Notes from Eve Abbey ~ March 2016

Sydney Booksellers, some publishers, customers and lots of ex staff turned out in force to remember Peter Milne on 27th January.

We found he was loved and admired by lots of people, not just our own indispensable advisor and friend. Peter's brother flew in from Perth and Fiona Stager from Avid Reader in Brisbane. Robert Milne went home with a beautiful condolence book signed by all. A fantastic photo of Peter beamed to all arrivals and in the window a huge In Memoriam poster shone out. We shall all miss him.

I've been reading The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding, which was one of our bestsellers at Christmas. This was an unlikely success. Harding is a descendant of the Jewish family which had to escape from an idyllic village on the outskirts of Berlin in the Thirties. What started as a curiosity about a home treasured in memory for his grandmother, became an overwhelming interest. He researched right back to the original estate, through various owners and tenants until finally he was able to convince the authorities that this quite ordinary house should be conserved.

Although the house is the main character, the people passing through are all interesting and tell the social history of Germany in the twentieth century. Most interesting of all is the barbed wire fence which was one day erected at the lake edge at the bottom of the garden. This eventually became the Berlin Wall! He calls it A Story of Germany, as indeed it is. Highly recommended and also, if you haven't read Stasiland by Anna Funder, I recommend you now read this fabulous account of the German Democratic Republic.

It is a happy choice that I am now making my way through John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman.  It is over six hundred pages, of which fifty contain notes and then the index. Le Carrés real name is David Cornwell and Ronnie Cornwell, his father, was a consummate con-man who dominated the lives of his sons, David and Antony Cornwell. He is immortalised in A Perfect Spy, my favourite. At one point I feared author Adam Sisman had also been conquered by the charming Ronnie as the first one hundred pages are taken over by Ronnie!

This is a fascinating book. One can tend to forget the enormous success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carré's third book written while he was working in the secret services. And one can sometimes overlook just how many books Le Carré has written, and continues to write. He worked very hard, especially in the days before a word processor.

He was always diligent, revising proofs right up till the last possible moment and often contributed to the film scripts of his books and even, like Hitchcock, enjoyed a cameo part in several of the films. I think he was indeed addicted to writing. He became fabulously wealthy and very famous. The middle part of the book dealing with negotiations with publishers and film producers is gloriously full of trade gossip. He does become rather angry at the state of the world. He says he became more radical as he grew older and certainly agrees he has had a wonderful life. I think he wrote twenty three books, most of them classified as espionage thrillers, always with a political angle which often proved prescient.

A new book is due soon and his backlist is being reissued regularly as licences expire. These are the titles in his catalogue:

• The Spy who Came in from the Cold
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Smiley's People
• The Secret Pilgrim
• Call for the Dead
• A Delicate Truth
• The Naive and Sentimental Lover
• The Tailor of Panama
• The Mission Song
• The Honourable Schoolboy
• A Murder of Quality
• The Constant Gardener
• A Small Town in Germany
• The Night Manager
• A Most Wanted Man

We also have a DVD set comprising Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People and a Spanish edition of The Constant Gardener Jardinero El Fiel. The biographer widely discusses reviews and plots of the books so you can sort out which title you can start with to dip into le Carré's marvellous catalogue.

Some of us have enjoyed the amusing novels by Michael Wilding featuring Plant the bumbling detective threading his way through bohemian Sydney. Michael has put on his academic gown again so this Emeritus Professor of English and Australian Literature has won the 2015 Prime Minister's Award for Non-Fiction for his latest book Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clark, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall: A Documentary.

It has also won the Colin Roderick Award. This is a book that has just evolved over the years since Michael was writing about Marcus Clark in the 70's. He has had suggestions and connections from all sorts of people who played a part in fossicking out the story of these three famous Australian authors. Everyone is pleased that it made it into print.

Keep well,

Eve

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Colour your world in 2016

Like many people, the booksellers at Abbey's have watched the adult colouring book trend take off.

And we've also wondered how this arose (well, this has surely come from the US - right?) and what is all the fuss about?

