With Humdrumming’s republication of the works of Denys Val Baker, beginning with The Sea’s in the Kitchen, we’re having a Denys Val Baker Week here on Dial Publishing, so stay tuned for lots of information about the man, the writer, and the works.

Denys is rarely heard of nowadays, but if you ever come across one of his books, acquire, read and enjoy (see the sidebar). They are rib-ticklingly funny and an immensely good read.

Denys Val Baker (1917 - 1984), owner and editor of The Cornish Review, was the author of twenty hilarious autobiographies. Titles of these included, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Petrified Mariner, which give you a flavour of them. He wrote in the 1950s through the 70s, and was a full-time professional author, by which I mean he was always broke.

Nevertheless, he managed to buy an enormous old tramp steamer, MVS Sanu, and, with no sailing experience whatever, took his large brood of wild children and long-suffering wife, Jess, on incredibly dangerous voyages. He was on the rocks more times than Jack Daniels.

Denys lived in Penzance, Land’s End and St. Ives in Cornwall, and was usually seeking some means of financing his next outrageous project. He was an adventurer in the grand English tradition, though always amusingly shambolic.

You once could find his books on the shelves of most libraries, where they were among the most popular titles for borrowing. These days they’re not so easy to come by, although Amazon has a good listing of second-hand copies, mostly at premium prices. Denys would have been amazed.

His character never allowed a moment to pass without doing something absolutely beyond the pale. A catalogue of his adventures would take 20 books to compile, which is probably why he wrote 20 autobiographies.

When I lived in Penzance we occupied a house across the road from his, though he had been dead for a decade. I noticed there was no blue plaque on his house, which is a pity, though everyone remembered him in the library, where he did most of his research. His son, Martin, still runs a print business in the town, and his wildest daughter, Demelza, lives there too.

Denys was one of the old school of writers. He spent a lot of time in London, mostly in the literary pubs around Soho where he hung out with the likes of Dylan Thomas and other luminaries of the scribbling fraternity.

But his heart was in Cornwall, as was most of his written output. He will be best remembered for his twenty or so “funny books”. Gerald Durrell is probably the nearest comparison.

Let’s hope he will not be totally forgotten, especially in the county that inspired his best work.

Syntagma Media has just launched a great new blog by Steve Newman, Commissioning Director at Humdrumming, a new publishing house based in Stratford Upon Avon — Shakespeare and RSC country.

Steve starts off by telling us about the signing of bestselling American author, Allan Weisbecker, whose memoirs, Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? will be published by Humdrumming, probably next year.

He also heralds the long-awaited republication of Denys Val Baker’s joyous autobiography series, beginning with The Sea’s in the Kitchen this week. Be first to buy the book here.

There’s also an incipient deal underway with a very big-name British author. I had a hand in this at the early stages, but I’m not at liberty to name the name until a final deal has been struck.

All very exciting stuff. Stay tuned for more information.

There’s a post over on Syntagma about the future of the printed (written) word in an age of New Media which is forcing us down the road of more conversational communications.

It’s by yours truly so I deliberately avoided saying (writing) “interesting” post. You may judge for yourself.

It is really the second part of an earlier piece on A Code for Blogosphere Conversations.

Needless to say, I totally agree with everything said … er … written.

Lee Thompson, who designed the cover shown above for Humdrumming, has some interesting things to say about book cover design:

Book covers these days have to fulfill a great many tasks, and this can result in a struggle over the author’s vision and the publisher’s bottom line. For most authors, the whole joy of writing comes from others reading and benefiting from the author’s words, and money is often secondary. If authors were only interested in money, most of them wouldn’t write!!

The dichotomy comes in that publishing houses are, at the end of the day, a business. A business that’s part of a £16bn ($30bn) industry in the UK, with lots of competition and a broad marketplace for potential sales. When you look at the business structure and costs behind printing, storage, distribution and promotions, each title needs to sell well not only to earn back the advance paid to authors but also to recoup the thousands (in many cases hundreds of thousands) spent on getting the book into stores. I think there are few authors out there who have a full appreciation of these processes and that can often lead to frustration on their part.

