tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20458456794447966082024-03-16T18:53:08.763+00:00Bookride<b>RARE BOOK GUIDE - THE RUNNERS, THE RIDERS & THE ODDS </b>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.comBlogger627125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-9111931961903728872015-02-27T09:15:00.001+00:002016-09-10T08:24:23.179+00:00Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-82578996436780258702014-08-06T18:22:00.001+00:002016-09-10T08:23:22.683+00:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-55364206792504315562014-03-05T16:02:00.000+00:002014-03-06T10:01:28.321+00:00PBFA Book Fair 22/3/14<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="text-align: justify;">A quick note about </span>a one day book fair this merry month of March at the Olympia Hilton (right at end of High Street Kensington). It is an innovative book fair run by Deborah Davis (consultant to Any Amount of Books.)<br />
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Specialising in Modern Firsts, Illustrated Books and Children's literature. No books on trains, boats, planes or Arctic Exploration...not this time.</div>
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<b>Be there or be square.</b> 11AM- 5PM Saturday 22rd March. 380 Kensington High Street London W14.</div>
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<br />Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-75338853454788516042013-08-10T23:12:00.001+00:002013-08-11T08:53:04.666+00:00STOP PRESS - We have moved on, oh yesWe have started another blog, archiving things found in our warehouse, it's called <a href="http://www.jot101.com/">Jot101</a><br />
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Worth a detour. We will no longer be posting at Bookride.<br />
All is not lost however -- posts are still pretty bookish! Check these out:<br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/08/how-to-become-spy-in-6-easy-lessons.html">How to become a spy (in 6 easy lessons)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/08/the-crazy-quilt-murders-1938.html">The Crazy Quilt Murders (1938)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/08/i-danced-with-wittgenstein.html">I danced with Wittgenstein</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/05/1920s-rare-book-wants-list.html">Enormous 1920s Rare Book Wants List</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/07/john-betjeman-on-cr-ashbee.html">John Betjeman on C.R. Ashbee</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/06/the-table-talk-of-ts-eliot.html">The Table Talk of T.S. Eliot</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/06/the-day-of-rabblement-james-joyce-1901.html">James Joyce - The Day of the Rabblement 1901</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/06/second-hand-bookshops-in-paris-1880.html">Second hand bookshops in Paris (1880)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/05/dressing-vorticist-violent-hunt.html">Violet Hunt - Dressing Vorticist</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/04/national-front-versus-calder-and-boyars.html">National Front versus Calder & Boyars (1968)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.jot101.com/2013/03/plath.html">Sylvia Plath, Suicide & the Professor</a><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">Widmerpool says go</span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span><a href="http://www.jot101.com/" style="text-align: center;">there</a><span style="text-align: center;"> right away!</span><br />
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<br />Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-91788303699368872212013-03-25T10:54:00.001+00:002013-03-25T10:54:24.122+00:00Bosschere / Pound '12 Occupations'
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<a href="" name="OLE_LINK2"></a><a href="" name="OLE_LINK1"><b>Jean de Bosschere,
12 Occupations, trans Ezra Pound, Elkin Mathews, Cork Street, London, 1916.</b><o:p></o:p></a></div>
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<b>Current selling prices £500+</b></div>
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Collectors of early modernist literature are well aware of the rarest
of Ezra Pound’s first experimental ‘ imagist ‘ poetry (<i>Lustra,</i> <i>A Quinzaine For this Yule</i>
etc ). But this little pamphlet, a translation of an early work by the Belgium
poet and artist Jean de Bosschere is so scarce
that it doesn’t even get a mention in <i>The
Young Genius, 1885</i> <i>– 1920</i> (2007),David
Moody’s monumental first volume,. Nor does it feature in other collections of
letters from Pound. However, in the recently published letters to his parents,
De Bosschere’s name does crop up several times, though I cannot find a mention
of <i>12 Occupations</i>. Did the translator
see it as mere hackwork done to pay the rent of his bedsitter in Kensington ? It
seems possible. He must have done a good deal of this sort of thing at the
time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pound was a famous talent-spotter and De Bosschere was just the sort
of multi-talented. artist/writer that he would have nurtured. Having, in 1900 graduated
from art college in Antwerp, De Bosschere paid several visits between 1901 and 1905 to
Paris, where he met writers interested in the occult. From 1905 he seems to
have supported himself as an art critic until the outbreak of the First World
War, and during this period became an admirer of symbolism and of the mystic
Catholic writer Paul Claudel. In 1915 he fled the Great War for London where he
met, not only Pound, but also fellow Imagist poets like Richard Aldington and
John Gould Fletcher, as well as D.H.
Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. His own first collection of poetry ( <i>Beale- Gryne</i> ) had appeared in 1909 and he continued to write poetry and
novels throughout his life, although possibly because most of the latter were
seriously weird, they remained
unpublished at his death. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Knowing that Pound was the go-to man in London, the Belgium showed him
his work( presumably both his writings and drawings )in 1916. At first, Pound didn’t
know what to make of it. , but felt ‘there was something or other figiting
around in his carcass, trying to get out in expression‘. De Bosschere himself
was a great admirer of the drawings of Lewis and Gaudier.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pound did however submit the Belgium’s verse to <i>Poetry
</i>and De Bosschere in turn wrote a critique of Pound for <i>The Egoist</i>. In 1917 De Bosschere’s persistence was rewarded when he
received a three year contract to illustrate books for Heinemann, including
works by Ovid and Wilde.In the following year Pound reported that an exhibition
of De Bosschere’s paintings was coming
on in the West End. By 1920 Pound had become a great admirer of his graphic art and the two men met occasionally
in Paris. <o:p></o:p></div>
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De Bosschere’s first novel, <i>Dolorine
et les Ombres</i> (1911), had provoked charges of Satanism, and indeed he later
gave himself the nickname ‘ Satan ‘.However, the black and white illustrations
for <i>12 Occupations</i> seem more ‘ dark ‘than
satanic. One illustration shows a strange bug- like creature turning a
machine-tool wheel. In another, a man appears to be operating a contraption for
hanging miscreants on the gallows. The accompanying descriptions in French are strongly declamatory in tone and the translations are admirably Poundian. Here is a
fragment from ‘The Chair and Table-Maker’:</div>
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<i>The chair-maker has democratized the throne…<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>By means of the table, he brings the food half-way to our mouths.
For the table is the first floor of the earth, as heaven is its garret.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Oh, admirable work of this man, which delivers the featherless biped
from the animality which lives on the earth.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Greek has not done better for our sublimity.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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God knows what Pound thought of the whole undertaking, though no
doubt he was glad of the money. For some reason, his name does not appear anywhere
in the book, but I doubt if he minded. There is no mention in his letters home
of any fee, nor how well the little book sold.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Although <i>12 Occupations</i>
has always been regarded as a rarity in America and the UK, in Europe they get
far less excited about it. In 2006 a copy appeared at auction in France with an
estimate of 20/50 Euros. In February 2012 Bloomsbury sold a similar copy for
£260. The <i>12 Occupations</i> currently
with Peter Harrington at an eye watering £2,250 is signed by the author, who
has also hand coloured some of the illustrations. Oddly, on 11 Oct 2012 at
Swann Auctions in NYC a dummy version, possibly from the publishers’ archives,
made $3120 with a copy of the trade edition. The latter may be the one that
Zubal are offering, because it wasn’t there when I first looked a year or so
ago. <o:p></o:p></div>
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R. M. Healey <o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p>[ Many thanks Robin - the Bloomsbury 2012 copy,from where the pic above came, was shabby at the edges. This used to be a sleeper, one of the 500 books a good modern first scout was seeking. Not many sleepers anymore.]</o:p></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-31325822212430642242013-03-08T20:47:00.001+00:002013-03-08T20:50:56.169+00:00Invasion of the Pods<br />
<b>THE INVASION OF THE PODS</b><br />
<br />
Bookride has long had a quarrel with those Books on Demand publishers, with good reason. A few years ago they were as mild irritation that got in the way of the ‘ real ‘ book on Abe. They could be annoying, but you tolerated them. Today the situation is very different. They seem to have taken over the whole of ABE like some giant pulsating fungus out of Quatermass, or those giant PODS from ‘ The Invasion of the Body Snatchers ‘. If this expansion continues they will push out all the real books, just as the replicated human clones from the pods pushed out all the real humans in the film.<br />
<br />
Did I say ‘will’? In some cases they already have. Take the other day. For some reason I decided to check out copies of Ackermann’s <i>Repository of the Arts</i>—a publication venerated among design historians and for that reason famously expensive. Less than two years earlier, not long after I had bought a respectable 1809 volume from a bookstall in Ripon market for a bargain £5, I discovered half a dozen good copies at the usual inflated prices of £200 or £300 a piece. When I entered the book title again, there they were, the book clones. I scrolled down until I had gone through the whole list—not a single real copy of the real Repository could I find—all were Repressed Publications/Kessinger/Nabu clones.<br />
<br />
Then it occurred to me. Had I and other innocent seekers after real books been responsible for all those other alien life forms that were taking over the world of real books ? Was it possible that whenever an ABE user signals an interest in a particular (often rare) title this triggers a mechanism that registers this interest and relays it to a BOD publisher, who then reproduce it as a POD book ? How else can you explain why so many titles I have enquired after on ABE have soon after appeared as POD books? .<br />
<br />
Surely too, is it no coincidence that the rise of the POD has coincided with the rise of the postgraduate degree scam, which itself is partly a way by which the polytechnic-turned –universities raise funds, possibly for their crappy libraries? I suppose it could be argued that if you are only interested in acquiring the text of a book, perhaps to aid your postgraduate research, the cost of a POD would be cheaper than paying for a visit to the British Library, if you live in Plymouth or Newcastle. But in the end, if demand for personal copies of rare texts continues to increase there is a real danger that dealers will be discouraged from advertising their copies of these ‘real ‘books online, for fear of having them swamped by the clones. In addition to the Repository, I’ve looked up other titles that I used to see on ABE, and these too seem to have disappeared. Also, bizarrely, some PODS now cost more than the ‘ real ‘ books that they reproduce.<br />
<br />
I’d like to quiz Mr Kessinger and his friends about their sales figures. How many PODS do they sell? After that I’d like to meet some of those who have bought PODs of titles that are available as real books, either online or in the hundreds of second hand bookshops that, despite the Internet and Kindle, can still be found throughout the UK. Have they looked for these titles in these bookshops? If not, why they have rushed into buying a grubby little computer generated body snatcher of a book, barely held together, with misprints, a meaningless cover and smudgy illustrations, for only a little less, in some instances, than the real thing, which they could have had if they’d looked a little further or waited a little longer.<br />
<br />
It all reminds me of people who will gladly spend more on a reproduction of a Georgian dining room table in perfect condition than they would on an identical table in the same saleroom that happens to have slight wear. These people are fools.<br />
<br />
So I say to anyone tempted to buy a POD, please don’t. Use your brain. Be patient, or pay the going rate for the real thing. Some of these rarer titles will be good investments, whereas the PODs will never, ever, ever, be worth anything but a few pence.[R. M. Healey]<br />
<br />
Rave on Robin! I second that emotion. Btw that is my distant cousin below...<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7ROa18_1nOc/UTpPB8RZDWI/AAAAAAAAENE/g2Vpwf1_ioc/s1600/googleespresso_1484347c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7ROa18_1nOc/UTpPB8RZDWI/AAAAAAAAENE/g2Vpwf1_ioc/s320/googleespresso_1484347c.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-17120646543470704072013-02-05T19:31:00.000+00:002013-02-05T19:32:05.553+00:00Frances Cornford. The Holtbury Idyll<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2045845679444796608" name="OLE_LINK2"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2045845679444796608" name="OLE_LINK1"><b>FCD (Frances
Cornford). The Holtbury Idyll. (No name, No Place, No Date but circa 1908)<o:p></o:p></b></a></div>
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<b>Current selling price $2,000 <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Anyone who has read an anthology of English poetry will remember the
very short poem which contains the
following lines:<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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'O fat white woman whom nobody loves<o:p></o:p></div>
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Why do you walk through the fields in gloves<o:p></o:p></div>
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Missing so much and so much ?’<o:p></o:p></div>
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It can be found in <i>Poems </i>(1910)
the debut collection of Frances Cornford, a member of the famous Darwin family
of Cambridge (Charles was her grandfather ),who had just married a young
classics don, also confusingly called Francis. He went on to write on Socrates
etc., while she published further slim volumes
of witty Georgianesque verse that sometimes recalls Betjeman, while the couple,
distinguished only by their respective initials (hers were FCD), went on to
establish at their home in leafy Millington Road, a refuge for the ‘intelligentsia’
of the sort that seems peculiar to Cambridge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Fat White Woman‘ was an instant success, but its notoriety was to plague
Cornford throughout the rest of her life. Its critics attacked her for
presuming that the woman she had viewed from a train was unloved. Housman and
Chesterton both parodied the poem —Housman probably for academico- political
reasons (Mr Cornford was a rival in classical studies at Cambridge)—Chesterton for socio-religious reasons (as a Catholic he opposed the atheism
of Cambridge rationalists among whom the Cornfords moved). Even today,
bloggers are divided about the poet’s view of the outside world. Was Cornford an
intellectual snob who observed lesser beings from an academic ivory tower, or is
there irony in her poem ? Personally, knowing the Darwin set, which still
exists in an exiguous form at Cambridge, I favour the former. What is certainly
known, but not presumably by the bloggers, is that <i>Poems </i>was <b>not</b> Cornford’s
debut volume. This turns out to be <i>The Holtbury
Idyll</i> (1908). <o:p></o:p></div>
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The confusion is easy to understand. Google <i>The Holtbury Idyll</i> and you will get nothing. A trawl through
abebooks will produce <i>nada</i>. The title isn’t in Copac. Alan Anderson, whose 19
page <i>Bibliography of the Writings of
Frances Cornford</i> (a cool £150 from Peter Ellis) has <i>Poems</i> as her debut collection. And yet, flick through <i>Ahearne</i> and you will find <i>The Holtbury Idyll</i> listed under FCD,
that is, Frances Crofts Darwin. I think we should trust the word of the
Ahearnes, assume that the book does indeed exist, and tick off Mr Anderson for
not doing his research.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But it <i>is</i> a puzzle. The
University of Cambridge online catalogue failed to turn up a copy. David’s, the
best known bookseller in Cambridge, hadn’t heard of it-- even the man who had
worked there for 25 years-- though he did say that they had a copy of <i>Poems</i> for sale. When I remarked to him that a living Darwin
might know of it, or even own a copy, he hinted that one who might have
information was no longer around, which didn’t exactly help. I mentioned in passing
that I couldn’t find a single Darwin in the Cambridge phone book so he
suggested that I try Darwin College, which I did. The secretary to the Bursar
was friendly and promised to get back to me if she found anyone who could help.
