This picture was taken at my last Ottakar’s Putney Christmas Party in December 2008. I don’t believe any of these wonderful people still work full time in bookselling. The last one I heard of was Felix Howes who was running the reading group in Waterstone’s Wandsworth Town, but I doubt he’s there now. I never met anyone who considered bookselling a lifetime’s career even those who like me ended up making it so.

I worked with a host of ultra-intelligent people very many of whom I considered too good for the job and with whom I felt we were privileged to work. I shudder to remember the oddities I would regularly inflict on my team such the staff briefing on the merger of Ottakar’s and Waterstone’s which I likened to a dalek invasion (complete with illustrative film footage).

Reading Paul Morley’s The North has left me flooded with memories of childhood in my hometown of Stockport in the late seventies. Then it was possible to spend a blissful Saturday afternoon wandering round Stockport’s ragbag collection of bookshops, some of which would be thought of as junk shops nowadays, and all of which have vanished. Many of my happiest moments have been spent in bookshops and very many of the most magical shops that graced those streets are (impossible to have imagined at the time) vanished without a trace:

Grass Roots Bookshop, run by a radical collective, and housed in a basement just off Manchester Picadilly is my personal favourite and the teenage hours spent in there generated much of my political education.

In London there are bookshops that are now just ghosts and legends such as Compendium Books in Camden and Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop, crammed with poetry pamphlets, in Floral Street, Covent Garden.

Every time a bookshop dies a little of our collective spirit fades away.

We’re launching a writing competition in September for the best poem or short story inspired by life at sea. I wanted to call the poetry prize the Hart Crane Award, but my colleagues all looked blank. After a quick straw poll, I couldn’t find a single person in our organisation who’s even heard of him.

To me he’s the greatest of the sea poets, one of the all time great American poets and a giant of world literature. I know the Bloodaxe Collected Poems is out of print but the wonderful Selected Poems published by Faber and edited by Maurice Riordan is still available.

Hart Crane, ed Maurice Riordan, Faber 2008, ISBN:  9780571238033 £5.99

Surely he can’t have been forgotten?

This is one of my favourite poems and one of the inspirations for this blog:

The Light-Keeper
by Robert Louis Stevenson

As the steady lenses circle
With frosty gleam of glass;
And the clear bell chimes,
And the oil brims over the lip of the burner,
Quiet and still at his desk,
The Lonely Light-Keeper
Holds his vigil.

Lured from far,
The bewildered seagull beats
Dully against the lantern;
Yet he stirs not, lefts not his head
From the desk where he reads,
Lifts not his eyes to see
The chill blind circle of night
Watching him through the panes.
This is his country’s guardian,
The outmost sentry of peace,
This is the man
Who gives up what is lovely in living
For the means to live.

Poetry cunningly guilds
The life of the Light-Keeper,
Held on high in the blackness
In the burning kernal of night,
The seaman sees and blesses him,
The Poet, deep in a sonnet,
Numbers his inky fingers
Fitly to praise him.
Only we behold him,
Sitting, patient and stolid,
Martyr to a salary.

··· Robert Louis Stevenson ···

MY MISSION STATEMENT

To increase seafarers’ global access to books.

   My aims:

The promotion of reading and writing at sea among seafarers.

To campaign for the widespread introduction of subsidised book provision to seafarers around the world.      

My goals:

To help launch and promote  a string of multi-level campaigns to promote reading and writing at sea.

To help create a global non-profit book distribution network to benefit seafarers

       My values

I believe that all seafarers should be able to read and have access to books.

I believe that those who cannot afford to purchase books should be subsidised by those who can.

      My Passions

     Sea

Seafarers

The Safety of Life at Sea

Self Development through Creative Writing

Championing  Exciting but Neglected Books and Authors

Independent Bookshops

Reader Development

Reading Groups

New Writing

Poetry

These the views expressed in this blog are the private beliefs and intentions of Mark Jackson and should not necessarily be supposed to reflect the policies and practices of my employer the Marine Society and Sea Cadets nor any other organisation to which I am directly or indirectly affiliated.