Le Carré - Call for the Dead (1961)

John Le Carré. CALL FOR THE DEAD. Gollancz, London, 1961.

Current Selling Prices
£4000+ /$6000+

MODERN FIRST EDITION / ESPIONAGE
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...in fact I dreamt of a fine/fine 'Rebecca' and a shelf full of Gollancz first editions all pristine in their yellow jackets. Orwell was there, Dorothy L Sayers, Gibson's 'Neuromancer', Larry Niven's 'Ringworld', Daphne's even more valuable book 'Jamaica Inn' ...a bunch of early Michael Innes, Visiak's 'Medusa', a 'Lucky Jim'', Charles Williams, Edmund Crispin, Kafka and the first two Le Carré's--with a few signatures and the odd loosely inserted autograph letter a 3 foot shelf of the top titles in fine condition would be knocking on a six figure sum in dollars and with luck even pounds sterling.

Near the top of the list is 'Call for the Dead' Le Carré's debut novel with Smiley as a sort of antiBond figure-- unstylish, plodding, cuckolded. This suspense novel was runner-up for the first prize in the British Crime Writers Association awards for 1961. Plot summary: "A murder passes for suicide . . . A bereaved wife is forced to hide her grief . . . A master spy challenges a favorite pupil to a lethal duel . . . ". Penguin blurb: "John Le Carre's taut, coiled tale of cold-war espionage set in foggy London and introducing a hypnotically fascinating hero, George Smiley, short, fat, and unobtrusive-by all outward appearances a far too ordinary man to be what he really is: a top intelligence officer on the trail of the most fiendishly clever spy ring ever to operate out of East Berlin." Le Carré is now regarded as 'one of the half-dozen best novelists now working in English' (Scott Turow.) Interestingly the special spy language used in the books has apparently been adapted by MI5 itself where it was not used already - lamplighters, dead drops, moles, one time pads, pavement artists etc.,

VALUE? There are a lot about. A decent inscribed copy sold last month at Bloomsbury for £3300 + commission and can now be found listed at £9000. It has made more several times in auction without a signature - £8000 at Sotheby's in 2000 and £5900 (In repaired d/j with minor soiling, unsigned) in 2002. While there are a lot for sale at the moment no one is breaking ranks and the lowest price (a modest example but with a TLS loosely inserted) is £4500. A seller in South Africa (something of an epicentre for silly prices) wants £20000 for a very fresh example from his own collection. He also wants to see extra postage ('Courier Service only for this item.') Beware of dealers selling their own collections.

Another seller at a vertiginous £15K+ for an unrestored but not fine copy suggests that the book would make a very good long term investment. Possibly true if you bought last month's auction copy, but at this price you might wait until well beyond the 2024 Olympics just to get your money back. In fact when a bookseller suggests a book is an investment it is an almost infallible sign that it is not. The book market is notoriously hard to predict and an author who is sexy now may go flat before long. Patrick O'Brian has not gone ahead for several years, the R.D. Wingfield market has become flaccid, John Fowles tanked in the 1980s, Durrell is treading water and even Robert Graves is not the man he was etc.,

OUTLOOK? Le Carre's first two books are always going to be hard to find and a perfect copy could nudge into five figures especially when some optimism returns to the market. The yellow Gollancz jackets are thinnish and prone to wear. Auction records suggest that the book is in a gentle, possibly temporary, decline. His second book 'A Murder of Quality' is a better read and scarcer but not as valuable and may prove a better bet. The consensus is that he has not produced a great book since the 'Constant Gardener'; most of his books beyond the first three are very common (even signed.) Worth noting is the fact that the jacket of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' remained exactly the same for about 10 printings-- this is sometimes turned to advantage by fiendish dealers who marry them with jacketless firsts or upgrade lesser copies. An almost undetectable ruse--as they say in Russia--'not caught, not a thief.'

Poems in Pamphlet series, 1951 – 1952/3

Single copies or even complete or nearly complete sets of this comparatively unregarded series aren’t hard to find, and compared with the often less attractive Fortune Press volumes brought out by the more commercially minded Reg Caton are distinctly cheap, especially when one considers that a handful of the poets concerned achieved literary celebrity ( not always for their poetry ) later on in their careers. The brilliant debut collection by Charles Causley tends to be singled out by dealers on the Net, but the work of
several other debutants is worth looking out for, including 'Relations and Contraries' by Charles Tomlinson and 'The Outer Darkness' by Thomas Blackburn, as well as volumes by interesting writers, such as Alan Barnsley, Ursula Wood, Peter Russell, Jon Manchip White and Jocelyn Brooke.

Each slim volume had an identical size and design, was bound in card covers and priced at a modest shilling. Each appeared in consecutive months over a two year period and could be bought either from bookshops or directly from the publisher - the American Erica Marx from her home in Aldington on the edge of Romney Marsh.

Marx, whose centenary falls this year, seems to have been unusual among literary publishers in that she had liberal, almost altruistic motives. Little is known about her early life, but we do know that before she established the Hand and Flower Press in Kent in 1940 she operated Les Press de L’Hotel Sagonne in Paris for two years. Presumably, like Caton ( who may have been her inspiration ) she scoured the literary press and especially the many ‘little magazines ‘of the forties ( some of the names of which appear in the separate pamphlets ) looking for those who she felt deserved ( as she explained )‘ publication in book form ‘.

It would seem that by the mid forties she had already begun to publish the work of poets she admired, such as Thomas Fassam, and the 1950 debut of Michael Hamburger predated his appearance as a poet in pamphlet. Of the twenty six poets she published in 1951 and 1952/3 half a dozen can be classed as outright duds, including Marx herself, writing as Robert Manfred; some of the others already had reputations, such as Peter Russell, the expert on Pound, who was already the admired editor of the little magazine Nine, Rob Lyle, who conducted the Catholic magazine Catacomb, F. Pratt Green, who was an admired and prolific writer of hymns, and the novelist Jocelyn Brooke. Causley, Tomlinson, Blackburn and Hamburger consolidated their reputations as poets. Quite a few of the remaining poets became better known for other things.

Robert Waller was to write the intriguing 'Shadow of Authority' (1956), a novel that satirised BBC radio producers, including Geoffrey Grigson and Roy Campbell. Charles Higham, at twenty the baby of the group, became a controversial Hollywood gossip-style biographer, and is still alive. Arthur Constance, the oldest at 60, was a bibliomaniac who by 1951 had already collected a library of 16,000 volumes, including arguably the largest collection of clippings on Fortean phenomena ever assembled —an archive which was scandalously destroyed after his death. Ursula Wood became the mistress of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in a strange ménage a trois; Alan Barnsley, A.J. Bull, Thomas Fassam, Frederic Vanson and Hal Summers ( a Whitehall mandarin in his spare time ) continued to publish verse, while Jon Manchip White went on to an amazingly prolific career as a novelist and screenwriter, even contributing an episode of the Avengers*** in the nineteen sixties.

With Poems in Pamphlet it’s best to buy a complete set of all 25 volumes, which one dealer is offering for a modest $200, admittedly a big mark up on the original 14s 6d for the 1951 set ( including postage ), but a bargain considering the big names included in these sets. Separate copies can work out expensive, especially if signed. For some extraordinary reason Bookbarn International want $69.57 for R.H.Ward’s signed Twenty-Three Poems , which makes Hamburger’s debut volume from Martin Booth’s library, for which The Poetry Bookshop asks a mere $40.23, seem a bargain. Similarly, if you pine for a copy of A Time to Speak complete with tipped in dedicatory note by ex BBC employee Gwyneth Anderson ( one of the ‘ duds ‘) it’s yours for a mere £70!!
Better value, I suppose, is The Elements of Death by gay icon Jocelyn Brooke, for which Peter Ellis demands $142.47. And although I paid just £1.20 for my Causley and less for my other titles, most volumes in the series can be had for between £5 and £8. [R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin for throwing light on this slim series. Good to see something affordable and something which if bought carefully (avoiding shacks, barns and the carriage trade) might hold its own in value. Poetry is an investment, sometimes a surprisingly good one...Talking of the great Jocelyn Brooke I have always kept an eye open for his 'Six Poems' which he published privately in 1928. Recently republished (also in 50 copies) by Callum James.
The original has to be into four figures but the 2009 edition is a fine substitute. Mentioned in D'Arch Smith's 'Love in Earnest' it is one of the last flowerings of the Uranian movement:

'Here we may ride, you
and I; the sun is in your hair, and you
have pinned the shivering
early primrose to your coat...
the pale, nude flowers
that I
picked for you.'