I am still waiting.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Other books by Cornford are quite thick on the ground. There are
several copies of <i>Poems </i>on Abe that
hover at around $70. One that might be nice to have is <i>Spring Morning, </i>which appeared from the Poetry Bookshop in 1915,
complete with wood engravings by Gwen Raverat ( another cult figure in smart
Cambridge circles ). The Woolfs, doubtless guests at Millington Road, brought out Cornford’s <i>Different Days</i> in 1928.Perhaps
the biggest puzzle is why the Ahearnes place such a high price on a slim volume
(probably a pamphlet ) published by a poet whose work, apart from ‘Fat White
Woman’, hasn’t lasted. For $2,000 you could buy a copy of John Gray’s <i>Silver Points</i> or Hilda Doolittle’s first
book…Or a lot of other interesting firsts, for that matter.[<o:p></o:p>R. M. Healey]</div>
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Many thanks Robin - looking out for that one. It will probably show up in the library of a relation - a Darwin, Raverat, Wedgwood, Cornford or Keynes. Although the much liked poetry collector Quentin Keynes does not appear to have had one. </div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-56120726214843447942013-01-14T07:24:00.000+00:002013-01-14T07:26:14.619+00:00R.Murray Gilchrist, The Stone Dragon ( 1894)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Current selling price
£2,000+.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RCqN-Zj2CTE/UPOyKi304gI/AAAAAAAAEMY/7kBbtlhn4Jo/s1600/Gilchrist+stone+dragon+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RCqN-Zj2CTE/UPOyKi304gI/AAAAAAAAEMY/7kBbtlhn4Jo/s1600/Gilchrist+stone+dragon+pic.jpg" /></a>Until the early 1970s R. Murray Gilchrist (1868 - 1917) was
known mainly for some unremarkable regional and other novels together with a
few bog standard topographical books on Yorkshire and the Peak District, none of which have ever
attracted the attention of collectors. Then, in the 1970s his horror fiction began
to be anthologised and before long this Yorkshireman was being hailed as a undeservedly
neglected master of the Decadent and Gothic, worthy to rank with some of the
greatest masters of the genre. Over the past forty years stories from his debut
collection <i>The Stone Dragon</i> have been
anthologized more than a dozen times and the book has been reprinted in 1984,
1994 and 2003. Because of this interest demand for first editions of his most
acclaimed book has escalated enormously in recent years.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Frustratingly, little is known about the life of Gilchrist.
It seems that he was born in Sheffield in 1868, where he attended the grammar
school there, and apart from a short sojourn in Paris soon afterwards, he remained
in the Peak district for the rest of his short life, living for some time near
Holmesfield, in his mother’s house, the largely
Tudor Cartledge Hall, with a male companion, which suggests that he may have
been gay. In the early 1890s his ‘Decadent’ tales featured in W. E. Henley’s <i>National Observer, </i>a mainly non-fiction
magazine that also published Yeats and Kipling. In 1891, his first novel, <i>Passion the Plaything </i>appeared, but
although this and two further novels, <i>Frangipanni
</i>(1893) and <i>Hercules and the
Marionettes</i> (1894) were not a great critical success, reviewers were much
more enthusiastic about his first collection <i>The Stone Dragon</i> which came out in<i> </i>1894<i>.</i>. Thereafter, Gilchrist was in demand and he published
further stories in more mainstream magazines, including <i>The Idler</i>, <i>Pall Mall Magazine</i>
and <i>Windsor Magazine.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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It has been remarked that the critical neglect of Gilchrist since
his death in 1917 has been mainly due to his unevenness as a writer. Writing
mainly of his novels one critic of the time described his work as 'incomplete,
elliptical, mannered and uncontrolled'. Elsewhere the same critic, after
praising the good qualities of one particular novel, condemned him as a writer
of 'great moments and appalling weaknesses.' These remarks, which were echoed
by other critics, seem to have contributed to Gilchrist’s critical fate.The stories
in <i>The Stone Dragon</i>, however, appear to
have escaped these critical reservations, despite
the fact that some of them share some of the stylistic failings of the novels.
It’s the themes treated by Gilchrist in this Decadent fiction that attract the
modern sensibility. Stories that address same-sex passion, the lust for youth, and
feminism, predominate and it is perhaps no coincidence that the resurrection of
Gilchrist followed directly on from the sexual liberation of the nineteen
sixties. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the title story, for instance, the hero has to choose
between two women—one boringly conventional and submissive and the other erotic
and unconventional, with the stone dragon itself acting as a symbol of emotion frozen
for all time, just as in a conventional marriage. Other aspects of gender and
sexuality that occupied so many writers and artists of the 1890s (one thinks
immediately of Beardsley and Swinburne) are explored with imaginative power in <i>The Stone Dragon</i> and in later
collections. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-stLZgkEfuVk/UPOyIG4W26I/AAAAAAAAEMQ/9RZ-PWwV_l8/s1600/R.Murray+Gilchrist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-stLZgkEfuVk/UPOyIG4W26I/AAAAAAAAEMQ/9RZ-PWwV_l8/s1600/R.Murray+Gilchrist.jpg" /></a>If you want some first or early editions of Gilchrist for a
few pounds his topographical guides are
easily available. Most bookshops will stock <i>Ripon
and Harrogate </i>(1914) and <i>The Peak
District</i> (1911) for around £5 each, though one chancer in East Moseley
wants a very silly $244 for <i>The Peak
District</i> because it retains its dust jacket ( he must have been reading
Tanselle on book jackets !). The bigger prices are reserved for Gilchrist’s
novels, a handful of which are available online. One of the cheapest seems to
be <i>Damosel Croft</i> at $83 (Peter
Ellis), with the undated <i>Pretty Fanny’s
Way</i> going for $164.39. Most of the other novels hover around $90.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Not surprisingly, <i>The
Stone Dragon</i> claims top spot. There is an wonderful inscribed copy of this 'legendarily scarce' title on sale from Adrian Harrington at a decadent $4,152,
but if you have a ‘ horror ‘ of paying over the odds, one dealer in Australia
will sell you a copy in only slightly worse condition for $1,250, which seems a
bargain to me. Incidentally, if you can somehow find the ‘Colonial ‘edition of
the same book it should cost you even less. [<o:p></o:p>R. M. Healey]</div>
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Many thanks Robin. This is a book I have never seen although one customer has a copy down Bexhill way. Must</div>
check him out when next in God's waiting room.<br />
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<!--EndFragment-->Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-70749228294493586062012-12-31T19:24:00.001+00:002012-12-31T19:25:35.450+00:00Book Jackets reviewed<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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G. Thomas Tanselle. <i><b>Book
Jackets, their history, forms and use.</b></i> Oak Knoll, 2nd edition 2011. £45.<o:p></o:p></div>
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How many academic books sell out in months? This one
did. Around a year ago I ordered a copy
of the first edition and the publishers told me that they had sent it. I never
received the book and was later sent a second edition. Perhaps some book
collecting postal worker took the first to be sent. If any work in the field of bibliophily is likely to become a new ‘must have’
for collectors dealers and auction cataloguers alike, this is it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For one thing, it’s a labour of love by arguably the world’s
greatest authority on book jacket history. Secondly, it is based on the
author’s own collection, which was begun in 1968, and is soon to be lodged in
an American library. This catalogue is supplemented
by Tanselle’s decades-long correspondence with fellow enthusiasts in the field,
notably Tom Congleton, who used to write a column for <i>Rare Book Review</i>. Thirdly, the book has the distinct appeal of
cutting edge research, albeit in a subject that for many non-bibliomaniacs, has
always been regarded as the source of loud belly laughs.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Forget all that. Book jackets are no longer a joke. To laugh
at book jacket is to pass up the opportunity to make big money. There are many
examples of a jacket being worth more than the book without it. For instance, a
first edition of <i>The Great Gadsby</i>
with the jacket will sell for many times more than a copy without one. In 1999
a copy of <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>
in a jacket made £80,700 at auction. A copy of Kipling’s <i>Just So Stories</i> (1902) in its dull brown jacket made £2,600 at Sotheby’s in 1986, the
cataloguer noting that the ’ book on its own ‘ would sell for about £100.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But why do so many collectors insist on a jacket ? Simple. If
the history of book jackets can now be traced back to around 1830, as Tanselle
argues, surely it is not too much to ask that a book printed in, say 1930,
retain its jacket and to be worth more by having it, especially as the jacket
may contain important information not available in the book itself, such as
reviews in obscure magazines, illustrations, and remarkably, extra material on
the reverse surface of the jacket. And although most early jackets were dull
brown paper affairs that simply reproduced elements of the title page in black
ink, a jacket, however uninspiring, must be seen as part of the book. Does any
collector of LPs throw away the sleeve notes on acquiring a new addition to his
record library? <o:p></o:p></div>
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But this new collecting trend brings with it new dangers.
Tanselle warns us that modern technology has meant that laser- printed facsimiles
can be passed off as the real thing by unscrupulous dealers. The old consolation
that exceptionally rare modern books can’t be copied convincingly probably
still applies, even in the age of the computer printer, but jackets are a
different matter. With four figures sums at stake collectors must now be very
vigilant.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Half of Tanselle’s treatise is taken up with such matters,
including, of course the history of the jacket, which we learn was a natural
development from the first protective
devices for fragile books, which were slip cases made of card. The first
example listed dates from 1779, but doubtless others will be discovered sooner
rather than later. After all, this is cutting edge stuff. Tanselle is good too
on the rationale of the book jacket in the twentieth century and he rehearses
all the silly reasons proffered by librarians and so called ‘ book-lovers’ for dispensing
with them at the earliest opportunity. This is all very illuminating , but the
meat of the book resides in its second half, which is a chronological list of
jackets up to the end of 1900.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Why 1900 ? For Tanselle this seems a reasonable cut-off date.
By 1900 the number of jacketed books listed has crept from 2 in 1871 to over
137 in the year 1900. And anyway, have some finishing point has to be laid down, however
arbitrary. Why do incunabula end in 1499 ? For collectors of book jackets
Tanselle’s list is a ‘ wants list ‘, especially to American collectors. Those
titles included in it are around 80% American imprints, because, after all,
Tanselle is an American who lives and works and buys books in the States.
However, the power of the Internet has enabled him to correspond with
collectors and dealers all over the world , with the result that many British
and a sprinkling of exceptionally early European jackets/slip cases, are also
included. Many of the British books they
cover seem to be illustrated editions of classics or verse, with Andrew Lang
and Kate Greenaway featuring frequently. Others are rather dull or obscure
books for which no sane person would think of shelling out three figure sums if
it wasn’t for the jackets that come with them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There are some exceptions. We learn that the first edition of
Dickens’ <i>Edwin Drood</i> (1870) was
issued with a jacket and as such is well documented in the literature on the
author. No price is mentioned, but you can be sure that it will be high. Lewis
Carroll’s <i>The Hunting of the Snark</i>
(1876) is a more famous example of a jacketed classic. Another gem in a jacket is a work edited by
Theo Marzials, one of John Betjeman’s favourite poets. His <i>Pan-Pipes, a Book of Old Songs</i> (1883) was priced at a cool $350 in
1989.[<o:p></o:p>R. M. Healey]<br />
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Many thanks Robin. Sorry you actually had to buy the book to review it, that doesn't happen at the TLS! The biggest price differential on a jacket I can think of is for Greene's <i>Ministry of Fear</i> (London, 1943) a book that can be obtained in decent condition <i>sans</i> jacket for £40 but wearing a smart jacket £8000 is achievable (more if you believe web mall prices.) That's 200 times, I guess if <i>Drood,</i> a sort of £200 book, was to sell for over £40,000 in d/w, which seems entirely possible (although unfinished and posthumous) Dickens would take the biscuit...</div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-62441114112639007802012-12-03T11:00:00.002+00:002012-12-03T11:11:55.148+00:00Two economics classics<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Adam Smith, <b>An
Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of</b> t<b>he
Wealth of Nations</b> (London, W. Strahan and Cadell; 2 vols, 1776 )<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Current selling price around £100,000<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just as every natural scientist covets a first of <i>The Origin of Species</i>, many city bankers
would love to find a copy of <i>The Wealth
of Nations,</i> now generally recognised to be one of the most influential
books ever published. A first edition would be nice, and such a book, if one
could be found, would hardly stretch the finances of your average hedge fund manager.
