My thanks to Anna Sinclair for submerging herself in the complicated fret of this project: format conversions, disintegrating or fast-breeding emails, wearisome scanning sessions, self-cannibalizing disks. The whole landfill of unanchored words. To say nothing of the eccentricities of the local postal service (sacks in the canal, packages stacked on doorsteps, thwarted deliveries that were never recaptured). If a potential contribution to our City of Disappearances failed to reach me, its fate should be seen as a very proper response to the enterprise.
I’m grateful to all those who responded to my impossible demand: demonstrate disappearance. And I’m especially grateful to Michael Moorcock and Sarah Wise, who understood – better than I did – just what was required: entries for an ever-expanding encyclopaedia of loss.
The support and enthusiasm of my editors at Hamish Hamilton – Simon Prosser, Juliette Mitchell, Francesca Main, Sarah Coward – is much appreciated. Discussions with my agent, John Richard Parker, helped me to shape the way the book evolved.
[I. S.]
‘Battle of Mudchute’ by Steve Beard is extracted from his novel Meat Puppet Cabaret, published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2006.
‘Dora’s Story: Lost and Found’ by Kathi Diamant is extracted, with the author’s permission, from Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003).
Extracts from Place are published by permission of Allen Fisher. Place was reissued in a handsome new edition by Reality Street (Hastings, 2005). Our thanks to the editor, Ken Edwards.
‘The GLC Abolished’ by Bill Griffiths was first published in the collection Future Exiles: 3 London Poets (London: Paladin, 1992).
‘The Cellar in Gray’s Inn Road, WC1’ is extracted from The Old House (A Generation of Lawyers) by Malcolm Letts (London: Frederick Muller, 1942). With thanks to Amanda Sebestyen for bringing this to my attention.
Rachel Lichtenstein gives thanks to Miriam Becker, Avram Stencl’s greatniece, for permission to publish the poem ‘Where “Whitechapel” Stood’ (translated by Elinor Robinson from the sequence ‘Whitechapel’ in Yoyrl Almanakh (1956); a special celebratory edition of Loshn un Lebn, with a cycle of forty-one poems about Whitechapel, to mark 300 years of continuous Jewish life in England); and to Susannah Rayner, Head Archivist at SOAS, for permission to look at the Stencl archives. To Majer Bogdanski, Derek Reed, Bill Fishman and Tony Laurence for interviews conducted with Rachel Lichtenstein. Special thanks to Bill Fishman for his support and advice.
Alexis Lykiard’s ‘Vanishing Hero, Vanished Place’, written for May Day 2004, was originally published in a longer version in the periodical Tears in the Fence (Autumn 2004). Our thanks to the editor, David Caddy, for permission to reprint.
Jeff Nuttall’s ‘The Singing Ted’ was originally published, in a fuller version, in Poetry Information, 9/10 (Spring 1974). Thanks to the editor, Peter Hodgkiss, to Nuttall’s estate and to Jill Ritchie.
Extracts from Robinson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) are published by permission of the author, Chris Petit.
Tom Raworth’s A Serial Biography was originally published by Fulcrum Press (1969). The extracts used here are by permission of the author.
The interviews with Derek Raymond are taken from The Cardinal and the Corpse, a documentary made by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair for Illuminations Films. With thanks to Martin Stone for permission to revive his Silvertown elegy from that production. (And to Madeleine Sinclair for elegant and accurate transcripts.)
‘Récits’ by James Sallis was first published in the Transatlantic Review (1970).
John Seed’s poems are extracted from Pictures from Mayhew (London 1850), published by Shearsman Books (Exeter, 2005). Our thanks to author and publisher.
‘Fallujah London’ by Iain Sinclair was originally published in the London Review of Books as ‘Museums of Melancholy’.
‘Grub Street’ by Alan Wall is indebted to Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture by Pat Rogers (London: Methuen, 1972).
Marina Warner gives many thanks to Tom Fisher for making inquiries in local pubs on her behalf for ‘Old Hags’.
‘The Life of It’ by John Welch first appeared in PN Review.
‘Nova Scotia Gardens’ is extracted from The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise, published in 2004 by Jonathan Cape and in 2005 as a Pimlico paperback. Thanks to Will Sulkin (publisher), Sarah Wise and Jonathan Cape for permission to reprint.
With thanks for the photographs and illustrations to: Paul Buck (Hairdressers’ Journal, photo: Michael Barnett, 1965), N. Diamond, Nick Frewin, Patrick Keiller, Andrew Kötting, Rachel Lichtenstein, Claire McNamee, Michael Moorcock, Jill Richards, Marina Warner, Carol Williams and the National Railway Museum (BTC Clapham 911/54). (Other photographs were taken by Iain Sinclair.)