The other John Lennon

A very odd find in a box of antiquarian books bought at auction-- the completely unknown John Lennon's Rossall Hall. A Poem (Printed for the Author, Preston 1834.) It was bound up with 6 other books including a book of Epicurean recipes (1832) and Memoirs of Madame Malibran de Beriot by Isaac Nathan author of The Hebrew Melodies. All in a small rust coloured moiré cloth-bound book with a leather label on the spine with the word 'Miscellanies' lettered in gold. Decent condition with some occasional foxing to text. The John Lennon book appears to be, like its author, completely unknown-- no copies at WorldCat, Copac or the mighty University of Karlsruhe database which has the complete catalogues of many worldwide libraries. The book is an UNCLE ('Unique No Copy Located Elsewhere') and worth a small fortune (let me dream...)




The book is a mere 36 pages and is mostly devoted to unadulterated praise of the great local landowner and philanthropist Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood (1801 - 1866) who founded the town of Fleetwood, in Lancashire and was squire of Rossall Hall. At the time he also owned most of Southport. The book is dedicated to him and some of the verses may have been used in his election campaign. At the 1832 general election, Fleetwood was elected M.P. for Preston, in the first parliament following the Reform Act. The poem's style is slightly thumping, far better than McGonagall, but Swinburne he was not:

Hail Rossall Hall! thou stately dome,
With heavenly virtues blest:
Where learned sages find a home,
And weary traveller's rest.

Lennon, however, was no sycophant, his backing of Fleetwood was based on the politician's promise of work in the reform parliament for the rights of a million hand-loom weavers '...who, for a series of years have been labouring under the most unjust privations ever yet recorded in the annals of England's domestic history.' Lennon was campaigning in his poems for a minimum wage of a pound a week for the weavers. Fleetwood's many good works are recorded in his lengthy Wikipedia entry. He was also responsible for starting the development of the new resort town of Fleetwood built on a rabbit warren at Rossall Point near his stately pile. Initially he had considered naming his new town New Liverpool or Wyreton. I can find no trace of this John Lennon, the political poet, but an afternoon in Preston Library would probably reveal a few facts about him. Politically he was on the side of the working man and a dogged campaigner for worker's rights- that and a certain facility for rhyming connect him to his illustrious namesake.

Other compelling connections appear with a bit of searching online. Rossall Hall later became a private school and was attended by Stan Parkes, John Lennon's cousin. A fan site has this:

"Lennon had a large affiliation with Fleetwood where he regularly visited his cousin Stanley Parkes, the 'big brother' to the young John, the son of his Aunt Elizabeth (known as Mater)...George Parkes, the husband of Elizabeth and father of Stanley, died young and they moved to 33 Galloway Road where they lived with a local Fleetwood solicitor Mr Hodson. Stanley recalls he would often visit Liverpool and return to Fleetwood in the school holidays with his cousin Leila, Aunt Harriet's daughter. Stanley recalls they would all go up to Blackpool on the tram two or three times a week during their summer holidays to see separate shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss and his big band. However, Stanley recalls it was George Formby who John particularly liked. The duo used to pass Formby's house regularly on the bus journey from Preston to Fleetwood where he and his wife would often be sitting in deck chairs in their garden at the front of their house. Stanley recalls he and John would wave and they would wave back. Stanley and the young John were keen fans of Fleetwood Flyers Speedway Club and Fleetwood Town FC. "

For a small outlay you could probably find the original John Lennon on ancestor or public records sites. He may even have been a relation to John Winston Lennon but probably not great grandfather as that man was said to have come from Ireland. A website called John Lennon's Family Tree states John Winston Lennon's great grandfather, James Lennon, son of Patrick Lennon, was born in County Down, Ireland in 1829. His father was a farmer. The John Lennon who flourished in 1832 appears to have been poor. He may have been a weaver himself ('One hundred hours we, every week/ Must toil for scanty fare...') He apologises to the great squire for 'the feeble outpourings of his rustic muse...the rude grasp of poverty will not afford me much time for mature reflection in the humble, but useful ranks, of a workman.' The book was printed by Wilcockson's of Preston. Who paid for the printing?

Et Tu Healy? James Joyce, 1891 (revisited)

"His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this . . . century
Can trouble him no more."

James Joyce. ET TU HEALY? (PARNELL.) Privately Published /Alleyn and O'Reilly (Printers), Dublin 1891.