I remember my old paymaster at <i>Rare</i>, Bernie
Shapero making a very early <i>Wealth of Nations</i>
the star turn in a collection of works on economics that he was trying to sell a
few years ago. I even remember wondering at the promotional drinks party
whether one of the treasured volumes might get nicked. However, I ‘m not
entirely sure whether the book in question was an actual <i>first </i>edition. You can say goodbye to £100,000 if you want one of
these. Currently, there is one on line, appropriately, in Beverley Hills. And in
Pennsylvania there is a second edition for £60,000. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Apparently, all copies of the first edition were sold within
six months and Smith spent some of 1777 incorporating important emendations in a second edition, which appeared in 1778
and is now ( rather oddly ) scarcer (at
500 copies ),according to the Pennsylvania dealer, than the first. Other
editions followed, some published in the newly empowered USA. As Smith died in
1790, editions which appeared after this date lack the glamour, or indeed
significance, of the early editions, but they still go for three figures. Were
I buying an eighteenth century edition I’d go for one with interesting
marginalia and crossings out from the hand of a prominent businessman of the
Industrial Revolution. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
J. M. Keynes, <b>Indian
Currency and Finance</b> (Macmillan 1913)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Current selling price
£1,875.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unlike some of the rarest first editions of his Bloomsbury
pals, the great economist’s first book is not a sexy title. It is a rather dry
treatise on economics which is now so pricey that only a completist
Bloomsburyite with long pockets would afford a copy. It is more likely to
appeal to admirers of Keynes the economist, since it is the first hint of the
direction in which the great man was to go with his radical theories regarding
the necessity of government intervention in fiscal affairs<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NyyAJvv0tdc/ULyDcB5fDAI/AAAAAAAAEKM/tTIDMZ42W7s/s1600/Adam+Smith+1776.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NyyAJvv0tdc/ULyDcB5fDAI/AAAAAAAAEKM/tTIDMZ42W7s/s1600/Adam+Smith+1776.jpg" /></a>Keynes, like many a spoilt child of wealthy late Victorian parents,
had a comparatively easy ride financially up to his late twenties. After
graduating from Cambridge in maths he received a generous ‘allowance’ which
enabled him to follow his intellectual bent without the fear of falling into
debt. Even when, in 1906, he was able to earn money for himself as a Clerk in
the India Office he still continued to receive an allowance. His exposure to colonial
economics resulted in <i>Indian Currency and
Finance</i>, which was published while Keynes was a recently elected Fellow of
King’s College. In this treatise Keynes addressed the problem of the rupee and
its relation to its exchange value in silver and gold. He argued that as long
as the unit of current had no intrinsic worth in relation to gold it would be
vulnerable to international market fluctuations. A return to the gold standard,
however, would guarantee the stability of the Indian economy, particularly
regarding exports. Thus instead of letting the free market determine the future
worth of the rupee, the Government had a duty to step in whenever necessary
with a fiscal policy for India that would safeguard the currency in relation to
world trade. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This was a distinctly radical theory in 1913 and Keynes was
strongly opposed by free-marketeers. However, his talents were recognised by
government economists and the book earned him a seat on the Royal Commission on
Indian Finance and Currency. Only in the thirties, however, were his ideas on
government intervention recognised as a possible alternative solution to the
economic crisis then gripping the nation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps sensing that his writings were likely to prove
popular in the future Keynes persuaded
Macmillan to share profits from <i>Indian
Currency</i> and future works on a 50/50 basis. His predictions proved accurate
and by 1942 over 4,000 copies had been sold, netting him £295. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qbw7klWapoE/ULyI2s2siAI/AAAAAAAAEKg/NyxUQ341jyE/s1600/65366_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qbw7klWapoE/ULyI2s2siAI/AAAAAAAAEKg/NyxUQ341jyE/s320/65366_1.jpg" width="143" /></a>Though it lacks the glamour of <i>The Wealth of Nations</i>, <i>Indian
Currency</i>, without question, a spectacularly dull looking tome, might be
easier to acquire among a job lot at some country auction. But if you can’t
wait thirty years for such a chance find, there are a handful of copies online.
These range from two ex-library books at £250 and £350, to a lovely copy in the
original cloth, for which Harrington wants £1,875. [<o:p></o:p>R. M. Healey]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thanks Robin. That old Adam Smith book could almost be bought as a hedge against inflation (although at a little less than £100K). I seem to recall William Rees-Mogg (bookdealer and <i>Times</i> editor) setting out to prove that it out-performed the market at one time. As for Keynes years ago <i>Indian Currency</i> was a bit of a sleeper and I bought one from a dealer in Eastern travel, normally an ambitious pricer, at about a quarter of value. Couldn't happen any more.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-89394379423588995052012-11-23T11:13:00.001+00:002012-11-23T12:03:45.698+00:00Caledonia<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anthony Powell. <i>Caledonia: a Fragment.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Published for the Author 1934)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Current selling price £3,000 +<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This eleven page bagatelle is actually Anthony Powell’s <i>fourth</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> book, but is certainly more sought after by Powell
fanatics than his first. Only 100 copies were printed for the author on the
occasion of his marriage ( some say engagement ) to Lady Violet Pakenham . The
squib, a pastiche of Augustan satire was aimed at the rise of the Scottish
presence in British life, which for me goes back to the liking for things Caledonian
that began with the Waverley novels and Blackwood’s </span><i>Noctes Ambrosiana</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in the Regency period and continued through the
reign of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Queen Victoria ( think
Balmoral, Our Life in the Highlands, the gamekeeper Brown etc ) and only waned a
little at the end of the Edwardian era. Powell confessed that he had no quarrel
with the Scottish and only saw them in the light of his Englishness and
Welshness. </span><i>Caledonia </i><span style="font-style: normal;">contains <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>twelve lines on Scottish music by
Powell’s friend Constant Lambert and there is an illustration by the mildly
cultish Edward Burra, who was little known at that time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The book was printed to be given away to friends (did Powell
have 100 friends in 1934 ? ) and some of the most coveted copies today bear
inscriptions to them. For instance, for a mere $4,128 R.A. Gekoski will gladly
sell you a copy inscribed by Powell to Mr David Talbot Rice, Gent. Professor
in Art of the University of Edinburgh, who was, like Powell, an old Etonian. The
faux eighteenth century style of address chimed in perfectly with the pastiche,
but it also turned out to be prescient. Talbot Rice, like many an eighteenth
century academic at Oxbridge or the Scottish Universities, managed to remain in
post for 38 years, a feat unimaginable in our day of peripatetic academics.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Alternatively, for a staggering £7,500 Peter Harrington will
be delighted to sell you the copy of <i>Caledonia</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> bought at a Dominic Winter sale for £1,550. Inscribed
bizarrely ‘Feb 16<sup>th</sup> 1930’ to Wyndham Lloyd, who was apparently a
physician and wrote </span><i>A <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hundred
Years of Medicine</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. According to the
Powellites, Powell was not a snob and his obsession with his own genealogy and that
of his friends had more to do with his fascination with 'characters' in
history. His friendship with Lloyd and his brother may be connected to his
interest in his own Welsh ancestry.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fOvGzL9hskE/UK9Z30ID5DI/AAAAAAAAEJ4/E7PksJuIKqo/s1600/caled%C2%A3%C2%A3%C2%A3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fOvGzL9hskE/UK9Z30ID5DI/AAAAAAAAEJ4/E7PksJuIKqo/s1600/caled%C2%A3%C2%A3%C2%A3.jpg" /></a>Powellites with smaller pockets might have to pay around
$3,000 for a plain copy, though the one available at this price in the USA does
have <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>six holograph corrections in
Powell’s hand. Presumably, the rest of the edition has these too. It would seem
that Powell retained the bulk of the remaining himself, so a few unadorned examples
may have been skulking in his library at his death. One wonders what happened
to these. Luckily, for those who just want to read the text, the Anthony Powell
Society will sell to members for just £8 a facsimile of <i>Caledonia </i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>published
in 2011 by the Greville Press, complete with tartan covers but with an
additional portrait of the author after Henry Lamb, Powell’s brother in law. Non-members
can find copies of the same book for around $20 on the Net. Those with even
less money to spare will find the complete text in Kingsley Amis’s </span><i>Oxford
Anthology of Light Verse .<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because Caledonia is such an insubstantial book it could easily be
overlooked at book sales and end up sold alongside less distinguished slim
volumes or pamphlets. It is certainly worth looking out for. A price tag of £3,000
for eleven pages must be some sort of minor record for a modern first. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Incidentally, Powell, despite what Powell and his acolytes vehemently
disputed , is pronounced Powell, to rhyme with Howell (it being a Welsh name
apHowell, son of Hwyl. I should know. Winifred Powell, mother of Denis Healey,
was my grandmother. [R. M. Healey]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Many thanks Robin.<i> Et tu Healey!</i> I saw a copy of <i>Caledonia </i>on the memorable house call we did at V.S. Naipaul's country cottage. Among many other things we bought a bunch of books inscribed to him by Paul Theroux and Theroux got into such a bate that he wrote a book about it. Naipaul had a <i>Caledonia </i>inscribed to him by his pal Powell - <i>that</i> he wasn't selling. He did imply that Powell still had a few left which might explain the bit about 100 friends.<br />
<br />
As for £3000 for 11 pages there are several modern first worth more per page - off the top of my head - the limited edition of <i>Whoroscope</i>, Virginia Woolf's Roger Fry pamphlet, the Bruno Hat exhibition catalogue and obviously the one page poem Sylvia Plath handed out on the streets of Edinburgh in 1960 - <i>A Winter Ship</i>, not to mention a couple of Joyce broadsides and the Parnell pamphlet. In fact you could probably get a million pounds worth of the stuff in a Fedex envelope...</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->
Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-76101638484477915172012-11-03T11:30:00.001+00:002012-11-03T11:32:01.173+00:00Rare books on the screen<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For some reason, the world of rare books seems less
appealing to film and TV producers than it does to crime or thriller writers.
However, there are a handful of examples where rare or antiquarian books
feature prominently on the small screen and in movies. Here are seven that
immediately come to mind.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1) <i>The Big Sleep </i>(1946).
Directed by Howard Hawks, starring Humphrey Bogart.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-516Gx2peAAU/UJT7XlnjyRI/AAAAAAAAEJk/0n_4ry5Dp1U/s1600/bisleep@@@.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-516Gx2peAAU/UJT7XlnjyRI/AAAAAAAAEJk/0n_4ry5Dp1U/s320/bisleep@@@.jpg" width="320" /></a>In the film Philip Marlowe enters Geiger’s rare bookstore
and asks to see certain books with ‘points ‘. This is clearly a wind-up, as
Marlowe rightly suspects that the store is a front for an illegal operation.
Incidentally, what happened to this term, beloved of the rare book world in the
twenties and thirties? It seems to have died out completely. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2) <i>The Ninth Gate </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(1999).
Written and directed by Roman Polanski, starring Johnny Depp. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Probably the best known example of a film in which a rare
book plays a central role. Depp is the bookseller who is asked by a client to authenticate
his copy of <i>The Ninth gate of the Kingdom of Shadows</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a seventeenth century treatise on devil worship, of
which only two other copies are known, one of which may have been written by Satan
himself. The book in question is fictional, but is based on the </span><i>Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1499), whose woodcut
illustrations are cryptic instructions. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are given glimpses of pages from the book, which looks
little like any seventeenth century book that I’ve ever seen. Best thing in the
film is the art direction, especially the higgeledy-piggledy interior of the
bookshop. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3) <i>Casting the Runes</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
BBC TV drama based on the short story by M. R. James.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By far the most convincing TV drama involving rare books. A
scholar wishes to borrow an exceedingly rare work from an ancient academic
library, but finds that a mysterious stranger wants to do the same. The rest of
the story shows why this book is so important to both men. James is a brilliant
plotter and the spooky atmosphere of the library is wonderfully conveyed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4) <i>The Name of the Rose</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
(1986).Directed by Jean-Jacques Arnaud from the novel by Umberto Eco. Stars Sean
Connery, Christian Slater, and Ron Perlman. </span></div>
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Visually a terrific film, thanks to <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>brilliant art direction that includes <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a sublimely romantic landscape setting (
presumably somewhere in northern Italy or the Balkans) and a library whose shelves
are crammed with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>incredibly
ancient-looking tomes. The library, which looks as if it was designed by Escher
from an idea by M. R. James, always reminds me of one of those amazing ancient
European libraries featured in that excellent tome <i>Great Libraries of the
World</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. All the books look so scrumptious that
the fire which breaks out must bring out archivists and rare book librarians in
a cold sweat. The plot has holes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How is it that in the midst of an inferno Sean Connery is able to make
such a rapid choice of which books to rescue? I also find it hard to believe
that there exists a poison so virulent that a scintilla deposited in the mouth
through page-turning could accumulate in the body without its taste (most
poisons are very bitter) being noticed by the illuminators in the scriptorium. Most
poisons of this potency need to be injected. </span></div>
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5) <i>Black Books </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(</span><i>
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">2000-2004).Channel 4, starring Dylan Moran,
Tamsin Grieg, and Bill Bailey.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kvl3lHe_Qgo/UJT7UHsSB9I/AAAAAAAAEJc/w_gn_LBh-r4/s1600/bbooksf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kvl3lHe_Qgo/UJT7UHsSB9I/AAAAAAAAEJc/w_gn_LBh-r4/s320/bbooksf.jpg" width="320" /></a>It must be the only British sitcom to be set in a
second-hand bookshop. I don’t know how much background research the
scriptwriters undertook, but they seem to have concocted a very believable
owner from characteristics shared by a random selection of the most rebarbative
book dealers in the UK, several of whom may have been those encountered by
Driffield and myself. Bernard Black has a sharp and indeed withering wit, which
most dealers don’t necessarily show to their customers, unless you count barely
audible grunts as wit. Although the exterior shots use Collinge and Clark’s
premises in Bloomsbury, rumour has it that some aspects of Bernard Black’s
personality are based on various bookshop characters - Eric Barton, Thoreau Books, possibly Charing Cross Road shops.</div>
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6) <i>Happy-go Lucky </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(2008).
