Max  Beerbohm and The Age of Improvement

In a recent Jot we looked at the way Sir Max Beerbohm ‘ improved ‘ certain books in his library by adding illustrations to them or altering their printed illustrations to make a point about the authors. Some of these books were inscribed to him by the authors, but that didn’t seem to bother Beerbohm. On occasion he would also add false inscriptions from famous people, such as Queen Victoria.

The source of information concerning these amusing interventions may have been the catalogue of ‘ The Library and Literary Manuscripts of the late Sir Max Beerbohm ‘that Sotheby & Co issued to accompany the sale of the author and artist’s library on 12 and 13thDecember 1960. Beerbohm had died in (  ) and his widow followed him on (  ).

Anyone wishing to obtain some idea of Beerbohm’s literary likes and dislikes could hardly do better than to study this catalogue, which is profusely illustrated. It is quite obvious that he didn’t take to Rudyard Kipling and the feeling was probably mutual.

Jot 101 Beerbohm Kipling improvement 001

Here is a description of Lot 136.

KIPLING ( RUDYARD) BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS and other verse; the illustration on the title-page altered by Max Beerbohm  into a portrait of Kipling, blood dripping from his red fingernails; signature of Beerbohm and an inscription: ‘H.M.B. from F.H.H. on fly-leaves, original cloth.                                                                                                                            8vo 1892

And here is Lot 137.

KIPLING (RUDYARD)  A Diversity of Creatures , Max Beerbohm has introduced a pen-and-ink caricature portrait of Kipling, behind bars, into the design facing the title-page, and under the author’s name has written: ‘the Apocalypic (sic) Bounder who can do such fine things but mostly prefers to stand ( on tip-toe and stridently) for all that is cheap and nasty’; pen-scoring on last page, original limp red calf gilt                                                                                                                                                                                                               8vo Macmillan and Co., 1917

And Lot 139

Le Gallienne (Richard) RUDYARD KIPLING, A CRITICISM, inscribed on fly-leaf by the author : ‘ For Max from Dick. June 1900’, the portrait of Kipling altered by Max Beerbohm into a bitterly satiric caricature, and the title changed from ‘ Rudyard Kipling ‘ to ‘Rudyard Kipling’s soul’, original cloth, the leaf bearing the portrait detached and fore-edge frayed. 8vo 1900.

And lot 239

To the frontispiece of Frederick Whyte’s A Bachelor‘s London(1931), which features a drawing by Josephine Harrison entitled ‘ The House of the Light that Failed ‘, Beerbohm has added a pencil caricature of Kipling and four lines of verse parodying the poet:

Fred Whyte ‘e done me bloody proud,

So to Je’ovah Thunder-browed

Says I, “ O Jah, be with me yet,

Lest I forget, lest I forget.” 
 Continue reading →

Some literary curiosities inspired by Aubrey Dillon Malone’s  Stranger than Fiction (1999)

edition-originale-disparistion


James Allen, an American  robber, left orders that after he died a copy of his autobiography, which had appeared in 1837,  be bound in his own skin and presented to one of his victims, John A. Fenno, as a sign of his remorse. After his death Fenno’s family bequeathed it to the Boston Athenaeum, where it can now be viewed.

 

The first poem published under the name of Dylan Thomas ( ‘His Requiem’) wasn’t his own but was copied from The Boys Own Paper. It was only after Thomas had become famous that this plagiarism was reprinted as a curiosity piece.

 

Mark Twain reviewed his own book, The Innocents Abroad, anonymously in 1869.

 

The smallest book ever printed was the 1985 reprint of the children’s story ‘Old King Cole’ by the Gleniffer Press of Paisley in Scotland. It measures 0. 9 cm high and the pages can only be turned by a needle. Eighty-five copies were printed, one of which can be bought through Abebooks for $1,045.