*** The episode of 'The Avengers' written by Jon Manchip White was called 'Propellant 23' and aired on 6 October 1962. He also wrote a lot of other 'tellys' including Sergeant Cork (first episode) Witch Hunt, Naked Evil, Mystery Submarine and the movie 'The Camp on Blood Island' (1958) (story and screenplay). Below is an image from his Avengers episode--the plot concerns a lost bottle of rocket fuel and it features Honor Blackman, with Geoffrey Palmer as a nasty piece of work. Manchip White was born in 1924 and currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee where he still writes novels.

Praise for the Book-Seller

I recently found some kind and encouraging words for the book shop owner in Grant Uden's 'Stange Reading' (Newnes, circa 1936.) It is a short series of sketchy pieces about literary curiosities--forgers, cryptography, 'lexicomania', 'Books which have altered history' etc., In the chapter 'Some types of bookmen' he writes:

For the Bibliopole, or book-seller, there can be little but praise. From the stateliest shop of New Bond Street, Albemarle Street or Charing Cross Road, down to the humblest den in a back street or the tumbled stalls of market places, the vendor of books is a magician.

His rows of friendly bindings are pleasant inns in an arid desert of plate-glass windows, thirty shilling tailors, hat-shops, milliners and multiple stores. His catalogues arrive on the breakfast table as unfailing antidotes to "the petty round of irritating concerns and duties." He may be a bad father, a fratricide or even a member of Parliament, but put him among his books and he is metamorphosed into a benevolent Cheiron with the wisdom of the ages to bestow, the friendly guardian of a treasure house, a veritable panaceist, a successful alchemist, a genuine dispenser of the elixir of life...

Written in the ChesterBellocian high flown manner of the period--a portentous, rhetorical style not unburdened with cliche and platitude but nevertheless refreshing--as a 'benevolent Cheiron' I have nothing but admiration for this Grant Uden. And it is not at all over the top-- surely most booksellers keep a regular supply of 'the elixir of life' under the counter. The slighting reference to MPs shows they were held in low regard even then. There are no bookshops left in Albemarle Street since Thorps left at least 30 years ago, New Bond Street has Sotheby's (sometimes known by rakish dealers as Dotheboys) but Charing Cross Road still has bookshops despite the best efforts of unthinking and unlettered landlords.

Max Beerbohm, Carmen Becceriense 1890

Max Beerbohm. CARMEN BECCERIENSE. Privately printed (Godalming, 1890).

A great rarity from the 'incomparable Max' as Shaw called him. His first publication which appeared 119 years ago almost to the day. A teacher at his public school Charterhouse, a Mr A.H. Tod, charmed by its prodigious wit, had 25 copies printed at Godalming. It is thought that it was done by the printers of the school magazine 'The Carthusian'. It is so little known that its existence was doubted by an earlier Beerbohm bibliographer. They had thought that John Lane's reference to it (as "Beccerius') in Max's 1895 'Works' was 'light-hearted'. It reads:

[1890.]

Beccerius | a Latin fragment | with explanatory notes by M.B. [N.D.
About twelve couplets printed on rough yellow paper, pp. 1 to 4, cr.
8vo, notes in double columns at foot of page. No publisher's or
printer's name.

The only copy known (at Charterhouse Library) is indeed on yellow paper. The slim pamphlet is an elaborate mockery in Latin elegiacs of 19th Century textual scholarship. Auden said that it was a work of which 'an adult humourist could be proud'. It could be said to prefigure Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' in its style--the fake poem and the over elaborate commentary with undercurrents of academic rivalry and obsessive pedantry. He comments on a line about the applause received by a poet:

'We have it on the authority of an earlier writer that Cornelius Grano was applauded for no less than ten minutes. Whether Lucretius was justified ...in calling the applause "nimius" is not a question of vital import. The true poet is not shackled by petty details but my old friend Professor Mayor is...the question is, however, trivial - indeed its very triviality is the best excuse I can offer for the space I have devoted to its discussion.'

Max also prefigures Joe Orton in his altering of plates in books (something for which Joe, unbelievably, went to jail - because they were library books.) Max tended to alter his own copies. Below is an etching of Kipling from Richard Le Gallienne's 1900 work on him where he has changed the title to 'Rudyard Kipling's soul'. I don't know what the original looked like (although it is a book that can be bought online for £10.) J.G. Riewald, a Beerbohm scholar, says 'the portrait has been worked on...and finally transmogrified into a cruel, bitterly satiric caricature full of loathing-"cleft chin, idiot sneer, and eyes jerking sideways as if in panic...' Max obviously had it in for Kipling as he altered the frontispiece of 'Barrack Room Ballads' into a portrait of the author, blood dripping from his reddened fingernails.

One is more likely to come across one of Max's altered books than a copy of 'Becceriense'. He is said to have 'improved' quite a few books including works of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Pater, Conrad, Housman, Tolstoy, Yeats, Belloc, Henry James, Tennyson and several more Kipling books. As for 'Becceriense', no copy has shown up as far as I am aware - either in catalogues or in auction... it is almost priceless and Beerbohm surely has one or two collectors with very deep pockets.

Beyond a joke...a price too far

Barry Baldwin. THE PHILOGELOS OR LAUGHTER LOVER. Gieben, Amsterdam 1982.

Current Selling Prices
$100-$800 /£65-£550

This continues the mild rant about pricing in the last post which proved oddly popular. Recently I bought a book on the web about the Philolegos - a collection of very old jokes translated from the Latin and Greek. They date from around 300 B.C. It is basically a thesis and translation with addenda published by Gieben in Amsterdam in 1983. One of the ancient contributors, Philistion, a mime artist and comedian working the stadiums in the time of Augustus is supposed to have died laughing. I found the only copy online whose price was not a joke and paid a slightly ambitious £30 for it. Having read most of it I put on a pile to sell but looked it up again and now found only 3 copies, one at a £100, one on Amazon Canada (haven of awesome pricing) at £190 and one with a German dealer at a mammoth, breathtaking £590. Thus I might sell mine at £60, representing a decent return on my money after 6 weeks. I suppose I shouldn't knock the overpricer as it means that I can come in way under them and appear strangely reasonable (even though I have a nasty feeling it is actually worth about £20.)

These extremely old jokes (some say the oldest in the world) are not exactly ribticklers, taste in humour having changed over time. Take this one (which has been used to date the collection)-

"Whilst attending the games held in honour of the millennium of the city of Rome, an egghead came across a defeated athlete in tears. 'Cheer up' he consoled him, 'I bet you'll win at the next millennial games.' "

An egghead, by the way, is the butt of many jokes and appears to have been a current type- the 'scholasticus' -a sort of vacuous pedant. Here is another egghead joke on the subject of book buying:

" A witty young egghead sold his books when short of money. He then wrote to his father, 'Congratulate me, father, I am already making money from my studies!' "

R.o.t.f.l. (as they used to say.) There are a whole series of jokes about people from the Greek city of Abdera whose citizens were apparently distinguished by their stupidity. Here is one of the better Abderite jokes:

"Seeing a eunuch chatting with a woman, an Abderite asked him if she was his wife. The eunuch replied that people like him could not have wives. 'Ah then she must be your daughter.' "

There are freakish circumstances in which vastly overpriced books can sell. A friend deep in the country had a call from a comic writer in London who needed a book for a sketch. It was Baron von Gagern's deathless work on wanking- 'The Problem of Onanism' (Mercier Press Cork 1955). Because the book amused him he quoted the guy £300 and 2 hours later a courier appeared with a cheque and shot off back to the metropolitan studios with the slim volume. It can be obtained fairly easily for £10. I sold a cookbook to a guy who needed it for a present for his host in Thailand--the man sent a taxi from Birmingham to London to collect it, pushing the £50 price to at least £300. Other books can get unrealistic prices because they are bought as leaving presents, inducements, rewards, for purposes of romance or seduction or because the book is needed urgently or the possession of it will make the buyer lots of money or even clinch a deal.

