Andre Simon - Soliloquy of a Bibulous Bibliophile 1

 All hail André Simon (1877-1970)  bibliophile, gourmet, wine connoisseur, historian, writer and trader in wine (especially champagne.)  Born in Paris, he came to London in 1902 as the English agent for the champagne house of Pommery and Greno.  Although he lived in England from then onwards, he always remained a French citizen. He wrote over 100 books and pamphlets on wine and food and collected wine books all his life -his personal collection was one of the finest ever assembled. His love of books is described by Hugh Johnson in the foreword to the Holland House facsimile reproduction of his definitive wine bibliography Bibliotheca Vinaria:  "His senses of sight and touch were as well developed as his famous sense of taste.  Books to him were objects of physical attraction.  I remember many occasions when he took book after book from his shelves for me to admire their print, their woodcuts or their bindings."  Simon believed that "a man dies too young if he leaves any wine in his cellar," - only two magnums of claret remained in his personal cellar when he died at the age of ninety-three. There was another stash however, for on what would have been his 100th birthday, 28 February 1977, 400 guests at the Savoy Hotel in London drank to his memory in claret he had left for the occasion: Chateau Latour 1945.

I found this article by him in Wine & Food of Winter 1966 - a magazine he had founded with the great Corvine A.J.A Symons in 1932. It does not appear anywhere on the web but I have not produced it quite in its entirety for copyright reasons- cutting out a few longueurs, deviations etc., I will add some footnotes later. For the moment it is worth noting that this is a book collector so involved with wine that he bought the Gutenberg Bible (current value surely $20,000, 000 or more) because it contains a description in Isaiah of the planting of a vineyard. This is a bit like a collector of tennis books buying a Shakespeare First Folio because the bard mentions the game in Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing and Heny the Fifth ('When we have match'd our rackets to these balls./We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set ...) His library would have been the kind of collection a dealer could retire on and follow the good life -as defined by Andre Simon.

Andre Simon - Soliloquy of a Bibulous Bibliophile 2

The Soliloquy of a Bibulous Bibliophile.
By André L. Simon ('Wine & Food' No 132, Winter 1966)

Is there anyone anywhere today, I sometimes wonder, who had the opportunities which were mine, during three score and ten years of my adult life, to enjoy wonderful wines, the likes of which the post-wars generations will never know, and the privilege to enjoy them with such wonderful friends? I doubt it.

One of my oldest friends- he was born in 1847- was Sir James Agg-Gardner, a little man and a great lover of wine…he was one of a few friends who lunched with me at my old Mark Lane headquarters, in 1918, to celebrate my return to civilian life.* There were still, on that day, four magnums of Cockburns 1847 in the cellar; we had one of them and it really was magnificent! We were on the eve of a General Election and we all drank good luck to Sir James in the wine of his own vintage. I promised him, somewhat rashly, another magnum of 1847 Cockburn, should he be re-elected. He was re-elected of course, not only that year, but twice again during the next twelve months: it took three elections in two years to get a working majority, and this was why and how my last three magnums of Cockburn 1847 went in two years! No regrets: they were at their best and could not possibly have been any better had they been kept any longer.

... I had the good fortune to hear of a small parcel of Chateau Lafite 1870, in 1935, tasted the wine and found it still very good, old as it was: it was not château bottled, but bottled at Leith, in Scotch bottles, with first-class corks. So I bought it for the Saintsbury Club, of which I was Cellarer then and during the first thirty years of the Club’s existence. I put aside a dozen bottles in the hope that the Lafite and Ian (Campbell) would celebrate their eightieth birthday together, which they did, in 1950, at the Vintners’ Hall.

A much younger friend of mine, Eustace Hoare- he was born in 1899, a great claret year!- was the most charming host imaginable. He was also a great claret lover, and his old Eton mentor, C. M. Wells, Charles Walter Berry, Vyvyan Holland, myself and other claret lovers, met at Eustace’s hospitable board on many happy occasions; we greatly enjoyed fine fare and the finest clarets of 1899 and 1900, as well as each other’s company, of course, but we always failed to agree which was the better of those two great claret years, reserving our final judgement until we had had another ‘sitting’!...

How grateful I am to have still with me, on my shelves, so many old friends, the books which I have been collecting all my life. There are, I know, many bibliophiles who have a far greater number of books that I have, some of them rarer and more valuable than any I have, but I cannot imagine anybody having assembled a more representative collection of books of wine interest*, not only books dealing exclusively with viticulture and wine-making, but others in which wine is considered from the moral, social, economic, and medical angles. This, although the Bible cannot be called a ‘wine book’, I did not hesitate to buy, when I had the chance to do so, a beautiful Folio of Gutenberg’s Bible, printed at Mainz, between 1450 and 1455, with Isaiah’s description of the planting of a vineyard.

