London & Glenn Thompson
This is my first time in London and I'm loving it. Oxford Street transports me back to Downtown Brooklyn and I eat roti at a Jamaican restaurant with the best pepper sauce I've had in year (and they don't sell it!). It's rainy and the multitude of shoppers jam-packed with umbrellas poking each other's eyes out gives me a buzz: Over there a car drives through a puddle and splash! That pretty girl is now all wet! Like New York, London is full of transported souls, all seeming a vital part of the pulse of the city. As I walk down the streets, I start thinking about Glenn Thompson.
Glenn Thompson used to work upstairs from Marie's at 625 Broadway. He owned Harlem River Press, Writers & Readers and Black Butterfly Books. He flirted shamelessly with me and everytime he flew to London, he'd bring me back a box of chocolates. At this part of his life, his brother had reentered, and we: Marie, Glenn, his brother, myself would hang out at Gonzales Gonzales downstairs and drink margheritas. I loved mine with salt and no ice. His face was caramel: And I'm not just talking color but texture--smooth and shiny.
So anyway, I find myself thinking about Glenn cause he passed away in 2001. I never really dealt with that, just treated it from afar. So I decided to try to find out what was left of his company here in London (he was based both in NYC and in London) and then I find his obituary and start to cry. I just want to take this moment to send Glenn my love. I know there are many of you reading this who feel the same. Rest in Peace Glenn--You made our lives so much richer & I look forward to eating some chocolate and sipping margheritas with you again one day.
Here's the Obituary from The Guardian:
Glenn Thompson
A pioneering black publisher, he saw books as a window for opening the minds of the oppressed
John Berger and Margaret Busby
Wednesday September 12, 2001
The Guardian
It is difficult to write about a hero, because a hero is defined not only by his qualities but by his actions. And whereas qualities can be enumerated in an obituary, actions, if they are made to be clear, demand another kind of undying space. Glenn Thompson, a pioneering publisher who has died aged 60, was for me - and many others - a hero.
He was born in Brooklyn, to George and Clara Thompson, but his mother died when he was 11 and, shortly afterwards, his father was sent to prison. Glenn, and his younger brother Denis, spent their time on the streets of Harlem, and were later placed in institutions. His gratitude to an unknown teacher who taught him to read and write was to polarise the rest of his life.
Books became the centre of it because they opened this world, the one he had known on the streets. He was a man of action, and the act of his life was that of offering literacy, in all its forms, because with this gift comes the chance of entering history and making choices.
Glenn had the slender brown hands of a trumpeter. A recent personal memory, when he was already seriously ill, is of him listening, transported, to a CD of Johnny Hartman singing with John Coltrane.
He left New York for Europe in his early 20s, and hitch-hiked to India and Nepal, where he had a rendezvous with a woman with whom he had fallen in love. He fell in love many times - in defiance of the indifference and basic hostility that often reside in "reasonable" behaviour.
Leaving Asia, he worked for two years on a kibbutz in Israel. It was there, I imagine, that he first encountered the experience of a working collective. Books for him were inseparable not only from action, but from the principle of sharing. Hence his life-long intransigence to everything elitist. After Israel, he returned to New York to set up a reading clinic for illiterate Puerto Ricans.
Glenn's heroes were the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Friere (The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed), the subversive philosopher Van Illich (After Deschooling What?) and, more recently, the Indian storyteller Arundhati Roy, who wrote The God Of Small Things about a deity who supports the peasants of Kerala in their fight to keep their land, threatened today by the construction of merely money-serving dams. For Glenn, literacy was more than the capacity to read, it was the capacity to lay claim to a legitimate inheritance.
In the late 1960s, he came to London with his first wife, Margaret Goseley, and set up the bookshop and cultural meeting point Centerprise, in Dalston. Against establishment predictions - polite variants on the theme "pearls before swine" - the project worked, and still flourishes. In 1972, Centerprise printed its first book of poems by the black poet Vivian Usherwood. Glenn believed that one reason for publishing books was to allow existing voices to converse with world literature. Prophetically, he imagined books as websites.
In 1974, with his second wife, Sian Williams, and others, he started fullscale publishing with the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, most notably producing the first Beginners books, which explained to readers - not in an arduous, condescending manner, but with a certain streetwise insolence - the theoretical heritage of Marx, Einstein, Castro, Darwin, etc. It also published fiction by, among others, Neil Jordan and myself.
What was it that made Glenn so persuasive? He encouraged, he exaggerated, he was obstinate, when necessary he oversimplified. He was protective, not of himself but of others. He was secretive, he was headstrong, he had the talent of a guerrilla commander in the sense that he was already within himself a demonstration, a visible proof, of the dreamt-of victory being struggled for.
