Billy Childish. The First Creatcher is Jellosey, 1981.

Billy Childish. THE FIRST CREATCHER IS JELLOSEY. Phyroid Press, Chatham, 1981.

Current Selling Prices
$400-$900 /£200-£450

POETRY / ART/ POST PUNK
Billy Childish's books, the valuable early ones, mostly look like fanzines - cheaply home printed, stapled with b/w photos and drawings-- some of Childish and his erstwhile consort Tracey Emin. Tracey has gone on to make Rolls Royce money, Billy is still madly productive but more of a cult than a celebrity. However his books are very saleable with a fanbase all over the globe (inc China) and his works sell with alacrity unless you put 'stopper' prices on them. One used to find them in the collections of fellow poets and artists and Childish mailed a certain amout out to critics etc., We got a box full from the collection of the late Jeff Nuttall when he was moving house. All have now sold. The only thing I have left is a broadsheet blutaked to the wall of a room full of book boxes at our warehouse--it lists 24 books of the Phyroid Press 1978 - 1982 with the above title (spelled here as Jellosy) the penultimate. It also lays down some ground rules when dealing with the esteemed publishing house:-

'1. Do not swager yu bollocks when you come in
and dont give us any arty shit
yu will resive a brocken jaw and apendiges pretty qwick
2. If yu bottle out n turn out to be a whimpy one
we will not give you respect
infact we will do you down.
3. Do not talk of CND feminism or any of
that crap or we will bust yu lip

We talk the strong langwige that only children can bear
we drink neat carosean n smoke full strength navi-cut
our noses are smokeing chimny stacks
they fall over and crush yu wife and kids

We feed on boil pork n black cocain...'

This was obviously not Sidgwick and Jackson but Childish (with his cohort Sexton Ming) produced a good body of work from their Chatham / Gravesend residences that is now seriously collected to be continued

Hill. Mercian Hyms, 1971. (R.I.P. Peter Jolliffe)

"King of the perennial holly- groves, the riven sand- stone: overlord of the M5 : architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross : guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge : contractor to the desirable new estates : saltmaster : money- changer : commisioner for oaths : martyrologist : the friend of Charlemagne.

'I liked that', said Offa, 'sing it again.'"

Geoffrey Hill. MERCIAN HYMNS. Andre Deutsch, London 1971.

Current Selling Prices
$550 - $1000 /£270-£500

POETRY
I found this book at the bottom of a box this New Year morning. I had read it before in paperback -a collection of 30 prose hymns, the first of which is quoted above. A superb achievement by Hill, possibly his finest work; I had not realised its value until I checked it out and was surprised to find no copy less than $640 and a signed presentation from the author to my old professor at Southampton, the fine Catholic poet F.T. Prince at $2000+. A nice find. The point about the book that most sellers emphasise is that the boards have a tendency to splay and unsplayed copy are prized. Mine was almost completely unsplayed, joy of joys.

Whether people step forward eager to buy at £300 is another matter. I am a believer in the old bookseller's maxim 'the right price is the wrong price' and feel that very clean copies probably sells at between £200 and £300 and higher priced copies sit on the web for long tranches of time. It was a rather sad book to find as formerly I would have quoted it to friend and colleague Peter Jolliffe of Ulysses who died over Christmas.

Peter was a great dealer, a good poet himself and coincidentally a great admirer of Geoffrey Hill. His favourite poet was probably W.S Graham. He was honest, highly intelligent (Oxford) had great integrity and a sweet nature. A little shy and extremely modest - he was not one of those Oxford guys who keeps reminding you that he went there. He was not old and his health had been compromised for a long time but he had soldiered on uncomplainingly in his Museum street shop. A natural stoic (except in the case of a book missed from a catalogue!) I have an abiding memory of him staying the night at a house my wife and I had rented in the Aptos Hills about 1995 - I offered Peter the sofa but in the morning I found him asleep sitting up in an armchair with a sort of beatific look on his face. As I recall we set off on the morning tide to scout Monterey and Pacific Grove (via Moss landing where Peter hit a good shelf of poetry and bought some of them from an old lady bookseller who had never heard of Larkin, Betjeman or Heaney.) Last word to Geoffrey Hill for Peter -- from the 24th Mercian hymn - "'Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum' dust in the eyes, on clawing wings, and lips."

Adios Peter - for the moment the great world of books feels hollow and flat without you.

