Everybody’s Rebound: sustainability in the 1940s

156 Charing Cross Road

Found in a pile of books here at Jot HQ—a paperback copy dated 1943 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot Investigates. It’s exactly the same size as a Penguin, but was in fact published for the British Publishers Guild by John Lane at The Bodley Head. These ‘Guild Books’ were originally designed to rival Penguins, which were dominating the paperback market at the time. However, they never proved as popular and the Guild later folded.

But this particular Guild Book is different from most others in the series in that the original covers have been removed and replaced by what appears to be brown salvaged card. There is a panel for the title which is rubber-stamped, underneath which is a triangle bearing the legend ‘ EVERYBODY’S REBOUND’ 1/6. There then follows an explanation of what ‘Everybody’s Rebound was trying to achieve.

This is a rebound copy of a book worth reading published by a well-know publisher.

We are rebinding books such as this, in order that as many books as possible may do their job twice and so help the vital “ Save Paper “ Campaign.

If you have any books of any kind, and in any condition, that you can spare send or bring them to us and we will make you the highest cash offer.

                                         EVERYBODY’S BOOKS

                                    156, Charing Cross Road, W.C.2.

It is questionable whether this or any other book ‘rebound ‘ by Everybody’s Books was ‘ worth reading ‘. What is not in dispute is the merit of salvaging paper at a time of shortage. The thinking seems to have been that at a time when reading was an important way of distracting people from the War ( after all, the sales of poetry went sky high during the conflict), any means of giving damaged  paperbacks a new lease of life was worth doing. Better to rebind a coverless book than print a new edition using paper which was a scarce resource. What was not revealed was whether hardbacks without covers could be saved in the same way. Nor was there any indication as to when this Guild Book was rebound. An inscription on the inside cover shows that a certain Ann Seabrook owned the book in September 1948, and as paper salvage continued until 1950, the rebinding  may have occurred around 1948.

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Collecting on a Professor’s salary Part two.

William White was a professor of Journalism and American Studies, which may partially explain his academic interest in certain American writers, but we at Jot HQ are at a loss to understand why he spent time and good money assembling a collection of the work of such a mediocre American novelist as John Marquand. In his account of how he came to do so, White seems a little embarrassed, as if he needed to justify his ‘ affection ‘ for a novelist ‘not of the first rank ’. And when he brings in the opinion of another critic to support his case, he further mystifies us. According to T. G .Rosenthal, Marquand ‘never achieved greatness but was an excellent entertainer’. Talk about damning with faint praise. The status of Marquand as a novelist is unlikely to alter in the coming years. Today, most of his first editions can be bought for a few pounds, although Do Tell Me, Doctor Johnson , at £60, and The Late Lord Apsley ( according to White the best thing he wrote) at £90 are exceptions. Maybe it was the journalist in White that saw merit in Marquand. But ever the completist, he could not pursue his prey with half measures:Jot 101 Hemingway pic

‘ I have just about every first edition of his forty novels, collections of short pieces, books he wrote introductions for, and pamphlets plus reprints, English editions, and translations—275 volumes, not counting periodical appearances…’

In a previous blog on White as a collector we have seen how admiration for a writer, such as Housman, could become an overweening obsession bordering on mild insanity. This confession concerning Marquand only confirms this view. Continue reading →

Farewell to True Bookshops

This rather plaintive cri de coeurfrom the pen of someone called John F. X. Harriott (1933 – 90), whose Periscope column was The Tablet’s renowned voice of common-sense’ for many years, is a very slim (just ten pages) pamphlet brought out in 1987 by

Farewell to True Bookshops cover pic 001

the Rocket Press under the aegis of Jonathan Stephenson, a private publisher from Blewbury and Oxford book dealer Robin Waterfield.

When he wrote the original Tablet piece on which he based his booklet Harriott was in his mid-fifties and had evidently been a lover of second hand bookshops for many years, but was becoming aware that the book trade was changing for the worse. His piece is partly a hymn of praise to the old school book dealers he had known and partly a diatribe on new bookshops. He begins by describing an encounter with the kind of bookshop ‘which used to grace every town in the kingdom but is now as rare as a coach and four’.

