Hub Editions

For thirty years I handmade paperback books. They were perfect-bound, with a card cover & dust jacket. I designed individual dust jacket free of charge because I enjoyed doing so.

I never wanted to be overwhelmed with work having freed myself from wage-slavery and choosing what I did and when I did it. .

In thirty years, there were more than 200 Hub texts published for friends & colleagues, including books of haiku, proper poems, novels and autobiography – a fair estimate tells me I have hand-made around fifteen thousand individual books in that time. I never made much out of it.

It was a cottage industry and was physically somewhat of a strain. I have now ceased doing things for other people regretfully.

For more than ten years Hub Editions was the major publisher of James Kirkup’s haiku and tanka and other poems…

I continue to handmake my own publications – books of poetry, haiku and a series which started in 2001 called ROOM

The Room Series

Amongst other titles of my own now is a continuing series with the general title ‘ROOM’ of which there have now been 16 volumes of over 200 pages each. For several years I had been contemplating producing a guide to the writings of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky & Maurice Nicoll; their writing on 4th Way studies is both compendious and sprawling; as it turns out, several people have had a go at publishing what could be called ‘Gurdjieff Made Simple’ books; but all the time I’ve been accumulating notes towards a guide, I’ve had Gurdjieff on my shoulder more and more loudly saying that followers of the 4th Way have to be made to work hard—NOTHING SHOULD BE GIVEN IN A READY-MADE FORM. I have both wanted to produce the guide and have held off because I felt myself falling into the trap of producing a mechanical guide to how to stop being a machine. Rather than jettison the thinking I’ve done, I tip much of what I have written into the ROOM books: they can be described as a kind of ‘farrago’ or ramble round my library using 4th Way studies both incidentally and practically. They are political, literary, philosophical, autobiographical rambles.

I have now written & published a book on Mr G & Mr O called There Must be Something More to Life than This which is something Ouspensky said you had to be able to say to qualify as a follower of The Fourth Way.