By the way academic books published in English in Europe are often rare and can command very good prices--look out for Brill, Van Stockum, Kluwer, J.G. Gieben, Martinus Nijhoff etc., Four Courts Press in Ireland are also unexpectedly expensive on occasions.


One of the explanations for absurd prices is that at the time the book was put up it was the only copy available thus giving full rein to the dreams, fantasies and fears of the pricer. An unsaleable collection of vanity published verse printed in Stoke Poges ('Songs at Sunset') in 1961 can thus get priced at £600 because the pricer somehow stopped at that figure in their head ('if they will pay £500, surely they will pay £600' etc.,) Other sellers then come in at £400 and £300--the blind leading the blind. Real value £3.50- a price at which it still might not sell. It's a mad world my masters...

Checking book values on the web...

The first thing to remember is that most books are of low value or no value. Some books are worth less than nothing. A quick look on ABE (or in the case of newer books, Amazon) will ascertain whether the book is common or not. In the case of a book of negligible value the screen will fill with copies with prices starting at £5 or less, sometimes at £0.01. Prices less than this are not permitted. Do not (at first) put in too much information -author's surname and part of the title will do (e.g. Steinbeck /Wrath) with a few boxes ticked such as 'first edition' 'Dust Jacket' etc., Too much information entered can lead to the impression the book is rarer than it is --this is a ploy, by the way, sometimes used by canny sellers to demonstrate a book is more valuabe than it really is. Beware.

The mistake most people make when valuing books on the web is to take their price form the highest or the mid range. None of the books listed have sold and anybody who had to buy one would choose the cheapest in decent condition; only a mad person would choose to pay more than necessary. Take your price from the low end of books in comparable condition. Considerations of postage and proximity may then be taken into account and you might pay a little more to a reputable, proven dealer. If you were selling the book a dealer might give you between a third and a half of the low price, or if you were to sell the book on Ebay you might achieve half or possibly a tenth and in some cases nothing. Once in a blue moon you will get way more than this, but you will almost never achieve the highest price--nor will the seller even if he waits 150 years.



What about if the book is not on the net? You may have a prize or something so obscure that punters for it are non existent. You can leave the book as a want at ABE and be informed when one shows up but it may take years. In the case of an obviously rare and desirable book you can consult auction records in a library or consult a venerable dealer (preferably from ILAB, ABA, ABAA, PBFA or some recognised book association.) You are not obliged to sell to them and they may charge for an appraisal (usually waived if they buy the book.)

Who are these guys with absurdly high prices? Generally they have had unhappy childhoods, uncles who drank, boorish parents or have been educated at unpleasant and expensive schools. Until the internet came the truly greedy dealer could not make a living as no one would buy from them. Now it is the Wild West out there; although charging an absurd price seems like poor business as your cash flow will be a mere trickle. I am not talking about renowned dealers with fabulous stocks--their prices, although high, are seldom insane and they often have the best stuff. Any serious collector will occasionally have to buy from them and they will sometimes offer terms. It is worth keeping a shit-list of malodorous overchargers as their prices often distort the first few prices in the list--I won't name them but avoid the likes of Len's of Bournemouth, Wainwrights of Peaktown, Books of Venture, Rapturous Editions of America, Books of William Why and various bookbarns, sheds and shacks...not forgetting Attic Books of NH - in a vigorously contended field the world's most overpriced seller.

Good luck. Apart from ABE and Amazon I recommend megasearchers such as the excellent viaLibri which can also take you to world libraries for further research. Also Bookfinder and Addall are very useful. For sobering or unpredictable prices check if copies are currently being sold on Ebay. Lastly Google can sometimes uncover copies for sale on independent sites run by oddballs who have not joined the bookmalls...

Harold Acton, Aquarium 1923

Harold Acton. AQUARIUM. Duckworth, London 1923.

Current Selling Prices
$130-$300 /£80-£200


POETRY / BRIDESHEAD GENERATION
‘ Drunk with the whiff of steak in passage-ways…’. (Young Sailor ).Sounds familiar, doesn’t it ? Or how about ‘Mr Bedlam’s Sunday Breakfast’ for the title of a poem? It is hardly surprising that the intoxicating influence of T .S. Eliot on an impressionable freshman like Harold Acton at Oxford in 1922/23 would have been reflected in this, his first book. Indeed, Acton was notorious for declaiming passages from The Waste Land from his window at Christ Church and for being one of the ‘ aesthetes ‘ at the University, along with Betjeman, Waugh and Connolly. Indeed Waugh, who is said to have drawn the best parts of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited and Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags from Acton, claimed he and his friend shared ‘ gusto ..a zest for the variety and absurdity of the life opening to us, a veneration for artists, a scorn for the bogus.’ And this hedonism is certainly present in Aquarium. .

Aquarium has received very little critical attention since it appeared—which may be an example of reverse snobbism by writers on early modernism –the idea that someone with all the privileges that Acton enjoyed ( Italian palazzo, paintings by Italian masters on the walls etc ) could not possibly have written anything worth considering at the age of 19. But the fact remains that despite the verbal showing off of an adolescent flexing his muscles (nacreous, mephitic, fuliginous, nubiferousness are some examples ) many of the poems in Aquarium aren’t half bad.



The book shows obvious echoes of Edith Sitwell, whose Bucolic Comedies had appeared in a similar format from the same publisher a year earlier (Acton dedicates a poem to her ). But while Sitwell’s lyrics primarily show her musicality Acton’s poems are strongly visual, even when he is nicking the idea of a poem with a musical theme from the older poet, as in ‘Conversazione of Musical Instruments ‘. Acton seems inevitably drawn to images of a gorgeous opulence , which can be sometimes overpoweringly artificial and stifling. And though he can visualize the naturalistic urban scene, it is always with the disgust of an aesthete surveying the horrors of the Industrial Age.

‘ Blast-furnaces and gasometers, yards
Of bulky timber-joists and refuse heaps,
Pitch, cataclysmic mounds of dross and slag,
Deep, yawning pits, the seething pores of Hell,
Slim towers of factories, vertiginous
Soul-traps to vitiate and brutalize…’

While images of affluence are often preferred :

‘And in the sloe-gin heat of summer days
The sky’s enamel is not quite Limoges…’


Aquarium is a sought after book, possibly due to the Brideshead Effect . Four years ago it featured regularly in the Wants List of Book and Magazine Collector at £80. At about this time Ulysses were asking £375 for a copy inscribed by Acton . Another copy, this time inscribed to Desmond Harmsworth featured in a recent Bloomsbury sale***. Most, including my own copy, for which I paid twenty pence in a Birmingham bric-brac shop some 30 years ago, seem to lose bits or all of their back-strips. A glassine jacket has been mentioned by dealers , but I haven’t seen a copy with one. Today ABE have just three copies—oddly two from booksellers in Wales—and though all seem very similar in condition, prices range from £70 to £180. [ R.M.Healey]

Caricature of Acton (with megaphone) above by Evelyn Waugh--no mean draughtsman. Thanks Robin. I have a feeling that was me offering £80 in the BMC for 'Aquarium'. It was not so much that the book was a surefire earner but if someone had a copy they might well have other rarer survivals from the 1920s. A good book on this crowd is Martin Green's 'Children of the Sun'. I recall having Graham Greene's annotated copy in a time when I did printed catalogues. The Acton I would like to have is his Hours Press book 'This Chaos' - it summons up this jazzy era--especially the Bright Young Things, our own sonnenkinder. I have started to collect Hours Press in a leisurely way --should any reader see any about. Lastly someone who had met Sir Harold told me had the world's most fluting voice...