Well, it turns out that there are some very real health benefits to this fad - so much so that I'm hoping it doesn't end and we might actually see some societal benefit as we all dial down the 'stress-o-meter' a notch or two. (and perhaps air-drop these and some coloured pencils into the world's war zones…)

Apparently the act of colouring moves your brainwave activity away from 'beta' towards more restful 'alpha' brainwaves and lowers your heart rate. If you're a perfectionist however, you'll probably want to stay away from colouring books with scenes. You'll just end up stressing about the correct colour of things.

But for now, the only stress you'll feel is choosing from our wonderful selection...

View a selection

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Notes from Eve Abbey ~ January 2016

I picked up a copy of Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff – Soldier, Spy and Translator...

...written by a descendant, Jean Findlay. Scott Moncrieff's most important claim to fame is for his translation of Proust’s magnum opus Remembrance of Things Past, all seven volumes, as well as countless other items including the works of Pirandello and Stendhal. The accounts of trench warfare and meetings with various war poets are good. The spy bit is interesting – as an enthusiastic homosexual in those times he was practiced in deception. As a family descendant Findlay had access to family diaries as well as masses of letters, including those with Vyvian Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son. Perhaps this explains rather too much detail about his childhood. However, literati will enjoy this. It’s a picture of a literary lifestyle now passed.

I also read my first Henning Mankell crime novel over the holidays. It was called The Return of the Dancing Master and is one of the first books by this author before the introduction of Inspector Wallander. This is about the murder of a reclusive old man living in the forest, followed by several more deaths, all seemingly connected. Now I shall start on the eleven volumes featuring the troubled Inspector Wallander.

The first one is Faceless Killers followed by The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, One Step Behind, Sidetracked, Firewall, The Fifth Woman, The Man Who Smiled, The Troubled Man, The Pyramid (a prequel of short stories), and An Event in Autumn.

Unfortunately Henning Mankell died late 2015 so there will be no new novels. Wallander's daughter, Linda, assisted the Inspector in Before the Frost, the first of an intended offshoot series that Mankell didn’t continue because he was affected by the suicide death of the actress that played Linda in the Swedish television adaptation. Linda also assisted Wallander in An Event in Autumn.

Quicksand: A Memoir is due for publication early 2016.

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Now for some very sad news. Peter Milne died just before Christmas. Our indispensable, seemingly everlasting Peter Milne. Readers of Abbey’s Crime Chronicle will feel bereft. Abbey’s and the book trade generally owe a great deal to him. Peter worked for Abbey’s from 1971 to 2011. That’s forty years of hard work, suggestions, insight and infallible memory and invigorating, cheerful company. I can’t count the hours that Peter devoted to ensuring Abbey’s is a great bookshop.

In addition he has been President of the NSW Booksellers Association (1976 – 1978; 1980), Junior Vice President of the Australian Booksellers Association in 1979, a co-writer of the first National Constitution for the Association and was made a Life Member in 1994. In 1997 he was awarded the Lloyd O’Neill Award for Services to the Book Trade.

His enthusiasm for crime writing led him to create the Crime Chronicle, a monthly list of new titles that now goes out to over 2,000 subscribers. He was a co-founder of the Crime Writers Association of Australia and led the booksellers case at the NSW Prices Commission hearing into book prices in 1978.

Peter retired in 2011 but was still on the end of the phone for me whenever I couldn’t remember some name or event. He was 75 years old. I shall miss him.

Details of the wake can be found here.

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I also have to tell you about the death of Brian Johns, another book trade icon. Others will remember him in his roles as Managing Director of both SBS and later ABC but I remember him as an energetic publisher for Penguin in the 80’s, which were a golden age for bookselling and as Managing Director of the greatly appreciated Copyright Agency Limited. He was always an encouraging enthusiast for books. A terrific bloke. Thank you Brian.

Keep well,

Eve

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey ~ December 2015

I think it must be ten years since Anne Whitehead told me at lunch one day that she was going to write about an obscure story...

...a story about Napoleon's time on the island of St. Helena as a prisoner of the British after his defeat at Waterloo, and his aborted escape from Elba. It is a story with lots of tentacles, about his unlikely friendship with a precocious young woman named Betsy, who was the daughter of Thomas Trywhitt Balcombe, one of the owners of the store providing food and goods to the island as well as to passing ships.