‘…Rooms of books unfolded one upon another, and staircases of books wound upwards into dark mysterious attics. There was that marvellous smell of cricket bat oil and dusty bacon. …The bookseller…was ancient and sallow and far beyond any human intercourse. We crept about him silently, pulling out handfuls of ripe nineteenth and twentieth century first editions, old childhood favourites, books of Victorian instruction to prospective travellers abroad, and lowering to the floor tremendous theological tomes which took up the challenge at the end of St John’s gospel…’

In contrast, Harriott declares:

‘ the newest of all bookshops…sell nothing but piles of ill-written, ill-spelled, ill-bound non-books from America….They do not invite one to buy good books because they are cheap, but to buy books simply because they are cheap. Such shops have no dark corners, no winding staircases, no smell of antiquity, no ripening booksellers or collectors poring over their catalogues. Instead they have neon lights and rows of paperbacks in alphabetical order and a computer to tell the customer that everything worth reading is out of print. They are savage places where there is always a keening wind and moans of spiritual hunger troubling the air.’

 

So far, so goodish, but he is not comparing like with like. Second hand bookshops have a place, but new bookshops obviously have a function too. Harriott  also doesn’t explain why new bookshops in the UK are importing all their stock from the USA, or why American writers should adopt the Queen’s English. Or why no American book is likely to be worth reading. This is not a very intelligent approach.  But then our Catholic friend goes a bit off-track. Continue reading →

Walter Jerrold as book collector

Autolycus of bookstalls 001We at Jot 101 had not imagined the travel writer and biographer Walter Jerrold ( 1865 – 1929 ) to be a frequenter of second-hand bookstalls, but there he is as an unabashed collector of ‘unconsidered trifles ‘ in  Autolycus of the Bookstalls (1902), a collection of articles on book-collecting that first appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette, Daily News, the New Age, and Londoner.

But as we already knew him as a biographer of Charles Lamb we should have known better, and indeed he mentions Lamb several times in his book. Jerrold’s range as a bibliophile was wider than Lamb’s, but he seems to have been particularly drawn to writers of the Romantic period. He wrote about collecting Thomas Hood, Cobbett, Coleridge, Southey, and Rev Sydney Smith, while also mentioning books on Oliver Cromwell and Ruskin. In addition, he appears to have rather liked association copies of all dates, and boasted that he had ‘snapped up ‘volumes bearing the signatures of Cardinal Manning, George Eliot, Sydney Smith and Thomas Noon Talfourd at ‘Metropolitan stalls’ in recent years. Jerrold was also tickled at the idea of buying books that had been displayed in the windows of very unliterary shops—in one particular instance an ‘ oil and colourman’s shop in the Seven Dials’, where a first of Ruskin’s Political Economy of Art and a Tennyson signed by George Eliot rubbed shoulders with ‘ soap, soda, pickles and jam ‘. Finding literary treasures in unlikely stores was probably more common in Jerrold’s time than it is now, although your Jotter does recall his first entry into collecting back in 1968, when he found an odd volume of the fifth edition of Johnson’s Dictionary and a battered early edition of Gay’s Fables, complete with nice copper plates, in the window of a car mechanic’s shop opposite Sketty Library in Swansea, along with spanners and a grease gun. After negotiating with the mechanic he secured the two tomes for just 2/6 ( 12p ).

Jerrold favoured ‘ Booksellers’ Row ( aka Holywell Street, off the Strand ), a disreputable  area cleared for the construction of Aldwych c 1900, from where he moved to ‘ that newer Booksellers’ Row which has sprung up in Charing Cross Road ‘, itself a product of slum clearance a little earlier. He also ( in passing ) mentions the stalls in Farringdon Street, for so many decades dominated by the Jeffrey family (see earlier blog in Bookride) , and Aldgate, in addition to the New Cut opposite Waterloo station. The two latter sites went many years ago and following the demise of George Jeffrey, the Farringdon bookstalls, where a lucky punter a few decades ago bought an early sixteenth century scribal copy of a work by Sir Thomas More for a few pounds, folded within a year or so. Today the only surviving ‘Booksellers’ Row ‘ is in Charing Cross Road. Continue reading →

Coffee and Kafka, anyone?

