This month’s Gateway online features James Leatham’s classic pamphlet, ‘Factors of Civilization’. This is a very thought provoking pamphlet – and I’d recommend reading it all (even the bits you disagree with!) Indeed some paragraphs had me getting very hot under the collar (The Doric especially) and calling Leatham for a turncoat – until I read to the end of the paragraph and realised he has a point!
That’s the great thing about Leatham, because he is writing and publishing ‘without fear or favour’ he can say controversial things and challenge us to engage with them. There’s a good deal of sense in what he says and as he points out in his patriotism – perhaps if we don’t like the way things are, it’s up to us to do something to change that! If you also read Leatham’s cultural offering this month ‘John Barbour: Father of English Poetry’ I am fairly sure you will not come through without feeling Leatham abounds in contradiction. Think a bit more deeply and you may find that contradiction lies within yourself. It is, I suggest, part of the human condition. It should go without saying (for fear of being accused of contradiction) I have ‘issues’ with Leatham saying things like: ‘All good literature would die if people of taste and enthusiasm did not keep quoting and praising the masters of it. The public really prefers skimble-skamble stuff, provided it be new.’ Yet there is part of this I agree with. Take out the ‘good’ and lose the final sentence and I have less problem. Really he’s saying ‘praise what is worthy as a means of keeping it alive.’ That’s not quite so bad (though we do have to agree on what ‘worthy’ means. In its entirety the quotation seems like a really classist statement to me – I either have to think that Leatham was in fact a cultural snob – or perhaps I need to understand history better. Perhaps the context in which this was written and the context in which I receive it are not just worlds away but almost incompatible, or inconceivably different. The lines of communication are definitely flawed in some respect. But that does not, in my opinion, mean one should dismiss either this statement, or its place in the entirety of its essay. For a start, taking things out of context – which most quoting does – is a tricky game. The soundbite is not reliable. And reading an essay is a skill, which requires a level of concentration and an active engagement (including disagreeing) with the argument put forward. We should not be afraid of that or shy away from it. We should not dismiss someone’s argument because there are bits we don’t like. Or even damn it completely because we see contradictions. No one is in a position of full knowledge and therefore our most deeply held convictions are always open to charges of weakness, often contradiction, when viewed from a different perspective. The important thing, surely, is the creative communicative act that occurs when reading – finding out how another person sees the world – even, and perhaps especially when this challenges your world view – is a valuable part of life in general and reading in particular. Which brings me on to the central point of this month’s editorial. Freedom (and fairness) of publishing. Not freedom of the press per se, but of the act of publishing. The ubiquitous cliché ‘publish and be damned’ is no longer worth the consideration it has been given. For me, as for Leatham, I choose a new stance and it is ‘publishing is an adventure.’ We are, in case you hadn’t noticed it, living in the middle of a publishing revolution. It used to be said that everyone has a novel (or book) in them. Now everyone, with minimal skill, effort can publish that book at virtually no financial cost. Whether this is a good thing or not is a very complex issue. The freedom to publish allows creativity to flourish. It also potentially drowns us in poor quality reading material. I could direct you to the Orraman’s article last month on reading (or not) Sir Walter Scott, to start dealing with the thorny question of what is ‘good’ in relation to reading matter. For me, publishing has been about profit and product for far too long. I believe it should be about choice and creativity. I do not intend to bang on about the bad state of ‘traditional’ publishing – life is too short – and it simply diverts from my central premise. I am more interested in discussing what level of awareness there is (or isn’t) amongst the general reader about things such as the ‘bestseller’ culture? Most people I speak to are woefully unaware of the ‘pay to play’ aspect to publishing. Most people are woefully ignorant of publishing at all when it comes down to it. For the most part they don’t care where their reading material comes from – who made it (even who wrote it) and who brings it to the bookshelf. All most people seem to care about is ‘is it good.’ And by this they mean ‘is it popular’ and by this they mean ‘will people laugh/scorn/denigrate/stigmatise me if I say I like this.’ I ask: Was the genie let out of the bottle with Fifty Shades? Is this the kind of book we have all secretly been wishing for our whole lives? Or was it the mother of all marketing campaigns. Yes, forgive me, in the world of capitalism, the altruist becomes a cynic. I further suggest that readers need to open their mind not just to what they consume but where they find what they consume, and they need to question whether they are really making choices or are being ‘sold’ to. It’s a classic freewill/ determinism dilemma. We all want to believe that we are making choices in our reading matter – but we tie our identity (especially our social identity) up with being acceptable to our group. If that ‘tribe’ is aspirational then we want to read ‘literary fiction’ and nothing but ‘literary fiction’ will do. Highbrow readers do not want to read ‘popular’ fiction – but in fact what the marketeers have achieved is making a range of ‘populars.’ The popular is no more than the group acceptability factor made concrete. If all your friends like something you like it too. If that is a police procedural, or a cosy crime, or chic lit all well and good. It’s fashion folks. And it’s fast fashion. These days one season we are being sold sado-masochistic erotica and the next season it will be bodice ripper historical. Now fantasy, now sci-fi. Genre is king in the publishing hierarchy. You’ve got to be able to pigeonhole your book in order that you can create your cult of readers. In the modern world, of course, mutating genre and creating transgenre genres is also all the rage. But the key commonality is that all these are ‘created’ – and not by the author. They are branding exercises. And while branding may be a creative endeavour, it’s not the kind of creativity I’m interested in. Branded fiction is all the rage - don’t get me started on ‘celebrity’ fiction. So where are we with all this? My point is simply that it’s time to wake up and realise that the profiteer publishers are selling to you, not offering you a free choice. And it’s been going on so long that people are losing the ability to make a choice. The choices we think we have are: – shall we read it as hardback (showing our high status) paperback or ebook? Will we pay £20 or £10 or Free, or will we even find our books in the library? Will we get our fiction from the charity shops, or from Amazon online? But these are essentially choices of delivery platform. Surely more important is WHAT we are reading and what choice we have in the whole affair. Active choice means engagement. In modern publishing this means navigating many shark infested waters. Whose recommendation can you take at face value? Reviews of ‘indie’ writers books by other ‘indie’ writers (who we assume may also be readers) are often denigrated and indeed the whole ‘indie’ movement is subject to the cry: Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. It’s a cry issued by the gatekeepers and those with a vested interest in reducing YOUR choice. For me, if there is vanity in publishing it is in publishing something that is not worth reading. But what is not worth reading? In actuality, perhaps the vanity from the perspective of a writer is in thinking that you can make a living as an author. That you ‘deserve’ to make a living as an author. That what you have to say is interesting enough or important enough for the whole world to want to read. Or worse still, the belief that the whole world NEEDS to read what you write. But this vanity is embedded into the aspirational capitalist nature of our society. It’s what keeps the wheels of industry (and publishing) turning – but it is not the best friend of the reader. Traditional mainstream publishing is a very small fish pond. Or perhaps better viewed as the top of a pyramid structure. The ‘lucky’ or privileged few get to publish ‘properly’ with the endorsement of the elite power structure and the rest are only expected to engage by reading the work of the elite. Well, if we peasants start revolting they have other ways to get our money off us. They may help us to spend our money publishing ourselves, and they’ll take our money off us to market ourselves – but we are swimming against a very big tide. We are low down in the pyramid structure – and they keep us waiting to throw a six to get onto the snakes and ladders board of life. Publishing success lies in finding the people who want to read what you write. But for all too long this has been mediated by the elite. And they are not going to let their grip go easily. This is the real crux of the dilemma at the heart of ‘the publishing revolution.’ And I can’t help but think that we should be focussing on other issues in this publishing revolution of course. Perhaps we should be looking at both environmental and cultural issues. There is a strong environmental argument for Print on Demand technology for one thing. And for digital content. We all know that the ‘ereaders’ and ‘technology’ carries its own environmental ‘footprint’ but this is not a good argument to maintain an outmoded method of printing which sees thousands of books pulped and remaindered just so that in the first instance they can be printed ‘for peanuts.’ There is a third way. Print on Demand offers the best practice example of publishing. But it is being hijacked by unscrupulous pseudo publishers who are offering ‘reprints’ at over inflated prices, which are essentially just photocopies (usually poor ones) slapped between covers. And this poor quality threatens the progress of the genuine opportunities offered to authors and publishers by the true Print on Demand model. Digital publishing is the future, in all its formats, but it offers a great threat to the traditional models of publishing. For that reason alone we should embrace it. But not be fooled. eBooks should not cost £5 and they certainly shouldn’t cost £50 as I saw one academic publication priced recently. The pricing wars in ebook publishing are simply reflective of the traditional powerhouses trying to undermine the freedom of the masses. The costs of producing ebooks (especially where a print book exists) are minimal. The potential profits are huge. The traditional mainstream publishers still have to work out how best to maximise this profit – and we as customer are very vulnerable at the moment. We are guinea pigs in the market. Consider the costs of printing: (The article on Spending a Penny is worth a look in this regard) Printing 1 book is expensive. Printing 10 equally so. Printing 100 still makes the cost too high for ‘the market’ to bear. Print 1000 and you are starting to see a profit on a book of £8.99. Print 10,000 and you can push your book out into all the stores at £3.99. But is a £3.99 book better than an £8.99 book? In any way. And simply being able to produce many books cheaply irrespective of the environmental wastage of this model must be considered as unsustainable. Again, there is a whole other article on this, so I won’t go into it in depth just now. Suffice it to say: there is no fair trade in books. Publishing has not been about the creator (or one might suggest the consumer) but about profit for the market driven capitalists. Yet writing is a creative act. Publishing has been and sadly all too often remains the commercialisation of that creativity. In a capitalist model, exploitation is bound to follow. What about a non-exploitative publishing? What is the possibility of considering non-commercial creativity as a success? Is this plain madness? It’s another issue to consider – again beyond the boundaries of this article. I’m just trying to make you start thinking – start questioning – start making choices. We do well to remember that what is important in books is the CONTENT and that the ‘delivery platform’ is less so. These days we can take 1000s of books with us wherever we go on a device which weighs less than any paperback. Indeed, we can actually take 10,000 books with us on a micro SD card (you just need to find a place to ‘plug and play’ and that is all an ereader or tablet is – a plug and play device). As technology improves maybe soon we’ll just carry our media ‘libraries’ with us on portable flash drives and plug into whatever techno- receptor is available wherever we are. Hardware and software companies, like the publishers, are fighting to maintain their control and their profit-driven businesses in the face of a revolution many of us are not even aware we are part of. It’s happened with music. It’s happening with video. And like it or not, books are just another option in the plug and play world. They’re not always the sexiest option -perhaps that’s why erotica is being marketed heavily these days – the marketeers are desperate to keep books sexy! Some of us might just see through that. There are, believe it or not, other reasons to read. We are really lucky in the early 21st century because we have access to the most incredibly diverse range of reading material in the history of history. We are cursed because we have forgotten how to make active choices. While we prefer spoon feeding, or need to look over our shoulder as to whether our choices make us socially acceptable, we are more impoverished than the illiterate peasant of earlier times. Access isn’t everything. Low price isn’t everything. Even if we have the ability to make an informed choice about what we read, the bookmarks are stacked against us. Unless you start from the position that the books you REALLY want to read may well be invisible and you are going to have to hunt them down, then you will never reach your potential as a 21st century reader. You can be one of the beautiful people. You might be one of the rich, or successful or intellectual or cultured elite. But you are living in poverty all the same. Poverty of creative expression is a real issue. Which is why I encourage anyone and everyone who wants to publish, to do so. There are many reasons for publishing and the vanity is in the reason for writing, not in the writing itself. Reading and writing have become slaves of capitalism and commerce. That is simply a fact. And the real publishing revolution lies in freeing books and their readers (in whatever format) from the shackles of ‘good’ and ‘bestselling’ and taking them into the world of creativity and choice. In conclusion I have no more to say than that I believe reading the articles in this month’s Gateway are a step in the right direction towards opening the mind, challenging one’s beliefs and at times prejudices, and embarking on a more active, choice-driven pattern of reading. And it won’t have cost you a penny. The profit is all yours. Rab Christie Out with the old and in with the new.