Possible Selling Price
£1,000,000+ / $2,000,000+

LITERATURE / JUVENILIA/ POETRY / LOST BOOK
This is an update of an earlier post with new info at the end. 'Et Tu Healy' is a broadsheet poem by James Joyce said to have been published by John Joyce, his proud father, in 1891 when Joyce was nine years old. No copies have ever surfaced. There is, however, highly credible evidence for its having been printed and distributed among friends and family. Whether any copies have survived is another matter. The evidence comes from 4 sources - Joyce's father, Joyce himself, his brother Stanislaus Joyce and the dealer Jacob Schwartz of the Ulysses bookshop in High Holborn, London.
Stanislaus Joyce wrote in his 'Recollections of James Joyce' (1950)

He tried poetry, too, in the style of the drawing-room ballads to which he was accustomed ('My cot, alas!, the dear old shady home'), but the most successful was a piece on the death of Parnell, which I see mentioned apparently with my brother's sanction, by the title of 'Et Tu, Healy', though I do not remember that it bore that title. It certainly was a diatribe against the supposed traitor, Tim Healy, who had ratted at the bidding of the Catholic bishops and become a virulent enemy of Parnell, and so the piece was an echo of those political rancours that formed the theme of my father's nightly half-drunken rantings to the accompaniment of vigorous table-thumping. I think it was in verse because of the rhythm of bits of it that I remember. One line is a pentameter. At the end of the piece the dead Chief is likened to an eagle, looking down on the grovelling mass of Irish politicians from

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this . . . century
Can trouble him no more.

The production was much admired by my father and his circle of friends, whose judgement, in questions of literature at least, was as immature as the budding author's. My father had it printed, and distributed the broad sheets to admirers. I have a distinct recollection of my father's bringing home a roll of thirty or forty of them. Parnell, however, died when we were still at Bray, so the piece must have been written some months or a year after Parnell's death, because I am positive that the broadsheet was printed when we were living at Blackrock. My brother was, therefore, between nine and ten years of age when his ambition to be a writer bore its first timid blossoms. The lines I have quoted have stuck in my memory because 'the dear aerie' were standing jokes between us as late as when we were living at Trieste. Moreover, in the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist, now called Stephen Hero, the poem was assigned to the period I have indicated, and, further, describing a hasty packing up and departure from Blackrock, my brother referred to the remaining broadsheets, of which the young Stephen Dedalus had been so proud, lying on the floor torn and muddied by the boots of the furniture removers.

Richard Ellmann, Joyce's bographer, has always insisted that Stanislaus Joyce was a man of great integrity and a truthful and reliable source of information.

Ellmann reports in his biography that John Joyce (who died in 1931 and didn't think much of his son's Ulysses) told dealer Jacob Schwartz in regard to the broadsheet: "Remember it? Why shouldn't I remember it? Didn't I pay for the printing of it and didn't I send a copy to the Pope?' I have heard that some enterprising dealer went to Rome and managed to check the Vatican's holdings without any success. It is not surprising, because even if it had arrived there a broadsheet is likely to be misplaced or, at best, miscatalogued. There is some suggestion that the piece may have been called 'Parnell' - and our dealer may not have looked under 'P.'

I do not have Slocum's bibliography with me (I am in San Francisco) but I recall something about a receipt for the printing having been seen by a reliable witness. I know that Slocum quotes four further lines from the poem:

My cot alas that dear old shady home
Where oft in youthful sport I played
Upon thy verdant grassy fields all day
Or lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade.

Joyce remarked to Harriet Weaver that he had parodied these lines in 'Finnegans Wake.'

So where is this valuable item? If it is around a copy would be with the Joyce family or relations or Blackrock friends and neighbours the Murrays, Monaghans, Thorntons, Sheehans, Gallahers etc., A surviving copy could show up loosely inserted in some sheet music, or old Dublin Newspapers or magazines or in a scrap album or possibly bound up with other poems and pamphlets.

It is not unthinkable a copy would survive, for example such ephemeral items as the auction catalogue of the disgraceful and hurried auction at Oscar Wilde's house in Tite Street show up every now and then. However Joyce's vision of removal men treading the paper into the ground is all too believable. Also, as Ellmann notes, there was a lot of shame and disgrace around the Joyce name in Ireland after the supposed obscenity of 'Ulysses' was reported there - so any remaining copies could have then been destoyed.

There are many instances of books that were published with no copies having survived, mostly minor works. The most famous, and certainly even more valuable than 'Healy' if it ever turned up, is the Shakespeare play 'Love's Labors Won.' The dealer Pottesman ('Potty' - a great runner of incunabula) discovered in 1953 the August 1603 booklist of the stationer Christopher Hunt, which lists as printed in quarto:"Marchant Of Vennis[sic], Taming Of A Shrew, Loves Labor Lost, Loves Labor Won." There is other evidence but in general it is more doubtful than the Joyce juvenilia.

VALUE? Joyce published 2 other broadsheets 'The Holy Office' (1904/5) and 'Gas from a Burner' (1912) which show up irregularly at serious money. 2 not bad copies showed up at the 2004 sale of the much loved Quentin Keynes making £27000 (Holy) and £14,000 (Gas). The Joyce market is strong but fickle, collectors (not always cultured) come and go. At one point Joyce highspot prices depended on the severity of North American winters, as the biggest punter was a glove manufacturer. From the Quentin results one could very vaguely extrapolate a price if 'Et Tu Healy' showed. Say 30 times the pair + £200K for luck = £1.43 million or $2.7 million. There is a limit because it is the work of a nine year old boy, very slight and damn it, another could turn up!

