The A – Z of Celebrity Collections (continued)

Gerhardie

Does anyone read, let alone collect, the novels of William Gerhardie ? He was born in St Petersburg in 1895 and his novels are set mainly in Russia. A literary lion in the twenties, Waugh called him a genius and H. G. Wells championed his work. But his star waned. He published nothing after 1939 and died in 1977, an almost forgotten figure. Prize-winning biographer Michael Holroyd, however, has always been a great fan. He tried with others to jump start a Gerhardie (left) revival by providing forewords to reprints of his work, but seems to have failed. He owns a number of his firsts, including Of Mortal Love and The Romanovs. The grateful Gerhardie signed the latter ‘ To Michael Holroyd, the English Gogol, from William Gerhardie, the English Chekhov. He is still appreciated by a few cognoscenti , if the prices in ABE are any indication, although there are very few first editions for sale, and even a signed limited edition of this once feted novelist can be had for under £100.

Herbals

Passionate gardener Germaine Greer, who as a child wanted to be a librarian, combines her interest in women’s writing with a love of herbals. One of her favourites is Elizabeth Blackwell’s Curious Herbal (1737 - 39 ), which was published to repay her waster of a husband’s debts. After the redoubtable Blackwell was given access to the Chelsea Physic Garden she drew 400 of the plants there, provided the accompanying text, then etched the plates (comfrey, left) and coloured the prints made from them. The book, which appeared in parts priced at a shilling plain and 1/6 coloured, was an instant success with the public, though some professional botanists were a bit sniffy. It went through several editions and as late as 1806 the large paper edition was still selling for its original price of 10 guineas. Today, the book is highly sought after and you’d have to shell out a $55,000 on ABE for a copy of the first edition, though later ones are a little cheaper. Incidentally, Elizabeth’s wifely devotion cut no ice with her ne’er do well husband, who ended up being beheaded in 1747.
Tree–lover Felix Dennis is also keen on ancient herbals and owns several, including Fuch’s celebrated De Historia Stirpium of 1542. Rather bizarrely, the billionaire feels that these early herbals are ‘ too expensive ‘.



Hollywood

Art connoisseur, actor and director Edward G. Robinson, who lost most of his picture collection when he divorced, also had a wonderful library, including, I believe, incunabula. Jerome Kern had a priceless collection of American and British firsts and manuscripts, which he sold in the nineteen twenties. In contrast, the director George Cukor owned a ‘ worthless ‘ library, according to Book Dealer to the Stars, Elliot Katt, whom I interviewed in March 2000. If, for instance, he was entertaining Aldous Huxley for the evening Cukor would send someone out to buy a copy of a book by his guest for him to sign. The book this assistant came back with would inevitably be a crappy copy and when Cukor’s collection was sold after his death every book was found to be worthless, even though most were signed. ‘The best thing you could do with such books, Katt told me , ‘ was to rip out the signed pages, mount them with a photograph and frame them. So that’s what happened ‘.

Michael Jackson was interested in certain people at certain times, according to Katt, who would close his store when Jacko stepped through the door. On one occasion the singer bought the actress Elizabeth Taylor’s biographical epic Nibbles and Me, which was about her pet squirrel. In the mid eighties the King of Pop was seriously into books about child movie stars who became adult stars.
Katt also revealed that Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark was based on an obscure labour of love published in 1975 by Jack Mathis called Valley of the Cliffhangers, a compilation of the cliffhanging serials brought out by the Republic Studios between 1935 and 1955. Though originally priced at $66, this limited edition, now fetches between one and two thousand dollars.

Incunabula

Even big name celebs baulk at the prices that pre-1500 books fetch. Many, including Felix Dennis, who is fascinated by ancient typefaces, covet incunabula, but perhaps even multi-millionaires have better things to do with £20,000+ ( although I suspect that Dennis has one or two select items secreted away somewhere ).The library of the late Sir Paul Getty, an eminent cricket-loving Anglophile, contained several volumes of incunabula, but after all, the man was a scholar as well as a gentleman .Perhaps it’s the fact that most pieces of very early printing are in Latin that deters modern celebrities, including Madonna. Certainly, books in Latin or Greek ( of whatever date ) feature very little in the libraries of the forty or more celebs I have interviewed.



Junk and antique shops

Most antique and junk shop owners only have a rudimentary knowledge of rare books, which even in today’s world of the Internet makes such shops good hunting grounds. Only the other day I bought a Geneva Bible of 1611 for a mere £20 in a junk shop. Back in the sixties, when David Battie began to collect, the opportunities to nab bargains were much greater. As a young amateur dealer Battie paid two shillings (10p) for a manuscript by William Sowerby, the famous botanist. Ignorant of its worth, he was overjoyed to sell it for £20. Today, as he ruefully admitted to me, that manuscript might fetch twenty or thirty thousand pounds. [Robin Healey]

Many thanks Robin, wise and timely words. I had not heard of this Hollywood sleeper 'Valley of the Cliffhangers' and copies are unlikely to show up in profusion on these shores. There are copies in its meretricious padded leather binding on ABE at around $900. Some unfortunate punter paid $3696 for a copy in 2005 at Hake's Americana Auctions. It was described thus:

2.5”x18” with 448 pages. Beautifully designed book features several pages of photos, text and cast listings of dozens of Republic serials of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Some of the great serials include: “Dick Tracy, SOS Coast Guards” starring Bela Lugosi, “Zorro Rides Again” starring John Carroll, “The Lone Ranger” starring Lee Powell and Chief Thunder Cloud, “The Lone Ranger Rides Again” starring Robert Livingston and Chief Thunder Cloud, “Drums of Fu Manchu, Adventures of Red Rider” starring Donald Barry, “Zane Grey’s King Of The Royal Mounted, Adventures Of Captain Marvel” starring Tom Tyler, “Spy Smasher, G-Men VS. The Black Dragon, Secret Service In Darkest Africa, Captain America” starring Dick Purcell and “The Crimson Ghost” among many, many others. Book has gold embossed title and art showing Republic Studios. Pages are NM and cover is Exc. An amazing and beautiful record of serial motion pictures.

Interestingly the real selling point (Lost Ark inspiration) was not used to sell it. I calculate that with interest etc., the buyer dropped $3000 when he put his hand up to bid. So much for sleepers. As for the deathless Gerhardie he has become quite desirable and is asked for in the shop. Graham Greene, a great fan who also knew him, once said that he (Gerhardie) was amazed that his genius was not immediately recognised by all, a feeling not uncommon among writers.

A – Z of Celebrity Collections

Design

Amiable Antiques Roadshow veteran Paul Atterbury (left), who lives in a railway carriage, collects books on modern design and has harsh words for the Blessed William Morris, the medievalist, proto-socialist printer, wallpaper, fabric designer and alleged poet . To Atterbury Morris was ‘ an awful typographer and an awful book designer who set back book design fifty years ‘. Atterbury found the Kelmscott Chaucer impossible to read and many bookmen, who prefer Roman to Gothic type, would agree with him. However, there are enough Arts and Craft worshippers around to keep the prices of the small number of remaining Chaucers ( 425 copies were printed )sky-high. In 2007 a copy sold for £88,000 at auction.

Dracula

At an interview in 1998 Iain Sinclair confessed to me that he’d once bought an ‘immaculate ‘first of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the original yellow cloth for fifty pence in an Oxfam bookshop. Alongside on the shelf, apparently, was a paperback film tie-in, which was priced at £1.50. Sinclair eventually sold his first for a blood-curdling £1,000, but wishes now that he’d kept it. 'It would have been nice to own a copy in such wonderful condition.’ The recent craze for vampire literature has pushed up prices for early editions of Dracula and a first issue in good condition would currently fetch around £7,000.

Engineering .