Now in 2015, at long last, after deep research Anne's book called Betsy and the Emperor: The True Story of Napoleon, a Pretty Girl, a Regency Rake and an Australian Colonial Misadventure has been published by Allen & Unwin. This is a fascinating story made more interesting by the inclusion of Anne's research into early New South Wales. So much so that we have put the book in Australian History. It is certainly not fiction or biography and it will please many different people. The Australian connection leads down to Dame Mabel Brookes.

There is an absorbing picture of St. Helena, which Anne visited during her research; a fascinating picture of the pretensions and demands of the once-great Napoleon; an amusing picture of Regency society where, of course, Betsy Balcombe married a ne'er-do-well handsome rake; and finally, a friendly picture of Sydney society in the early days of the 19th century, where Thomas Balcombe was sent as Colonial Treasurer. When Napoleon first arrived on St. Helena with his retinue of supporters, he chose to live in a pavilion in the garden of Balcombe's residence while the house he was destined for was made ready. This took some time so Napoleon was a daily presence in the life of the Balcombe family. In fact it seems to me that the effect of these meetings remained with them all their lives.

It is a coincidence that Tom Keneally stumbled upon this story two years ago when he saw an exhibition of Napoleonic memorabilia in Melbourne. His book, a novel written in the voice of Betsy, is called Napoleon's Last Island and is a good read. Both books were reviewed together by Phillip Dwyer, an academic who has himself written two books about Napoleon, and is now writing another book about Napoleon's time on St. Helena! His books are Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769-1799 and Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power 1799-1815. I think I am going to have to read these.

Isn't it amazing how the aura around Napoleon remains? When I was in Paris with Hilary Nicholson we spent a whole day in Les Invalides and came away like stage-struck teenagers marvelling at the exploits and glory of Napoleon. It took some days to remember how many people died along the way. What enormous self-belief he had! And convinced others to agree! Remember the sardonic fable written by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans) about Napoleon's escape from Elba called The Death of Napoleon. As a final bit of trivia may I point out the family name Tyrwhitt in Balcombe's mode of address? Can it possibly be the same family which keeps putting inserts in the local newspapers offering well-made shirts to order? Such an unusual name and so difficult to say or spell!

[Editor's note: I too have been set off on a 'Napoleonic' reading trail after reading The Count of Monte Cristo. I've heard it said that Napoleon tops the list as the most popular biographical subject and we certainly have quite a few of them in stock: Vive le Napoleon au Abbey's!]

Keep well,

Eve

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey ~ November 2015

I had trouble starting the latest Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction...

 – All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – mainly because it seemed too dense – too many details but I did come to revel in this fine book. The author took ten years to finally finish this so take the time to enjoy it. There are two contrasting stories: one about a blind girl whose father works in the Museum of Natural History in Paris where he is in charge of all the keys, and another about a boy and his sister living in an orphanage attached to the mining community in Essen. Their stories finally meet in the small town of St. Malo which was almost totally destroyed by Allied bombing at the end of the Second World War. Marie-Laure has unwittingly become the keeper of a precious stone hunted by the Nazi treasure seekers, while Werner has become a fabled fixer of radios, uneasily serving his Nazi commanders.

Many people at home enjoy the afternoons on ABC Radio listening to Richard Glover’s cheerful approach to life, as well as his columns in the newspapers. He has written a thoughtful and amusing memoir called Flesh Wounds in which he recalls his life growing up with an uncaring mother who is also deceiving every one about her own identity. Quite remarkable really that he has turned out such a well-adjusted, cheerful and amusing person. Many thanks go to his loved wife, scriptwriter and author Debra Oswald. Dare I say “this is a nice book”?

I did enjoy The Waiting Room by Melbourne writer Leah Kaminsky. This is mostly set in Israel where the main character is both a mother and a doctor. Her uneasiness in living daily with the threat of some sort of attack is multiplied by her anxiety for her small son. Her days are also interrupted by the voice of her dead mother, once a holocaust survivor, and now giving her daughter regular advice. Will she remain in Israel with her loved Sabra husband or will she return to Melbourne?