The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot 1922 / 1923

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu
Unreal City



T. S. Eliot. THE WASTE LAND. Boni & Liveright, NY 1922 / Hogarth Press, London 1923.

Current Selling Prices
$2500-$10000 /£1200-£5000


MODERN FIRST EDITION / POETRY
The most famous long poem of the 20th century. Seen by many (inc Cyril Connolly) as the greatest triumph of literary modernism. There is a scene in the TV version of Brideshead where the effete Anthony Blanche proclaims the poem through a megaphone to his languid fellow students at Oxford - 'o o O that Shakespehearian Rag- It's so elegant /So intelligent ' - the scene gives an idea how the poem was received at the time. The anthem of a generation. Waugh took the title of his novel 'A Handful of Dust' from the poem. An old poet I used to buy books from (George Barker) had known the great man when he worked at Faber. He said that Eliot told him that when he wrote 'The Waste Land' he always had the seedy Praed street area of Paddington in mind. Not so shabby now but there are still vestiges of it's former squalor.

The Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas, endowed with billions, has the dedication copy (below) as well as Evelyn Waugh's entire library (4000 books) + Joyce's library from Trieste (632 books) +Coleridge Family library, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Wyndham Lewis, J. Frank Dobie, Christopher Morley, Sir Compton Mackenzie and Oliver La Farge.

The poem was first published, without the author's notes, in the first issue (October 1922) of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot. The first appearance of the poem in the USA was in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine (actually published in late October). Both periodicals have sold for over $1000 each at ebay - they love literary periodicals there. In December 1922, The Waste Land was published in the US in book form by Boni and Liveright, the first publication to print the notes. It is said they were demanded by the publisher to bulk the book out a bit.

In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's London champions Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in an edition of about 450 copies, the type handset by Virginia Woolf. (She wrote in August 1923: 'I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliots poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles'.) Some copies have hand written corrections by her.

The Boni NY edition was 1000 copies, the first 500 being bound in the publisher's flexible black cloth, the remaining 500 or so copies of the first edition were bound in a more solid cloth. The first issue has a dropped “a” in mountain on page 41. In the second sate 'mountain' reads 'mount in' a misprint that persists in the quite valuable NY 1923 second edition.

VALUE? Both the US and the UK are basically $10,000 / £5000 if in decent condition. No jacket assumed on the US edition, (although it can have one.) Copies in compromised condition can be had in the low thousands. The 1971 signed limited Faber edition in vellum (300 copies only) printed by Giovanni Mardersteig on the hand-press of the Officina Bodoni in Verona goes for circa £2000 in nice nick and has been that price for a decade. The Duke of Windsor's copy made $3000 at the Al Fayed sale in Paris. The preferred edition aesthetically is the rather fragile UK edition from Hogarth Press (1923) although it doesn't tend to last well so that clean intact copies are valuable. Many copies have been sophisticated or restored.

A copy turned up at a US book fair around the turn of the century inscribed by Eliot thus "au grande poète français Paul Valéry hommages de l'auteur T. S. Eliot. 1.xi.23.". It had been brought over by a very high end Parisian dealer and was snapped up at circa $10,000 and winged it's way around the fair adding $10K or more each time. It made $95,000 at the Rechler sale and was last seen at $250,000, about what it takes to stop it selling entirely. Another copy presented by Eliot to Geoffrey Faber with a great inscription in Italian (from Dante) can be had for £85K, another inscribed to Richard Aldington with a few corrections made £90,000 in 2001. Nice copies of the US first in jackets have made as much as $45,000 in auction this century. The outlook is probably healthy, there won't be a TV series or a George Clooney movie but unless we are in for some apocalyptic dumbing down it will always be known and celebrated as the supreme achievement of 20th century poetry.

The text can be found online sometimes with extensive annotations e.g. at the Tripod site. However clicking on the links in the poem takes one to commercial sites - when you click on 'Starnbergersee' in line 9 it tries to book you a holiday in Bavaria; I guess these academic sites have to pay for themselves.

My Edens After Burns. Val Kilmer.

Much sought after and much desired item - because it is by a movie star, and one with a more than usually dedicated fan base. He also probably inherited a few Jim Morrison devotees + some comic book afficionados and even followers of 'The Saint.' Possibly they used to follow Roger Moore... His book of poems is an Ebay blue riband item and, if you find one at a yard sale for a buck, stick a fork in yourself...you're done.

