Laughing Torso / A Bohemian Word Cloud

I was going to do something on Nina Hamnett's 'Laughing Torso' which has a splendid cover which cannot be found on the web and I left my copy at home. Will scan in on return. Nina Hamnett (1890 – 1956) was a Welsh artist, writer and artist's model (that's her by Modigliani.) She became known as the Queen of Bohemia and wrote this memoir in 1932. Aleister Crowley unsuccessfully sued her and the publisher for libel over allegations of Black Magic made in the book and it became a best seller. The Great Beast's magickal activities are also dealt with in Betty May's more valuable Tiger Woman another great bohemian memoir (1929). Nice jacketed copies of 'Torso' can fetch £100 and the limited edition £150+. The 'torso' refers to a sculpture of her by Gaudier Brzeska. She was close to Modigliani and this reminiscence of him gives a flavour of the work, Nina is sitting alone in a Parisian cafe:

"Suddenly the door opened and in came a man with a roll of newspaper under his arm. He wore a black hat and corduroy suit. He had curly black hair and brown eyes and was very good looking. He came straight up to me and said, pointing to his chest, ‘Je suis Modigliani, Juif, Jew,’ unrolled his newspaper, and produced some drawings. He said, ‘Cinq francs.' They were very curious and interesting, long heads and pupil-less eyes. I thought them very beautiful. ...I gave him five francs and chose one of a head in pencil. He sat down and we tried to understand each other and I said that I knew Epstein and we got on very well, although I could not understand much of what he said. He used to drink a great deal of wine and absinthe when he could afford it. Picasso and the really good artists thought him very talented and bought his works but the majority of people in the Quarter thought of him only as a perfect nuisance and told me that I was wasting my money..."

The last sentence shows how wrong some people can be - those drawings are now worth 100,000 times the price that Nina paid... The book, as Robert Scholes says in his splendid 'Paradoxy of Modernism', offers us 'glimpses of the bohemian core of Modernism and ...perspectives on the roles open to women in that dark center of Modernist art.' He also looks at the lives of the spirited Kiki (of Montparnasse) and the elusive Beatrice Hastings who wrote under at least 16 pseudonyms.

In my research in GoogleBooks (these dudes are bringing in a renaissance of scholarship and learning) I came across a sort of snapshot summary of the text of 'Laughing Torso' which they call 'Common terms and phrases' but is otherwise known as a 'word cloud.' Edited down a little it gives an impressionistic summary of all things boho-- espadrilles are there and only the berets are missing:-

Absinthe accordion Aleister Crowley Arthur Rimbaud Augustus John Bal Musettes beautiful black hat bottles Brancusi cafe Calvados Camden Town champagne Chelsea Cocteau Countess Cubist danced delighted Diaghilev Dieppe dined dinner Dirty Dick's drank drawings dressed drink Eiffel Tower Erik Satie espadrilles Fitzroy Square Fitzroy Street Foujita francs Gare Montparnasse Gertrude Stein girl Golf Juan guitar Henri Rousseau Horace Cole Iris Tree James Joyce Jean Cocteau Latin Quarter Les Halles Les Six lunch Luxembourg Gardens Modigliani Montmartre Montparnasse myself Nancy Cunard Newhaven night Omega Workshops Osbert Sitwell Oscar Wilde painted painter Paris Paul Verlaine Prefecture of Police restaurant Roger Fry Rotonde Sickert Stravinsky studio Vermouth wife wine woman wonderful Wyndham Lewis young

The Books of Brin

In an earlier posting Google Books -A Library to Last Forever I suggested that Google so-founder Sergey Brin had accumulated well over 15,000 real books by the time he was 26. He still has a site up from his Stanford days with them all listed - My Favorite Books - a strange but just about credible collection with a heavy emphasis on SF and fantasy fiction although almost all the world's classics are there from Aeschylus to Xenophon. There's Crowley and Huxley, Le Fanu and Lovecraft, Deepak Chopra, most of the Booker authors and an unusual amount of female writers (some romantic or sword and sorcery) for a mere male to possess. I had a vague suspicion that these were not books read by him or even owned by him. How could the poisonous 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' be a favourite book, let alone co-exist with Chris Rock's 'The Bitch Factor' ? Through some data mining aided by Google I ascertained that indeed these were not Sergey's books, but part of an early web search project done while he was at Stanford. Below is the garage in nearby Menlo Park where Google was born and where I had imagined he kept these books.

Sergey Brin did not possess 15000 books. In 1996/ 1997 he and 3 other Stanford guys were working on something called 'Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Expansion (DIPRE)'. As they put it

We begin with a small seed set of (author, title) pairs (in tests we used a set of just five pairs). Then we find all occurrences of those books on the Web (an occurrence of a book is the appearance of the title and author in close proximity on the same Web page). From these occurrences we recognize patterns for the citations of books. Then we search the Web for these patterns and find new books. We can then take these books, find all their occurrences, and from those generate more patterns. We can use these new patterns to find more books, and so forth. Eventually, we will obtain a large list of books and patterns for finding them.

They chose 5 books - Isaac Asimov's Robots of Dawn, David Brin's Startide Rising, James Gleick's Chaos: A New Science, Shakespeare's 'Comedy of Errors' and Dickens's 'Great Expectations'. Each book seems significant in hindsight--and it is likely these data miners in the dawn had great expectations. Anyway it was only the two science fiction books which produced usable patterns (3) and after searching 5 million web pages for these two they found 105 patterns…eventually adding the word 'books' they produced 15,527 titles "with very little bogus data." These are the books listed on the web as 'Sergey Brin's favourite books.' Books were useful for establishing the search code as the author and the title are often close together. To a civilian this stuff is mostly impenetrable but it seems what they were doing was laying the foundations for the code used by Google, truly a licence to print money (so much that he is now contemplating launching a space ship...)



Reading this list without knowing the above it had seemed a strange and wondrous bunch of books. He even had a title that someone asked for this morning - D.E. Harding's mystical classic 'On Having No Head.' It is not impossible for a young person to accumulate 15000 books--if he or she buys 30 books a week from age 15 to 25 and has somewhere to put them they can achieve it with ease. Regular attendance at library sales will help. I have seen such collections, the novelist Hanif Kureishi who used to live near our shop in the early 1980s had about 10,000 paperbacks and he was not yet thirty. I knew a teenage dealer with 20000 books in a storage unit in the unpromising London suburb of Neasden. So it was entirely credible Brin, a highly educated student, could have this quantity of books.

I first became suspicious when I came across books on the list by the obscure 90s writer Dollie Radford. I knew her books because recently we bought some of her son's library from a relation-- he had been a minor poet and a fringe Bloomsbury player (that's him below picnicking with handsome Rupert Brooke and RB's inamorata Noel Olivier and Virginia Woolf in a fetching headscarf.) What was Sergey doing reading Dollie? When I googled the pair of them all was explained. He actually mentions Dollie in one of his papers 'Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web' -noting that 'one of the most surprising results was finding books which were not listed in major online sources such as 'The Young Gardener's Kalendar by Dollie Radford [Rad04]…'

Collecting John Piper

Frances Spalding’s long awaited twin biography of John and Myfanwy Piper is being reprinted less than a month after its appearance. This is something almost unheard of in the small world of art history books. So either there is currently a Piper resurgence, or the OUP has badly underestimated the demand, or both. Or perhaps people want to discover more about the hitherto neglected Myfanwy, who among things, was Betjeman’s muse. But there is no doubt that John Piper has some incredibly dedicated fans. The Net is full of them. One of the most devoted is Ken Hayes, whose John Piper site is admirably comprehensive.

