The Chinese auction house Beijing Huachen has heeded the view of the Chinese Government and withdrawn the famous 1950 painting of Mao Zedong. It is now in talks with Chinese museums. I had a similar experience two years ago when I stepped in and purchased privately one of Connie’s Rye Maritime Heritage paintings for £500 to stop it going under the hammer at Rye Auction Galleries. At the time I scrambled to raise the money…and perhaps it would have made sense to let it go to auction to establish a price for Connie’s artwork. But I decided to stop the sale.
On the Rye Maritime Heritage Project…apart from meeting orders from Rye booksellers Martello and Meads Books and wholesalers like Gardners…my only activity since Connie’s death has been this buy back of one of the five paintings in the Rye Heritage Collection in private hands. To understand the situation some background is required.
Connie completed the last of her thirty-six (40”x30”) watercolours for her Maritime Heritage Collection a few weeks before her death in November 2002. The plan was to have Rye’s Maritime Heritage in local bookshops by Christmas 2003. This would have meant that the 2000 copies of Rye From the Water’s Edge…a pocket edition with seventy-two pen & ink drawings that combined Connie’s Rye Maritime Heritage pictures with her images of Future Rye…printed in 1996 and selling steadily for £9.95 each...would have sold out some time this year after providing a profit to Academic Inn Books’ Rye Water’s Edge Partnership of around ten thousand pounds.
By then the 16 author shares held by John Seymour…as well as Connie’s 16 illustrator shares…would have yielded about £150 per share. For my 32 shares…16 in my own right as the partnership’s Merchant Adventurer and 16 held as Capital Shares by William Franklin & Sons Limited to finance the project…this would have meant a nice little earner over ten years of around £500 a year. The illustrated coffee table editions of Rye’s Maritime Heritage and Future Rye were then to go on sale in local bookshops…and to a mailing list built up over ten years…to provide a further source of profits for the Rye Water’s Edge Partnership in the future.
In contrast to other publishers the authors and illustrators in an Academic Inn Book’s Partnership retain their copyrights...with illustrators leasing theirs back to their partnership on a seven-year lease. The Rye Water’s Edge Partnership took out its first lease in 1996 so Connie’s copyrights were up for Academic Inn Books' first ever lease extension in 2003…the signal for a new programme to exploit the commercial potential of the Rye Maritime Collection as artwork and digital images.
This sums up the Academic Inn Books’ business plan with this particular local partnership providing the commercial template for other partnerships. But Connie’s unexpected death put the whole Academic Inn Books’ Publishing Project on hold when I decided to defer all further work on my publishing interests until the Connie Lindqvist Estate had cleared through probate.
Looking back at the AIB 2005 Business Plan it is clear that I had decided against shutting down AIB and abandoning the dozen publishing projects on the drawing board. With hindsight I should have been more active during 2003 and 2004 as ‘on hold’ has been interpreted by some as ‘handing in the keys’ and ‘walking away’. This is what lies behind Berni Fiddimore’s grab for AIB’s Magpie Sagas stock…together with a disastrous relationship she was in at the time. Ironically one publishing project I pushed ahead with after Connie’s death was the Magpie Sagas Project.
Traditionally Connie had sold her water colour artwork, ceramic tile panels and vertical pottery ware for a penance straight off her easels or drawing boards. But her hourly rate often worked out at a third the minimum wage and a tenth of average UK wages. In 1993 I started to act as Connie’s agent. This meant seeing that digital images and copies were taken of her work and the terms of her work were improved. But these terms had been determined back in the early seventies. They would have outraged both trade unionists and feminists…but applied to all pottery workers in Rye. Connie had to withdraw her labour from Rye Pottery for two years before the novel idea of negotiation was grudgingly accepted and she could sign a new agreement with an acceptable structure.
Our response to the copyright issue was Connie’s own pottery. She did not need to become a potter but was going to buy in her pieces from Staffordshire…as the potteries in Rye often do...or from local independent potters. Selling was the hard part. Rye Pottery has their own stall at the Birmingham Gift Fair every February…and a list of customers worldwide. Iden Pottery and David Sharp Ceramics have sales outlets in Rye and sell to tourists and to local people within a catchment area that stretches to Brighton in the West and to Tunbridge Wells in the north.
Any idea of giving Rye Pottery a commission for selling Connie’s output was only feasible if she negotiated from a position of strength…something that looked like being another long process. But this was the route we were planning to go in 2003. Meanwhile in 2002 Connie had succeeded in getting her own signature on her Rye Pottery tile panels and on her David Sharp Ceramics house plaques. The next step was for Connie to have her own mark on the verticalware (jugs, vases etc) produced for…and sold by…Iden Pottery. More about this another time.