Val Kilmer. MY EDENS AFTER BURNS. Blue Feather Press, Wildomar, California, 1987 ISBN 0932482201

Current Selling Prices
$1000-$1500 /£500- £750

MOVIES / POETRY
Self-published collection of poetry - most of it written between Val's years at Juilliard (including the poem SAND which he read during his interview with Inside The Actor's Studio) and the filming of WILLOW. One of the poems is about his relationship with Michelle Pfeiffer called 'The Pfeiffer Howls At The Moon.' Val emotes - "Poetry is a very subjective and intimate expression. It's literally your heartbeat. Your rhythm. The song of your soul. It's super-concentrated. It's a dense piece of yourself." Strangely Michelle P also enjoyed a relationship with the other and first modern age Batman, Michael Keaton.

The book was originally supposed to be a kind of Christmas present, and available in limited quantities to the public. He quickly decided to buy all of the either 2,000 or 5,000 (numbers vary) copies that were printed and that hadn't been sold, and he only gave those copies to close friends. The rest he has said that he stores in his garage. This is very common with self published books, but the usual reason is that no one wants to read the book or has heard of it. He is said to have given copies away at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1988. Can find no samples of VK's poems online and VK fan sites either don't have it or are too respectful to publish them. On Amazon a fan says that she would buy the book (at $1200) but 'I would be intruding into the author's personal life, subverting his original intentions, and violating his boundaries. I have to stick to my values...' Uncommonly noble, almost unique sentiments.

The only thing I could find were some lyrics apparently penned by Kilmer for a loosely knit rock group he occasionally sings with:“One more mortal has let me down/ I’m alone with my rhyming/in an unknown town/alone with poetry and foreign football on hotel/television/and text messages from a troubled kept woman.” Not unworthy of the late great Jim-Jim, bringing to mind his eerie lyric 'Cars Hiss by my Window.'

His creative writing talents were also expressed in a documentary that he made entitled JOURNEY TO VICTORY a.k.a. JOURNEY TO MAGMA . Val describes it as "not so much to do with nuclear weapons as it is to do with people and their hopes and fears for the future. That inevitably has to do with whether there will actually be an earth, but it's not as widely prejudiced like most of the documentaries I've seen on the nuclear issue. They seem to go completely one way or the other, either pro or anti, which makes both arguments as bad as each other. Hopefully, this will bridge the gap a little, and there's a great sense of fearlessness which I hope comes across in the film, as these people have such a strong conviction that there are answers to these seemingly unanswerable questions."

Kilmer is a distant relative of the well known US poet Joyce Kilmer ( 1886 - 1918, a man - Val shares with him a Unisex moniker.) Last year he helped AMERICAN FORESTS plant its 20 millionth tree and gave a reading of his kinsman's deathless 1913 'Trees' poem

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

VALUE? (Updated Aug/2007) You can buy copies, pretty decent ones, even signed, at between $1200 and $1500 although an unfortunate nutso wants $7000 copies for a copy that has been there since before Google was invented. (Now taken down and put away in a skybox with other non existent items.) It has made as much as $4000 on ebay and might do again if an ebay person didn't check ABE or Amazon or the copies there sold. Ebayers frequently do not check anywhere else, and do not know any other book site than Amazon- this leads to freak results and happy sellers. It should be noted that the $1200+ copies have been there for many months and possibly copies sell at less than this on a regular basis, leading to the conclusion that $1200 is the price that it doesn't sell at. Some dealers are always searching for this price, the golden mien, and are mortified if the book sells. The right price is the wrong price. [ W/Q ****]

Bear in mind all the copies in Val's garage. Possibly yesterday's book - a financial graph of recent prices would show a slight downward sweep; but Kilmer is a magic name...want level is high. No copies available now at less than $1200 and oddly all are signed. (Our photo below shows the poet Joyce Kilmer. He was killed at the Second Battle of Marne in 1918 at the age of 31. His 1911 book of verse was called 'Summer of Love'.)

Robert Frost. A Boy's Will. 1913.

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

(My November Guest / 1913)



Robert Frost. A BOY"S WILL. London: David Nutt 1913.


Current Selling Prices
$1000-$7500 /£500-£3800

POETRY / AMERICAN LITERATURE
The author's first book published in England where the 40 year old poet was living in a Bungalow at Beaconsfield. He had published an earlier work in 1894 called 'Twilight. Five Poems' in an edition of 2 copies one for his future bride, Elinor White, and one for himself. He destroyed his own copy. The remaining copy is at the University of Virginia. R B Russell ('First Edition Pricess 2006/7') helpfully values it at £35000. It would take a strange set of events for it to be offered for sale but RBR's estimate might be a tad cautious.