It’s an irrefutable fact that everyone “judges a book by its cover”. As much as we’d like to think the merits of the book will shine through, if the cover is appalling, the sales will reflect that. So on that business level, the cover has to stand out in a book store. Recent research (published in this week’s Bookseller magazine) has shown that most readers are becoming less and less influenced by general cover quotes, so the art has to be distinctive.

Read the rest of his piece at Celebrity at Work.

Colin Wilson (left) and Richard Perceval Graves at Glastonbury Tor.

Colin wilson has long been one of my favourite authors. From The Outsider to Beyond the Occult, his work is never less than engrossing and highly intelligent.

He is Syntagma’s celebrity of the day over at Celebrity at Work, where I asked him about his original view of living to be 300 and solving the meaning of the universe.

Read the interview: Link to blog. Link to post.

They said it couldn’t be done. A new novel that would challenge Dan Brown’s ultimate bestseller. A book of such startling plausibility that it must surely be true.

The Syntagma Code.

The publishing world is abuzz with rumour and counter-claim. Does The Syntagma Code throw real light on the greatest danger facing mankind today: the Algorithm?

Only time will tell.

There’s a lot of good writing being done on the network by Syntagma Media writers, so I’m starting to assemble some of the best into what I call our SynBin.

When we have enough posts I’m going to string them into a book called SynBin: The Best Writing from around Syntagma Media, and publish it under our Dial Publishing imprint.

We have some very good writers and writing here at the Towers. Just take a look at Adelle’s Fifty-Something Women, which has a New Yorkish edge and humor. And there’s a lot more too.

I’m trying not to include myself in this book, but I may have to make up some numbers at the end.

We’ve reorganized the distribution of book and publishing assets at Syntagma Media, so that what was “Publishing Corner” has now been moved over here.

The reason for this is that the three book blogs will not be active until just prior to their publication — people tire of hearing about a book for months before it’s published. Because these sites are not updated regularly, they lower the average traffic metrics of the whole of the network.

So, I’ve decided to separate them off to this quiet corner, where they can be themselves without jeopardizing the advertising revenues of the main network.

As an author and a publisher, I often find myself in an ambivalent position. I know the problems publishers face in a crowded marketplace. I also recognize the gripes of authors against their publishers.

So I’m posting this little cri de coeur I found on the web. It’s written by a publisher, obviously, who shall remain anonymous, largely because I’ve lost the reference. But it does provide some insight into the always tortuous relationship between author and publisher :

“Authors really don’t like publishers. They don’t like us because we change their work ~ or force them to. We reject their titles. We dress their books in jackets they hate. We take custody of their manuscripts and refuse visitation rights. We don’t let them see or comment on marketing plans. We spend very little money or time promoting their books. Our royalty statements might as well be Aramaic. We don’t return their voicemail or e-mail. We don’t communicate and we don’t care. Sure, that’s an over-generalization, but it’s too close to the truth for comfort. It should concern us that so many authors feel this way about their publishers. And it’s our fault, really, for not communicating better about exactly what we do, and why.”

Shouldn’t all publishers have these insights?

The British judge, Peter Smith, who presided over the recent Da Vinci “plagiarism” trial in London, has secretly embedded a coded message in his ruling on the trial.

The New York Times spotted this and writes: “LONDON, April 26 — Justice Peter Smith’s 71-page ruling in the recent ‘Da Vinci Code’ copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge’s occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of copyright law but also of more esoteric topics like the history of the Knights Templar.’

“The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC,” the judge writes in the 52nd paragraph of the ruling, alluding to his code and referring to the two works at issue in the case — “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” and “The Da Vinci Code” — by their initials. (In the United States, the book is called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”)

If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, says the NYT, you find that the first 10 spell “Smithy Code,” an apparent play on “Da Vinci Code.” But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code.

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