Compendium Books

[2] The establishment of Compendium Books was initially encouraged by feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, whom Diana Gravill had met as part of her involvement with the Antiuniversity of London in 1968.

Compendium also had sections for left-wing politics, philosophy, feminist books & the aforementioned 'mind, body, spirit' department, invariably referred to as 'the back desk'.

There you would find Mike at the heart of a group of autodidacts, musicians, writers, lowlifes and drunks whose house band was the Pogues and whose cultural heroes were Jim Thompson, Hank Williams, Tom Raworth and Little Willie John....As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Camden became a magnet for the world's teenagers and Compendium underwent a facelift.

Visiting Americans, from old beat heroes like Lawrence Ferlinghetti to new literary lions like Walter Mosley, read there; so too did the London writers Iain Sinclair, Martin Millar and Derek Raymond.

In Render's The Guardian obituary, his friend Philip Derbyshire recalls the William Burroughs book signing that Chris masterminded.

Also a key person in the early years of Compendium was Don Skirving, who went on to run the very successful Airlift Books with his partner Beth.