Directed by Mike Leigh, starring Sally Hawkins.</span></div>
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One of the funnier scenes set in a bookshop sees the
delicious Sally Hawkins gamely engaged in the thankless task of engaging a
monosyllabic assistant in conversation, but failing miserably. Happily, being
cheerfully disposed, the lovely Sally won’t give up her mission to cheer people
up, although sadly she is doomed to failure. </div>
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7). <i>Midsomer Murders</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
ITV. </span></div>
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As far as I know only one episode of this popular TV series
concerns the criminal activities of a rare book dealer, but I may be wrong. Clearly,
the scriptwriter doesn’t want viewers to learn how little he knows about
bookshops, book dealers or antiquarian books generally, because the workings of
the book trade plays only a peripheral part in the screenplay. </div>
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<i>Note. Have you noticed that when someone in a period
drama is seen reading or handing over a book that has been recently published
(say, a copy of his or her novel or poems) the volume is invariably bound in
leather, rather than in paper-covered boards, or even cloth; or if it is a book
of spells it is invariably jewel-encrusted or bound in a very new-looking or
brightly coloured leather. Could some props person explain why this is so? [R.M. Healey]<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Many thanks Robin. Second hand books tend to turn more on TV - there was even a <i>Lewis</i> with a sort of occult bookshop run by the actor who used to play Trigger. Recently there was a slightly suspect man with a lawyer wife who sold second hand books on the internet and the copper (Vera?) seemed surprised that this was a viable business. Our own area Charing Cross Road features in the gay 60s noir <i>Victim</i> where a shop in Cecil Court is used for drop offs. Brilliant film with Dirk Bogarde. Some scenes in the cult Hanif Kureishi movie <i>Sammy and Rosie Get Laid</i> (Stephen Frears) were shot in our old Hammersmith shop. </div>
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Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-50439342635150140722012-10-16T00:02:00.000+00:002012-10-16T00:02:18.895+00:00THE LONG, LONELY LEAP<br />
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In celebration of yesterday's great jump by Felix Baumgartner we are reposting this from 2007. Captain Kittinger (now 84) was up there with the Austrian daredevil. The only person FB talked to on his descent was the captain. He broke all sorts of records but Kittinger was actually in free fall for 17 seconds longer! </div>
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<br /><a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_A5qhnmd_hog/RqHYDtXZ_eI/AAAAAAAABB4/5mjR-wZaWT8/s1600-h/kittinger.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5089586612134346210" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_A5qhnmd_hog/RqHYDtXZ_eI/AAAAAAAABB4/5mjR-wZaWT8/s400/kittinger.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">In an open gondola hung beneath a shimmering cloud of plastic, a man ascends to the awesome height of 102,800 feet. He looks about him at a world that is not the world of man. The atmosphere of his planet lies beneath his feet. The velvet blackness of space is close enough to reach out and touch. He is absolutely alone. Then he jumps . . .</span> </b>( From the blurb of 'The Long Lonely Leap' 196i)</div>
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<b>Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr., USAF (with Martin Caidin.) THE LONG, LONELY LEAP. E.P. Dutton & Company, N.Y. 1961.</b></div>
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<b>Current Selling Prices<br /><span style="color: red;">$600+ /£400+</span></b></div>
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AVIATION / SPACE TRAVEL</div>
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Highly uncommon regularly published book that is much sought after. Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, well before liquid-fuel rockets were fully operational, a small group of military men made the first exploratory trips into the upper stratosphere to the edge of outer space in tiny capsules suspended beneath plastic balloons. They are sometimes referred to as 'the pre-astronauts.' Doctors, physicists, meteorologists, engineers, astronomers, and test pilots, they made great personal sacrifices and took great risks in the promise of high adventure and the opportunity to uncover a few secrets of the universe. One of their number, Capt. Joseph Kittinger, rode a balloon up to 103,000 feet in an open gondola and then stepped out and freefell to Earth, becoming the only person to break the sound barrier without a vehicle. Kittinger wrote the book with Martin Caidin, aviation writer, pilot, and author of over two dozen books, the two men flew and spent months together to re-create the amazing events of this story.</div>
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<a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_A5qhnmd_hog/RqHYD9XZ_fI/AAAAAAAABCA/3FbbFvhbjY8/s1600-h/jk34.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5089586616429313522" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_A5qhnmd_hog/RqHYD9XZ_fI/AAAAAAAABCA/3FbbFvhbjY8/s400/jk34.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" /></a></div>
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A good summary was posted on the <a href="http://mlsandy.home.tsixroads.com/Corinth_MLSANDY/jk035.html" target="new">Corinth Information Database</a> in 1995</div>
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"These...jumps reached their climax in his famous record leap from the very edge of space itself, almost 20 miles above the earth. This drop included a free fall lasting more than an incredible 4 1/2 minutes, during which Captain Kittinger reached a falling speed of 614 miles per hour before his parachute finally opened at 18,000 feet. Captain Kittinger describes the preparations for the balloon ascent, and the actual ascent itself. He tells of floating for eleven minutes in the alien world of space, 102,800 feet up. Then . . . the descent. Using an actual tape recording of his words as he fell, Kittinger relates his impressions, vividly re-creating this magnificent and terrifying experience."</div>
</blockquote>
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In later life Joe Kittinger served three combat tours during the Vietnam War, flying a total of 483 missions, On March 1, 1972, he shot down a MIG-21 in air-to-air combat, and was later downed himself on May 11, 1972, just before the end of his tour. He spent 11 months as a prisoner of war in the "Hanoi Hilton". He was not a good prisoner.</div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">VALUE? </span></b>I hesitate to say 'sky high' but this a hard book to find. There are copies sans d/w at $1000+ on the web and well read copies at $500. Wikipedia, posited a reprint in November 2005 that didn't happen and says that 'surviving copies are 'expensive.' A National Geographic from December 1960 has an article about his jump and that can command $50. His signed photo can go for $300.</div>
Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-57563584756440476062012-09-28T17:54:00.001+00:002012-09-28T20:38:09.699+00:00At the Bookshop 1822 and 2012<br />
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We posted this extract from an 1820s English/ French conversation manual on our shop website in 2005 and on revisiting it find that it now needs a modern version. It gave an interesting insight into a vanished world.<br />
<br />
Note the concern with the appearance and quality of the books, the perennial problems with trying to get the binder to do what the bookseller and customer wants, and on time. The eagerness of the collector to be the first to be offered fresh stock from the shop has changed very little. Also still with us are the problems of delay in postal sytems...</div>
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It is interesting that in the early nineteenth century women bookbuyers were thought likely to be attracted to Large Paper Copies and vellum. The customer's knowledge of book lore and binding styles has changed somewhat.</div>
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<b>1822</b> </div>
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<b>Well ! you are a man of your word, as usual: and the books that you were to send me, when shall I have them?</b></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CYBMBZCcUcI/UGXjo4YXEaI/AAAAAAAAEJI/R8zV76r-ph0/s1600/boooookkkkooo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CYBMBZCcUcI/UGXjo4YXEaI/AAAAAAAAEJI/R8zV76r-ph0/s320/boooookkkkooo.jpg" width="251" /></a>Eh bien ! vous etes un homme de parole, comme a l'ordinaire: et ces livres que vous deviez m'emvoyer, quand viendront-ils?</div>
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<b>You are under great obligations to your binder; he often furnishes you with an excuse.</b></div>
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Vous avez un relieur a qui vous avez de grardes obligations , car il vous sert souvent de manteau.</div>
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<b>I protest that I sent them to him the same day you came to buy them.</b></div>
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Je vous proteste que je les ai fait porter chez lui le meme jour que vous etes venu les acheter.</div>
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<b>Well, I am willing to believe you; but, tell me, have you received anything new?</b></div>
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Allons, je veux bien vous croire; mais, dites-mio , avez-vous recu des nouveautes?</div>
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<b>None since I had the honour of seeing you; but we have received within these few days the bill of lading of several chests which we expect every hour.</b></div>
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Aucune, depuis que j'ai eul'honneur de vous voir ; mais nous avons recu ces jours-ci le connoissement de plusieurs caisses que nous attendons incessamment.</div>
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<b>Do not fail to preserve me a copy of every thing you meet with that is interesting.</b></div>
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N'oubliez pas de me reserver un exemplaire de tout ce qui pourra s'y trouver d'interessant.</div>
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<b>Have you Moliere in a small size?</b></div>
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Avez-vous Moliere en petit format?</div>
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<b>We have the stereotype edition, on four different kinds of paper.</b></div>
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Nous avons l'edition stereotype, sur quatre differens papiers.</div>
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<b>As it is a commission that a lady of my acquaintance has given me, I think I had better take the large vellum paper.</b></div>
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Comme c'est une commission don't une dame de ma connoissance m'a charge, je crois que je ferai bien de prendre le grand papier velin.</div>
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<b>2012</b></div>
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<b>Are all your books to be found online?</b></div>
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Sont tous vos livres pour être trouvé en ligne?</div>
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<b>I have seen many copies of this book at Amazon some priced as low as 1p</b></div>
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J'ai vu de nombreux exemplaires de ce livre sur Amazon certains prix aussi bas que 1p</div>
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<b>The Harrington brothers have a fabulous signed copy of this book in a magnificent binding. Sadly their price is beyond my means.</b></div>
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Les frères Harrington ont une fabuleuse copie signée de ce livre dans une magnifique reliure. Malheureusement leur prix est au-dessus de mes moyens.</div>
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<b>Please email if you see any books about hippies, beatniks, thieves or punks.</b></div>
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Veuillez nous contacter par e-mail si vous voyez des livres de hippies, beatniks, des voleurs ou punks.</div>
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<b>He has closed his bookshop and now sells online from his home.</b></div>
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Il a fermé sa librairie et vend maintenant en ligne à partir de son domicile.</div>
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<b>We do not sell the Kindle machine. I am sorry to say that we regard it with disfavour</b>. </div>
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Nous ne vendons pas le Kindle machine. Je suis désolé de dire que nous le considérons avec défaveur.</div>
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<b>My price is fair. You can check the current price at ABE on your iPad. </b></div>
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Mon prix est juste. Vous pouvez vérifier le prix actuel à l'ABE sur votre iPad.</div>
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<b>That price is from an American web company called Custodial<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"> </span> Arts. I am sorry to inform you that their prices are utterly ridiculous and they are lunatics.</b></div>
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C'est le prix d'un Américain société web appelé Custodial Arts, je suis désolé de dire que leurs prix sont tout à fait ridicule et ils sont fous.</div>
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<b>Thank you. I do not require the Print on Demand edition. They are an abomination. </b></div>
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Merci. Je ne nécessitent pas un POD edition. Je considère ces livres comme une abomination.</div>
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<i>P.S. The latter translation is via Babylon and I am waiting for a colleague in Paris to send a less robotic version.</i></div>
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Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-50240495278365468252012-09-27T08:56:00.000+00:002012-09-28T17:47:19.097+00:00 Ford Madox Ford as Daniel Chaucer<!--StartFragment-->
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<b>Daniel Chaucer (ie Ford Madox Ford), <i>The Simple Life
Ltd</i></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>, John Lane, The Bodley Head, London 1911.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b>Current selling price £300 +<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Seeing that every branch of Waterstones is presently crammed
with fat paperback reprints of the <i>Parade’s End</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> tetrology, now perhaps is the time for publishers to consider new
editions of the less well-known titles by Ford Madox Ford. One of the
contenders must be </span><i>The Simple Life Ltd</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1911), one of two satires with similar themes, the other being<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><i>The New Humpty Dumpty</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1912 ). A reprint would certainly please members of
Ford’s fast-growing band of followers. At present there is no copy of </span><i>The
Simple Life Ltd</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on ABE. Indeed, there
appears only to have been one edition, and this is an ever present item on some bookseller’s wants lists.</span></div>
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<i>Simple Life Ltd</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is
still regarded as a ‘curio‘ among critics, positioned somewhere between the
early fiction and poetry and the experimental, impressionistic work of Ford’s mature
years. Published at a difficult period of his life, just two years after he had
been displaced as editor of </span><i>The Fortnightly Review</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, it is a satire on Utopian lifestyles, but
predominantly focuses on those who corrupt the ideals of the simple-life
movement <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for their own gain. It features
caricatures of many of those with which Ford had been associated a few years
earlier, while living a simple life himself <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in Pent Farm, Kent and Limpsfield, Surrey. These figures
included anarchists and proto-socialists such as Kropotkin, Edward Pease and
the Garnetts. The frequently abrasive satire at the expense of many of his
former friends may explain why Ford chose to write under the pseudonym Daniel
Chaucer, which he continued to use for </span><i>The New Humpty Dumpty.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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The straight-forward plot of the novel revolves around the
lives of a group of Simple-Lifers (as they are called throughout the book) who,
led by the charismatic Simon Bransdon ( a thinly disguised version of Joseph
Conrad) settle in cottages on land belonging to a Tory squire. Here they engage
in the usual alternative pursuits of vegetarianism, abstemiousness, weaving,
maypole dancing and homeopathy, while they investigate such paranormal
phenomena as telepathy and thought transference. This idyllic existence begins
to implode when one of the more fervent supporters of the utopian philosophy
leaves the colony for university and returns as a Thoreau-like critic of the
leader’s achievements, while the colony’s administrator is first revealed as a
peculator and then is shown abandoning <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the colony to set up his own garden city in East Croydon.</div>
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In the end the settlement is destroyed by fire—an
appropriately symbolic end for a social experiment that carries within it the
seeds of its own destruction.</div>
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<i>The Simple Life Limited</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
is interesting from a historical perspective. While it was being written physically
threatening anarchist activity (such as the Sydney Street Siege) was continuing
in London side by side with the peaceful Garden City movement, which, initiated
principally by the Quaker Ebenezer Howard, had borne its first fruit with the
establishment in 1903 of Letchworth Garden City. Ford could hardly have been
unaware of the ideals of Howard and his disciples and if he visited Letchworth may
have noticed that these principles when turned into bricks and mortar did not
always benefit those who most deserved to be rewarded. Today, it is ironic to
discover that <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>some of the ‘ early
‘houses in ‘ the World’s First Garden City ‘,though originally built as ‘
affordable ‘ alternatives to the insalubrious terraces of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>industrial cities, are now <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>among the most expensive homes in Hertfordshire,
and as such <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>well beyond the
pockets of today’s simple-lifer .</span></div>
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The recent TV-induced surge in the popularity of Ford
doesn’t seem to have affected his online values much, if at all. Most
firsts, of his many works in fiction and non-fiction come in at under £20, some
at under £15. Such low prices are probably a reflection of his high productivity
and the necessarily uneven quality of his output, which amounted to, on average,
a book a year. Even early editions of the <i>Parades End</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> tetrology aren’t expensive. The exceptions are his
‘masterpiece‘, the Good Soldier (1915), which is online at £2,500, and the two
satires, </span><i>The Simple Life Limited</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
and </span><i>The New Humpty Dumpty—</i><span style="font-style: normal;">the
latter being of particular interest to those studying the history of socialism
and environmentalism.</span></div>
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I would to thank Nathan Waddell of the University of
Nottingham for allowing me to see the whole of his article on <i>The Simple
Life Limited</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. [</span>R. M. Healey]</div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin. £300 might be cautious for a very sharp copy and in a d/j it would be thrice that. 'Good Soldier' - his masterpiece and a Connolly 100 is, as we have noted, a £10000 book in a jacket. I enjoyed the recent Hueffer fest on the BBC - there are some echoes of 'Simple Life' in the Wannup family. The late Peter Howard had a bunch of early jacketed FMF's he would take to fairs for many a year, oddly they were not subject to his usual very deep discounts...</i></div>
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<i>Above is Ford with Joyce and Pound, the unassuming party on the right is John Quinn, lawyer to the Modernists. His literature collection, sold in 1924 was probably the most desirable of the last 100 years. He owned most of Joseph Conrad’s major manuscripts, the manuscript of Joyce’s 'Ulysses', Synge’s manuscript of 'The Playboy of the Western World', Eliot’s 'Waste Land' and much of Yeats’ best work in manuscript. Those lawyers...</i></div>
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Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-45406355395186472822012-09-01T09:37:00.000+00:002012-09-01T09:54:47.875+00:00Bertrand Russell<!--StartFragment-->
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<b>Bertrand Russell, <i>Principles of Mathematics</i></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>, Cambridge University Press. Volume one (all
published), 1903<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b>Current selling price<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>£2,000+<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<i>‘ With the beginning of October (1900 )I sat down to
write The Principles of Mathematics, at which I had already made a number of
unsuccessful attempts . Parts III, IV,V and VI<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of the book as published<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>were written that autumn. I wrote also parts I , II and VII
at that time, but had to rewrite them later, so that the book was not finished
in its final form until May 1902. Every day throughout<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>October, November and December, I wrote
my ten pages, and finished the MS on the last day of the century, in time to
write a boastful letter to Helen Thomas about the 200,000 words that I had just
completed …’<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Bertrand Russell, <i>Autobiography</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, volume one, 1967.</span></div>
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Russell, arguably the greatest British philosopher of the
twentieth century was just 28 when he undertook this astonishing feat. The
title page indicates that a second volume which would be a ‘symbolic account of
the assimilation of mathematics to logic ‘was to follow, but Russell later
discovered that Alfred North Whitehead was preparing a work along similar
lines, and so he decided to collaborate with him on a larger work that would be
published as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Principia
Mathematica </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in 1910 – 13. Both books are
sought after, but the earlier work is perhaps more in demand from purists.