*** Indeed on 12/12/08 someone paid £660 for a lot described thus. ' Aquarium, upper hinge weak, original patterned-paper boards, lacking backstrip, nick to top edge of upper board, 1923; An Indian Ass, original cloth, slightly soiled, 1923; Four Sonnets, folded sheet stapled in original blue-grey wrappers, n.p., n.d., the first two first editions, signed and inscribed by the author to Desmond Harmsworth on front free endpaper ; and another from Acton's library with his signature...' Judging by the price the buyer was probably an end-user, rather than a dealer, unless the unnamed book was a great rarity. Note that the backstrip was missing yet again...

David Bailey's Box of Pin-Ups, 1965.

David Bailey. DAVID BAILEY'S BOX OF PIN-UPS. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London [1965].



Current Selling Prices
$6000-$12000 /£3000-£6000

One of the victims of this recession has been photobooks. However like real estate in Britain and America they had become grossly overvalued and a correction was due. There were 3 big photo auctions in May and, whereas none bombed, results were lacklustre. Dealers tended only to be buying on commission and collectors only shelled out for stuff in exemplary condition.

Some surrealist items did well (the 1936 photo collage book 'La Septieme Face du Dé' by Hugnet made £10000 in it s Duchamp covers) and others badly --rude boy Hans Bellmer's not uncommon 'Les Jeux de la Poupée' failed to make its £40K reserve. Bailey's book turned up in 2 sales on the same day. Christies copy in a repaired box and lacking the cardboard throwaway insert made a punchy £4375. At Bloomsbury the gavel came down almost simultaneously at £1800 on a lesser copy ('missing lower cover and cardboard packing sheets stamped 'To be thrown away', the box with some marks and splits at edges.) Below is our original late 2007 report on this groovy book. It is hard to imagine the circumstances in which one would find a fine copy--but if one were found, even in these borassic times it would surely make £10,000+. Perhaps Lord Snowdon, the unsaleable photographer, still has his copy-- pristine because too nasty too touch with its pics of lowlife criminals and thugs. Possibly, like Churchill's Graham Sutherland portrait, it was destroyed.

PHOTOGRAPHY / 1960
Much sought after and valuable book from the mid 1960s before kaftans, bells, patchouli and psychedelia. I can remember as a teen seeing it in the shops and thinking it was expensive (£10?); there must have been quite a few printed and they got bought by the affluent and many got broken up and pinned up on walls of their kids -- the exact purpose for which they were intended. Of the few sets I have handled, quite often the photos had been taken down and put back in the box - with the pinholes at the corners as the evidence. In this auction description they have tape marks:

David Bailey's Box of Pin-ups. Description: A set of 36 portrait photographs (halftone prints), sheets 370 x 320mm., printed captions on versos, 15 (list available) with small tape marks at top corners, loose as issued in original box, upper cover with title, notes by Francis Wyndham and portrait of Bailey by Mick Jagger, lower cover with a repeat of Mick Jagger by Bailey, both cardboard packing sheets stamped "To be thrown away" present, the box with some marks and splits at edges, folio, Sixties style recorded and defined in a select gallery of movers and shakers from the worlds of music, fashion, art, photography, advertising, film and the stage. "Glamour dates fast, and it is its ephemeral nature which both attracts Bailey and challenges him." The text on the reverse of the image, penned by Francis Wyndham, cites Shrimpton as the inspiration behind this homage to visual culture: 'I want to do a book about images', said David Bailey, 'Jean's an image'.

This set made £4000 in 2004. There is some fetish about sets that retain the piece of thick card printed with the instruction to throw it away. A fine set made £20K in a photo sale in 2006 when 2 sixties obsessed and presumably bunced up punters went into full combat in a classic pissing competition. Some might consider the 60s way overrated and Bailey too. His work is noticeably absent from Martin Parr's seminal 'Photobooks 1 & 2'. Bailey has been accused of lack of taste and certainly anybody seen wearing a studded and pleated denim flat cap (as DB did in his documentary about Cecil Beaton) would have a job explaining himself to the taste police + his photos of Marie Helvin wrapped up in newspaper are a sort of limp response response to the pervo chic of Hemut Newton. His real strength has been as a fashion photographer drawing out stylish and sexual response from the beauties of the Love Generation. Also as a collector of photography he showed interesting and innovative taste--at CSK I recall seeing him buy a Van Gloeden of a svelte young girl--a rare item as the good Baron mainly concentrated on boys.



'Pin-ups' was art-directed by the caricaturist Mark Boxer, later editor of Tatler and briefly editorial director of Vogue, and David Hillman, responsible for Nova in its glory years. The subjects included Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp, Brian Jones, Kasmin, Jean Shrimpton, John Lennon & Paul Mccartney,Beaton, Rudolf Nureyev, Michael Caine, Hockney, Snowdon, the Kray Brothers and others. The strong objection to the presence of the Krays on the part of Lord Snowdon was the major reason no American edition of the "Box" ever appeared, nor a British second edition was ever issued. Gerald Scarfe, regarding the book as obsequious, responded promptly with ‘Gerald Scarfe’s Box of Throwups’ - a book I have never seen and which may be just a contribution or a ghost. Image below is of Bailey's muse - the pulchritudinous Jean Shrimpton aka 'The Shrimp.'

VALUE? Not impossibly rare - the print run was quite high because it was trendy material. However fresh, complete, unhandled examples with the box firm and intact are pretty scarce. Copies have made as little as $3000 in auction in the last 3 years and defective copies less, on the other hand they can climb to $10,000 and beyond. No copies at present on any internet bookmalls. People used to actually sell the pictures individually like some botanical breaker--think £100 a plate. Possibly to future generations the photos will be like Julia Margaret Cameron's highly prized photos of Victorian beauties and celebs. On the other hand the 60s era may be seen as less 'far out' and amazing when the boomers are no longer around to proclaim its ecstasies.

Bookdealer types - the uneducated seller

There is an old story about a Cecil Court bookseller. His son turned up one day and reported that he had failed his A levels and would not be going to university. The father said 'Ah well you'll just have to go into the book trade...' Until recently most booksellers were uneducated men, except at the highest end of the trade and possibly the fringes. Now there is no need for an education especially with the interweb--there you will find all you need to know to sell a book and, more usefully, the price you can get. With experience, guile and indefatigable industry the dealer will fairly soon learn the books that make money and crucially those that don't. John Dunning's bookdealer Janeway hero was a policeman and bruiser and there are several ex-coppers in the trade, not to mention ex-army and ex-gravedigger (not that any of these jobs necessarily exclude being educated.)

These wise dealers tend to stick with the bleeding obvious --Fleming, Rowling, Rackham, Narnia, Mockingbird, Steinbeck and Hem, mountaineering, polar exploration, atlases, sets of Jane, Dickens, fore-edge paintings, colour plates, Sam Beckett & Jimmy Joyce, Churchill etc., It doesn't matter that they know nothing of Dadaism, Oulipo, the School of Night or the Harlem Renaissance--this information will appear at a keystroke. Education, in some ways, will hold the dealer back and he or she can waste valuable time browsing obscure tomes out of whimsy or a misguided thirst for knowledge. An American friend and dealer recently met up with his old Harvard pals (now mostly stinking rich) at a reunion and told them he had become a bookdealer. Their reaction was one of pity, one even remarked 'what went wrong with your life?!'

The dealer instinct is more important than knowledge of books. If you can trade rugs or mirrors or soya beans you can probably trade books. You buy a book for a dollar and sell it for $2 (or preferably $5). You need a laptop, a pencil and a rubber (eraser--preferably pink) and you're away. The writer Javier Marias encountered a dealer in Buenos Aires -

'... a type... whom I though had disappeared from the face of the earth, except, perhaps, from England, where everything seems to persist in its original or Dickensian state. I mean the type of book dealer who knows absolutely nothing about what he stocks and sells, and therefore doesn't usually mark his books with prices, but decides how much to charge on the spot after hearing the prospective buyer's query, and particularly the tone in which it is made. Such a dealer is guided less by the binding, the print run, the date of edition or the author than the interest betrayed in the customer's way of looking at and handling a particular volume...

