The best book about Swedish Politics was written in 1989 and is entitled The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997). It is the first published work by the English poet and political essayist William Shepherd and was published for a teenage audience in China by Academic Inn Books with a Swedish teenager as Production Editor.
The first edition of 500 copies was printed in Glastonbury and this is the only title by the author listed in Books in Print although a recent Google search turned up several hundred essays on a number of websites including thirty articles published between 1989 and 2006 by the London-based political journal Fourth World Review.
A recent phone call to the publisher confirmed that stocks of 225 books are in the firm’s warehouse and that none of the 300 books distributed had turned up on eBay or in used bookshops. There are no plans for a sequel but in anticipation of a sharp rise in demand with the release of several William Shepherd manuscripts in book form by Academic Inn Books and as e-books by the Brittany-based e-publisher cesc publications the price is now ₤19.95. The transcript of a conversation with the author in September 1990 entitled Tavern Talk is available on the internet.
Every year the Swedish political class gathers on the Island of Gotland during the long summer recess from midsummer into September for Almedalsveckan…a very Swedish Glastonbury Festival. In election year each party’s top performer…formerly known as party leaders…sets out their stall and pulls rabbits out of a hat.
The winner this week was the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson who brought along Ségolène Royal the French Left’s main presidential candidate, mother of four and sixth sexiest woman in the world according to a survey for the French edition of the sleazy For Him Magazine…well ahead of Jennifer Lopez (34th) and Elizabeth Hurley (41st). Who needs policies when you can associate yourself with such high-class French Socialists? On the other hand one look at the motley coalition of Tories, Centrepartistas, Christian Democrats and Liberals opposing the Social Democrats and their Green and Red allies and it is hard to see how the Government can lose in September.
William Shepherd revealed recently that his original plan was for four editions…for Christmas 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1998…taking up on average one month a year of his time. Every third year he would base himself in Sweden from midsummer until the end of September. By 1998 this plan had been scaled back to two editions with research for the 1998 edition happening to coincide with the reconnaissance trip for the Linnaeus Gotland Journeys Project.
Vemara duly arrived in Visby Harbour during the first week of June 1998 after seven weeks at sea and set sail for England on 30th September with William and Helena Shepherd as crew. William Shepherd jumped ship to return to Stockholm once Vemara was through the Kiel Canal and Malcolm Wallace replaced him to Zeebrugge.
For the final leg Connie and Helena were sailing alone and can claim to be the first all women crew to bring a boat into Rye. The woman skipper of the gaff-cutter in Retrieved from the Future published in 1996 owes a lot to the author John Seymour’s trip up the East Coast in Vemara in 1995 selling and promoting their Seymour’s Seamarks.