People who can’t afford paintings by Piper tend to collect the books written, designed or illustrated by him. I’ve already dealt with the Shell Guides series in an earlier blog, but there are so many other Piper items worth collecting. Some are very obscure and very expensive indeed. Take his first book, published when he was just 18-- The Wind in the Trees. I’ve never seen a copy of this book of verse which Piper’s dad got the Horseshoe Publishing Company of Bristol to bring out in 1921. Even Hayes admits to not having found a copy. Presumably they exist somewhere, or is this another et tu Healy situation ?

Piper’s second slim volume, The Gaudy Saint, which appeared 3 years later from the same publisher, is only slightly less scarce. Blackwell’s have a copy at a hefty $942. Then in 1925 Piper senior paid the Curwen Press to publish his memoirs. Sixty-three Not Out would be unremarkable without the 19 tiny vignettes by the twenty-two year old artist, by then planning to leave his post as a clerk in his father’s law firm for art school. About 20 years ago I actually found a copy marked at £10 in the basement of a shop in Cecil Court ( I forget which one ), but rejected it as a bit peripheral. What an idiot I was! I’ve never seen another copy since, but Maggs now have one priced at $707. Drat it !

Brighton Aquatints (1939), Piper’s first important book, is not seriously scarce but is always sought after. There is a tale that Betjeman coloured in some of the aquatints, but I’ve never actually seen a coloured version. Incidentally, Piper also contributed an aquatint as a frontispiece to S John Woods excellent John Piper: Paintings, Drawings and Theatre Designs (1955) and this too I have seen coloured in, though it looks better uncoloured. Myfanwy once gave me one of these prints from a pile hanging around at Henley Bottom Farmhouse after Piper’s death. A few years earlier she had very kindly presented me with a whole run in mint condition of the incredibly scarce Axis, the avant garde art magazine she had edited in the thirties. For this I will be eternally grateful. I would never have been able to afford such a treasure otherwise.



Another great scarcity is Colour in the English Country House, which appears in the bibliographies, but which few, including myself, have seen. It’s possibly the sort of booklet that might have been discarded with annual spring-cleanings and could be worth having if it turned up in a box of books somewhere. Most other Pipers are nothing like as rare. Books with wrapper designs by him shout out Piper and are common enough, as are books containing his illustrated. Piper’s own title in the Britain in Pictures series, British Romantic Artists, comes up all the time. On ABE at present there are 62 copies, all hovering around £6- £20, but for some reason one chancer in Santa Barbara ( about as far away from Piper country as you can be ) has stuck a price of $250 on a copy. The thing doesn’t seem to have an original Piper abstract or postcards from Betjeman loosely inserted. It’s just a perfectly ordinary copy of a common book in a standard wrapper printed with printer’s ink, rather than painted by Piper himself in an idle moment. But on this particular subject, Piper did on one occasion reproduce in ink the cover of his Buildings and Prospects for a friend who had lost the wrapper of his own copy. Now that would be a book to covet. [R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin. I sympathise with your annoyance at having let go 63 Not Out ('a bit peripheral'). I have done this with other books and regretted it and gone back only to find "the swifter glove of another hunter" has nabbed the book (Javier Marias.) Hells, bells and buckets of blood! A trivial point about Piper is that sartorially he was similar to Anthony Powell - they both wore non v-neck pull overs over shirt and tie with the tie plumping out the at top of the pullover like a second Adam's apple - to me it tends to signify the chap will not put up with any nonsense. James Lees Milne also affected this style (are there others?) I guess it's an upper class thing and you seldom see it anymore. I am not sure if Piper is a long term investment and whether succeeding generations will discover his art. Given the enthusiasm with which his bio has been received he is probably sound. Because he has never been trendy it is unlikely that he will go out of style...

Below is a splendid Piper painting - Gordale Scar, Yorkshire, 1943.

Diary of a Nobody (1892)

George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith. THE DIARY OF A NOBODY. J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, and Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. Limited, London. 1892.

Current Selling Prices
$300-$600 /£200-£400

COMIC NOVEL
An English comic novel written by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith with illustrations by Weedon, it first appeared in the magazine Punch in 1888 – 89, and came out in book form in 1892. The diary is that of Mr. Charles Pooter, a city clerk of lower middle-class status but significant social aspirations, living in Upper Holloway. Other characters include his wife Carrie (Caroline), his raffish and slangy son Lupin, his friends Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing (jokes about coming and going), and Lupin's unsuitable fiancée, Daisy Mutlar. The humour derives from Pooter's unconscious gaffes, his suburban social pretensions and self-importance, also the many snubs he receives from those he considers socially inferior, such as tradesmen. Pathos (and bathos) is mixed in with the humour--e.g. when Pooter attends the Mansion House Ball (the highest point of his social ambitions) he is distressed to find his name omitted from a long list of guests published in the "society" column of the Blackfriars Bi-weekly News. A letter of complaint results in him and his wife being listed as Mr. and Mrs. Potter, which further enrages him, leading to a correction in the paper which then lists him as Mr. Pewter.

The supreme English comic classic, still near the top of ubiquitous 'best ever book' polls. As Lord Rosebery said "I regard any bedroom I occupy as unfurnished without a copy." It ranks with right up there with Jerome's K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat, Waugh's Scoop, 'England their England' 'At Swim Two Birds' and the novels of Wodehouse. Jon Wilde wrote in 'The Guardian' about the 2007 documentary 'The Real Mr Pooter'- there may be novels that are more widely loved than Diary Of A Nobody, but surely none more deeply loved… A fair few acquaintances of mine unashamedly admit that they cannot seriously consider a friendship with anyone who does not find the novel uproariously funny.' He goes on to mention other Pooterish characters--Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones, Captain Mainwaring, Victor Meldrew, Alan Partridge, David Brent, Peep Show's Mark Corrigan. He neglects to mention Widmerpool, a successful Pooter (if that's possible.) Oddly enough Arthur Lowe who played Captain Mainwaring played Pooter in a radio adaptation (an almost definitive performance.) The big point that JW makes is that if you don't find it funny 'it almost certainly means that you're self-deluded and humourless enough to be considered Pooterish.'

VALUE? Not especially high but more that 'Three Men in a Boat' which was also published by Arrowsmith three years earlier (you want the address as 'Quay Street' not '11 Quay Street'). Very decent copies should not cost more than £300, Adrian Harrington currently has a decent copy with a signed photo of Weedon Grossmith for £475. It might be more if it was George Grossmith (left) - famous in his day for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs and creating a series of memorable characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it is said he was the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s. Julie Burchill nominating 'Diary' as her favourite book notes that he also found the time to dally with morphine, possibly as a way of dealing with stage-fright.

