STML is proud to present readr – a lightweight yet high-capacity solution to the problem of information retrieval and storage. From the press release:

All around the world, every day, millions of people use the internet to access information, catch up with the latest news and gossip, and masturbate. But what they’re mostly doing is “reading”. Currently, the information available to “readers” is split into hundreds, if not thousands, of different formats: html files, pdfs, rss feeds, blogs, plogs, podcasts, writely documents, wikis and acres more – producing a morass of information with no unifying source. The technology to access this information is expensive, delicate, prone to breakdown and rapidly obsolete; storage is expensive; and, moreover, there are few ways to distinguish between high quality, useful information and that which is out of date or just plain wrong. Thousands more people waste their lives designing and maintaining such technologies.

But there is a solution.

readr uses the latest in 15th-century technology to bring the most up-to-date information to your fingertips with a revolutionary, startlingly clear, ink-based display; a sequential, numbered organisation system; and a pretty cover. readr addresses all of the concerns with the internet outlined above, while elegantly solving them:

• Format: readr is built on an innovative language that is already understood by over 800 million “readers” the world over: the English language. No more junk code or strings of “!-#php//^$&^$&*^$&*^_45723last phrase not acceptable” – even Martin Amis is readable!
• Price: The low cost of readr production, which is pegged to the price of cellulose rather than silicon on the open market, enables readr units to be shipped for less than £10, or less than £20 in the case of the Pro (or “hard-back”) versions.
• Robustness: readr’s patented analogue kernel is so robust we can guarantee that it will never crash. That’s right: never again will you turn the page to see the words “404 error: Next Chapter Not Found” or, worse, The Blue Page Of Death. (Note: it is still not recommended that you drop readr in the bath.)
• Capacity: Each readr can hold anything from a hundred to a thousand “pages” per volume, and if you also invest in our paradigm-breaking Shelves system, your storage options are potentially infinite. Sequential indexing also means no more Googling: just pick up and go!
• Choice: unlike the internet, where every idiot with a Blogger account can fart their opinions onto your monitor, a tried and tested peer review system ensures quality and checks facts in all readr units. Admittedly, some Wikipedia-style fictions may creep through but at least you can just rely on your own judgement – of the cover.

Check out the readr gallery here.

Note this well: readr has been out of beta for over five hundred years! So, let’s all sing the readr anthem: “Go and read a fucking book”

UPDATE: Following a £250 million buy-out by Amazon.com, readr is now known as “Pagez”.

UPDATE 2: Normal service will resume like Ronnie Corbett (that is, shortly).

There’s one final post we have to make about the Book Fair, which was all a long time ago now, and that’s to mention the amazing Laugh it Off from South Africa. Justin Nurse from Laugh it Off dropped by our stand (after hearing about us from Michelle of Oshun) to tell us all about himself.

Justin makes stunningly good, Adbusters-style anti-ads, detourning the presentations of South African and international companies to great effect – the above example uses Avis car hire to satirise SA’s continued reliance on underpaid black labour to support white affluence, while others poke fun and a little more in the direction of both big business (Johnny Walker takes a tumble in the ‘Keep Drinking’ ads) and youth apathy (Mtv and ‘eMpty’s Stoner of the Year’ award). He also publishes a regular zine with mini-campaigns, such as the anti-fashion ‘Fascionism! For Successful Cloning’ based on the Diesel campaigns, and a selection of poetry and other books.

In 2002, he fought a hard fight with SAB Miller, the massive South African conglomerate which owns Castle Lager and brews a host of international beers in SA, over a T-Shirt Laugh it Off produced based on the Carling Black Label logo. “White Guilt: Black Labour” didn’t go down too well with the suits, and it went all the way to the High Court before Justin won the right to satirise (read the full story in press clippings [pdf]). Naomi Klein, of No Logo fame, commented that the SAB case was the most important yet regarding the rights of corporation ownership versus the right to individual freedom of expression.

Laugh it Off is, in Justin’s estimation, pretty much the only outfit of its kind in SA (and, therefore, by extension, Africa). That is, in a media culture still relatively unquestioning when it comes to brand consumption, the only outfit opposing globalisation with the tactics that have arguably made the most impact elsewhere: good ideas and headline-grabbing stunts, well executed. As one of the commentators on the SAB feud noted, when the G8 came to Durban a few years back, an event that, on other occasions, prompted thousands and thousands to take to the streets in Seattle and elsewhere, a mere 200 turned out to protest – yet Africa is the place most affected and most likely to be affected, one way or the other, by the G8′s global policies. If Laugh it Off can do something to stir up some action, it’ll have a huge effect on a still-young nation.

Justin was at the Book Fair in search of European distribution for his work, most of it international and just as recognisable over here as south of the Equator – and European sales would, we’re sure, provide a huge boost to the business, which Justin descibes as “a social organisation run on business lines”. Serpent’s Tail, among others, turned him down, but if there’s anyone else out there who’d be interested in putting out some excellent quality political satire that’s damn funny with it, let him know.