Caricaturist Ralph Steadman, a Gillray de nos jours, has a garden of rusty machine parts made into sculptures and was once an apprentice in an aircraft company. His working book collection includes a Catalogue of Surgical Instruments and Appliances with appendix (1892), which he cherishes for its illustrations of urinals, bowel clamps and enema syringes. It is unlikely that he ever paid much for this huge book, with its thousands of illustrations, but at present there is only one copy on ABE, and this is the edition of 1914, which is priced at ( $240 ). But Steadman’s fascination for mechanical engineering is most strikingly reflected in his ownership of Steam Pipe Installation, an American handbook from the 1930s, which appeared in an edition of 2208 copies.‘ Its illustrations remind me of the paintings of Francis Picabia ‘, he told me, when I interviewed him in 2003.’ They’re wonderful of their kind ‘. A copy dated 1938 is reasonably priced at $24.50 on ABE.
The market for really early books on both mechanical and civil engineering has always been buoyant, mainly because there are so few really attractive titles around and so many well-heeled buyers willing to cough up. A visit to the wonderful library of the Institute of Civil Engineers near Trafalgar Square will give you an idea of the range of printed matter available, from an edition of Vitruvius dated 1491 to Switzer’s famous Introduction to a System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulics of 1729.


False books

Not much reading matter here, but possibly a rewarding subject to collect. A better bet than tiresome contemporary crime fiction, anyway. Dickens had false books in his library with witty labels on their spines. For instance, the multi-volume Wisdom of Our Ancestors consisted of volumes dedicated to Superstition, Ignorance, Disease and Instruments of Torture; whereas The Virtues of Our Ancestors was a volume so narrow that its title had to be printed vertically. You can still buy naff wallpaper unconvincingly printed with book spines one of which spells the surname of the author of Pride and Prejudice as ‘Jane Austin’. I don’t know if Dickens’ ‘ books ‘ could be taken off the shelf, but The Internal Lubrication of Tubes, which detective story writer Simon Brett proudly showed me, certainly can. It’s a well disguised box holding a spirit flask (geddit ?). Incidentally, I was totally fooled by a whole wall of false spines that hid a door in billionaire Felix Dennis’ Soho bolt-hole. Perhaps he got them custom made from the Manor Bindery, which claims to be the leading supplier of dummy books. Incidentally, I’ve often wondered what becomes of the singularly unexciting lots comprising Victorian gift books, odd volumes, books of sermons and editions of Walter Scott that are catalogued in auctions as ‘ Bindings ‘. Do they inevitably end their lives chopped up in places like the Manor Bindery---or do they find a role decorating the shelves of some interior design shop in the Pimlico Road along with the painted French furniture and chandeliers ?

Flowers

Botanical books may not fetch as much as they did in the nineties, but this does not deter well-heeled celebs, among them Arthur Mullard soundalike, David Bellamy, the TV botanist, from collecting them. He claims to be descended from John Evelyn, author of Sylva (1714), so perhaps botany runs in his blood, though as a boy all he wanted to be was a ballet dancer (he still writes ballets). Bellamy has a number of New Naturalist titles, which appeared in small editions and have always been collected ( some rare volumes go for many hundreds of pounds ); but his more prized treasures include Culpepper’s own copy of his Pharmacopia Londoniensis (1675), which he bought with the fee that the shampoo manufacturers Badedas paid him for a consultation, and Liber Rustica (1529), which had all its pages uncut when he bought it for a bargain £275. Today, expect to shell out a four figure sum for this exceptionally interesting Latin text on gardening. [Robin Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Had no idea that Bellamy was descended from John Evelyn, the family must have gone through some serious changes. As for 'Dracula' the Cosmatos copy made £8000 + the juice 5 years back and it was not at all fine. Uber-dealer Peter Stern has a bright copy from Pickford Waller's library at £30,000 delicately described thus: '..insofar as this modestly produced book allows, it is, if only to a bibliomaniac, a thing of beauty.' In re Felix Dennis - it is gratifying to see a hippie make a billion, especially one who is a serious book-collector.
.

Death in the Dark...

Stacey Bishop. DEATH IN THE DARK. London : Faber & Faber, [1930] 

Current Selling Prices
$1500 /£1000

DETECTIVE FICTION / AVANT-GARDE LITERATURE / MODERN FIRST EDITION

Sleeper awake! One of the great sleepers of modern literature but so rarely encountered that I have no real qualms about rousing it from slumber. The last copy I heard of was three years ago on a Maggs catalogue of the library of the much missed gentleman publisher (and runner) Alan Clodd. £1200 was being asked and appears to have been achieved. The book is by the New Jersey born composer George Antheil (1900-1959) under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. Self proclaimed 'Bad Boy of Music', championed by Ezra Pound, composer of over 30 Hollywood film scores, including the much rated Dementia (1955) and practicing “endocrine criminologist” he also wrote this scarce detective novel published by Faber (under the auspices of T.S. Eliot) in 1930.

The story behind the writing of the book goes something like this: from 1927 to 1933 Antheil lived variously in Vienna, Tunis, and Cagnes-sur-Mer, writing opera and stage works for productions in Vienna and Frankfurt; in 1929 he was summering in Rapallo, Italy something of an ex-pat artists colony. That year T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats came through and also the German writers Gerhart Hauptmann and Franz Werfel. All of these writers are said to have had a hand in the work, with some final editing done by Eliot for the London Faber edition. Antheil had been surprised to see that off-duty these highbrow writers tended to read detective writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers. Antheil had an interest in criminology through theories he had developed about the thymus gland and endocrinology in crime detection. So serious was Antheil’s belief in endocrinology that it is said the Parisian police made him an honorary lifetime member. Antheil assured the assembled authors that he could write a detective story as good as anything they were reading and Death in the Dark was the result. Theoretically it should be a C item in the bibliographies of Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Hauptmann and Werfel as they are all said to have helped with its writing. The book's hero Stephen Bayard was based on Pound. Despite the involvement of 2 Nobel Prize winners and Il miglior fabbro himself the book is generally considered almost unreadable. I have always associated Rapallo with Max Beerbohm and would like to think he also dropped by to add a whimsical chapter.


The book was issued without a jacket (possibly a glassine wrap may have existed) with very attractive pictorial boards - one of only two books issued in this way by Faber, the other being Bruce Hamilton's To Be Hanged - A Story of Murder, a rather scarce thriller dedicated to Patrick Hamilton, the author's brother, and worth about £200, possibly more if very sharp. Faber illustrate the Antheil book on their Flickr page , can find no image of To Be Hanged. As for content the British Museum have the book under these categories 'Private investigators — New York (State) — New York — Fiction -- Murder — Investigation — Fiction.' It has not been reprinted. The fascinating story around it more than outweighs its supposed unreadability and it may be a good investment, although a deep academic analysis of its genesis could affect prices -up or down. It has to be admitted some of the information about the book comes from Antheil himself and book-dealers whose enthusiasm may outweigh their scholarship. A much cheaper book is his Bad Boy of Music (Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, 1945) nice jacketed copies of which can be had for less than $100.

There are many oddball stories about Antheil. This from Wikipedia takes the biscuit:

He considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and wrote a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as The Glandbook for the Questing Male. Antheil's interest in this area brought him into contact with the actress Hedy Lamarr, who sought his advice about how she might enhance her upper torso. He suggested glandular extracts, but their conversation then moved on to torpedoes. Lamarr (right) had fled her Austrian munitions-making husband, and coming to the US had become fiercely pro-American. Together they conceived and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system: Lamarr contributed the knowledge of torpedo control gained from her husband and Antheil a method of controlling the spread spectrum sequences using a player-piano mechanism similar to those used in the Ballet Méchanique. Despite the initial enthusiasm of the U.S. Navy, the invention received little attention at first; and the importance of Antheil and Lamarr's discovery was only acknowledged in the 1990s.

Eddie Gathorne-Hardy

I seem to have ended up with books from the library of the bookseller,botanist, publisher and Bloomsbury minor character Eddie Gathorne- Hardy (1901 - 1978). Not the good stuff but mostly detective paperbacks in regrettable condition and a few fascinating pamphlets from his (and his brother's) Mill House Press (discussed in last weeks posting.) We bought the 'last knockings' of Alan Ansen's Athens library and he obviously knew Eddie well and appears to have inherited some of his books. Ansen was an American poet and writer, compadre of William Burroughs and the dedicatee of The Naked Lunch. He and Eddie seemed to have shared a taste for 'cosies' (Golden Age British detective fiction) and indeed there is a photo (below) of Eddie from the Bloomsbury power spot Ham Spray in 1932 showing him reading 'Twenty Five Sanitary Inspectors' a now much wanted thriller by Roger East.