Browsing this masterpiece the other day it occurred to me that blogs, with a few exceptions, are basically 'diaries of nobodies' and the struggle of man with his insignificance as the Grossmith freres discovered is both a comic and a tragic matter. John Fowles in 'The Aristos' talks of this struggle (with what he calls 'the nemo') as the supreme source of anguish and suggests the ways of challenging the 'nemo' used by modern man--'I build up a unique persona, I defy the mass. I am the bohemian, the dandy, the outsider, the hippy...' Portentously he adds '...Oswald killed President Kennedy in order to kill his real enemy: his nemo.' I guess if he was still around he would say that people who go on reality TV shows are confronting their nemos… Will deal with this strange work 'The Aristos' (Cape 1964) at some point--its value as a first is not insignificant.

Google Books -'A Library to Last Forever'

Google co-founder Sergey Brin was an 'op-ed' contributor to the New York Times last week. An interesting article -part puff and part manifesto. It was called 'A Library to Last Forever' -the view from Mountain View as it were. He has so far got the text of 10 million books, many over 100 years old and well out of copyright, up on Google Books and wants to get millions more, especially books post 1923 where US copyright takes hold (i.e. books that are no longer in the public domain.) A good well reasoned article rejecting ideas of a monopoly - at one point he writes - ' I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at… a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.'

The NYT readers comments are interesting--some outraged at this attempt to sequester the worlds wisdom and knowledge, many profoundly grateful (especially writers and researchers) some worried about the future of books and Brin's motives. One alarmist called Google 'Shiva the Destroyer' another 'A Trojan Horse' ("Beware of Google bearing gifts.") One angry chap compared the Google project to 'agribusiness' - an attempt to own the rights to all books ever published. Over half were positive, one guy urged them to 'soldier' on - 'we will cover your back.' A lot of optimists thought the Library of Congress should be doing this--nobody seemed to mention the cost of digitising books or the vastness of Google's investment ( surely a billion dollars or more -page turners, copyright lawyers, endowments, researchers, experts, academics, programmers, equipment etc.,) As Brin says, anybody can do it (and quite a few have, but not it such a monumental way) but due to their AdWords revenues they can pay for it and it will be money well spent for them and hopefully for us.

He talks of his legal tussles with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. '…while we have had disagreements, we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.' Good stuff, but the battle is not nearly over and the motives of large, rich companies are often suspect. In the new age of Obama's America it would be nice to think these guys could be idealists, even visionaries, who have made enough money to allow them to see beyond the mundanities that motivate corporate man (money and power). Time will tell, but the sheer scale of their ambition is formidable.

In arguing the need to preserve texts digitally Brin talks about how libraries have been devastated over time by fire and floods (the library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, the L of C lost two-thirds of its collection in a fire in 1851 etc.,) While he was at Stanford in 1998, floods destroyed tens of thousands of books and a similar flood had happened there just 20 years prior. He notes laconically 'you could read about it in 'The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report', published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.' It is on the subject of freedom and easy and open access to books that he fires his best shot:

"More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily."

Some NYT comments said you could order all the books you need through Inter library loans, but this is can be a cumbersome method and is only available for some books in some countries. Buying out of print books ('orphans' in googlespeak) from book dealers has a great deal to be said for it but money is sometimes tight and many books are too rare to be affordable or even to be available. As a dealer I see the scheme opening up the market rather than harming it. New collectors, readers and book enthusiasts will be created by this bold 'Forever' project - especially among the under thirty crowd, who are now seldom seen in bookshops or at bookfairs; those born after the year of the Jubilee and Punk (1977) i.e. the post-literate generation. Sergey was four at the time but by the time he was 26 he had accumulated well over 15,000 real books...of which more soon.

Below pic of Basra University Central Library: books destroyed by fire - June 2003

Jane Austen. Emma (1816)

[ Jane Austen.] EMMA. A novel. In Three Volumes. By the author of "Pride and Prejudice" &c. &c. John Murray, London 1816.

Current Selling Prices
$8000-$30000 /£5000-£20000

CLASSIC LITERATURE
I am briefly revisiting' Emma' as there is a new BBC series with the handsome actor Romola Garai. Also a mediocre copy made $8,400 in New York last month possibly indicative of a flatter Janeite market. The auctioneer notes '...in keeping with Murray's stated views on edition sizes, 2000 copies were printed. Emma is also the only one of Jane Austen's novels to bear a dedication (to the Prince Regent)' . The lightest of her works and often cited as her most accomplished, fulfilling, as it does, her own formula for a successful novel - '3 or 4 families in a country village..the very thing to work on.' Many editions are wanted apart from the expensive 3 decker first, including the still valuable one volume Bentley (1833) fancy illustrated editions (Hugh Thomsom, Chris Hammond) Avalon Society, Limited Editions Club, Folio, Easton etc., Possibly the most wanted and easiest assimilated book of the divine Jane. A bibliographic warning note comes from Geoffrey Keynes:

'...The collation of the first volume of Emma is peculiar in that the first sheet consisted only of the title-page and the dedication to the Prince Regent, while the half-title was printed on the last leaf, which would otherwise have been blank. If the binder has omitted to transfer the half-title to the beginning of the volume, it will appear, at first sight, to be imperfect.'

Strictly speaking the half-title should be at the back of the book to be in its correct position.

The novel has such a strong and true storyline that it easily transposed into an acclaimed movie set in a modern US high school in Beverly Hills ('Clueless.' ) Also filmed 3 other times and done on TV about once a decade. There is rumour of a Bollywood version. As noted 2000 copies of the 1816 first were printed -- it is uncommon to find the half titles and final blanks still present as it is more often rebound in leather lacking these.





VALUE? Has twice made £25,000 at auction this century, both times in original boards (usually slightly repaired/ restored.) A 'very fine' copy bound in 'half , calf gilt, extremities worn' made $24000 in 2002. Recently it has made as little as £5000 several times with a few disappointing 'buy-ins' at carriage trade auctions--usually for less than limpid examples. A decent copy lacking half titles made $11,400 early in 2009 in NY. It can be found in handsomely bound state at most high end book fairs and is not especially scarce. The Bentley one volume 1833 edition can make well over £500; people try to make sets of the Bentley editions which complete can go for several thousand pounds. Jane Austen books in reprint often attract buffoon like over pricing. One chancer in Atlantic City has a whole series of basically old and used turn of the century pocket editions, none worth more than $20, at $200 to $400. They don't appear to ever sell so there are pages of them on the net with other dealers following his witless lead -once again belying Blake's maxim that a fool will persist in his folly until he becomes wise. William Blake could never have foreseen the imbecility of the internet bookseller. What possibly happens, and this is true of many manic over pricers, is that very occasionally some deluded punter buys one of their books thus justifying the whole enterprise.



Sets of Austen are the most rebound of all sets in history. The reason is that unless you put an absolute 'mind at the end of its tether' price on them, they will always sell. They make the perfect gift, prize, reward or inducement. Hard to find a decent set of 19th century (albeit late) leather bindings for less than $1000. Modern 6 volume sets from Easton in a sort of spam leather can be had on ebay at between $300 and $500. Below is Gwynneth Paltrow as Emma - 'clever, pretty and self-satisfied...' That's Romola Garai above--actually in 'Daniel Deronda' but what the heck--one wonders if she would play her namesake if they adapted Ms Eliot's 1863 novel 'Romola'.