Compiled in an airport hotel room using an Ellmann from a local bookshop, a paperback of Stanislaus, memory of bookdealer's anecdotes, Google, speculation, leaps of faith and Peet's good coffee. If anyone can shed any further light please write or comment, might touch it up when I get home to my own reference library.

Addenda August 08. I now have the bibliography and also Herbert Gorman's book 'James Joyce. A Definitive Biography' in front of me. Slocum, the bibliographer, points to Gorman as the source for the name of the printer. It was Alleyn and O'Reilly, although Slocum say it was actually Alley and O'Reilly--'the firm...was traced through a series of mergers to the Temple Press; a director of this press stated that all records were destroyed during Easter Week in 1916.' Copies may have been lost during this 'rising' or rebellion that lasted from April 24 to April 30 mostly in Dublin, although someone somewhere is said to have seen the receipt. Slocum states that the pamphlet is mentioned in unpublished letters from Constantine P.Curran and P.S. O'Hegarty in the Slocum Library. I like Gorman's final words on the subject

'No copy of this juvenile outburst aginst injustice and treachery is known to exist but it is still possible that some fortunate explorer fumbling through yellowed pages in a neglected Dublin garret may chance upon this Joycian opus number one of the year 1891.'

The search goes on - how many unexplored, neglected Dublin garrets are left!?

Failiure Press, 1973 -1975? (Stephen Fry) 2

The solution to the clue 'the way someone uneducated smokes a cigar nonchalantly' (7 letters) is, of course, ABANDON. It was once considered vulgar or common to smoke a cigar with the band on, as it demonstrated how much you had paid for the cigar, an ungentlemanly thing. Hardened gamesters might get to that eventually but how about this? 'The Monroe Doctrine has bonus queen involved.' Solution = SARKI (H.H. Munro was Saki, add an R for Queen, duhhh.) Somewhat easier and with the Fry touch is 'Prep-schoolboys' bedroom has insects at one end - and yet they sleep! (7 letters.) Answer below.

Also elementary is 19 across 'Dial for Art' (DALI). He was very fond of anagrams and especially hard hidden ones-- try this - 'A short established rape: he likes a malenky malchick.' The answer, which doesn't exactly come like clockwork, is PEDERAST. The great Baron Corvo is honoured in this clue- 'the great man himself - with a bar on' (5 letters). An early love of wordplay is demonstrated in this marvellous clue - 'Take a sou from something wonderful and you get something metaphysical (7 letters). Answer below. A great writer that Fry was to play in a major motion picture is evoked in this clue ''The lady of the lake made hers famous, anyone keen on the popular Aestheticist' (2,5,5,3) Answer below.

I noted that this magazine 'The Failiure Press' has at its mast on the first issues 'incorporating Rat's Alley' and also freakishly 'incorporating Rat His Alley.' Presumably these were earlier emanations from the King's Lynn Corvines and echo the lines in The Waste Land -'I think we are in rat's alley, / Where the dead men lost their bones'. Google knows it not - but it will now.



Answers-- Dormant / Marvell /An Oscar Wilde Fan.

CODEX SERAPHINIANUS by Luigi Serafini (Seraphianus)

CODEX SERAPHINIANUS. Franco Maria Ricci, Milan 1981.

Current Selling Prices
$350-$750 /£200 - £400

ART /IMAGINARY WORLDS/ EXPERIMENTAL
Other wordly encyclopaedia in an unknown, imaginary language describing an arcane system of fantastical knowledge. A masterpiece of fantasy painstakingly illustrating a non-existent world and written in a non-existent language which seems to be a surrealist parody of our own world and is also a pastiche of Diderot's Encyclopaedia and illustrated antiquarian books of the 16th century and earlier. Created by Luigi Serafini, 'globetrotter and architect,' historian and gastronomer, set and costume designer, an industrial designer,a potter and a painter, and a writer of stories and articles. Also worked on design of Fellini's last film 'La Voce della Luna.' The book covers such topics as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, geometry, hairstyles, cards, flying machines, transport, chemical analyses, labyrinths, Babel, costumes, foods... Talking of Babel the intro is by Italo Calvino who proposes a deciphering machine - an idea regarded with amusement by Il Serafino. Great stuff - probably inspired by all the kerfuffle around the mysterious but probably fake Voynich Manuscript. Sometimes wrongly spelled Codex Seraphianus or Codex Serafini of Codex Serafianus...

VALUE? A book that used to be easily found and I wish I had kept a few. All editions, even latish reprints, seem to command at least a $100, the first US was by Abbeville in 1983 hard now to get at less than $250 and often more, but not scarce. There are about 6 different language editions, one of the few books where it doesn't matter too much. These came out in 1993 and were limited to 5000 some signed and go for $400+.

