Writings for Mike
Updated 27th March 2007
![[Mike Hart]](Mike.jpg)
Mike Hart, 1948-2002
Mike Hart was a bookseller who really knew and loved books. He was a great supporter of new writing and of contemporary poetry in particular. Tom Raworth has written that Mike was a powerhouse for poetry during his years at Compendium. In his 20 years at Compendium bookshop in Camden Town he was the guy at the front desk that would always be able to tell you what was going on in the poetry scene - who was giving a reading, who had a new book out, what was happening with the small independent presses. And almost invariably Mike would introduce you to some author you'd never heard of but whose writing was just what you wanted. Ivor Cutler wrote of one such occasion when Mike introduced him to a book that was so exhilarating that it reminded him why he started writing in the first place. A great many people had the same experience with Mike - being reminded ourselves of why we became readers and why we continue to read.
The aim of this space on the internet is to provide an opportunity for people to remember Mike. A growing and living remembering of Mike through writing.
Please feel free to email Peter Manson (see homepage for email address) with your memories and tributes to Mike. They will be posted here as received.
John Hart
[Follow these links to view obituaries of Mike Hart at the Guardian and booktrade.info websites.]
cris cheek | Adrian Clarke | Peter Feeley | Alec Finlay
Scott McGowan | Peter Middleton | Tom O'Hagan
Simon Perril | Tom Raworth | Robert Sheppard | David Toop
Mike is also remembered in this article by Steve Beresford from Paris Transatlantic magazine.
Sadness here too on this. Mike was part of a line that included Paul Hammond and Nick Kimberley. Compendium had 3 shops when i first went there. Now it's gone completely and aside from bookfairs and the bookartbookshop and readings there's nowhere to browse a stock of recent small press publications in London - is there? Mike was a generous guy with a lovely soft sense of humour. The twinkle in his eyes which drove his big heart is something i'll always carry as was the fierceness of commitment that underpinned it. We went and had lunch together several times with Kathy Acker when she was in town. A sandwich of caustic asides between tender conversations and runaway giggles. Mike had one of those infectious giggles verging on muggsy from the whacky races. When we were just the two of us talk often turned to Tom Leonard and Bruce Andrews and Kathy and The Fugs.
good to know him some
sad to hear he's gone
he made a difference
love and love
cris
I had dealings with Mike at Compendium from the mid 80s on. When I took in Writers Forum titles he always paid cash up front "for Bob", gave me a generous discount on my own purchases and was always glad to set up launches on the shop premises. Not only that, he was warm, drily humerous, and, as far as I could make out, wholly unegotistical - I must have chatted to him for hours, all told, but never found out much about him beyond something of his musical tastes. I bumped into him outside Murder One - it must have been in the spring - and thought he looked unwell, but, eyes twinkling, he was as genial as ever. I feel like crying.
Adrian
I knew Mike Hart as a school friend in Glasgow at St Aloysius College. He was always at the cutting edge of music and introduced me and many of our friends to the blues and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry at a time when radio was playing middle of the road. He explained the influences that were shaping British music at the time so that we started listening to the rough originals alongside the pop versions. He showed me how to hold a guitar and tried to teach me to play the mouth organ properly. He was a strong influence on me and others yet in a gentle way. He had a great sense of humour and an ability to challenge accepted standards but was never destructive. I lost touch with him many years ago but I have always considered him one of my friends. I have just learned of his death and am truly saddened despite the thirty odd years since we last met. I often imagined I would meet him again and have a chat about how life had treated us. Now I know I never will. Mike was clearly a good guy and much loved.
Peter Feeley
the empty table
for mike & john hart
Mike Is liKing thEse
tHe lAtest arRivals Table
I recently found your tribute web page to Mike Hart and it brought back some memories of the man who I met by chance back in the mid 1990s.
At that time I was playing in a blues band that was getting some press attention in Glasgow and Mike's brother was a photographer who took some photographs of the band on one occasion at one of our gigs. Mike was there too and he really dug the music and introduced himself to me in the Scotia Bar in Glasgow's Stockwell Street at one of our performances. Right away I realised this guy liked music, and all kinds, from Ornette Coleman to Tony Williams Lifetime to Allen Toussaint. A treasured C90 tape is an Allen Toussaint tape and a Meters bootleg he gave me. That was Mike all over, generous, enthusiastic about art and music, and a really interesting conversationalist.
