Author Archives: Jot 101

The Poet who bored Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm (1932), the cult satire on the doomy English novels of, amongst others, Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith, seems to have been a very generous and good natured woman, according to her nephew and biographer Reggie Oliver (b1952), who was also a playwright and the author of horror stories. In three pages of a typescript found at Jot HQ, which he sent to the bookseller Joan Stevens (and which may subsequently have been incorporated into his biography, Out of the Woodshed), Gibbons met some colourful characters at the mid- seventies parties she held at her home in Oakshott Avenue, Highgate, which incidentally was a two minute walk from my late uncle, Denis Healey.

One was the then fashionable (now almost totally forgotten) novelist John Braine, the former librarian who found fame and fortune with such blockbusters as Room at the Top and The Vodi. Here is Reggie’s description of the man:

‘ He was large, shaggy, genial and physically repulsive. A distinctive presence, enhanced by an unusually loud voice, allowed him to dominate the conversation. I got the impression he was one of those writers—by no means uncommon—whose interest in literature was confined to that produced by themselves. Certainly, I never heard him discuss any books but his own, and even those rarely. But he had pronounced views on almost everything else; and I can remember one enjoyable afternoon when he laid down strict guidelines for us all on the correct method of making bread. Continue reading →

George Sims, bookseller extraordinaire

Found among papers at Jot HQ a typescript of a tribute by Anthony Rota to his fellow antiquarian bookseller George Sims at his memorial service in November 1999. Rota also wrote Sims’s obituary, which can be found on the Net.

Many successful rare book dealers are interesting people—more interesting than, say your average auctioneer or art dealer. One thinks immediately of Eric Korn, who was a schoolmate of Jonathan Miller and Oliver Sacks, and who after giving up a Ph D on the biochemistry of snail hearts, became a bookseller almost by accident ( see previous Jot). Late in life he became an acclaimed columnist for the TLS and a fixture for many years on Round Britain Quiz. If Rota is to be believed George Sims was this sort of bookseller.

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Hugo Manning

Hugo manning pic Found among some papers at Jot HQ, three photocopied pages of a panegyric by poet William Oxley to his better known poet and friend Hugo Manning (1913 – 77). Entitled ‘ The Scapegoat and the Muse ‘ it lavishes praise on a man who appears to have been a larger than life character in the mould perhaps of his friend Dylan Thomas, who was his junior by a few months and from whose work he drew inspiration. But Manning, in Oxley’s eyes, seems to have been an amalgam of so many attributes:

‘Hugo Manning restless traveller of the world and of the imagination’s ‘realms of gold’; Hugo Manning journalist-clerk and Reuter’s hack, Hugo Manning massively simple man sick with an old-fashioned integrity; Hugo Manning homo sapiens with burnt up-soul sacrificed on what unknown altars of pleasure; Hugo Manning late—ah-all too late –poetic developer…Hugo Manning last of the true troubadours…Hugo Manning mind, soul and things flesh caught at the cross roads and in what crosswinds of Judean-Christian-Hellenic cultures…’
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The Good Food Guide is launched

Last year we featured some Jots based on entries taken from the 1960 -1 edition of the Good Food Guide. Recently we were lucky to find among a run of the entertaining Leader magazine dated 20 May 1950 an article by the Guide’s founder, social historian Raymond Postgate, announcing the launching of ‘The Good Food Club’, as it was then known.

The tone of the article is a refreshing mixture of enthusiasm for the future of British eating-out and a denunciation of hospitality practices present and past. ‘We have been extremely patient ‘, Postgate complains, ‘but now the last excuses have ceased to be valid, Food is ill-cooked in hotels and restaurants, or it is insufficient, or it is badly and rudely served up—or all three ‘.

By 1950 much of the rationing to which much home produce had been subjected for ten years was gone, as had the 5s ( 25p) meal limit imposed by the Ministry of Food ( see a previous Jot). So, in Postgate’s opinion, hotels and restaurants now had no excuses not to serve up generous portions of good quality food with courtesy. But as Leonard P Thompson demonstrated in his account of poor hospitality in 1948 ( see recent jot) such experiences were the rule rather than the exception.

The article brings up some revealing points. We had no idea that back then drinks could not normally be served in hotels after 10 o’clock at night. That rule seems absurd today. However, we were aware that sixty odd years ago the Basil Fawlty style of hotelier cited by Postgate was more common than today—the reason possibly being that Cleese’s character acted as a corrective to poor service. It is also interesting to discover that in 1950 ‘ English law does not allow you to tell unkind truths about hotels and cafes, unless you are very rich and don’t care about libel actions ‘. Today, thanks to the excellent Trip Advisor, the angry recipient of poor accommodation and disgusting food can do just that with no fear of a letter from Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne landing on the doormat. Which is how it should be. Continue reading →

The Great British Tea

Found in Old Inns of Suffolk, an often consulted work by local historian 440px-Customers_enjoying_afternoon_tea_at_Lyon's_Corner_House_on_Coventry_Street,_London,_1942._D6573 Leonard P Thompson, is a complaint about the ‘catchpenny ‘afternoon teas served up by typical road houses and other mediocre eating places.

Writing in 1948,Thompson argues that excellent and value for money teas can still be found in Britain, but that the ones offered by hotels and similar outfits are invariably unimaginative, mean and ridiculously expensive.

Thompson begins his complaint with a eulogy to a tea he once had at The Fleece, Boxford, near Sudbury, once the home village of the late Peter Haining, the doyen of paste and scissors anthologists, from whose archive ( now owned by Jot 101) Old Inns of Suffolk may have come.

‘It was a Tea of an essentially home-made order. There was plenty of bread-and-butter. There was potted meat and home-made jam. There were biscuits, there was cake. And there was a pot of refreshing, honest to-goodness tea. The price was extraordinarily reasonable. And it all pointed to this moral: if one country inn can observe the ancient traditions of its proud place in England’s social history, so can others. Some, indeed, do, but they are all too few; and of that few, the majority are completely unimaginative. Hotel Teas display the least imagination; two or three wafers of rather dry bread, lightly smeared with a mixture of margarine and butter; perhaps a couple of diminutive sandwiches of indefinable and often dubious content; a piece of dry cake, or an equally dry and hideously plain bun. Such is the usual composition of the average Hotel Tea . Continue reading →

The Clash and Storm Jameson—an enigma

The Clash was formed in 1976. Storm Jameson died ten years later, aged 95. I don’t know what sort of music Ms Jameson liked, but I doubt if she was a great fan of punk rock. But if at 85 she was an enthusiast for this music genre she might have been delighted if Paul Simonon, The Clash’s bassist, had taken the name of their band from her 1922 novel The Clash.

She might have been even more pleased if, when the band members had finished putting together their difficult second album, they named it after another Jameson book, London Calling (1942).

But of course, it’s unlikely that either of these borrowings took place. One could ask Mr Simonon for the truth, but he might not be willing to admit it. After all, it’s not very rock and roll to name your band after a fusty old ‘twenties novel. Joe Strummer (1952 – 2002) is no longer on the planet to spill the beans. Other former members of the band might not be able to recall the stories behind the two names.

There are countless examples of musicians borrowing the names of their bands from books, movies and even newspaper headlines, but for a punk outfit to take the names of both their band and their second album from two books written by the same largely forgotten octogenarian female writer seems beyond belief.

And yet….It has been said that the band Generation X, fronted by Billy Idol ( aka William Broad), took its name from a book published in 1964 by Jane Deverson ( see previous Jot ) that Mr Broad had found in his mother’s home . Was Storm Jameson a favourite author of Simonon’s or of any other member of The Clash ? [RR]

La Guerre du Feu ( The Quest for Fire)

La Guerre du Feu, an early fantasy novel, probably written by Joseph Henri Honore Boex (1856 – 1940), one of two Belgian brothers who often wrote fiction together under the pseudonym J.H Rosny-Aine. was published in 1911 by the Bibliotheque-Charpentier in Paris. It is said to have been first translated into English by Harold Talbott in 1967. If this is true, it is odd that the acclaimed journalist and translator Eric Mosbacher in his note of 8.5.1979 ( shown) stated that this ‘ remarkably uninspired story’ was ‘ totally undeserving of translation ‘ and that the Souvenir Press should decline it. It is possible, of course, that a translation into a language other than English was proposed. Mosbacher translated from French, Italian and German.

Mosbacher’s description of the original novel reflects his utter disdain for it; the final line of his summary: ‘the caste (sic) also includes mammoths, tigers, etc’ says it all. Nevertheless, the producer of the movie, set in palaeolithic Europe, and based on the translation, seems to have been happy with the story, and ‘The Quest for Fire’ , with a budget of $12m, a director in Jean-Jacques Arnaud, and a cast that included the facially challenged Ron Perlman in his debut role and Rae Dawn Chong as the love interest, was released in 1981. It made $40m at the box office, gave Chong a well deserved award for her performance and garnered an Academy Award for make –up. Not bad, considering that the dialogue was restricted to grunts and shrieks. It launched the movie careers of both Chong and Perlman, with the latter starring as the deformed, simian-like creature Salvatore in The Name of the Rose.

It is not known whether Mosbacher ever saw the movie (unlikely) or that he regretted not accepting the invitation to translate it, if indeed the job had been offered to him. He and his wife, Gwenda David, also a translator and who incidentally I visited in her Hampstead home years later, continue to work together until his death in 1997. [R.M.Healey]

Banned books

Banned books: No 12: Lummox by Fannie Hurst

Found in the Summer 1924 issue of Now & Then (Jonathan Cape) is this brief announcement:

‘LUMMOX finds new admirers every day. Miss Hurst is expected in England shortly, and many admirers are hoping to meet her. She is a prominent figure in New York literary and dramatic circles and has a number of friends in Europe also. The ‘ ban ‘ of the circulating library still remains, but the book is on sale at the bookshops. The current impression is the third.’

This ‘ban’ is a bit of a puzzle. The journalist for Now & Then places the word in quotation marks, which suggests that although Mrs Hurst’s book was in the shops, it was not available for borrowing in certain circulating libraries, though these libraries are not specified. Nor is it clear whether these libraries are in the U.S. or the U.K. A thorough online trawl has revealed nothing on this issue.

At the time Fannie ( or Frances ) Hurst, as the report suggests, was an immensely popular, best-selling American author of rather sentimental and melodramatic novels, many of which had been adapted for the cinema. It has been claimed that she accepted $1m for the film rights of one particular novel. As for the problematical Lummox there seems little in this tale of a young female immigrant who is exploited and abused by her rich employers that could possibly offend even the most delicate sensibilities of an average circulating library subscriber. However, Hurst’s proto-feminism and support for the oppressed in society might have touched a few nerves among members of the wealthy middle class in post-war Britain. [RR]

Being engaged to be married, 1954 style

In view of the coming Royal Wedding here’s a glimpse of the conventions regarding engagements that prevailed sixty three years ago. So You’re Engaged, a collection of essays by a motley crew of contributors, containing some ‘big‘ names of the time, such as the cartoonist Marc, Gilbert Harding, Godfrey Winn, John Betjeman, Constance Spry, Peter Ustinov, Elizabeth Arden, Andre Simon and Googie Withers, is undoubtably a period piece, just as today’s guides to healthy living and spiritual wellbeing will be regarded as ‘of their time’ in the future.

The first contributor was ‘What’s My Line’ radio celebrity and confirmed bachelor Gilbert Harding, who injects some clear-headed common sense into the ‘delovely and delicious ‘aspects of being engaged. It’s all very well the groom drinking in all the beauty of his future bride, Harding warns, but this is the time to notice some of her irritating habits. ‘Does she get lipstick on her teeth, comb her hair in public, let her stockings get twisted, let her nail varnish flake?’ Moreover, does the handsome fiancé ‘ talk with his pipe in his mouth, does he use a clothes brush, does he keep his shoes clean and can you bear his friends ?’

There are some wise words too from Gilbert on how to keep the marriage on an even keel. Harding cites five ‘really happy marriages ‘he has known in which the couples have alighted on a winning formula. They behave, Harding suggests, as if they are ‘still engaged’. Continue reading →

What a Grey Day: synaesthesia in 1939

Just two weeks before World War Two broke out John O’ London’s Weekly for August 18^th, 1939, published four letters from readers blessed with a form of synaesthesia in which certain words, numbers and letters of the alphabet are associated with particular colours. This uncommon condition has been known about for some time, but until the autistic savant Daniel Tammet (b 1979) published his memoir, Born on a Blue Day (2006), few outside the realms of psychology knew much about it.

Tammet, born Daniel Paul Corney in a Barking council house, was an unremarkable child, although he was later diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. At the age of twelve he suffered an epileptic fit that left him semi-conscious on the kitchen floor. When he came to he gradually discovered that the fit had left him with a remarkable series of skills. Synaesthesia was one of them; others included an astonishing ability to calculate, an amazing gift to acquire foreign languages at speed, and a memory that in time enabled him to memorise packs of cards and to recite the value of pi to 22,514 digits. This array of skills was far more spectacular than those that brought fame to another autistic savant, the American Kim Peek, on whom the ‘Rain Man’ of movie fame was based. Peek, it must be added, was intellectually challenged, whereas Tammet, as befits someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, is clearly, as his books demonstrate, a man of superior intellect.

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Rognon de la Flèche and ‘Treasons Bargain’

Found – an art catalogue from 1990 of an exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in Belgravia, London. Rognon de la Flèche was the name by which Lady Cara Harris was known in her role as an artist. Parkin’s intro explains:
Rognon de la Flèche was the pseudonym of Lady Cara Harris and literally means ’ the tale of the arrow’ or more to the point ‘the sting in the tale’…To mention her name to old friends like John Betjeman, John Sutro, Adrian Daintry, Cecil Beaton and David Herbert would bring forth a knowing smile, almost instantaneous laughter and the inevitable hilarious story. I personally love the one of her daughters wedding date when she forced the somewhat reluctant bride-to-be to accompany her to Harrods to choose some new bath taps..having wasted the Harrod’s assistants time for several hours not to mention her by know somewhat agitated daughter’s – she apologized serenely remarking that she was suffering from the severe problem of ‘bidet fixée.’

The only daughter of the redoubtable Mabel Batten, known as ‘Ladye’ who was a ‘close friend’ of both Edward VII and Johnnie Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, Cara Harris was also the mother-in-law of Osbert Lancaster. The art of Rognon de la Flèche 1865 to 1931 (Lady Cara Harris continued until 1952) was first shown in December 1933, at the Warren Gallery, in Bond Street. Now some 57 years we are showing not only repeated this eccentric exhibition but also a collection of homemade dolls whose births, marriages and social activities became regular features in the pages of The Times and Tatler. Also showing during the exhibition will be one of her remarkable films Treasons Bargain (1937). Described as having five acts and 106 scenes it stars an elderly aristocrat (Lady Cara) who successfully outwits the ‘baddie’ Catptain Desmond Sneyke (Osbert Lancaster) and features performances by Lord Berners, Sybil Colefax, Lord Donegal, Victor Cunard, John Betjeman and and Cecil Beaton…’ Continue reading →

G.S.Fraser on George Barker, the purple monkey

Found on a scrap of paper which looks as if it has been scrunched up into a ball and ironed out flat is this squib on the poet George Barker by G. S. Fraser, the poet and critic.

The item is signed but not dated, but as it refers to Barker’s departure for Japan in 1939 to take up an appointment as Professor English we must infer that it dates from this time. Fraser looks back at Barker’s short but promising literary career, which then consisted of three volumes of verse, the first of which had been published by David Archer ( the David referred to ) at the Parton Press, and a number of contributions to little magazines, including New Verse, which was founded and edited by the gifted poet and highly influential critic Geoffrey Grigson.

For some reason known only to himself Eliot saw enough in Barker to encourage his efforts and it was Eliot who got the semi-educated Barker ( he didn’t even have a degree) his teaching post in Japan. This, however, was bad timing for Barker, as his burgeoning academic career was curtailed due to the outbreak of the Second World War and he was forced to return to England.

The whole tone of the squib strongly suggests that there was no love lost between Fraser, a good minor poet and a sound critic, and the wayward, uneven and often drunken and opinionated Barker, who if one is to believe all the stories about him, seems to have been a sort of Poundland Dylan Thomas, both as a writer and as a professional scrounger. However, on the subject of alcoholic writers, it is valuable to apply Thomas’s own definition of an alcoholic as ‘someone you dislike who drinks as much as you ‘. Continue reading →

Food products named after writers

Spotted in California at De Luxe Foods this American/ Irish cheese named after Oscar Wilde. Aged two years. Probably very decadent. There are not that many commercial foods and beverages named after writers and artists. Plenty of dishes, however, like Omelette Arnold Bennett, Peach Melba, Chateaubriand etc.,- Wikipedia has an extensive list.) I have also seen a Jack London wine (a Cabernet Sauvignon with a wolf motif on the label) and a Conradian coffee called ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Back in Europe there is a very more-ish chocolate biscuit called Leibniz, the name taken from the great thinker and mathematician. Jerry Garcia was the inspiration for Benn and Jerry’s ‘Cherry Garcia’ and in France there is a champagne named after the Marquis de Sade- at 35 euros a bottle it is not cruelly expensive. The Wildean cheese was $6 for just over half a pound. News of any other such products would be welcome. Why isn’t there a small sponge cake with a distinctive shell-like shape named after Proust? Or a Balzac coffee (did he not sometimes drink 50 cups a day?)

A working copy

I thought I would record this dogged description of a ‘dog’ (booksellers slang for an unsaleable book.) I have forgotten what the title was but as I recall it was not at all valuable even in decent condition, and certainly not rare. The best that could be said of it is that it was a ‘working copy.’ Why the seller persisted with his or her description is a mystery. At least they did not end the description ‘else fine.’ Most sellers would put it in the recycling bin, surely no charity or thrift shop would accept it:

A few library marks…First 2 leaves barely attached. Front inner hinge tender. Green cloth fraying at tips, scuffed. Scattered, light pencil marks mostly to margins. Light spotting to endpapers. Ex-Library. Rebound in modern, library-style binding. Serious tears to 3 of the 4 folding maps, 1 repaired with tape, 1 with careful stitching. Short tear to 4th map. Water stain to lower portion of text block. Foxing throughout. Twenty-Fifth Thousand. Brown cloth, lightly faded on spine, embossed decoration and gilt in center of front boards. Both volumes have amateur repair to frayed tips and spine ends, spines glued to text blocks, moderate foxing and soil to leaves. Last signature in vol 1 tender. Owners’ names on front endpapers: 16 plates, some starting to detach. 25 short tears to margin of text, some repaired with tape or showing residue from tape. Inner spine tender. Former owner has covered the cloth and front paste-downs with a clear, adhesive backed plastic cover. Green cloth is a bit grubby, spine lettering rubbed. Folding map has 1 short tear to margin. Scattered foxing. Binding tender. Lower half of backstrip missing. Full spine and board corners reinforced by clear tape. Boards soiled, title page more so. Lacking half-title and frontis. …Volume 2 has a serious chip to top of spine…

Photo below is of some distressed books glimpsed at Warwick Castle.

Tribute to Balzac / Balzac Mania

Found – this handsomely printed card (in its original envelope) with a poem addressed to Balzac’s American bibliographer William H. Royce by a minor American poet Alfred Antoine Furman. Furman is unknown to Wikipedia but produced a small body of poetry including, in 1918, some American poems on World War 1. Royce worked for the well known New York book dealer Gabriel Wells in the 1920s. Wells was a major player in rare books and manuscripts at the time at the time. Wells and Royce shared a deep interest in Balzac (it was Wells who saved Balzac’s house at Passy from destruction), and during this time the firm became the centre of the sale of Balzaciana. Royce himself assembled a major collection of Balzac material. His Balzac library was sold and his papers were donated by his daughters to Syracuse University. Balzac collecting was at its height at the time and lavish editions of his work (in English) were produced. Furman’s poem has Balzac as the greatest author ever ‘…the figure of a genius so supreme/ The ages show no equal.’ It is hard to imagine an American rare book dealer paying for the preservation of a European writer’s house in our time..although a few could afford it. The poem reads:

Balzac is still held in high esteem as a writer, although he has been surpassed in renown by Proust and possibly Hugo. Few people now plough through all 90 volumes of his Comédie Humaine. One great fan was the playwright (and artist ) August Strindberg, himself a writer of world class – he described reading La Comédie Humaine as like living a second life, the highest praise. He credited Balzac with giving him ‘..a kind of religion – which I would like to call non dogmatic Christianity.’

The manuscripts of George Bernard Shaw

In The Book Handbook for 1947 F.E.Lowenstein, the biographer of G. Bernard Shaw, quotes from an article published in The Daily Sketch of 3^rd November 1941 which recounted how in 1928 American bookseller Frank Glenn headed a syndicate of dealers which bid in London for some Shaw MSS.

“…Shaw unblushingly mentioned £5,000 at first with the remark that ‘you cannot buy the writings of a genius for a farthing ‘ . But eventually he must have come down, for the group obtained some manuscripts for £400. Now a single item has been sold for £500.”

This notice caused Bernard Shaw to write a letter to the paper, which was duly printed in the issue of 12^th November. Here is an extract:

“ Allow me to warn Mr Glenn and all who it may concern that I have never sold a manuscript in my life, nor autographed an edition for sale, nor even a single copy to be auctioned at a bazaar.

“…The transaction to which Glenn refers no doubt arose out of the enterprise of somebody who, having obtained specimens of my handwriting from some correspondence on which he had engaged me, imitated it as best he could in pages from my published works, had photostats made of them and sold them as Shaw manuscripts.

“No such manuscripts had ever existed, as I write for the Press in Pitman’s phonetic script (without reporting contractions) which is then translettred on the typewriter by another hand and sent to the printer.

I have presented a few pages of the Pitman script to public libraries with a fancy for such relics ( I kept ten pages of St Joan picked at random for this purpose ), but the rest have been ruthlessly torn up and are not available even for the waste paper war salvage”. Continue reading →

Over tipping

A few brief notes on tipping. Tipping is a controversial business – in some cultures it is deemed insulting, in others almost obligatory. Are wealthy people expected to give larger tips? I spoke to a taxi driver who drove Ringo to Liverpool from London in the 1970s and the great drummer gave him a £100 tip, the best he had ever had. There is the story of the rich man who was so impressed by the service of a waiter that he bought the restaurant and gave it as a tip – in some versions of this tale the waiter is said to be the hotelier Cesar Ritz. In one of John Le Carré’s novels a character suggests that people (like him) who over-tip are held in contempt by waiters etc., The idea is that the over-tipper is a sad, inadequate person trying to be liked, or at very least, showing off his wealth..

Francis King wrote of his time escorting extremely wealthy fellow author Somerset Maugham around Japan is the early 1960s – “..in a restaurant he gave a vast tip to two charming and attentive waitresses. Seeing that I was astonished he told me: ‘Never believe the idiots who tell you that people despise those who overtip. That’s a fiction put about by the miserly. On the contrary, people are always delighted if you give them more than they expect.’

One wonders whether Henry James was an over-tipper. His advice was: ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.’

Dangers of the Christmas Table

In the November 1927 issue of Good Housekeeping Miss A. Gardyne suggests decorating a Christmas table for children. Most elements of it seem awfully jolly and fun (to use the language of the time), but to a Health and Safety Inspector of 2017 some features would be regarded as positively dangerous.

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More bargains from Birmingham in 1913

Edward Baker, a bookseller from John Bright Street, Birmingham, frequently placed full page adverts in the Bookman magazine during the early years of the twentieth century. In previous jots we have looked at deleted items that a hundred or more years later were listed in Abebooks with large ( sometimes eye-watering )prices attached to them. This time we feature a selection of ‘ first and scarce editions ‘ taken from an advert of October 1913. Current Abebook prices are listed next to them. All books are first editions unless otherwise stated.

Oliver Goldsmith, Vicar of Wakefield, 2 vols 1766. £4 4s (£4 20p)

Today @ £4,000 – £5,000

Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, £6 6s (£6 30p)

Today @ £695.

Rudyard Kipling, Soldiers Three, 1888, £8 8s (£8 40p)

Today @ £2,800

Lord Alfred Douglas, City of the Soul, 1899. 15s (75p)

Today @ £488.

Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, fo., 1627. £6 6s (£6 30p)

Today a 1635 ed. @ £325

The Scourge, with 18 coloured plates by Cruikshank, 2 vols.,1811 -12. £3 3s (£3 60p)

Today 11 volumes @ £7,500

Southey & Coleridge, St Joan, 2^nd ed inscribed, 1798. £21

Today same ed. inscribed to Chas. Lamb @ £4,800

Thos. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 1859. £6 6s (£6 30p)

Today @ £395

Capt. Dickinson, Narrative of the Operations for the Recovery of the Public Stores and Treasure Sunk in H.M.S. “Thetis“, 1836. Very rare. 10s 6d ( 52p)

Today this guide to the whereabouts of sunken treasure is yours for £500 !

Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, 1816. £7 10s (£7 50p)

Today this ‘mad, bad, and difficult to read ‘novel is yours for a mere £1,250. Continue reading →

Are Novels Deteriorating ?

Discovered in a copy of the November 1927 issue of Good Housekeeping, a book-sized magazine with a middlebrow literary flavour ( Arnold Bennett, W.J.Locke, Frank Swinnerton, and St John Irvine contributed to it ), is this feature by G.H.Grubb, the London chief of Putnam’s.

As we can see, Grubb regrets the thousands of manuscripts that he and his fellow editors have to deal with every year, ninety-eight per cent of which are ‘wasted efforts …inconsequential manuscripts written by inconsequential people ‘.He expresses barely disguised disdain for the lack of trouble taken by new novelists, who see in the novel only opportunities for fame and celebrity, rather than the practice of a ‘high art ‘. But, he admits that like every other publisher, he is obliged to continue his task of sifting in the tiny hope that ‘the real thing of merit’ will appear. Indeed, he feels that in the slight decline of what he calls the ‘ sex novel’ ( later to be labelled ‘ bodice rippers ) that the future looks promising for the emergence of a ‘ clean novel, rightly admixed with sentiment, true in its life realisms, and big and broad enough to find a place for a little humour and a modicum of religion ‘. Continue reading →