Richard Carlile (1790 - 1843)

(Richard Carlile.) THE POLITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF THOMAS PAINE. Carlile, London 1819.

Current Selling Prices
$500-$700 /£350-£500


POLITICS / POLITICAL HISTORY
The rather muted publicity given to the bicentenary of Thomas Paine’s death this year reminds me of the interview I had with the late lamented maverick actor and film-maker Kenneth Griffith a few years ago. Lured to his large Victorian house in Barnsbury ostensibly by the promise of an introduction to his uniquely vast library of books and memorabilia on the Boer War, for much of the time I found myself being regaled with off the record tales, including a recollection of the time when leaders of the IRA were invited to tea and how Griffith’s film on Thomas Paine was deemed too radical to be broadcast.

The seriously inflammatory writings of the famous atheist and republican, born in Thetford in 1737, were banned by the British authorities from the start, but suppression was particularly draconian in the period of political unrest following Waterloo, when any publisher or bookseller who dealt in Paine’s writings, faced jail and bankruptcy. The publisher who stood out as Paine’s greatest champion in this era was Richard Carlile, a Devonian tinsmith who had turned to radical publishing in his mid twenties and from whose premises at 55, Fleet Street (‘The Temple of Reason’), a steady stream of seditious literature emerged for six or more years. Carlile, incidentally was the bookseller who somehow managed to obtain 180 copies of the first edition of Shelley’s audacious, privately printed , Queen Mab (1813)— a copy of which Rota wants £23,000 for.

Carlile ( 1790 – 1843 ) quite simply refused to be silenced and when he was carted off to Dorchester jail in 1819 he brazenly spent the next five years conducting his business from behind bars. As a political prisoner, rather than a common felon, he enjoyed, like Leigh Hunt before him, a measure of freedom and comfort. Although he had little time for flowery wallpaper and an ottoman, his ‘ Repository of Reason ‘ was comfily appointed with sink, bed, desk, odd bits of furniture, and the use of two servants to cook & clean. Carlile also took up vegetarianism while in jail and worked out with weights to keep himself fit. Naturally, he was left with plenty of time to edit his radical magazine, The Republican, which the jailers didn’t seemed to mind him doing, though apparently when he once misbehaved his frying pans were confiscated.

I’d been looking for something by Carlile when quite by chance I found it on the shelves of that funny little bookshop in Harmood St, Camden Town. This was volume one of Paine’s Political and Miscellaneous Works dated 1819, which was bound in a sort of suede decorated with an abstract pattern in pyrography which I like to think was done by a fellow political prisoner to pass away the hours. This was the book, an earlier edition of which, turned one of the Cato Street conspirators to thoughts of revolution in 1819. Two prefaces, both dated Dorchester Jail, November 1820---rather good propaganda this—were bound in with the sheets of my 1819 edition, and the book continued to be sold, at first by Carlile’s 'shrewish' wife Jane, then when she joined her husband in jail, by the dedicated ‘shopmen and women’ who to evade capture themselves operated at one time an ingenious self-service system ( ‘The Invisible Shopman’ ) which consisted of a clockwork apparatus that allowed customers to select the publication they required, which was duly dispensed to them via a series of chutes, flaps and pulleys, a bit like those vacuum tubes you used to find in old-fashioned department stores in the fifties.

There has always been a lustre of radical chic surrounding Carlile and his fellow radicals of the early 1820s, and anything bearing his name is sought after. Currently ABE has no copy of his Political and Miscellaneous Works, but the companion Theological Works, also of 1819, is there for $361 ( ‘A chance to own a piece of Britain’s history ‘, says the vendor, and he’s right ). Jarndyce has an eight page pamphlet by Carlile for an inflammatory $141 and another of 16 pages for $160. Other more substantial pamphlets can be had from the States, where Carlile is a truly big name, for $350 a pop. Most of these publications are all from his glamorous jail period. Later works, including his writings on freemasonry, are generally cheaper. [R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin. Wise words as always. I remember Kenneth Griffith (obit 2006) from "Only Two Can Play' (one of a small group of movies featuring librarians--that's him right with Peter Sellers) and of course as the mad old curmudgeon in 'Four Weddings...' Wikipedia reveals he kept death threats from the Ulster Volunteers proudly displayed on his wall. I guess you saw them. The full title of his TV documentary was 'Thomas Paine, The Most Valuable Englishman Ever' --ambiguous and provocative at the same time. The Wiki entry also reveals that his parents during WW2 '...at his request gave him a leather-bound copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf: he later explained in interview that he wanted to understand what he was fighting against.' A good point--not everyone who buys Mein Kampf is a foaming fascist, just most of them. I have seen a few Carlile books in my time, some at the house of the late, great Paul Foot, but need a few more (and some 'Queen Mabs') for my customers. What happened to KG's books? That would have been a useful house call!

Books for War, Books for Soldiers

I found this picture mentioned peripherally on a tweet from the redoubtable book blog Book Patrol coming out of Seattle, the caffeine capital of the world. It shows the results of a book drive in World War One--bundles of books on the steps of New York Public library. The actual poster urging people to bring books to libraries "for our men in camp and 'over there'" is hanging in the background- a jumbo size version. It is by Charles Buckles Falls and came out of a poster project at the Division of Pictorial Publicity, part of the Committee on Public Information; the campaign was lead by Charles Dana Gibson, the creator of of the Gibson Girl image and those charming large white illustrated books (which are always worth less than you would think.) The poster seems to sell for several hundred dollars and giclee repros for about a $100 if a good size.

There was also a move in England during WW1 to get citizens to donate books for the war effort. These were not for the soldiers who were busy reading cheap copies of fiction by Buchan, Sapper and Ian Hay; because of a paper shortage the books were pulped. I have heard that this is one of the reasons that Victorian three volume novels ('three deckers') are so rare. In 1914 a three decker novel was like a Betamax video is in 2009 - obsolete, vieux jeu and space intensive. I have heard dealers speculate about this and it may be a myth - pulp fiction, you might say.

Do soldiers still need books? Did they have campaigns like this in WW2, Vietnam or the Gulf War? And when the books go to war (like all the books on the NY Public library steps) how many make it back? Some do, I know, because I have bought them. Typically they come back somewhat the worse for wear. One thinks of stories of soldiers carrying books in vest pockets (usually bibles) that saved their life by stopping a bullet ('bullet hole through middle of book else fine...')

Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen

This book has honourable mention in 'Bizarre Books' by the wacky duo Lake and Ash. It is in the section 'Against all odds / Titles to make the heart sink.' I just bought a decent variant copy of the 1929 first edition for £15 from an Oxfam shop (via Amazon) and the cheapest now available is £30 with one chancer asking £125. Len of the Chines, normally angrily overpriced, wants £45 for his decentish copy with the gilt thistle on the cover. Other titles in this section of 'Bizarre Books' include 'The Wit of Prince Philip' 'Songs of a Chartered Accountant' 'Not Worth Reading' 'The Bright Side of Prison Life' 'A Holiday with a Hegelian' 'Along Wit's Trail: The Humor and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan' and 'Cameos of Vegetarian Literature'. This might just be a growth area in collecting...