The two oldest friends on my shelves have been with me for over sixty years, through two world wars and many vicissitudes: I only paid a guinea for each of them and each is worth at least £50 today. One is a little book of eight leaves in full calf binding, but there were only seven leaves in a blue paper dust cover when I bought it from Pickering and Chatto, in 1904: I had the missing first leaf added in facsimile from the British Museum copy. It is the earliest of all books ever printed that deals exclusively with wine: its title is De vino et eius proprietate; its author is unknown, but I am as sure as one can be without documentary evidence that it was written by Jerome Emser: it was first published, in 1478, in German, before being translated in Latin. My other old friend is a perfect copy of Andreas Bacci’s De Naturali Vinorum Historia, printed in Rome in 1596, a full hundred years later than his little brother; I bought it from Smith, an odd antiquarian bookseller of Brighton, one of those rare bargains that gladden the heart of a bibliophile.

One of the earlier post-War I books which I treasure, as I do the memory of Hugh Cecil Lea, who gave it to me in 1920 as a Christmas present, is William Turner’s A new Boke of the nature and properties of all Wines that are commonlye used here in England. My copy is a perfect copy; it came from the Huth Library and is one of five known copies.

There were comparatively few books written and published before the seventeenth century that dealt exclusively with wine, but there were many books on agriculture in general in which an important place was given to viticulture and wine-making, and many of them are on my shelves. The finest and oldest of them is the first edition of Peter Crescenz’s Opus Ruralium Commodorum, printed in Ausbourg, in 1471, which I bought from Maggs Brothers, forty years ago, for £280; a beautiful copy in its original pigskin binding, with seven embossed brass pieces at seven of the corners, and one in the centre of the front cover…

Arnaldus de Villanova’s Tractatus de Vinis, and similar books written by the doctors of the School of Salernes, deal with wine in a pseudo-scientific fashion, and are interesting as such: one German doctor, for instance, in his Regimen Sanitatis printed at Strasbourg, in 1513, recommends a draught of wine when having a bath, adding that the Queen of England, Elizabeth, always had one, and there is a woodcut on the title page showing the queen, with her crown on her head, sitting in a great wooden tub and her doctor handing a draught of wine to her!

Fathers of the Church and moralists of old have also written a great deal about the use, more especially the abuse, of wine, and I have many of their writings, none more consoling than the assurance given in one of those books that you may happen to be drunk and be perfectly blameless, that is if you have been given bad wine: you were drugged, not drunk!

The Purple Cloud (1901) - the book of the moment

All the recent news about the volcanic ash cloud over Europe and consequent turmoil and disruption were like a science fiction or Doomwatch story--it brought to mind the great post apocalyptic fantasy by M.P. Shiel The Purple Cloud. Published in 1901 and revised in 1929, it has appeared in many editions (a US hardback cover below) including pulp paperbacks. The first edition is the best but rather rare, especially in collectable condition. I am grateful for M.Stone and J.Baxter for sending me an image from Paris of what looks like a very decent example.

M.P. Shiel (1865-1947) was a British writer of Irish mulatto parentage. His fantasy and supernatural fiction has a dedicated cult following but he is also known for his 'radium age' SF and his strange and alluring detective and mystery fiction. Bookride will deal with him in greater depth later but his Purple Cloud seems especialy prescient right now. It concerns the first man to reach the North Pole - he returns to find all life on earth has been destroyed by a poisonous gas realised from volcanoes and explores the world like the traditional 'accursed wanderer'. He does not take it well and turns to total decadence and drugs, burning entire cities down for his own amusement…until at last he discovers another human… slightly more apocalyptic than holiday makers stuck on the Costa del Sol admittedly. His prose style is well regarded - some however say that Shiel's writing was as purple as his cloud-here is a flavour of it from this work:

“For oftentimes, both waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which orb I was, nor in which age, but felt my being adrift in the great gulf of space and eternity and circumstance, with no bottom for my consciousness to stand upon, the world all mirage and a strange show to me, and the frontiers of dream and waking lost.”