Oddly, it was not even Russell’s first book. </span><i>German Social Democracy,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> which appeared in 1896, when Russell was 24, now
fetches over $2,500. It is astonishing to think that this was penned when
Gladstone was still alive and radio communication and powered flight had not
yet been perfected. Russell, of course, lived to see the first men on the moon.
Maybe because he was such a presence in intellectual circles for so very, very
long, that he is so revered, despite his persistent womanising, for which,
oddly enough Albert Einstein is excused. Both men, incidentally, have been
retrospectively diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, with Russell being labelled
as the more extreme case.</span><br />
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In <i>Principles of Mathematics</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Russell particularly acknowledged the influence of the logician Peano
on his ideas, arguing that mathematics and logic are identical. Indeed, some
reviewers felt the book to be of greater interest to philosophers than to mathematicians.
It consisted of 59 chapters and was divided into seven parts---indefinables in
mathematics, number, quantity and order, infinity and continuity, space, matter
and motion. Interestingly, considering that Einstein was working on relativity
at the time, Russell anticipates this theory, though he rejected<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it. G.H Hardy, who reviewed the
book, called Russell’s ‘firm belief in absolute space and time’ old –fashioned.
Hardy also felt that although it was 534 pages long, the book was too </span><i>short.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> In his view some chapters were too compressed to
deal with important issues lucidly. </span></div>
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In 1904 the mathematician Edwin Bidwell Wilson lauded <i>Principles</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as ‘a monument to patience, perseverance, and
thoroughness’. So in demand was it that it went through several editions in
Russell’s lifetime and beyond. Today, though it has had its critics, it is still
seen as a landmark in philosophy. To Jules Vuillemin writing in 1968 it:</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G4Y0zFMfpLk/UEHX00eHjRI/AAAAAAAAEH0/7Wz_R1K7GgY/s1600/Bertrand$$$$.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G4Y0zFMfpLk/UEHX00eHjRI/AAAAAAAAEH0/7Wz_R1K7GgY/s1600/Bertrand$$$$.jpg" /></a><i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘inaugurated
contemporary philosophy…It is serious and its wealth perseveres…it locates
itself again today in the eyes of all those that believe that contemporary
science has modified our representation of the universe and through this
representation, our relation to ourselves and to others .’<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Today, first editions of <i>Principles of Mathematics</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are in great demand, but hard to come by. Presently,
ABE has 8 copies available. Even the cheapest, which is rebound, is selling at
£387, while those in the original binding, but without jackets, are going for
well over £2,000.The print-run must have been pretty small. Russell was not an
established name, and even had he been one, new theories in philosophy and
mathematics, by their very nature, are only in demand from University
departments in these disciplines. Some idea of the risk any publisher took with
such a book in this period may be gathered from the problems described by
Russell that beset the follow-up, </span><i>Principia Mathematica</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (three volumes, 1910 - 13. Apparently, the Cambridge
University Press estimated that there would be a £600 loss on the book. The
syndics agreed to bear a loss of £300 and the Royal Society donated £200. The
remaining £100 had to be found by Russell and Whitehead.</span></div>
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As the author wryly remarked in his <i>Autobiography</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, 'We thus earned minus £50 each by ten years’ work.
This beats the record of </span><i>Paradise Lost</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.' [R.M. Healey]</span></div>
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Many thanks Robin. How many dealers have found this book and thought it was just an odd volume? There are quite a few books like this ('all published') - right now I can only think of a fairly modest Vita Sackille West and Alfred Marshall's <i>Principles of Economics</i> (1890) usually exchangeable for a $1000 bill. As for blameless womanisers you might add Gandhi and JFK! H.G. Wells was something of a satyr but not quite so illustrious...The copy above is for sale at £2000 during next week's York Book Fair (York Modern Books) - a decent looking example with the ownership inscription of A. D. Lindsay Master of Balliol College, Oxford to the front end paper.</div>
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Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-67133747098452794032012-08-18T09:16:00.001+00:002012-08-18T09:16:13.424+00:00Ralph Chubb, The Golden City.
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<b>Ralph Chubb, The Golden City.</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> (Posthumously published, 1961, in an edition of 18).</span></div>
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<b>Current selling price £3,000+</b></div>
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Ralph Chubb (1892 - 1960) has been called a modern day William Blake, partly because
most of his books were exquisitely hand printed in tiny editions, some of which
were hand coloured by the artist, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
partly because he is seen as an anti-science, visionary Utopian whose principal
theme was the redemption of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Albion. Unlike Blake, he was a solipsist who placed himself at the
centre of a mythology in which golden lads in their teens, cavort through endless
sunny afternoons in an earthly<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>paradise of prepubescent innocence. While Chubb’s Uranian verse drew
inspiration from people like Walt Whitman, his paintings, many of which are now
in public collections, suggest that the painter of naked youth, Henry Scott
Tuke, was also an influence. </div>
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Chubb is a genuine maverick ---an isolated figure in twentieth
century English art, but there is a strong demand for his best work from a
devoted, even fanatical, following. An early book, <i>The Sun Spirit</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, is currently available at $7,500. One avid collector,
the Oscar-winning, swinging sixties cinematographer, David Watkin ( The Knack,
Help, The Bed Sitting Room ),who died in 2008, owned a number of Chubb titles.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8c8d-TiGk6w/UC9buLbnbKI/AAAAAAAAEHg/wY6IoLf1Ffs/s1600/chubb+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8c8d-TiGk6w/UC9buLbnbKI/AAAAAAAAEHg/wY6IoLf1Ffs/s1600/chubb+1.jpg" /></a>One of the few interesting people to have been born in
Harpenden, Chubb moved from the town to nearby St Albans while still a baby and
became a pupil (Stephen Hawkin was a later product ), at St Albans School
before going up <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to Selwyn College,
Cambridge in 1910. At the outbreak of war he served as an officer with
distinction, before being invalided out. In 1919 the army, it would seem, paid
for him to attend the Slade School of Art, where he met the print-maker Leon
Underwood. His family, who by then were living in Curridge, Berkshire, encouraged
him to exhibit his paintings, built a press for him, and a sister helped him
get a job as an art teacher in a local school. </div>
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Throughout the twenties Chubb
produced a string of publications, three of which were commercially printed.
One of these, <i>The Book of</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>God’s
Madness</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, explored Manichean ideas
reminiscent of Blake. Towards the end of the decade Chubb’s Uranian activities,
both in Hampshire and in London, caused a scandal in his village and he was
forced to resign from his teaching post. He and his family moved and made their
new home at Fair Oak Cottage, among the woods near Ashford Hill, east of
Kingsclere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1929 Chubb was
emboldened to publish his sexual manifesto, </span><i>An Appendix</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, using a crude duplicating machine. Soon afterwards
he acquired a lithographic press, which he continued using until his death.
Like Blake before him, he was now able to integrate drawings and text and
publish his controversial work without fear of editorial interference.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Partly<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>because of the Uranian content of these
publications, partly because the editions were so miniscule, Chubb has never
been <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>regarded as a ‘ fine printer
‘ in the tradition of the Doves Press, Gregynog, and the rest, but was seen more
of a visionary and polemicist who happened to work in this exclusive field. His
refusal to curb his sexual politics meant that he lived in poverty for most of
his working life. His books were hardly money-spinners and his paintings, though
praised, lacked the appeal of those by Henry Scott Tuke, and did not sell. Working
in his shed studio on the edge of Benskins Wood, haunted by an idyllic
childhood and becoming more paranoiac by the year, he ploughed a lonely furrow
in the immediate post-war world. During his final years he donated many of his
books to the national libraries of the UK.</div>
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Chubb may have seen his final project, <i>The Golden City, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">which contains some of his most engaging poetry</span><i>,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as a possible commercial success, and therefore kept
its boy-love content to the minimum. Unfortunately, he did not live to see it
finished. At his death in 1960 only the graphic element of the book had been
completed, and it was left to his devoted sister Muriel to engage a
professional lithographer to complete the printing of the title page, table of
contents and colophon. The edition of only 18 copies were then bound by
Sangorski and Sutcliffe and dispersed to various interested parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, only five copies are known to exist
outside public collections, and these are the uncoloured ones. In fact, </span><i>The
Golden City</i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is so rare that one international dealer in the genre
has confessed to never having seen a copy. Other dealers only know it as a
legendary ultra-rarity. In the years that followed her brother’s death Muriel
also managed to get two other, far less ambitious <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>projects published. </span><i>The Day of St Alban</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> appeared in 1965 and this was followed by </span><i>Autumn
Leaves</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1970). Both are more common, but
less sought after than his </span><i>magnum opus</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Perhaps, however, they may be good bets as investments. [</span>R. M. Healey]</div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin. Always great to find a Chubb but sadly such finds are infrequent. Last one seen was bound in corduroy, seldom used in binding - there is not even a limited edition of Adrian Bell's 1930 book 'Corduroy' thus bound. The photo of Chubb is enigmatic - does he look bashful or haunted or possibly burning with Pater's 'hard gem-like flame'? There is a definite resemblance to the young Gene Wilder. Are they related?</i></div>
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Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-86632228157275640562012-08-08T08:43:00.002+00:002012-08-08T08:43:34.000+00:00Man’s Life is this Meat...<br />
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<b>David Gascoyne. Man’s Life is this Meat. Parton Press, London 1936<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Current selling price<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>£300+<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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When, in 1994, I interviewed David Gascoyne over shepherd’s pie
in his<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>thirties semi in Oxford
Street, Northwood, a somewhat unglamorous corner of the Isle of Wight, he told
me of all the Surrealist art he had to sell in order to survive during his
fallow period. I should have asked him if he had a copy of his second
collection of mainly surrealist poetry, <i>Man’s Life is This Meat</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to show me, because I knew that it was a legendary
rarity and I was unlikely to find a copy outside a copyright library. But I was
there principally to discuss Gascoyne’s friendship with Geoffrey Grigson, who first
published the best poem in this collection ,‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream
of Isis’ , in an early number of </span><i>New Verse</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, when the poet was just 17. It was while at Grigson’s home in Keats
Grove, Gascoyne told me, that the bizarre title was chosen. Apparently, the
two men were perusing a typographical manual when quite at random they found a
phrase 'Man’s Life is…'. They then turned over the next page and found the
words 'this meat' at the head of it. It was a truly 'found moment', as <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gascoyne admitted.</span></div>
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In 1936 Gascoyne at just 20 had already published three books.
