Stewart Lee will be in afternoon conversation with me in the intimate environs of Newcastle’s fabulous Live Theatre, ahead of his evening show at the significantly larger Theatre Royal. From the Live Theatre website:
‘The world’s greatest living stand up’ (The Times) comes to the Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, to talk art and ideas with Neil Jackson in support of the (fairly…) recent publication of Post Nearly Press Conversation Series.
With live music by Mariam Rezaei and Angharad Davies courtesy of Tusk Festival.
Funds raised from the event will support Live Theatre’s Talent Development and Children and Young People’s programmes.
In response to the efforts of Chroma Editions to support local food banks via sales of their lock down book From Tarmac to Towpath, our friend Ian Heames of Face Press has made a beautiful gesture.
For sale, with all proceeds going to the local food banks, is an incredibly rare Iain Sinclair item. An absolute must for collectors of Sinclair’s work.
This is number seven of a set of twelve copies of the exquisite “hors de commerce” version of Fever Hammer, published by Face Press in October 2021. It is hand-stitched, hand-numbered, and signed and dated by Iain Sinclair.
The guide price is £70.
Please make a generous offer. You will be giving critical and direct help to vulnerable folk as deep winter sets in.
Please email: julian@voicesinalane.co.uk to make a bid. Closing date is 15th Jan 2022. Winning bid receives book plus proof of donation.
Chroma has done a really great job in publishing this compilation. It gathers the original five books, all the original artwork, beautiful arrangement and design by David Banning, a new original cover by Craig Turnbull, plus a substantial and completely exclusive foreword from Iain Sinclair – Pre-Posthumous Words for Post-Nearly Press. There’s also an introduction by me, Neil Jackson.
CHROMA EDITIONS plans to release the compilation in November 2021. In colour soft-back form (a format which allows a rather more egalitarian price point), it will gather together the content from the five books to date, plus all artwork, and I’m very happy to say it also has a brand new original cover by Craig Turnbull (as shown above).
Also I am thrilled to announce that the book has a substantial and completely exclusive foreword from Iain Sinclair – a bristling and brilliant piece of writing titled Pre-Posthumous Words for Post-Nearly Press. Here’s a snippet:
What you have to appreciate, as a card-carrying ‘post-nearly’ spook, one of the reforgotten with no ticket of return, is that everything that follows is a posthumous dream, spun, as politicians would have it, around ‘the direction of travel’. ‘This is so surreal,’ they bluster. That state of dissociated and unfocused emotionalism required of moderately successful Olympic athletes by media vultures frantic for another orgasm of salt tears. But the experience of not-being-there is as real as it is ever going to get…
More details (and info on how to order) will follow in the next email.
Finally, more exciting news from Chroma. David Banning’s book ‘BOUNDARY SONGS: Notes from the Edge of the Lake District National Park’ has made the Shortlist for The Striding Edge Prize for Guides and Places at the 2021 Lakeland Book Awards. Winners will be announced on 19th October. See all the Chroma news here.
Collectors have enquired over the years, and still do, about the possibility of acquiring past editions of the Post-Nearly Press conversations series. All copies, even damages and rejects, are sold out, and it has always been the intention that these stapled books will not be re-published in that form. This still holds true – only potential future editions with new voices will extend that series.
However, it remains a shame that collectors cannot access the editions they want, especially were the series to continue. To that end a hardback compilation is planned which will feature the five editions to date (with Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Andrew Kotting, Alan Moore and Stewart Lee), along with artwork, introduction, foreword and some extras.
Discussions are ongoing with Chroma Editions in the hope of producing this compilation during 2021. Updates will be posted here, on Twitter, and to the mailing list (to which you can subscribe with the link provided).
Meanwhile, please consider Chroma’s exciting new book From Tarmac to Towpath – Excursions into Lockdown. All proceeds from this authentic and completely original publication, with haunting psychogeographical visions and dispatches from thirteen contributors such as Clare Archibald and Joanna Pocock, the book edited by David Banning and Julian Hyde, go to food banks.
From Tarmac to Towpath: Excursions into Lockdown is a collection of works created on the streets of London, Lancashire, Cumbria, Newcastle, Glasgow and the Firth of Forth when the UK was in Lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Featuring text and images from 13 artists across the UK, a document of traces emerges formed of spectral walks, psychogeographical encounters, eerie geometries, deserted towpaths, former railway lines, discarded masks, ghostly enclaves and sudden verdures. While boundaries dissolve, everything is muffled and haunted, desperate for re-connection. Dust, rust and peeling paint triggers acknowledgement of hyperawareness. Stunned side streets and somnolent houses (evoked by Graham Greene as, ‘the unfamiliar shadows of half-things, broken things, former things’) are amongst many captured moments that remind us of the unprecedented emotions and events of life in lockdown.
POST-NEARLY PRESS 