Famous Irish writer John Banville has a new novel out called The Blue Guitar. His books are always finely written and this time you could call the work a “stream of consciousness”. Oliver, the narrator and main character was once a successful artist but now has returned to the small town which was his childhood home. He confesses to a secret delight in stealing small things but stealing his friend’s wife is not so small! The novel covers just one year, the current year in Oliver’s life, told as he writes on a large jotter in the kitchen.

Are you enjoying the television detective series called Vera? I am. The stories come from some of the novels written by Anne Cleeves. I recently read, and enjoyed, the latest in the Vera series, which is called The Moth Catcher. These stories are all set around Newcastle in County Durham and I was happy to note there was not much blood and gore! A friend tells me that the stories Anne Cleeves has written which are set in the Shetland Isles are especially good so I have ordered the first two in the series – Raven Black and White Nights. They are being reissued just now, no doubt as a result of the success of the Vera TV series. I noticed that The Moth Catcher is dedicated to “Brenda with Thanks” so I assume this to be Brenda Blythen who plays Vera on TV. My friend tells me that it is worth reading the Shetland series in correct order as things happen in the lives of the characters.

Keep well,

Eve

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey ~ September 2015

Some months ago I read a proof copy of Stuart Kells' Penguin and the Lane Brothers which I found totally absorbing.

When I enthused about this book to friends I was amazed how many people said "Who's Sir Allen Lane?" Sacrilege! I'm sure not many customers at Abbey's would have said that! This new counter history of Penguin Books is very much for people interested in the book trade as well as books. I can put my family in this box. When we lived in London, Ron Abbey started the first Penguin Only bookshop in Charing Cross Road, for Colletts, the well-known bookshop up the road. We opened, and closed, four separate Penguin Bookshops in Sydney, and of course knew or knew of most of the characters in this alarming story. In England, Penguin is very much an icon – more so than in America or Australia.

Sir Allen Lane is always regarded as the founder of Penguin – the revolutionary idea of publishing good books at a cheap price and there are many stories about his activities, but Penguin was really founded by Allen and his two brothers (with some other stalwart helpers of course). Their Uncle John, who was a Director of The Bodley Head, a famous imprint, was childless and had suggested Allen, who was then sixteen and named Allen Williams, join the firm as his heir. All members of the family changed their name to Lane. There was an unfortunate outcome here.

When Uncle John died he left his shares in The Bodley Head to Allen but left considerable cash to brothers Richard and John. It was Allen's bad luck that in the near future The Bodley Head went bust so his shares weren't worth much. He never quite got over this and it would go a long way to justifying his scandalous treatment of Richard when the shares in Penguin went on the stock exchange. It was just at the time when Penguin had successfully published D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover so Penguin's name was on everyone's lips. People queued around the block to buy Penguin shares when they were first issued. Allen had persuaded his brother to sell his shares back to himself before the float, this being "the best way" to handle it. He paid Richard 8 shillings yet on the stock exchange they reached a great deal more.

Eventually all three brothers were working at The Bodley Head, living together as young men about town, and very close to each other. In the early days they all contributed in many ways. Allen was, in fact, not much of a reader but an excellent frontman, moving easily in society and always open to suggestions about books or series that should be published. He was more interested in his various lady friends and happy for Richard and John to look after the details. Even Allen Lane's friends admit he was a difficult person and not a very effective CEO but he did have enormous vision and an ego big enough to claim as his own many of the efforts of other people. Penguin and the Lane Brothers is, of course, not published by Penguin. Black Inc are doing this good deed to put the record straight.

This reminds me of the book about Oxford University Press and the making of the giant Oxford English Dictionary. The granddaughter of the famous and revered main editor, Sir James Murray, wrote about this in her book called Caught in the Web of Words. The Press doesn't exactly come out shining in this story. Murray was never properly paid and was left on the outer as he wasn't really an academic, more a self-taught man. Towards the end of his life he was allowed, as a favour, to walk in the academic procession. The book was published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, and was kept in print at Yale University Press where it is today only available as a print-on-demand. You can read another version of this story in Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything. After the enormous success of his book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which is about one of the more eccentric contributors to the OED, it was suggested to him by Oxford University Press, that he might like to write the full story, which he has done in his usual pleasing way.