Here for the moment is one of Lord Aberdeen's jokes entitled 'Another Irish one':

An Irish Census recorder on enquiring - 'How many males in this house?' received the reply - 'Three of course; breakfast, lunch and tea!'

As the foreword notes ' In the realm of wit and humour, Lord Aberdeen is a name to conjure with... the publishers have great pleasure in introducing to the public a few of his gems.' There is a ribtickling short ghost joke where a man shoots off his foot thinking it is a ghostly hand, a girl from Aberdeen who kept quiet about where she was from because her 'mither' told her 'Noo Annie be sure and dinna boast.' There's even a good book joke that would probably have them speechless on the Edinbugh fringe:

'A certain man had built and furnished a new house and was showing it to Cardinal Cullen who was accompanied by Father Healy. In one of the rooms, on a shelf above the writing table, there stood a neat row of books. Pointing to them the owner said "These, your Eminence, are my friends." But Father Healy chimed in (wait for it) "Yes, and he has treated them like friends; he has never cut them.'

ROTFL as they used to say. Et tu Healy etc.,

Lytton Strachey / Dora Carrington and Bloomsbury

BOOKPLATE FOR LYTTON STRACHEY BY CARRINGTON (1931)

Current Selling Prices
$130-$320 /£75-£200



A miniature piece of Bloomsbury history - this small bookplate by Dora Carrington measures 1 3/8 inches high by 1 3/4 inches wide in it's largest version. The large version is rarer than the smaller but both have now become quite elusive. The tiny postage stamp size one measures only 1" by 3/4 ". Both have the words Lytton Strachey in a plaque or cartouche with folded edges surrounded by net-like cross hatching in a dark sepia tone.

A relic of the artist and Bloomsbury goddess. Carrington wrote of this bookplate in her diary (March 20 1931) rather prophetically:- 'As I stuck the book plates in with Lytton I suddenly thought of Sothebys and the book plates in some books I had looked at, when Lytton was bidding for a book and I thought: These books will one day be looked at by those gloomy faced booksellers and buyers. And suddenly a premonition of a day when these labels will no longer (be) in this library came over me. I longed to ask Lytton not to stick in any more.' He died 10 months later. Carrington shot herself a few months after.

VALUE? Bloomsbury specialists tend to charge £150+. They can occasionally be found at less than £100. I once had a supplier for the plate who had one in every volume of Strachey's OED. Bloomsbury collectors tend to be fervent in their pursuit of material so they seem to have all sold. It is so small that I lost a couple. Strachey was a keen collector of antiquarian books so it can turn up - usually in valuable items. An early work associated with Strachey is 'Euphrosyne.' We catalogued one a while back thus:


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


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.



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

The above dialogue brings to mind the lines at the end of 'Some Like it Hot':

Jerry: But you don't understand, Osgood!
[Pulls of wig]
Jerry: I'm a man!
Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect!

VALUE? I have had 2 copies in 30 years both from old Bloomsbury types. This generation have now almost all died. 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, forever, sound asleep. Think £1500 and above. (pic below Virginia Woolf and Angelica Garnett - her sister Vanessa Bell's daughter by Duncan Grant.)



COLLECTING BLOOMSBURIANA. There are some of the opinion that the entire coterie did not produce one masterpiece, some point to Virginia Woolf as a proven writer of world class books. Some talk of Maynard Keynes as a genius, certainly his name has been invoked enough in the current slump. Huge claims can be made for E.M. Forster. A fellow dealer opines that Bloomsbury collectors are the maddest of the lot. Most would not have been welcome at Charleston or Monks House.

OUTLOOK? The Bloomsbury industry is mostly about gossip, drama and romance --Vita and Virgina, Vita and Harold, Vita and Violet, Dora and Lytton, Vanessa and Clive, Vanessa and Duncan and then there's bad boy Bunny Garnett...tangled relationships, posh backgrounds, country estates, the pursuit of sexual freedom, the desire to shock the bourgeois, high intellectual ideals - they will be collected until the Kingdom comes, prices already high, will probably rise...

Five types of Book Dealer

The indigent bookseller. A low key bookscout of no fixed abode. Sleeps in the back of his car or in flyblown motels or occasionally on fellow dealers floors or in lockups. His car is a disgrace but just passes legal tests. Keeps his books in a storage unit (U Storage) where he is perpetually in danger of missing his rent. There is always a character like this in John Dunning's excellent bibliomysteries and he normally comes to a sticky end. Occasionally he finds a sleeper which he runs at a quarter of its value or persuades a fellow dealer to put in on Ebay and go halves. Invariably male, mostly American where the climate is more conducive to being a bum. He has, as Groucho would say, 'worked his way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.'

The grandiose bookseller. Has a fine mansion downtown or a showoff country estate (seldom both, booksellers are not hedge fund managers.) He may have horses, pools, tennis courts, a taste for antiques, vintage wines, brand new luxury cars and exotic travel. Because bookselling does not generally support this lifestyle he quite often goes broke and all his books are sold off in auction at sobering prices.

The humble bookseller. Sometimes known as the 'mere man' (at one time we had bought a rather prestigious collection full of fine bindings, literary first editions and scholarly works and a dealer seeing these asked 'Do you have anything for the mere man.') He does small provincial fairs has an eye for a good military, naval or transport books--he will sometimes plump for Noddy, Ladybirds or Observer books or New Nats. He tends to sell his good books to specialists but has now discovered the internet and is perplexed as to pricing--if he puts the book too low it will go like a bullet but if he charges what everybody else is charging the book never sells. He knows books that will sell well at £10 on Ebay, has a roof over his head, a car that is properly insured and taxed and generally enjoys the chase. He is not to be confused with his close relation see 'the teabag bookseller.'

The pompous bookseller. Has a broad knowledge of the ancient world, can quote Shakespeare and even Dante (in Italian). Sometimes went to Oxford or Harvard and will remind you every four minutes. When classical music is playing he immediately names the piece and may even start to conduct it. His books are priced within an inch of their lives but he will give deep discounts to anyone half interested; such is his bravado, chutzpah and charisma he can usually buy well from estates, fellow dealers and widows. Usually somewhere along the line he has had an amazing buy that made him take himself pretty seriously or he may have inherited a large sum from a doting aunt. He seldom goes broke and as Oscar put it -'he has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.'

The raffish hustler. Another almost exclusively male type. A bookdealer with a colourful, sometimes dark past. Born in a mansion or from a semi in Barnet, he may have been in rock music or owned a night club, sometimes there is a spell in rehab or an over acquaintaince with the bottle. Broken marriages, bankruptcy and banishment are not unknown. Possessed of fiendish intuition, deep and recondite knowledge he wades through the world of of old books finding great treasures but tends to squander the money on pleasure or occasionally takes a big loss on books that turned out wrong. He is optimistic by nature. Keith Richard is sometimes mentioned but this guy tends to be wirier and possible a little wiser but never as wealthy. When on the skids fellow dealers or wealthy collectors bail him out and he is never down for long. He can sometimes hustle himself to near the top of the trade, relies heavily on luck and serendipity and is much admired by other dealers who lack his bravura. He is closer to the indigent type and never pompous...