Frost is closely linked with the New England region, he attempted to catch 'the abstract vitality of our speech' in his poetry. However his first two collections were published in London - A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). He and his wife and children had moved to England in 1912 after he had been unable to make a living in a variety of occupations (including cobbling) or to find a publisher for his poems in America. Through his friendship with the Imagist poet F. S. Flint he made important contacts in London like Ezra Pound, Edward Thomas, T. E. Hulme and Georgian poets like Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson --these were essential to Frost's publishing success. Books of poetry were usually reviewed by critics who know the author (then and now.)

When Ezra Pound's favourable review of A Boy's Will appeared in 'Poetry: A Magazine of Verse' in May of 1913, Frost reacted with mixed emotions. He knew that Pound's review would be crucial in influencing other critics in England, but he disagreed with Pound's assessment of his poetry as simple and untutored. Norman Douglas wrote, in a review, of his 'simple woodland philosopy' but there was a darker side to his poems, a combative and troubled spirit--Lionel Trilling famously called him 'a poet of terror' at a speech given on Frost's 85th birthday.

A Boy's Will is not especially scarce but there are 4 distinct states of the first London, David Nutt edition, and the first state has become hard to find and quite valuable. The 4 states are A. Bronze cloth (above). B. Cream coloured vellum paper covered boards stamped in red. C. Cream coloured linen paper wraps, stamped in black and 8 petalled flowers. D. Cream coloured linen paper wraps, stamped in black and 4 petalled flowers. There is also a signed limited edition of 135 in cream wraps. As so often with 'points' it comes down to minutiae like the number of petals on a flower. After releasing fewer than 350 copies, the book's publisher, David Nutt, went into bankruptcy after the First World War and the remaining unbound sheets were acquired by Simpkin Marshall & Co. In 1923, most of the sheets and some bound copies were purchased by Dunster House Bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those copies bound in binding variant D were thought to have been sold by Dunster House and tend to show up in the United States.

VALUE? A fine first state copy inscribed to Eleanor Farjeon is currently on the market at $30K possibly the kind of price it takes to stop it selling entirely. Eleanor Farjeon was a close friend of Edward Thomas who Frost described as 'my only brother' and it is a fine association of which much can be made. Mostly Frost prices seem to have flatlined a little since the 1990s. At the Drapkin sale where many prices went radio rental (mainly on account of the finely wrought boxes) the desirable one of 135 signed in an elaborate quarter morocco folding case with onlaid cloth and leather design made $1920, the kind of price it had been making 20 years earlier. A perusal of terrestrial auction records shows an above average number of 'buy-ins'- but poetry has always been a hard sell. Signed copies are not at all scarce but attract the highest prices--in 2001 a copy in the A binding (lower cover cockled at top outer corner) inscribed to Marie A. Hodge made £8K (then $12000.) There are usually plenty at ABE to get a fix on prices but remember they are the ones that haven't sold. [ W/Q * ]

TRIVIA. Frost was keen on all the fruits of his late fame including the honour of reading at Kennedy's inauguration--of this Edmund Wilson bitchily remarked - 'He seems to have taken up residence in Washington and is all over the place, full of faking and self - satisfaction. He wanted us to know he was a shrewd old boy - though obviously eating up the the honors being paid him by the President...'



Too many awards, gongs and sashes are unsuitable for writers and poets. The classic case is the unsaleable French writer Andre Maurois who could hardly move for medals and our own tuft hunter Stephen Spender. Donald Hall weighs in- 'For him, as he liked to say, there was room for only one at the top of the steeple: he demanded to be the only one. He was jealous of all other poets.' These quotes are from the excellent 'Bedside Book of Bigheads', my new bible. To be fair however, Frost, one of the greatest American poets, was a mere novice among writers when it comes to conceit.

