26 September
Today I suddenly realised what life under Black Crow reminds me of: living in the Soviet Union. It would be unfair to compare Britain at the moment to the view from a window in Moscow University’s Stalinist hostel in the winter of 1970…
…but it feels similar. And the reasons aren’t difficult to find. You prepare yourself to go out into a hostile environment (on some days, western students I knew in Moscow didn’t get further than that). You have to wear special headgear, people keep their distance and stare straight through you, there’s only one subject on everyone’s mind anyway: how awful the regime(n) is. You return to your room with a deep sigh of relief, because it’s the only place where you feel FREE. You can think freely, even talk freely (to yourself, not the microphones). Unfortunately, of course, if the inside of our own houses is the only place we now feel at liberty, we don’t have it. We have to curtail our freedom for the sake of our physical health and we shall get our freedom back, but in the meantime it doesn’t surprise me that Russians’ mental health suffered so much under communism.
12 October
Dahlias are vibrant, but chrysanthemums are the great survivors. ‘Lates’ come into flower in November and can last a month either outdoors or in a vase. Dahlias still breathe summer, chrysanths fight against winter with their subtler shades, forms and smell. No wonder they are synonymous in the East with happiness and long life. My own chrysanths are only just coming out, but I’ve certainly been cheered by this brilliant new book:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
It covers nearly four thousand years of growing and showing, is full of riveting detail, and superbly illustrated with everything from blooms of infinite variety to paintings, pottery and cigarette cards. I was particularly fascinated by the working class origins of much chrysanthemum-growing in this country and the penultimate chapter, ‘A Literary Bouquet’, which amongst other things looks closely at John Steinbeck’s short story of 1937 ‘The Chrysanthemums’. As you would expect of a garden historian whose most famous book is about garden gnomes, it is all enhanced by Twigs Way’s hilarious dry wit. She closes her book with a haiku by Bashō:
When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.
21 October
Some bestselling writers have complained on television that their sales are being undermined by the recent explosion of indie publishing. Rose Tremaine diplomatically implied that many of these books were of poor quality and shouldn’t be published…
But many should, and never would be by your bestselling publishers. Does Ms Tremaine actually not want competition? Is she against a free market? Because that is what digital self-publishing has created in the teeth of the commercial closed shop.
Moreover, the ‘explosion’ has made it more difficult for everyone including self-publishers. Most people would be stupefied to contemplate the obstacles to publication and selling copies that, say, Andrew Tatham has to confront. It takes real grit.
Speaking personally, publishing and marketing my own book has been a never-ending learning curve because the last book I published in this country as Sam&Sam was in 1987. One learns the hard way. For instance, the late John Dewey assured me from his own experience that a review in the TLS was worth a hundred copies, because that many readers and librarians throughout the world took their cue from it. It was a very long fight to get a review there. When it appeared, completely out of the blue, it omitted the Web address from which copies should be bought. Consequently, TLS readers went straight to Amazon and ABE, where it sold out before we could get more copies up ourselves. For that reason, I think, we sold only one copy through the Sam&Sam website.
It’s all a question of learning fast and spotting opportunities. Because of the pandemic, commercial publishers have been producing fewer books and advertising less in the TLS. Consequently I’ve just secured an amazing deal for an ad there in the Russian issue of 11 December, and I’m delighted to say that the paper itself has complimented Sam2 on his ‘striking’ design:
We might sell a hundred copies, we might sell none, but the only way to find out whether advertising in the TLS is worth it is to do it — and at a time when COVID has pushed the price down. A bonus is that this ad will in effect be one for both my book and Sam&Sam generally. So we are reorganising the website to showcase all our books Russian and English. Watch this space for an account of the results!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon, 1912
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 12
26 September
Today I suddenly realised what life under Black Crow reminds me of: living in the Soviet Union. It would be unfair to compare Britain at the moment to the view from a window in Moscow University’s Stalinist hostel in the winter of 1970…
…but it feels similar. And the reasons aren’t difficult to find. You prepare yourself to go out into a hostile environment (on some days, western students I knew in Moscow didn’t get further than that). You have to wear special headgear, people keep their distance and stare straight through you, there’s only one subject on everyone’s mind anyway: how awful the regime(n) is. You return to your room with a deep sigh of relief, because it’s the only place where you feel FREE. You can think freely, even talk freely (to yourself, not the microphones). Unfortunately, of course, if the inside of our own houses is the only place we now feel at liberty, we don’t have it. We have to curtail our freedom for the sake of our physical health and we shall get our freedom back, but in the meantime it doesn’t surprise me that Russians’ mental health suffered so much under communism.
12 October
Dahlias are vibrant, but chrysanthemums are the great survivors. ‘Lates’ come into flower in November and can last a month either outdoors or in a vase. Dahlias still breathe summer, chrysanths fight against winter with their subtler shades, forms and smell. No wonder they are synonymous in the East with happiness and long life. My own chrysanths are only just coming out, but I’ve certainly been cheered by this brilliant new book:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
It covers nearly four thousand years of growing and showing, is full of riveting detail, and superbly illustrated with everything from blooms of infinite variety to paintings, pottery and cigarette cards. I was particularly fascinated by the working class origins of much chrysanthemum-growing in this country and the penultimate chapter, ‘A Literary Bouquet’, which amongst other things looks closely at John Steinbeck’s short story of 1937 ‘The Chrysanthemums’. As you would expect of a garden historian whose most famous book is about garden gnomes, it is all enhanced by Twigs Way’s hilarious dry wit. She closes her book with a haiku by Bashō:
When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.
21 October
Some bestselling writers have complained on television that their sales are being undermined by the recent explosion of indie publishing. Rose Tremaine diplomatically implied that many of these books were of poor quality and shouldn’t be published…
But many should, and never would be by your bestselling publishers. Does Ms Tremaine actually not want competition? Is she against a free market? Because that is what digital self-publishing has created in the teeth of the commercial closed shop.
Moreover, the ‘explosion’ has made it more difficult for everyone including self-publishers. Most people would be stupefied to contemplate the obstacles to publication and selling copies that, say, Andrew Tatham has to confront. It takes real grit.
Speaking personally, publishing and marketing my own book has been a never-ending learning curve because the last book I published in this country as Sam&Sam was in 1987. One learns the hard way. For instance, the late John Dewey assured me from his own experience that a review in the TLS was worth a hundred copies, because that many readers and librarians throughout the world took their cue from it. It was a very long fight to get a review there. When it appeared, completely out of the blue, it omitted the Web address from which copies should be bought. Consequently, TLS readers went straight to Amazon and ABE, where it sold out before we could get more copies up ourselves. For that reason, I think, we sold only one copy through the Sam&Sam website.
It’s all a question of learning fast and spotting opportunities. Because of the pandemic, commercial publishers have been producing fewer books and advertising less in the TLS. Consequently I’ve just secured an amazing deal for an ad there in the Russian issue of 11 December, and I’m delighted to say that the paper itself has complimented Sam2 on his ‘striking’ design:
We might sell a hundred copies, we might sell none, but the only way to find out whether advertising in the TLS is worth it is to do it — and at a time when COVID has pushed the price down. A bonus is that this ad will in effect be one for both my book and Sam&Sam generally. So we are reorganising the website to showcase all our books Russian and English. Watch this space for an account of the results!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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