Vintage ad for Listerine on the inside of a mystery fiction magazine from 1940, the end of the era of the 'shudder-pulps.' Ads in these mags often relied on shaming the reader - acne, bad breath, weedy body (the guy who gets sand kicked in his face.) The rare pulp 'Red Star Mystery' was the first ever of that title, it lasted about a year. Don Diavolo (The Scarlet Wizard) seen on the cover  was the inspiration for Rawson's famous hero, the Great Merlini. Did the phrase 'Sorry Watkins but we're cutting down' have some currency in the 1940s? Listerine suggests all firms have their employees use it once a day 'maybe a few super- employees can get away with it, but lesser ones shouldn't even try...'

Found in a copy of John Pearson's book and addressed to someone called Jeremy. Dated 30/10/70 from Knightsbridge. Pearson was a friend of Fleming and had been his assistant at the Sunday Times. The tone is friendly and urbane but very frank; it is important to record that John Pearson adds this postscript 'He did have a great sense of humour about himself which made it all tolerable...''

I have been thinking about what you said about Flem[ing] being sort of a rebel. You're right up to a point. He would certainly have agreed with you...As a pseudo-Marxist I would say he was at best -or worst - a phoney rebel. Whatever rebellion or rebelliousness he went in for began as a reaction against his money-grubbing family , his intolerable mother, his unbeatable brother and the memory of his impeccable father.

What is interesting about him is that the rebelliousness this produced never channelled into any political form at all although his teens coincided with the 1930s...He was far too narcissistic , too self-absorbed,too lonely to indulge in politics. There was also an extraordinary vein of caution or cowardice in him. He was not the man to kick against the system in any serious sense at all. He wanted money , social position , worldly success ; and his rebelliousness came from the feeling that these social goodies were being unjustly denied him - not that they were wrong in themselves.

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This was found in a reprint set of Lord of the Rings and is a sort of news sheet to keep Tolkien lovers abreast of the latest news, almost certainly 1967 when Smith of Wootton Major came out. The Silmarillion was eventually published posthumously in 1977.

No, we are not publishing THE SILMARILLION yet! Professor Tolkien is still writing this book and we will let you know when we have a date for its appearance, but on the 9th November we are publishing SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR – a mid-winter tale, half homely, half fay. The setting of Tolkien’s new story is the village of Wootton Major, where the office of Master Cook was exalted once in twenty-four years by the preparation of a Great Cake to mark the Feast of Good Children. Although the merry-making over which the Cook presided was human and hearty, other, less material powers were exchanged during the ceremonies, and for some the world of man and the world of faery met and blended in a strange, beneficent conjunction. Pauline Baynes has illustrated this little book, which costs 7s. 6d. net and will be available from your usual retail bookseller. It is an ideal present for a Christmas stocking, or for those who deserve something more than a card.

Coming soon after Christmas will be THE ROAD GOES EVER ON, a handsomely produced song-book of Donald Swann's musical sittings to a number of Tolkien's poems. Professor Tolkien has embellished the pages with calligraphy and notes that will be great interest to enthusiasts.

At about the same time Philips Records will issue THE POEMS AND SONGS OF MIDDLE EARTH. On this disc the Song Cycle will be sung by William Elvin with Donald Swann as accompanist. On the second side, for the first time, Professor Tolkien can be heard reading a selection of his poems in English and Elvish.

From the papers of Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, sometime book dealer, Edward Gordon Craig specialist, theatrical history and dance expert. Published in a somewhat revised form in 'London Calling' (BBC Overseas service journal) June 5 1941. 6 million books lost in blitz at Paternoster Square - unimaginable treasures.

BOOKS, THEATRES & BOMBS.
by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher
February 7, 1941.

Nearly eight years ago, as we can now see, the Nazis revealed themselves in their true colours. What happened on the night of May 13 1933 was no obscure diplomatic or political more, unknown to all but statesmen. It was a simple act of destruction which has profoundly effected the lives of us all. Do you remember? Twenty-five thousand books were made into a bonfire outside the University of Berlin and were destroyed in the presence of about forty thousand people.
    At the time it may have seemed nothing more than the triumph of one political party over another but we know now that all the violence and suffering of the interviewing years are, as it were, lit up by the flames of that bonfire. By its light we see and understand another fire seven and a half years later - the fire of the night of December 29, 1940, when, in the district around St Paul's Cathedral, nearly six million books were destroyed and some of the most precious treasures of our architecture were wrecked. By its light we see and understand other events, the destruction of the library of University College, London; the destruction of the library at Holland House and the partial destruction of this lovely and historic mansion, for which the people of West London had feelings of the warmest affection. We see and understand the destruction of the library of the city of Tours and the looting of the museums and art collections of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, and Belgium. Recently, the Louvre and the famous chateaux of France have been plundered, not to satisfy artistic craving for possession but to provide funds from the art markets of neutral countries for more weapons of destruction.
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From the papers of  Janet Ashbee wife of C.R. Ashbee
(Arts & Crafts Movement). This is Fry before Bloomsbury...