In 1932, at the age of 16 and while attending Regent Street Polytechnic, he paid
for his first collection to be printed. This was the very slim <i>Roman Balcony</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which consisted of short poems, each composed of a
few images A year later, in 1933,through a family connection with Harold Monro,
Cobden Sanderson brought out his brilliant first novel, </span><i>Opening Day</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, for which Gascoyne received an advance of £50 which
helped finance his first visit to Paris that same year. In 1935 appeared his </span><i>Short
Survey of Surrealism</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the product of the
meetings he had had with leading surrealists in the French capital . </span></div>
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The long poem <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> '</span>And
the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis', though published under the strong
influence of writers like Eluard and Breton, is nevertheless the work of an
extraordinarily precocious imagination .</div>
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<i>‘…across the square where crowds are dying in thousands<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>a man is walking a tightrope covered with moths<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>there is an explosion of geraniums in the ballroom of the<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>hotel<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>there is an extremely unpleasant<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>odour of decaying meat<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>arising from the depetalled flower growing out of her ear<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>her arms are like pieces of sandpaper<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>or wings of leprous birds in taxis…<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>she was standing at the window clothed only in a ribbon<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>she was burning the eyes of snails in a candle<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>she was eating the excrement of dogs and horses<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>she was writing a letter to the president of france<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HB-II69yszY/UCIlpfDiObI/AAAAAAAAEHE/Z1U4UXSN-jw/s1600/Gascoyne+at+35XXX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HB-II69yszY/UCIlpfDiObI/AAAAAAAAEHE/Z1U4UXSN-jw/s320/Gascoyne+at+35XXX.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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And so it goes on. David Archer, who had already published
Dylan Thomas’s 18 Poems in 1934, could hardly ignore this other poetic prodigy,
and so <i>Man’s Life Is This Meat </i><span style="font-style: normal;">appeared
in 1936. By this time Gascoyne and Roland Penrose were busily organising the
first International<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surrealist
Exhibition, which duly opened at the New Burlington Galleries, off Piccadilly, on
11 June, 1936. On the opening day, reporters counted among members the smart
society people like Lady Wimborne and Lady Juliet Duff, Herbert Read, Osbert
Sitwell, Sacha and Mrs Sacha Sitwell, Baroness d’Erlanger and Constant Lambert.
Grigson contributed an exhibit and Gascoyne was among those who extricated <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Salvador Dali from his famous diving
suit, which was decorated like a Christmas Tree. Other living exhibits included
Sheila Legge, who wore <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>long white
satin dress and carried in one hand a model leg ( geddit !) filled with roses,
and in the other a raw pork chop (perhaps Lady Gaga was inspired by this
get-up). Paul Nash removed a bloater attached to a picture by Miro because of
its unpleasant smell. Edward James showed off some of his Afghan hounds. The
exhibition, which closed in early July, attracted an amazing 20,000 people.</span></div>
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Currently there are only two copies of <i>Man’s Life is This
Meat</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for sale online, both of them
interesting association copies. The more expensive of the two contains a
fascinating letter from the author and at £450 seems to be one of Gekoski’s uncommon bargains. Gascoyne, whose brilliant career was cut short by mental
illness, is now regarded as a significant figure in the history of English
Surrealism, although one critic observed that he wasn’t an English writer at
all, but ‘ a French writer who happened to write in English ‘.</span></div>
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<i>Roman Balcony</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is also
difficult to find. It has been said that only 350 copies were printed and that
those which didn’t sell were pulped. There is a signed copy online at <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>£575, which seems steep. </span><i>Opening
Day</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is rare too, but when he was a
bookseller in the eighties psychogeographer Iain Sinclair managed to snap up a
copy for 50p on George Jeffry’s stall on Farringdon Road. [</span>R. M. Healey]</div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin -- brilliant stuff. 2 sleepers in the poetic realm. In re Dali I heard he was nearly a gonna trapped inside that diving helmet. Good to hear Edward James had a walk on part. Currently I could do with a box full of books by him.</i> </div>
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<br /></div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-78856673127311778902012-07-24T18:39:00.002+00:002012-07-30T23:43:52.642+00:00Alvin Langdon Coburn<br />
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<b>London, with an Introduction by Hilaire Belloc, Duckworth
and Co and Brentano’s, London 1909. Folio, 20 photogravures.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Current selling price: £6,000 - £10,000<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Apparently the Olympics are coming to London soon, so with
this in mind and also with the more interesting prospect of a new, glossy,
authoritative study by Pamela Glasson Roberts out soon from Thames and Hudson,
it’s time to visit the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn, dubbed by George Bernard
Shaw 'the greatest photographer in the world'.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-THJv3xeko5Q/UA7rTNdoIuI/AAAAAAAAEG4/BVAgadqQOSQ/s1600/Coburn%C2%A3%C2%A3tower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-THJv3xeko5Q/UA7rTNdoIuI/AAAAAAAAEG4/BVAgadqQOSQ/s320/Coburn%C2%A3%C2%A3tower.jpg" width="245" /></a>Coburn is the big hitter among art photographers-- the man
who was the first to create art out of the humble topographical photograph. But as well as his well
captured portraits and urban landscapes of London and New York , he later
experimented with ‘Vortographs’, which makes him especially fashionable now that Futurism and Vorticism are
currently very hot indeed. Alas, at the height of his powers he retreated to
Wales, where he became embroiled in Freemasonry and the occult. He died almost
forgotten in 1966.</div>
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Despite its size <i>London</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
looks superficially like a standard Edwardian chatty topographical book of
which there are so many-- the sort of book you might find at the bottom of a
tea chest at some obscure country sale, or at a jumble sale in the Cotswolds.
The title page tells you that the text is by Hilaire Belloc. It could just as
easily be by Edward Thomas or E.V.Lucas, or indeed George Bernard Shaw, who was
originally approached to supply the Introduction. It is only by opening the
book and flicking through its pages that you discover its true qualities. The photogravures
are stunning. Even if you didn’t know Alvin Coburn from Alvin Stardust you’d be
enchanted.</span></div>
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An American from Boston, Coburn fell in love with
photography after being given a Kodak as a child of 8 in 1890. At 17 he
accompanied his photographer cousin F. Holland Day to London, where nine of his
plates were included in an exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society. In
1904 he held his first one-man show in New York City as well as having a
photogravure published in Stieglitz’s magazine <i>Camera</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>Work</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
He subsequently made other visits to England, taking photographs of the capital
and studying the photogravure process at the London County School of
Photo-Engraving, before settling permanently in the metropolis in 1909. He had
already been commissioned by Brentano’s and Duckworth to create twenty plates
for a luxurious coffee-table book on London and after building two
hand-operated printing presses in his new home he immediately set about putting
all his new engraving skills into practice. For </span><i>London </i><span style="font-style: normal;">he personally prepared the plates, creating proofs from
them until he had created the perfect plates for his printer to match. He also
supervised the printing. </span></div>
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The appearance of London created a sensation. Never before
had the British seen their capital is such romantic light, though William Hyde’s
<i>London Impressions</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> had done something
similar in 1898; nor had buildings and bridges been photographed from such
elevated positions. Coburn’s image of Tower Bridge, which had only recently
been opened, is unforgettable. </span></div>
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Other publications in which Coburn was involved are equally
expensive today. <i>New York</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the follow-up
to </span><i>London,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> which contains an
iconic photogravure of Brooklyn Bridge, can go for even more, that is if you
can find a copy. Many copies of both books must have been broken up for framing,
which may explain why only two complete copies of </span><i>London</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are currently for sale online at £11,000 and £15,000.
More common are the many annual editions of Coburn’s </span><i>Men of Mark</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> series, which range from $3,000 for issues featuring
middle-ranking figures, to $17,000 for the 1913 issue that contains portraits
of big names like Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats and Mark Twain. Copies of </span><i>Camera
Work</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> also range from $1,500 to a staggering
$3,500 for the 1906 issue, although with all these fragile publications
condition is an important factor. Many copies, notably one on Abebooks, for
which one chancer requires $2,000, have damaged spines, and others may be dog eared
or have pages creased. They are, after all, essentially magazines. Perhaps the
best current online Coburn bargain at $1,250 is a copy of </span><i>The Blue
Grass Cookbook</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1904), an unremarkable book
in many respects, but notable for being the first in which his photographs
appeared. It is basically a celebration of southern USA cuisine and of those
women who perfected it. </span></div>
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All in all over a working life of around 61 years Coburn
illustrated 25 books, most of which featured photogravures, but not all command
big prices. Search for anything featuring his work, and look out for the new
book on him.[R.M. Healey]</div>
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Many thanks Robin. The online prices seem very high. In auction the book has never made more than $11000 and usually makes about £4000 to £5000. The $11K record goes thus:</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://search.bookpricescurrent.com/cgi/WWWdispit.cgi?5" style="color: #7a2930;">Coburn, Alvin Langdon</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">-</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b style="color: #7a2930;">London.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> L & NY, 1909 - Folio, - orig bds - rebacked & recornered, small repairs to bd extremities - With 20 mtd plates. - Some spotting to text - With ALs to Douglas Glass, 3 June 1956, laid in</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">- Christie's New York, Apr 10, 2008, lot 3, $11,000 -</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Open Book pp. 50-51</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: 'normal Arial', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">Somewhere I have seen a little masonic book with Coburn wearing the dress of the order and looking about as Bohemian as John Major. It seemed curious he had once been a wizard of the lens right up there with Sander, Emerson, Ray and Stieglitz.</span></span></div>
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</div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-58196980712680516752012-07-09T08:27:00.000+00:002012-07-09T08:42:50.756+00:00More celebrity collections, an A- Z<br />
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<b>Sherlock Holmes<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The popularity of our greatest fictional detective is
evinced by the fact that there are at least two fan clubs devoted to him.
Membership of both is studded with celebs, but it is not easy to discover
exactly who of these are genuine collectors. Popular entertainer Stephen Fry, a
member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, has a fine collection of
firsts, as has cultural historian and literary odds and bobs man, Christopher Frayling, and comic
novelist Simon Brett. The late Richard Lancelyn Green began his vast collection
of Sherlockiana at the age of seven, and painstakingly built an accurate copy
of Holmes’s study in the attic of his home. He vigorously fought a campaign
against the sale of the Conan Doyle Archive in 2003, but all his efforts
failed. At about this time I asked for an interview on his life’s passion, but
he refused. He committed suicide soon afterwards and Sherlockians have
speculated that the manner of his death, which closely resembled the suicide in
‘Thor Bridge’, suggests that, like the heroine of that story, he was trying to
implicate one of his enemies in his death. Green’s collection of 14,000 books
and over 200,000 other items filled 12 vans.<b><o:p></o:p></b><br />
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<b>Signed books<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Multi-award winning former US country singer Barbara
Mandrell has a collection of around 300 autographed books at her home. She
appears to confine herself mainly to show business figures, but also values her
signed copy of Margaret Thatcher’s <i>The Downing Street Years</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which was a present. Perhaps someone should tell
her that the unsigned copies are worth more. A much more interesting item in
her collection is the ‘ very special ‘ book that Katherine Hepburn signed for
her. ‘She never signs her books ‘ Mandrell revealed, ‘ But she signed one for
me ‘.</span></div>
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Crime writer Ian Rankin collects signed books by writers he
admires but has never met, such as Anthony Burgess and George MacBeth. He signs
copies of his own books for collectors, but never adds a dedication. 'People
don’t want dedicated copies', he contends.</div>
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<b>Theatre<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The late Dame Edith Evans had a wonderful collection of
books on the theatre, including many which George Bernard Shaw, had inscribed
to her. Tragically, when she was close to death an unscrupulous dealer conned
some of these from her for paltry sums. Brian Forbes attended the auction at Christies
where the remaining volumes were sold, but despite being armed with £10,000
from the Theatre Museum, was 'outbid ten times over'by an American University.</div>
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<b>Underground<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZIyTzT12OVU/T_qYBa7vPfI/AAAAAAAAEGE/HQ73nw8_bvI/s1600/burroughs+junkie&&&&.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZIyTzT12OVU/T_qYBa7vPfI/AAAAAAAAEGE/HQ73nw8_bvI/s320/burroughs+junkie&&&&.jpg" width="193" /></a>Key Sixties figure Barry Miles, co-founder of IT and owner of
Indica, the trendy bookshop/gallery where Yoko Ono and Lennon first met,
documents all things Beat and guards his probably unrivalled 'Beat library and
archive' at his West End home. <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Wales<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Travel writer Jan Morris, who lives in Gwynneth, collects
books on Wales and has so many copies of the Transactions of the Society of
Cymmroddian, which was founded in 1751, that she has to store half of them at
her son’s house. Neil Morrissey, star of Men Behaving Badly and that Homebase ad
with Leslie Ash, is a great fan of Dylan Thomas and once owned five properties,
including Brown’s Hotel, in the
poet’s hometown of Laugharne. But how good is his collection of firsts by
Thomas ?<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Women’s fiction <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Jacqueline Wilson is that rare being, a true female
bibliomaniac and has haunted second hand bookshops since she was a teenager. Fiction
by women outnumbers other genres in her vast, double-stacked library, and when
I interviewed her she showed me her firsts of Anne Tyler, Stevie Smith and Iris
Murdoch. She was horrified when a friend announced that she had sold all her
Barbara Pym firsts to a dealer for £10 each.<br />
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Germaine Greer also collects work by female writers, mainly
of the seventeenth century, on whom she has published . She collects female
artists too and once landed a wonderful portrait by Gwen John for a bargain.