He was much admired by fellow writers such as Wells, Machen, E.F. Benson, Rebecca West, Carl Van Vechten, Dashiell Hammett ('a magician...') Ellery Queen, August Derleth, J.B. Priestley etc., Hugh Walpole said of him "A flaming genius! At his best he is not to be touched, because there is no one else like him." His values are high. An indifferent rather worn example is offered at $1200, a fairly decent presentation copy at an adventurous £2500 but a thousand pound note would not be out of the question for an uninscribed sharp and fresh looking example.

Fashion in book collecting

Fashion’s a funny thing. Turn up at Gekoski with an armful of signed firsts of Barrie, Galsworthy, Coppard, Shaw, and Walpole, and you’d be politely shown the door. Waddle in with a battered copy of Ulysses complete with an authorial inscription to Wyndham Lewis and suddenly he’s fishing out his cheque book. Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce and Lewis were all of the golden 1880s generation who came good in the 1920s, but it would seem that in the era of their greatest fame as modernist icons, book collectors actually preferred Galsworthy , Barrie, Coppard , Shaw and Walpole. Indeed, in magazines like the Bookman, whole articles were devoted to collecting their firsts and limited editions-complete with ‘ points ‘ in this developing market for modern firsts.

Fashion never bothered the average reader. Shaw hasn’t been’ in ‘since God knows when, but no-one told me that when St Joan was chosen as a text for my O level syllabus. As far as my teacher was concerned, Shaw was as relevant in 1968 as he had been in the twenties. And the importance of Galsworthy was recognised by producers of that sixties adaptation, The Forsyte Saga, while Coppard was surely still in vogue in the late sixties if a series of his dramatised short stories on TV was any indication. It followed ( I assumed ) that collecting their books was a good investment move. I clearly remember as a teenager in 1969 being shocked to discover that the first of Shaw’s Apple Cart that I had recently plucked out of a jumble sale for sixpence was only worth about 2 shillings. Today you can get one for £1—even less in real terms-- on the Net.

The Bookman of the early thirties is a good source of material on the market for modern firsts. The expert, usually Gilbert H. Fabes, who wrote long
bibliographies based on these contributions, doesn’t focus entirely on the moderns, but is clearly intrigued by the trends he discovers in the market. According to William Foyle, Fabes’ knowledge of the modern first edition market was ‘ unique ‘, though other collectors and dealers felt unhappy that he had given away too many trade secrets in his first bibliography. Today, as a bibliographer Fabes can be seen as a trailblazer, despite the fact that his critical judgements would not now bear scrutiny—he classed Priestley with Dickens and A. A. Milne with Lewis Carroll. Masefield too was reckoned among ‘ the first rank ‘.

This price movement upward appears to have began in the prosperous years of the twenties, at about the time when the rage for collecting modern etchings took fire. In a magazine interview in 1927 a young actress called Barbara Hoffe, along with confessing rather bizarrely that her favourite meal was a mushroom omelette, also revealed that her favourite hobby was collecting ‘first editions cheaply’. Not long afterwards W. H. Smith launched a new quarterly, The Book Window, which was devoted to reviews of the best books and ‘ to those limited and deluxe editions likely to appeal to collectors ‘. But though the etching market collapsed dramatically with Wall Street in 1929, leaving artists like Graham Sutherland without customers, the Bookman pieces would suggest that the market for modern firsts was more resilient. The timing of the Bookman articles may even suggest that modern firsts were, post 1929, being promoted as alternative investments to etchings.



Today, on the whole, modern firsts are still better investments than etchings, though the Web’s print dealers would tell you otherwise. The sad truth remains that had your bookish granddad taken Fabes’ advice and bought firsts of Shaw et al sixty odd years ago they’d be worth a fraction in real terms of what he’d paid for them. Consider the table below and take into account the enormous inflation since the thirties -here stated at a modest 20 times factor:

George Bernard Shaw
John Bull’s other island (1907) £2 (£40) now £20 .

James Barrie
Better Dead (1887) £35 (£700) now £85
Auld Licht Idylls (1888) £25 (£500) now £35
My Lady Nicotine (1890) £25 (£500) now £150

John Galsworthy
From the Four Winds (first book, 1897) £50 (£1000) now £150
A Man of Devon (1901) £40 (£800) now £180
The Man of Property £35 (£700) now £60

A.E.Coppard
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me 1921 £10 (£200) now £50
(signed, Golden Cockerel)
The Black Dog (1923) £15 (£300) now £16

Bet you wish your granddad had instead backed a young etcher called G. Sutherland when the crash came. His crepuscular pastoral scenes inspired by Samuel Palmer now retail at a cool £4,000 each. [R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin, wise and timely words. Caveat emptor etc., As a dealer I have to differ with you slightly on Shaw values; last time I checked there were still good punters for signed Shaws especially with incisive and amusing inscriptions, and you would probably find the Oracle of Bloomsbury Square ponying up for a signed copy of Barrie's play 'Peter Pan'. I still get excited when I find a Galsworthy writing as John Sinjohn (they are far from common) but cool down when I check the price on ABE. His 1897 novel 'From the Four Winds' would be a good title for a prog rock concept album.