74 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea,
March 1902

    Roger Fry came up from Dorking to see me today, and I felt rather like my small self at 6 years when a strange child was asked to tea, and we were told to "make friends". I had seen him but for a moment at our play, and had remarked only his gaunt face and air erect as of one who sees a ghost and is afraid.
    We plunged at once, and talked of civilization, the town and the country, and the real sane life. He says he finds the Carpenterian "Simplification of Life" leads to endless complexity, and he has given it up -- it was a clean waste of energy.
    "I like civilization", he said, "not the cumbrous artificial kind of course, but a civilization so perfect that it tends to complete simplicity."
    But the servant question is harassing him much, the Dorking menage being at present without the Great Indispensables. He railed at the independence of latterday servants--
    "They dont enjoy it", he said, "look at these half-educated maids, do you think they're any the happier for their sense of reverence having disappeared? not a bit. The old folks may have commanded their servants like dogs, but the servants looked up to them, and stuck to them. There was something to admire and something stable and human that they could become attached to. And see how they run!" he concluded, "and what misery it is without them!"
    He was delighted with out little Umbrian Madonna, and I saw he was burning to restore it.
    "Yes, it's a lovely thing," he said, "I COULD make those little angels and their gold frocks come out if I tried!"
    He lives now, I understand, by lecturing on Art and by restoring old pictures. As a creative artist he seems to have been so susceptable to everyone else's style that his own clever painting went to the wall. The only possible trade became the submersion of his own style in that of each painter whose work he restored. He is said to be an adept at it, and his judgements are received in artistic circles I hear with entire submission.
    He complains that the criticism of modern pictures is deadening; entirely destructive and negative.
    He was much more sympathetic than I had imagined-- I had heard much of him, of the emancipation from his Quaker family, of his strange marriage with Helen Coomb, of her mysterious illness, their exile in Italy, their reappearance and the arrival of the little son. I gather that his horizon is now quite filled with the boy. It was pretty to hear him talk of him, and the child is to be brought up without any theories whatever, except the eminently male one that the mother is to do all the educating, for the present anyway.
    I was glad to have the chance of seeing what manner of man he was. He has the eyes and the smile of the idealist who at the same time is human.

I once met Clare Winnicott. She was one of the leading British social workers of the 20th century.  The wife of Donald (D.S.) Winnicott, an analysand of Melanie Klein, a wartime innovator in caring for evacuated children, a teacher and mentor to a generation of social workers, and a gifted psychotherapist. Her husband had died in 1971 and in 1980 she called me to her flat in Knightsbridge to help her sell some of her books.

She was a pleasant woman and showed no sign of what I later found was a bout with cancer. Her books belonged to her and her late husband and had annotations by them and were mostly concerned with psychoanalysis and sociology. She had a small collection of TS Eliot which she kept. She died 4 years later and seemed to be in her late 60s at the time. I bought a van driver with me to help load and on hearing that she was a psychoanalyst he asked her what she thought of us, something I would not have asked. She replied cheerfully 'You are two of the most normal people I have met for a long time." Which was reassuring - although I had a feeling it was a stock reply!

This is a cutting from a book from about 1990 that fell out of another book...wonder if this is the man who broke the bank!

A Look at Monte Carlo
The longest consecutive run of even numbers in the history of roulette at Monte Carlo is a series of twenty-eight. The mathematical odds against a series of twenty-nine even numbers occurring are so great, that the wheel at Monte Carlo would have had to have been spun since prehistoric times (about 6500 years ago) to give a statistically justified expectation of such a sequence occurring once.

From a scarce work (1882) which covers such curious subjects as revivals after execution, female jockeys, Blind Jack the roadmaker of Knaresborough, singular funerals, whimsical wills, curious epitaphs, the Caistor Gad-whip Manorial Service, dog whippers and sluggard wakers, how the town of Alfreton was played for at a game of cards etc.,The author seems to have been a contributor to 'Notes & Queries' and fascinated by the odd, curious and strange. God preserve us from a shower of pilchards...