One of the books was by Eddie's sister Anne Hill ( of Heywood Hill and once affianced to James Lees-Milne) Trelawny's Strange Relations (Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley 1956) presented by her to Alan Ansen. Loosely inserted was a xerox of an obituary article on EGH from The Times by Patrick Leigh Fermor with inked notes by Anne Hill. It appears not to have been published (not on Google and not on The Times website which I joined for a day after giving £1 to Murdoch.) It is pretty fancy stuff, very affectionate and worth sharing with bookinistas, connoisseurs of literary eccentrics and lovers of minor, forgotten characters.

An Independent obituary on Anne Hill who died in 2006 has this background info- "…born Lady Anne Gathorne-Hardy in 1911, only daughter of the third Earl of Cranbrook. The Gathorne-Hardys - ennobled in the 1870s after Anne's great-grandfather served in Disraeli's cabinet - were a rather intellectual and distinctly unconventional family, with a characteristic rapid, affected speaking style. Anne had four older brothers, whom she adored - Jock (who succeeded in 1915 as fourth Earl), Eddie, Bob and Anthony. Eddie and Bob were experts in the rare book world, though best known to their contemporaries for their flagrant and rackety homosexuality. (The outrageous Miles Malpractice, in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, is based on Eddie.)" Miles is certainly not the only character based on Eddie and I would be grateful to hear of others. In a movie I can see him being played by the late, great Richard Wattis. Take it away Paddy (notes by Anne Hill in square brackets.) :

It would be said of no-one but Eddie Gathorne-Hardy that he belonged with equal fitness to the pages of White's Natural History of Selborne and the Satyricon of Petronius. Further analogies, with correct instinct but a few decades too early, could be sought in Valmouth and South Wind, but found to a split second in date, mood and intention in Vile Bodies, and though the brief intemperance of his Oxford days and the scrapes and festivals of the young and the bright in the 'twenties London gave him an aura which never quite faded, it was a figure of strong intellectual substance and authority that vanished from the scene on June 18th.

Originality and independence of mind stamped his background. Born in 1901, second son of the Earl of Cranbrook and Lady Dorothy Boyle, he was sent to Eton and Christchurch, but while the passion for the natural sciences which he shared with his father and brothers was turnng him into a widely travelled and accomplished botanist, his years with Elkin Matthews and a bent for scholarly research made him the best known authority  on the 18th Century among the antiquarian book dealers of his time. Less professionally, his pursuit of recondite lore found entertaining scope in Cornishiana- a collection of the eccentric dicta of Mrs, Warre Cornish - and in the slender but hair-raising confines of Inadvertencies where those passages of English literature which are open to comic or scabrous misconstruction are hilariously set forth.

Mediterranean hedonism and botanic and archaeological curiosity drew him to the Levant and war-time [services at] the Embassy in Cairo landed him, very aptly, and for most of the emergency, in a crumbling Mameluke palace under the old minaret of Ibn Tulun. He often returned to his native Suffolk, but his Athens flat, later on, with his books and specimens and his many lares was his chief base.His commanding figure was a familiar sight at tables under the island plane-trees, the formidable brow and [the high-bridged nose] will be sorely missed, and the [severe] horn-rims: these had long replaced the monocle which [improbably] flashed there for a year or two in the 'thirties. [He was surrounded by writers all his life.] His range of reading was wide and abstruse; deaf to music, his poetical ear was classically faultless; but it was the idiosyncrasy of his character, the mixture of formality and the reverse, the humour and the strong touch of the outrageous, which captivated all [and made it impossible for authors to keep him out of their books.]

Time gradually changed him into a Peacockian figure - [for bookish] analogies are unavoidable - a sitter for the Dilettanti portraits with a dash of the great Whiggery, a sceptic Voltairian aristocrat but not a stoic for tedium, humbug, bad scholarship, and, indeed, the recent handicaps of ill-health, could set the air crackling all around him with oaths and groans. He demanded much of his friends and got it, cutting through their quandaries by never doing anything he didn't want but repaying the trouble many times over by the charms and surprises of his company. The intonation of his voice was bandied about by all who heard it and of all his traits, it is the perhaps the extraordinary gift of witty and lapidary or cumulative phrase which his friends will remember with the most lasting amusement, affection and delight.

(Pics show EGH in specs to left with his brother Robert + Eardley Knollys and A.N. Other and then in specs to right of Lytton Strachey with brother Robert, Peter Ralli and Lady Julia Morrell--shots by Lady Ottoline Morrell. As for the Mill House Press the book you want is their 1927 production Wailing Well by M.R. James, £400 for nice copies and knocking on a £1000 for the signed one of seven.)

The Blair signing project

Serious protests are expected outside Waterstone's in Piccadilly when Tony Blair signs his memoir A Journey on 8 September. A £30,000 bounty has been offered by the Stop the War Coalition to anyone who manages to arrest Blair. The Coalition's Andrew Burkin said: "We are appalled that Waterstone's are prepared to have him on their premises. It is a disgrace that he is swanning around with police protection at our expense ­ he should be in The Hague on trial for war crimes." Cost of protection is estimated at £250,000. Tony has received a £4.6 million advance. For the signing itself, the rules imposed by Blair's publishers on the Waterstone's event include no photos, no personal dedications and all bags, backpacks and briefcases must be checked in, along with cameras and mobile phones... Blair will sign a maximum of two books per customer.

No customer can actually guarantee to have their book signed. Tony probably has an urgent appointment afterwards to make one of his £2000 a minute speeches, so time is limited. It is hard for those outside Britain to understand the depth of loathing people here have for Blair. We also hate to see a guy making serious money unless he is kicking a football or in a boy band. To be fair other stars have imposed similar restrictions at signings, fans had to go through all sorts of hoops a few years ago to get their book signed by Paul McCartney. It was all worthwhile when later that week they made £300 on Ebay for a few hours of bollocks at Harrods. Dylan did a signing where one of the provisos was that none of the bookshop staff looked him in the eye, but strange behaviour is now expected from rock stars.

I had an earlier signed Blair book last year and it sold with alacrity at £200. Now there are no signed books for less than £400, with signed photos at £100. Being a very important person he has little time for signing and probably regards autograph hunters as losers. Churchill had no such problem and even Margaret Thatcher was, in her day, a willing signer. As for Ted Heath…

Salman Rushdie is an Olympic standard signer and will sign up to 8 books per person including old editions, consequently signed values are low. It will be interesting to see the fate of copies of Blair's A Journey on Ebay hours after the signing.

I went to a signing by Colin Wilson in the early 1990's and was surprised to see several Wilson clones. Young guys in black polo neck jerseys and black National Health specs with thatches of unruly hair, like the angry young man Wilson had been in 1960. The idea of a Blair clone is slightly distasteful but one wonders if people's dogs will be banned from the Waterstone's signing-- especially poodles.

[Pic below of Pamela Anderson in the famous book signing scene in Borat.]

Inadvertencies

I have found a curious pamphlet from the rather neglected Mill House Press which was run by Edward Gathorne- Hardy. Printed on mould made paper in 1963 It is one of 200 copies only and called Inadvertencies collected from the works of several eminent authors.

Basically a collection of inadvertently obscene passages from mostly 19th century classics. The double entendres game. This passage from Charles Dickens gives the flavour -- 'She touched his organ; and from that bright epoch, even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable, as he had thought, of elevation, began a new and deified existence.' My favourites are from Henry James. There is always a faint air of embarrassment with the Master anyway and Gathorne- Hardy has found some corkers. The slim pamphlet seems to go for a £100 so I am taking the rest of the day off. Take it away Eddie (and Henry):

"'Oh, I can't explain,' cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. 'I've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings - it's this.' And he swung his tool." (Roderick Hudson)

 "You think me a queer fellow already. It's not easy to tell you how I feel, not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how many ways he's queer." (Passionate Pilgrim)

'What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other....' (The Sacred Fount)

"It 's just like Longueville, you know," Gordon Wright went on;
"he always comes at you from behind; he 's so awfully fond of surprises." (Confidence)

"Then she had had her equal consciousness that within five minutes something between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but come."  (The Wings of the Dove)

"This time therefore I left excuses to his more practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct appeal from a young lady next whom, in the hall, I had found myself sitting.' (The Coxon Fund)

THE A - Z OF CELEBRITY BOOK COLLECTING

Celine

Right wing anti-semites are probably not much in vogue just now, and most firsts without wrappers by this controversial French novelist are very reasonably priced at under £30. Iain Sinclair is a keen collector. Having already acquired Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Instalment Plan, he was delighted to find a rare pink jacketed edition of Celine's Guignol’s Band (1954) ‘on the floor’ of a Tunbridge Wells bookshop. Sinclair’s friend and colleague, Chris Petit, a film-maker (Radio On, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman) and thriller writer, is another great admirer. (Pic of Celine Left.)


