Burnout

Back on Sunday afternoon, and it feels already as if I've never been on holiday! Piles of post, emails, submissions, bills, phone calls, deadlines . . . sigh!

Luckily enough the London Book Fair is starting on Monday – a welcome break from the horrors of the office.

There's a few things I should report, but I'll wait for better, less frantic days. Stay tuned.

AG

Windmills

Windmills are quite a scary thing, and I can understand how the Knight of la Mancha could take them for formidable enemies. We visited the series of twenty-odd windmills in Kinderdijk (about 25 miles from Rotterdam) yesterday, and were able to climb to the top of one of them which was open to the public. Quite interesting, but the surrounding landscape was even more interesting: a mixture of idyllic countryside and modern noisy factories.

Today back to Bruges, and tomorrow back to England and the daily grind.

AG

A View of Delft

A sumptuosly sunny day today after yesterday’s greyness. We went to Den Haag in the morning – great, elegant city, and visited the Mauritshuis Museum, which hosts, in a couple of rooms, around a dozen all-time masterpieces of painting (all by Vermeer and Rembrandt, although there’s a few interesting paintings by Hals, Van Eyck, Holbein, Bruegel and others).

Because The Hague is not on the main touristic routes (for the time being!) and it was a Thursday morning, we could actually see the paintings without having to elbow our way to the front. I spent five minutes gaping at The Girl with a Pearl Earring (which we saw before at the Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery a few years back), and ten in front of Vermeer’s View of Delft, the real reason why we went all the way to Den Haag. The Rembrandt paintings were also very impressive, not just his self-portraits (which seem to be in every gallery in the world) but his famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.

After lunch we decided to see the real Delft, Vermeer’s city, and what a discovery it was. Without a doubt, it is the highlight of our trip so far. If you’ve never been there, we heartily recommend it. It’s a gem of a city – easy to visit, beautiful and surprising at every corner. The flower market was on, as well as a big market in the main square, between an impressive old building and the New Church – new as opposed to the older one a few hundred yards away – dating back to the fourteenth century.

After a brief stop at our hotel in Leiden, we were off again at around 7:00pm, this time bound to Amsterdam, which we had visited a few times before we had our kids. We were there in little more than half an hour, parked a couple of hundred yards from the Dam and had a lovely dinner at Gauchos – which, funnily enough, I think is the same chain we have on the riverside in Richmond.

So this is Holland in a nutshell – a lot of life, history, culture, variety, and all very close at hand as it’s a relatively small country. We are loving it.

AG

Contrapasso

Stuck in traffic for one hour around Leiden. The weather has turned grey . . .

Bruges la vive

It's always interesting to see, when you travel, some of your prejudices smashed to pieces and others embarrassingly confirmed. When I thought of Belgium, a country I had only travelled through but never visited in the past, two words would come to mind: "boring" and "grey".

So what a nice surprise to come to a very sunny and lively Bruges, and travel around Belgium and find it so green and interesting (especially from a historical point of view).

But let's have a look at how some of my other deeply ingrained prejudices have fared over the last forty-eight hours.

Food: I thought it was terrible, and this has sadly been confirmed.

Beers: Belgian beers have a great reputation, but I have given up alcohol for good (at least until the London Book Fair), so. . .

Weather: I imagined it to be as overcast as Hull or Aberdeen on a bad day. Not so during these two very warm and sunny days.

People: the cliché wants them dull and phlegmatic, but they seem lively and nice enough, even outside a tavern.

Trains: boringly over-punctual. Alas, not true: our train to Gent this morning was sixty-two (62) minutes late. It is true that the woman who made the announcement on the Tannoy cried, but still it's refreshing to see that Flemish and blemish can occasionally live together.

My first impressions of Belgium are very positive. It doesn't seem a cutthroat society. There are many nice shops, elegant people, beautiful houses, lots of green, many farms with animals near cities, which has to be a good sign. There seem to be few cars (thousands of bikes are parked in front of the station – what a contrast to many other European cities) and relatively few people around. Maybe that's the trick.

Amazing that this lovely place is only around an hour's drive from Calais.

Tomorrow morning, off to Leiden.

AG

Confession

As I write this, I have two books on my desk and about three hundred and fifty (and growing) on the bookshelves around me. The two books are a collection of poetry that I published around five years ago, A Modern Bestiary, and the finished copy of my first novel, Bestseller, to be launched at the London Book Fair on 20th April. The three hundred and fifty books around me are the ones I published over the last ten years, first at Hesperus Press and then at Alma Books and Oneworld Classics, most of them works in translation by some of the authors I admire most in world literature. Although I am very proud of my achievements as a publisher, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that, really, my heart is in writing.

I could actually go further and say that if I became a publisher it was probably only in order to get my own works published. . .

AG

Bestseller Day!

The book, my book, has come back from the printers – what a wonderful job they did. I was almost afraid to open it, in case a glaring typo would jump out at me. However, Bestseller passed the flick-through test, the scariest one.

It was an amazing week, with the Oneworld Classics and the Alma Books catalogues sent to the printers and the preparation for the launch of our Overture Opera Guides.

Please have a look at the Oneworld Classics catalogue here, and the Alma Books one here. Or if you prefer a hardcopy, please send us a message.

Off on a trip to Holland and Flanders next week – I hope I'll be able to post reports – otherwise I'll talk to you when I'm back.

AG