  More remarkable still than a shower of frogs is that of lizards. The scarcity of these animals, one would think, would almost exclude the possibility of their appearing in such numbers as to constitute what might be termed a shower. The following, however, appeared in the Montreal Weekly Gazette of 28th December, I857-- " During the heavy rain of Sunday last, live lizards, some of them measuring four inches in length, fell from the clouds like manna, though not as plentiful, nor alf so welcome. They were found crawling on the side walks and in the streets, like infantile fugitive alligators in places far removed from localities which they inhabit."
  Carriber, in his interesting little volume, entitled " Odd Showers," gives the following account of a descent of fishes: "On Wednesday before Easter, in I666, a pasture field of two acres, at Cranstead, near Wrotham, in Kent, was all overspread with little fishes, supposed to have rained down, as there was at the time a great tempest of thunder and rain. Wrotham is far  from the sea, there were no fish-pinds near, but a great scarcity of water. The fish were of the length of the little finger, and proved to be about a bushel; none were found in any adjoining fields. This account was given a letter from Dr. Robert Conny, to the late Dr. Robert Plot, F.R.S., who it seems had promised the former an account of a shower of herrings."
  The Rev. Aaron Roberts, B.A., curate of St. Peter's, Caermarthen, wrote a letter to the Times, which appeared in that paper of February 25th, I859, giving particulars of a shower of pilchards which occurred at Mountain Ash, Glamorganshire. From his account it appears that some of the fishes were about four inches long. A number were caught and preserved in fresh water, salt water killing them almost as soon as they were put in it.

This strange note fell out of an old paperback collection of her poems. It came from a house in Fortune Green. Oddly enough the 'professor' mentioned in the note  wrote a book about his experiences and the 'channelled' poems. Sylvia Plath-Last Encounters (Bedford 1989)

From the catalogue of Charing Cross Road Bookshop (2002) It was priced at £1500 and is no longer for sale.

Bruce Robinson. Withnail and I. Typed manuscript..82 pages typed recto only  in rung bound folder.(1976)  Closely written typed pages written in the first person mainly describing the picaresque London and deep country adventures of 2 out of work actors. The main character is Withnail, although this treatment reads somewhat differently form the script of the 1986 film the essential plot and the outrageous character of Withnail is the same. Many good scenes were not included in the film , possibly for reasons of time. Robinson appears to have written the story out as a novel with a great deal of dialogue, the typescript has his name and Fulham address (c/o Linda Seifort) and phone number with an arrow and the handwritten words ‘Me till Set ‘76.’ The tyescript was apparently touted around the film industry for years until Bruce Robinson managed to make the film himself in 1986. The typescript appears to be mostly ‘top copy’ i.e. straight from the typewriter with occasional tippexed corrections or new typed lines cut out and stuck to the page over the corrected line.

There are a small amount of short handwritten corrections. Some of the memorable lines in the cult film are here--for example the drug dealer Danny (here called Sammy) advises Withnail who is contemplating having his hair cut --’"A very foolish move man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government...Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight." It is hard to think of a cult film with a more dedicated following than ‘Withnail and I’ - the village where the country scenes (Stony Stratford) are shot still has visitors  bothering the tea room with lines from the film such as:-  “We want the finest wines available to humanity, and we want them here and we want them now...” Semi aubiographical based on his experiences sharing a flat with the actor Vivian Mackenderell an elegant wastrel, the typescript ends in the same way as the film with Marwood and Withnail looking at the wolves in a cage in Regents Park.

Press cutting (Sunday Times, London?) dated 1960 found in a copy of Aytoun Ellis's book Essence of Beauty. Interesting how the modern Mocha is no longer a food drink...

SIR,–No meals were served in the seventeenth-century coffee-houses. The serving of coffee after dinner was however an established practice before that century ended, although only in the nobility. Richard Hoare, the goldsmith, who had removed from Cheapside to Fleet Street in 1690, made " a plain coffee port " for Lord Derby, to be sent to Knowsley with " six pounds of coffee berries." (The coffee doubtless came from Hoare's neighbor at Temple Bar–Thomas Twinning.)
  By the mid-eighteenth-century, when most of London's 2,000 coffee-houses had closed down or become clubs, taverns, or chop-houses, coffee was served with meals in certain of the inns and eating-houses, particularly in provincial towns like Chester, Exeter, Liverpool, and in Edinburgh and Glasgow.   Anyone who has tasted Mocha coffee as made in the early coffee-houses–" the bitter black drink " (as Pepys called it)–will agree that it was food and drink in one! The only complaints appear to have come from " the trade," jealous of this new and formidable rival, and from the women, who complained that they were neglected by their husbands whose addiction to this " enfeebling " drink made them " as unfruitful as the desert from where that unhappy berry is said to be brought."
                J. A. Aytoun-Ellis     Sussex.

*                      *                      *                       *                       *

SIR,–In " The Cook's Oracle " by Dr. Wm. Kitchiner (seventh edition, 1823) you read:-
  Coffee, as drank in England, debilitates the Stomach, and produces a slight nausea. In France and in Italy it is made strong from the best coffee, and is poured out hot and transparent. In England it is usually made from bad coffee, served out tepid and muddy, and drowned in a deluge of water, and sometimes deserves the title given to it in " The Petition against Coffee," 4to, 1674, p. 4, " a base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking Puddle Water." . . . . No coffee will bear drinking with what is called milk in London.
Has the situation changed very much?
                W. H. S. Williams.
    Tenterden.