 

The eccentric French novelist George Perec (1936 – 82) wrote a book called La Disparition ( The Disappearance) in 1969 which didn’t use the letter ‘e’.  The English writer Gilbert Adair translated the text as A Void in 1995, replicating the non-‘e’ format.  Perec also wrote a novel which contains no other vowels except‘ e’. The first edition of La Disparitionis hard to find, but there is a copy of the 1979 edition in Abebooks priced at a very reasonable £205 !!

 

The bibliophile Maurice Hamonneau has bound a copy of  Hitler’s Mein Kampf in, appropriately enough, skunk skin. He also has a copy of All Quiet on the Western Frontbound in a First World War uniform.

 

In 1996 a book by a joker called Richard Ferguson called WhatMen Know About Women appeared which consisted of 200 blank pages.

 

Richard Templeton’s novelty item, The Quick Brown Fox (1945 ) contains 33 sentences all of which contain 26 letters of the alphabet. A copy of this very short book can be had online for a mere $10.

 

Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise (1960 ) has no full stops until the very last page of the book, which contains 40,000 words.

 

American Lord Timothy Dexter’s A Pickle for the Knowing Ones(1802) has no punctuation whatsoever. However, in 1838 he added a page onto the book which contained various grammatical appendages, such as colons, semi-colons, commas, exclamation marks etc. These, he suggested were for readers to scatter throughout the book. No copies of the first or 1838 editions of this rarity can currently be found for sale online. Continue reading →

Ninety Years Ago : Christmas Books in 1930

Inspired by the Christmas edition of the Bookman for 1930 here is a heart warming fable about certain books and their rise in value over the years. It concerns Stephen, a precocious bookworm who later became a journalist on the TLS, his father, mother and sister Bessie and the new books that he decided to give them on Christmas Day in 1930. Like Covid hero Colonel Sir Thomas Moore, Stephen is still with us and the three books for which he paid little more than £2 10s in 1930, having raided his piggy bank for the purpose, are now worth more than £10, 000 !

PaterGreene Name of Action

Stephen was gazing around the bookshop to see what Pater might like and found a book with the word action in its title. As he knew that his father enjoyed adventure stories he bought a copy of The Name of Actionby someone called Graham Greene, who he’d never heard of. Unfortunately, Pater agreed with the novelist, who later condemned this book as being ‘of a badness beyond the power of criticism…the prose flat and stilted ‘ and consequently failed to finish reading his son’s gift, which was placed in the family bureau bookcase and never taken down again. Luckily, in 2020 Stephen’s grandson James, a book dealer by profession, discovered it ninety years later while visiting his granddad on his 100thbirthday. He looked it up in Abebooks and to his delight discovered that there were three or four copies of Greene’s hated novel, all of which, like his granddad’s copy, were in pristine condition. One of these was priced at $9,321 !

 

Mater

 

Peter was aware that his mother loved reading travel books and also liked the first novel of this young chap called Evelyn Waugh, so when he found a copy of Waugh’s travel memoir, Labels among all the books on Africa and Asia in the travel section he bought it for her. His mother was delighted with her present and over the next few years read it two or three times from cover to cover. Luckily, despite its use, the book managed to stay in good condition and James, on the hunt for further modern firsts in the bureau bookcase, found his late great aunt’s  copy, which he discovered was worth around $2,500 , according to Abebooks.

Bessie

Looking around the shop for a book that Bessie might like Stephen immediately rejected those books that were likely to be unsuitable for the eight-year old sister, such as Rupert in Trouble againby Mary Tourtel and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Little Pig. After some time he found a small pile of limited edition copies of Dream Daysby Kenneth Grahame all of which had been signed by the author and the illustrator Ernest Shepard. Although this book turned out to be more expensive than the two others he had bought, he knew that Bessie loved The Wind in the Willowsand Pooh Bear, so he gritted his teeth and bought the thing. Unfortunately, he had overestimated his sister’s interest in the whimsical side of Kenneth Grahame. Dream Daysturned out to me nothing like as funny as The Wind in the Willowsand eventually ended up in that bureau bookcase. Book dealer James found this too and was delighted to report back to his granddad that the book his ungrateful sister had returned to him was worth about £500. 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 →

Book collecting in 1930

Bookman Christmas 1930 cover 001The collecting of modern firsts seems to have begun alongside the rise of the modern etching as an investment opportunity in the early years of the twentieth century. However, while the Wall Street Crash of 1929 succeeded in almost singly handedly destroying the market for etchings, the taste for modern firsts persisted for years afterwards and may even have benefited from investors turning to book collecting from etchings.