After a silence of some seventy years, Gateway is back with us. I don’t claim it is improved and it is only ‘new’ in some respects. In its original form Gateway was published in the middle of each month as a 3d (threepenny) pamphlet. It contained an average of 24 pages per edition and ran to some 360 editions over 30 volumes. It was the work (and life) of James Leatham. Gateway began in April 1912 and the last edition covered the period of July-December 1945. Leatham died on 14th December of that year, just a few days shy of his 80th birthday. Today Gateway is free, will still come out in the middle of each month and is available online. The articles still feature and focus on Leatham’s writing while adding some other content both from the past and present. I am aware that stepping into Leatham’s shoes gives me some big boots to fill and my intention is to remain true to the spirit of the original Gateway, which is to offer up personal thoughts on culture and politics. Leatham first published in the 1880’s and over his lifetime we may see that he could exercise some level of hindsight. The world and his relationship to it certainly changed over 60 years – years he described as ’60 years of World-Mending’ – but his fundamental beliefs in social justice and freedom of speech remained undimmed despite the vicissitudes of a life spanning High Victorian through the Boer War, then First and Second World Wars. We are all to some extent created and limited by our experience, the times and circumstances in which we live. I have an additional level of hindsight to Leatham, in that I can look back at his writing and offer some updated criticism or contextualisation – though it is not always wise to transpose attitudes across centuries. However, all too frequently when reading Leatham’s writing (and I am barely a beginner in this endeavour) I find myself thinking that if only more people had read, and listened to – and acted on - his analysis of the world, we might not be in the state we are now. This is perhaps no more than to say, if we had not pursued the path of capitalism instead of socialism, Scotland, and Britain, might not be as they are today. Whether your interest is culture, history, politics or social justice; and particularly if you have an interest in the reality underpinning the competing ideologies of capitalism and socialism and want to make sense of a country which can adopt neo-liberalism and ‘Red Toryism’ then you may find this new Gateway of interest. Jeremy Corbyn could learn a lot from James Leatham. As could we all if we are prepared to read with an open mind. While many see Mr Corbyn as a ‘new’ broom – others dismiss him as a ‘throwback’ to a past which is out of step. Neither of these is strictly true. Jeremy Corbyn, and David Cameron exist as firmly in the ‘now’ as Leatham did in his own time. All remind us of the long way Scotland still has to travel before returning to the status of an Independent nation. Perhaps all that we really learn from historical writing is how little the fundamentals change. How firmly those who wield power hold on to it and how chameleon like they may seem while really being leopards. The same spots are there if you look hard enough. And perhaps all we have to contribute as living writers is the testimony of a personal perspective regarding our particular piece of the jigsaw. If so, the only good justification for personal writing might be said to be to offer honest testimony. I was here. This is how I see it. This is what I believe. These are all valid reasons for writing – and when they invite others to share an opinion or question an ideology or belief system – they are the basis of a true form of propaganda. It is a propaganda above lies and untruth; a purer form which seeks to give voice to the minority, those on the margins and reminds us all that we should take any and all ‘facts’ from the mainstream of culture and political elite with a very large grain of salt. It is in this respect that Leatham describes his writing as propaganda. And in this respect that I continue to use a word which has now become redefined to suggest it as the purveyance of deliberate untruths. In one of his earliest publications Leatham wrote: ‘as a Socialist I hold that this world will never be a tolerable place for the mass of mankind to live in so long as they allow the landlord and capitalist to monopolise the means of production.’ This is a belief he held on to for his entire life. It is one I share. It is with that in mind that I dare to tread where Leatham trod, dare to hope that by sharing his words and adding some of my own, I might encourage others to the pursuit of ‘world-mending’ to which he dedicated his life. In a world where the soundbite and tweet are fast becoming the de rigueur means of communication, Gateway unashamedly champions the ‘long form.’ Where possible we make articles and essays available in downloadable formats so that you can read at leisure, even away from the screen. I hope you will enjoy Gateway in its new form and open yourself to the fusion of old with new which it offers. Rab Christie James Leatham started The Gateway Journal in 1912 while he was living in Yorkshire. At the time he was running The Cottingham Press, but following his move to Turriff in 1916, he set up The Deveron Press (Turriff is set on the River Deveron) and published under this name for the rest of its, and his, life. Volume 1 number 1 came out in mid July 1912 and was the start of a propagandist publishing project that ended only with his death some thirty three years later. During all this time it came out more or less monthly (at some points it was quarterly) and offers an insight not just into the opinion of James Leatham over three decades but into an important time of change for the world. The cover price was 3d for the whole of the life of The Gateway. It was possible to buy a yearly subscription for 4s and if you felt really flush you could buy a bound yearly volume for some 6s. The standard length of the magazine was 32 pages. The content remained fairly standard as well. The first volume comprised: The Blight of Ibsenism By the Editor Extended Terms A Chiel’s Amang Ye. By Francis Grose. In Reply to Kind Inquiries – Hanley and After – Barren Labourism – The Minimum Wage – The Right to Work – War and Famine The Girl Critic, A Play. By Jacobus Things that are not what they sound Tact and Talent. A Story by James Leatham Impossible. Over time the Editorial covered issues of culture, society and politics. Leatham wrote most of the copy for the magazine, Francis Grose wrote political pieces and Jacobus wrote on culture. Both were his nom de plumes. This was neither unusual for Leatham, nor indeed for the magazine press of the day. Leatham had written for the Peterhead Sentinel as ‘Archie Tait,’ for some years earlier in his career. The Gateway was Leatham’s personal mouthpiece, but he also accepted stories, poems and commentary from other writers/readers. The Gateway was an unashamed Socialist propaganda paper. Before we go further I should offer an explanation of the term ‘propaganda press.’ These days we impute a totally negative meaning to the word propaganda, but in Leatham’s day it was used in a simpler way, meaning: information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause. The more negative connotations have grown up as a result of Two World Wars and the use of ‘propaganda’ in times of war, so that today the suggestion is that propaganda is biased and misleading if not deliberately false. However, we need to return to Leatham’s understanding and use of the word when we read his work. For him propaganda is simply: the particular doctrines of principles propagated by an organization or movement. You’ll note it stems from the root ‘propagate’ which is much more nurturing and evocative of organic distribution rather than the immediate click-heeled Nazi saluting picture we get when the word is used today. Leatham was happy to declare that his writing was propaganda. His justification for it was thus: All the organs of public opinion – press, Parliament, radio, pulpit, are in the hands of careerists who support the established order. He sought to offer an alternative, and later in life he explained why: It is because the newspapers do not give the material facts of social progress, and still less emphasise their significance, that I have for years maintained a propagandist press, with no advertisers, directors or shareholders to please. It is correct to say that I maintain the press; it does not maintain me. Unless a propagandist enterprise had a party organisation behind it, it never pays. Sometimes not even then. This was then, if not a labour of love, then at least a labour of conviction. And that, I might hesitate to suggest, makes it something of a rarity in the history of magazine publishing. In picking up where Leatham left off, we want to offer something similar. But in today’s world of 24 hour news and social media overload, we do not see the need for another online magazine focussing on the events of the day. What we do see the need for is a place to visit ‘forgotten’ and ‘lost’ work. We’re committed to the writing that slipped down the back of the sofa, or was air-brushed away because it didn’t suit the concerns of advertisers, shareholders or directors. There is no party organisation behind this. Our aim