gay books. Sometimes parcels from the USA containing\nlesbian and gay books simply disappeared in transit. Particular books on the\nwar in Ireland were of interest to the police. This was before the days of the\ninternet when it was easier to stop imports, but the state was largely\nunsuccessful in holding back radical bookshops. Mushroom Bookshop imported a\nbanned title on the British intelligence services, Spycatcher, from several\ndifferent countries, including the Netherlands and the USA, and filled our\nwindows with copies. Oddly, the first person to see the window display was a\npoliceman, who came in, advised us that the book was illegal, wished us luck\nand left quickly!<\/p>\n\n\n\n But often the biggest threat was from the far right. In\n1826, there was a free thought (atheist) bookshop in Nottingham which was under\nsiege by fundamentalist Christians for weeks. At one stage the owner, Susannah\nWright, kept a pistol for her own protection. Her assailants were the political\nancestors of the fascists who regularly attacked radical bookshops in the\n1970s, 80s and 90s. A lot of the trouble from fascists was low level, gluing up\nlocks, spray\u00adpainting windows, phoning death threats, but some of it was more\nphysical. Shop workers were sometimes injured in attacks. In Fourth Idea\nBookshop in Bradford one fascist assaulted a customer only to find out he was\nan undercover policeman snooping in the shop! In 1994, some 50 fascists smashed\nup Mushroom Bookshop. Thirteen served prison sentences for doing so. But we\nwere also under pressure from Islamic fundamentalists over Satanic Verses. The\nresponse of the radical book trade was to sell the book openly, under posters\nsaying \u2018Fight Racism, Not Rushdie\u2019. The fascist threat has diminished, but has\nnot gone away. Last summer, the London bookshop Bookmarks was invaded by people\nfrom the far right. The book trade as a whole rallied to their support,\nincluding the commercial sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the height of the radical book trade there was an annual\nSocialist Bookfair, involving some 450 publishers including those from the\nacademic and commercial sectors, an annual Feminist Book Fortnight, several\nInternational Radical Black and Third World book festivals, a London Irish Book\nFestival, specialist distributors, and Booksellers\u2019 Action for Nuclear\nDisarmament, which brought together bookshops, writers and publishers. The\nLondon Anarchist Bookfair was the only survivor up to modern times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The radical book trade shrank for many reasons. Funding\ndried up, changes in local taxation were not favourable to small businesses,\nthe British Net Book Agreement collapsed (which enabled the chains, then the\nsupermarkets, then Amazon to sell books at a discount, cherrypicking the best\nsellers). The collective\u00adworking ethos of many shops struggled with changing\ntimes as city centre rents soared. Idealist young people opened caf\u00e9s, not\nbookshops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, over the last few years, the radical bookshop movement\nhas begun to find its feet again, creating a structure. We reformed as the\nAlliance of Radical Booksellers. The Bread and Roses Award for Radical\nBookselling started up, which spawned the Little Rebels Award for radical\nchildren\u2019s books. The London Radical Bookfair was set up and has been hugely\nsuccessful, and a decentralised anarchist book festival replaced the London\nAnarchist Bookfair. There are local anarchist and socialist bookfairs springing\nup. There have been a few new openings, notably Lighthouse Bookshop in\nEdinburgh, but also many of the recently opened commercial shops are radical\neven if not formally so. This was evidenced when Five Leaves Bookshop revived\nthe Feminist Book Fortnight last summer, with fifty bookshops taking part from\nacross the radical and commercial sector. The general trade increasingly sees\ndiversity (in class, race, sexuality) as important in its staffing and what is\nbeing published, which has helped to bring the radical side and the commercial\nside together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n News from Nowhere still flies the flag as a women\u2019s\ncollective, sometimes using the slogan \u2018Shop with the Real Amazons\u2019. In 2017\nHousmans, London\u2019s premier radical bookshop, won the London Independent\nBookshop of the Year award and, in 2018, Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham\nbecame the national Independent Bookshop of the Year, the first radical to do\nso. Staying the course is important and, yes, that means being more\nbusinesslike, paying decent wages to retain staff, and drawing in new customers\nall the time. Locally, our partners include Nottingham City of Literature, a\nUNESCO project. Indeed, it was a member of our staff who wrote the bid that won\nCity of Literature status. All the self\u00addefined radicals aim to build strong\nlocal partnerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a0In 1943, Harold Laski wrote: More parochially, as\nI write this, our bookshop\u2019s 2018 events programme has just finished. It\nincluded an evening of translated poetry from around the world and a talk on\nRojava, the liberated Kurdish area in Syria. Over previous weeks, we had\nevenings on the lives of Trans people, on Travelling people\/Romanies, on older\nlesbians, discussions on Black history \u2014 forty events this autumn, and our own\nradical bookfair with supporting programme. I\u2019d like to think that Susannah\nWright, she who packed a pistol to defend her bookshop in 1826, would have\napproved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A version of this article first appeared in the Journal of\nHumanity, the counterculture journal of Nieuwe Vide in Holland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ross Bradshaw, activist, publisher and writer, was recently invited to Haarlem in The Netherlands to speak about radical bookselling. He knows his trade, which is why Nottingham\u2019s Five Leaves Bookshop, which he founded in 2013, was named Independent Bookshop of … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/21BradshawBooks_Template.pdf.png\")
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\u2018If I had to put the purpose of this war in a sentence I would say that we fight it that men and women may freely choose themselves the books which give nourishment or pleasure. In Germany they burn the books; in Britain we sell them. So long as we can continue to say that, we can be confident of the outcome of this struggle.\u2019
We continue to say that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/21BradshawBooks_Templat3334e.pdf.png\")
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