Dr. Trelawney unmasked-- Aleister Crowley and Dr. Philip Oyler

Philip Oyler. SCARLYN. E. S. Fowler, Eastbourne (1911)

Current Selling Prices
$80-$120 /£40-60

POETRY / MYSTICISM
A small thin 28 page book of poems. The poems are of a pantheistic, Theosophical bent and are by a young man who went on to live a long life as an educationalist, Utopian, 'New Lifer' , country writer and 'Prophet of the Soil.' He was also an inspiration for the mystic and mage Dr Trelawney - a recurrent character in Anthony Powell's roman fleuve 'A Dance to the Music of Time' . Tim D'Arch Smith, in the revised edition of his excellent work 'The Books of the Beast' has a chapter on Dr. Trelawney ('thaumaturge and seer') where he draws parallels with Aleister Crowley and Powell's fictional creation. At that point Powell, much amused, wrote to Tim D'Arch Smith and said that Crowley was indeed an inspiration but he also used a certain Dr. Oyler. He notes in his journal for 4/8/88 that Oyler was-

''...an earlier avatar...who used to lead his mob of children in Grecian costume in runs across Grayshott Common, when we lived at Stonedene just before the First War. I have come across references to Oyler occasionally (I foolishly did not note them down.) He was just as described in 'The Kindly Ones' with a touch of Crowley added...'

Until I found that Dr.Oyler was also known as Philip Oyler (1880-1973) I could find little on him. But as Philip Oyler he is reasonably well known especially as a country writer - his 1950 book on farm life in the Dordogne 'The Generous Earth' is regarded as a minor classic and came out in Penguin in 1961. He seems to have inspired the earlier incarnation of Dr. Trelawney. The later Dr T is a darker figure, owing much more to Crowley - at one point in 'Music of Time' he is hounded by the 'Sunday papers' after a devotee had fallen to her death at a temple Trelawney had set up in remote North Wales '...there was talk of nameless rites, drugs, disagreeable forms of discipline...'

Oyler wrote an earlier work before the slim volume of verse 'Scarlyn' that is rarer (but not, as yet, valuable) - 'Invitation to the Woods' published by Henry J Drane in 1910. At 175 pages it is probably not verse but may be a 'back to nature' polemic. Drane is a fascinating publisher of odd books, many of which are now very thin on the ground - they published Edward Heron-Smith and Edgar Saltus among others. Oyler contributed to various theosophical and New Age / New Life magazines at this time including 'The Path' and 'The Adyar Bulletin.'

In 1912 he wrote an article on 'Education from a Universal Standpoint' for 'Freewoman.' He then seems to have founded a (progressive) school at Headley Down in Hampshire known as 'the Morshin School.' From here he published 'non cranky' books on diet and well-being such as ' Simple Rules of Health'. For some reason this is still mentioned on the net as '3d. net. Post free from the author, Morshin School, Headley, Hants' as if you could still send (or Paypal) 3d (about 6 cents) to him. He was instrumental in bringing Rutland Boughton's music festival to Glastonbury from Letchworth. This flourished from 1914 to 1926.

Oyler nexts turns up in the 1940s near Sarlat in the Dordogne where he buys a farm and discovers a vanished pastoral world and becomes something of an advocate for the soil, for an acre of land for every countryman and other Utopian ideas. His books 'The Generous Earth and 'Son of the Generous Earth' are about his experiences there. He was a neighbour of Delius whom he saw often and his last recorded writing is a piece on the great composer published in 1972. He is mentioned, even in 2007, in holiday brochures and estate agents sites about this still wonderful area. He is unknown to the DNB and Wikipedia.

VALUE? This little book of poems, 'Scarlyn', which started me on this quest, is very hard to find but, sadly, not easy to sell. A dealer would probably hold out for at least £40 because there are seldom any copies for sale and it is likely to be the only one on the net. 'Scarlyn' appears to be a sort of beautiful seer wandering with his love 'deep set in thought,/...in the elfin autumn woods...' The book is illustrated with drawings of trees and windswept landscape by R. Wheatcroft and dedicated to 'My Mother-- who does not know me.' A sample of the verse - possibly the kind of thing he would have addressed to his followers on the downs:

'Walk circumspectly. Day is wrapped about
With night, and all we know is still no more
Than all we say is all of that we feel.
The past is Now, Now is eternity.
Our soul-life is in it, and when we live it
We are in it too. What the past aspired
To be, we are...'

Step aside Eckhart Tolle. Lastly one wonders whether Oyler, like Crowley and Dr T, had some sort of mystical greeting:- with the Great Beast it was, of course, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' to which the only response was 'Love is the Law, Love under Will.' Trelawney's was 'The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True' to which the correct response was the splendid 'The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.' Trelawney's pronouncement on death, later echoed by Scorpio Murtlock his sinister latterday follower / reincarnation in the hippie era, has the Oyler touch - 'There is no Death in nature, only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation...'