Workaholic art historian Frances Spalding collects firsts of Bloomsburyite
stalwarts such as Virginia Woolf, as well as Stevie Smith. It is likely that
the library of the self-deprecating Jeannette Winterson
also contains a fair number of key work by female writers.</div>
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R. M. Healey</div>
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Last in series…<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin. A little unfair on Baroness T...as a dealer, I find she is very saleable, although she signed a lot of books. It's Ted Heath you don't want, some of his books are quite hard to find unsigned. Also Katherine Hepburn is not an impossible signer although her signed autobiography is a few hundred of your British pounds. I once saw her in a London cab and she laughed when recognition dawned on my face...a great moment. Lastly I have seen Jeannette W bidding at auction - for a T.S. Eliot item as I recall. A great punter.</i></div>
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<br /></div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-2762120318513546852012-06-23T09:09:00.002+00:002012-06-23T09:12:53.782+00:00More celebrity collections, an A – Z<br />
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<b>Modern firsts</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZuHzvVv04_I/T-WHA3Y0G1I/AAAAAAAAEF4/1GqPbgZAMzQ/s1600/bryant2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZuHzvVv04_I/T-WHA3Y0G1I/AAAAAAAAEF4/1GqPbgZAMzQ/s320/bryant2.JPG" width="229" /></a>A popular field
with celebs. In his library of over 6,000 books at his home in north Essex,
fogeyish Simon Heffer has a large number of modern firsts. One of his luckiest
finds is the controversial <i>Unfinished Victory</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by Arthur Bryant, which suggested that we should not be beastly to the
German, and which now sells for more than £150. In 1998 Heffer found a copy online
nestling on the shelf of a charity shop in Milton Keynes for an amazing £8. Melvyn
Bragg has a complete collection of first editions by D .H. Lawrence, while
ex-punk turned ardent royalist, Tony Parsons, collects first editions of his
favourite books, which include </span><i>Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, Catcher in
the Rye</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> ( up to £5,000) and the Bond
novels. Poetical billionaire Felix Dennis has shelves of modern firsts,
all immaculately jacketed, in his Carnaby Street eyrie. These include </span><i>The
Naked and the Dead, To Kill a Mockingbird, Under the Volcano, Voss</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><i>Billy Liar.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<b>Music Hall.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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At one time show business celebs were avid collectors of Music
Hall memorabilia. Nowadays, you’d have to be around 100 to remember the era of Chergwin
and Little Tich, and so the field for the more pricey stuff is open to genuine,
but younger connoisseurs of the
Halls, like Roy Hudd, Jools Holland and Paul O’Grady. Hudd is known to collect
a wide variety of Music Hall memorabilia. Oddly, I am a little surprised that
more of those who admire the London-centric psychogeographers, such as Will
Self, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, aren’t attracted to Music Hall too. Although
he told me that he didn’t have a large library on London, I suspect that
Ackroyd does own a few works on the London Music Hall era. Didn’t he write a book on Dan Leno ? </div>
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<b>Nazis<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Veteran horror actor Sir Christopher Lee (b. 1922) has
confessed to owning only five or six books on the occult, but does admit to
having a very large collection of books on the ‘Third Reich, Nazis and the SS ‘,but
only because he was involved with war crime investigation... Good excuse, Sir
Chris! <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Odour</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></div>
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Veteran travel writer, Jan Morris, is a great collector of
travel books, but is also a book-sniffer. ‘Some people sniff drugs and glue,
but I sniff books. It’s just something I’ve always done. ‘ Desmond Morris one
told me that a scientist he knew could pinpoint the geographical origin of a
book by its smell. He was best at identifying recently published books, but no
doubt he was up for older books too. It is well known that American books of a
certain vintage have a strong whiff of something resembling root
vegetables. </div>
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<b>Photographic books<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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With the rapidly rising interest in arty photographic books,
the prescience of Antiques Roadshow pundit David Battie is admirable. He has
long been a collector in this neglected field and when I talked to him he
became very voluble about his copy of the exceedingly rare <i>The Habit and the
Horse</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1857), a treatise on ‘ female equitation’ (contains lithographs from photographs by Herbert Watkins) which he claims
is the earliest book of this kind. Elton John collects photographs and possibly
books of photographs. Bouffant-haired Queen guitarist Dr Brian May has a large
collection of photographic books, with a strong focus on stereoscopy, in which
he because interested as a child. In the late sixties he discovered the
pioneering stereoscopic photography of T. R. Williams relating to an
unidentified English village. After many years of research May identified the
village as Hinton Waldrist, Oxfordshire and in 2009 published his findings in </span><i>A
Village Lost and Found</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. This is one of the
few books by a rock star that has nothing whatsoever to do with sex, drugs and
rock and roll. Identifying the others might be subject of another blog !<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>Gay literature</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></div>
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‘Uranian’ literature, including books by Edward Carpenter, E. E. Bradford et al., has always
had a healthy market, but work by more modern gay writers is perhaps more popular today. It is possible
that many gay celebs have good collections. The trouble is, few if any,
advertise the fact. </div>
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<b>Reference <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The best known collector of reference works is probably the
late prankster Jeremy Beadle, who had an insatiable appetite for facts and
figures and used his library to devise fiendishly difficult questions for his
TV quiz show.[R.M. Healey] <i>To be continued...</i></div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin. One of the reasons I am not doing much blogging is that this year we bought the immense library of the great Beadle + more recently 2 even larger collections. Occasional tweets and that's it for the moment. A propos of sniffing books - the great dealer Andrew Henderson used to do this. The reasons may be almost occult but at least it can detect the presence of mould...as for Uranians Freddie Mercury collected the the great gay painter Henry Scott Tuke and it's hard to imagine he would not have had at least a few books of 'Love in Earnest' verse and hopefully a bunch of Baron Corvo. Last if the billionaire Felix D still has his 'Voss' a mod-first dealer might give £10 for it if the jacket is fine, but not us.</i></div>
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<br /></div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-73300872764811169932012-06-12T09:36:00.002+00:002012-06-12T09:36:51.935+00:00More celebrity collections, an A - Z<!--StartFragment-->
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It is unlikely that too many movie stars actually collect
film-related books; it is much more probable that this province belongs to
film-buffs. Chief of them all is Leonard Maltin, who devotes himself to classic
movie memorabilia, including film stills, posters and books. When he was
interviewing Ginger Rogers at her home he spotted a book of juvenile fiction on
one of her shelves, at which Ms Rogers exclaimed: ‘ My mother wrote that ‘. It
turned out that Lela Rogers had indeed published <i>Ginger Rogers and the
Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(1942 ). Later
on, he found a copy in a second hand bookstore and sent it to her to inscribe
for him. Today a poor copy of this book can be yours for around $1. One with a
jacket is currently online at $60.</span></div>
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<b>Cookery<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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As well as the obvious celebrity chefs, such as Anton
Mossiman,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Delia Smith and Jamie
Oliver, a less obvious collector is <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jake Gyllenhaal, star of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Brokeback Mountain</i>. In an interview Gyllenhaal confessed
that as well as eating healthily and growing his own food, he loved collecting
old cookery books:</div>
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‘ I have a massive section in my library of beautiful old
cookery books. I really have a strange obsession with them…’</div>
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<b>Diverse collectors<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Madonna collects books, but perhaps only President Bill
Clinton knows exactly what she collects. Not too long ago, probably while he
was here for the Hay Festival, he took Madge for a tour of Charing Cross Road.
Did she visit Any Amount of Books ? Other celebs who described themselves as
collectors include Chelsea Clinton and Twilight<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>star Robert Patinson, though doubtless security
considerations prevent many other celebs from revealing their collections to
the wider world.<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Fine printing<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Veteran lyricist and composer Leslie Bricusse (<i>Goldfinger,
Scrooge, You Only Live Twice, Doctor Doolittle, Willy Wonka, Harry Potter etc
etc</i> ) has amassed a superb collection of books on fine printing at his home in
California. Recently, a few books from his collection that were signed by the
Beatles have appeared on the market.</div>
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<b>Graham Greene<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mu6lEqMEEXU/T9cLXY8QGjI/AAAAAAAAEFc/gu9ppyko8vU/s1600/Rosenthal$$$$$.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mu6lEqMEEXU/T9cLXY8QGjI/AAAAAAAAEFc/gu9ppyko8vU/s320/Rosenthal$$$$$.jpg" width="224" /></a>Bryan Forbes bought the books of Graham Greene, including
the rare <i>Rumour At Nightfall</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> ,when they
first appeared. Around 1951 he got to know the author personally and they
remained friends until Greene’s death in 1991.On being presented with one of
his books Greene would sign it for his friend and a few months before he died he
presented Forbes’ wife Nannette Newman, of Fairy Liquid fame, with a signed
copy of the ‘very rare‘ </span><i>The Third Man</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Being a collector himself, Greene would have appreciated the
significance of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this particular
presentation. Other well known collectors of Greene include Melvyn Bragg and Bernie Taupin.</span></div>
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<b>History<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The late multimillionaire Bee Gee, Robin Gibb, was extremely
keen on British history and had a sizeable library at the 12<sup>th</sup>
century Prebendal, his main home in Thame. In an interview he admitted that he
loved anything ‘old ‘ and certainly he belongs with Sting, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Elton John as a rock star with
remarkable taste, at least in architecture. Such is the importance of The
Prebendal that Pevsner devotes two whole pages to it and contends that the 13<sup>th</sup>
century Chapel <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is 'one of the most
elegant EE buildings in the county’.<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Jack Kerouac<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Johnny Depp, star of the antiquarian book movie The Ninth
Gate, has confessed to being an avid collector of Jack Kerouac firsts, as well
as those by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Edgar A. Poe, and
Dylan Thomas. Reportedly to have
‘weird‘ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tastes, he is said to collect
dolls, insects and 'pig skeletons' too.</div>
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<b>Wyndham Lewis<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Vorticism is very cool at present (witness a simple Etchells
composition on paper that went for more than £100,000 recently ! ) and
arch-Vorticist Lewis has many admirers, particularly among the rock music
fraternity. These include the late Captain Beefheart, Brian Ferry, David Bowie,
and Holly Johnson, among many. Iain Sinclair is also a keen collector. The tale
of how he assembled an almost complete collection of Lewis on one visit to Farringdon
Road is fascinating:</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UHjeGA7XNjc/T9cLSNf-u-I/AAAAAAAAEFU/SRweKOT1P40/s1600/lewis$$$$.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UHjeGA7XNjc/T9cLSNf-u-I/AAAAAAAAEFU/SRweKOT1P40/s320/lewis$$$$.jpg" width="209" /></a>‘They were in a box and Jeffery didn’t allow people to
examine them. It was pot luck. The box had a price tag on it, but you took a
chance on whether the contents were worth the £75, or whatever it was. You knew
he’d bought them in some auction, and had an idea of their value, but it was a
gamble. Well, I bought that box of Wyndham Lewis and I still have them. A few
items needed repair, but most were in pretty good nick and now I own virtually
a complete Wyndham Lewis collection, including some rare volumes in dust
jackets, like <i>Snooty Baronet</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which
would have paid for the whole thing anyway.’</span></div>
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Veteran publisher Tom Rosenthal, the model for one half of <i>Private
Eye’s</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Snipcock and Tweed, is a fanatical
Lewis man too. However, his superb library of major modernist literature, which
also includes wonderful firsts of Conrad, Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, is also
notable for the remarkable absence of books by a certain T. S. Eliot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘He’s an anti-Semite and I don’t want
his books in my library...' he once growled to an amazed Rick Gekoski. More
sensibly, Rosenthal also excludes anything by Mrs Virginia Woolf: ‘Boring
books, never admired her ‘.</span></div>
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<b>Local history<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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In pursuit of books on his home county of Nottinghamshire the
late Alan Sillitoe was an inveterate browser among second hand bookshops
wherever he went. He found many treasures in or around Sussex and Kent. His theory
was that because people from the North and Midlands often retire to the
south-east coast their book collections end up there after their deaths.