Another dispatch from the newspaper inside my head:

It’s impressive that anybody at all has exercised their critical attention on an instance of Clive Cussler’s apparent moral inattention. It’s not something one sees very often: Cussler has a critical aura of protection about him, but one cannot read one of the novelist’s works without unease. We may begin with Cussler’s more famous – and more famously ambiguous – relationship with Tom Clancy, the lapsed-NeoCon. We hold him to account for his actions – that almost goes without saying in critical circles – so what about Cussler?

Well, if the attention is for sound reasons, the only useful and meaningful way to hold an adventure writer to account would be to hold him to account according to the mores of airport novels, just as the only meaningful way to hold Clancy to account would be according to dross (as many have done – the Daily Express book pages for instance).

We can approach this by asserting that one novel (Sahara), despite being a straightforward adventure novel is surely, in essence, a call for the recolonisation of Africa, one that under its stereotyped characterisations and turgid prose is on the side of Fascism, of imperialism and racial persecution.

We can add weight to this argument by extracting from the Dirk Pitt saga the more shadowy backstory of Pitt’s sidekick, Al Giordino (while leaving aside for a moment the doubly-denied homoeroticism of their relationship). Giordino’s Italian extraction points to the regressive context of Cussler’s work: the continuation of Mussolini’s grand plan for Africa which approached as far as the Sahara desert in the 1940s before its defeat by the Allied forces, represented in Sahara by French industrialist Yves Massarde. We may also gesture wildy in the direction of the Nazi obsessions of Cussler’s first novel The Mediterranean Caper.

What we shall not address, and which perhaps might offer more interest than this critique, is why someone else – Julian Barnes, for example, or Ian McEwan – someone with apparently impeccable ethical credentials, is not in any way as enjoyable as a good Clive Cussler novel; often quite the opposite?

[Sources: 1 and 2]

Browsing Amazon.com the other day, as is my wont, I was reminded of a rather interesting feature they served up a while back: SIPs.

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

And so we find that STML favourite The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad yields such predictable SIPS as “robust anarchist”, “gentlemen lodgers”, “perfect anarchist” and “old terrorist”, while William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch has the more visceral “old gash”, “old junky”, “his cock” and “sick morning”. There’s a good literary guessing game to be had here.

Likewise, Ulysses gives us the wonderful and unmistakeable “ute ute ute”, “tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom”, “base barreltone” (and the somewhat more prosaic “quaker librarian”); and I challenge you to come up with a set of words which could better describe the writings of Iain Sinclair than “retail landfill”, “soft estates”, “payroll boys”, “motorway circuit” and “orbital walk” (from London Orbital). Strange juxtapositions occur too: Walter de la Mare would probably be unimpressed to find himself grouped together with Friction 5: Best Gay Erotic Fiction under the phrase “fat cock” (“The horny old Gardener’s fast asleep; The fat cock Thrush To his nest has gone; And the dew shines bright In the rising Moon”).

For their own reasons, Amazon does not allow you to search for your own SIPs, only giving you access to those they have discovered themselves – this is probably because searching for SIPs actually lets you search all text in the Amazon Search Inside program, which might well lead to some Google Print-type copyright hoohah.

Nevertheless, out of grand generosity, and because noone else appears to have done it, your friends at STML have come up with a solution. Behold:

From this week’s issue of the newspaper inside my head:

In what was described by an independent spokesweasel as “a really fucking great precedent for the industry”, the international publisher Penguin today announced that they were offering refunds to anyone who had purchased a copy of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, following allegations that the author may have embellished or even lied about the story. Readers who bought the book directly from the publisher will be able to return it for the full purchase price.

Orwell’s graphic account of the hardships of poverty in the inter-war slums of London and Paris has sold millions of copies since its original publication in 1933, but this week the Smoking Enfield 303 website revealed that, far from working “seventeen and a half hours” a day, “almost without a break” in the suspiciously-named ‘Hotel X’, Paris, Orwell was frequently seen gallivanting around London and the Home Counties in an open-topped Gallardi roadster in the company of a number of young women.

To back up its claims, the site highlights an incident in Chapter XVI of Down and Out… in which Orwell claims to be the witness to a murder that took place beneath his hotel window:

I could see the murderers, three of them, flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, and they said the school-children had come from miles round to see it.

According to the Smoking Enfield, no record for this crime is held in any of the archives of the Paris Gendarmerie or the Police Militaire for the years 1928-30, the years Orwell was resident in Paris, and goes on to suggest that the author might have lifted the incident wholesale from an acquaintance’s lesser-known memoir, Paris Whore Catheter Scene by George Bufy.

Professor Steve Trout, noted academic, told your correspondent that “Close examination of the relevant texts suggests a resemblance between the two, although Paris Whore… was written some years earlier. Not only does it describe a murder in a Paris alleyway, including the tell-tale details of the lead piping and the wine-coloured blood, but it also gives some background details on the author’s colonial childhood in Southeast Asia and his time spent working as a syndicalist pig-breeder in the English shires.”

The late George Orwell, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1950, defended his work, stating: “I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.”