Lytton Strachey and friends. Euphrosyne. A Collection of Verse. 1905

Anonymous. [Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney - Turner, Clive Bell, Walter Lamb and Leonard Woolf & others.] EUPHROSYNE. A COLLECTION OF VERSE. Elijah Johnson, Cambridge 1905.



Current Selling Prices
£1500 / $3000


POETRY / BLOOMSBURY
Large 8vo. 90 pages. Ur Bloomsbury. Poetry in a ninetyish style with an interesting long poem ‘At the Other Bar’ about a a disappointed drunk and other poems on 'Dreamland', 'Water Spirits' 'The Trinity Ball' 'Andromeda' etc., The poem 'The Cat' is known to be by Strachey as are a few others, the poem 'Song' by Lamb is addressed to a Duchess. A collection of verse and translations from French published in the summer of 1905 - as Quentin Bell says in his biography of Virginia Woolf '...they seldom alluded (to it) in later life so that the book would have been forgotten if Virginia had not managed to keep its memory green...Virginia laughed at it and began a scathing essay upon it and its contributors...' Indeed she used the name 'Euphrosyne' for a ship in her first novel "The Voyage Out.' In her unfinished May 1906 essay on the book and the Cambridge set behind it she wrote '...some few songs and sonnets were graciously issued to the public some little time ago, carelessly, as though the Beast could hardly appreciate such fare, even when simplified and purified to suit his coarse but innocent palate...it was melodious ...but when taxed with their melancholy the poets confessed that such sadness had never been known & marked the last and lowest tide of decadence.'

In our last copy a pencilled note by a bookseller stated the book came from the collection of Raymond Mortimer and Francis Birrell - the only other time I have seen this book was in the collection of Dadie Rylands. Although VW mocked the writers for their 'overweening seriousness' this is a fascinating piece showing the very earliest manifestation of the Bloomsbury set as a coherent group. It is a book unlikely to surface outside of Bloomsbury writers collections and is decidedly scarce.

I heard of a third copy going through CSK at the sale of the library of Lytton Strachey’s sometime lover Roger Senhouse (1899-1970) who was a translator of Colette and a partner in the publishing business Secker and Warburg. Interestingly that was a famously botched sale from the 'chinless' of Christies-- almost all the books were in tea chests and contained incredible Bloomsbury rariana, signed Virginias, Hogarth & Omega Press, scarce Continental presses and a batch of presentation George Orwells. A lot of the books went for very little and ended up with the celebrated and unlettered bookseller George Jefferys, who knocked them out on the pavement at Farringdon Road - pretty much as you see in our signature photo top corner of this web page. A friend who got a few chests was surprised when Cyril Connolly turned up at his premises (with entourage) wanting to buy from the collection. 35 years later you still see Senhouse books with his small neat pencilled ownership signature. He had the admirable habit of compiling indexes in books where the dastardly publisher had been too lazy to include one. Non fiction books without indexes are like a bicycle without wheels. Simile needs work, but an indexless work is abhorrent, horrific and unforgivable.

The photo above shows the beautiful Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce in 'Carrington' the best of Bloomsbury movies (most are poor vide 'The Hours') - Pryce was an exceptional Strachey and Rufus Sewell a fiery Mark Gertler. Sample from the script - Gertler is pissed that Carrington is in love with Strachey:

Mark Gertler: Haven't you any self-respect?
Dora Carrington: Not much.
Mark Gertler: But he's a disgusting pervert!
Dora Carrington: You always have to put up with something.

VALUE? I have had 2 copies in 30 years both from old Bloomsbury types. In a list of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's own library (4000 books at Washington State) it is noted they had 2 copies, seemingly both bound up by Virginia. The book is preceded in the Lytton Strachey canon by Prolusiones Academicae (1902?) which is hideously scarce and probably slight. 'Euphrosyne' is a true sleeper and I feel bad about awakening it, my excuse is that it is too uncommon to have any real currency, also there are other Bloomsbury sleepers of greater value that can remain, for the moment, sound asleep.[ W/Q * ]

An American Prayer. Jim Morrison, 1970

Jim Morrison. AN AMERICAN PRAYER. Privately Printed ( by Western Lithographers in Los Angeles but not stated.) 1970.