is simply to be a place you can come and find out about the hidden past of our shared culture, politics and society. Our conviction is that public domain work should be much more readily accessible and available and while we are just one small voice (as Leatham was) we are shouting about some big issues. In this commemorative issue we set the scene, offering a sort of transition between Leatham’s unfinished project and our own taking up of the reins. This month then, you can read Tact and Talent (as it was in the very first issue of The Gateway some 103 years ago) as well as dipping into some other issues, still current or blowing echoes from the past. We begin to scratch the surface of the issue of copyright. A writer retains copyright in his/her work for 70 years after their death. Offering this level of protection can, however, be a double edged sword. As in the case of James Leatham it can mean an effective gag being put on a writer for that length of time. Leatham’s copyright is lifted on 31st December 2015, and that is one reason we’re bringing The Gateway back to life, to start spreading his writing as widely as possible as soon as it becomes public domain. Unlike writers such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G.Wells, with whom he clashed over the issue, Leatham himself was keen on his work being disseminated as widely as possible. He said: An author who believes his views are for the good of the world will want them as widely diffused as possible. For other authors, the wide distribution has more to do with money than conviction. Leatham was a socialist. Reading his work offers an illustration and explanation of socialism in a way rarely found. I have been surprised to learn things about the emergence of the Labour party and its relationship with socialism through reading Leatham and I hope to be able to share much of this with you in the months to come. Leatham’s commitment was co-operative collectivism(now there’s an expression you don’t hear every day any more). His brand of socialism, some might say socialism itself, has passed into history, but if you read his writing you’ll see how different things might have been if only we had listened. Today we’re obsessed with Corbynism and the fragmentation of the Labour Party, and its distance from the Labour Movement and the roots of Socialism. Leatham has plenty to say on this subject: reading his work can offer information (and advice) from the birth of a movement to what might indeed be the death of the same movement. I recently heard members of the Shadow Cabinet being described as ‘right wing Labour.’ This is a phrase that should be unintelligible and yet… The past century has seen many changes. Who could have believed that The Berlin Wall would come down, that Russia, and China, would effectively become part of the capitalist ‘project.’ If I was to talk to Leatham today, I might feel compelled to tell him that ‘we are all capitalists now. Even the socialists.’ And see what he thought of that. Other issues also still dominate, though in changed ways. Reading Leatham I often think that if we’d only listened to his advice we’d not be in the mess we are now, but it’s important also to remember that he lived in a time which was vastly different. The article in this edition ‘Do Banks Make Money’ is a good example of this. The questions may be the same, but the landscape has significantly changed. And keeps changing. Reading Leatham with the benefit of hindsight, offers us the opportunity to challenge him, and our own pre-conceptions, and to think hard about the paths we are taking – both those we can see and those hidden from us. It helps engage us with a world – not just one that is lost, but one that we may have given away in favour of what I call ‘gilded cage syndrome.’ Leatham can help you open the doors to that cage and flap your wings. For me personally, reading Leatham is a stark reminder at how much society has changed, and how little human nature has changed. It makes me think that we are all pawns in the game of society. But lest we get too downhearted in the political maelstrom which seems ever more Orwellian the older I get, Leatham also had plenty to say on the issue of culture. And let’s remember, he died before Orwell’s classic novel was written. I consider 1984 a real watershed in political fiction. I wonder what Leatham would have made of it? Leatham is not shy in talking about literature or culture. And his ideas are sometimes unusual, and initially can seem almost bizarre. He offers a seventeen part view of Shakespeare’s plays from a socialist perspective. We’ll dip into these over the months to come. He didn’t like Ibsen but he did like Barrie’s ‘The Little Minister.’ Yet he railed against mass market publishing and championed high literature. I find his attitudes complex, challenging and supremely interesting. I believe they force us onto a kind of meta level of retrospective criticism where we have to understand the time in which they were written as well as the psychology and politics of the man who was writing. For those who like to challenge literary norms and conventions, I warn you, this can become an obsessive game. It’s certainly the diametric opposition of the spoon-fed commentary posing as critical authority we find most commonly today. I know that in taking over the editorship of The Gateway I am standing on the shoulder of a giant. I hope he would approve. They are big boots to fill, and by some accounts (there are still a few who remember Provost Leatham from their childhood’s in Turra) he wore spats. I cannot compete with his sartorial elegance and I will not try to compete with him. I am, I suppose, a Leatham Lamb. He will always be the master. In this edition we offer a gentle introduction to all things Leatham. His article on ‘The Best of Friends’ shows a man who may genuinely be described as a ‘Bookman.’ He’s not the greatest fan of novels, finding history much better. He writes: ‘Novels are good enough for people who can’t assimilate an idea unless it is presented in a pictoral or dramatic setting, or for those who don’t want ideas at all, but read merely to kill the time in life which they don’t know how to use. To those who read to learn, Green’s History is vastly more entertaining than the best society novel; and as regards the great majority of novels of all sorts, it is only the sober fact to say of them that truth is especially stranger to that sort of fiction.’ I disagree with him fundamentally on this point, but he does put up an argument which I feel compelled to engage with. Leatham is often provocative and it’s the kind of provocation which I find positive, challenging one out of the ‘comfortable’ position and making one think about the very nature and justification of all we think we know. Leatham wasn’t precious about his work. Many of his pamphlets ran to numerous editions over the years, and while he may not have fundamentally changed his views, he was not averse to adding knowledge gained through experience into the mix. This was possible with penny pamphlet production – more ephemeral than ‘real’ book publishing. What we now have as ‘legacy’ of Leatham, through old pamphlets and the bound volumes of The Gateway which still survive in a very few academic libraries, may seem to over-position him into one time or one view. I believe his writing was more evolutionary than this might suggest. One day someone (and I fear it won’t be me) may make a serious in depth study of the progression of Leatham’s views and ideas through his own writing – there is an absolute gold-mine to be explored – but the explorer will have to dig deep – Leatham was a prolific writer and re-writer. It is almost fitting that his autobiography remained unfinished at his death, ironic that it stopped just at the point when he moved to Turriff and set up the Deveron Press, and it ends like an unfinished project. It would be ridiculous to suggest that Leatham, who died just shy of his 80th birthday, suffered a life cut short, but it is not ridiculous to note that only his death could stop his life’s work, which was the expression of his convictions. Many of us settle down, or sell out, long before this time. Leatham kept going because while he might change his views, he never changed his commitment. One cannot help but see a note of irony on his unobtrusive gravestone at St Machar’s Cathedral (Leatham was not a religious man) which reads ‘His works liveth for evermore.’ To me this suggests a wry smile at the world. And that’s one reason I was happy to get involved with this project which seeks to bring some truth back into that perfect Leatham ‘one liner.’ I like to think that Leatham would enjoy the idea of us bringing him Lazarus like, back into the world. Especially in a world where his writing can be disseminated for free to a huge potential readership. The new Deveron Press will be publishing Leatham’s unfinished ‘60 Years of World-Mending’ in May 2016 to mark the 100th anniversary of The Deveron Press itself. We will also be bringing out other of his seminal works in paperback format. But I am tasked with making sure that there’s something new for you to read every month, mostly Leatham but also other important lost public domain works. Leatham wrote ‘Publishing is an adventure.’ I hope you’ll join me on this adventure on a month by month basis. The small team behind the New Gateway cannot promise you a run of 30 years to rival Leatham, but we’re determined to give it a good 5 years – and if all goes well a decade – by which time we hope not only that we will have shared a lot of important public domain work, but that such sharing might have become so ubiquitous that we no longer need to do so, because all of you out there have learned how to seek it out for yourselves and that open access becomes a reality not just a pleasant theory. And you can quote me on that – without fear of copyright! Rab Christie , December 2015. |
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