Isaac Rosenberg. Night and Day (1912)

Isaac Rosenberg. NIGHT AND DAY. (Privately printed, London 1912 )

Current Selling Prices
$8000+ /£5000+


Now that Brick Lane, hitherto best known for its curry houses and Indian grocers, is becoming, with new boutiques and ethnic food stalls, an annexe of Camden Market, perhaps the twenty-somethings who flock there every Sunday to chomp their Thai noodles will notice as they emerge from Aldgate East station the blue plaque high on the wall of the adjoining Whitechapel library that commemorates its association with perhaps the most original of the First World War poets, who died at just 28. Isaac Rosenberg, born into a Yiddish-speaking family, soaked himself in English poetry in this library and the fruit of his desultory reading was his debut collection Night and Day, of which only fifty copies were printed.

Unlucky in many respects—especially in his background and early education—Rosenberg was very lucky in his patrons, who ensured that his writing got an audience. Reuben Cohen, a radical in an era of anarchist plots and nascent Socialism, was one supporter, while his boss, Israel Narodiczky, who from his works in 48, Mile End Road, became the leading Yiddish printer in London, was another. For an auto-didact like Rosenberg the publication of Night and Day was an act of bravado by a tyro in the English language who was just struggling to express himself in verse. Though his collection hinted at an emerging talent, echoes of Rosenberg’s favourites among the Romantics and Victorians are more obvious still, which may partly explain the failure of the book to make any impression on the literary editors who were sent copies. Even the attempt by Rosenberg’s friend Joseph Leftwich to sell the book outside Toynbee Hall failed to produced a single sale. So, in the end, like many another first-time, self-published writer, Rosenberg gave away the entire edition to editors, friends and relations. But those who inherited copies from the original recipients should have cause to feel grateful. This modest looking pamphlet of twenty-four pages will today fetch over £5,000. That’s if you can find a copy.

Rosenberg’s printer Narodiczky was an interesting character too. His bread and butter work was producing largely uncontroversial texts in both Yiddish and Hebrew, that are avidly collected today, but he also had radical sympathies and his home in Mile End Road, just around the corner from where radicals in 1910 were involved in the Sydney Street Siege, was the meeting place of anarchists and other political rebels, and he narrowly escaped prosecution himself for printing a large edition of a seditious newspaper in Italian, pleading ignorance of the language as defence against complicity in sedition. His anti-establishment credentials were such that in late 1915 D.H.Lawrence and John Middleton Murry persuaded this ‘ little Jew’ to print 250 copies of their pacifist magazine The Signature for £5. Only 3 issues actually appeared before lack of interest and suppression by the authorities caused it to fold. Today, Simon Finch will sell you copies of these three issues for a mere £700.

At about the same time Narodiczky also printed Rosenberg’s second collection, an eighteen-page pamphlet entitled Youth, in an edition of around 100 copies in paper covers, for the sum of fifty shillings. This time, it had become immediately obvious that the War had hurt Rosenberg into becoming a poet of real power and originality and he immediately sold 10 copies at half a crown each.

Narodiczky must have been sufficiently impressed by the relative critical and commercial success of Youth to allow Cohen, under the imprint of The Paragon Printing Works, to use his own machines to produce Rosenberg’s play Moses for nothing in 1916. Patron and poet hoped to recoup the costs by selling some hardback copies for 4s 6d. In the event, most of the sheets were bound between bright yellow card covers and sold for a shilling, although, as with Night and Day , many were given away by Rosenberg.

Today, of all the First World Poets Rosenberg is regarded as having the most arresting voice, and poems such as ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ from Youth frequently feature in printed anthologies and on WW1 poetry sites. Accordingly, a demand for the two excessively rare collections is perhaps stronger now than it has ever been. At present, there are no copies of Night and Day on ABE , but four copies of Youth can be found, at prices ranging from $500 to $750, which is a reflection of the fact that there are twice as many copies of this title than there are of Night and Day, although Youth is many times a better book. Ludicrously, three of the American dealers have Rosenberg die at the age of 18, which makes him a rival in precociousness to Daisy Ashford. Do the maths !! One of these innumerate dealers does manage to correct the poet’s age at death while offering a lovely presentation copy of the slightly rarer Moses, complete with publisher’s corrections, for $3,000. [R.M.Healey]

Thanks Robin. A few added notes: I have admired Rosenberg's poetry since buying a copy of 'Night and Day' with an original poem written by him on the title page. It was also a signed presentation to Laurence Binyon (himself no mean war poet.) As I recall it went to a dealer in California for a fattish sum 20 years back. Israel Zangwill's copy with 'holograph corrections' made £2000 in 1981 at Sothebys - this was the last copy to go through the rooms.

His paintings and drawings are also very desirable and highly skilled, he studied at the Slade with a distinguished peer group that included David Bomberg and Mark Gertler, as well as Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Dora Carrington. His self portrait above reminds me oddly of the late film- maker Derek Jarman. Am I mad? Rosenberg's art is very seldom offered for sale. At some point in the 1980s we bought some books from the estate of Rosenberg's friend and biographer Joseph Leftwich--there were no drawings but several copies of 'Poems' (1922) in the blue jacket. This still not a scarce book and $1000 copies are to be strongly avoided. A few lines from that magisterial work:

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

That was a bad typo...

It is hard to imagine a worse place to make a typo (typographic error) than on the title page. Copies of the book with the correct title page are fairly abundant--the British Libray has one and there are several in US libraries. One can only speculate how this one came about--possibly the book was a cheap pirate of the original local best seller and the title was shouted across a busy print room with the 'how' pronounced in the Italian style. When the error was pointed out the printers may have just kept printing them as a hilarious curiosity like the riverside sign 'Omlets' in 'The History of Mr Polly". *

I can see the book being touted about 1950s Venice by bent gondoliers and a bunch of shady crooks (as played, say, by Italianate versions of the young George Cole). I only have the title page which someone left folded into a Baedeker 'Italy from the Alps to Naples' and I subsequently stuck it on the wall of my book pricing room along with other mildly amusing bookish tat -like a headline clipped from a 1960s UK tabloid 'The Man with a Mountain of Books'. That's another story...