Coming from Glasgow I had never heard of Compendium books in Camden, but my brother moving down south gave me a chance to go and visit him in the shop, which I duly did on a few occasions. I loved the shop mainly because it was well stocked with music biographies of the artists I liked and I soon realised Mike liked them too. On each visit Mike would suggest a book from the shelves I should get, and then a pint in a little Irish pub down the road, and we'd catch up and talk about how things were going in Glasgow and I'd try and jog Mike's memory about an Ornette Coleman gig at the Bracknell Jazz Festival in the late 70s he'd been to. It was all lovely stuff, he was such a humourous guy. Great company.
I hadn't been down to London for a while and one day I was at work and I got an email from my brother. Mike had died and his obituary was in the Guardian. I was gutted, didn't even know he was ill or even that Compendium had closed its doors. Friends up here confirmed he'd come back to Scotland at the end, and I hadn't even known anything about it.
Then I realised I was just one of many people Mike had touched with his humanity, humour and generosity. He was a one-off.
Mike Hart poetry bookseller
The contribution of booksellers to the poetry world is not recognised enough. Mike Hart's sad death is a reminder of just how important they can be. He worked very hard at Compendium to keep the poetry section alive and in touch with what was going on. Like others I looked forward to going to the shop to see him, and felt that his presence there was a rewarding part of going to London, because he would greet you with enthusiastic suggestions for new books, and news about readings and poets' visits to London. An informal information service about poetry. Go in the door and he would invariably say that there was not much new in, and then reflect for a moment and rush off to the poetry section and starting pulling out books, or even on occasion disappear down to the basement for the special stock. Each book on the shelves represented careful thought about the writing. My knowledge of several poets started with his encouragement. When he moved to Murder One I followed and used the excuse of buying sci-fi and mysteries to go on talking, although it was noticeable that he was under more pressure to keep working there. His keen good nature and care for the distribution of new poetry, much of which he could talk about knowledgeably, must have been a significant help in keeping the poetry scene going. On more than one occasion he even engineered introductions to other writers who happened to be in the shop. He will be very much missed, and as Cris said, he made a real difference to the building up of readerships and the discussion that is the lifeblood of poetry. Hard to believe he's gone.
Peter
Drinking wine of an evening in France my sister-in-law mentioned that Mike Hart had died. She didn't really know him, but knew he had been a friend of mine. I hadn't seen him for some thirty years but experienced that sense of desolation that comes with the end of a kindred spirit. My spirit was - is - kindred to some extent because Mike established the cultural signposts that have remained significant in my life.
He had failed fourth year in the sweaty competitive academic school we attended and sat in front of me in a maths class. This might have been about 1962. I had started playing in a local band and we had little clue about anything to do with the music except that it was a blast to wallop a guitar in front of girls. Before long Mike was guiding me towards Chuck Berry, then Muddy Waters. He had found a secondhand record shop, specialing in jazz, near the Barras, in Glasgow's east end where he picked up the very first recording I ever heard of Robert Johnson. It was on the Phillips label and had hysterical sleeve notes. The author of these made a great mystery out of the fact that he had misinterpreted the words "..elegant movements..." as "...Elgin movements...". What mysterious element of black culture could these Elgin movements refer to? As well as being stunned by the music, Mike and I cracked up over these sleeve notes.
Besides the huge blues interest there was also literature. That first year (1962) we became friends - I think I might have nicked a pen off him in primary school five years earlier - in 1962, in an English class, after exams, when we were allowed to indulge in some free reading, I remember Mike reading Tropic of Cancer (Panther publication?), the liberal English teacher grunted ambivalently. Mike pointed me to the Beats, the Moderns, the Absurd. We went to Edinburgh to hear the Liverpool poets accompanied by Davy Graham. We saw Beckett in Dublin and one of us stole a lavish edition of Dylan Thomas poems from an undeserving capitalist in London.
It was with Mike I saw the films of Eisenstein, Bunuel, Truffaut, with him heard performances of Cage, Stockhausen, he brought me to an awareness of Klee, Kandinskyas well as his beloved Impressionists.