Finally the 1981 2 vol Italian FMR ed which sits on the web currently at $1800 with another at a vertiginous $5K (signed). Wacky book, wacky price. Stories of later eds going for a few hundred on ebay, ex lib and beat copies less. STOP PRESS. Initially posted Jan 07, since then the $5K one has disappeared and there are 2 signed ones of the 1981 edition limited to 4000 copies each in clamshell boxes at a steep $4000 and an equally decent one at $2000. Some unreconstructed dealers are still trying for $3500 + for the 1993 edition (available easily at minus $500) one with the shouted description '...beyond rare--a true cult classic in it's ultimate form::::::::::OVER-THE-TOP ===LIMITED EDITION. FINE CONDITION. CLOTH COVERED CLAMSHELL BOX HOLDS THE MAGNIFICENTLY HARDBOUND BOOK. BOARDS OF VOLUME ARE CLOTH COVERED, GILT, EMBOSSED AND HAS A GRAPHIC AFFIXED. SHOCKING REPRODUCTION QUALITY...' Shocking , I guess, is a good thing in the counter intuitive world of web bookselling; from here it sounds like 'appalling.' [ W/Q *** ]

Crook Frightfulness 1932, 1936. A Classic of Paranoia.

Crooks can hear your thoughts.
Stranglehold you by Ventriloquism.
Hold whole populations in service.





'A Victim'. CROOK FRIGHTFULNESS. Birmingham: Cornish, 1932; Birmingham: Moody Bros., revised edition, 1936.

Current Selling Prices
$100-$250 /£50-£120

ODDITY / BIZARRE BOOK /NARRATIVES OF MADNESS
A strange and slightly disturbing book with some laugh out loud passages. It tells of how a young man whose business was rent collecting in London's East End became the victim of of a life-long 'persecution' by crooks, even as he travelled round the world - persecution by muttering and whispering, staring, gassing, obscenities and 'Ventriloquial Terrorism.' The writer believed that his tormentors possessed a "stethoscope apparatus that enable[d] them to hear [his] thoughts". The subtitle of the book gives something of its flavour : "They are the most powerful, terrible and pitiless killers, cunning, amazingly and enormously treacherous." The first book I have done that is listed in the magisterial 'Bizarre Books' (Lake and Ash). They describe it thus:

"...Crook Frightfulness is the autobiography of a hunted man who believes himself to be continually hounded and molested by evil men, or 'crooks'. 'How was I to know that I had of my own violation opened the doors of Hell- to turn me from a cheery, care-free youth of 18 to a prematurely aged man, terrified by horrible men, threatening my sanity and life?' ...He also provides a detailed account of what he describes as 'ventriloquial terrorism', whereby '...a molestor using ventriloquism may be in a house or building or walking along in a tram or bus or in a car, yet he can throw his voice anywhere undetected by those who are near them.' This technique gives rise to various embarrassing experiences, including one where 'I had just bidden adieu to a friend on the Aberystwyth Marine Parade and had just turned away from him when I heard the words-"The old sod"- said in my voice tones too!' "

Copies of 'Fish Who Answer the Telephone and Other Bizarre Books' can be had at the Bizarre Books Website.

The book is listed at the excellent and comprehensive site Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness. Here are a sample of other titles in this fascinating field.

Davidson, D. Remembrances of a Religio-Maniac. Stratford-on-Avon, UK: Shakespeare, 1912.
Dawson, Jennifer. The Ha-Ha. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.
Gilbert, William. The Monomaniac, or Shirley Hall Asylum. New York: James G. Gregory, 1864.
Handler, Lowell. Twitch and Shout: A Touretter’s Tale. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Hewitt, Harald. From Harrow School to Herrison House Asylum. London: C. W. Daniel, 1923.
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Random House, 1993.
Kerkoff, Jack. How Thin the Veil: A Newspaperman's Story of His Own Mental Crackup and Recovery. New York: Greenberg, 1952.
Lowe, Louisa. The Bastilles of England; or The Lunacy Laws at Work. London: Crookenden, 1883.
----- A Nineteenth Century Adaptation of Old Inventions to the Repression of New Thoughts and Personal Liberty. London: Burns, 1872.
----- Gagging in Madhouses as Practised by Government Servants in a Letter to the People, by one of the Gagged. London: Burns, 1872.
Osborne, Luther. The Insanity Racket: A Story of One of the Worst Hell Holes in This Country. Oakland, CA: 1939.
Riviere, Pierre. I Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother . . .: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (ed.Michel Foucault; trans. from 1973 French ed.). New York: Random House, 1975.
Roberts, Marty. Sojourn in a Palace for Peculiars. New York: Carlton, 1970.
Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House, 1990.
Wannack [pseud.]. Guilty but Insane: A Broadmoor Autobiography. London: Chapman & Hall, 1931.

Of these I have read the novel 'The Ha Ha' and Styron's sympathetic account of a struggle with depression where he offers no easy remedy except time. The curious thing about the 'Crook Frightfulness' is that contemporary reviews of the book (to be found in the 1936 reprint which I have at my side) mostly took the book at face value, believing that gangs of criminals followed the man round the world muttering insults. A brief reading reveals that the writer is suffering from paranoia, with many sane interludes in which he describes his travels in New Zealand, the West Indies etc., One giveaway is that wherever he is in the world the threats (uttered by passers by, people on roofs, passing taxis) are almost all the same e.g.'English sod' 'bum shit' 'sod him out' 'pooped out of England' 'the British skunk' 'the white dude' 'the beast' etc., A review in the Hampshire Telegraph in 1935 notes 'Students of criminal methods should obtain this book...exciting reading..." Far more is known about mental conditions now, doubtless pills could be prescibed and the police might now be more sympathetic to his complaints--in the book he is continually being ejected from police stations or pointedly ignored.

