Signed in Blood

There's been a fair bit of discussion over the last week or so about book signings and how onorous authors feel they are, Abebooks Reading Copy blog has turns up some amusing anecdotes :

From those who are incredibly successful…

There’s a shocking story about Stephen King signing books in a Seattle shop. He signed for hours until his shoulder ached and a publicist had to apply an ice-pack. Then his fingers dried up; they cracked and began to bleed, and he asked for a bandage. Hearing this, a fan in the queue demanded to have some authentic Stephen King blood on his book. Others joined in and he signed in his own blood for hours. Chuck Palahniuk, the modern gross-out novelist, author of Fight Club, recalls a visit to a store in Austin, Texas, where the staff dished out free beer to the signing queue, and where an aggressive queuer, possibly not Chuck’s greatest fan, demanded of a quaking employee: “Why should I wait in this long line to get my books signed by that dickwad?”

and those who are not…

Jonathan Coe, author of What a Carve Up! and The Rain Before It Falls, recalls two encounters at a signing in Brighton: one woman picked up his new novel, read the author’s biog on the back flap and sniffed, “Is that your only claim to fame?” When he said, “Yes,” she replaced the book without another word. The other was a girl student who said brightly, “Can I ask you a question? Why are all your women characters so crap?”

Humourist David sedaries, author of the bestselling When You Are Engulfed In Flames has a pretty unique way of handling signings he expalins in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Two years ago, he offered priority signing for smokers and was unsuccessfully sued by one disgruntled fan for discriminating against non-smokers. "My main thought was 'What are you doing in my audience? Who let you in?"', he told SiT's bookworm, Kelsey Munro. "So next time I offered priority signing to men under 5 foot 6."

... With popularity has come protracted book signings. "Something happens around seven hours and you become silly. In this one woman's book, I drew a plank. Then it looked like it would be a sign, like you'd have in a yard. So I wrote 'Abortions, $3'. She was upset, so I changed it to $13. It was already drawn. What else could I do?"

The Virtues of Virago

My favourite writers at this time were all men - Beckett, Flann O'Brien, BS Johnson, Alasdair Gray - but at a time when I was also struggling to find my own voice as a novelist, Dorothy Richardson flung open a door on to a new world of possibility. And, while my student contemporaries were immersing themselves in the new generation of British writers (the Granta generation, you might call it: Swift, Amis, Barnes and McEwan most prominent among them), I found myself drawn back repeatedly - almost perversely - to those bottle-green spines.

Author Jonathan Coe talks in the Guardian about how the Virago Modern Classics series and the women authors who changed his literary landscape forever.

Virago Press:

the first mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women. An exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world'

was set up by Carmen Calil, Ursula Owen, and Harriet Spicer (left) in 1973. The Modern Classics series was launched in 1978 with:

... a list dedicated to the celebration of women writers and to the rediscovery and reprinting of their works ... (to demonstrate) the existence of a female literary tradition and to broaden the sometimes narrow definition of a classic.

Among the authors brought to prominence by the series are many now widely acknowledged as among the world's best writers, including Margaret Atwood, Willa Cather, Grace Paley,
Pat Barker, and Angela Carter.

But was it necessary to have press solely for books written by women? And even if it was necessary in the dim and distant 70's, haven't we come along way since then?

Coe believes that there remains a gender bias in publishing "subtle and unspoken" even now.

If we take the Booker prize (for want of anything else) as being indicative of what the British literary establishment has considered most attention-worthy over the past 40 years, a clear preference emerges. In the first 30 years of its history, 108 of those shortlisted for the prize (63.5 per cent) were male, only 62 (36.5 per cent) were female. The Orange prize was set up in 1996, partly to correct perceived gender bias in the Booker (after it had gone through a particularly chauvinist phase - in the years 1991-95, only five women were shortlisted, compared to 24 men), but in the past nine years of the Booker, the pattern still hasn't changed noticeably: 33 men (61 per cent) have been shortlisted, compared to 21 women (39 per cent). ... Perhaps one shouldn't read too much into these statistics. And yet do they not imply, cumulatively, that while the reading public (spurred on by book groups and the Richard and Judy show) now has no hesitation in embracing and indeed privileging the work of women writers, the female novelist might still feel that the ultimate imprimatur of literary status - not the Booker prize itself, of course, but that indefinable sense of being taken seriously - still dangles tantalisingly out of reach?

If you are inspired to rush out to pick up the Modern Classics back list, the best place to try in the Klang Valley is Skoob.

Slam Dunk!

It's been described as "a cult cabaret club of words, music and all things intersected" and it's the latest craze to hit literary London: the Book Slam. The event has its origins in the slam poetry scene and the concept is simple: authors known and unknown read extracts from their work and DJs and bands play in between.



"It's just like a night down the pub, only with story-telling thrown in," is the way that Patrick Neate who started the Book Slam at his London bar Cherry Jam described it. And it isn't the great unpublished unknowns that turn up to read there: the venue has attracted hip established writers such as Jonathan Coe, Hari Kunzru and Nick Hornby, presumably looking for new ways to present their work and new audiences.


Toby Litt has a go!

Think it would catch on here? My bet is that it would. The combination of words and music is a sure-fire crowd puller. Last year during the Litfest I felt that the most exciting happenings actually took place in the bar in the evenings, especially on the evening of the superb Songwriter's Round.

It drew one of the biggest crowds the bar had seen - and many of those who turned up to listen and enjoy the readings were folks who'd never usually pick up a book from one year's end to the next.

Time to do something like this again methinks. Our literary scene could do with an infusion of hip.