For these men, we buyers must, I suppose, be an open book; our reaction tells them much more about the tome in our hands than the tome could have told them when it was resting on its shelf a minute before. They know nothing about their wares but they do know how to drill into the human psyche; they've learned to interpret the slight trembling of fingers that go to the spine of a book, the momentary blinking of someone who can't believe his eyes are seeing the title they've sought for years; they know how to perceive the speed with which you seize this long-wanted but unfindable book, as if - and although you're alone in the bookshop - you were afraid the swifter glove of another hunter might appear precisely at that moment and snatch it from you. In the presence of one of these disciples of Sherlock Holmes, you feel as closely observed as an inmate in a prison yard who knows the guard is scrutinizing his every movement and gesture. In the presence of such a book dealer you must rediscover, in self-defense and in defense of your wallet, the art of dissimulation: you must control your emotion, your impatience, your agitation and your joy, making, instead, a show of disinterest in or even disdain for the thing you most covet; you must count to ten before taking down from the shelf the volume your eyes have fastened on in disbelief and greed...'

The smart way around such a dealer is, of course, to make a pile of irrelevant books around your desired treasure, thus drawing attention away from it. If the bastard then looks up every book you are, however, stuffed...

Bookdealer types -- the Polymath

The polymath. A few are to be found in the trade. Ridiculously over educated, versed in several languages with the ability (usually) to decipher titles in Russian, Greek, Atabic, Chinese and even Japanese. Their natural home is Berkeley California. Often of unkempt appearance; their books, too, are sometimes a little scruffy. Colleagues in the trade, some barely literate, urge them to go on 'Who Wants to be Millionaire' but their trash knowledge (or lack of it) would let them down. The fact that Lembit Öpik married one of the Cheeky Girls (for example) has passed them by (pic below)



Very useful as antiquarian booksellers where their Latin helps and they can find significance and saleable features in the dullest old tome. They can identify the first book on Buddhism published in South America or the first kosher cookbook in Ladino or spot a Buxton Forman or Major Byron forgery at 10 feet or even ferret out an undeclared facsimile (woefully overpriced) in some ignorant dealers stock. Possessed of a Funes like memory, fond of puns, sometimes, but not always, a good cook, superb musician and dangerously experimental chemist. Some are libidinous, some uxorious, some live like monks--oddly enough they are seldom boring.

Not to be confused with the faux polymath bookseller--he (always male) thinks that he has absorbed vast quantities of knowledge from his books by osmosis and wears a permanent look of self congratulation. Often a specialist with a good knowledge in his area but little outside of it, he can appear at first to be a brainbox but once you get him off his subject he may seem as dim as a Toc H lamp (as my father used to say.) If, as sometimes happens, he wins some great collection and becomes temporarily wealthy, his vanity knows no bounds and he will fill shelf after shelf with pompous overpriced books and haunt book fairs braying about great auctions of the past etc., The world of modern first editions and even art has similar polymathic types, often sleeker but seldom with such depth and width of knowledge. More types to follow...

Fortune Press - Amis & Larkin etc.,

Kingsley Amis, BRIGHT NOVEMBER. (1947 ) £400 - £2,000
Philip Larkin, THE NORTH SHIP. (1945 ) £750 - £1,500


‘ The Fortune Press ‘ , Philip Larkin complained in 1945, ‘ is only a yelping-ground for incompetents who can’t get a hearing elsewhere’ . At the time Larkin had just posted his novel Jill to the owner of the Fortune Press, R.A.Caton, who was also preparing to bring out his debut collection of poems, The North Ship. The protracted publication of both books and the censorship of Jill by Caton ( himself, ironically, a publisher of mild homosexual porn ) kept their author in a fury of irritation and frustration for years —a state of mind which was soon to be shared by his friend Kingsley Amis, whose own first slim volume, Bright November was to be taken on by Caton. Both men concocted private, long-running jokes about Caton, and according to Larkin, Amis never lost an opportunity of introducing the seedy publisher into his novels, sometimes under a thinly disguised pseudonym.

This particularly pair of ‘ incompetents ‘ were, of course anything but, and when their fame grew Bright November and The North Ship became legendary rarities -- almost as scarce, and equally desirable, as the first volumes of poetry by Graham Greene and William Golding. At present there are only three firsts of The North Ship on ABE and eleven of Bright November. Prices range ridiculously for similar copies of the same edition.



But seekers after desirable modern firsts from the Fortune Press don’t have to spend hundreds or indeed look too far for other worthy poets. Arguably, Caton published more debut volumes by good poets than just about any other publisher in the UK. And considering ( as far as we know, for Caton was famously secretive ) that he operated alone ( or with minimal assistance ) from a damp and chaotic basement storeroom in Belgravia —this was an astonishing achievement. Having begun in 1925 as the vanity publisher of C Day Lewis’s 'Beechen Vigil'*, which after being peddled around Oxford, made its author a small profit, Caton by 1939 had published some of the earliest work by Lawrence Durrell, was taking on a raft of very talented poets of the thirties, including Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller and Julian Symons, before moving on to such Neo-Romantics as Henry Treece, Nicholas Moore, Francis Scarfe, Tambimuttu, and Drummond Allison. In all, according to his bibliographer Timothy D’Arch Smith, he published more than 600 books between 1924, when he set up his press, and the late sixties, when he finally shut up shop. He died in 1971.

Of the Fortune Press poets most have disappeared into obscurity. Not surprisingly, when most were true ‘ incompetents ‘---wannabe poets with no discernable talent. Many were eccentrics; one or two achieved a dubious notoriety. For instance, Sir Anthony de Hoghton, a scion of that Catholic Lancashire family who owned that romantic ruin Hoghton Tower, which you pass on the train going to Blackburn, persuaded Mark Boxer to publish a poem that began ‘ God’s in His garage, cranking up his Bentley ‘in a Cambridge student magazine— for which Boxer was expelled for blasphemy . In the end, it is said, de Hoghton ended up as a beggar on the streets on London.

Neither Amis nor Larkin received a penny for their work , but Caton did manage to recompense a few ( in 'Inside the Forties' Derek Stanford, who gives a graphic description of his dealings with the publisher, claimed to be one of the lucky ones ). Many were happy to pay Caton for the thrill of seeing their poems in print . In return Caton, by listing his authors and their works on the backs of each dust jacket, made his customers feel as valued as any of the poets of the more eminent houses, such as Faber. At the same time he cut corners to keep down costs . Apparently, in the early years of the war, he stockpiled a huge amount of cheap binding cloth of various colours and textures, which accounts for the variety of bindings you can find. In the war years and for some time afterwards bindings were generally shoddy, as in my copy of Patterns and Poems by Patrick Tudor –Owen, and Howard Sergeant’s anthology, For Those who Are Alive ( where the glue seems to have seeped through the cloth ), In contrast, by the fifties, when presumably Caton had become more prosperous and could afford good binding material) you seen some fancy bindings. For instance, some copies of Girls and Stations (1952), the fifth Fortune Press title by Terence Greenidge, the Oxford friend of Waugh, and fellow member of the Hypocrites Club , have, for some reason, mock alligator skin bindings, while copies of Raymond Tong’s Angry Decade (1951) are bound to the highest commercial standards. Incidentally, it was in a copy of the latter title that I was delighted to find a specimen of Caton’s handwriting on a review slip.

Fifty or sixty years on, most of the early Fortune Press authors are dead . Perhaps the longest lived at 95 was Hindu poetic superstar Dr Harivansh Rai Bachchan , the sought after English translation of whose classic, The House of Wine, was published by Caton in 1950. Another who died recently was poet-pugilist Vernon Scannell, who famously listed ‘ hating Tories ‘as one of his hobbies in Who’s Who. When prompted by a pint in his Otley local he recalled Caton as ‘ a slightly sinister old boy, a kind of Graham Greene character ‘.Derek Stanford died recently, but still alive at 89 is Margaret Crosland, the biographer of the Marquis de Sade, Edith Piaf and Colette, who sixty years later followed up her Strange Tempe of 1946 with a further collection of poems. When I interviewed her she could still remember visiting Caton in his lair. ‘ He looked like a second-rate accountant, wearing the traditional dirty raincoat, on his way to a sex shop ‘.