Backpacker Classics

I am not sure which books backpackers carry with them these days so this list may be a little out of date. The concept of backpacker books goes back to the days of the hippy trail when travellers would carry such classics as the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead or anything by Herman Hesse. A backpacker classic should have an element of profundity, preferably mystical -if not it should have cult status or be a statement about who you really are. There is an element of self discovery in setting off - the path to enlightenment, the journey inwards...A backpacker book is not a 'beach read'--the book must be worth the weight and space it takes up and should be reverentially handed on to other travellers or left in a hotel or bus station for another seeker to chance upon. I have garnered this list from my own experience of buying books from travellers, various lists on the web (one at Amazon) and an enormous thread about which books people would leave on a bus. In no particular order here goes:

Jack Kerouac. On the Road
Peter Mathiessen. Snow Leopard (essential reading in the high deserts of Nepal)
Joseph Heller. Catch 22
Herman Hesse. Siddhartha (also Glass Bead Game, Magister Ludi, and Steppenwolf)
Yann Martel. Life of Pi
Pirsig- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye
Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow
Zafon. The Shadow of the Wind. ('full of cheesy splendour' Stephen King)
Ken Kesey. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
John Fowles. The Magus.
Vikram Seth- A Suitable Boy (for a very long journey)
Milton. Paradise Lost
The Holy Bible (King James version)
Paulo Coelho. The Alchemist
Alex Garland. The Beach (backpacker's novel about backpacking-- a great read)


Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain (for the backpacker of the past, the wandervogel with his rucksack on his back...)
Gabrial Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude
George Eliot. Middlemarch (panorama of history category -still popular)
James Joyce. Ulysses (Odyssey thin paper version)
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness (a short story so add 'Lord Jim')
Tolstoy. War & Peace
Gunter Grass. The Tin Drum
Kahlil Gibran- The Prophet (“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.”) NB there is a spoof by 'Kellog Allbran'
Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days (why not?)
Patrick Suskind. Perfume
Umberto Eco. Name of the Rose( also Foucault's Pendulum)
Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse
Irvine Welsh. Trainspotting.
Borges. Fictions
Tolkien. The Hobbit (sometimes seen read until it has fallen apart)
Bolano. The Savage Detectives (heavy)
Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code (light)
Maldoror & A Rebours (for the decadent traveller)
Shakespeare. King Lear ( a teacher at my school read it every morning or so he said)
The Duke of Pirajno. A Cure for Serpents (for the traveller in Libya)
Di Lampedusa's deathless 'The Leopard' - another book by an Italian duke. Why can't any of our dukes write a decent book?
Tao te Ching
Popol Vuh: A Sacred Book of the Maya
Cormac McCarthy. All The Pretty Horses
Perec. Life - A User's Manual
Melville. Moby Dick.
Richard Bach. Jonathan LIvingstone Seagull
Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights (probably has added resonance read on a coral strand in Tahiti)
Aldous Huxley. Brave New World
Wiliam Golding. Lord of the Flies (file under 'dystopian travel')
Louis de la Berniere. Captain Coreli's Mandolin (if you insist)
Bulgakov. Master and Margarita (Mick Jagger's favourite book)
The Story of O (for the erotic traveller)
Donleavy. The Ginger Man.
Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus Trilogy
Baghavad Gita
B.S. Johnson. Travelling People

Bubbling under are a few names like Eckhart Tolle, Carlos Castaneda, Meister Eckhart, Dickens's Bleak House (to remind one of damp old England) William Gass, John Barth, Haruki Murakami, Edith Wharton, The Chalice and the Blade, Rudyard Kipling, The Celestine Prophecy, Atomised, Black Elk Speaks, Divine Comedy, White Goddess, Das Energi, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Margaret Atwood, Alice Sebold, WG Sebald, Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Man without Qualities, Goethe, Proust, Ballard (Terminal Beach) Leaves of Grass, Vonnegut, Dick, Gatsby and for a bit of a laugh P.G. Wodehouse, Flann O Brien or Waugh's 'Vile Bodies.

I remember seeing a guy at Milan's cathedral like central station sitting on the steps half way through John Livingston Lowes' 'The Road to Xanadu' - a weighty study of how Coleridge came to write his greatest poems. It seemed a good choice for a book to read on a journey -- as Toby Litt says "...its argument, that Coleridge had one of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever seen, is there on every page." He seemed oblivious to the rest of the teeming world lost in Lowes' deep investigation into the creative process. Wherever he was heading from Stacchini's gargantuan stazione ('bombastic splendor') he had good company for a 1000 miles or so. Bon Voyage or 'Latcho Drom' as the gypsies say.

Wyndham Lewis - Anglosaxony 1941

Wyndham Lewis. ANGLOSAXONY - A LEAGUE THAT WORKS. Ryerson Press, Toronto 1941.

Current Selling Prices
$1200-$1500 /£750-£1000

MODERN FIRSTS / POLITICS
The pages of Viz magazine are the last place one would expect to come across that famous photograph of the enfant terrible Wyndham Lewis smoking a cigarette, but there he, in a recent issue, in a mock ad for fags, unidentified by name and described ludicrously as a ‘fop ‘.Viz has always had a sophisticated readership ( the late Tory MP Alan Clark was one subscriber ) and so I expect that quite a few Viz readers would have recognised the photo of the thirty-something artist-writer, if not the description of him.



I feel the mocking, rather surreal, often puerile, and always mischievous, humour of Viz would have appealed to the author of the 'Apes of God' and 'Tarr', who was always good for a well-aimed swipe at the pretensions of pseudo-intellectuals and the inanities of pop culture. And now, it seems, after decades of comparative neglect, Lewis is in danger of becoming cool. The revival seems to have started in 2000, with the publication of Paul Edwards’ magisterial critical work and Paul O’Keeffe’s equally brilliant biography ( which features the famous fag photo on its cover ); a well received exhibition at Olympia was followed in 2007 by another at his old school of Rugby, and last year an acclaimed exhibition of his portraits at the NPG attracted a record 38,000 punters. Now the Net seems suddenly teeming with Lewis posts covering not only his art, which has always been admired ( Brian Ferry and David Bowie are collectors ) but also reassessing his hitherto neglected writings, which although condemned by Martian poet and Bill Oddie lookalike Craig Raine as ‘ unreadable ‘ are perhaps ( if some of the postings are to be believed ) finding a new, young audience.

Although, despite being amazingly prolific, Lewis never made much money from his writings, mainly because his books were printed in small editions. Consequently, all titles are hard to find, at least in the UK. It didn’t help that some titles were suppressed before publication or, in the case of 'The Doom of Youth', burned by order of the court as libellous. Around 350 copies managed to escape the flames, but the title remains a rarish, if not particularly sought after Lewis item. More worth looking out for is the booklet Lewis wrote while reluctantly exiled in Canada during the Second World War. Copies of 'Anglosaxony—a League that Works', which the small Ryerson Press in Toronto published in 1941, are as scarce as female readers of Lewis—which is a pity, because it is one of the writer’s most interesting publications. In it he condemns the Fascism he had flirted with a few years earlier and set outs in orderly fashion all the points in favour of British democracy, including its electoral system, the tolerance of Britons and the political advantage the UK has as a sea power. The ‘ pamphlet ‘ ( as Lewis called it ) was pretty well ignored by the newspaper press in Canada, despite the efforts of Lorne Pierce, the literary editor at the Ryerson Press. A follow-up book was submitted by Lewis to another publisher, but never published.

I’ve only ever seen one copy of 'Anglosaxony', and that was in the collection of the Canadian journalist and Lewis uberfan C. J. Fox , who had been smitten by the writer’s work as a teenager in the early fifties. Back in 1993 I had interviewed him about Grigson and Lewis in his tiny flat in Sydenham, where he proudly conducted me around his marvellous collection, which also included original artwork and letters. Only now has this resource found a permanent home -- at the University of Victoria, British Columbia ( which also has the Betjeman papers ).