Who are the Coppards, Walpoles and Barries de nos jours? I suggest Louis de Bernieres and Ian McEwan --the first is already in decline and some very silly prices are now being asked for early McEwans-- a bad (or good) lead indicator... you might add Cormac McCarthy who had quite a showing in American Book Review's recent 40 Bad American Books. Turning up on Oprah may not have helped. Price, of course, does not reflect quality, good or bad. Values are determined by serious buyers, generally well off, confident, not to say self important. This is why Fleming still makes serious money but also Joyce, Orwell, Biggles and Greene.

As for Galsworthy you can find incredible variants in his prices. Some of his books are hard to sell for 1 cent. The world's most expensive web seller, whom I shall call 'Attic Books,' (because their prices go through the ceiling) have the signed limited edition of his collected plays at a mind blowing $2500 (it can be bought easily for $45 and his signed collected works in 30 exquisite vols can be had for considerably less). Oddly enough they have recently halved the price of this from $5000, a thing uncommon amongst gross over-chargers. Most absurdly priced books stay at the same level year after year-- a seller in the Midlands, who could be said to have put the peak in Peak District, has his entire stock at almost exactly three times normal retail and never reduces the prices. Because nothing much sells he has a very large web stock and his prices have become useful to many more sober sellers as they can generally get about a third to a quarter of his prices -and also appear to be eminently reasonable against his price. It's a mad world, my masters.

The Dreadnought Hoax Part 2

One of the easier Hogarth Press books to find, despite the fact that of the 2530 copies all but a 1000 were pulped. It does not appear to be rising in value-- It used to be worth about £200 for a clean copy and still is. It can show in a glassine wrap and some sad colllectors get excited about this--especially Hogarth completists dedicated to continually upgrading their collection. One wonders if Bloomsbury collecting has peaked, all the principals have died, some reached a 100 or so. Collections will still surface from children and heirs and also collecctors dead, fed up or in debt. The whole thing started in the mid 1970s with the formidable Holroyd Lytton Strachey biography and Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf volumes. These punters are now collecting their bus passes and their books will surface in bookshops, online and in auction over the next 30 years. Are new, younger Bloomsbury collectors piling in? I haven't noticed many - it is still a steady market but probably not one to go long on. Some are of the opinion they did not produce any great books- however this has seldom been relevant to collectors or values. Values tend to come from scarcity and desire...

An interesting new selling technique emerged in my researches -the negative sell. You knock the book and its authors but still charge the going rate. It is more amusing than the relentless 'greatest book ever written' cataloguing style. A respected dealer wanting £125 for an average copy has this to say about it:

'... two of (the photos) underline the fact that Mrs. Woolf and her mates needed a clip round the ear...An interesting if slightly nauseating account of a bit of undergraduate tomfoolery on the part of Virginia Woolf and a gang of her posh mates dressing up as exotic royalty in order to gain access to HMS Dreadnought because it would be so frightfully funny and they were slightly bored. Useful from the point of view that it underlines the universal truth that just because you're a literary genius doesn't mean that you can't also be a weapons grade prat...'

Perhaps this technique could catch on with One Hundred Years of Solitude being catalogued thus -

'pretentious unreadable twaddle of interest only to dim-witted backpackers, by the Nobel prize winiing Garcia Marquez, leader of the now totally discredited Magic Realist school. Roberto Bolano (praise his name) denounced Marquez as a kind of cultivated sellout who was “thrilled to know so many presidents and archbishops" and added that most Nobel Prize winners were 'jerks'. Fine in first state dust jacket. $3000.'

When dealers start knocking books they are selling it could mean that they are so easy to sell you don't need to puff them anymore, or they are so ubiquitous and slow to sell that they are moved to put the boot in. In my opinion this will always be a good book because of the involvement of the great prankster Horace de Vere Cole. He is unlikely to be forgotten; his friend Augustus John attended his funeral and said that, as he watched Cole’s coffin being lowered into the ground, 'In dreadful tension I waited for the moment for the lid to be lifted and a well-known figure to leap out with an ear-splitting yell. But my old friend disappointed me this time.' Cole and Augustus John were both in involved with the society beauty and bohemian goddess Mavis de Vere Cole Wheeler.

