Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal October 2006 Volume 4(5)

Endpiece

Word chain

A wonderful book festival provided plenty of literary links for Colin Will.

The 2006 Edinburgh International Book Festival was the best I’ve attended. The programme was vast and varied, with something for everyone. The audiences were large and appreciative, the speakers and readers were excellent, and the weather was, apart from one wet day, warm and sunny. As every year, the Festival is an opportunity for meeting up with old friends, including my fellow columnist Brian Osborne, and many fellow poets. Another old friend I met was the novelist and poet Alan Spence. His new novel, The Pure Land, published by Canongate, was launched at the Festival. I have a connection with the subject of his novel, so we had lots to talk about, in between mobile phone conversations.

Thomas Blake Glover was born in Fraserburgh in 1838 and grew up in Aberdeen. He took a job as a clerk with Jardine, Mathieson & Co in Japan, which was then opening up to Western trade and influence, settled in Nagasaki, rapidly made his first fortune, and married Tsuru, a young Japanese woman. He imported the first locomotive to Japan, started the first shipbuilding and engineering company in Japan (now Mitsubishi) and a brewery, now the Kirin Beer Company. He made alliances with some of the more open-minded ‘clans’ opposed to the Tokugawa Shogun, and, at the risk of his own life, helped to smuggle a group of these young progressives to the West. On their return, having learned about Scottish commerce, industry and politics, they were among those who overthrew the last Shogun and reinstalled the Meiji Emperor, one becoming Japan’s Prime Minister, and another its Foreign Minister. Tsuru always wore a butterfly motif on her kimono, and this may have influenced Puccini when he was writing Madame Butterfly, although the characters and relationship could not have been more different.

He is revered in Japan, while being largely overlooked in his native Scotland. In Nagasaki there is a Glover Park, within which sits the Glover House, shielded from the 1945 atomic bomb by a low hill. By a bizarre coincidence, Glover’s own birthplace in Fraserburgh was hit by a wartime bomb, and is still a gap site. More than two million Japanese visit the park each year, a measure of his influence and honourable status in Japan.

Photographer Ken Paterson was commissioned by the Glover Trust to take photographs in and around Nagasaki, and I was then asked to write some haiku inspired by Ken’s photographs. The outcomes formed an exhibition in Fraserburgh’s Lighthouse Museum this Summer.

Alan’s book is a moving and powerful telling of the Glover story, previously the subject of Alex McKay’s biography, The Scottish Samurai. Incidentally, Alan told me that his book started life as a film screenplay. After years of discussions, negotiations and frustrations, the project was scuppered by the release of the film, The Last Samurai. The money men decreed that another samurai film so soon after this would be uncommercial, so Alan was persuaded to turn the story into a novel. I think that’s one reason for the dialogue in the book being so natural and believable. It’s a wonderful read, and I commend it to you.

Namu Amida Butsu.

Book Festivals, as well as providing opportunities for readers to meet authors, and vice versa, give attendees the chance to buy books. The bookshop at this year’s Edinburgh event was very well stocked, and looked to be doing good business. The trade terms offered are not that much different from the most commercial chains, so publishers won’t make a fortune from sales, but it does provide a good showcase for them. Maybe they have to look at it in that light, as a promotional opportunity, rather than as a chance to sell large quantities of their titles. My worry is that cover prices may have to creep up to compensate for the discount rates demanded by some booksellers. EIBF will no doubt say that their shop profits are reinvested in the Festival, and that’s true, but the margins for publishers and authors are squeezed very small.

So what did I buy at this Festival? Two geology texts I hadn’t seen before (so the showcase idea worked); a book about Scottish plant collectors; a scientific compilation by Steve Jones; poetry by Simon Armitage, Alan Spence’s novel, and, naturally, a lot of latté.

As I write this, plans for the 2007 StAnza Poetry Festival are well advanced. Details of the Festival programme will be available.. It’s our 10th anniversary, and we’re making every effort to make it our best ever. It’s always awkward writing this in advance of the release of the programme. I can’t be too specific in case some arrangements fall through.
All I can do is to give you the dates;14-18 March 2007: the place; St Andrews: and suggest that you make sure your diaries are clear. It’s going to be great.

Colin Will | www.colinwill.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 4(5) October 2006

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