In an issue dated June 4th1954 of Desiderata, the weekly publication ‘providing a direct link between library and bookseller‘ we find the following news snippet from the back page:coffee machine 1950

A Sussex bookseller has set up a coffee-bar at the back of his spacious shop with a counter, decorated in red and gold and equipped with the latest type of coffee machine, fitted into a tall bookcase. He claims, no doubt correctly, that it is the only coffee-bar to be found in any bookshop in the country and says, according to a press report, that in installing it he had in mind the coffee-houses of the 18thcentury “ at which it was customary for people interested in books to meet to discuss literature”.

A  good idea, perhaps, but not our cup of tea.

The report does not state whether the unnamed bookseller/barista sold second hand books or new ones, or both, but since most of the content of Desideratais devoted to the ‘wants‘ of provincial libraries and second hand booksellers (the eminent dealer Charles Traylen is featured in this particular issue), we can reasonably suppose that the bookseller in question dealt in second hand books.

We have absolutely no idea why this dealer should be so certain that his shop was a pioneer in providing coffee, but the tone of the report seems to suggest that to the journalists who covered this story such a service was a great novelty. Nor are we told whether this coffee was offered free to customers as a sales gimmick, or had to be paid for. We at Jot 101 pose this question because we remember well back in the 1990s a certain book dealer in Hitchin, Hertfordshire ( alas now gone) who supplied comfy seats on which customers could drink their free cup of very good percolated coffee. This most welcome bonus only lasted a few years, but at the time your Jotter felt it to be a rather clever way of establishing good relations with the clientele. Before then and since coffee, when it featured at all in bookshops, which was rare enough, it had to be paid for.

We looked in vain on the Net for book dealers of the 1950s who might have emulated the Sussex dealer’s example, but good ideas in marketing are almost always copied in some form or other by rivals, so there must have been a few takers for this coffee ‘n’ books scheme. Certainly many dealers over the years have tried to inculcate in their premises an informality akin to that found in a private library. In the 1980s the legendary Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank in Paris positively encouraged customers to become literary flaneurs by providing sofas for them to lounge around on. And an earlier Jot featured a certain bookseller in the USA who made her small shop a simalcrum of a some arty person’s back parlour, with tasteful bric a brac jostling for attention with rare books. [R. M. Healey]

 

Rupert Croft-Cooke—-novelist and dealer in rare books

In an earlier Jot we discussed the prison ordeal suffered by the prolific novelist Rupert Croft-Croft-Cooke memoirs cover 001Cooke for homosexual activity with two sailors, comparing it to the conviction of British hero and computer genius Dr Alan Turing for a similar offence at about the same time. We are now going to look at Croft-Cooke’s brief period as a second hand bookseller between the wars.

 

Working in a second hand bookshop is, for obvious reasons, a popular means of earning a crust for struggling writers. George Orwell is probably the best-known bookshop assistant, but there are others, including Brian Aldiss, whose debut publication, The Brightfount Diaries, was a fictionalised account of his days working in an Oxford antiquarian bookshop. However, more than a few writers actually ran bookshops themselves, including an American novelist. Another was the diminutive film director and actor- turned thriller writer Brian Forbes, who owned a rather glamorous bookshop in Virginia Water, just a mile or so from his distinctly swanky home near Wentworh golf course.

 

Some of these bookshop owners/writers began as collectors and, as in the case of Forbes, earned enough from their other occupations, both past and present, to continue their collecting activity. However, it seemed that Croft-Cooke was never a book collector in the classic sense when in 1928, at the age of 24, before he had established himself as a novelist, he decided to open a shop with his brother in Rochester High Street. Continue reading →

The Lost Art of Advertising fliers

Found, among some papers at Jot HQ is this very long and thin flier for The Bookseller advertising pic 001Beauchamp Bookshop of 15a Harrington Road, which was once located by South Kensington station in SW London. Its most striking quality is the boldness of the two colours ( red and black) used for the various period typefaces on display. To someone who grew up in the Swinging Sixties, when designers took inspiration from Victorian (and even older) typefaces and decorative flourishes, it could date from that time. However, the telephone number featured (KEN 6904) might quite equally suggest a slightly earlier date, though the fact that the all-number system began in London in 1966 doesn’t help us much. Some specialist magazines devoted to design, such as Signatureand the Penrose Magazine, were experimenting with typefaces in the forties and fifties. Indeed, the fact that the Beauchamp Bookshop wished to buy books on  bibliography and printing suggests that the owner, Mr Philip Pearce, had an active interest in book design. It is telling too that his special need to acquire ‘ late 18thand early 19thcentury books ‘ betrayed a fondness for well printed and well designed books from this pioneering era of fine printing.

 

As to the bookshop owner, we at Jot 101 must confess an ignorance of Mr Philip Pearce and his shop. South Kensington has always been a haven for book collectors of large and small purses, but the Beauchamp Bookshop has long gone. Nor does the Net record anything about it or its owner, who seems not to have made a mark on the world outside of selling books. We at Jot HQ have asked a leading rare bookseller in the district, but he cannot remember  Mr Pearce. Perhaps some collectors in the Jottosphere might recall bookshop and/or owner. If they do, we’d like to hear from them.   [RR]

At the Bookshop 1822 and 2016

Retrieved from our old Bookride site – this not unamusing extract from an 1820s English/ French conversation manual.  It gives an interesting insight into a vanished world. It is followed by our modern version where the translation was slightly robotic, so apologies for that…

Note the concern with the appearance and quality of the books, the perennial problems with trying to get the binder to do what the bookseller and customer wants, and on time. The eagerness of the collector to be the first to be offered fresh stock from the shop has changed very little. Still with us are the problems of delay in postal sytems…  Also it is interesting that in the early nineteenth century women bookbuyers were thought likely to be attracted to ‘Large Paper Copies’ and vellum bound books. The customer’s knowledge of book lore and binding styles has changed somewhat.

1822    
Well ! you are a man of your word, as usual: and the books that you were to send me, when shall I have them?
Eh bien ! vous etes un homme de parole, comme a l’ordinaire: et ces livres que vous deviez m’emvoyer, quand viendront-ils?
You are under great obligations to your binder; he often furnishes you with an excuse.
Vous avez un relieur a qui vous avez de grardes obligations , car il vous sert souvent de manteau.
I protest that I sent them to him the same day you came to buy them.
Je vous proteste que je les ai fait porter chez lui le meme jour que vous etes venu les acheter.

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Anonymous book donor revealed

Found in a collection of ephemera this intriguing typed letter from the long vanished New York bookshop Tessaro's. The shop was in Maiden Lane which appears to have been a kind of bookseller's row. The address later housed a rare bookshop called Sabin's. Tessaro's was formerly called Rohde and Haskins who had dabbled in publishing at the dawn of the 20th century.

The letter deals with a request for the identity of the anonymous donor of a book from the recipient - a nurse (presumably) at The General Hospital at Fox Hills.  The shop decided ('we'll take a chance') to reveal the donor's identity. Significantly he was a soldier, as Fox Hills was a very large Army hospital dealing at that time with WW1 casualties. There the story ends. It would be nice to add 'and reader she married him.' The bookshop as go-between must be uncommon and in our cautious times it might not reveal the donor, or possibly send on the request to the donor for permission…

Dear Madam 
Acknowledging receipt of your note of 28th July we would say we do not know that the sender of the book desired it to be known who sent it, but we'll take a chance and say to you, in confidence, that it was mailed to you on the order of Lieut. G.C. Anderson.
Yours very truly,
TESSARO'S

Fox Hill Nursing Staff (1921) from
Advance Archive Photos (many thanks)

Barron’s Textbook Exchange, Brooklyn 1941

Found on the front endpaper of an American book on Abraham Lincoln -- this bookplate label advertising a used bookstore. This store was the first business of the still extant and flourishing Barron's  textbook business and the owner started out mimeographing textbooks in the basement of the shop long into the night after the shop was closed. As Publisher's Weekly noted in 2011: 'In 1941, the after-hours mimeograph business became Barron's Publishing, and its first offering was the aptly named series Barron's Regents Exams and Answers...Seventy years later, the series is still going strong, albeit with some innovations—apps, e-books, and a subscription-based Web site—that could never have been imagined in 1941.'

He was still around and working in 2011 when he celebrated 70 years of business, which dates this label from the early 1940s. Of note is the broad range of business he was engaged in  - used books, stationery, art supplies, records both classical and modern, gym wear and even new books...this kind of enterprise is still needed to survive in the book trade.