VALUE? When I started out book collecting in the great barn of a shop in Reading (William Smith) I was looking for oddities like this and used to find copies of the book for about 25p (50 cents). It was not especially scarce and had something of a vogue among connoisseurs of the odd and downright strange. The only copy on the web at present is a ludicrous but not completely surreal price of $325 at Amazon. I bought a copy off a canny and costive Suffolk bookseller last year for £35 less 10% and resented it. Odd books are less fun if you have to pay through the nose for them. However it seems that the book has become difficult and a collector on the web at a record site values it at $200 with the following rant:

To take an example from the world of rare books, if you have the money I can get you a fine first edition in parts of David Copperfield tomorrow. It'll cost you a huge fucking bundle but all the really big dealers know where to get one (usually from each other). But I can't get you tomorrow a copy of CROOK FRIGHTFULNESS, a very very strange book privately published by a schizophrenic in the '20s. It's only worth a couple hundred dollars because only a few people know about it and want it, but it's a lot rarer than the David Copperfield. And to my mind it's just as interesting! Put simply, expensive and common are not opposing terms...

The first edition, according to a review in the reprint, has a 4 page leaflet accompanying it 'Ventriloquial Terrorism in 1932'. I have never seen this. The author suggests a counter active 'detector' is needed that 'will give the direction and distance that the ventriloquial voice derives from...' [ W/Q ** ]

John Lennon. Celebrities Choice. 1966.

(John Lennon & others.) CELEBRITIES CHOICE. National Book League, London 1966.

Current Selling Prices $100 + / £50+

PAMPHLET / CURIOSITY
It is always worth looking at pamphlets and thinnish wraps items as they can be rare and are often overlooked. There is at least one dealer who looks at nothing else. This piece from 1966 might attract attention because of the words 'celebrity' - the right contributors can make a pamphlet worth its weight in gold This one not only has a contribution by John Lennon but also Philip Larkin and Harold Pinter. I described the last one I saw thus:

'8vo. Illustrated wraps. pp 24. The favourite books of such diverse celebrities as John Lennon, Julie Christie, J. Paul Getty, Joyce Grenfell, Philip Larkin, Harold Pinter, Margery Allingham, Joan Sutherland, etc. John Lennon had chosen some interesting books. he has divided them into up to the age of 11 (Alice, Wind in Willows), teens (Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984, Sartre, Steinbeck, Thurber), from the age of 20 (De Sade, Heller, A.A. Milne, Alan Watts), current reading (Thomas Stanley, Pre-Roman Britain). Harold Pinter chooses 2 Becketts, a Donne, a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, and Kafka's The Castle. Philip Larkin as usual plumps for Barbara Pym...'

In Hunter Davies bio of the Fabs he notes that, of the Beatles, only Lennon had a proper collection of books--the only books I can recall Davies mentioning were 'The Mass Psychology of Fascism' and 'The Passover Plot.' I have also read somewhere he had a copy of 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds' - a book that if it was updated would have a chapter on the Beatles. Last week I met a woman in her early 60s who had known the boys in Liverpool in the Cavern days, she described John as short-sighted and consequently rather aloof, Paul as friendly - but all the girls loved George the most and, oddly enough, were also crazy about Pete Best who was considered very handsome. His good looks may have lead to his being edged out of the group...She was at the Cavern on the momentous day that Brian Epstein came to check them out. When, a little later, she turned up at a gig where all the fans were screaming the house down and you couldn't hear the music, she stopped following the group - sic transit gloria mundi...

VALUE? This has sold in the past for $120 and more and appears to be quite hard to find and is easy to miss. It has to be in very nice condition, pamplets often get creased and mangled. Once Beatle collectors have got all the major and minor books they start looking around for ephemeral stuff such as this, what in a bibliography would be a 'B' item (contributions to books.) I once saw a rather silly Beatle book going for £10--an attempted genealogy of the moptops that apparently was produced in a mere handful of copies --that must now be worth a goodly sum. There are also rarish opuscula on trivia such as the supposed death or disappearance of Paul...

Dean Koontz's lost novel 'Hung' ?

Current Selling Prices
$500-$1200? /£250-£600?