The Bookman, arguably the most wide-ranging and luxurious magazine available to a middlebrow literary  readership at this time, regularly devoted several pages to all kinds of book collecting, including the vogue for modern firsts. It is revealing to discover just how tastes in modern firsts have changed over the past ninety years. Today, the best works of Modernist giants, such as Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Virginia Woolf and Lawrence are sought after. Back then, the emphasis seems to have been on contemporary fiction. In the Christmas edition for 1930, for instance, the writer discusses the merits of the many catalogues he has received from dealers. Among them is one from Bertram Rota ( ‘ very readable and educating it is in these days of lowish prices ‘) and from this some highlights are selected.

‘ I note a good collection of Brett Young’s works, including a copy of “ The Dark Tower “  for £3 10s., some seventeen items of Hugh Walpole’s works  ( “ Maradick at Forty “, 25s.) and many works of J.B. Priestley…’

In another catalogue it is noted that J. M. Barrie’s  “ Window in Thrums “ was priced at 16 guineas and A. E. Coppard’s Adam and Eve and Pinch Me could be had for 6 guineas. 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 →

Lousy condition / Cold climate

Found in our old blog Bookride from 2011 this piece about a quest for the world’s worst condition book. Below (right) is a pic of IMG_2825 a particularly lousy LOTR found in a holiday rental college. Compared to the books we found this copy is quite acceptable.. We wrote:

…have been trying to build a set of books by Nancy Mitford for a customer who wants to have them bound in leather. In these cases you require no jackets, the covers can be worn but the text must be clean. I have dismissed all the nice copies at silly prices and all the lousy copies at whatever price, although as usual some of these were pricier than the ones in exemplary condition. Some were so bad they reminded me of the Dada knife (lacks handle and blade). They lacked pages, spines, boards, some even had missing title pages – mentioned as an afterthought as if it was no big deal.

Inspired, motivated, energised and exasperated I started on a search for the worst condition book on the entire web. In 2007 there had been a legendary Webster’s dictionary on Ebay that was basicaly a pile of ruined, frayed and crumbling paper — it looked like, as Jimmy Webb would say -‘Someone left a cake out in the rain…’ It attracted no bids but was a fun item for a while. That was a yardstick. There are not that many truly appalling books on the web as they take a long time to describe and you cannot charge much for them. There are some eighteenth century and earlier books in laughably bad state often with huge loss and every indignity a book can suffer, presumably catalogued because of their antiquity. There is a type of customer who thinks old books should be a bit worn and distressed, even a few dealers. It should be noted that old and ruined books can have their uses as door stops or draught excluders etc., Continue reading →

Marie Corelli in 1909

 

Jot 101 Bookman Corelli 001Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, Tennyson and William Gladstone admired her; Mark Twain and most of the Press did not. She is said to have outsold Dickens. Some of her novels went into twenty-five or more editions. In an era when writers like H. G. Wells were promoting the  New Woman, she reviled this modern phenomenon, and yet some of her heroines could be said to have embodied the virtues—a sense of adventure, a resoluteness and a curiosity– of this type . She promoted Christianity and yet wrote about occultism and transcendence. In her private life she dressed as a rather twee lady, but was a hard-nosed businesswoman in her dealings with publishers and the Press. She had a reputation for ostentation. Owning the grandest house in Stratford-on-Avon ( now an outpost of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute ), she had  acres of trim garden, a tower for writing and a gondola on the river. Her readers adored her, so why, nearly a hundred years after her death is Marie Corelli, arguably the best-selling female author of all time, now almost totally forgotten ? If you wish to buy a first of her many novels today, you need not part with more than a tenner—often much less. From being a former Queen of the subscription libraries Corelli has become a literary curiosity, fit only for examination in academic studies on the cult of celebrity and the role of the popular novel in society.