Horace married her, also later the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. Wheeler (a handsome early TV star) was first attracted by her 'skipping walk', she was muse, model and mistress to Augustus John and was involved in a scandal where she shot her lover Lord Vivian and was jailed. None of the photos on the web do her justice but John's drawing on the cover of her son's biography Beautiful and Beloved captures her look. Horace called her 'Bungaloosie,' which echoes the immortal words 'Bunga, Bunga' spoken on board the Dreadnought. Her ashes are scattered in Cadogan Gardens---an area where we once bought a killer library. But that is another story...

The Dreadnought Hoax Part 1

Adrian Stephen. THE "DREADNOUGHT" HOAX. Hogarth Press, London 1936.

Current Selling Prices
$150-$450 /£100-£300


MODERN FIRST EDITION / HUMOUR / SEDITION
Adrian Stephen's account of supreme prankster Horace de Vere Cole's elaborate hoax, in which he, Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), Guy Ridley, Anthony Buxton and Duncan Grant masqueraded as Abyssinian royals, with Adrian Stephen as their interpreter, and were treated to a tour of the Royal Navy's flagship HMS Dreadnought. Also known as the 'Bunga, Bunga' affair, it was de Vere Cole's finest and most successful prank. He had done a dry run in Cambridge as an undergraduate when he had posed as the Sultan of Zanzibar — who was visiting London at the time — to make an official visit to his own college accompanied by his friend Adrian Stephen (brother of Virginia Woolf). There had been a few hairy moments--at one point an elderly woman academic tried to talk to the Sultan in his native language. The resourceful Stephen informed her that in order to talk to him she would first have to join his harem. Language also proved a problem on board the Dreadnought. This is from Wallechinsky & Wallace's Hoaxes in History:

"Taken by launch from the harbor to the Dreadnought, Cole and his cohorts were received by Home Fleet Adm. Sir William May. After inspecting a marine guard, the party was taken on a tour of the ship, during which Herr Kauffmann explained the various sights to the wide-eyed Ethiopians. Unsure of what sort of dialect to use, Adrian Stephen suddenly began spouting passages of Vergil's Aeneid, mispronouncing it sufficiently to make it unrecognizable as Latin. Later, when he could remember no more Vergil, he switched to Homer, mispronouncing the Greek in the same manner he had altered the Latin.

For their parts, the four in blackface could not have responded more enthusiastically to all that they were shown. Although Virginia-fearful of being discovered a woman-limited her commentary to an occasional "chuck-a-choi, chuck-a-choi," the others let go with loud exclamations of "bunga, bunga" at everything from an electric light bulb to the ship's heaviest armaments. "

It was, for its time, a media sensation and small children would taunt sailors with cries of 'Bunga, Bunga.' De Vere Cole pulled off many other pranks, some violent, even criminal. One excellent wheeze was to hire four bald men to attend a particularly pretentious play with the letters S H I T written on their pates so that when they removed their hats the word could be clearly seen from the dress circle. Less pleasant hoaxes included wrestling the lifelike dummy of a naked woman on the pavement , banging her head and shouting 'ungrateful hussy' and standing in front of a moving train and lighting his cigar off the engine after it screeched to a halt. Dom Joly could only dream of such japes. He sold the throne of Croatia to a gullible 'mark' and is also said to have slept in a bed in the shop window of Maples. These and other hoaxes are recounted in an excellent recent biography by Martyn Downer - 'The Sultan of Zanzibar.' Continuing soon with book values, speculations on the Bloomsbury market (are the knockers moving in?) , a picture of the beautiful and beloved Mavis de Vere Cole Wheeler (if I can find one) and an olla podrida of trivia, gossip and whimsy... by the way that's Virginia Woolf with beard top left, Horace is said have attempted to 'ingratiate' himself with her but she regarded him as 'an intolerable bore...very rich and very vulgar...'