Chesterton

When was G. K. Chesterton last in fashion ? Perhaps as long ago as 1932 , when his firsts fetched serious money. Tory ex Education Secretary Kenneth Baker and ‘ Tory anarchist ‘ Richard Ingrams aren’t bothered by such considerations. To them the man Wyndham Lewis memorably called ‘a foaming Toby jug’, is still an attractive figure. Baker loved his ‘ marvellously romantic language ‘ and in the fifties was able to acquire firsts for ‘ half a crown ‘ ( 12.5p ) in Foyles’s. But though most of Chesterton’s poems, novels and short stories are never likely to rise in value, the first two Father Brown titles and three of his earliest novels remain expensive. For instance, Peter Harrington has a superb copy of The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) for $2,000, while the rarer Wisdom of Father Brown can go for up to $750, though the cheapest copies of The Credulity of Father Brown and The Secret of Father Brown are listed on ABE at a mere $12 each. Multiply these prices by ten for copies in jackets, though these would be pictorially dull and parcel-paper brown in colour. Expect to pay up to $400 for a decent copy of the fantasy classic The Man Who Was Thursday ( 1908), though a Cecil Court bouquiniste is asking $940 for his copy.

Cobbett

William Cobbett will always be collected for the simple reason that he has never really been in fashion. Richard Ingrams is a great fan, as was the late Paul Foot. In fact the two Private Eye stalwarts used to spend their lunch hour away from Greek Street looking for works by Cobbett and other radicals among the book barrows of nearby Berwick Street, which, alas, are long gone. Among Ingrams’ fine Cobbett collection is a copy of his History of the Reformation inscribed by the author to the Pope, which he bought from Hatchards and which today might go for many hundreds of pounds. Though not actually trendy, Cobbett is now seen as a practitioner of such New Age values as self-sufficiency, environmentalism, libertarianism and plain speaking on politics, religion and the corporate world. His hated ‘ stock-jobbers ‘from the Great Wen building villas in the Home Counties can be compared with modern-day bankers buying huge Georgian rectories in Norfolk with their obscene bonuses .



Colour printing

Don’t let that professorial mien fool you. Bamber Gascoigne, the original University Challenge question intellectual. Actually, he began as an expert on theatrical farce, later becoming an authority on colour printing. One of his prize possessions is Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, which he bought from Robin de Beaumont. Antique Roadshow expert David Battie, whose physician ancestor gave his name to the adjective we use the describe the mentally ill, is also passionate about colour printing and owns a much loved copy of Oliver Byrne’s The Elements of Euclid (1847), arguably the most sought after of all early colour-printed books, which Battie acquired with the compensation money he received after a road accident. Even while he was working as a porter at Sotheby’s earning £8 10 shillings a week, a copy fetched £70 at auction, which gives an idea of its value.

Cookery

Multi-millionaire face of Sainsbury’s, Jamie ‘ Pukka ‘ Oliver, is known to be keen collector of manuscript cookery books, while other celebrity collectors in this most fashionable of fields include actor Richard Griffiths, and TV cooks Delia Smith and Clarissa-Dickson Wright.

Cricket

Legendary ex Stone Charlie Watts has a purse long enough to afford the great rarities of cricketiana, which along with other sports memorabilia, will always find wealthy collectors. Wisely Watts uses pal David Frith to bid for him at auctions. Colleague Bill Wyman, Penge’s most famous son, is also a cricket fanatic, though he seems to prefer metal detecting to collecting cricket books. Tim Rice is another well heeled collector who probably uses an agent at sales.

Crowley

Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page is a well known admirer of Aleister Crowley. In 1971 he bought the Great Beast’s cottage in Scotland and once owned a bookshop which he named The Equinox. He outbid Kenneth Anger in 1973 for a copy of Crowley’s legendary essay in erotica, The Scented Garden of Abdullah (1910), a rarity which can fetch over £2,000 at auction and costs over £100 in modern facsimile form. [R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. I guess celebs are a new aristocracy, a 100 years ago we would be going on about baronets and belted earls. Celebrities are better looking, surely -but are they any brighter? When Jamie Oliver was on Desert Island Discs he told Plomley or whoever that he had never read a book and would not actually be taking one to his island. I suppose manuscript cookery books are an exception. Manuscripts are a rich man's taste--for example they are collected by Bill Gates (early science.) A useful punter. As for Jimmy Page he has just issued a signed book from the redoubtable Genesis publishing house - I expect it to become hotly traded on Ebay. Rock on.

THE A - Z OF CELEBRITY BOOK COLLECTING

Animals

TV zoologist and popular anthropologist Desmond Morris (Naked Ape, Man Watching ) has a wide-ranging, enquiring mind and a huge library ( 25,000 volumes and growing by the day) that reflects not only his professional concerns as a zoologist, but also his interest in related fields, such as literature, art ( especially surrealism), ethnography and archaeology. Of the works on zoology his favourite is The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents by Edward Topsell (1658), which is coveted by zoologists for its extraordinary depictions of animals. He also acquired ‘for a few pounds’ some loose pages from Gessner’s Icones Animalium Quadruped, a much earlier work in Latin on which Topsell partly based his own book. Gessner very rarely appears for sale. Topsell is more common and a copy can go for £3,000 or more, depending on condition.

Attenborough

No-one collects books by Sir David Attenborough, as far as I know. However, I have been told on good authority that the veteran broadcaster owns a wonderful collection of antiquarian books on travel and animals. Unfortunately, he has twice declined to be interviewed by me, and I have decided to leave him in peace.



Auctions

Some celebrities avoid auctions for obvious reasons, although a few, such as Rolling Stone Charlie Watts, employ agents to bid for them. Others attend them to lend colour to TV programmes such as Cash in the Attic, which often feature lots sold on behalf of various charities. However, a few celeb collectors are addicted to auctions. Desmond Morris is one of these. Having begun to visit them as a boy his addiction has persisted up to the present, as he explains:

‘ They’re very dangerous places for me. I tend to get carried away. I went to one recently and ended up with over 270 books, which was a very bad day. No-one wanted one particular lot, and so I bought it on spec. Later, I sifted through this lot and found just half a dozen books of value. The rest are still in cardboard boxes.’



Beatles

Cult psychogeographer and ex book dealer Iain Sinclair once bought for a small sum around the time of the author’s death a copy of Lennon’s In his Own Write ‘ from a sort of gypsy woman ‘ in Portobello Road. It was apparently signed by all the Beatles and their girl friends, and he considered selling it on his stall for £25, but eventually let it go for a cool grand.That was in the days before auctions of Pop Memorabilia . Today, of the big names that attract the most interest, the Beatles and Elvis top the charts with the stars that died young ( Hendrix, Joplin, Bolam, Morrison, Brian Jones, Sid Vicious ) well down the list. But the good stuff is still out there. Just think how many fliers, autograph books, programmes and tickets the Fab Four must have signed in their 8 years of fame.

Beats

Sinclair collects the Beats too and has a first of William Burroughs’ Junkie published in pulp thriller format under the pseudonym ‘William Lee’ with Maurice Helbrandt’s Narcotics Agent, which he houses in a specially made slip case. He didn’t tell me where he found this modest looking paperback of 1953, with its sensationalist cover, or how much he paid for it, but I sometimes wonder if copies have ever turned up in some otherwise unpromising UK charity shop ( not Oxfam, obviously ) among the chick lit, modern thrillers and self-help books. My advice, however, is to try thrift shops in the States. But if you can’t wait, expect to shell out a cool £300, or more for a copy, although don’t expect it to be in good condition.




