#kitcaless

Congratulations to Kit Caless on the worldwide release of his fascinating new book SECRETS - What We Hide And Why, an Audible Original.

Available to download from Audible worldwide from 21 July 2022.

Kit Caless has something to tell you.

When Kit was a child, his father worked for the UK Ministry of Defence’s security forces. But Kit didn’t know it at the time—he wasn’t allowed to know. And reflecting on that, he finds himself thinking about other secrets.

Keeping a secret alters everything. How you view yourself. How you act in social groups. How you interact with a loved one, a boss, a colleague, a neighbour.

Depending on the context, being asked to keep a secret can make you both trustworthy and untrustworthy; powerful and powerless; reliable and unreliable. Secrets are dynamic, they move from person to person, location to location.

Secrets are hard. They hurt. But they also bond.

Secrets is a book about who holds secrets, why, and what the impact of holding a secret can have on you, the community around you, and society in general.

But don’t tell anyone that.

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Congratulations to author and Influx Press Publisher Kit Caless. As reported in The Bookseller,

“Audible has landed an exploration of secrecy in modern society by Kit Caless, Influx Press publisher and son of a security forces officer.

Secrets: An Exploration was commissioned by Victoria Haslam from a proposal on exclusive submission. Audible secured worldwide English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German and Portuguese language audio rights from Sarah Such at the Sarah Such Literary Agency and it will be available exclusively on Audible in late 2021.”

Kit Caless is a writer and editor from Hackney Downs. He is co-founder and editor of Influx Press, a small independent publisher of fiction and non-fiction from the margins of culture. He is also a regular contributor to VICE and the author of ‘Spoon’s Carpets: An Appreciation.’ (Vintage / Square Peg, 2016)

Rachael Smart, an MA student of Creative Writing at The University of Nottingham spoke to him about his writing on behalf of The Letters Page.

Published last year, Kit Caless’ ‘Spoons Carpets: An Appreciation’ is a catalogue of more than 80 J.D Wetherspoon’s carpets. This fascinating book straddles the terrain between fiction and non-fiction, featuring photos of each unique floor tapestry, its location and local history. Whether that carpet is bohemian, retro, regal or plain old ugly, all the well-trodden histories underfoot are drawn out by Caless’ incisive research. Thankfully, this epic project wasn’t a solitary pub crawl and once Caless had established his aptly named blog, ‘Wetherspoon’s Carpets’, in 2015, boozers nationwide soon got uploading foot selfies featuring Wetherspoon’s carpets.

‘Who Knows the Origin of Anything?’ in The Letters Page (Vol. 2) is a series of emails addressed to somebody who replicated Caless’ Wetherspoon’s Carpet blog on Instagram. Caless captures all the absurdities of ownership within the muddy realm of digital publishing with wry wit. It is written in a passive-aggressive style that Patrick Cash at The London Review describes as ‘Vice-like humorous, tragic, and vaguely existential.’  Despite its humour, the correspondence serves as a timely reminder that the grim realities of plagiarism are never too far off in the digital landscape. I start by asking Caless what he thinks about plagiarism in relation to social media:

‘The difficult thing about the plagiarising of my Wetherspoon's Carpet blog,’ he says, ‘is that I'm essentially just compiling pictures of other people's art, nothing more, nothing less. I'm using other people's designs and even other people's photos to create a blog, so what leg do I have to stand on when complaining about using other people's creations? That was the funny thing about it, I was getting mad that someone else had copied my idea of compiling someone else's photographs of someone else’s designs.

There’s a certain inevitability to digital publishing because of its immediacy - once the words are out there the consequences can be both rewarding and damning. ‘You can copy and plagiarise immediately online,’ Caless says, ‘and there are plenty of instances of people's tweets being nicked and tweeted by a bigger account. It's much harder to keep on top of. Many social media accounts have been set up with the same idea as mine: collecting photos of Wetherspoon's Carpets. You can also get an idea out rapidly. I set the Wetherspoon's Carpet blog up within weeks of discovering the unique qualities of the Spoon's tapestry, so I didn't spend years working on something in secret only for someone else to pip me to the post, which is a good thing. Everything on social media is time stamped - so I knew the dates other Spoon's Carpet accounts had been set up on, and coincidentally, nearly all of them were initiated the day after a big feature in the Guardian about my blog.’

Caless is renowned for ‘Spoons Carpets’ but he’s also supportive of new and emerging writers. Not only does he publish writers at Influx Press, but he co-founded and edits literary e-zine, LossLit, with writer Aki Schilz. The project, based on articulating notions of loss, has a collaborative social media write which trends monthly on Twitter due to its wide-reach and participation.

‘I love LossLit,’ he says. ‘It started as a joke, genuinely. I’d written a short story which had just been published by The Bohemyth and it was a very sad story about the death of a lover. Aki told me I was writing 'loss literature'. Then, later that evening on Twitter she wrote a sad poem and I tagged it #losslit and off it went. It was a bit of banter between us and we did some mock #losslit. But then, somewhere, it turned serious and we actually got creative with our 140 character stories / poems.  The wonderful (and awful) thing about Twitter is that it's a completely open forum. So people who were following mine and Aki's account that evening also joined in, and tagged the tweets with the #losslit hashtag. We all stayed up until 2, 3am doing it. Aki and I then decided to make it a monthly thing, and three years later here we are. It's a pleasure to curate and be part of.’

Seeing as Caless is a hallowed expert on floor tapestries, I ask him to talk me through his very own bespoke designed Spoon’s rug. ‘The essence of a Spoon's Carpet,’ he tells me, ‘is that it must represent the local area of the pub, or the person the pub is named after. So let's pretend the local area is 'my brain'. The main colour would be an Arsenal red for starters. Then you'd have the DNA helixes of all 9 Wu Tang Clan members weaving across the wove. Then in repeating squares of three you'd have the cityscapes of London, Mumbai and Buenos Aires respectively. Finally, at the edge of the carpet, (before it meets any wooden flooring) I'd have the hem of the Kent coast line running from Dover to Margate. Jheeze, it would be magnificent / repulsive.’

* (delete as applicable). 

Kit Caless pictured next to the magnificent Spoons Carpets - An Appreciation carpeted bookshop window in Waterstones, Piccadiilly.

The Spoon’s carpet quest goes on. 

Send Kit your local spoon’s carpet - see wetherspooncarpets.tumblr.com for details.

Congratulations to author and publisher @KitCaless, whose brilliant forthcoming book SPOON’S CARPET - based on his multi-trending tumblr wetherspoonscarpets.tumblr.com - has been chosen as October BOOK OF THE MONTH in @theBookseller magazine.