Collecting Eric Ravilious

Current selling prices £2 - £3000

Arguably the most fashionable twentieth century English artist of the present day—more trendy than either Bacon or Freud, but appealing to a very different audience. Ravilious’ ascent to star status possibly began with the publication of Freda Constable’s The England of Eric Ravilious in 1982. Since then, a number of studies focussing on various aspects of his work have appeared, most notably Alan Powers Imagined Realities. The appeal for his admirers lies in his peculiar vision of England in peace and war, captured in intense wood engravings that take their inspiration from Blake and Bewick, in spirited lithographs that owe something to continental surrealism and English folk art, but more brilliantly still in pallid watercolours informed by the artist’s early training as a wood engraver, but taking their palette from the English tradition in watercolour and the decorative motifs of, among other things, late eighteenth century Wedgwood creamware. In this world planes and tanks are reduced to toy-like dimensions and people, where they are present at all, become mere dolls --part of a play world of empty landscapes and interiors that exude a sense of dream-like menace. Ravilious, like his friend Edward Bawden, is the archetypal artist as designer- and- decorator and his work chimes in with the modern liking for irony and playfulness, and for interior design. His vision is the classical counterpoint to the sturm und drang romanticism of his exact contemporary, John Piper.



But unlike both Bawden and Piper, Ravilious died before he could fulfil his true potential. An aviator lost at sea at just 39 in 1942 —he left behind designs that were used years later, and now anything with a Ravilious motif on it is sought after —from the posthumous fifties meat plate, lemonade or milk jug by Wedgwood, the 1953 Coronation mug, to his four hundred plus wood engravings scattered around various publications. He it was who designed the logos of The Cornhill Magazine in 1929 and of Wisden, and a set of wood engravings for the Kynoch Press Notebook and Diary for 1933 that deserve comparison with those of William Blake. His most famous book is High Street, which the Curwen Press printed for Country Life in 1938. This collection of 24 brilliant and quirky lithographs of shop fronts and interiors mainly in London (including furrier, second-hand dealer, undertaker and oyster bar ) which accompanies a text by architectural historian J. M. Richards, has now become, without question, the most sought after English illustrated book of the twentieth century. Only two thousand copies were issued, but many of these have been broken up for their plates and thus copies in good condition are rare.

At ABE you can find perfect or near perfect ones at up to £3, 250. The book’s rarity is compounded by the fact that the original lithographic stones were destroyed during the blitz. But with demand for High Street so great, it was only a matter of time before some sort of reprint appeared and in 2008 Alan Powers ( who used to execute exquisite watercolours of shop fronts himself ) brought out a history of the book ,The Story of High Street . which attempts, among other things, to identify the shops featured. This limited edition itself has now become a collector’s item for those who cannot afford the original book. Copies now trade at $238 or more.



For Ravilious fans with lower horizons, issues of Wisden and the post-1929 Cornhill Magazine can easily be obtained for a pound or two. However, anyone wanting a copy of the very scarce Kynoch Press Notebook and Diary for 1933 will probably have to be content with the reprint published in 2003 by the Incline Press, copies of which can be had for £48, though the ‘deluxe ‘ issue is quoted at £280. [R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. More trendy than Freud and Bacon, cooler than Koons and Emin - I hadn't realised. I used to see High Street round the bookfairs in the 1980s priced in the low hundreds and often a bit shaken. When it became a four figure book it disappeared and I had the odd email offering me a copy at over a £1000. Because of my curious need to make a profit I did not buy, but sadly I have never found a copy asleep. The highest auction record for the book is £1200 + premium for a copy at Winter in 2008, slightly chipped at spine. £3250 is what you have to put on it to stop it selling. Also desirable is his 1929 Almanack for Lanston Monotype Corporation (12 wood engravings) -a copy made £400 4 years ago. His Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne from Nonesuch in 1938 (44 woodcuts) can command £600 or more. Sellers sometimes claim it was his finest work; certainly It was his final great work before he met his death off Iceland in 1942.

Express to Hollywood

Victor McLaglen. EXPRESS TO HOLLYWOOD. Jarrolds, London, 1934.

Current Selling Prices
$600-$800 /£350-£450

MOVIES / BOXING / AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This is a return visit to a resolutely unfindable book. Actually, Peter M a reader of these postings found a copy and mailed me these images. Many thanks. There are no copies on the web and I have only heard of one going through Ebay; there is also the copy mentioned by Prize Fighter in the old comments field. Family members, boxing fans, Brits in Hollywood scholars and movie fans want it.