Boer War

I was quite unprepared for the number of volumes assembled by the late maverick actor and film maker Kenneth Griffiths in his four storey Victorian home in Islington. Most were on the Boer War, which Griffiths got into during the fifties via stamp collecting. I sometimes wonder what happened to this collection, which was by far the best in private hands in the UK, possibly in the world. Rare titles in Griffith’s library include the Cape of Good Hope Railway Reports (1900) and South Africa Field Force Casualty Lists, but the most valuable item, according to him, is an empty envelope overprinted ‘Special Post ‘, which he valued at around £10,000.


Bloomsbury

Denis Healey bought a first of Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens in Italy during the war for the equivalent of two shillings (10p), which was a good investment for the future Chancellor, who is a devoted Bloomsburyite, even down to choosing a house a few miles from Charleston Farmhouse. Nowadays all Bloomsbury products are in great demand and copies of this attractive, but physically delicate product of the Hogarth Press, with its Omega Workshop hand coloured
wallpaper wrapper, can go for as much as $36,000 . Peter Harrington has a copy at this price.

Rupert Brooke

A lock of Rupert Brooke’s hair is one of the most prized items in the collection of Grecian 2000 enthusiast and Radio 2 DJ Mike Read. Other books by or on the First World War poet include De la Mare’s Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, which is not common and the scarce Poems (1911), a snip at over £400. When I last spoke to him in 1998 Read was still coveting the incredibly rare The Pyramids (1904) and The Bastille (1905), two prize-winning poems that Brooke published while at Rugby School. Today , perhaps, the DJ can afford to buy them, though the royalties from his biography of Brooke won’t help him much . He’d need to set aside at least £12,000 for the two.

Next C - E

[R.M.Healey]

Wise words Robin and many thanks. I should explain these morceaux are taken from many years of interviews with well known book collectors, celebs and writers- including at least one billionaire. I can vouch for the delightful Baron 'Blue Planet' David Attenborough as a collector, I have seen him at ABA fairs buying large botanical colour plate books from carriage trade dealers. Not a great investment, prices having generally been higher in the 1980s than now. As for the Beatles I know that Ringo has a serious collection of books about pirates, possibly begun in his days as a shipboard entertainer. He was last seen asking to be called by his real name --Richard Starkey--on Aviva adds. The good old Norwich Union.

Sherlock Holmes / State of the Market/ Literary Swindlers 2

I have been thinking about Conan Doyle this week and the failure at auction of a fine first signed presentation of A Study in Scarlet. It was bought in at £250,000. Possibly the Sangorski rebind was a good excuse not to buy it, a limpid wraps copy inscribed would surely sell. Possibly a warmer inscription or a presentation to a fellow explorer of the spiritual realms-someone like Madam Blavatsky or the boy avatar Krishnamurti would have carried it over the finishing line. The inscription read - "This is the very first | independent book of | mine which ever was | published | Arthur Conan Doyle. | Jan 9 / 14".

There must be several thousand Sherlockian punters worldwide but sadly (for the seller) not one of them with a few hundred grand to spare for the great 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual. One dealer I met took it as a portent--he also cited a lacklustre Churchill sale and major botanical books that were making less now than in the early 1990s without even building in inflation. 'Prices are dropping like stones' he mused. All is not lost, price changes can often be explained by shifts in taste and one can see new auction records being broken almost weekly in the field of fine modern first editions in fine jackets or with great inscriptions. Follow the money --as the swindler might say.

My favourite Sherlock story is Charles Augustus Milverton. Holmes, master of disguise, in pitted against the evil and resourceful Milverton - a pitiless blackmailer of noble women. Holmes disguises himself as a plumber and heads to Hampstead, where he courts Milverton's housemaid, even managing to become her fiancé. The character of Charles Augustus Milverton was based on a real blackmailer, Charles Augustus Howell, an art dealer who preyed upon an unknown number of people, including the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Not quite a literary swindler, although he may have trousered some of Ruskin's money. His biographer Helen Rossetti Angeli, could find no evidence to support accusations of blackmail. There is a fine Beerbohm watercolour of him eavesdropping at a door while his lover while Rosa Corder forges Rossetti drawings. He is said to have been involved in his friend Felice Orsini's attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858 and to have persuaded Dante Gabriel Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal. His death was equally macabre -he was found close to a Chelsea public house with his throat slit, and a ten-shilling coin in his mouth. There is a suggestion he may have died elsewhere. The ten bob bid treatment was apparently reserved for those guilty of slander.



Ruskin, rich in his time, employed him as a secretary between 1865 and 1868. He trusted Howell with "affairs needing delicate handling and a wise discretion..." - mostly to manage his discreet charitable donations. Howell sought increasingly to obtain complete control of Ruskin's finances and Edward Burne-Jones persuaded him to sever his connection with Howell. Whistler thought he was a fine fellow, however, a "wonderful man...genius...splendidly flamboyant." [To be continued.] Pics from Chinese 1980s Sherlockian graphic novels including 'Charles Augustus Milverton.'

Literary Swindlers

I was intrigued by a chapter in Memoirs of Harriot, Duchess of St. Albans (Colburn 1839) headed 'Literary Swindlers.' In 1822 the former actress Harriot Mellon (1777 - 1837) had inherited over a billion pounds in today's money from her husband Thomas Coutts, the banker. She went on to marry the 9th Duke of St. Albans a man 20 years her junior. She left her vast fortune to Coutts's grand daughter the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to whom she was very close. Harriot's fortune made her a target for a species of literary swindler who probably still exists today in some form. Harriot had lead a colourful life and there were many rumours about her origins and her career so writers were able to concoct 'a shameless mass of falsehoods' about her. As Mrs Baron-Wilson, author of these memoirs, puts it 'Mrs. Coutts being regarded as a female Croesus...was assailed by the lowest order of literati.'

The first chancer, one Mitford, demanded a £100 for the copyright of his manuscript. On being refused he found a publisher but 'the source was too polluted to prove injurious to any but the parties who brought it to light...soon after this Mitford died in abject poverty in St. Giles's workhouse.' This was a world much lower than Grub Street and largely unrecorded, it is likely that many of these writers met equally ignominious ends. There were many attempts, one by a Church of England clergymen and in one case Harriot grabbed the manuscript off a 'well dressed' blackmailer and threw it in the fire. She was from the 'publish and be damned' school and several lewd and spurious accounts of her life actually made it into print including A tale of the last century. The Secret Memoirs of Harriet Pumpkin, a celebrated actress ... By the Ghost of old Ralph. An exceedingly rare book, probably now worth much in excess of the money the swindling author received...

The modern equivalent would have the material on his Iphone and threaten to press the send button to his blog unless paid for his hack work. [To be continued with consideration of the real Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer to the PRB, a recent £700 8 volume work Whore's Biographies, Irish literary blackmailler Thomas Ashe and of course the grandest of grandes horizontales the courtesan Harriette Wilson...]

Collecting antique cookery books

Reading that Sotheby’s are to sell a wonderful private cookery library on 15 July reminded me of the time I interviewed the brilliant Swiss chef Anton Mossiman (below) at his plush Belgravia restaurant. I wanted to know more about his huge collection of cookery books and had asked him to bring to the interview some of his favourite volumes. I was not prepared for the treasures that he lay before me on the table. These included an edition dated 1507 of Der Kuchenmeister, the earliest cookery book ever printed, which was partly in Latin, partly in German.. He also showed me a first edition dated 1570 of one of the most attractive cookery books ever published--- the work of Bartolomeo Scappi, chef to Pope Pius V, which contains fascinating plates of cooking utensils. In all, Mosimann’s gastronomic library came to around 6,000 volumes, most of which he has placed at the service of the students on his training centre in Battersea.

Mosimann had been a dedicated collector since his training on the continent—where he had picked up early texts for a few francs--hence the European slant to his collection, and I suspect that the continent is still the place to look for very early cookery and medical texts. However, even on the continent, treasures like Scappi and Der Kuchenmeister are rarely to be found outside libraries, and in the unlikely event of copies turning up for sale, would fetch five figure sums. Most 16th century and seventeenth century cookery books in English are also expensive, with Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660), which won praise from Elizabeth David and Frances Bissel, making more that £4,000 at auction a few years ago. Doubtless the demand from well heeled celebrity chefs has pushed up prices. For a collector with a more modest pocket the place to start is the early eighteenth century-- a time of peace and plenty when a burgeoning middle class loved to stage elaborate dinner parties.