Current Selling Prices
$2500-$4000 /£1200-£2000


POETRY / ROCK
12mo. 5 inches tall and 4 inches wide in slightly grained burgundy red boards gilt lettered on the cover. Has the appearance of a prayer book. Sometimes described as being bound in leather but believe me, it's faux. The only information printed inside is '© James Douglas Morrison 1970 All Rights Reserved' printed at the bottom of the verso of the blank front endpaper. It has 40 unpaginated pages, 37 printed. This is the first edition that Morrison had printed in 100 copies (?) as described at OCLC / World Cat and conforms with the copy sold at Pacific Book Auctions in 1993 (for $500.) A single visionary poem in Morrison's peak Dionysian style full of incantation-- 'Give us a creed/ To believe/ A night of Lust/ Give us trust in /The Night...'

Sometimes thought to be 500 copies, but it's pretty scarce and OCLC shows only two holdings - at La Jolla (San Diego University) and Berserkly. I incline towards the 100 copies school. We bought a copy from the estate of contemporary American composer Lou Harrison in Aptos, California and it was the only nod towards Rock in the entire collection of books and records. I was told by his acolytes that Lou had considered 'Light my Fire' an inspired work.

VALUE? Our copy was described thus: 'Attractive bright condition with very slight handling wear i.e. very slight marks and a discernible hairline crack at upper spine hinge - overall VG or better. Issued without d/w.' It is a vulnerable little book. We got $2200 for it in 2003 after a month or two on the net and sold it to a high end dealer who attempted to double up. He may have achieved this; Jim Morrison is, was, and always will be hotter than a 2 dollar pistol.

A reprint was published in Louisiana in 1983/84 that some people want $300 for but is apparently sanitised. The LP and CD have 90% of the uncensored lyrics in a booklet and don't cost much. At a Rock memorabilia sale in London 2005 someone paid £1080 against an estimate of £1000/ £1500, no condition noted. A fabulous signed copy sits on ABE at $14000 at present. The seller notes: 'The majority of copies, which were subscribed to, were sent out in mailers bearing the address of the Doors Fan Club, Santa Monica.' This argues quite forcibly against the 100 copies theory because the boys had more than a 100 fans. However the book seldom shows up at all. An enigma. It has been known to show up in Bible stores as it has the deliberate appearance of a little prayer book. Jim was buried in July 1971 at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris not far from Oscar Wilde, Molière, Chopin, Edith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust and, best of all, the assassinated Black Prince who lies serenely on top of his grave. Jim's grave is a bloody disgrace as befits a wild rock star. [ W/Q ** ]

Ezra Pound's Rarest --'A Lume Spento' 1908.

Ezra Pound. A LUME SPENTO. A. Antonini. 'In the City of Aldus' [Venice] 1908.

Current Selling Prices
$45000-$90000 /£24000-£48000

POETRY
A byword in rarity and high value, although Pound's second work 'A Quinzaine for this Yule' is also very rare. 150 copies printed (some sources say 100, a census has revealed 25 holdings, so 150 is more likely.) Published in Venice and sent to friends and literary movers and reviewers in Britain and America. In the same manner Basil Bunting's rare first book 'Redimiculum Matellarum' was sent from Milan in 1930 and Larkin's 'XX Poems' was posted from Belfast (some without stamps) in 1951. A1 in the Gallup bibliography where the misprints are noted (in many copies they are corrected in EP's hand.) The University of Delaware (from whom this pic comes, many thanks) appear to possess a not bad copy of the book (possibly lightly restored at the edges) and they sum up the influences on this work thus:

Ezra Pound’s early work, culminating in the publication of his first book, A Lume Spento, was infused with the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Romanticism, of William Butler Yeats’s Celtic nocturnes, and especially of Robert Browning...

The young Pound was also very influenced by Algernon Charles Swinburne, whom he claimed kept alive the notion of poetry as pure art, and whose rhythm and sound—both extremely important elements in Pound’s concept of poetry—he admired greatly. “Swinburne beats us all,” he wrote to Archibald MacLeish in 1926.
Henry James was another influence, less for his style than as an example of an American abroad in Europe (although Pound later described his long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as a “Henry James novel in verse”). Pound wrote an extended commentary on James’s work after his death in 1916, which he called a “Baedeker to a Continent.”

The book is his dedicated to his 'first friend William Brooke Smith: Painter, Dreamer of dreams.' He was going to dedicate it to fellow poet H.D. but Brooke Smith his closest friend had died at age 24. An enigmatic figure, possibly more than a platonic friend, he is described variously as a 90s aesthete, a sexual revolutionary, a dreamer and a dissolute hedonist.