It is not certain exactly how many copies of Anglosaxony were published, though the print run would probably have been small. Lewis was not well-known in Canada and it is likely that all those newspaper editors who were sent copies regarded the book as mere propaganda and therefore not worth keeping. Their descendants may be regretting this now. There is no copy on ABE at present , though a recent reference work on Modern Firsts values the book at £750. Lewis himself asked for an advance of $50 ! [R.M.Healey.]

Thanks Robin--from a purely commercial point of view Lewis is (imnsho) risky--he goes in and out of fashion, some of his 20s and 30s works are common even in jackets (he was a greatly collected author in the days when Rota, Bell Book and Radmall and Serendipity ruled the roost.) Good to hear he is coming back however -- as one reader says at Amazon 'Make no mistake, the guy was a fascist and a raging misogynist' but he was most certainly not a fuckwit like so many collected authors sold by the newer modern first gang.

As for fascism, as Robin notes, he changed his mind by 1941. His Paris based novel 'Tarr' is a good start if you are minded to dip into him - a book high in the modernist canon for its attack on English individualism, its jagged Vorticist style, its punctuation--another Amazon reader recommends it as a 'beach read' warning however that it will 'somehow manage to kick sand in your face.' Lewis revised the book twice but the 1918 original is the goods. He was a great and prolific painter and his pictures used to occasionally turn up underpriced. As for his puce monster BLAST (1914) I have a customer for both issues in good shape. Ship and bill.

Hocus Pocus 2

In July 2009 at Sotheby's a lot described as 'TRACTS ON MAGIC, FOLK LORE AND SOCIAL HISTORY' (20 works in one volume, contemporary calf, cropped, very occasionally affecting a few words, upper cover becoming detached...) made £30,000. Sotheby's (sometimes known to raffish dealers as 'Dotheboys' - a Dickensian reference) wanted 25% on top of this (£7500) for commission and may have collected another 5 to 10% from the owner, although they sometimes waive this if the estate is very grand or is consigning boatloads of desirable stuff. With books they tend to become motivated if a five figure sum can be achieved. If you spend over £500K on one item buyer's commission drops to a paltry 10%.

To be fair the cataloguer may have put in a few hours work on his description of the contents of this fabulous book. He certainly consulted Donald Wing's Short-Title Catalogue of Books --an essential book that can mostly be accessed through the splendid ViaLibri. It is hard to speculate what 'Hocus Pocus junior: The anatomy of legerdemain' (1654) would have made on its own. Maybe £18000? This is what we know of the other books from the catalogue:

[Neville, Henry] A new and further discovery of the Islle [sic] of Pines. Allen Bankes and Charles Harper, 1668, [Wing N509], first 2 leaves soiled with small marginal chips--Heath, J[ames] Paradise transplanted and restored. 1661, [1], 7pp., [apparently unrecorded issue, not in Wing]--[Gayton, Edmund] Walk knaves, walk. 1659, [Wing G421]--B., A. Learn to lye warm... reasons, wherefore a young man should marry an old woman. H. Brugis for W. Gilbert, 1672, [Wing B10], The life and death of Ralph Wallis the cobbler of Glocester. E. Okes, for William Whitwood, 1670, [Wing L2008]--Cromwell, Henry. The Lord Henry Cromwels speech in the house. 1659, woodcut illustration on title-page, [Wing L3047A, recording 6 copies]--The tales and jests of Mr. Hugh Peters. for S. D., 1660, engraved frontispiece, [Wing P1721; Sabin 61196]--[Butler, Samuel] A proposal humbly offered for the farming of liberty of conscience. 1663, [Wing P3705aA]--Wild, Robert. A letter from Dr Robert Wild. for T. Parkhurst, J. Starkey, F. Smith, and D. Newman, 1672, [Wing W2140]----Flagellum poeticum: or, a scourge for a wilde poet. Being an answer to Dr. Robert Wild's letter. for J. L., 1672, [Wing F1128]--[Achard, John] Moon-shine: or The restauration of jews-trumps and bagpipes. Being an answer to Dr. R. Wild's letter. for R.C., 1672, [Wing A439]--One and thirty new orders of Parliament, and the Parliaments declaration: published for the satisfaction of the people off [sic] the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland... together with the Parliaments ghost: to the tune of Mad Tom. 1659, [Wing O331]--[Stubbe, Henry] Rosemary and Bayes: or, animadversions upon a treatise called, The rehearsall trans-prosed. Jonathan Edwin, 1672, [Wing S6064]--C., J. Peters patern or the perfect path to worldly happiness. 1659, title within woodcut border, [Wing C784], couple of small tears affecting a few words--Dugdale, Sir William. The manner of creating the knights of the antient and honourable Order of the Bath. Phil. Stephens, 1661, [Wing M458], few small holes in final leaf affecting a few words--Langbaine, Gerald. The foundation of the universitie of Oxford. M. S. for Thomas Jenner, 1651, [Wing L370]--Ibid. The foundation of the universitie of Cambridge. M. S. for Thomas Jenner, 1651, [Wing L368]--Jennings, Abraham. Digitus Dei, or an horrid murther strangely detected. Declaring the suspicion, apprehending, arraignment, tryal, confession, and execution of Richard Rogers... for murthering of one Ruth Auton his sweetheart, having first begotten her with child of two children. A. Seile, 1664, [Wing J555A ]--Peacham, Henry. The worth of a peny, or, a caution to keep money. S. Griffin for William Lee, 1667, title with typographic border...

The most interesting and valuable book apart from Hocus Pocus has to be 'The Isle of Pines' (1668) by George Pine (ie Henry Neville) subtitled ' A late Discovery of a fourth Island in Terra Australis, Incognita' it is a much reprinted and much translated 'libertine fantasy' where a shipwreck leaves young George Pine with four women survivors on a mild and fertile island, soon copiously populated by their offspring, whose rapid increase in numbers is charted. Early British erotica, however mild, is much prized and very hard to find, it also has deep interest to collectors of early Australiana. It appears to be a very valuable book--Quaritch paid £300 for a copy ('stained & repaired with loss of text...') in 1980 and an ex library second edition made £600 in 1983. At a special sale in 2005 at Australian Book Auctions, someone coughed up a stonking $24000 Australian dollars ($18,604 US) - well over £10K for the 'Davidson' copy of the 1668 first.

Together with an 'orrible murder, some early economics ('The worth of a peny') another suggestive work ('Learn to lye warm.....') and an early work on bag-pipes this was a book to fight over. There is a theory, often advanced by the much missed book runner Andrew Henderson, that a small quantity of interesting books will often make more than if they were individually lotted. The idea is that dealers wanting one particular item are then forced to value the other books, some of which will be outside their area of expertise. In order to get the book they want they will often over estimate the final value of the other books. Auctioneers know this and make up interesting lots for dealers and collectors to fight over...In this case the lot was made up for them.



The book was said to have gone to a magic punter. One wonders if it is fated to be broken into twenty parts. A while ago David Copperfield was known as a great acquirer of such books - also the amusing and erudite Ricky Jay. Copperfield is appearing in Las Vegas at present and may not be such a punter (or he may have it all.) His Bardotesque ex wife Claudia Schiffer lives up the road from here in a country mansion (East Anglia.) Someone said they had seen her at a 'stately' car boot sale selling off posh tat but I think that was an illusion...