Heffers—a life in books

Everyone who has ever lived or studied at Cambridge knows Heffers. It’s the big cheese bookseller in the city and is an international brand too. Around 1996 the company, which then employed around 300 people, issued a brief history, which has been useful in compiling this profile.

The Heffer family originally came from Grantchester, celebrated by Rupert Brooke and now the home of well-known storyteller Jeffery Archer. In 1876 William Heffer opened up a stationery shop in Fitzroy Street, just east of the city centre, where his success with a sideline of hymn books, bibles and general school books, convinced him that he ought to focus more on bookselling. Further success resulting from 25% discounts for cash and an expansion into academic and general titles, made it possible for Heffers to relocate to the city centre in Petty Cury.

Heffer then became a printer—and books printed by the company from the early twentieth century until 1987, when a management buy-out created the Black Bear Press-- can often be found, especially locally. Following William’s death in 1928 the company, with its three distinct areas of operation, was steered forward by son Ernest, and grandson Reuben, who became an influential figure in University and city life. Further success, especially internationally, followed the appointment as General Manager in 1964 of Cambridge graduate John Welch, who had no experience of bookselling and was not even a family member.

Heffers remained in Petty Cury until the late 1960s, by which time the decision of the City Council to redevelop the street, and the continuing expansion of Heffers as a business, made it necessary for the company to relocate once again. This time the decision was made easier by the offer by Trinity College of premises in Trinity Street once occupied by a grocer. The site was redeveloped from scratch and today, the design of the shop that has been called ‘one of the first and largest custom-built bookshops in the country’ is admired internationally for its bold simplicity.

Doubtless over the decades many students have supplemented their grants by working the odd Saturday at Trinity Street, but few have gone on to achieve the success of children’s writer Pippa Goodhart, the prizewinning author of over ninety books. Having, like the founder, grown up in Grantchester, she got a Saturday job with Heffers at the age of 16, then after University and teacher-training, returned to the shop when she failed to find a post as an infant teacher. For five years she managed the Heffers children’s bookshop, but moved to Leicester to start a family. It was here that she began to write for children, never imagining that her work would end up being sold in the very bookshop she had managed years before. Her life has gone full circle now with a move back to Grantchester.

Recently retired Newsnight anchor Jeremy ‘Paxo’ Paxman is another Heffers habitué. He was spotted not long ago by one blogger who had to ‘stare him down when he was pretending not to know where the queue started. He got behind me’, adds the blogger.

English Books in Paris

Found in a mid 1930s American detective thriller, tipped in at the front (for exchange purposes) this flier for  the Gibert Joseph (or Joseph Gibert) bookshop at 26 Boulevard St. Michel in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. It is still there at the same address with many books in languages other than French. The English language section is adequate but there are few rarities as there were in the past.

The curious thing in this ephemera is the notice 'Free Entrance' -- I can think of only one bookshop in the world that charges entry ($5) and that is run by a much arrested, deranged and violent bookseller in New Hampshire U.S.A. Possibly this is a mistranslation. The phone number has been changed by hand which might enable someone in the know to date it quite accurately. It looks like the 1950s. Until the advent of Shakespeare and Co.,  Gibert was the main source of used English books in Paris. Interestingly it also caters for the four other most wanted languages there, mostly because these are the nearest countries, although there has long been a large Russian community in Paris.

I once met….Bryan Forbes

It was in the summer of 1999 that the actor, screenwriter, director (Stepford Wives, Whistle Down the Wind, Séance on a wet Afternoon), turned crime writer, who died last May, had asked me to meet him at his second hand bookshop in Virginia Water.

It was an odd sort of shop—not the type one would come across in most provincial towns or indeed most parts of London. Here were no grubby leather-bound tomes in tottering piles, or cabinet of curiosities. I think it sold new as well as second books and indeed most volumes seemed to be of the twentieth century. I glanced around expecting to find rare books on golf or lawn tennis, classic American hard boiled thrillers or collections of recipes for cocktails.

But there no time to look further as Forbes appeared in person and we were soon speeding along in what was probably his Aston Martin to his home on the ultra- exclusive Wentworth estate. I only caught a glance of its exterior, but it seemed to be a huge and classic twenties film-star mansion, which it was, in the sense that Forbes later told me that as a young budding film star in the fifties he had bought it as a total wreck and had spent  many thousands of pounds doing it up. Something to admire, I thought.

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