As I said, there’s some good poetry out there .If most Fortune Press books rarely fetch more than a tenner, the highlights do much better. Titles to look out for are Poems and Songs (1939 ) by Gavin Ewart ---the first book by this witty one-time ad man and lithograph salesman, who made his debut in New Verse while still a public schoolboy with the scandalous ‘Phallus in Wonderland’. Poems and Songs is not that rare and most copies can be had for well under £100 . However, for some reason or other, one American bookseller wants $175 for his ordinary copy, whereas for a further $25 another American will sell you David Gascoyn
e’s own signed copy. Also worth having is Roy Fuller’s debut Poems (1940). Through ABE you can choose either an ex library wreck with 2 pages missing for 5 quid or a choice copy contain a postcard from Fuller to Cyril Connolly referring to Caton. It might be worth the extra cash to learn what Fuller actually thought of little Reg. (Caton pictured left.)

More extravagantly priced is a copy of Dylan Thomas Poems of 1934 which Caton cheekily reissued in 1942 at the height of Dylan’s fame—a bit of a coup this, but Caton was nothing if not an opportunist. The princely sum of $1467 is demanded for this, presumably because the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive has inscribed it to Mary and Herman Peschmann ( who they, ed ? ). But the loudest guffaws should be reserved for copies of Terence Greenidge’s Girls and Stations. Either the Waugh connection or the Betjeman foreword, or the fact that the author’s first Fortune Press title, The Magnificent (1933) was ordered to be destroyed for obscene libel , must be responsible for two dealers demanding the same sum of $203.81for their jacketless copies. Lastly, if you really insist on jackets and don’t mind being nagged, there’s a bookseller in Margate who will for £25 sell you a copy of 'Patrick Freed' by composer and Busoni scholar Terence Gervais White ‘ in a very good minus d/w of the SCARCE first edition. Copies in d/w are VERY SCARCE ‘. Yes, we heard you the first time, dude... (R.M. Healey)

* Still oddly ubiquitous, although now hard to find for much less than a £100. At one point I had 3 copies. Only 11 offered on ABE this week...and by the way there is Tim D'Arch Smith's excellent bibliography of the press (Rota 1983) with more good info on the life and foibles of the enigmatic Caton. At one point we (Any Amount) had a station wagon full of Fortune Press, now almost all gone, including multiples of jacketless North Ships and many by Aubrey Fowkes (boy does he sell) under his various names. They came from the manse (near Edinburgh) of the 1970s 'Fanny Hill' publisher whose name escapes me...(ed.)

A collection of right wing books...

I once bought a few shelves of old books from the Borough of Brent in London. At the time they were famous for their dour doctrinaire political correctness; sure enough above the shelves they had a notice to the effect that 'the Borough of Brent does not endorse the views expressed in these books.' Thus distancing themselves from the racism and sexism of nineteenth cetury novels, the period anti-semitism and xenophobia of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates etc.,. I was told this was as a consequence of complaints received from literalist locals...anyway above this posting should hang a sign 'Bookride abhors the views expressed in these books.'

Last week I bought a table full of right wing books. Not jackboot stuff , no Mosleyite brownshirt effusions (distasteful but much wanted) but more the intellectual right wing - the post Nietzchean, anti-democratic crowd--believers in aristocracy, racial theorists in the line of Arthur de Gobineau, opponents of egalitarianism, dabblers in eugenics, haters of degeneracy. Certainly the authors would not make great dinner companions but their books are undeniably saleable--more so than the left wing if you can put up with the customers. More than once in our shop I have even seen collectors of left wing literature discussing their books with right wing collectors--a temporary comradeship established through book collecting.

Here was Anthony M Ludovici, (1882 –1971) an English philosopher, Nietzschean sociologist and social critic. Almost laughably right wing -he opposed Jews, Arabs, foreigners, and 'odd people' — eccentrics, cranks and fanatics — having anything to do with government. His books, unless grossly overpriced sell with alacrity at healthy sums. Here also his associate, mentor and fellow translator of Nietzsche Oscar Levy the German- Jewish author of The Revival of Aristocracy (1906) and The Idiocy of Idealism (1940) both very hard to find and in nice shape worth £50 or more each with his 'My Battle for Nietzsche' in England proving almost unfindable. De Gobineau was here. sadly only as reprints. His major work Essai sur L'Inélgalité des Races Humaines (Essays on the Inequality of the Human Races 1853 - 55) can fetch over £4000. He has a lot to be responsible for having first developed the racialist theory of the Aryan master race. The Wikiman says '...Hitler and Nazism borrowed much of Gobineau's ideology, though Gobineau himself was not particularly anti-Semitic. When the Nazis adopted Gobineau's theories, they were forced to edit his work extensively to make it conform to their views, much as they did in the case of Nietzsche.' Here is a bloody useful 2 volume work of a right wing theorist, one Edgar Julius Jung (no relation) author of 'Der Herrschaft der Minderwertigen' (oddly translated as 'The Rule of the Inferiour.') Although opposed to decadence and liberalism he dared to criticise the thuggery of the Nazis and was murdered by the S.S. in the 'Night of the Long Knives (1934).

The prize item should have been the much desired book by Francis Parker Yockey (aka Ulick Varange) called 'Imperium'. The original from 1948 in 2 volumes can fetch over £2000, enough for a luxurious (but short) holiday in the Eurozone. Alas I merely found a handsome reprint (some chancers want a £100 + for it but realistically a £50 note is all that can be achieved.) Yockey was a far right fascist theorist continuously pursued by the FBI for over a decade -he was eventually jailed in San Francisco and swallowed a cyanide capsule - committing suicide in order to protect the anonymity of his political contacts. His book 'Imperium' argues for a race-based, totalitarian path for the preservation of Western culture. It was opposed by foaming Nazis such as Colin Jordan and Lincoln Rockwell as they felt his more socialistic ideas would undermine true Nazism.

Usefully there was a load of Nietzsche (sells like hot cakes) , some Schopenhauer, a decent boxed set of Spenglers 'Decline of the West' and a 4 vol set of Jakob Grimm's 'Teutonic Mythology' + a bit of 'Occult Reich', fascinating fascism, all stuff to look out for at boot sales, library sales, flea markets and those rare shops not connected to the beastly web.

Lastly some useful information about a moderarately great 'sleeper'--not many people know that Ludovici wrote poetry (much wanted) but also several unfindable novels including 'Mansel Fellowes (1919) + a novel under the pseudonym David Valentine 'Poet's Trumpeter' (1939.) I have a customer...

School of Night

Muriel Clara Bradbrook ( M.C.) THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT. a study in the literary relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh. Cambridge University Press, 1936.

Current Selling Prices
$100+ ? /£60+ ?

LITERARY HISTORY
Muriel Bradbrook's book is curiously unfindable but it seems to have established modern research into this shadowy group. It was reprinted in America in 1965 but even that edition has gone to ground. The name of the group is drawn from a satirical and slightly obscure allusion in a passage in Act IV, scene III of Shakespeare's play Love's Labours Lost, in which the King of Navarre says "Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night." There is even some doubt whether this is the correct reading (see Wikipedia who report alternatives such as 'Scowl of Night.') A scholarly site called Everything2.com has this on it:-

"An Elizabethan esoteric school founded by Walter Raleigh (a follower of John Dee) and Thomas Harriot, the renowned astronomer and astrologer. Its membership included the Earls of Northumberland and Derby (both alchemists); Sir George Carey; William Warner and Robert Hues (with Harriot known as the 3 Magi); and the poets Marlowe, Chapman, and Roydon. Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, was a driving force and financial backer within the group. Known as the 'Wizard Earl' he was jailed by James I, at the same time as Raleigh, for alleged involvement in the Gunpowder plot and treason.
The school was influenced by the ideas of John Dee and Chapman's poem 'the Shadow of Night' which celebrated the Saturnine, Hermetic melancholia, symbolic of the unconscious, the inspiration of the night and the first stage of alchemy, the Nigredo. Shakespeare knew of the group but never joined and parodied it in his Love's Labour's Lost ...The exact activities of the group were unknown but its ethos was similar to later Rosicrucians and Raleigh is believed to have acted as its main agent in the attempted colonization of America. The group was broken up with the rise of the Stuarts."