PULP FICTION/ PORN /ODDITY
A cheap paperback that is said to be by Dean Koontz and is, judging by the cover (not always wise) of a lewd, probably erotic nature. Also the title points that way. The blurb reads:-"THIS BOOK "SCANDALIZED" NEW YORK PUBLISHERS.  THEY WOULD NOT PRINT IT BECAUSE OF ITS SEXUAL CONTENT...BUT SEX IS YOUTH'S DEFENSE AGAINST THE VIOLENCE OF OUR TIMES; AND VIOLENCE IS ALL AROUND. HUNG! WILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE GRAPHIC STORY OF A SEXUALLY LIBERATED GENERATION." A true sleeper that in the Koontz world was, for a while, a jealously guarded secret. A serious collector on a Koontz site writes:

'...Since January 2001, I have been subjected to nasty emails, had my ethics questioned and been told that I am no fan of Dean Koontz. All of this came about because I was approached by someone who had located a paperback book called "Hung", written by Leonard Chris. and wanted to know if it was the same book which had been mentioned in the Katherine Ramsland biography.
After reading the entire text and comparing it with what little information was publicly known about the book, I was able to verify that it was the "lost" novel that Koontz himself had ADMITTED writing and, therefore "Leonard Chris" was the pseudonym Koontz had REFUSED to acknowledge. I was ecstatic because I now knew that pseudonym.

As a long-time collector of Dean Koontz novels, I felt a responsibility to make that information available to other Koontz fans. There is, however, an elite group of Koontz collectors who believe that the fans should not be given this information, presumably because these collectors have searched long and hard for "Hung" (as well as other titles which Koontz is alleged to have written under other as-yet unacknowledged pseudonyms) , and they wish to be able to obtain these books from unsuspecting individuals at lower prices. I'm no knight in shining armor, folks, but that strikes me as just plain WRONG...'

He cocludes by saying that it is possible that DK himself did not want his authorship revealed. The significant thing here is that he has not disowned the book which means it is probably by him - although the above writer does not actually say how he knows from reading the book that Koontz was the author. One assumes the style or phrasing or ideas in it are uniquely Koontzian--possibly some tricks of description, oddities of language, sentence structure etc., External info and hearsay may also play a part...

A similar thing happened with the Lovejoy writer Jonathan Gash - he was said to have ghostwritten the 1959 Bodley Head book 'Streetwalker' - an anonymous autobiography of a London prostitute. The book (not scarce) was changing hands at £100+ until Gash publicly stated he didn't write the book. Similarly in the 1930s Graham Greene was said to have co-ghosted (with Ronald Mathews) another autobiography of a London prostitute ' To Beg I am Ashamed'. This has been fairly roundly disproved although it is possible he may have had a hand in revising it. Copies of the London and Paris firsts can still command $1000 but do not sell with any alacrity - as they did when there was no doubt in the matter.



The reaction of these Koontz collectors to the revealing of hidden, secret knowledge seems almost quaint in these Google days. In my trade many dealers tried to hold on to hard won information about rarities - price guides were scorned and it was considered sacrilege to sell a customer a copy of 'Book Auction Records.' Even before the net this was all falling apart. My opinion is that there will always be 'sleepers' and great finds, because the ocean of information is so vast that no one person, or even groups of experts in half moon specs, will ever master a significant part of it.

VALUE? The Koontz scholar quoted above (to be found at Angelfire ) is investigating the authorship of more than ten other novels published under several other pseudonyms which he believes may have been written by the great man. In an article Dean Koontz wrote for ENREGUMEN 8, a fanzine published in 1971, he admits to writing 30 pornographic books to build a "healthy bank account." This could be something of a minefield but copies of this unassuming, slightly lurid paperback are pretty scarce. There are no copies for sale and none seem to have passed through ebay. Koontz wrote another book in 1970 for sleaze publisher Cameo under his and his wife Gerda's name (said to have been a printer's mistake) 'Bounce Girl' - a copy of this resides on Ebay as a Buy it Now at $1995. Possibly a chancer's price; so far no one has pressed the buy button. Extrapolating from this I am tempted to say $1000 and I'll stick with that. A lot of people want this book. [ W/Q *** ]

A "Ghost" -- a priceless book / Lost in the Wilds

This is a book I do not possess and never will. Sounds useful if you are lost in the jungle after your light aircraft has had to make a forced landing.

D. Croyle. LOST IN THE WILDS. No place. No date. (1997)

Current Selling Prices
$0000 / £0000


ODDITY / GHOST
A much wanted book that doesn't actually exist. There are about 40 people waiting to be quoted it at abebooks.com and several elsewhere. The book is seen being read by billionaire magazine publicist billionaire Charles Morse (Anthony Hopkins) at the beginning of the 1997 movie 'The Edge.' It appears to be a book about survival in the wilderness but was mocked up by the props department (the director's assistant was a chap called Darragh Croyle.) The book is never seen after Morse's plain crashes in the woods and would have been kind of useful. Google reveals one bloke who wants the book for his son's school work. The book is what is known in the trade as a 'ghost.' This is usually a work announced as a forthcoming book that never gets published. In the case of the faked up book 'Flyfishing' by J R Hartley, featured in a UK Yellow Pages ad, it became so famous that someone actually wrote and published the book.



VALUE? Priceless. For everything else there is Visa. The curious thing is that one site says it is a small yellow book that costs $75 and BibliOz lists it but with no details. The book has as a sort of half life-- as befits a ghost. No ISBN as yet. BTW if you are lost in the wilds, especially the bush there is a book by one Alan Fry (Toronto 1981) that covers most eventualities: ' Survival in the wilderness : a practical, all-season guide to traditional woodlore and survival techniques for hikers, skiers, backpackers, canoeists, travellers in light aircraft, and anyone stranded in the bush.'

