On Friday 10 and Saturday 11 November, the Small Publishers Fair returns to the Conway Hall, London, showcasing the work of over 60 publishers from across the UK and around the world, with an exhibition and a varied programme of readings and talks (click here for details of the reading programme). Longbarrow Press will be sharing a stall with Gordian Projects over the two days of the fair; we’ll have a full range of titles and a number of special offers. Join us for the Gordian Projects showcase and a reading by Brian Lewis of Longbarrow Press in the Brockway Room on Saturday afternoon at 1pm (full programme details here).

‘Amid the turmoil and haste at the technological and territorial frontiers, the standardisation of time that swept east and west with the railroads, and the irregular physical and temporal fractures that convulsed this newly joined-up world, the Victorians were stealing backward glances at an ‘ideal landscape … formed of a wholeness that was no longer theirs’. These landscapes were not so much encountered as contemplated; glimpsed from a train carriage, or revisited as framed images. The glass in the frame is both window and mirror.’  In an extended essay for the Longbarrow Blog, Brian Lewis surveys the poetry of Nancy Gaffield (by way of Eratosthenes, Solnit, Muybridge and Hiroshige), the ‘vigour and surprise’ of which ‘is traceable to an ongoing negotiation between the grid and the ground, the ‘mental map’ and ‘physical topography’, the abstract and the particular, the past and the future.’ Click here to read ‘Mirror Image’. ‘Writers compare themselves to magicians. Magicians are tricksters, manipulators, deceivers, con artists. They are sworn to secrecy when it comes to the possibility of illuminating their craft…’  Elsewhere on the Longbarrow Blog, Chris Jones presents the third instalment of his year-long enquiry into the creative process, reflecting, here, on the ‘tricks‘ of composition, dismantling the cult (or convention) of ‘stagecraft’ and ‘sorcery’, choosing, instead, to ‘take the trick apart, studying its mechanisms, its weight and shine, from multiple angles.’ Click here to read ‘The Trick’.

Finally, two new posts by Mark Goodwin illustrate different ideas (and practices) of ‘flight’. In the first of these, a memoir of swallows ‘banking up into the wide summer blues’ of a Leicestershire childhood prefaces an account of hand-rearing a ‘nestless’ swallow chick, ‘the impossible to touch’. ‘You could never get near them – all speed & agility – and yet that fast distance they carry or project… that was, and still is, a kind of unique nearness, a bringing in of the far…’ Click here to read ‘Flight of Being’. In ‘A Corner & A Carried Line’, Goodwin introduces a collaborative film exploring a ‘forbidden fenced elsewhere’, a worked-out, disused quarry in Charnwood, the team and their telescopic pole ‘tak[ing] flight, through a corner of a universe’. You can read the essay (and watch the short film) here.

Images:
1: Emma Bolland
2: Eadweard Muybridge
3: Nikki Clayton