But generally you should forget manuscript books of recipes. Mosimann found original material in them, but many recipes were copied from printed books and most manuscripts are dominated by home remedies for the bite of a dog or the bloody flux. It’s all a bit folk-lorist . I’ve looked at a lot of these cookery manuscripts and most are no better than that most boring of documents, the common-place book of some bored cleric or unmarried daughter of a Georgian landowner. Instead look out for the big names of the Georgian and Victorian period—Hannah Glasse, Sarah Harrison, Eliza Smith , Mrs Rundell, Eliza Acton, William Kitchener, Francatelli, Mrs Beeton.

To Mosimann and many others Hannah Glasse is a classic. Fifty editions of her Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1746) were published in the 18th century alone and early editions are always pricey at £700 upwards. And although Glasse’s predecessor, Eliza Smith, bulks up her Compleat Housewife (1739) with 190 pages of home remedies and suchlike, a first will still set you back around £600, while the Kegan Paul reprint of 2005 is listed on the Net at a dyspeptic $200. Another early Georgian, Sarah Harrison, is worth seeking out for her tips on preserves and sauces. I was lucky enough to be given my copy of the sixth edition (1755) by a friend, but much as I appreciate the gift I cannot understand why Dombey & Son are charging £1,040 for a book of such modest length. Mrs Rundell, a much more voluminous writer, whose Modern Domestic Cookery by a ‘Lady’ (1806) reached 65 editions in 35 years, isn’t anything like expensive. I bought my early Victorian edition for just £3.50 in the nineties, and at present Roe and Moore have a second edition for a piffling £28.



Most cookery writers of the 18th and 19th centuries are female, but there are some outstanding male writers too. Charles Carter was a contemporary of Glasse’s, but his Complete Practical Cook (1730) is now, according to one Suffolk dealer, who wants a tasty £3,800 for his copy, ‘ very scarce ‘. Then there is William Kitchener, a doctor, with a doctor’s no-nonsense attitude. He was primarily interested in the working of the digestive system and his scientific take on cookery made his Cook’s Oracle(1817) an instant hit ( eight editions before 1830) . In some ways, he was the Heston Blumenthal of Regency England. He was also unusual it that he named particular grocers in London as sources for ingredients. I paid £6 for my copy, but today expect to shell out at least £100 for an edition from the 1820s onwards. Eliza Acton probably deserves to be called the greatest English cook and the prices match her status. Jonkers have a first of her Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) at £955, but later editions ( five within one year ) are much cheaper. Acton offered homely fare, something Charles Francatelli, chef to Queen Victoria and author of The Modern Cook (1846) would have disdained. My copy is almost mint---not a single gravy stain-- which suggests that for some readers Francatelli was more suited to fantasy bed-time reading, than practical use Of the equally voluminous Mrs Beeton, who lived under a racecourse pavilion and died at 29—not a lot needs to be said here, except that a first of her Household Management (1861) can be had for a surprisingly modest £500, though those countless late editions that crowd the cookery sections of second hand booksellers should cost no more than a few quid . [ R.M.Healey]

Thanks Robin, wise and timely words as always. I mentioned earlier the story of the great cookery book library that I didn't get...Sometime in the 1980s I was called to a house in the Belgravia /Chelsea area to offer on a a load of books. They belonged to a pleasant person called Felicité Gwynne who was then manager of the exclusive Chelsea bookshop Sandoes. I remember walking along the hall past rows of fabulous cookbooks including what seemed hundreds of 18th century and earlier tomes in limpid contemporary bindings. I mentally punched the air as there are few things that sell faster or more easily. I was whisked up to her quarters in the attic and asked 'What about those cookery books?' - Felicité politely informed me 'Oh those are my sisters and are not for sale--she's Elizabeth David you know...'

Meanwhile here is a recipe for a Yorkshire Pudding from The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, by Hannah Glasse, 1747. Serious calories. It is from the excellent Jane Austen Centre site and even has a video demonstration of how to make this gastronomic delight.

Take a quart of milk, four eggs, and a little salt, make it up into a thick batter. You must have a good piece of meat at the fire; take a stew-pan and put some dripping in, set it on the firel when it boils, pour in your pudding; let it back on the fire till you think it is nigh enough, then turn a plate upside down in the dripping pan, that the drippings may not be blacked; set your stew-pan on it under your meat and let the dripping dorp on the pudding, and the heat of the fire come to it to make itself a fine brown. When your meat is done and sent to table, drain all the fat from your pudding, and set it on the fire again to dry a little; then slide it as dray as you can into a dish; melt some butter, and pour it into a cup and set it in the middle of the pudding. It is an excellent pudding; the grave of the meat eats well with it.

Teenage Testament

I found this typed statement among some papers that I had bought from the late John Rolph, a marvellous man, publisher with the Scorpion Press and latterly a 'tea bag' bookseller in his rambling shop at Pakefield, Lowestoft. He had published several Royston Ellis poetry pamphlets including the great-looking 'Rave' (1960). Ellis's statement, written when he was 18 is cri de coeur from teenland--the teenager at the time had only just been invented, before that in what is now known as 'the age of deference' you went uncomplainingly from boy to man, from girl to woman, wore sensible clothes and behaved yourself. A historic document, not quite on a par with the Dada Manifesto (at the Cabaret Voltaire in July 1916) but of some significance-- it is a carbon copy with a note by JR 'given to me by Royston 1960.' It appears to be unpublished. Photo above - Eel Pie Island 1960, below Johnny Vincent rocking on the IOW. Take it away Royston:

Teenage Testament

With the on-coming Spring the teenage has burst into bud once again. But this year there is no getting rid of it with weed killer. Teenagers look like being the prize blooms featured in every newspaper, magazine, television programme and family discussion.

Throughout the country youngsters are being interviewed for their views on life, love, manners, religion....In fact, everything that will give the outsider an idea of what makes teenagers tick. A so-called typical teenager romps into the public eye and is immediately condemned and criticised by earnest religious bodies as being 'not a fair representative'. A learned youngster states his views and straightaway teenagers accuse him of being out of touch.



One thing that all these probes have proved is that there is no such thing as the typical teenager....We, and I speak now as a teenager, have healthy defiance for conventionally-held beliefs. We will not take "no' or "you mustn't" for an answer. We aim to keep hypocrisy from our outlook. The world of the tut-tut brigade is swiftly crumbling. In two generations time the tut-tuts will be dead.

This is suddenly a teenage world, and we're sick of the state it is in. We teenagers have never had inhibitions, smug delusions. That is why we are going all out for life in away that we feel is right. The current state of the world is no glorious testimony for accepted traditions.

We are rebels with a cause, the cause of thinking teenagers who can see nothing to be learnt from the limp achievements of adults; only that adults can learn something from us, from out untainted outlook.

I am not a spokesman for teenagers. I am merely echoing the views of modern-thinking youngsters and adults everywhere. And it so happens that the non-thinking types, the types that couldn't care less, anyway, are now doing and believing the same things by instinct rather than by deduction.

But this outlook is not new. For generations there have been young rebels kicking against conventions. Many writers, painters, musicians, scientists have felt this way. It's just that the current cult of teenagery is giving every youngster a chance to sort things out for himself. The surge of teenage feeling is acting as virile impetus.




This is not the struggle of misunderstood teenagers battling against pedantic parents, but the struggle of free-thinking honest individuals campaigning against the hypocrisy and power-bloated minds of the dear old tut-tut squad.

Myself, I believe that this straightforward and sincere attitude will help teenagers to become worthwhile and voluble citizens, cherishing a close bond between themselves and their children, and a realistic understanding of the problems of living.