Corelli sold millions of books, but was she ever any good ? The Bookman, a serious middlebrow literary journal, certainly saw her  as a significant writer. In May 1909, at the height of her fame, a whole issue was devoted to an appreciation of her life and work by A.St John Adcock, the magazine’s editor, who called on various admirers to support his view of her greatness. Firstly, Adcock takes aim at those ‘cocksure’ critics who set themselves up as the final arbiters of good writing: ‘ There are a thousand times as many critics who have never written a line of criticism, but are not therefore the less cultured, impartial, competent.’ Adcock then turns to the ‘ superior ‘ critics of Marie Corelli:

No living author has been more persistently maligned and sneered at and scouted by certain members of the Press—by the presumptuous and struttingly academic section of it particularly—than has Miss Marie Corelli; and none has won ( by sheer force of her own merits, for the press has never helped her) a wider, more persistently increasing fame and affection among all classes of that intelligent public which reads and judges books, but does not write about them… Continue reading →

Edward Baker, the Demon Bookfinder General of Birmingham

Edward Baker Poe coverIn some of our past bulletins recording the nefarious dealings of Edward Baker, who called himself the ‘ most expert bookfinder extant ‘, but who we prefer to dub ‘The Demon Bookfinder General of John Bright Street’, we credited him with what today might be regarded as generosity. He had the habit of selling quality deleted books, including works by Oscar Wilde and Dowson,  at knock down prices that in today’s market might sell for decent profits. After all, because a book is deleted it doesn’t follow that it loses its value. Thomas Hardy was deleted, as were many other celebrated novelists. On the debit side, however, as a buyer Baker was niggardly to the point of criminality.

 

Let’s start with what he was prepared to offer for one of the rarest titles in American literature. Edgar Allan Poe is now regarded as a key writer in the American Romantic idiom. ‘The Raven ‘ is a staple of most Americans’ childhood education, and his creepy tales were pioneer works . He is even credited with inventing the detective story. Poe’s debut, Tamerlane and otherPoems ( Boston, 1827) was privately published when Poe was just 18. The edition was around fifty, which made it so rare that today perhaps only twelve copies have survived. In 2009 one of these fetched $662,500, a record for a work of American literature. In 1907, when he offered just £2 for a copy, Edward Baker, who knew the book was a great rarity , would not have expected to buy a copy in Birmingham, but being a shark, he offered a ludicrous price anyway. If he had been a better businessman, an offer of £20, might have interested someone in Europe. To compound his criminal offence Baker offered a measly 25/- for The Raven and other Poemsand the same price for Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. We at Jot HQ would love to know if Mr Baker ever managed to acquire any of these incredibly rare Poe firsts.

 

It gets worse. Today, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell isa rarity that most  Bronte fans would love to acquire. It is nothing like as scarce as Tamerlane,but today you’d need to shell out at least £2,000 for a decent copy. .In 1909 Ed Baker would give you 25/-.There are more horror stories. Baker seemed to have a penchant for Shelley, or at least one of his well-heeled clients did. Perhaps one of them was A.M.D. Hughes , author of The Nascent Mind of Shelley, who later became a professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, just down the road from Baker’s shop. There are twelve very rare  Shelley  titles in Baker’s  ‘wanted ‘ list, but only two of these ( the Adonais, which was printed in Pisa following Keats’ death, and Queen Mab(1813), would he give more than £3 for. Today, many Shelley firsts will fetch up to £2,000, some much more.. 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]

Autograph Collecting hints

Unknown [Found at Bookride 2010 -our first site, this wise piece about autographs.] Try to avoid forgeries! To my mind the ‘blink’ test is a good start in testing for authenticity. If on very first seeing it the autograph doesn’t feel right don’t touch it. As Malcolm Gladwell details in over 300 pages of his book Blink. The Power of Thinking Without Thinking the unconscious mind often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. If the seller doesn’t pass the blink test either, drop it like a hot brick. Kenneth Rendell, purveyor of manuscripts to the great and the good, advises avoiding the kind of dealer who brushes you off when probed, he adds: “The real expert will bore you with answers.” I also like what he says about how forgers often fail to get the feel of a signature right -the “flying starts and endings of the pen”.

