OU blog

Personal Blogs

Stylised image of a figure dancing

My Publishing House

Thursday 9 July 2026 at 07:23
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Martin Cadwell, Thursday 9 July 2026 at 10:49

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

Cadwell NOT Caldwell

silhouette of a female face in profile

My Publishing House

[4 minute read ] 

In the city library a few days ago, I fell into a conversation with a seated librarian behind her desk. When I say 'fell' I mean I engineered it by looking at her as I approached. And, when I say 'conversation' I mean she asked questions and I answered.

       'Can I help you?' she smiled at me.

       'Yes. I am looking for a book on publishing.' I thought that was specific enough but after a minute or two her creased brow was matched by her exasperated, 'It would help if you could be a little more specific!'

       'Ah! Yes. I see. There is a big gap in the book publishing world. There is vanity publishing at one end and the huge multi-national publishers at the other end; you know the ones who own every other smaller publishing house.'

       'The big four.' she satisfyingly smiled.

       'Tesco, Asda....Are we talking about supermarkets now?' I hoped it was amusing, but really I wanted, as usual, to show off a little, and bizarre is my style.

She smiled that same smile that meant she had been dealing with the weak public for a long time. I suppose to her, I had just interjected an 'ad' into a quite dull YouTube video. I pressed the 'Skip' button for her, and moved on.

      'I am interested in, perhaps, opening a very tiny publishers of books and such-like, and really have no clue about the industry, so I was wondering if you have a book on publishing that might give me an insight.'

     '705' She didn't leave it there though. She wasn't rude. She didn't say it tiredly. 'They are a monopoly.' I didn't let it go. 'They', 'Big Four' and 'monopoly' just didn't square with me because I knew I know the actual word for a group of controlling influencers in a market.

       'Not a monopoly, is it? There's an actual word for it, but it escapes me right now.' I blurted.

She looked at me tiredly, but with some compassion.  I could see her think, 'So what? Is it that important to you to correct me? And trying to be comedic in the first instance too?'

She told me where to go. You wish! No, she directed me towards the right place. The nearest shelf to where we were sitting, though still twenty to thirty metres away (60 - 90 feet). I walked the whole of the rest of the library floor, looking, and then worked my way back towards the desk looking for 705. I got lost twice and ended up in the Cookery section and then the Pregnancy section.

You should remember that I had been drinking the 'orange squash' with its mind-altering sweeteners in them, so it wasn't my  confusion I was carrying; it was the confusion of the chemistry and psychiatric world that set my thoughts into turbulence at that time. I got home with books I neither needed, nor had time to read, but only a single book on publishing; a book published in 2000! How relevant is a book that old? It has to have something in it, right? Time will tell, but I have to have an open mind and prepare to freely extrapolate from it to loosely compare ideas to modern practices; modern practice I have yet to read about or discover. I need to remember what could now be obsolete.

It often takes a great deal of effort to get even the tiniest piece of work done, or gain the key statement in a book before we can actually set about making progress. I call the 'key' statement, 'the 1% that I must seek'. It is the crucial piece that holds everything together, the 'king-pin'. So, I shall have to read the entire ?outdated? book on publishing, just in case I learn something that allows me to learn something elsewhere at a later time. 

       'More wine, sir?'

       'No. Thank you, Jeeves. I shall need a clear head for a period.'

       'Very good sir.'

       'Oh, one more thing, Jeeves. Re-instate the pastry-chef, would you? This might take a while.'

Jeeves cocked an eyebrow but I didn't elaborate. 'Very good sir'. He left but not before he poked the fire a little, which sent exciting crackles into the air. The book is not that good, I thought.

Reality struck, last night, when I spluttered a dead fly out of my mouth along with the last dregs of cold and rancidly-cheap coffee I had swigged from my mug. Hmmm. Things were different when things were different in the past. I could not help but think of my father showing me how to make a 'weasel', 'pop' with a tin of Tate and Lyles Golden Syrup. Of course, all he did was turn the tin upside-down and then after a few seconds turn it right-side-up and open the lid. The empty air space that had temporarily been at the bottom of the tin rose through the syrup and 'popped' across the whole of the contents of the tin. It isn't really 'pop goes the weasel' because that  is an old dish much in the same socio-economic category as bread and dripping, I think. It has half a pound of tuppenny rice and half a pound of treacle in it, anyway.

Just like the 'pop' or the 'weasel' my head was feeling treacley and glutinous and everything inside was slipping, but not at all like the beauty of Picasso's 'Persistence of Memory' with the melting clock. Time had passed, but nothing had 'stuck' except what most of us would throw away with the empty Golden Syrup tin; the sticky syrup that stubbornly lines the inside and no spoon will shift. That persistence would get washed away and my mind would again be an empty receptacle, but, you know what? I didn't just sit and stare into mid-space and make stuff up, like I normally do. Fantasy is great if you can afford to be poor in coin, but rich in mind, I always say. Well, if I remember it, I will from now on...to myself, of course, maybe; because that maxim is not really that good, is it? But, it's a start.

