Sam&Sam publishers — a brief history

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius will be published under the imprint Sam&Sam. ‘What?’ you ask. ‘What on earth’s that?’ Quite. It was deliberately concocted to give nothing away, because it originated in Russia in the period of samizdat.

Having been a dissident himself, Ul’ianov (‘Lenin’) knew only too well the power of the private printing press, so he made it a criminal offence to own one. To get round this, in the post-Dzhugashvili (‘Stalin’) era, people started pounding out unprintable works on their sit-up-and-beg typewriters. I have seen up to nine carbons on a typewriter beneath onion-skin paper. These copies were then stapled together or professionally bound in the black economy, circulated on the dissident networks, or even bartered for goods and services. The activity was called samizdat, which simply means ‘self-publishing’. I first made the acquaintance of Brodsky’s and other poets’ work through this medium.

A friend of mine was part of a literary group that were specialists in samizdat. He fell in love with an explosive red-headed beauty, a single mother, but his efforts got no further than a distinctly Elizabethan relationship of raillery, tease and (for my friend) agony. He tried everything, including writing Shakespearian sonnets to her in Russian, which he claimed were translations of the works of  ‘Samuel Goathead’ (159?-1629). She said these were not translations, as Goathead never existed, and challenged him to produce the originals; at which point he came to my room in the Moscow University skyscraper and asked me to bash out the ‘originals’ (i.e. translations!) on my Olivetti typewriter.

When I got back to Cambridge I published my own, now exceedingly rare edition:

The title page of Goathead’s complete sonnets in Camizdat

Number three in this scholarly edition was the ‘original’ of the first sonnet by my friend to the Titian-haired Maia, the sonnet that started it all off:

Click the image to enlarge

I had smuggled out the odd samizdat work in 1970, after ten months in Russia, but when I went back in 1972-74 my friend was churning out typescripts of excellent works by other people (often deceased), and in the name of Russian culture I decided I should get these into safe keeping in the West. My own typescript-smuggling intensified, therefore, and I also used the diplomatic bag (strictly forbidden for this purpose). In, I think, 1974 my friend proposed that when the ‘weather’ was right we should start anonymously publishing some of his samizdat texts in Britain. The question was, what should we call ourselves that was opaque? Since we were both pseudonymously Samuel, and the sam bit in samizdat means ‘oneself’, the solution seemed obvious…

Sam&Sam published their first book in 1979. It was for children and came out in Russia in 1000 copies. The second was an anthology of ‘aphorisms’ by the Russian émigré philosopher Berdiaev. It had been compiled and typed by my friend and resided with other samizdat works in the dolgii iashchik (‘long gestation drawer’) of my attic. Berdiaev had been expelled from Russia by ‘Lenin’ and was completely non grata in the ‘Stalin’ era. In 1985, perestroika encouraged us to cast his aphorisms on the water. I printed 500 copies in Cambridge in a very small format. About a third, I would say, were bought in Britain. The rest were taken to Russia, where the book was even quoted in the Duma.

After the fall of communism, things took off. The final typescript, corrected by the author, of the Russian translation of Sophie Koulomzin’s Our Church and Our Children, which had lain in my attic for ten years, was retrieved by my friend on a trip to Britain and published openly in Russia in a joint venture with another publisher, Martis, in 20,000 copies in 1993. The following year it was reprinted in 30,000 copies! My friend had been, and probably still considers himself, a member of the ‘catacomb’ church in Russia rather than the nationalist one, but not all the books Sam&Sam published in Russia were religious. Notably, two of them were about Pushkin.

Two publications of the Russian branch of Sam&Sam

I myself have so far published only one other work under the Sam&Sam imprint, and that was in 1987. My main job, of course, was to get the typescripts out of Russia and preserve them from mould for the day when they would be publishable there. Perhaps Sam&Sam’s most considerable achievement in Russia has been to publish with Martis a twelve-volume hardback edition of the works of Georgii Fedotov, a scholar, theological philosopher and democrat who also died in emigration.

The two books I published as Sam&Sam in England were nicely produced, I would say, but in soft covers. A 500-page hardback, with jacket, illustrations and index, is proving a rather different matter. (More next time.)

Samizdat does not qu-ite seem necessary in today’s Russia. There is the Internet. On the other hand, the successors to the KGB continue to tighten their grip on the use of that. But, just as the digital revolution has slashed the cost of printing over here, so too, if necessary, digital publishing could take over in Russia from the old typewriters and carbons.