2 June
I have never known the cow parsley so high in front of my shed…
11 June
We have completed our ‘hardcopy marketing’ for Edna’s Diary. 130 free copies have gone out to stroke clubs, NHS speech and language therapy units, key figures at Stroke Association UK, stroke professionals, popular and specialist publications, and every friend and relation we think would enjoy the book and possibly buy some copies to give as presents. Two recipients of copies promptly made donations to the Stroke Association — an action we had not foreseen. The ‘hardcopy marketing’ is vital, of course, but the social media marketing which we are doing will probably be more effective. As usual, it is totally impossible to predict the sales graph.
16 June
Walking into the centre of Cambridge, I passed the A[mateur]D[Dramatic]C[lub] Theatre, scene of some disasters and (relative) triumphs of my own in bygone days, and saw this banner hanging outside:
Veteran Calderonia followers will have instantly recalled my post of 1 November 2016…where I mention that the ‘chimney-sweepers’ in Shakespeare’s lines ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ are now taken to refer to the decline and death of dandelion heads. The banner is an ingenious use of Shakespeare’s floral image. The only trouble is, the lines come from Cymbeline, not As You Like It. I suppose we must go and see the production to understand the relevance.
18 June
Today is the first night of a World Premiere at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London — Lady Chatterley’s Lover The Musical. I have to say, the posters do not augur well: Lady C. and Mellors look roughly the same age and curiously proletarian/Grunge. The mind boggles at how justice is going to be done to the sex scenes. The temptation with modern film and stage adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is to focus on one aspect of it: class, pornography (Sylvia Kristel in the lead role, 1981), British industrial relations, naturism, the long shadow of the First World War, romantic love story… I shall be interested to read the reviews, especially as I am going to run a series of posts about the novel from the middle of July to the end of August. Having recently read the whole novel for the first time, I am now reading it again. The writing is supremely alive. So the claim that this musical will ‘reenergise Lawrence’s sensation for a new audience’ seems, frankly, fatuous. However, it is directed by Sasha Regan, whose all-male Pirates of Penzance was brilliant.
25 June
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
Sam2 has persuaded me that our next project should be to publish a new edition of my 113-page biography of Chekhov (Hesperus, 2008) — both in paperback and Kindle. It makes a lot of sense. I wasn’t 100% happy with the editing of the first edition, but it was to be one of the launch volumes of the series ‘Brief Lives’ so I bowed to the urgency. Then just as the marketing should have got going, the credit crunch wrecked it. Hesperus sold just over a thousand copies in a year and I took the copyright back.
How I tackle a second edition, however, is giving me a lot of thought. I will work from my original digital version, of course. There are one or two ‘typos of fact’ that sharp-eyed Chekhovians picked up, i.e. dates and spellings that were accurate in my pencil manuscript but had been misread by me when I typed it up, and they will be corrected. But I have just completed a week’s manual and online searching for Chekhoviana published since 2007, and discover that three more volumes of the day-by-day record of Chekhov’s life have come out in Russia, from May 1891 to September 1898. These are usually about three hundred pages long and I shall have to read them…
As well as the three or four additions I already know I want to make, I must weigh up whether I should write something on the areas of Chekhov’s life that some Chekhovians suggested I had neglected in the first edition. But the book was written to a strict 30,000-word limit and if I add more than 2000 words or so its genre and, dare I say it, ‘charm’, will start to evaporate. I must also avoid generalisations about Chekhov’s ‘character’; or generalisations generally. Facts, specifics, specifics, facts. So those are the constraints. A lunch at ‘Polonia’ is called for, to discuss the way forward.
30 June
The last day of National Aphasia Awareness Month. It has been a privilege and pleasure to be involved, and in particular to work with Melanie Derbyshire, Assistant Director – Aphasia, at Stroke Association UK, who graciously allowed Edna’s Diary to travel on her social media. I’m convinced the awareness campaign has been a success.
During the pandemic, stroke clubs have not been able to meet physically, so the copies we have sent their organisers are only just reaching the hands of club members. Even so, I have had some very positive responses from them, and today a long letter from the Head of Speech and Language Therapy at a major hospital saying that she has circulated copies to her team specialising in stroke rehabilitation, who will discuss making a bulk order.
I’m quite hopeful, after this special month of marketing, that my mother’s book will eventually reach a lot of readers and sell steadily. And I’m particularly grateful to those people who have said what a nice little book it is to handle (thanks to designer Sam2).
Click here to buy the book on Amazon.