I was really pleased to see Helen Garner's This House of Grief win the Australian Crime Writers Association prize for NON-FICTION. (read more on the awards)

This sad story of the father who drove his car into a dam and drowned his little boys may seem a difficult choice for readers, but it is in fact a most absorbing story. Helen Garner never fails to offer a profound approach.

Keep well,

Eve

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

All Your Friends LIKE This ~ How social networks took over news

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Two journos and a geek walk into a bookshop. "What's news?" says the bookseller...

If you need to generate interest in your business, your products or services, or your organisation's ideas, then this is a book you need to read.

"But isn't it a book about digital news media?" I hear you ask.

Only on the surface, I reply. That's because the trio of authors came from a news media background. The book however is really for anyone involved in the dispersal of ideas - something which I'm doing right now because I work at Abbey's ~ where ideas grow.

As I write this post, the big news about print news media are the significant lay-offs of journalists across Fairfax's regional printed newspapers. This is because social networks like Facebook and Twitter are becoming the primary delivery channel for news. While older print news outlets are struggling (although targeted niche titles like The Saturday Paper have emerged) the news still happens and newer online media outlets like Buzzfeed and Junkee have drawn the eyeballs.

So what sort of news is being shared? What makes something shareable?

This question captured the attention of the authors of All Your Friends Like This - two journos and a tech-head: Hal Crawford, Andrew Hunter and Domagoj Filipovic, all three having worked at nineMSN at some point. The three decided to build a tracking tool. A web-scraper to gather data from the media website articles, Facebook and Twitter. Filipovic did his thing and The Likeable Engine was born.

Speaking in an interview with Richard Aedy on RN, Filipovic said "When media companies decided to put the LIKE button on all their articles they kind of lost control of the metrics and these things are now publicly available and there for everyone to see". The collation and analysing of this sharing data has given rise to a new industry. "There are companies making complete businesses out of this sort of stuff."

Expanding on how eye-opening the data can be Crawford said "As the information on your audience becomes exposed and you see what your audience is actually doing, everything changes."


In the book they expound their ideas around the four qualities they've determined makes something shareable. To help us keep this in mind, they developed this memorable acronym:

S.E.N.T. - Simple Emotional New Triggered

SIMPLE
The story needs to be something that people understand straight away.

EMOTIONAL
Something that tugs at the heart-strings or makes you go Wow!

NEW
What works best is the unexpected or the tried 'n' true formula of The Reverse: an example is the classic headline 'Man bites dog!'

TRIGGERED
If something is before you all the time, it will come to mind more often and then is more likely to be shared. Examples are weather and public transport - things that affect a wide range of people, so they relate more readily to shared articles on the topic.


Once something with a strong blend of the above qualities catches your eye, what is your reason for sharing it?

Crawford, Hunter and Filipovic overlay three motivations behind sharing behaviour:

NEWS-MAKING - this is the traditional idea that 'newshounds' have. It's newsworthy, so share it.

INSPIRING - this is more what we tend to think drives sharing - the sharing of inspirational stories.

TEAMING - But this - THIS - is the heart and soul of it. Most of our sharing is really about us saying something about who we are, what we believe and what we want to be identified with. This involves an aspect of judgement - we approve or disapprove.

I would also call this last aspect TRIBING because the motivations behind this kind of sharing run deep to our core personality - a mindset that we retain throughout our lives. Our sharing is often to seek out or reinforce links with similar-minded members of our tribe.

The War on Journalism: Media Moguls, Whistleblowers and the Price of Freedom
Andrew Fowler explores how traditional media has struggled to make the transition from print to online.


More reading:

What's Next in Journalism? New-Media Entrepreneurs Tell Their Stories
Margaret Simons (Ed)

The Deserted Newsroom
Gideon Haigh

Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age
Jonah Berger

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck
Dan Heath & Chip Heath

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman

Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future
Jonah Sachs

Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World
Naomi S. Baron


And now for something different...

The Dragon's Voice: How Modern Media Found Bhutan
Bunty Avieson



Craig Kirchner

#mediastudies   #media   #digitalnews   #journalism   #facebook   #twitter   #murdoch   #fairfax   #packer

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers