Diary of a Nobody (part 4)

chrysanthemum displaySeptember and October turn out to be very busy months for our gardener. He spends huge amounts of time preparing blooms for various local shows — spraying them with Malathion, deshooting ( etc etc), wins some prizes, including a first place, is disappointed by failures ( is second out of three), resents the success of other exhibitors and moans about the rain destroying blooms. He is writing articles for the Chrysanthemum Society and visiting various national exhibitions in London.

Perhaps ashamed at his poor performances in the language while on holiday he enrols for  Italian classes at the famous Morley College, but as they fall on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, regrets that he might be a poor attender ( Chrysanthemums come first, no doubt!). He later attends some on Monday evenings. He pores over his holiday snaps, worries when some don’t arrive on time, and pastes the flowers he picked in Austria and Italy into an album. And for the first time we discover that he has children. It’s the first mention of them in his Diary—unless they are someone elses’ children. And his cycle journeys to his mum become more frequent. On one visit in September she cooks him a ‘smashing dinner ( chicken and Xmas pudd)’ . On another occasion he brings her some of his prize blooms, leading on 28thSeptember to the perhaps unique and certainly hilarious diary entry in the history of diaries—‘ visit Mum, take her some ‘ mums ‘.

He still doesn’t own a car or a TV set, but he does buy a spanking new hi-fi gramophone and wireless combined, which he feels is ‘pricey ‘ at £29 ( it is really, considering that his monthly salary is probably around £50). As ever, in the evening entertainment is confined to listening at home to light opera, a talk on the Third Programme, a radio play on the Home Service, or the occasional game of canasta at a friend’s home. He never seems to visit the pub with ‘the lads‘ from work. Perhaps the redoubtable Madge wouldn’t like him to. Continue reading →

‘Every woman with stockings is a whore’ and other scurrilous entries in an early nineteenth century common place book

Here is a dual purpose thick octavo notebook bound in calf with a clasp. Nineteenth century diary & common place book 001The front part is a short record of travels in Germany and Belgium in which the anonymous male diarist, who is accompanying his mother, at one point tells us that he was born in 1802, is very scathing about the appearance of most of his travelling companions. In one instance he remarks that the young son of the parson in the party ‘seemed to be as ugly as his father and as vulgar as his cousin’. He is singularly unimpressed by most of the foreigners he encounters along the way. For instance, he notes that his fellow diners at the Table d’Hote, were ‘12 disgusting looking Germans who luckily eat enormously & spoke little ‘. The following evening diners at the same table were’ rather more disgusting in their appearance & manner of eating than the day before ‘. Predictably, he is also critical of the meals he is obliged to eat and the inns that serve and accommodate him. In one inn he accuses the landlord of serving him a dish of greyhound puppy.  Our diarist certainly places himself above the common lot. He seems knowledgeable about art and is a little snooty regarding the collections he views, suspecting that most of the paintings were copies from the masters. More positively, he is often ecstatic about the scenery and buildings he encounters and he particularly praises cathedrals and castles. We yearn for more, but unfortunately, the diary stops abruptly after thirty pages.

 

The back pages of the volume is devoted to anecdotes, jokes of dubious taste in English and French and snatches of Arabic —in ink and pencil and in different hands. The passages in Arabic may also be indecent, of course.

Here is a selection of the more publishable remarks from this section of the volume:

Gold and Paper

At a fashionable whist party, a lady having won a rubber of 20 guineas, the gentleman who was her opponent pulled out his pocket book and tendered £21 in bank notes. The fair gamester observed with a disdainful toss of her head.“ In the great houseswhich I frequent, Sir , we always use gold “. That may be so, replied the gentleman, but in the little houseswhich I frequent we always use paper.”

Appropriate text.

Mr Sterne (possibly the author of Tristram Shandy), the day after his marriage took for his text: “ We have toiled all night and caught nothing”

Royal Favour.

A low frenchman boasted in very hyperbolic terms that the king had spoken to him; & being asked what his Majesty had said, replied” He bade me stand out of the way “. Continue reading →

 The Poetry Reading—a literary squib by John Heath-Stubbs

From the archive of the booksellers and publishers Eric and Joan Stevens is this carbon copy of a squib typed out by the poet John Heath-Stubbs and signed by him  on 30 May 1963.I say ‘ typed out ‘, but as he was virtually blind by this time, and there are no typos, it is unlikely that he actually did so. In his later years the cult figure Eddie Linden, hero of the book Who is Eddie Linden?,read to Heath-Stubbs, so he may also have been a sort of amanuensis in the sixties.

The poem, which is entitled ‘Poetry Reading ‘and appears unpublished, pokes fun at various eminent and not so eminent literary figures of the period. The occasion was a meeting to commemorate a ‘notable Georgian poet ‘ and was arranged by  ‘ The Organisation for Ossification Of Literatwitters ‘, which may be a swipe by Heath-Stubbs at the Royal Society of Literature, which had elected him a fellow in 1954.Identifying the poet being celebrated is not easy. Most of those who contributed to the famous Georgian anthologies were born in the 1870s and 1880s and weren’t around in 1963.The last of the genuine Georgians, Ralph Hodgson, died in 1962, so the poetry event may have occurred in that year or soon before. If he is ruled out the only other   possible contender would be Edmund Blunden, although the ‘Merton field mouse’ (as Geoffrey Grigson called him ) isn’t generally regarded as a Georgian poet. However, Blunden did receive the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson medal.

The other literary folk ridiculed —the Chairman,  ‘Estaban Heartsleeve ‘, ‘ Sandy Sladge of the Sunday Sludge ‘,‘ Sir Solon Sepulture ‘, ‘Mr Bang with his prizefighter’s roar ‘ and ‘Mr Bing’ —- are even more difficult to place, although the last two men, respectively ‘ tall and blond ‘ and ‘ short and pink’, should be a little easier to identify. The satirist reveals the name his friends knew him by (‘Stubbs’) at the close of the poem, as well as his avowed liking for alcohol and pub-going. He had been, after all, a prominent member of the Soho crowd in the ‘forties.

Today the RSL, perhaps aware of its past reputation for ossification, seems to have gone too far in the other direction. Seemingly anyone who has published at least two books, is well known as a reviewer for the nationals, and is a regular on TV, radio and at literary festivals, is offered a fellowship. Sadly, quite a few lack the literary skills of past Fellows. The Society also unashamedly reflects the current popularity of literary biographies and crime fiction to such an extent that the list of Fellows contains more writers in these genres than novelists, dramatists  and poets. Many believe that by a too ready recognition of these doubtful genres as ‘literature ‘it has betrayed its original aims.

[R.M.Healey]

Diverse Paths Lead Diverse Folks to Rome

 

Rome visit typescript 001An unusual item found among the archives at Jot HQ the other day is an eighteen page Xeroxed typescript bound in cloth and illustrated with rather poor Xeroxes of various art works.  Entitled Diverse paths lead diverse folk to Rome, it narrates a fortnight’s vacation in the Eternal City during May 1955. This particular copy was presented to the author’s travelling companion, the eighty year-old ‘Nell’ Hill.

The author, who identifies himself at the end of the narrative, was M. T. Tudsbery (‘Tud’), formerly the BBC’s Civil Engineer, and the man who in 1932, with the architect George Val Meyer, was responsible for Broadcasting House, the iconic BBC HQ in Langham Place. The other companion on this trip was Alan Campbell Don (1885 – 1966), who was Dean of Westminster at the time. Nell was his cousin.

It goes without saying that for the Dean this was not his first visit to Rome. However,   for Nell the occasion was a double first —it was her debut flight and her first trip to the Italian capital. Not so unusual for someone born in 1875. What is far more astonishing is the fact that this was also Tudsbery’s first visit. It would seem that this civil engineer, who must have studied the history of architecture, had never deemed it necessary to explore a city of such amazing and significant buildings –which included one structure, the Pantheon, which had been built by Hadrian himself, and had survived totally intact.

Tudsbery’s previous lack of exposure to the wonders of Rome may go some way to explaining his childlike enthusiasm for everything he encounters–from the Colosseum and the Pantheon to the paintings of Fra Angelico, Carravagio and Raphael. In contrast, as a civil engineer he was quick to notice all the inadequacies of the various ‘modern’ buildings in the city although he also admired scale of the main railway station. Tudsbery also had a good ear for the amusing anecdote. At the Colosseum he overheard an American tourist express amazement at the extent of the bomb damage inflicted by German aircraft on this ancient building! Continue reading →

Short story by D — “Morphine…”

This was sent in by an old friend (writer and book dealer Robin Marchesi) – an occasional follower of jot. It concerns another old friend dead these seven summers…

Not long ago, I stumbled on a sheaf of papers acquired in the mid 1990s. I recalled the old friend, who left them with me.

His name was Derek Briggs and he was educated at Culford School near Bury St Edmunds, where he was recognized as a brilliant scholar. He made it straight to Kings College, Cambridge, but only lasted a year, before being sent down. As I recall marijuana was involved.

He went to London in the early 70’s where he established himself, as an underground figure with an esoteric air, exploring the varying options on offer, without visible means of support, other than his quick wit, intellect and charm.

No enemy of almost any drugs, he evolved from being a ‘pre-digital’ ‘couch surfer’ in London, to a world wanderer; in a permanent struggle, with himself, to survive, in the semi mystic state, which had become ‘normal’ to him.

Continue reading →

My Book of Confessions…

Benn June confession page 001Here’s an oddity that turned up recently at Jot HQ. The Querist’s Album: a Book for Confessions and Autographs (Glasgow, n.d., but c 1880) is a pocket-sized tome comprising several sets of pages meant for autographs together with questions addressed to the person supplying the autographs. All the questions are the same.

The questions are obviously addressed to young people—perhaps those in their late teens or early twenties. In this particular copy only around half the pages are filled and many responses date from the late Victorian or Edwardian period. One of those from this era was the actual owner of the book, one M.E.Laxton, who was given it by her aunt.

Most of those supplying an autograph have also answered the questions. However, Miss Laxton dodged many of them and appears to have found some impertinent, including one asking if she was ever in love.   A few have merely signed their names, but have left the question pages blank. One anonymous male has only answered a handful of the questions. When asked what is the most beautiful thing in Nature he has replied ‘ Woman ‘, and when asked at what age should men and women marry replies 45 for a man and 60 for a woman. This person also confesses to having been married twice and been in love thirteen times. Another male, a Mr Grant Miller, replies to the questions in what appears to be a ballpoint pen, even though he dates his answers to 1910. His ideal woman is Sophia Ridsdale. Then we have ‘Edith Broughton’, who also uses a ball point pen for her answers dating from April 1905. A further respondent is ‘Clement Bartholomew’.

Continue reading →

Authors most in demand

Screenshot 2018-10-18 12.32.43With a bookshop in Charing Cross Road , in the centre of London, it occurred to us to find out which authors are most asked for and  sell the quickest. So we asked around. The answers are in  three tiers.

1. Asked for a lot

Jane Austen, Beckett,The Bible, Brontes, Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter, Agatha Christie, Churchill, Aleister Crowley,  Roald  Dahl, Conan Doyle, Darwin,  Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Heaney, Joyce, Kafka, Kerouac, Stephen King, CS Lewis, AA Milne, Orwell,  Beatrix Potter, Pratchett, Rackham,  Ayn Rand, JK Rowling, JD Salinger, Shakespeare,  Bram Stoker,Tolkien, V Woolf, Waugh,Wilde, Wodehouse

2 Quite a lot

Jeffrey Archer, Marcus Aurelius, L Frank Baum, Enid Blyton, William Burroughs, Byron, Cervantes,  Baron Corvo, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Neil Gaiman, Kenneth Grahame, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway,  I Ching, Keats, Kipling,  D.H. Lawrence, HP Lovecraft, Milton,  Nabokov,Sylvia Plath,  Pinter, Edgar Allan Poe, Anthony Powell, Rilke, Seneca, G B Shaw,  Dr Seuss, Mary Shelley (and PB), Tao Te Ching, Dylan Thomas, John Wyndham,

Continue reading →

Diary of a Nobody (part one)

chrysanthemum displayWe at Jot 101 are fascinated by MS diaries. It’s a wonderful day when we find one kept by someone famous, but sometimes it’s the journals of anonymous marrow growers and dahlia fanciers living in the leafy suburbs that can be windows into past lives. Such a diarist was the man who acquired a thick T.J.& J. Smith Dataday diary, possibly as a gift from his ‘ lady wife’ at Christmas in 1956, and began filling in the entries, starting with the 1stJanuary 1957.

As far as we can see, the name of the diarist doesn’t appear anywhere in the volume—why should it? Back in those days it wasn’t deemed necessary for the owner to fill in personal details. And anyway, if the volume was lost and someone known to the diarist found it, compromising or embarrassing entries in it might take some explaining! We do, however, know something about the man himself which would probably identify him to anyone in his community who might discover the diary. That he was married to Madge (sometimes shortened to ‘M’) , worked  in the City or in Whitehall (possibly at the Treasury) , lived in south-east London, where he was both a diligent DIY-er, and  an very enthusiastic member of the Bexleyheath Chrysanthemum Society, is easily determined. Almost every other entry concerns either his garden activities or his home improvements. His daily grind in the City is rarely, if ever, mentioned, and most entries on central London relate to shopping trips or entertainment. Here was a man who, like so many others, endured a sometimes ‘unpleasant‘ job  for the sake of his weekends at home. Continue reading →

A Common-Place Book for the 21st Century

Common Place book cover 001Most of the Common-Place books you find in auctions or second-hand bookshops date from the nineteenth century—usually before about 1860—and are dull, dull, dull! They invariably contain passages from history books, books of sermons, and extracts from poems by Felicia Hemans and Robert Southey. Often they are illustrated by amateurs who like to think they can draw. Occasionally there are exceptions to this rule, but these rarely surface. So it’s nice in this Age of the Internet to find a Common –Place book that contains some information that is not always easy to find using Google. Such is the volume that we at Jot HQ discovered in a box of ephemera the other day.

This item in question is an orange, octavo sized HMSO indexed book containing entries in ink and biro and clippings from magazines, the latest of which dates from 2007 check. The writer may be someone called Michael Revett—because under ‘ Anagrams’ we find three offerings, namely Vertical Theme, Three Malt Vice and Three Claim Vet. There is a Michael C. Revett who in 1975 married the printmaker Eileen Revett in Suffolk, and he seems to be the only real candidate. This Revett is interested in computing and other aspects of science and technology, because one of the cuttings comes from the New Scientistand many of the Common-Place book entries have a scientific theme.

Here are some of the more entertaining facts in the book:

B.

Some profound observations by Mr Yogi Berra, the famous American baseball player.

‘You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there’

‘You can observe a lot by just looking’

‘There are some people, if they don’t already know, you can’t tell ‘em’.

‘You don’t hear much about born-again Buddhists’. Continue reading →

Iris Murdoch as a book collector

IMG_5189Found – a receipt from the late booksellers Eric and Joan Stevens for books sold to the novelist Iris Murdoch in 1966. There is also a request in her hand  for anything by, or on, Pushkin. Iris Murdoch was very keen on Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky, but she did not write about Pushkin – although her husband John Bayley wrote Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary which was published in 1971. This request may have been for him.

Her order is certainly eclectic- some religious, even mystical work, (Radhakrishnan and Swedenborg), a geezerish prison memoir, not at all her style – Frank Norman’s Bang to Rights and a book on the Samurai (‘Bushido’). Peter’s My Sister, My Spouse is about Lou Andreas Salome ‘A Biography of the Woman Who Inspired Freud’ (also Nietzsche and Rilke) – an important and much loved  writer and psychiatrist.  Penn’s  No Cross, No Crown is William Penn’s work on Primitive Christianity from 1669, probably not a first edition at 10 shillings, although the Stevens were always very reasonable in their pricing.

Other works ordered include  a Baedeker for the Rhine, possibly for a holiday. It its still fun to visit Europe with an old Baedeker. Schopenhauer is dealt with fairly well in her later work Metaphysics as a Guide  to Morals. Kropotkin fits in with her interest in Russian life and literature. Hale’s Famous Sea Fights is a mystery, possibly light reading or a present for a friend.

The Stevens’  had other famous writers as clients, including Anita Brookner and Geoffrey Hill, from whom they also bought many books. Iris Murdoch’s considerable library eventually went into the book trade, but not to Eric and Joan.

Harold Smith (1918 – 2005)—librarian, writer, publisher and collector

Labour movement bibliography picThe link between Socialism—or at least, left-leaning tendencies– and bibliophilism has a long and honourable tradition. One thinks of William Hone and Leigh Hunt in the Regency period. Charles Lamb, who wrote warmly of his love for ancient volumes, wrote blistering attacks on the Tory administration of Lord Liverpool in the same era. Later on there was William Morris, a proto- Socialist, who was into fine printing. In our own time the radical Labour leader Michael Foot could be classed as a bibliomaniac. My late uncle, Denis Healey, with a library of around 16,000 books could be placed in the same class. Also, in our own time, David King, the chronicler of Soviet history, had a vast library.  And then, two years younger than Foot and a year Denis’ junior, there was Harold Smith. Not quite in the same league as a collector perhaps, but a bibliophile with a collection of over 3,000 volumes of, and certainly one who devoted all his working life to books—initially as a librarian and latterly as a publisher in the tradition of Morris.

Smith was born in 1918 in the Hackney Salvation Army Women’s Hospital to a Polish couple who had come to Britain as children. Tragically, Harold’s father died six months after his birth and his mother was left to care both for her son and her war-injured brother, on the proceeds of a sweet shop. After Highbury School and at the outbreak of hostilities Harold served in the army Pay Corps, mainly in South Africa, where he learnt the rudiments of librarianship. On returning to the UK he continued his studies part-time while working on the journal of the Plumbing Trades Union.  Following his initial appointment as an assistant at Westminster City Libraries in 1947 he moved to various posts around the country, including one in Manchester, where he became friendly with the artist L. S. Lowry. He ending up back in London as Deputy Borough Librarian at Battersea in 1961. The amalgamation of the old boroughs under the GLC in 1965 saw him as the Deputy Librarian for Wandsworth, which was when his troubles began. Continue reading →

George Sims, bookseller extraordinaire

089Found 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.

Continue reading →

Banned books

Lummox coverBanned 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]

 

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.

IMG_4329

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:

 

IMG_4435

 

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

3e5c4065586acf3e602e984d11e6506f--george-bernard-shaw-vintage-surfIn The Book Handbook for 1947 F.E.Lowenstein, the biographer of G. Bernard Shaw, quotes from an article published in The Daily Sketch of 3rd 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 12th 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 →

More bargains from Birmingham in 1913

Baker bargains from BrumEdward 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, 2nd 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 →

Bookfairs –the price of speaking out against them

 

Peddle book fair ban pic 001All collectors and dealers love book fairs, don’t they? Well, up to a point. They can be good places to see what other dealers are up to— what treasures they are selling and how well they are doing. And even if they don’t buy anything, fairs can be good places for collectors to value their own collections. On the down side, fairs can be intimidating for collectors who only want to chat to dealers about books. There is often a tangible sense that dealers are only interested in talking to you about books if you show an interest in buying one of their items.

However, 20 years ago, it would seem that alongside these perennial complaints about dealers there was something more sinister going on behind the scenes. A clipping from the Watford Observer dated August 15th 1997 told the story of a local dealer who had had the temerity to challenge the book fair establishment and had paid a high price for doing so. Vince Peddle, co-owner of the imaginatively named Peddle Books, and publisher of the info-sheet Book News, had recently published a front page article in this magazine complaining that the over abundance of fairs was putting some dealers out of business. Continue reading →

More bargains from 1908 Birmingham

Birmingham Bargains Book Cat

A glimpse into the world of bookselling in Edwardian England. The following’ special bargains’—advertised for sale in ‘ new condition’– are listed in The Bookman of August 1908 by Edward Baker’s Great Bookshop, Birmingham. The discounted prices of 1908 are compared to what the same books ( inevitably in slightly worse condition) are listed at in Abebooks today.  

 

 

Beccari’s Wanderings in the Great Forests of Borneo (1901)    8s 6d (42p)       £600

Book of the Cat by Frances Simpson (1903)                             9s 0d (45p)     £325

Dominion of the Air by Rev J.M.Bacon (1904)                         2s. (10p)           £87

Moss Flora by R.Braithwaite (1887)                                       £2 10s (250p)     £120

Historical Locomotives by Bennett                                         1s   (5p)               £75

How I shot my bears by Mrs Tyacke (1893)                           2s 6d.(12p)        £650         Continue reading →

Shakespeare’s quartos

 

Quarto Hamlet cover 001When I studied textual criticism and palaeography at University under the legendary Peter Davison (editor of Orwell’s letters) I recall being impressed by the exceeding rarity of the original quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Rarer than hen’s teeth was, I believe, the phrase used. This was because the actors who used them to learn their lines in Shakespeare’s time had no reason to keep them after their acting careers had ended. Shakespeare was just another playwright, and it was only with the posthumous publication of the First Folio in 1623, when all the plays were collected together, that his true greatness began to be recognised.

These pamphlet-like quartos—often badly printed and containing countless errors—were published in small numbers and were not surprisingly badly treated by the jobbing actors who used them every day. Very few survived, hence their great rarity. Despite this, it wasn’t until the early twentieth century, when American multi-millionaires came into the market, that the first quartos began to fetch startling prices—startling, that is, for the time. Today, such treasures might bring in six figure sums. Continue reading →