Royston Ellis
March, 1960

George's Price

Below is a sample of George Jeffrey's handwriting. He has priced a 5 vol set of Arthur Mee's I SEE ALL( 'The World's First Picture Encyclopedia') once a desirable set which had lost favour even before the web. His usual price was £1 with the long flourish afterwards. £15 was serious money down Farringdon way in the early 70s. I once had the whimsical notion of compiling a monograph on dealer's pricing hands so that you could identify where a book had been bought, but it seemed an endless task with generations of pricers and, over time, 1000s of shops. There are probably a 100 different styles coming out of Hay on Wye alone. Iain Sinclair's neat little signed price (i/s) will one day add to the price of the books that he sold at Camden Passage. Did Orwell price books when he was as a part- time assistant in "Booklover's Corner" in Hampstead? Presumably Nancy Mitford priced books in her time at Heywood Hill and over in Berserkeley Jonathan Lethem must have pencilled in a few prices in his days at Moe's. Joseph Connolly priced books for decades, so far adding no discernible value; Graham Greene was involved with a bookshop or two - but may never have wielded a pencil and rubber.

Occasionally you get a collection where the buyer has left the price in and a neat note as to where, when and in which shop the book was bought. Who could not recognise a book priced by Mr Peake at the Scientific Anglian in Norwich, or the looped 'ff' of George Locke from Ferret Fantasy?

Lost Bookstalls

No 1. Farringdon Road ( 1870s – 1994 )

There were bookstalls along London’s Farringdon Road from the 1870s, but the ones that collectors alive today remember with affection were a string of stalls run by the Jeffrey family from around 1909 until 1994. In 1932 the journalist Harold Massingham listed some of the volumes that were likely to be found on these stalls:

‘Mammoth folios, Old Strand Magazines, Andrewes on the Ten Commandments, Pindar’s Prolegomena in Olympionicas, A System of Gynaecology, Radium Therapeutics, A New Concordance, Moore’s Navigator, Moody’s Analysis of Railroad Investments, Cowper’s Companion to the Temple, Elinor Glyn’s The Man and the Moment, A New History of Methodism, Gall Bladder and Bile Ducts, Chitty’s Statutes, Booth’s In Darkest England, The Inventor of the Numerical Type for China, A Woman Sold and Other Poems, Tilyard’s Stones of Stumbling, My Friend the Curate, McHenry’s Spanish Grammar, Letters of Joseph Jekyll, The Life of Isabella Bird, Aurora Borealis Academia. ‘

Other grateful customers at this time included Betjeman, his friend Geoffrey Grigson, and the popular novelist Jeffery Farnol. Later on, Spike Milligan, rock music writer Charles Shaar Murray and the West Indian guru CLR James, were regular browsers This was during the early era of George Jeffrey III, an instantly recognisable figure in his blue nylon overall and thermos flask, who had taken over from his father in 1957. Many booksellers built their stock from these stalls. One dealer from New Zealand opened a book and found some letters from Lord Byron enclosed. Cult psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, who had a stall in Camden Passage at that time, found rare modern fiction, such as David Gascoyne’s novel Opening Day in the piles of books dumped onto the pavements at twenty-five pence a throw, and which I regarded with some disdain. Bewick expert Nigel Tattersfield discovered in a box a scribal copy of Thomas More’s Comfort Agaynst Trybulacion dating from the 1530s, but bound in Victorian cloth and priced at £20, which he later sold for £42,000, while a fellow Bewick man, Iain Bain bought the original plates of David Lucas’s Constable’s Landscape Scenery, which ended up at the Tate. Jeffrey sold original drawings too. According to the artist Geoffrey Fletcher someone found a Graham Sutherland drawing among a pile of original artwork. I myself obtained a large portfolio of prints and drawings for a mere £6 only to discover when I got home that half of them were by the portraitist Henry Edridge and the antiquarian Thomas Fisher. Not long afterwards I bought for just £50 an exceedingly rare second edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes ( later dubbed the 'Book of Martyrs'- pic below) dated 1570, complete with gruesome woodcuts of ‘heretics ‘being burned, which is considered almost a Holy relic of Protestantism by American dealers of the Bible Belt, who offer single pages from such early editions for upwards of $200. Here too were numerous 18th and early 19th Court Guides, odd volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Annual Review and huge Cassini maps of France ( the precursors of our Ordnance Survey maps )from the late 18th century for £3 each . I recall one customer getting stroppy when he thought he had put aside a particular map only to discover that I had already laid claim to it . I seem to recall that I came off worse in that dispute. Some dealers I have spoken to recalled incidents of mild violence arising from such disputes. Many dealers crowding around the stall on the regular Saturday scramble circumvented any possible problems by grabbing any books that mildly interested them from the new stock that Jeffrey dumped on the trestle table. They would then retire like bibliographical squirrels to the nearby wall, leisurely go through their pile and select the few books they actually wanted to buy, before returning the rejected tomes to the trestle tables. I refused to take part in this unseemly ritual, thinking it highly unethical, but no doubt I was the loser by this decision. No-one was sure where Jeffrey obtained his eclectic stock, though judging from the nature of many of the books on sale, and the plethora of bookplates, many must have come from disbanded private and institutional libraries and from retired book dealers. For instance, when the famous poetry bookshop Turret Books folded, much of the stock ended up on Jeffrey’s stalls.



Jeffrey too had a strange attitude towards his stock. If you dared dispute the price of an item he was likely to snatch it back and rip it in half before your eyes. If he caught you stealing you were banned for life. And oddest of all, he seemed complacent about how items he knew were rare were handled by his customers. I distinctly recall the rare American first edition of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819) which was priced at £20, getting tattier and tattier by the week as it passed through hundred of hands over a period of months, until it was almost in tatters. From being worth hundreds it ended up almost worthless and fit only for the bin. And doubtless, over the years, this relaxed attitude towards the source of his livelihood resulted in the relegation of many other once valuable books to the rubbish heap. And indeed rubbish bins in his part of Farringdon Road were a good hunting ground. When the trestle tables had been towed away for the day, it was sometimes worthwhile scavenging among the litter bins for mid eighteen century topographical prints and old book boards.

I was told by one dealer that Jeffrey handled so many books that he couldn’t keep up with the valuation of his stock and that he was probably just happy to make a decent profit from his business. And he did well from his trade, of that there’s no doubt. He was unlikely to have lost sleep over the disposal of the odd Washington Irving first, though I remain to be convinced that he regarded with equanimity the loss of a sixteenth century manuscript worth over £40,000. When Jeffrey at last went to that great book warehouse in the sky the local council took the opportunity to raise the rent for his pitch. His son decided to opt out ---and an era came to an end. [R.M.Healey]



Thanks Robin. Ah George! It is hard to join wholeheartedly in the sentiment about George being a wonderful old character, which he undoubtedly was, as to me he was a fierce and implacable business rival in book clearances and also could not be outbid at auction if he fancied a lot. He used the dangerous but effective cross subsidisation technique. If one lot came in cheap you put the amount saved on the next lot and so on. This can lead to one paying £500 for a lot only worth £300 but it frightens off the opposition. It tended to work, although as the wise dealer Roger Elliott once said--at auction when you get rid of a rival he is quickly replaced, sometimes the next week. On the subject of the More scribal MS George said a wise thing, something to the effect that he could have wasted a lifetime looking closely at his books and checking every unusual item but that was just not his style. Anyone would be slightly peeved to drop £40K (probably about £200,000 now) but he was not inconsolable and Nigel T always told me he was treated just the same afterwards - and found further treasures, but none as handy as the blessed Saint Thomas More...

Ian McEwan. First Love, Last Rites, 1975

Ian McEwan. FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES. Jonathan Cape, London 1975.

Current Selling Prices
$600 - $1000 /£400-£700

MODERN FIRST EDITION
A serious and collectable first edition from one of the big players in the 70s Brit pack of novelists--the others include Barnes, Amis and Rushdie. The New Yorker notes;' It is now a commonplace that McEwan has edged past his peers to become England’s national author.' Movies are made from his books and he has gone from an edgy cult novelist to a mainstream, middle class favourite--is he heir to the mantle of Nigel Balchin, Nevile Shute, C.P. Snow and J. B. Priestley or, as Martin Amis has suggested, a new Conrad ? If the latter then his current prices may rise in time and his early works may be, as several dealers put it, be 'ones for the vault' or 'the pension fund.' Talk of pension funds however usually indicates desperation, or that the price is too high now but you merely have to wait a few decades for a gilt-edged payoff.