Avoid signatures that look more like a drawing than writing and ones that seem to have stops and starts. Also signatures in cheap editions of books can be suspect, most forgers will not risk screwing up a signature in a four figure book. Forgers often stick to a plain signature so a date or sentiment is useful (belying the tiresome ‘flat signed’ schtick.) Also beware the desirable signature that is seriously underpriced, you may be lucky but it is often a sign of a grifter at work. If it is very cheap, of course, it may be real but unrated or unrecognised. Age is no guarantee of authenticity, forgers have been around since Heraclitus stood in the river. Ebay is a minefield. Bad Salinger forgeries appeared there after the writer’s death and usually made a few hundred dollars. Like the curate’s egg they were ‘good in parts’ but if it is wrong it’s worthless, if it’s right it’s a few thousand. In one of the online signatures Salinger appeared to have misspelled his own name…a bad start. Continue reading →

The Prices of Books

Book prices title 001H.B.Wheatley’s Prices of Books (1898) is a real eye opener, not just for the prices realised by truly great and important books,  but also for those works which today would not fetch ( in real terms) anything like the sums that our Victorian forebears might have paid.

 

In view of the stunning Tate Gallery exhibition of works by Blaket hat closed recently, it’s a good time to look at some of his most significant books.

 

Songs of Innocence and Experience(1789). At the sale of Sir William Tite’s Library in 1874 a copy rebound in green morocco fetched £61. In 1882 a copy from the Library of William Beckford sold for £146.

 

Today a copy, even in poor condition, would attract a huge amount of attention. In 2001 Christies sold a copy for $941,000 in New York.

 

At the same Beckford sale a copy of Milton: a Poem fetched £230. Today, there doesn’t seem to have been a copy on the market for many years.

 

It has already been remarked in a recent post that the grasping Birmingham bookseller Edward Baker was only prepared to pay 25/- for Blake’s debut poem Poetical Sketches,which was not illustrated, but is possibly rarer than most of his subsequent illustrated works.

 

Robert Browning

Of Browning’s first publication, Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833) only eight copies were thought to exist at the close of the nineteenth century. One with an inscription by the author made £145 in 1896. Though Browning is deeply unfashionable today, the emergence for sale of one of those eight copies would attract attention, though it’s anyone’s guess how much it would make. Continue reading →

An Onitsha Market pamphlet

IMG_1074

Onitsha Market pamphlets appear to be a niche collecting area.There are some amusing examples in semi pidgin English about how to court and pick up girls, also  well written political and economic booklets. They are also referred to as African Market literature… There are quite a few at abebooks including a collection  of 30 at $2000 with Harper’s in the Hampton’s NY (‘…most of it characterized by sensational, and even slightly prurient, content, rustic production values, and a disarmingly naive, to an American reader’s eyes at least, approach to its subject matter.’) Brittanica defines them thus: ‘ A 20th-century genre of sentimental, moralistic novellas and pamphlets produced by a semiliterate school of writers (students, fledgling journalists, and taxi drivers) and sold at the bustling Onitsha market in eastern Nigeria.’
There is a good book on the subject An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets by Emmanuel N. Obiechina. Here is our catalogue description of one just found–

The Complete Story And Trial Of Adolf Hitler by J C Andrue.