Trivia. The working title of the movie was 'The Bookworm' and the film begins with Morse being presented with a 'beautiful' book (I think it's this Croyle ghost) and as someone says at the Stanford student discussion site:

' Our friend the billionaire happens to love books; moreover, his knowledge of things (he really knows EVERYTHING) comes only from books and, although theoretical, his knowledge will probably save them (no, I will not tell you the end).'

Must see this movie, it sounds anti-book, which is very much the spirit of our times. Don't be fooled however - everything is in books (except this one.)

Fumes of Formation. Amanda M. Ros, 1933

Amanda M. Ros. FUMES OF FORMATION. R. Carswell & Son, Belfast. 1933.

Current Selling Prices
$300-$500 /£150-£250


LITERATURE /POETRY / ODDBALLIANA
A scarce 44 page book by the extraordinary Amanda Ros. 2000 copies were printed but only 160 bound up; the remaining sets of sheets were destroyed. It never had a jacket, 100 had rounded spines, 60 had flat spines. Flat is best. A collection of poems, whose source the author describes in a note on the title-page: ''This inventive production was hatched within a mind fringed with Fumes of Formation, the Ingenious Innings of Inspiration and Thorny Tincture of Thought.''

Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860 - 1939) is still something of a cult. She is often cited with William McGonagall as an amazingly bad writer. However whereas WM was simply a thumpingly awful writer, Ros could occasionally turn out magical lines such as her dismissal of the critic D.B. Wyndham Lewis as '...a thick-witted, evil-minded snapshot of spleen.' In describing the gilded young hustlers whom she imagined flaunted along the streets of London she wrote:

'Their hair was a light-golden colour, thickly fringed in front, hiding in many cases the furrows of a life of vice; behind, reared coils, some of which differed in hue, exhibiting the fact that they were on patrol for the price of another supply of dye.... The elegance of their attire had the glow of robbery - the rustle of many a lady's silent curse. These tools of brazen effrontery were strangers to the blush of innocence that tinged many a cheek, as they would gather round some of God's ordained, praying in flowery words of decoying Cockney, that they should break their holy vows by accompanying them to the halls of adultery. Nothing daunted at the staunch refusal of different divines, whose modest walk was interrupted by their bold assertion of loathsome rights, they moved on, while laughs of hidden rage and defeat flitted across their doll-decked faces...'

Aldous Huxley wrote that the above passage is in the very spirit and language of John Lyly's 'Euphues' (1578.) Through her intense solipsism and isolation from current literary thought Amanda Ros had arrived 300 years later at the exact stage of development as Lyly and his disciples- 'We see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented...'

Fans include Twain, Huxley, Auden, Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Frank Muir and C. S. Lewis. Powell said of her -'She may be a long way from Shakespeare, but she partakes in however infinitely minute a degree, of the Shakespearian power of language.' The Inklings who would meet at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford for readings of her work - playing a sort of game of trying to keep a straight face for more than a minute while reading from her works and downing pints. Earlier a club of London men of letters (including Lord Beveridge, Desmond MacCarthy, E.V. Lucas and F.Anstey) met specifically to exchange the most ludicrous examples of her work that they could find.In a late interview with the BBC she was asked why she named a villain Lord Raspberry. It is reported that: 'Mrs. Ros put down her teacup with a startled air. "What else should I have called him?" she said.'

VALUE? You could probably build a complete Amanda Ros collection for $1000, for a £1000 they would all be in super condition with the occasional presentation and even signed letter. For £5000 you would be the Roman Abramovich of Ros collectors with a few manuscripts, early jackets and variants, proof copies, portaits, photos and scarce ephemera. There is a ceiling on value and a limited (but keen) coterie of collectors--she is not Sylvia Plath; for the truly borassic collector of Ms. Ros there is a good guide on the web - 'A Pauper's Guide to collecting her works' at Oasis of Futurity ('A Shrine to the Late-Lamented Amanda McKittrick Ros.') Her rarest items are probably the 2 broadsheets from 1915 and 1916 - 'Kaiser Bill' and 'A Little Belgian Orphan' (signed pseudonymously Monica Mayland.) St. Scandalbags (1954) is difficult, as is Poems of Puncture - published by the vanity press Arthur H. Stockwell in 1913. We sold Frank Muir's copy of this (with a few corrections by Ms Ros) in 2005 at £150. Frank had a lot of her books and knew her biographer Jack Loudan. At a London book fair in June 1973 a completist collection formed by a founder of the British Communist Party, one David Mercer of Thames Ditton, was offered by dealer Alf Wallis at £4500 - it contained many manuscripts, letters and rarities. Possibly not a great investment, 34 years later we have less of a taste for oddities, whimsy and weirdness. [ W/Q * ]