We lost touch entirely from about 1974 until 1991. I can't remember how we linked up at that time. We had some phonecalls. He turned me on to Tom Raworth, sent me books - Mike never wrote - mentioned projects concerning books on Glasgow rock in the 60s. We nearly met up in Glasgow in 1998. It was my fault we didn't. I'd had a day driving down from the Highlands, got to my brother's and accepted a dram and then couldn't be arsed to bestir myself to go meet him. I think he gave up on me then.
Mike was a guy who sat in front of me in a maths class in 1962. We hung out between then and 1970. No parent, no teacher, no lover, no other kind of mentor has had such a profound effect on my thinking before, during, after this time. If his spirit continues to live in the hearts of others as it does in mine he needs no other monument.
Tom O'Hagan
I am truly upset to get this news. Compendium was a real lifeline for me when I discovered it by chance in the late 80s. Mike Hart, though he didn't know me from Adam, was helpful beyond the call of duty; frequently scuttling downstairs or 'out back' to dig out a publication that he new he had somewhere. A lovely man who I'll never forget for his unassuming championship of the writing we all care about so much.
Love, and tears, to all
Simon
p.s. with Compendium gone, where do people go for poetry bookshops in London?
Val and I were both very fond of Mike, over a long time -- though living out of London we didn't often see him during recent years. I think the last time we met in person was the night Compendium closed for the final time. I remember at Bob Cobbing's funeral several people (Ralph Hawkins, cris cheek and others) wondering how Mike was and saying they hadn't seen him for a while. He was a powerhouse for poetry during his years at Compendium, and was the person I always advised foreign friends looking for odd or difficult-to-find small press books to contact. For me, he was also a primary source of new and interesting crime fiction. I'm really sorry his projected book on Maggie Bell seems to have foundered... it was a book I'd have been happy to read.
Another grey morning; another hole in possibility.
Tom
I was sorry to hear of Mike Hart's death. A keen supporter of alternative British poetry, as both bookseller and occasional poetry event organiser. He would always take stock, and was generous in taking stock as exchange for books. He also recommended texts. One I remember was Jacques Roubaud's Oulipo novel The Great Fire of London. I remember once I marvelled that stocks of Ship of Fools books had sold out and I asked who bought them. He looked at me with those deep piercing eyes that Adrian Clarke clearly also remembers, and said, 'There's a lot of strange people about.'
There's a lot of strange people who are going to feel sad at this news.
Robert
Like a lot of people, I can mark out certain important influences in my life by purchases in Compendium - in the early 1970s buying a copy of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism, for example, or the time that Nick Kimberley had a consignment of La Monte Young's 'black' album. In those days, booksellers tended to be more knowledgeable than most of their customers, and Mike Hart's expertise seemed to cover an extraordinary amount of ground. I bought my first Elmore Leonard in Compendium, and Mike directed me to Don DeLillo's Running Dog. This was long before either author was celebrated. Mike also knew which thrillers hit the spot as well-written, pleasurable escapism, and which ones were a disappointment. He would never express a negative opinion, but you could tell from his expression when to save your money. On the other hand, he was already ready with the new Beach Boys Stomp, or the latest rockabilly and deep soul fanzines; if I look through the books and magazines in my music collection, there are numerous obscure titles that remind me of our conversations, ands his recommendations.
Mike was a reserved man, perhaps shy, and so he was difficult to know well. After many years I discovered that he lived in Victoria Road, Alexandra Park, almost directly opposite to a house in which I'd lived in the early 1970s. We talked often about his proposed book on the Glasgow music scene and I tried to encourage him to finish it, get it out. Perhaps he knew too much, and felt unable to make the compromises that allow a book to become a practical reality. His knowledge could always surprise me. When I was putting together an ill-fated compilation to complement my book, Exotica, I was trying to track down the license owner for J.B. Lenoir's "I Sing Um the Way I Feel". Mike took this challenge seriously, and if we bumped into each other at a book launch, he'd update me on his researches into the problem. After his death I met Paul Hammond in Barcelona. Paul was surprised I hadn't been present at the wake organised in London for Mike. I'd felt badly enough, not knowing Mike was ill, even though I'd spoken to him in Murder One during the period when he moved there after Compendium, but to have missed the wake felt terrible. What saddens me is the fact that people like Mike, who quietly and modestly informed the tastes and knowledge of such a wide range of practicing artists, musicians, authors, and poets, have now become an extinct species.
David Toop
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