Others are more sceptical and see it as a very loose group of freethinkers, atheist and antinomians. It is not listed in Robert Anton Wilson's amazing list of conspiracies, cults and cover-ups 'Everything is Under Control' which has such groups as Potere Occulto and The Priory of Sion. It was the inspiration for a recent fine thriller by Alan Wall 'The School of Night - the story of a present-day researcher who becomes obsessed by connections between Shakespeare's plays and members of the "school". The book so far has no significant financial value, unlike Ms Broadbent's tome which has many wants posted on the web. Membership of the school does not seem to have conferred wealth or fortune--Chapman died in poverty, Marlowe was murdered in a tavern brawl.

Chapman's poem 'Shadow of Night needs to be reprinted. Meanwhile here are these dark, dark lines:-

Never were virtue's labours so envied
As in this light: shoot, shoot, and stoop his pride.
Suffer no more his lustful rays to get
The Earth with issue: let him still be set
In Somnus' thickets: bound about the brows,
With pitchy vapours, and with ebon boughs.
Rich taper'd sanctuary of the blest,
Palace of Ruth, made all of tears, and rest,
To thy black shades and desolation
I consecrate my life; and living moan,
Where furies shall for ever fighting be,
And adders hiss the world for hating me;
Foxes shall bark, and night ravens belch in groans,
And owls shall hollo my confusions
There will I furnish up my funeral bed,
Strew'd with the bones and relics of the dead.
Atlas shall let th' Olympic burthen fall,
To cover my untombed face withal...

Pics from the deathless Caspar David Friedrich.

Geoffrey Grigson. Legenda Suecana 1953.

A guest post by the estimable Robin Healey on a poetry 'sleeper'--although the severe limitation should alert most punters. Good to see Grigson's 'People, Places, Things and Ideas,' mentioned. This is the sort of book of knowledge that is never published anymore due to the internet. It is easily found, even 4 volumes in a slip-case and costs less than a couple of airport novels. It recalls a more earnest decade, the time of the Brains Trust and Bronowski, and was even published in America. I last saw a set in a St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop in Capitola, California for $5. Due to its weight and unsaleability I had to leave it there. The Grigson tradition carries on with his daughter Sophie who writes cookery books that you can actually cook from. Over to you Robin...

Geoffrey Grigson. LEGENDA SUECANA. Twenty-odd Poems. [Swindon, Wiltshire : Printed for the Author] 1953

Current Selling Prices
$100 -$150-$400 /£60 - £120


Most listeners to the Third Programme or readers of the Listener magazine if polled c1948 to name the most foremost living critic would very likely have nominated Geoffrey Grigson. The forties was truly the decade of this prolific ( in one year he published, I think, 9 books) and versatile broadcaster, fierce critic of poetry and art, anthologist, essayist, and, as a poet, master of precise, incisive observation. But the fifties saw him no less successful ( and a little more prosperous ) and in was in 1953, while engaged in editing an upmarket encyclopaedia, 'People, Places, Things and Ideas,' that he found the money to publish a small book that has now become a great rarity .

My copy of 'Legenda Suecana', subtitled Twenty-odd poems, bears no name of either author or publisher , and the date of publication occurs on the final page, along with the declaration that ‘ twenty-five copies have been printed by the Chiswick Press for the author ‘ . But though this statement is true, it doesn’t tell the full story. Grigson did receive 25 numbered copies himself, but two years ago I discovered another copy of the book containing a note from the publishers, Rainbird and Mclean, revealing that at least 150 more copies had been printed, probably for general distribution. All this would not matter were it not for the fact that the poems that comprise 'Legenda Suecana' chronicle Grigson’s brief adulterous affair with a young Swedish girl he had met while conducting research at the Bodleian Library—and that these revelations of naughtiness and the inevitable pain of rejection are most definitely not the sort of poems that most men would willingly broadcast to the wider world, never mind their wives and relatives.

‘ You smooth my head,
You warmly shift on me,
You move your leg, your thigh,
You ask—O bitch’s, bitch’s,
Question—‘Is it I
Makes you so potent?’…’

At this time Grigson was still married to his second wife, Berta Kunert, though relations had been strained for a while. Anonymity, and the control that Grigson exerted over who received the 25 private copies, offered a certain amount of protection, but if the 150 copies of the book were indeed sold or given away cavalierly by the publishers, it is inconceivable that a poet with so individual a voice could keep the facts of his liaison secret from any devotees of the Third Programme or the Listener who may have acquired a copy. In view of this, perhaps we should conclude that Grigson either didn’t know that so many more copies of his book had been printed, or, if he did, that he didn’t care who found out about his affair.

As it was, at about the same time that Legenda Suecana left the press he met, through 'People, Places, Things and Ideas' (pic left) , Jane McIntire, a young picture researcher twenty-three years his junior. Love blossomed and eventually, he left Berta . By the time the poems that make up Legenda Suecana had been incorporated into his Collected Poems (1963) he and Jane were a well-known couple and she had already embarked upon her sparkling career as a cookery writer .

It was Jane herself who presented me with my copy of 'Legenda Suecana' at a memorial poetry reading in 1986, a few months after Grigson’s death at the age of 80. I cherish this book, particularly as it came from someone intimately associated with the amorous adventures of 1953. For the many admirers of Grigson, 'Legenda Suecana' has become a desirable book –a fact that is reflected in the speed at which any copies disappear from ABE, despite prices that range from £50 to £100. I have never actually found a copy in any bookshop and at present there are none available in ABE.

George Chapman. Shadow of Night, 1594

The Shadow of Night: containing two poeticall hymnes, devised by G.C. Gent. At London : Printed by R[ichard]. F[ield] for William Ponsonby, 1594.

Current Selling Prices
£10000+ / $15000+

A book I would love to find, one of the earliest emanations of the gothic tradition in literature. A pair of complex neoplatonic poems on night and day--a quarto of 40 pages, it has 2 words in Greek in the title line which transliterate as 'Skia Nyktos'.

I was reminded of it recently when I came across a 1901 auction catalogue of the McKee sale which broke a few price records for rarities of Elizabethan literature. Books of this period were at the time the summum bonum of book collecting and, for a few rich and cultured players, still are. Most of the great books {without even including Shakespeare) require wads of cash not to mention 'realms of gold.' At the MCKee sale in New York 'Shadow of Night' ('very rare') made $230 and Chapman's famous work 'Seven Books of the Iliad of Homer' ('superlatively rare') made $865 and was bought by Pickering and Chatto (still dealing.) To get a fix on prices the great 1600 anthology 'England's Parnassus...Flowers of our Modern Poets' ('fine tall copy' -pictured left) made $230 - it has contributions by Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson. A copy of this same anthology made $23000 in 1990 and a less than brilliant copy £12000 at Bonham's in 2007. No copy of 'Shadow' has shown up in auction since WW2.

Chapman is, of course, the subject of Keats' sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.' He is said to have written it before breakfast after spending all night reading Homer with a friend and shouting with delight at the felicities of Chapman's translation. Middleton Murry called it "one of the finest sonnets in the English language." You couldn't really get a better review or puff for a book than this:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been
 
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
 
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
 Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
 
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

 When a new planet swims into his ken;
 
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

 He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men

 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
—
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 
T.S. Eliot called Chapman 'potentially the greatest artist' of the Elizabethan dramatists. The Oxford Companion refers to him as a genius manqué 'whose learning and energy were never sufficiently disciplined...' to be continued with some speculation on his affiliation with the shadowy secret society of freethinkers known as the 'School of Night'...