Pound himself is buried in Venice not far from Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Harold Brodsky and Baron Corvo. I went to Venice's Isle of the Dead (Isola di San Michele) in 2005 and found that whereas Pound is in a rather grand grave in the Russian section next to his partner Olga Rudge, Corvo is tucked away in one of those filing cabinet tombs about 12 feet off the ground. Hard to put flowers up there. The Baron died broke.



VALUE? A copy turned up in 2004 the property of the much liked Quentin Keynes, a major collector of highspot poetry. His copy was described thus:

'Occasional light marking and marginal paper flaws, variable light browning. Original light green printed wrappers, top edge trimmed, others uncut, later morocco-backed box (upper wrapper lightly spotted, creased and with short edge tears, some skilfully repaired, lower wrapper and spine replaced).'

It made £21,510, a not very good copy but it had a few notes by an old girl friend of EP's called Viola Baxter. Another also less than brilliant copy with the usual couple of pencil corrections by Pound, but no association elements, made £21,420 at Bloomsbury also in 2004. In 1990 a reasonable but soiled and faded copy made $60,000 at the toney Bradley Martin Sale.

In general, poetry is not as favoured as it once was by the men in soft suits who tend to be the ones who pay the fat sums for books- so Pound's star may not be in the ascendant. However a sleek copy or an electric association (Eliot, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Yeats. W. Lewis,H.D., F.M. Ford) could go ballistic. Pound's later anti semitism and crazed rants about usury have gone against him; Nabokov while also slagging off Brecht, Faulkner and Camus railed against 'the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake.' Nevertheless we have many customers who come through the shop and swear by his Cantos; to my mind they outvote the sage of Montreux. [ W/Q * ]

FOOTNOTE. 'A Lume Spento' translates as 'With Tapers Quenched' a reference to a funeral in Dante. He was going to call it 'La Fraisne' after a poem in the book, until the death of his friend William Brooke Smith. Dante was also the inspiration for Eliot's sincere but measured 'thank you' to EP for his radical editing work on 'The Waste Land.' Eliot called Pound 'Il Miglior Fabbro' - the better craftsman, the better maker.

Roberto Bolano (1953-2003)

Back in England, where it is Spring. In transit, I read a great piece in the New Yorker on Roberto Bolano, Chilean poet and novelist (1953-2003). He is now considered the greatest South American writer of his generation. His novel 'The Savage Detectives' (Los Detectives Salvajes)has just come out in English in USA and I ordered a copy, although one will probably come into the shop as a review copy. Comes out in April. It won the Rómulo Gallego prize, the most prestigious in Latin America. It has detective story elements. There is a good piece also on him at the New York Times. He was, like myself, a big admirer of Borges but had no time for magic realism ("it stinks" he said - good to hear someone say it). He derided Marquez - 'a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops.'

He called Isabel Allende 'a scribbler' whose 'attempts at literature range from kitsch to the pathetic...' Allende interviewed in 2003 dismissed him as an 'extremely unpleasant' man, adding 'Death does not make you a nicer person.' Bolano is quoted as saying about himself: 'If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.' He said that the Nobel Prize was typically won by 'jerks.' He was probably referring to Marquez again, definitely Octavio Paz, possibly Heaney (Bolano regarded himself primarily as a poet) maybe Cela. Again not something you hear often and refreshing. Literature, he wrote, 'is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen and tears...'

In Mexico City mid 1970s he was part of a bunch of Mexican post Dadaists known as infrarealistas publishing iconoclastic magazines and engaging in many provocative acts such as disrupting poetry readings by Paz and others and shouting out their own poems. Bit of a junkie, he cleaned up in his 37th year and spent the last decade of his life writing furiously as he knew his time was limited. He lived in a tourist town on Spain's Costa Brava (Blanes) got married to Carolina Lopez, a Catalonian, and had 2 children.


His final novel 2666 is over 1100 pages and although unfinished it was published after his death, it is currently being translated into English by Natasha Wimmer. A voracious reader of anything from minor poetry to dime store novels. He was also familiar with Anglo-American literature, and was fascinated by such genre writers as James Ellroy, Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy. He admired the latter day Surrealist painter Remedios Varo (also Catalonian). He stole most of his books and for that must be designated by us as an utter bastard. However there are excuses - he had a bloody hard life behind him including nearly being disappeared by the death squads of Augusto Pinochet....Wouldn't mind finding some of the Mexican mags. Lastly he wrote something called Porta Consigli di un discepolo di (Jim )Morrison a un fanatico di Joyce.What's that all about? Check out the New Yorker piece.