8vo. pp 36. Marked up throughout in red pen, probably by the author. Appears to be for a future edition, almost all the notes are to do with typography and appearance (indents, italics, bold, type sizes etc.,)  

Continue reading →

Harold Wilson’s playlist for Desert Island Discs

Found – Harold Wilson’s handwritten  playlist for Desert Island Discs from about 1969. In the end  never appeared on the show, although his wife Mary did..Only the list remains. Bought at Hansons Auctions in May 2019 in a large sale of books, papers and objects from his estate. These included some of his pipes and a novelty HP Sauce bottle. It was in the news.  No real shocks here, certainly no rock or pop and not even a crooner.. The Stanley Holloway Yorkshire Pudding piece (‘a poem in a batter’) is an amusing recitation of just less than 3 minutes that they might have played in its entirety. It is possible that the whole thing could be recreated using the actor Jason Watkins currently playing Harold Wilson in the Crown. But who would play Roy Plomley?

Huddersfield Choral Philharmonic ‘Behold I tell you a mystery..’
followed by ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound
40 Years On sung by anyone
First movement Italian Symphony
Tchaikovsky Symphony number five second side i.e. 3rd movement (part of it anyway)
Schubert Symphony (crossed out)
Radetzky March Last night of the proms or Black Dyke
I’ll see you again George Metaxa (name crossed out)
Stanley Holloway – How the first Yorkshire pudding was made
England arise the long long night is over
This is my lovely day George Metaxa and… (all crossed out)
Danny Kaye: Candy Kisses
Mine eyes have seen the glory ( Not Mormon Tabernacle Choir)
Poor wandering One: Pirates of Penzance D’Oyly Carte version
Liddel’s Abide with me Clara B.. (crossed out)
The Day thou gavest, Lord is ended
RESERVES: As time goes by and Dvorak 8th Slavonic dance

IMG_1037

More gleanings from Ian Fleming’s 1946 book catalogue

The catalogue issued in 1946 (previous Jot) by the directors of Elkin Mathews Ltd of Takeley, Elkin Matthews book catalogue 1946 001near Bishops Stortford, probably contained descriptions of books and manuscripts by one of the directors, Ian Fleming, an avid book collector. It’s tempting to imagine the future creator of James Bond trawling through some of the items in the catalogue in search of likely material.

We don’t know what language skills his fellow directors, B. K. Muir and C. H. Muir had, but we know that before the Second World War Fleming attended universities in Munich and Geneva to work on his language skills and visited Moscow in 1933 while   working for Reuters. It is likely that he was responsible for translating some, if not  all, of the foreign language manuscripts being sold by Elkin Mathews.

First, he may have examined a letter from the disciple of Karl Marx and founder of the Social Democratic Party, A. Bebel (1840 – 1913), which was written in German in 1893.In it Bebel complains that ‘since the abolition of the ban very few intellectuals and university folk have joined the party, or if they have done so, have abandoned it later on, out of fear or for reasons of social ambition’. He attacks the evolutionary socialist Rodbertus, who was opposed to Marxism and the University- Socialists.

This  letter of ‘great importance ‘ was priced at 9 guineas.

There is also a holograph MS of Maxim Gorki’s “From my Diary” consisting of 12 folio pages in Russian and priced at a bargain £40—more than a  month’s salary for a British University lecturer in Russian in 1946.

You could also buy a letter from the Swedish Nobel prize winner Selma Lagerlof ( who she ?,Ed ) for £2 10s,a ‘ very fine letter ‘ from the Nazarene painter J.F.Overbeck dated 1852 for 10/- less and ( a real bargain, this) ten letters from the German impressionist painter Liebermann, a victim of Nazi prejudice, for £2 15s. A single letter from the gifted German draughtsman A. von Menzel, to which were attached ‘ ‘three fine pen-and-ink drawings’, could be yours for £20. Continue reading →

A fascinating book catalogue of 1946

We found this rare and second hand book catalogue in our pile of ephemera the other day. It Elkin Matthews book catalogue 1946 001was issued by the well-established book dealer Elkin Mathews Ltd in July 1946, just a year or so after the close of the Second World War.