A Wonderful Time. Slim Aarons, 1974

Slim Aarons. A WONDERFUL TIME; AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF THE GOOD LIFE. Harper & Row, NY, 1974. (ISBN: 0060100168)


Current Selling Prices
$350-$650 /£250-£450


PHOTOGRAPHY
Large book (13 by 10 inches) - likely to be found on the white shelves of Long Island summer mansions and on glass coffee tables in the NY apartments of fashionistas, name droppers, decorators and photobook collectors. Aarons served as a combat photographer in World War II and was awarded a Purple Heart; friend of the famous, lanky and charming, he said "I'm not a master photographer. I'm a journalist with a camera." America's Cecil Beaton, but straight. Surprisingly the book is listed in Vol 2 of Martin Parr's essential 'The Photobook. A History.' Generally the discerning duo eschew coffee table style books and 'Society' snappers. Parr, however, detects a mild satiric note to the photos -'Aarons wields a sharp camera...' By the way, Bailey and Beaton are not to be found in Parr's extensive black books, which is a little harsh on poor Cecil...said to be a rather unpleasant man but with undoubted talent and skill.

The book is mainly colour and black & white photographs showing the estates, interiors and lifestyles of the Rockefellers, the Duchess of Windsor, the Vanderbilts, Lilly Pulitzer, T.S. Eliot, Merle Oberon, Cecil Beaton, Mary Hemingway, Gloria Guinness, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Jock Whitney, Truman Capote, Cobina Wright, Howard Hughes, Fleur Cowles and numerous others. Clubs, seaside mansions, pools and vast estates -endless opulence.

Dust jacket notes read: 'A Wonderful Time captures magnificently the life of America's elite from coast to coast, in Bermuda, the Caribbean, and Acapulco. Drawing from thousands of pictures taken since World War II on assignments for Holiday, Town & Country, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Vogue, Travel & Leisure, and other publications, Slim Aarons has put together the best of them--many never before published--with a narrative of his experiences and impressions while photographing American aristocrats on their estates and at play at their favorite resorts...having a wonderful time.' Other places and hangouts included The Myopia Hunt Club, Sugarbush, Snowmass, Bermuda, Jamaica, Acapulco, La Jolla, Nassau, The Exumas, The Bath and Tennis Club, Aspen, Hobe Sound, Montego Bay, The Waldorf. A vanished world. A litany of leisure, privilege and wealth. Dominick Dunne land. Baby you're a rich man too...



VALUE? Possibly a little old game/ vieux jeu in its appeal especially in a time of financial apocalypse. However this may have added to its appeal as its price has recently started to rise with all the cheaper copies that were available a year or more ago having found buyers. This is a book that has sold for over a $1000 but a careful buyer should find one for half that. One seller who has entered the photobook world late and seems to think it's full off mugs to whom money is no object, wants well over a £1000 for a less than fine copy and may have to dream on.
Another Society photographer from a slightly earlier era who is also much wanted is Jerome Zerbe, especially his 1937 privately published work 'John Perona's El Morocco Family Album.' Amazon had a decent one at $1250 but it went. An unpleasant sounding copy is being sold on Amazon for $1300, however it's sale would benefit the Mennonite Central Committee. Another wacky seller who notes that it features New York's pre Jet Set sipping swanky cocktails in 'swank Zebra banquettes' has 4 as new copies at $1800 in custom 'Martini Spill Proof' Mylar. Probably a lucky warehouse find but not one where the luck is being passed on...

OUTLOOK? Better than 2 years back when I first covered this book. I suspect it was published in a large run so it is unlikely to become rare but it will always be wanted, especially with the imprimatur of Parr and Badger. In good times it will sell to the leisured and loaded and in down times it has a bitter sweet nostalgic appeal. The popularity of the TV show 'Mad Men' which covers this era may also be helping its appeal. One of the great coffee table books.

The Shell Guides 1933-1984 (continued)

Piper’s Oxon appeared in 1939 and immediately demonstrated just how the perfect Shell Guide could be achieved . In so many ways Piper’s book is a masterpiece—from its arresting photographs to its gazetteer entries-- all testify to Piper’s brilliant talent for the obscure fact and the romantic image. Almost immediately it was cased by Faber. Incidentally, C & A.J .Barmby have a reasonably priced copy of a cased Batsford Oxon—all such bound Batsfords being, according to Mawson, ‘ fantastically scarce ‘ ( certainly, I’ve never seen one ).

Nor have I met a spiral bound Batsford ( or even Faber ) Gloucestershire ,but there must have been one, because Faber cased a spiral bound issue in June 1939, just after taking over the series, and these are the books offered for sale on ABE at the moment at prices hovering around £100- £150—Deighton’s being the most expensive, of course. Oddly, my copy, which was published by Faber in 1939, has no spiral binding and is cased using a strange black and grey modernist cloth as if for a library, although the spine lettering is much more like the lettering of a trade binding. Also, it’s in a larger format than the spiral bound books, and has a different quality paper. From this I deduce that it may be the first title in a planned new series by Faber that never took off, possibly due to the War. I’d love to know if anyone else has a similar copy. Incidentally, Gloucestershire is a superb guide, individual and intelligent, as befits the work of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s love child , and it’s significant that West was also the friend and biographer of Piper ( his John Piper of 1979 is a most leftfield view of the artist).

Piper and Betjeman toured Shropshire in 1939, expecting their guide to appear within a year, but the war intervened and Shropshire wasn’t published until 1951. Faber opened their great phase of Shell Guide publishing with a visually and verbally striking Guide. With its gaudy jacket in blues and orange by Piper and a wonderfully idiosyncratic, observant text, this is a truly charming title and the only Guide that the two friends wrote together. It is therefore one of the most desired titles of the post-war series. Surprisingly, there is no copy on ABE at present. Expect to pay around £30- £65.

The facts that the Guides didn’t immediately resume in 1945, and that Piper and Betjeman transferred their attentions to the lookalike Murray Architectural Guides in these immediately post-war years, suggests to me that Faber had become disillusioned with the idea of continuing the series. But the splendid appearance of Shropshire in 1951, followed soon afterwards by second editions of Oxon and Gloucestershire, perhaps indicate that the publisher saw a bright future for the Guides as more visually attractive rivals to the rather dull paperback Buildings of England series that had begun to appear in 1951.



For their burgeoning new series Faber opted for a total redesign modelled, probably on Betjeman’s advice, on Piper’s Oxon. So, despite the incorporation of the 1930s features in, for instance, Wiltshire, such as the cod-antiquarian title page and jokey, punning ads at the back, these Guides are real improvements as guides on the early spiral bound examples, for all their obvious charm. The main difference of course is that in the improved economic climate of the ‘ never had it so good ‘ fifties, and early sixties ( as opposed to the recession-hit thirties ) the Guides were printed in larger numbers and therefore are more common today. Copies of Piper’s updated Oxon, Verey’s Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, Stephen Bone’s West Coast of Scotland and Brian Watson’s Devon are comparatively easy to find, although copies with jackets are thinner on the ground. Rarer are Verey’s Herefordshire, with Rutland, by pioneer historical geographer W.G.Hoskins, even rarer.

The sixties was a decade when individual Guides began to expand in size, Faber being ever aware of the threat from the detailed descriptions offered by Pevsner. Titles from the sixties to the mid eighties, when the series finally folded, ironically with the prizewinning Nottinghamshire by Henry Thorold, are far more common and accordingly cheaper. Most can be acquired for anything from £6 to £20,, although, true to form some dealers on the Net try it on.




But even in this last phase some titles are advertised as being more scarce than others. I was never aware that my own Hertfordshire was rarer in hardback. My publishers simply told me that there was a print run of 10,000, and it is entirely possible that a high proportion of the sheets were held back for the paperback edition.

End of this series, thanks Robin - just acquired a battered 'Bucks' from a charity selling through Amazon for a tenner all in. It's the one with the sombre Edward Piper photos (above) - presumably the product of filters and deft darkroom technique. The writer and broadcaster Jonathan Meades in his 2002 piece 'Death to the Picturesque' says of these photos '...he renders the county as though it is perpetually in the throes of an apocalyptic electric storm.' Hard to find good images of the guides on the web, the Piper is a quick scan from my own copy and the Essex is there because it's just down the road (Scarfe also did a good job on Suffolk.)