Destroyed manuscripts— horror stories to chill the blood

 

1280px-George_Hamilton_Gordon,_4th_Earl_of_Aberdeen_by_John_Partridge

 

Found at Jot  HQ,  the pamphlet published by Winfred A. Meyers ,a well known dealer in autograph letters and manuscripts, containing  the talk she gave at the ABA Book Fair  at Albemarle Street, London, in 1961 on  ‘ How to Collect Autograph Letters and Manuscripts ‘.

 

Meyers sets off by making a good case for collecting autograph letters from a historical point of view. She argues that a letter or set of letters may help a ‘professional’ scholar piece together episodes in the life of a particular person, possibly solving a puzzle that has perplexed other scholars for years; letters can also immediately connect an amateur with the author of a work in that person’s library. So far,  so good. These are obvious benefits of collecting autograph letters. Meyers then comes to the horror stories of letters and historical documents lost, irretrievably damaged through neglect, or deliberately destroyed. What she tells us is indeed a litany of terrible losses:

‘…it is amazing after what has befallen letters and documents in the not so distant past, how much has survived. The rats that gnawed the letters from Elizabeth’s favourite courtier, at Belvoir Castle; the parish registers that turned into solid glue in the wet cellars of another stately home; Somerset House in 1840 sending the Exchequer Accounts of Henry VIII and the Secret Service Accounts of Queen Elizabeth to the waste paper merchant: the old India Office turning out the records of the Indian navy to the paper mills; the French Revolutionaries destroying and dispersing the papers of the Monarchy, and the restored Monarchy destroying the papers of the French Revolutionaries; the British army destroying the White House papers in 1812; the Southern States destroying their records before the advancing Union Army in the Civil War; the Sinn Feiners’ destruction of Dublin Castle records; the salvage drives and bombing of two wars; the mouldering records in a pigsty at Arundel Castle; the toy-drum and lampshade-makers’ part; Cassandra Austen tearing up the letters of her sister Jane, and George Washington’s widow tearing up all George’s letters to her and a terrible story I just heard of a collection of Emily and Charlotte Bronte letters that were torn up only last week…’ 

 Continue reading →

William Barnes Rhodes: the banker as bibliophile

Epigrams Rhodes title 001Found among papers at Jot HQ is this distinctly battered copy of volume one of Select Epigrams(1797) by William Barnes Rhodes, a rather interesting writer. Our copy lacks boards, has its title, but lacks one leaf (pages 29 and 30), three leaves (pages 57 – 62 ) , part of page 73 and pages 159 – 188. These omissions don’t exactly add to the appeal of what is left, but the incomplete book is worth reading, not least for its defects.

 

For one thing, anyone encountering the volume for the first time, as your Jotter did, would assume that the book consisted of one volume only. This is because someone, for whatever reason, has seen fit to erase the words IN TWO VOLUMES and VOLUME ONE from the title page. We know that our copy is the first volume because the contents of volume two from the Bodleian Library, has been digitalised and appears online. It is not known why volume one has not been digitalised in the same way. Incidentally, both volumes of the first edition are currently for sale through abebooks, but the bookseller has erroneously declared that the first edition is the ‘sole edition’, when in fact a second edition, was brought out in 1803 by William Miller, who published Washington Irving’s Sketch Book in 1820.

William Barnes Rhodes, like Charles Lamb, had a full-time job as a clerk while he pursued a literary career, but while Lamb worked at the East India House in the City, Rhodes, who was born in Leeds in 1772, obtained in 1799 a post at the Bank of England, just down the road from Lamb. It is intriguing to speculate whether the two men ever met. It is very likely, given their respective avocations, but Rhodes does not feature in Lamb’s correspondence. Interestingly, in 1823 Rhodes was promoted to the office of Chief Teller at the Bank, just two years before Lamb took early retirement from East India House.

Like Lamb too, Rhodes was interested in the theatre, though we don’t know if he was a great playgoer. He was evidently a well-paid official. At the great Roxburghe sale in 1812, when one of only two copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron dated 1471 fetched well over £2,000, and other fabulous books and manuscripts did equally well, Rhodes made large purchases of theatrical material. It was on the eve of this famous sale that the Roxburghe Club was formed by a group of leading bibliophiles. It is not known if Rhodes became a member, but he would have been interested in the objectives of this coterie. We are not aware of the actual contents of his library, but we do know that it was sold in 1825. Perhaps Rhodes sensed that his demise was near and wanted to provide for his new wife, who he had married that same year. He died a year later aged just 54. Continue reading →

Farewell to True Bookshops

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

Farewell to True Bookshops cover pic 001

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

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

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

In contrast, Harriott declares:

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

 

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

Patience Strong

Jot 101 Patience Strong Calendat pic 001Found amongst a pile of books at Jot HQ, the pocket-sized ‘Patience Strong ‘Quiet Corner ‘calendar for 1955 with its sepia photographs of ‘ picturesque ‘ spots in England. We had almost forgotten that publishers still used sepia photographs as late as this, but then remembered the lifeless and dispiriting photographs of landscapes and empty streets in Arthur Mee’s ‘King’s England’ series of county guide books. No wonder the county   guides  published by Shell from 1934 were regarded as such a welcome change from these  dreary volumes. Mee’s totally predictable descriptions of towns and villages in each county were matched by Strong’s trite and cliché-ridden verse formatted as prose in her calendar and exemplified  in ‘ The Sunlit Way ‘which accompanied a traffic-free photo of a ‘ quiet corner of old Warwick ‘ on the page for January 1955.

The Sunlit Way

‘May the way that lies ahead be lit with sunny gleams—and prove to be the road to the fulfilment of your dream…And may it lead you to the place where lost hopes are restored—where love is true and life is good and faith has its reward.’

Tumpty-tum …tumpety tum

England’s Treasures (October)

‘All along the roads of England treasures can be seen. Little old world villages with church and pond and green . Gems of beauty—cherish them and guard them jealously—and let no vandal touch the sacred scenes of history.’

Not sure about the scansion there, Patience.

 

The Glorious Month (May)

May is the month of bloom and blossom.

     May is the month of song and light.

Of tulips by the garden path

      And hawthorn hedges, snowy white.

May brings the bluebells to the wood

      And paints the cowslips by the stream.

May makes this sad old bad old world

      As lovely as a poet’s dream.

 

Which poet would that be?
Continue reading →

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 →