[Sources: 1, 2, and particularly, 3]

[Also, there's some new Short, Short Fiction in the Magazine.]

One of STML’s all-time favourite glacier-fighters, the great Kurt Vonnegut, author of such seminal works as Timequake, Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five, has a new book out. Having nearly died in a house fire in 2000, and suffered the loss of his entire personal archive, Von’s humour certainly hasn’t got any less black. Reviews have been mixed, but you can get a fairly good idea of the tone of the book – a collection of pieces written for the alternative journal In These Times – from the hand-lettered inserts between chapters, sampled below and available online here.

STML, for one, hopes that the old master, who will be 83 this November, gets some more fiction out before he himself becomes mustard gas and roses…

(Via Rake).

Ah, the joys of London in the summertime. Many readers may think that STML, staunch supporter of the little guy, the small player, the esoteric and the exotic over the large, the fat, the corporate and dull, would be a firm opponent of 3 for 2 offers, the oft-derided practice of plugging away those bestsellers with little hope for the undiscovered gems. But you’d be wrong. I love 3 for 2s.

3 for £2 that is!

Yup, it’s the return of the book bank. Worryingly, Tyrone, hero of Stroud Green Road and King among Booksellers, has not been seen for some time. Search parties have been dispatched, Metropolitan Police Forensics teams have been combing the thickets of Finsbury Park and riders have been seen, passing from beacon to beacon, upon the heights of Crouch Hill. All for naught. Instead, a cheery Irish fellow laid his sheets down outside Tesco’s yesterday and, with a flourish, produced his wares. And what an embarassment of riches! The complete works of David Eddings! Old beardy Sex manuals! Bizarre cookbooks!

Nevertheless, no good book goes unturned, and our eye was ecstatic to fall upon that ancient and venerable work, Simon Bond’s 101 Uses For A Dead Cat, last seen by the loo in my parent’s bathroom circa 1986.

There has been a bit of a resurgence in the dead animal comedy cartoon genre recently, what with the phenomenal (and deserved) success of Andy Riley’s Bunny Suicides, but you can’t deny that Bond got there first. Which makes it all the more cheering that a real proper organisation with an office and everything is trying to preserve his work for future generations (Click on ‘The Collection’ to see more).

One down, two to go. It is my Mum’s birthday today, and what could be a better gift than a guidebook to her favourite holiday destination: Exploring Paxos and Antipaxos, a skilful interweaving of walking guide, history handbook and mythological treatise, by Susan Valerie Oman. Cheap, moi?

Moving swiftly on, and a little seriousness was called for. Regular readers will know, STML is not one to turn down a good NEL. And there she was: Militant Suffragettes (1974) by Antonia Raeburn, with a lovely cover of a policeman gazing sternly at some uppity ladies.

“…what kind of women were these Suffragettes – man-hating, shrieking viragos or attractive, intelligent, sensitive members of their sex?” J.B. Priestley, from his introduction

A fascinating account, in fact, of a period about which I know shamefully little, and far from the usual NEL shoutiness. The account of Christabel Pankhurst’s first taste of disorder – a Liberal hustings at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1905 – compels one to read on:

Christabel and Annie listened attentively to Sir Edward Grey’s speech. Twice he was interrupted by men whose questions he answered, but the women waited quietly until he had finished. Then Annie Kenney stood up: ‘Will the Liberal Government give the vote to women?’ There was no reply and the chairman called for other questions. ‘I rose again and was pulled down by two enthusiastic liberals behind me. We then unfolded the flag [a small banner with the words VOTES FOR WOMEN] and that was enough.’ Roars of laughter and catcalls filled the hall, and Annie was surrounded by Liberal stewards who forced her to sit down. ‘Why doesn’t he answer my question?’

The Chief Constable of Manchester came down from the platform and advised her to present it in writing and accordingly Annie sent a slip of paper up to the platform: ‘Will the Liberal Government give votes to working women? Signed, on behalf of the W.S.P.U., Annie Kenney (member of the Oldham Committee of the Card and Blowingroom operatives).’ She added that for the sake of the ninety-six thousand organised women cotton workers, of whom she was one, she wished her question to be answered. Her note was passed round, read with amusement, and set aside.

Once again she rose to speak and, as the stewards seized her, Christabel leapt up to defend her. Elbowing away the plain-clothes police who had arrived, Christabel jumped on to a seat and called out the question again before she was pulled down. The two weomen were dragged into the gangway and swept out of the hall past the platform. ‘You’re a coward,’ Annie called to Sir Edward Grey. ‘If I leave this hall I shall hold a meeting of protest outside.’ Struggling to resist her escort, Christabel halted directly below the speakers, and looking straight up at Sir Edward she asked the question once again. ‘I remember thinking that suitably wreathed and attired he would have looked exactly like a Roman emperor. Pale, expressionless and immovable he returned me look for look.

Finally outside, Christabel, who had studied law, did one thing she knew could get her arrested. She pretended to spit at a policeman. Duly charged with obstruction, the campaign of the Suffragettes had begun.