First Love, Last Rites, a collection of eight short stories begins with a tale of incest -a boy so intent on losing his virginity that he settles on his sister. Further themes of sex, perversion, and the grotesque run through the stories, three of which have been filmed. Comparisons were made at the time with Roald Dahl, one story 'Solid Geometry' was especially fancied. The New York Times came up with painterly comparisons - "Ian McEwan's fictional world combin[es] the bleak, dreamlike quality of de Chirico's city-scapes with the strange eroticism of canvases by Balthus. Menace lies crouched between the lines of his neat, angular prose, and weird, grisly things occur in his books with nearly casual aplomb."

VALUE? It is hard to find copies in fine jackets for much less than £700 and you may have £1000 for a fine signed copy. There was a well attended signing shortly after publication at the Royal Society of Literature. OUTLOOK? Hard to call--probably good but not spectacular. Most of his books are fairly easily found, he is unlikely now to write a staggering masterpiece--a Magic Mountain or a Lolita or Decline and Fall- his works are said to be becoming very slightly duller. He is unlikely to do a Cormac and appear on Oprah, but movies may lift his prices. He could become the new Graham Greene in terms of collectability, but it seems unlikely. Buy modestly priced copies and hold until death or dotage. His best book is said to be The Child in Time which can be still be bought realtively reasonably.

Although never exactly a bliss-ninny McEwan was something of a hippy with the usual mystical baggage (and even according to Amis several kaftans) and often pictured in a three button hand me down and Lennonish specs. In this century he has fervently embraced rationalism, finds belief in God and the hereafter dim-witted, even abusive and hangs out with Christopher Hitchens (author of God is not Great, I am.) In going into the mainstream, the solid novel researched to within an inch of its life, he has vastly broadened his fanbase and there are those who feel his early works, now relatively scarce, should be priced as if he is a colossus of literature, one seller wanting £8500 for a fine/fine signed first of First Love. Book collectors are remarkably tolerant--if an ice cream seller wanted $25 for a lolly or a gas station $50 a gallon they would be hounded out of town by a braying, bloodthirsty mob. Possibly such dealers are prepared to wait a lifetime for prices to catch up or for a plutocrat collector to lose his mind and hit the buy button. Peter Howard always told me never to criticise another man's prices, because there may be something you don't know about their situation, Driffield used to say there was 'no statagem too strange' for a book dealer to use.

TRIVIA. Three years ago, McEwan culled the fiction library of his Fitrovia mansion. Instead of calling in a nearby bookseller he and his younger son handed out thirty novels in a nearby park. In an essay for the Guardian, McEwan reported that “every young woman we approached . . . was eager and grateful to take a book,” whereas the men “could not be persuaded. ‘Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks, mate, but no.’ ” The researcher’s conclusion: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

Lost Bookshops

‘Ralph the Books’, Swansea ( fl. 1930 – ca. 2007 )


As a schoolboy collector in Wales this was the shop that encouraged my early bibliomania. It was, of course, the bookshop to which Dylan Thomas ( who was the best-known old boy of my school ) sold the review copies for which he had no further use.
Ralph Wishart (1911 – 75) became a friend of the poet and was, no doubt plagued by American academics and young, earnest thesis writers. His shop—if indeed it was the one that Thomas visited—for there was another, much smaller one near the station at the other end of town—was a double fronted, bay windowed affair which went back a long way from the busy street . In each window there was always a display of what were considered to be the more striking books for sale, though these were not necessarily the most expensive. Welsh bibles, bible commentaries, books of sermons and other dull staples of the Welsh book trade of that time often served as stands for more modern, jacketed works on art or travel or whatever. Everything, including the books, seemed coated with dust and the books looked grubby and faded , though the windows were clean enough, but hardly sparkling. Entering the shop one’s impression was of books crowding every surface, even the long counter and under the counter too. On the left wall could be found dull books on Geography and adjoining the shelves small, cheaper books of all kinds were stuffed into a free-standing carousel. Opposite, exactly behind where stood Ralph or his brother—a lugubrious figure permanently clothed in a grubby grey overall-- lurked the best stock, which might have included recondite works in Welsh, modern firsts, cased late Georgian maps, Victorian illustrated books, leather bound antiquarian books on all subjects, and pamphlets. Getting to examine these choice items took a good deal of courage and guile. The space to manoeuvre behind the counter was so limited that placing oneself in a position to examine this stock comfortably involved shoving aside the shopkeeper. I was so conscious of usurping his space that I never felt happy as a browser here—and Ralph or his brother seemed unwilling to accommodate me. [Only available pic of the bookshop, an interior, on left.]

On the shelves next to the best books was the large, deeply dull-looking poetry section. I invariably made a beeline for these shelves in the vain hope of finding some forgotten slim volume from the twenties or thirties among the dross. I soon realised that this was not the place to locate anything of any appeal, and indeed it would seem that books hardly moved from here . I clearly remember seeing one slim volume called Wildtrack remain there for ten years or longer, though in Ralph’s such a non-movement was commonplace. Halfway down the shop on the right was Ralph’s cubby hole, where he presumably stored the books before they were shelved, but where everyone suspected he kept the really expensive stock. People were occasionally invited in for a chat , but not me. Maybe because I was not one of his long-standing collectors or a supporter of Swansea Town. I suspected it was because I was English. In Wales at that time there was a lot of anti-English feeling.

I used to visit the shop each time I came home from University and it always seemed much the same from when I had last seen it. And when I last looked around it in 2002, a few years before it closed for good, it had hardly changed since I had bought my first book there in 1968 . The back of the shop was twice the size of the front and was essentially a cold, dank, ill-lit warehouse with books jammed in from floor to ceiling and an island of books in the centre. Here were stocked all the cheaper fiction, from the classics to forgotten novelists of the late Victorian period onwards---Meredith, Marie Correlli, Dornford Yates, Annie Swan Warwick Deeping, Walpole, Priestley--- with nothing priced at more than 5 shillings or the equivalent. When it rained the roof leaked, showering boxes of books with droplets and creating nasty puddles on the uneven, cobbled floor. But Ralph and his successors never seemed bothered about this threat to their stock. Upstairs were the books in Welsh and the religious works—thousands
and thousands of them, many in attractive leather bindings—and I could never work out if the Welsh books were also religious in nature, despite having studied the language for two terms at school.

At the time it was easy to dismiss much of Ralph’s stock as irrelevant or just plain dowdy. He never seemed to prune the dead wood and I can’t remember if there was ever a bargain box or bargain shelves. But Wales has always been a happy hunting ground for book collectors --especially the larger towns and those with Universities ( ask Richard Booth ) -—and among the dross in Ralph’s shelves could be found books of real rarity. For instance, I bought here a scarce 6 volume pirated edition by Donaldson of Pope’s Works dated 1767, in light calf, which Ralph let me have for £1 17s 6d because, according to him, a rat had chewed off a corner of volume 6. And around 1970 I acquired for ten shillings volume two (July- December 1820) of the exceptionally rare Gold’s London Magazine, which I have never seen again for sale in 40 years of searching in shops and on the Net. This lucky buy introduced me to the writings of the brilliant parodist William Frederick Deacon, whose Warreniana is now recognised as one of the greatest works of its type. I have written and lectured widely on Deacon over the years and even wrote his entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—and all of this I put down to Ralph’s.

Ralph died in 1975 and his brother retired soon afterward, leaving the shop in the hands of a peculiarly charmless younger man, who I was later told, was the son of Vernon Watkins’ cleaner. I don’t know whether this was true, but I do know that the shop was never the same exciting hunting ground in the twenty odd years that he presided over it. [ R.M.Healey]

Thanks Robin. Many of us carry around a lost bookshop in our hearts. For me it was the rambling old bookshop William Smith at Reading. I heard it burnt down about 40 years ago. That is where I first got the taste for finding old and forgotten books. Charles Knight's evocative title 'Shadows of the the Old Booksellers' (1865) comes to mind, although that is mostly biographies of eighteenth-century London publisher-booksellers. It would be good to hear from others of any lost bookshops, I know Robin has more...I have fond memories of the second hand bookshop on the Beach Road in Felixstowe that closed about 30 years back, many a 'sleeper' found there...