Tags: persistence, library, publishing, book
Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Stylised image of a figure dancing

Understanding through Sensuality

Wednesday 4 March 2026 at 08:33
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Martin Cadwell, Wednesday 4 March 2026 at 10:02

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

silhouette of a female face in profile

[ 4 minute read ]

Understanding through sensuality

Understand not just learn

 

Every now and then I put my books away, back in my library (bookcases in the living room), but because my library is so far away from my office (also in my living room) I find that I select a book, carry it to my office, and tend not to immediately return it to my library (within arms reach of my desk). If I was married or lived with someone I suspect I might be more inclined to tidiness and even notice some of the biscuit crumbs that like to sneak up to the books on the floor that I haven't moved for a month or so. Oh! I sweep but I don't lift the books.

I suppose just like deliberately paying attention to someone's garden we might try to fathom how their mind works, we might also, by looking at the books someone has recently read or, in my case fail to return to the bookcases, glean some further understanding of what either entertains or distracts someone. Once, in a job interview I was asked, 'What distracts you?' The question was code for how many times a day do you look at your phone?

Some of the books on my floor, which though they are at the lowest elevation they might be at, they are in the most favoured place. Far from them being considered lowly and not important enough to be in a protected environment, they are the most interesting books to me, at this time.

Of course, there is the Roget's Thesaurus, The Concise Oxford Dictionary and Simply Psychology. There is also the Oxford Latin Dictionary; The Undercover Economist; Zen and the Brain; Encyclopedia of Superstitions; and The Fiction Writer's Handbook. The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman is in the bathroom because it has very short chapters. 

A new arrival to the floor is an AS and A2 revision book on Religious Studies.

I have three lap tops and one peripheral monitor and my garden is scrappy but at present has some Giant Winter leeks growing in it. There are about twenty growing cuttings from a Box shrub, and about twenty to thirty garlic plants struggling, as well as, when I put them outside each day, three heritage tomato plants and a single Bell Pepper plant from last season that I somehow managed to overwinter in my bedroom.

What can we deduce from this?

I like words; a lot! I am not fascinated but interested by how plants grow and like to lazily experiment with them; and computing is important to me. Actually, the last is a bit misleading in that the reason I have three laptops is because I separate tasks between the three in order that there is no obvious connectivity between all my digital actions. One of them never goes online.

The A3 and A4 size pieces of paper Blu-tacked to my walls with pithy paragraphs taken from books and online are the give-away. I am focused on understanding, which is a step beyond learning. They remain on my walls because I like to try to apply templates across different disciplines.

Yesterday, I attended a lecture on Reflective Commentaries (following some creative writing). I really wanted to contribute by telling the room that a complex system always starts with a simple system, and that a complex system cannot be created without there first being a simple system. That is the theory given by John Gall, a Systems Theorist. I had this in mind when I asked the question, 'Do you think it is a good idea to write a skeleton piece and then embroider literary devices onto it?' and later stated, 'I shall finish the story, write the reflection, and then revisit the story to make changes.'

People who highlight passages in text books and dog-ear the pages are doing the same as me with my 'Posters of Wisdom' on my walls, the latter of the two, dog-earin, is by far the furthest I would deface any book. Even if we have no bookmarks we do have cereal boxes or something to cut up into strips. The good thing about cereal boxes and strips of paper is that we can write the annotations on them that we would otherwise have written on the pages. The best thing about this is that we can remove the annotations on the strips of paper and read the text again unfettered by our prior thoughts and circumscribed beliefs. That, for me, is more about understanding than learning.

My neighbour was upset when I told him I have not read his wife's published cookery book, which they gave me a few years ago. I think he was upset because he felt I have a duty to read it because his wife put so much effort into recording her recipes and actions and then went through the publishing process. I have no duty to fulfill. Certainly, as someone with a PhD in Electronic Engineering, he was puzzled when I told him I don't follow recipes; I experiment. I may not be a good cook, but, effectively, the recipe book is as much use to me as a guidebook on Ancient Athens to someone of the period who lives in Athens, or something thereabouts in value. I like to learn and understand flavours, and find new combinations; you know, Basil goes with Tomatoes and you can't put lemon juice on mushrooms but you can put it in scrambled eggs.

I suppose I am a sensualist.

Tags: sensual, sensuality, understand, learn, learning, library, books, personal, understanding, focus
Permalink Add your comment
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 627688