Yet, finally, what made him persuasive, despite his misjudgments, was that all his excesses were so evidently the result of a gigantic desire to give. As often happens in action, people followed him closely because he was so vulnerable in taking them to where they would otherwise not go.
After a decade, the London Cooperative went bankrupt, and Glenn returned to Harlem, where he published black writers and, particularly, poets such as Asha Bandele, Safiya Henderson-Holmes and Mari Evans. If poetry was the literary form he responded to most naturally, it was perhaps because poetry draws windows everywhere - and Glenn loved windows as much as he hated shut doors.
A few years ago in Zimbabwe, he ran a series of workshops, teaching local would-be publishers how to produce independent books. He returned to Britain last year, to be with his family and continue publishing with his partner, Vastiana Belfon.
Condemned by cancer, Glenn oversaw his own death like a general. He had his own special way of walking down streets and through crowds. He was both confident and wary. He knew where he was going and nobody was going to stop him, but if they were there, he spotted them. The last time I saw him walking like this was on a crowded platform at the Gare du Nord in Paris in July.
He leaves three children, Shoshannah, Benjamin and Elisha, and two grandchildren, Nathaniel and Robin.
As his epitaph, I would quote from a poem by Asha Bandele in her book Absence In The Palms Of My Hand, which Glenn published five years ago in New York:
& if we don't start it up move it along
make some noise
then
those of us who know
will never convince
those of us
who don't know
Margaret Busby writes:
Never once was Glenn Thompson deterred from his mission to make a difference through publishing. "It isn't so much how you do it, it's that you do it" was a precept he espoused to make available books with the potential to change people's lives, and he was dismayed that current trends in the industry threaten that sort of publishing. His belief in knowledge being accessible, and in giving voice to those denied the opportunity to be heard - whether Palestinian or African-American - was connected with his own route to reading and the written word.
Though his schooldays were over by the age of 14, his education had just begun, taking off from the Beat cafes of Greenwich Village: "Everytime I heard someone mention a book, I read it. I began to dream of getting out of New York." Reading Camus made him want to go to North Africa, so he took a freighter to Tangiers. Over the next 4 years, he crossed the desert in Iran, travelled overland from Germany to Kathmandu and back, to India, Turkey, France, Greece, Holland, Nepal, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Israel. Ultimately, he pitched up in London in 1968.
Taking a job as a youth worker in Hackney, he wondered why the area had a quarter of a million people but no bookshop, and was told that working-class people don't read. So, in 1970, he started Centerprise, out of which developed a local publishing project, initially producing poetry by East End schoolchildren. The Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative was a logical extension of that maverick instinct.
Glenn's commitment to community and to black issues never wavered - and his was a global conception of black, encompassing all people of colour. Had time permitted, he would have expanded his children's books programme to include an Indian perspective. A title he was inordinately proud to have published was Toni Morrison For Beginners, in Shona, produced in Zimbabwe in 2 weeks; that he could pass on his knowledge and enable people with no previous publishing experience mattered immensely. He was generous to a fault with the time he gave to anyone who sought information from him; whoever didn't know, he wanted to tell.
Education was key to his publishing philosophy, and his mission to address areas of political importance, however sensitive, brooked no argument. While the innovatory Beginners series reached readers from all backgrounds, and those meeting Glenn for the first time were often surprised to realise he was black, his dedication to communicating different aspects of the black experience is evident in his other imprints from the 1980s, Harlem River Press and Black Butterfly Children's Books.
He published young performance poets before they were fashionable, and gave a start to many authors later taken up by major mainstream publishing houses, including Iyanla Vanzant.
Concerned that those sensitive to the needs of black children should write and illustrate books intended for them, he published bestselling works by Eloise Greenfield and Jan Spivey Gilchrist. Among other significant titles was the collection In Defence Of Mumia, which won the Firecracker Award.
Glenn could be bone headed about what he considered matters of principle, misguided pride sometimes clouded his better judgment, and, over the years, he was embroiled in fallings out (and back in) with colleagues, friends and family. But, equally, he inspired unstinting loyalty and affection, whether from co-director Deborah Dyson, who continues to run the New York office of Writers and Readers Inc, or from close associates such as Paul Coates of Black Classic Press, and Kassahun Checole of Africa World Press, who both flew to London to be with Glenn on the day he died.
His passion and single-minded vision are unforgettable: "Publishing is about communication. To communicate from one group to another, to take something very parochial and make it international, that's what it's all about."