 

It is interesting in several respects—not least because it lists books from the libraries of ‘Stephen Hudson’, the novelist and patron of the arts whose real name was Sydney Schiff (1868 – 1944) ,the novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, the acclaimed thriller writer Coulson Kernahan ( 1858 – 1943), the  fin de siecle writer Arthur Symons and Sir Hugh Walpole, the popular novelist and book collector. It is also revealing in that among the list of three directors published we find the name of Ian Fleming, who was to create James Bond a few years later. Fleming was a keen bibliophile, whose special interests included firsts of the most crucial works of modern civilisation (TV, atomic fission, birth control, motor cars and penicillin). One can imagine that before the list went out he would have selected several titles for his own collection.

 

Naturally, many of the items described in the catalogue are presentation copies from the authors and from friends and admirers; some contain pencilled annotations by the owners. For instance, at 4 guineas, a price which reflects the growing reputation of the author at this time, there is a copy of Betjeman’s exceedingly rare poetry pamphlet Sir John Piers (n.d.) with the poet’s corrections. Equally appealing and priced at 3 guineas is a first edition of Edward Dowson’s Decorations in Verse and Prose(1899) with a presentation inscription from Leonard Smithers to Arthur Symons: “ in memory of our friend the author “.

 

A number of the items listed had already been sold and this fact can be revealing.

For instance, an otherwise unremarkable copy of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel

(1927) was marked as sold, presumably because it came from the library of the popular philosopher C. E. M. Joad, at that time one of the most famous personalities on radio. He was, of course, much later on, prosecuted for fare evasion, an offence which effectively ended his career. Continue reading →

Book bargains in 1908

 

Baker's bookshop advert 001Before we report on the bargains available in May 1908 at Edward Baker’s Great Bookshop in John Bright Street, Birmingham (contrast it with Birmingham City Centre today, where there is not a single second hand bookshop ), let us examine what Mr Baker was prepared to give for top-end first editions in 1907 as advertised in The Bookman for May of that year.

For firsts of Keats’  Lamia and other poems (1820), Endymion (1818) and Poems (1817) Mr B. was prepared to shell out a measly £3 per item. We don’t know what his mark up was, but today Lamia would cost you £15,000 and Endymion£12,000.   For Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1866) 25/- was offered. A good copy of that book today is priced at an eye watering £37,000 in abebooks. For Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice(1813) and Sense and Sensibility (1811) he’d give you 15/- per novel, which was 10/- less than he’d offer you for Andrew Lang’s Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872). Even second and thirds editions of the Austens would today cost you around £10,000 each. As for a first of  Lyrical Ballads(1798),  without doubt the most iconic item of Romanticism in English Literature, Mr Baker was prepared to offer a whole £2 !! That’s £1 less than he would give you for George Meredith’sPoems  (1851). But there’s worse to come. For that most extraordinarily rare debut collection by William Blake, Poetical Sketches (1783), you’d receive a paltry 25/- , which was 10/- lessthan he’d give you for Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon(1865. This is sheer madness.

In relief we turn to some of the bargains that your great grandfather might have acquired in Mr Baker’s emporium had he visited it in 1908. We have omitted those titles that have appeared in previous Jots on Mr Baker’s bookshop.

All are first editions unless otherwise stated.

Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray (privately printed 1890).  25/-                  Today £3,700

Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi, two vols (1838)   £3. 10/-           Today £600

Aubrey Beardsley, The Story of Venus and Tannhauser(privately printed) 25/-  Today £300

Malcolm’s History of Persia, 2 vols, large paper 1815  £3 3/-     Today  £3,500

Barrington’s New South Wales, 1803  30/-                                   Today  £2000

Farmer’s Twixt Two Worlds, 1886  15/-                                         Today £350

  1. M. Whistler, Ten O’clock, 25/- Today £450
  2. B. Sheridan, The Rivals, £15 15s Today £850

Mrs Gatty, Book of Sundials, 25/-                                                 Today £285

Happy the grandson or granddaughter who might have inherited such books ! [RR]

 

An intriguing  letter from an unidentified  friend of W.H.Davies to Ivor Brown

Betjeman mentioned letter 001Found in a pile of papers around a year ago at Jot HQ is this draft of a barely decipherable ( hence the gaps and possible misreadings of words ) and incomplete letter written in pencil on the back of a typed Roneoed page headed ‘ The Association of British Chambers of Commerce/5thOctober, 1942/Parliamentary Bulletin No 462A/Information by question and answer. The draft letter is addressed to ( Ivor ) Brown, author of A Word in your Ear( 1942), a book that explores the history of certain words. The writer cannot be identified from any clues in the letter , though what clues there are might open up paths for Jot fans who are familiar with Cheltenham and the Cotswolds. Any with information are welcome to write in.

