blog.saltpublishing.com » Anniversary Anecdotes

Looking Back – 10 Years of Salt: Why we Needed an Office

Jen — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:12:39 +0000

I was looking through my old MySpace Blog , when I came across a slideshow I made back in April 2008. We were in the process of negotiating the lease on our office and I was reaching the end of my tether. Salt had been based in a room stuck at the back of our home, just off the living room (next to the TV) for 8 years, but had gradually encroached on every available inch of space throughout the house. At the same time, our family had grown, with each of the 5 human occupants having to compete for space with the boxes of Salt books, and the boxes were winning!

Here is the slideshow. Sympathy, please:

Two months later we moved in and our lives changed dramatically: newly-found glorious space, floors and walls that weren’t cardboard-box coloured and a working space with a view of a high street, not the fence of our back garden, not to mention a lovely view of the Co-op across the road where we could watch people buying their lunch. I can’t say that our house is much tidier than it was before, but at least I no longer lose the children’s birth certificates in the pile of submissions. Here’s a video I made of our new office, back in the days before it became as messy as the old one:

Looking Back: 10 Years of Salt — The Trees

Jen — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:04:11 +0000

I’ll never forget this day. It was late winter, 2004 (6 years ago, how can that be?!) and I was sitting at my desk in the cramped, hot and chaotic space that was the Salt office, tucked away at the back of the house, when the phone rang. It was the BBC’s Venezuelan Correspondent, who proceded to tell me that he’d been to see 21 Grams and had seen on the internet that we were publishing the poet quoted in it and could he have a copy of the book, please.

Pardon?

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but couldn’t possibly say that! I managed to glean that one of our soon-to-be published poets, Eugenio Montejo, had been quoted by Sean Penn in a film that was due to be released in the UK in 3 week’s time. A quick Google search revealed that we were the last to know this as the whole world seemed to be talking about it! I told Chris who quickly dug the files out – fortunately, we were close to finishing the proofing cycle and we set to work immediately to get The Trees ready for press. This though wasn’t quite as straightforward as it seemed: Eugenio Montejo was in Venezuela and spoke little English; his translator, Peter Boyle, was in Australia — to speak to the author we had to jump through international time zones on a global scale. It took several days to get enough information together to write the press release, with each of our questions requiring at least a two-day turnaround.

It turns out that the maker of the film, Alejandro González Iñárritu, had stumbled across Montejo’s work in dusty volumes in a library in the US. He was particularly taken by one of the poems, the remarkable ‘La Tierra Giró para Acercarnos’; ‘The Earth Turned to Bring us Closer’, and arranged with Montejo to have an English translation of it incorporated into the film. Despite Montejo being Venezuela’s most celebrated poet, little if any of his work had been translated from Spanish.

Meanwhile, while all this was happening, Peter Boyle was working with Montejo to pull together a bilingual selection of his work. And Peter had told us about the film, but it hadn’t registered! We issued a press release and got the book out in time for the film showing in the UK (the cover image was taken one foggy morning by Chris on the village green). The media picked up on it and we managed to get coverage in the Bookseller as well as the press and local radio (I was interviewed – it was terrifying!).

We had great fun with this book, including an excuse to go to the cinema during working hours. However, if you’ve seen 21 Grams, you’ll know that watching it in the morning isn’t perhaps the best of moves – we left the cinema dumbstruck and unable to function for the rest of the day, such is the power of it, particularly Benicio del Toro, whose performance is amazing. Sean Penn quoting from ‘The Earth Turned’ is such a poignant part of the story, it moves me even now. That film and this book will always be special to me.

Sadly, Eugenio Montejo died in 2008. I am pleased that it was Salt who brought his work to the English-speaking world. If you are seeking beautifully-written, life-affirming poetry, I wholeheartedly recommend that you look no further than The Trees.

Looking back: 10 Years of Salt

Chris Hamilton-Emery — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:32:53 +0000

The phone call came one afternoon. I was caught up in something tricky working on a sales pitch or some typesetting and I’d answered the call when I really hadn’t wanted to, and was regretting it as I put the handset to my ear. “I’m going to die,” said the caller. Very Murial Spark, I thought. “Really, well, how can I help you?” “I’ve put my selected poems together and would like you to publish them,” the caller went on. If I recall it was a bass voice, assertive, even a little bardic. I kept listening. “It’s Jeff Nuttall.” “Oh, hello, Jeff!” I’d never spoken to him before, but knew Jeff’s counter culture credentials and quickly thought, Well this is worth looking at. “I’m sorry to hear your dying, Jeff. Yes, send it in and let me look at it.” I remember laughing a little at the prospect of his imminent demise, joking with him, even.

A few days later a bound manuscript appeared and I decided within an hour that it was a book worth publishing. Jeff was almost entirely absent while I was producing the book, getting hold of him was difficult. When the calls came, they were nearly all preceded with the statement that he was dying. Did anyone know? Soon enough the book reached completion and we went to press. The intermittent conversations had left it very tricky to know for sure if the book was really correct. The stock arrived and author copies went out. I think it might have been a letter that arrived, saying that the cover copy was wrong. A slip in the text had inverted one key meaning. We decided to dump the stock and correct it. A fortnight went by and copies arrived, we sent them out and news came back that Jeff was happy, though there were a few things in the text …

A day or so later, we got a call. Jeff had been playing jazz in his local and had stepped out from the pub into the car park, sat in his car and died.

It was extraordinary and extraordinarily sad. He kept his promise. His Selection is still in print today.