It is the autobiography of a Hollywood hard man and ex boxer, recalling his wildly adventurous career prior to entering the movies. McLaglen was born in turbulent Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. His father, a bishop, moved the family to South Africa when McLaglen was a child. He left home at fourteen to join the army with the intention of fighting in the Second Boer War. However much to his chagrin, he was stationed at Windsor Castle and was later forced to leave the army when his true age was discovered. From 1904 - 1920 he was a boxer and in 1918 McLaglen won the Heavyweight Championship of the British Army. The Wikiman says of this elusive book:

"His tale of the road, his odyssey from his native England through Canada and the western United States, details his long-held desire to be a professional prizefighter, climaxing in a no-decision fight with world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. McLaglen supplements his story with vignettes of life as a farmer, gold and silver prospector, wrestler, policeman, soldier, vaudeville performer, miner, pearl fisher, big-game hunter, and sign-painter. In all likelihood the only Academy Award-winning actor ever, past or future, also to be Assistant Provost Marshal of the city of Baghdad, McLaglen writes a story that reads as though Jack London had written it. He writes with candor and humility, and with style. It is am immensely enjoyable book, and the fact that McLaglen was at the time of its writing only beginning to achieve the fame and popularity that would maintain his career nearly another three decades is both astonishing and a bit disappointing: it would have been wonderful to read his accounts of the next quarter century...."

Of course he went on to make "The Informer," "The Quiet Man," and "What Price Glory?". I have trod on his name on Hollywood Boulevard where, as Ray Davies has it, his name "is written in concrete."



VALUE? 20 years ago someone paid $120 for a signed photo at Darvick , there was a BIN for an insubstantial clipped note at ebay for $250. Sanders Autograph Guide (2000) rate his signature at $165 and a signed photo at $335 and spell his name McLaglin. He wasn't John Wayne, who can go very high indeed, but for some reason hard guy's signatures are often pricy. Jarrolds, an East Anglian publisher, tended to have funky colourful jackets so it would look good and modestly priced in the low to mid hundreds it would probably sell to the fastest finger in less than an hour on ABE--there are over 40 buyers waiting. It is a boxing book which, as far as I am aware is still a lively collecting area; there are even boxing book specialists - I used to ask them in vain for Arthur Cravan posters. Do they join the ring? Sans jacket the book still very good, people want to read it. There are no Kessinger reprints. Ugly though they usually are, new printings would lower the price.

Library Sales

Above is a bookplate of extreme cuteness for a library probably long since dispersed. I like the quote from Kit Marlowe: 'Infinite riches in a little room.' The other quotation you see on bookplates of this period is Shakespeare's ".....find tonques in trees,/books in babbling brooks,/sermons in stone,/ and good in everything....." The background behind the two kids looks like the Cotwolds for some reason. More real than these two sonnenkinder are the four fine persons running a library sale in our pic below.



I try to hit a library sale or two whenever I am in the States. Judging by a recent report from the excellent Americana Exchange they have become quite regimented. It used to be about joining a long boring queue ('line') as early as you could bear it and then on opening time ruthlessly rushing in - every man/woman for themselves. However at a sale at Palo Alto (a rich Silicon Valley town once renowned as the home of America's finest acid/ LSD) they did it thus:

...at 9 a.m. they whet your appetite by having an outside tent book sale with all books priced at $1.00 ..some very nice books, ephemera, prints...At 10 a.m. they send you a half block down the nearby driveway to another classroom full of the next best books at $1 each - shelves and shelves of them on every possible subject. About 10:45 you stagger back, laden with bags and boxes of books, towards the main room and get in line according to number. At 11:00 sharp, the first 150 people, who by now are revved and ready to bolt, get in (we were 146 and 147) and have an hour to shop, with a limit of twelve books each...

Library sale goers in California are apparently a pliant and unquestioning bunch, such marshalling would not work in Europe (with the possible exception of Germany) and in England it would lead to fights and possible hospitalization of some library staff and a handful of dealers.

The thing about library sales is to have a plan. It helps to know what they have in there and info can sometimes be garnered in the line. You have to know where to head first and it is useful to have a mate or two so that you can be omni-present (divide spoils later.) In my experience they tend to make mistakes in the area of funny older novels, slim vols of poetry and funky or kitsch artbooks, photobooks, manuals and trashy paperbacks. They overrate Children's books, leather bound books, Americana etc., Many dealers scoop up anything that looks sellable and then go through it more carefully at leisure, possibly checking prices on Iphone devices or phoning a friend. This is slightly disapproved of but universal; even now libraries are probably working out ways of banning it.



If possible avoid library books at library sales, you will see them priced up on the net but they look and feel unpleasant and with a few exceptions are slow to sell. Most library sales are disposing of unwanted donations so library books are not so common. It is good to arrive with some sort of shopping bag or a capacious and slightly naff trolley bag. You cannot make deals and you cannot take stuff back. You will see 'civilians' (non dealers) buying tons of utter rubbish that they would never look at in a bookstore. Bargains are known-- a dealer in Berkeley who seldom pays more than a buck a book recently found the true 1908 first (it's green) of Anne of Green Gables at a library sale and turned it round for $10K. I found a proof copy of Hemingway's 'Fiesta' - so long ago that I cannot remember what I got for it.