 

Dear Mr Brown,

Allow one old Cheltonian some 15 years your senior to thank you for the pleasure I have got from A Word in your Ear  in addition to the pleasure  from many similar examples  of lexical intercourse. There is much I should like to refer to, one; the fact that Nesh is a not uncommon word amongst the poor country people. As to clout too, my father, a Cotswolder from Daglingworth & like my son, an old Cheltonian , never spoke of Cleeve Hill, but always of Cleeve Court. I much enjoyed the quotation from Betjeman, but have never come across Silver ( ? ). Cheltenham has however produced one fellow poet (  ).Frederick Myers is much underrated for his poetry which is swamped by his Psychical fame. It should be remembered, if only for the lines originally on a grave at Grindelwald , but also on the memorial in Wasdale churchyard on the four men killed on Scafell Pinnacle some 30 years ago:-

 

           On moment stood they as the angels stand

           High in the stainless imminence of air;

           The next they were not, to their fatherland

           Translated unaware.

 

I do not see my book & my son’s as a classic to rank near him, being myself too ( ?  ) in verse to be under any illusion. If you can spare a moment with them you may amused by my ( ?   ) jingle & by The Dear Inn, which laments the closing of the great coaching inn above Naunton on the Cheltn. – Stow road, done, so it was said, by the squire of Guiting, who disliked his farm labourers frequenting it. My son’s little book was written originally as a Gunner before he got his commission in the R.A. He was my partner here & is now in Egypt. You may like my poem to our dear old friend W. H. Davies, the Welsh poet & ‘Super-tramp’. (I had to do most of his affairs & attended his cremation) as we saw him so often sitting surrounded by his beloved pictures– mainly portraits of himself & his magnificent Epstein hair.
 Continue reading →

London Life: a magazine for fetishists

 

 

London Life cover 001The front and back covers of London Life, which appeared from 1920 to 1960, should suggest the dominant theme of this magazine. In the three issues from the early 1940s that we found at Jot HQ recently scantily clad young ladies feature prominently on two of the covers, while the third shows a lovely young thing in full pout. Between the covers images of more scantily clad ladies in the form of photos and line drawings jostle for attention with feature articles on such topics as corsets and shoes, paint-on stockings, and ear-rings. There are also serials featuring Tilda, ‘ the world’s most glamorous girl ‘.But most of each issue is dominated by correspondence from alleged ‘ readers ‘ discoursing on every aspect of dress fetishism from a penchant for corsetry , high-heeled shoes and long gloves to the pleasures of transvestism.

Compared with what can be found on the Internet today this material is pretty mild, but in 1932 the magazine was deemed too audacious for the Irish government, who banned it. However, during the war against Hitler ( who is mocked in one issue) a more sensible British government doubtless felt that it provided much-needed glamour for demoralised troops.

All tastes were catered for by the correspondents, including in one instance, a sort of male transvestism in which the correspondent recalls the experience of wearing a corset borrowed from a friend:

‘ He asked me if I would like to be laced, and suggested a comfortable tightness at first, and as it was a beautiful evening, we decided to go for a walk after I finished dressing. We went quite five miles, and I shall never forget how comfortable I felt; no sign of fatigue, and on my return I requested him to lace me in much tighter—and it was quite a thrill seeing what a small waist I could achieve. Needless to add that I have now spent some coupons on a pair of my own, and although I don’t wear them daily, I particularly delight in walking in them, and have become quite a tight-lacing fan.
Yours truly,
“LACED.” Continue reading →