• Glenn Thompson, publisher, born September 24 1940; died September 7 2001
Glenn Thompson used to work upstairs from Marie's at 625 Broadway. He owned Harlem River Press, Writers & Readers and Black Butterfly Books. He flirted shamelessly with me and everytime he flew to London, he'd bring me back a box of chocolates. At this part of his life, his brother had reentered, and we: Marie, Glenn, his brother, myself would hang out at Gonzales Gonzales downstairs and drink margheritas. I loved mine with salt and no ice. His face was caramel: And I'm not just talking color but texture--smooth and shiny.
So anyway, I find myself thinking about Glenn cause he passed away in 2001. I never really dealt with that, just treated it from afar. So I decided to try to find out what was left of his company here in London (he was based both in NYC and in London) and then I find his obituary and start to cry. I just want to take this moment to send Glenn my love. I know there are many of you reading this who feel the same. Rest in Peace Glenn--You made our lives so much richer & I look forward to eating some chocolate and sipping margheritas with you again one day.
Here's the Obituary from The Guardian:
Glenn Thompson
A pioneering black publisher, he saw books as a window for opening the minds of the oppressed
John Berger and Margaret Busby
Wednesday September 12, 2001
The Guardian
It is difficult to write about a hero, because a hero is defined not only by his qualities but by his actions. And whereas qualities can be enumerated in an obituary, actions, if they are made to be clear, demand another kind of undying space. Glenn Thompson, a pioneering publisher who has died aged 60, was for me - and many others - a hero.
He was born in Brooklyn, to George and Clara Thompson, but his mother died when he was 11 and, shortly afterwards, his father was sent to prison. Glenn, and his younger brother Denis, spent their time on the streets of Harlem, and were later placed in institutions. His gratitude to an unknown teacher who taught him to read and write was to polarise the rest of his life.
Books became the centre of it because they opened this world, the one he had known on the streets. He was a man of action, and the act of his life was that of offering literacy, in all its forms, because with this gift comes the chance of entering history and making choices.
Glenn had the slender brown hands of a trumpeter. A recent personal memory, when he was already seriously ill, is of him listening, transported, to a CD of Johnny Hartman singing with John Coltrane.
He left New York for Europe in his early 20s, and hitch-hiked to India and Nepal, where he had a rendezvous with a woman with whom he had fallen in love. He fell in love many times - in defiance of the indifference and basic hostility that often reside in "reasonable" behaviour.
Leaving Asia, he worked for two years on a kibbutz in Israel. It was there, I imagine, that he first encountered the experience of a working collective. Books for him were inseparable not only from action, but from the principle of sharing. Hence his life-long intransigence to everything elitist. After Israel, he returned to New York to set up a reading clinic for illiterate Puerto Ricans.
Glenn's heroes were the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Friere (The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed), the subversive philosopher Van Illich (After Deschooling What?) and, more recently, the Indian storyteller Arundhati Roy, who wrote The God Of Small Things about a deity who supports the peasants of Kerala in their fight to keep their land, threatened today by the construction of merely money-serving dams. For Glenn, literacy was more than the capacity to read, it was the capacity to lay claim to a legitimate inheritance.
In the late 1960s, he came to London with his first wife, Margaret Goseley, and set up the bookshop and cultural meeting point Centerprise, in Dalston. Against establishment predictions - polite variants on the theme "pearls before swine" - the project worked, and still flourishes. In 1972, Centerprise printed its first book of poems by the black poet Vivian Usherwood. Glenn believed that one reason for publishing books was to allow existing voices to converse with world literature. Prophetically, he imagined books as websites.
In 1974, with his second wife, Sian Williams, and others, he started fullscale publishing with the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, most notably producing the first Beginners books, which explained to readers - not in an arduous, condescending manner, but with a certain streetwise insolence - the theoretical heritage of Marx, Einstein, Castro, Darwin, etc. It also published fiction by, among others, Neil Jordan and myself.
What was it that made Glenn so persuasive? He encouraged, he exaggerated, he was obstinate, when necessary he oversimplified. He was protective, not of himself but of others. He was secretive, he was headstrong, he had the talent of a guerrilla commander in the sense that he was already within himself a demonstration, a visible proof, of the dreamt-of victory being struggled for.
Yet, finally, what made him persuasive, despite his misjudgments, was that all his excesses were so evidently the result of a gigantic desire to give. As often happens in action, people followed him closely because he was so vulnerable in taking them to where they would otherwise not go.