Interestingly, Sillitoe only kept one copy of his debut novel <i>Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which is the only
Sillitoe title to fetch much money<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>today.</span></div>
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Romantic novelist and professional Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg
also collects books on his native county: ‘ I’ve been told by my friends that I
have the best collection of books relating to Cumbria and my birthplace
Wigton.’, he claimed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> [</span><o:p></o:p>R. M. Healey]</div>
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<i> <span style="color: green;">Many thanks Robin. It should be mentioned that Bragg is almost entirely uncollected and his books, even signed, can be bought for the price of a cup of tea. The Donn Byrne of our day. Who was he? Exactly. Enough Bragg bashing (I can do this because I am not seeking work in media.) Pig skeletons? Where does Depp get them? Are there dealers? Lastly I don't remember Clinton and Madonna coming in the shop but we get so many celebs (Boris, Hanif, Edwina) they may have gone unnoticed...</span></i><span style="color: green;"><i></i></span><i> </i></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-21307358048002685122012-05-22T22:31:00.001+00:002012-05-22T22:36:33.307+00:00More celebrity collections<br />
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<b>American books<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The late Gordon Burn, a near genius of true crime narrative </div>
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(biogs of Peter Sutcliffe and the Wests), and a devotee of Truman Capote, and
Richard Ford, adored the physicality of American books, which he collected,
along with magazines like <i>Esquire</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. ’ I
like the paper they use. I like the way they leave the edges untrimmed. I like
the way they provide those little notes at the back about the typeface they’ve
used’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>Architecture<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Veteran Torygraph fogey Simon Heffer is ‘ hugely into
architecture ‘ and owns a full set of Pevsner’s Buildings of England, though he
admits that he spent years searching for the hardback editions of North Devon,
South Devon and Middlesex ( so very common in paperback form), before finally
tracking them down in Ken Spelman’s York bookshop. He also collects ( or
collected ) Thomas Carlyle. Comedian Griff Rhys Jones is also keen on
architecture, as is Sir Michael Caine, who once admitted that he would have
liked to have been an architect. Janet Street Porter trained as one, but did
not practice. She collects contemporary art and in 1981 published a book on
collecting British teapots.</div>
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<b>Augustan literature<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Today, a bit out of fashion, but ex Times editor and
sometime bookseller Lord Rees-Mogg, has always seemed unashamedly fuddy-duddy,
and his MP son Jacob is resolutely keeping up the family tradition. Rees-Mogg prefers
the Augustan political values of social balance to those of Romantic
individualism, and when I interviewed him in 1998 I wasn’t surprised to learn
that from an early age he had been a keen collector of Edmund Burke, Alexander Pope
and Samuel Johnson. While studying history at Oxford he bought many books in his
chosen field. ‘In the fifties and
early sixties there was a lot of Pope around. No-one seemed very keen and
therefore it was possible to assemble a very good Pope collection ‘. Johnson
too was cheap back then. In 1950 from Blackwell’s Rees-Mogg secured a complete
set of the first edition of Johnson <i>Lives of the Poets</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with the prefaces and a very rare extra leaf . ‘There
were 68 volumes, all in boards, uncut. I paid £7.15s., I think<b> ‘. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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Another devoted collector of Johnson and other writers of
the period was the late, great Frank Muir, comic scriptwriter and ‘ Call My
Bluff ‘ veteran, who confessed that he often felt ‘born out of his time’ and
ought to have lived in the eighteenth century. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Blake<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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As an undergraduate fogeyish Rees Mogg, may have had few
good words for Wordsworth and Coleridge, but a few decades later he developed a
grudging respect for Romanticism—or at least for William Blake. His anecdote
about discovering a glass engraved by the great man in a sale at Christie’s is
worth repeating : “ It was an ordinary rummer with the bottom broken off, he
told me “There was a very Blakean angel on it, and an inscription which read 'Blake in anguish, Felpham August 1804’…I couldn’t see that it was wrong.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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A Times lackey was sent to bid for it and it was knocked
down to Rees Mogg for £55. The ‘Felpham Rummer’, as it was dubbed, was
afterwards sold to the famous Corning Glass Museum in New York, where it
remains on display ‘ No expert has ever questioned its authenticity’, he claims.<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>James Bond<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It is not known whether unlikely-looking Bond actor Daniel
Craig collects Ian Fleming firsts, but as he is moving into a large house with
his beauteous wife Rachel Weisz, in a village just two miles from me, I may have
a chance to ask him. I don’t see any of the other Bond actors as collectors,
but I may be wrong. However, film director and thriller writer Bryan Forbes is,
or was, a collector, and told me that before prices started rising he was
selling in his bookshop nice copies of all the Bond novels, including Casino
Royale, in dust jackets for just £50 each. <b> <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TsyuUES-ckg/T7wTAcyD4WI/AAAAAAAAEFA/pf3sj-KeMnU/s1600/gellar$$$.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TsyuUES-ckg/T7wTAcyD4WI/AAAAAAAAEFA/pf3sj-KeMnU/s320/gellar$$$.jpg" width="249" /></a><b> <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Children’s books<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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A collecting field very popular with celebs. Fans include finger
ring fetishist and multi-award winning author Jacqueline Wilson, whose early
loves were the late Victorian writers Mrs Molesworth, and the lesser known Frances
Crompton, and also Edith Nesbit. Sarah
Michelle Gellar is another. She casually
mentions her interest in 'classic children’s literature', is not too
forthcoming about authors, but surely must own a first of Dracula. Columnist
Lucy Mangan, who famously complained in the <i>Guardian Magazine</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that booksellers were always moaning about their lot
('they live this idyllic life surrounded by books and they practically growl
at you') has a ‘ rag-tag ‘ collection of
assorted children’s literature, including a pristine set of Joyce
Lancaster Brisley’s </span><i>Milly Molly Mandy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> books and much Enid Blyton, She decries the idea of collecting first
editions, however, believing it to
be a ‘ bloke thing ‘.</span></div>
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R. M. Healey</div>
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To be continued…</div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin. Craig was in a Waugh adaptation ('Sword of Honour') so he might </i><i>also </i><i>collect him. I have actually seen Ms Gellar (aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer) at a bookfair. </i></div>
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<i>The number of stars to be seen at bookfairs is small but growing. It's a safe environment and you are unlikely to be pressured into blowing a lot of cash...</i></div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-29544752021631540982012-05-15T12:08:00.001+00:002012-05-15T22:12:53.432+00:00Tardis and the art of bargain hunting<br />
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Ever fantasised about hijacking the Tardis and going back in
time to bag books that were going for pennies or a shilling ( or even gratis )
and returning to a UK in recession and selling them for tens or hundreds of
thousands ? Of course you have. Mind you, you’d have to deal in the correct
currency, but a few visits to auctions houses or coin dealers might solve the
problem. But do take a stout bag (perhaps a large backpack) and plenty of cash.</div>
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<b>1) Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813 ), a few old pence<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (1818) 6d.</b></div>
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In 1822, following Shelley’s death, wily old atheist Richard
Carlile somehow managed to bag around 180 sheets of the privately printed poem,
the author having already given away about 70 bound copies to friends. Ideally,
you would need to get there before Carlile, but if you were too late, the
radical rascal might do a deal. Fresh out of jail, he would need the money. If
you bagged the lot for £5, you might struggle to carry the sheets back home to 2012,
but it would be worth it. Harrington
has a association copy for £14,500,
but even if you consigned ordinary copies ten times a year to auction houses in
various parts of the world over a
period of ,say, eighteen years, you’d end up (after paying commission) with around
£1.5m profit ! </div>
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Shelley’s <i>Revolt of Islam</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which was published at the poet’s own expense in an edition of 750,
did so badly in 1818 that in 1829 the family ( Shelley’s widow or pater, Sir
Timothy ) sold the unbound sheets to
pirate bookseller John Brooks, in bundles of 25 for sixpence a copy.
Brooks then sold them in his bookshop for half a crown (12 1/2p). You could do
much better than Brooks in 2012. Actually, over £100, 000 better.</span></div>
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<b>2) Keats’ Endymion (1818). A penny halfpenny</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></div>
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Publishers Taylor and Hessey were so alarmed at sales that
they sold the remaining sheets of Keats’ long poem to a bookseller /waste paper
merchant called Edward Stibbs for a penny halfpenny (half a pee) a copy. This
Stibbs character then paid a jobbing bookbinder tuppence halfpenny ( 1p) to
bind some sheets and the resulting bound volumes were sold in Stibbs’s Strand
bookshop for 1s 6d. History doesn’t record exactly how many sets of sheets were
bound or what happened to those that weren’t. Had you landed in the London of
the original Tom and Jerry in 1821 doubtless you could have found Stibbs’s shop
and done a deal with him for all the sheets over a jug of ale and a visit to The Fives Court to see Bill Neat box . But whatever you
do, don’t mention that a copy of a bound Endymion in 2012 would fetch a cool
£6,000 !</div>
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<b>3) A ticket for Shillibeer’s Omnibus (1829). One (old)
penny upwards.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It’s not worth the risk of drowning to snaffle a Titanic
menu, but land in 1829 instead and
while you’re buying the unsold sheets of son Percy’s <i>Revolt of Islam</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for a bargain while also checking out Mr Peel’s new-fangled ‘bobbies’, you could make
your way to the New Road and try collecting some used bus tickets from the floors of Mr George Shillibeer’s
new patent Omnibus. The earliest ‘bus tickets ever issued in the UK rarely, if
ever, appear on the market, but when they do they generally make more than a
£100. Just think of how many you could cram into your bag. </span></div>
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4) <b>Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyiat of Omar Khayyam (1859) 1d
or 2d.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-80uG8fG6jOk/T7LUqLAX8OI/AAAAAAAAEE0/ny6eZKZSF-8/s1600/khayyam_large&&&&.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-80uG8fG6jOk/T7LUqLAX8OI/AAAAAAAAEE0/ny6eZKZSF-8/s320/khayyam_large&&&&.jpg" width="249" /></a> Whizz back to
the year 1861 and make your way to the Castle Street bookshop of Bernard
Quaritch, where in the bargain box you’d find priced either at one, two or four
old pennies, many copies of the remaining stock of young Mr Fitzgerald’s
translation of the Persian classic, which had found no buyers at the original
1859 price of one shilling. Grab as many as you can, and in case scholar
Whitley Scott and some of his literary cronies, haven’t bought their own
copies, leave some in the box for them to discover. Even if you only managed to
buy 50 copies, at the 2012 price of around £28,000each, those slim volumes would
be worth around £1.5 m today.</div>
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<b>5) <i>Catalogue of Manet and the Post impressionists</i></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><b> (1910) One shilling at the door</b></span>.</div>
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Programme the Tardis to land off Bond Street on or about 8 November 1910. Here you will find the
Grafton Galleries, where an exhibition of poncy foreign ‘ artists ‘, most of whom couldn’t even draw
properly, should be worth a look. While you’re there buy twenty or more
catalogues at a shilling a pop. Roger Fry might be on the till and you could possibly
bump into Virginia or Lytton. Even
without illustrations, copies of the catalogue now sell for well over £1,000,
so that’s a cool £20,000 profit.
Now that’s what I call ‘making an impression ‘.</div>
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Ain’t time travel a wonderful thing ? [R. M. Healey]</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q6M8kcE-48s/T7JFOrglOHI/AAAAAAAAEEo/FGLfWYmkCro/s1600/manet$$$$$.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q6M8kcE-48s/T7JFOrglOHI/AAAAAAAAEEo/FGLfWYmkCro/s320/manet$$$$$.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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<i>Many thanks Robin. A fascinating game, but don't forget the 'Diamond as big as the Ritz' factor - with so many duplicates of these items the market would flatten unless you teased them out over a decade or two... the best move at the Post Impressionists would be to swan around with your catalogue, buy £1000 worth of pics, about a dozen (they were on sale) concentrating on heavy hitters like Van Gogh and Cezanne, load them into a Tardis Transit Van parked around the corner in Haunch of Venison Yard, come back to now and bang them in auction and then look for your name on the Sunday Times list (£1.2 Billion). You could keep the catalogue as a memento -the money, as always is in the art</i>.</div>
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<br /></div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2045845679444796608.post-27355050630795281812012-05-03T21:18:00.000+00:002012-05-08T09:23:23.058+00:00Never mind the length…<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-etqE6xgAOtw/T6L0hEmHiWI/AAAAAAAAEEQ/SH6LFU8l1gE/s1600/declaration-of-independence-1776%2525%2525%2525%2525%2525.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-etqE6xgAOtw/T6L0hEmHiWI/AAAAAAAAEEQ/SH6LFU8l1gE/s400/declaration-of-independence-1776%2525%2525%2525%2525%2525.jpg" width="302" /></a>
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<br />
I once sold a small folded sheet of printed paper with a hole through the middle of it for over £300. Mind you, it was an exceedingly rare printed example in Latin of Lord Northumberland’s address from the scaffold in 1552, possibly published on the Continent for propaganda purposes. Weirdly, one previous owner who evidently ‘didn’t have the Latin’ thought it was something to do with boar-hunting ! According to the auction house, without the tiny hole (which affected text) it may have fetched twice or even three times as much. Sigh. <br />
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So, let’s look at one or two of the shortest works ever published and the extraordinary prices they command.<br />
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<b>George Santayana, Lines on leaving the Bedford Street Schoolhouse (Boston 1880) Four pages. $750</b><br />
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The great Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana is perhaps more appreciated in his adopted USA than in the UK, which may explain why his four page Lines on leaving Bedford Street Schoolhouse bears such a large price tag. The short poem, his first publication, appeared when he was just 17 and on his way to a brilliant career at Harvard.
Most of his subsequent published works, which in addition to philosophical treatises promoting his particular brand of scepticism and pragmatism, include a novel, volumes of memoirs and poetry, fetch nothing like this high figure, though naturally, like any other original thinker, he has his collectors.<br />
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<b>American Declaration of Independence, 1776. Print run of 500. $8.14 million</b><br />
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In 1776 five hundred ‘official ‘broadsheets declaring the independence of the United States were rushed off the press and distributed, presumably to lawmakers and politicians, across the new nation. Over the years various copies, in various states of repair, have been found, in public collections, framed behind glass or among the papers of deceased individuals in the US. Up to 1987 only three copies were known to be in private hands, but in this year a browser found a picture in a garage sale in Pennsylvania and bought it because he liked the frame. We’ve all done it. However, on removing the art work he discovered an almost mint copy of the Declaration being used as a lining. Possibly it had once been proudly displayed in the frame, only to be supplanted by the artwork at some point. <br />
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The lucky owner hung onto it for four years, until he consigned to the Sotheby’s where it sold for $2.42 m in 1991. Nine years later it was bought at auction by Norman Lear, the TV producer, for a whopping $8.14m. In 2006 a varnished copy of the 1820 edition, which the wife of a pipe fitter had donated to a charity shop, was bought for $2.48 by another jammy browser, who sold it on for a cool $477,650. Other copies must still be out there.<br />
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<b>Single pages</b><br />
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Although, strictly speaking, single sheets torn from very ancient books don’t belong here, some opportunistic online dealers still try to convince punters that a single printed page from any black-letter work printed before 1600 is valuable per se. For instance, two ABE dealers from Glastonbury and Cumbria both have different single pages from the Udall translation of <i>The Paraphrases of Erasmus</i> (1548) for sale at £55 and £95 respectively, slightly ambitious when one considers that the whole volume of 900 plus pages can be had for around £2,500. It’s a very rare book, admittedly, but not exactly incunabula. Better value, considering that it is the very first book to be printed using moveable type, is a single page from the Gutenberg Bible, which retails at the Great Site in the USA at around $100,000, according to which section of the book it comes from. In May Bloomsbury will be selling a page from a Gutenberg, so it will be interesting to see what such a rare item fetches. The estimate is £25,000- £30,000 [R. M. Healey.]<br />
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<i>Many thanks Robin. Talking of one sheet items one must not forget Joyce's broadside poem 'Gas from a Burner' (Trieste, 1912) which leaves little change from $20,000 and the one page poem 'Winter Ship' distributed by Sylvia Plath on the streets of Edinburgh in 1960. Only 60 copies and worth about £1500.Kerouac's 1966 broadside poem 'A Pun for Al Gelpi' is worth about the same and there are countless ephemeroids in 4 and 5 figures (like a ticket to a Mozart concert or last week's Titanic menu.) As for leaves from the Gutenberg Bible an incomplete copy was broken in the 1920s and leaves were issued by A Edward Newton in a book called 'A Noble Fragment'. 23 copies have shown up since 2000 and the last 4 made just over $40000 each and one in 1998 with 4 leaves made $85,000. Leaves from Shakespeare Folios also appear and make useful sums...</i></div>Bookridehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05881971821359627382noreply@blogger.com1