The Thousands

With every Jo Blogs getting published these days, it’s easy to think to yourself, ‘Well, why can’t I be a author? I know grammar and have a folio comprising of stuff I writes, like all the time my opinions count’. Well, SUGAR IN THE AIR has made me realise the second reason you shouldn’t be published.

Having been out of print for decades and plucked from obscurity this year by Hyphen Press, working with Stuart Bailey (of DOT DOT DOT and Dexter Sinister), SUGAR IN THE AIR – first published 1937 – demonstrates why we should be saving our trees to rescue good books instead of writing new ones.**And it shows that we don’t have any new ideas, anyway. It’s a manifesto for frustrated designers; it’s a reason to be proud of making things as opposed to selling them. It’s basically a critique of the mass-market approach to commerce. Yep. Too late, Gladwell. But wait, there’s more. It’s also a love story! Weird to read a narrative that so closely mirrors your own life even though the protagonist uses carbon paper and thinks of Nazis as guys with nice uniforms.

Synopsis: Poor old Mr Pry gets hired by a big dumb company to create glucose from the atoms in the air. (Substitute the brief you were just handed.) Weirdly, he actually does it. (This, as you know, is when things start to go wrong.)