After a decade, the London Cooperative went bankrupt, and Glenn returned to Harlem, where he published black writers and, particularly, poets such as Asha Bandele, Safiya Henderson-Holmes and Mari Evans. If poetry was the literary form he responded to most naturally, it was perhaps because poetry draws windows everywhere - and Glenn loved windows as much as he hated shut doors.
A few years ago in Zimbabwe, he ran a series of workshops, teaching local would-be publishers how to produce independent books. He returned to Britain last year, to be with his family and continue publishing with his partner, Vastiana Belfon.
Condemned by cancer, Glenn oversaw his own death like a general. He had his own special way of walking down streets and through crowds. He was both confident and wary. He knew where he was going and nobody was going to stop him, but if they were there, he spotted them. The last time I saw him walking like this was on a crowded platform at the Gare du Nord in Paris in July.
He leaves three children, Shoshannah, Benjamin and Elisha, and two grandchildren, Nathaniel and Robin.
As his epitaph, I would quote from a poem by Asha Bandele in her book Absence In The Palms Of My Hand, which Glenn published five years ago in New York:
& if we don't start it up move it along
make some noise
then
those of us who know
will never convince
those of us
who don't know
Margaret Busby writes:
Never once was Glenn Thompson deterred from his mission to make a difference through publishing. "It isn't so much how you do it, it's that you do it" was a precept he espoused to make available books with the potential to change people's lives, and he was dismayed that current trends in the industry threaten that sort of publishing. His belief in knowledge being accessible, and in giving voice to those denied the opportunity to be heard - whether Palestinian or African-American - was connected with his own route to reading and the written word.
Though his schooldays were over by the age of 14, his education had just begun, taking off from the Beat cafes of Greenwich Village: "Everytime I heard someone mention a book, I read it. I began to dream of getting out of New York." Reading Camus made him want to go to North Africa, so he took a freighter to Tangiers. Over the next 4 years, he crossed the desert in Iran, travelled overland from Germany to Kathmandu and back, to India, Turkey, France, Greece, Holland, Nepal, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Israel. Ultimately, he pitched up in London in 1968.
Taking a job as a youth worker in Hackney, he wondered why the area had a quarter of a million people but no bookshop, and was told that working-class people don't read. So, in 1970, he started Centerprise, out of which developed a local publishing project, initially producing poetry by East End schoolchildren. The Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative was a logical extension of that maverick instinct.
Glenn's commitment to community and to black issues never wavered - and his was a global conception of black, encompassing all people of colour. Had time permitted, he would have expanded his children's books programme to include an Indian perspective. A title he was inordinately proud to have published was Toni Morrison For Beginners, in Shona, produced in Zimbabwe in 2 weeks; that he could pass on his knowledge and enable people with no previous publishing experience mattered immensely. He was generous to a fault with the time he gave to anyone who sought information from him; whoever didn't know, he wanted to tell.
Education was key to his publishing philosophy, and his mission to address areas of political importance, however sensitive, brooked no argument. While the innovatory Beginners series reached readers from all backgrounds, and those meeting Glenn for the first time were often surprised to realise he was black, his dedication to communicating different aspects of the black experience is evident in his other imprints from the 1980s, Harlem River Press and Black Butterfly Children's Books.
He published young performance poets before they were fashionable, and gave a start to many authors later taken up by major mainstream publishing houses, including Iyanla Vanzant.
Concerned that those sensitive to the needs of black children should write and illustrate books intended for them, he published bestselling works by Eloise Greenfield and Jan Spivey Gilchrist. Among other significant titles was the collection In Defence Of Mumia, which won the Firecracker Award.
Glenn could be bone headed about what he considered matters of principle, misguided pride sometimes clouded his better judgment, and, over the years, he was embroiled in fallings out (and back in) with colleagues, friends and family. But, equally, he inspired unstinting loyalty and affection, whether from co-director Deborah Dyson, who continues to run the New York office of Writers and Readers Inc, or from close associates such as Paul Coates of Black Classic Press, and Kassahun Checole of Africa World Press, who both flew to London to be with Glenn on the day he died.
His passion and single-minded vision are unforgettable: "Publishing is about communication. To communicate from one group to another, to take something very parochial and make it international, that's what it's all about."
• Glenn Thompson, publisher, born September 24 1940; died September 7 2001
Comments
Who could know Glenn and read this without feeling blessed and privileged that he was in our lives and more personally for me...Finding a space and MOVING me to 625; publishing my authors;hanging out at Farellis (sp)and other watering holes; remembering our intense disagreements and equally as intense love and respect for each other, and so much more...and always missing his intellect,his joie de vivre, quiet revolutionary SPIRIT deeply.
Love you.
mdb