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
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Captain of the 11
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon c.1901
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 15
2 June
I have never known the cow parsley so high in front of my shed…
11 June
We have completed our ‘hardcopy marketing’ for Edna’s Diary. 130 free copies have gone out to stroke clubs, NHS speech and language therapy units, key figures at Stroke Association UK, stroke professionals, popular and specialist publications, and every friend and relation we think would enjoy the book and possibly buy some copies to give as presents. Two recipients of copies promptly made donations to the Stroke Association — an action we had not foreseen. The ‘hardcopy marketing’ is vital, of course, but the social media marketing which we are doing will probably be more effective. As usual, it is totally impossible to predict the sales graph.
16 June
Walking into the centre of Cambridge, I passed the A[mateur]D[Dramatic]C[lub] Theatre, scene of some disasters and (relative) triumphs of my own in bygone days, and saw this banner hanging outside:
Veteran Calderonia followers will have instantly recalled my post of 1 November 2016…where I mention that the ‘chimney-sweepers’ in Shakespeare’s lines ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ are now taken to refer to the decline and death of dandelion heads. The banner is an ingenious use of Shakespeare’s floral image. The only trouble is, the lines come from Cymbeline, not As You Like It. I suppose we must go and see the production to understand the relevance.
18 June
Today is the first night of a World Premiere at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London — Lady Chatterley’s Lover The Musical. I have to say, the posters do not augur well: Lady C. and Mellors look roughly the same age and curiously proletarian/Grunge. The mind boggles at how justice is going to be done to the sex scenes. The temptation with modern film and stage adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is to focus on one aspect of it: class, pornography (Sylvia Kristel in the lead role, 1981), British industrial relations, naturism, the long shadow of the First World War, romantic love story… I shall be interested to read the reviews, especially as I am going to run a series of posts about the novel from the middle of July to the end of August. Having recently read the whole novel for the first time, I am now reading it again. The writing is supremely alive. So the claim that this musical will ‘reenergise Lawrence’s sensation for a new audience’ seems, frankly, fatuous. However, it is directed by Sasha Regan, whose all-male Pirates of Penzance was brilliant.
25 June
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
Sam2 has persuaded me that our next project should be to publish a new edition of my 113-page biography of Chekhov (Hesperus, 2008) — both in paperback and Kindle. It makes a lot of sense. I wasn’t 100% happy with the editing of the first edition, but it was to be one of the launch volumes of the series ‘Brief Lives’ so I bowed to the urgency. Then just as the marketing should have got going, the credit crunch wrecked it. Hesperus sold just over a thousand copies in a year and I took the copyright back.
How I tackle a second edition, however, is giving me a lot of thought. I will work from my original digital version, of course. There are one or two ‘typos of fact’ that sharp-eyed Chekhovians picked up, i.e. dates and spellings that were accurate in my pencil manuscript but had been misread by me when I typed it up, and they will be corrected. But I have just completed a week’s manual and online searching for Chekhoviana published since 2007, and discover that three more volumes of the day-by-day record of Chekhov’s life have come out in Russia, from May 1891 to September 1898. These are usually about three hundred pages long and I shall have to read them…
As well as the three or four additions I already know I want to make, I must weigh up whether I should write something on the areas of Chekhov’s life that some Chekhovians suggested I had neglected in the first edition. But the book was written to a strict 30,000-word limit and if I add more than 2000 words or so its genre and, dare I say it, ‘charm’, will start to evaporate. I must also avoid generalisations about Chekhov’s ‘character’; or generalisations generally. Facts, specifics, specifics, facts. So those are the constraints. A lunch at ‘Polonia’ is called for, to discuss the way forward.
30 June
The last day of National Aphasia Awareness Month. It has been a privilege and pleasure to be involved, and in particular to work with Melanie Derbyshire, Assistant Director – Aphasia, at Stroke Association UK, who graciously allowed Edna’s Diary to travel on her social media. I’m convinced the awareness campaign has been a success.
During the pandemic, stroke clubs have not been able to meet physically, so the copies we have sent their organisers are only just reaching the hands of club members. Even so, I have had some very positive responses from them, and today a long letter from the Head of Speech and Language Therapy at a major hospital saying that she has circulated copies to her team specialising in stroke rehabilitation, who will discuss making a bulk order.
I’m quite hopeful, after this special month of marketing, that my mother’s book will eventually reach a lot of readers and sell steadily. And I’m particularly grateful to those people who have said what a nice little book it is to handle (thanks to designer Sam2).
Click here to buy the book on Amazon.
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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