One of her rarest books is 'Bayonets of Bastard Sheen ( 50 copies only in 1949). It was culled from letters written between 1927 and 1939 mostly vituperations against critics + a short piece 'Lewis Carroll. A Hasty Evaluation' prompted by the price of £15,400 paid by Dr. Rosenbach for the manuscript. She takes a very dim view of the Carroll book in several letters. Here is a list of her synonyms for critics:

Apprentices to the scathing trade
Auctioneering agents of Satan
Brain-blighters
Brain-bruisers
Character-clipping-combination
Clay-crabs of corruption
Conglomeration of braying opinions
Cornerboy shadows of criticism
Critic cads
Critic Crabs
Critic Curs
Crowdrops
Crows
Denunciating Arabs
Drunken ignorant dross
Egotistical earth-worms
Egotistic atoms
Evil-minded snapshots of spleen
Gang of drunken swags
Gas-bag section
Genius-beetlers
Genius-scathers
Half-starved upstarts
Hogwashing hooligans
Intelligibles of bad-breeding
Maggoty numskulls
Maggoty throng
Mushroom class of idiotics
Mushroom class of talent twisters
Poisonous apes
Poking hounds
Poor apes
Public character-tearers
Raging roughs
Random hacks of illiteration
Rodents of State
Scandalizers of books
Scandalmongering critics
Scathers of genius
Scathing circle
Scorchers of rare talent
Scribblers of thick witted type
Scurrilous scribes
Self-opinionated mortals
Starving critic cads
Street Arabs
Talent-pickers
Talent wipers of a wormy order
Tree of rebuff

Rave on, O rare Amanda!

Gadsby. A Story of Over 50.000 Words Without Using the Letter E. 1939

After surfboards and Booker novels something truly odd and rather rare. When I first came into the trade (around the time when Sweet were singing 'Ballroom Blitz' and footballers had long sideburns) a lot of people wanted strange and odd books, the more outlandish the better - now they all want 'The Man with the Golden Gun' and they want look under the wrapper to see if the embossed gilt gun is there. * Sic transit gloria mundi. However all is not lost, a veritable barmy army want Gadsby...

Ernest Vincent Wright. GADSBY. A STORY OF OVER 50,000 WORDS WITHOUT USING THE LETTER E. Wetzel, Los Angeles, 1939.

Current Selling Prices
$4000 / £2200 Want level 50 - 75 High


EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / ODDBALLIANA
A literary curiosity and a legendary rarity. Much sought after. The author E.V. Wright (1872-1939) wrote Gadsby in five and a half months, on a typewriter with the e tied down, "so that none of that vowel might slip in, accidentally". He finished his work about the middle of February 1937, and the typescript was illustrated in The Los Angeles times on 24 March. After seeking a publisher for 2 years Wright finally settled on a vanity press in LA. It is said that the publication of Gadsby coincided exactly with the author's death on 7 October 1939; however a copy is known with an inscription dated two months earlier and the copyright-deposit copy was received five months later. From the introduction:

"People as a rule will not stop to realize what a task such an attempt actually is. As I wrote along, in long-hand at first, a whole army of little E's gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called upon. But gradually as they saw me writing on and on, without even noticing them, they grew uneasy; and, with excited whisperings amongst themselves, began hopping up and riding on my pen, looking down constantly for a chance to drop off into some word; for all the world like seabirds perched, watching for a passing fish! But when they saw that I had covered 138 pages of typewriter size paper, they slid onto the floor, walking sadly away, arm in arm; but shouting back: "You certainly must have a hodge-podge of a yarn there without *us*! Why, man! We are in every story ever written *hundreds of thousands of times! This is the first time we ever were shut out!.."

A book much admired by the Pataphysicians and Oulipans esp Perec and Queneau who both searched for copies. The rarity is due to one of those warehouse fires that so frequently occur in the history of unfindable books (Nabokov's Despair, Beckett's Murphy, Moby Dick and Forster's Alexandria to name a few -- enemy action is also a great rarity creator...) Wetzel's novelty warehouse went up in a mighty blaze (a fireman died) along with most copies of the ill fated novel, it was never reviewed and only kept alive by the efforts of a few avant garde French intellos and assorted connoisseurs of the odd, weird and zany. It has been reprinted this century. Perec, of course,also wrote an e-less book 'La Disparition' (Paris 1969). Possibly in honour of Gadsby it was also 50,000 words. These books with grammatical restrictions are now known aa 'Lipograms'. Perec's work was translated into English sans e's as "A Void' by the brave Gilbert Adair.

VALUE? 'Gadsby' first editions occasionally surface, seldom in sparkling condition and for jacketless copies dealers tend to try for about $4000 to $5000, less for ropy ones. A reasonable jacketless first sold in early 2006 for $3000. An unpleasant sounding defective copy is listed at £850, signed by the author's sister. A nice copy wearing jacket might go ballistic but interest in such curiosities tends to be among persons unburdened with large amounts of cash, so who knows?

*In re the golden gun under the d/w: Mostly it is not present because the printers ran into production problems but it is said 400 got through with the embossed golden gun on the cover and it can add a £2000 or more to the price, good hunting!