Below is a library sale at Singapore Expo Hall --the ad proclaimed 'Book lovers have much to cheer this August as the National Library Board holds its 10th Library Book Sale. Books and magazines in all four official languages will be on sale from $1-$5, with each customer allowed to buy up to 60 items. Payment can only be made by cash, Nets or CashCard.'

Was there anything in English, any sleepers? Will check it out in 2010 ...It's now 2010 and August is coming up. Must check flights. Meanwhile libraries have started to have book sales online and so far they appear damned dull. You cannot replicate the excitement and the insanity on a paltry website. Check out the library at London Borough of Richmond effort. This is not Oklahoma or Arizona library sale nirvana with 500,000 books in a stadium with 2000 hyped up dealers barely containing their sanity in pursuit of treasure...

Collecting John Betjeman

Current Selling Prices
£2 - £2,000+

MODERN FIRST EDITIONS/ POETRY/ TRAVEL / ARCHITECTURE/ WHIMSY
A friend, the biographer Geoffrey Elborn, once told me how in 1977 John Betjeman awarded him two signed firsts of his books for rescuing a dog from a burning house next door to his own in Radnor Walk. He was visiting the Poet Laureate for the first time when the smell of smoke alerted everyone to a blaze in an upper storey. The emergency services were called, but the police who arrived first refused to enter the house, whereupon Elborn valiantly groped his way through the billows of poisonous smoke to rescue a terrier from a certain grilling.

After returning to his host and downing several medicinal whiskies offered by the poet’s mistress, Elborn was delighted to receive signed firsts of An Oxford University Chest (1938) and Collected Poems (1948), from Betjeman himself. These were suitably inscribed with characteristically jocular references to Elborn as ‘ Chief Fire Officer ‘ and were decorated with helmets, hoses, and other symbols of the profession. Unfortunately, poverty necessitated the sale of these mementoes of a sensational first meeting with the poet, a decision Elborn still regrets. So somewhere out there is a puzzled Betjeman fan who may possibly wonder at the inscriptions in their book or books. He or she will get no enlightenment from the Letters edited by Betjeman’s daughter, nor Bevis Hillier’s exhaustive Life, though Elborn himself has written of the incident elsewhere.



All this brings me to the rarity of certain titles, inscribed or otherwise, by Britain’s best loved poet. There is no question that ( Auden and Eliot excepted ) Betjeman is the English poet who attracts the most interest from collectors, something that unscrupulous dealers cynically exploit. Top of any collector’s list must be Betjeman’s debut slim volume Mount Zion (1931), which was printed in a trade edition for 5s 6d a copy and a deluxe limited edition of 100 for 12s 6d, by the publisher and connoisseur Edward James. The Rare Book Price Guide suggests a sensible range of £500 - £750 for the trade edition, but three of the four copies on ABE are listed at over £1,500, with a signed presentation, but ‘ neatly rebacked ‘ copy from Gekoski selling at a gamey £2,250. Some of the high prices demanded for Betjeman’s second collection, Continual Dew (1937), a much more common title, are even more vertiginous. You can buy a respectable copy from several dealers online for a very reasonable £30 or so , but one carriage trade dealer insists on charging $1,006 for a signed copy in no better condition that most of the others. Betjeman’s first prose book, Cornwall Illustrated (1934),the first title in the Shell Guide series, and an admittedly coveted book, is similarly overpriced. Deighton’s of Bournemouth is the principal offender ( see my blog on ‘Collecting Shell Guides’ ), with their copy a whopping NINE times the price of a similar one offered by Toby English, while two other spiral bound copies come in at $270 and $339 each.



Pursuing this logic, the exceedingly rare three or four titles by Betjeman, all of which were issued in tiny editions, such as Sir John Piers (1938 ), Ireland’s Own (1958) and Some Immortal Hours (1957 )would be, if available, stratospherically expensive, but of course these hardly ever come up for sale, so we’ll never know. Apart from such peripheral rarities, most of the other Betjeman titles were printed in largish editions and are consequently relatively inexpensive, though the intriguing A Handbook on Paint (1939) seems impossible to find, and the Shropshire Shell Guide (written with John Piper) can fetch more than £50. Of the prose titles the best by far remains First and Last Loves (1952), which should be acquired, if at all possible, with its striking wrapper, which is usually missing. Note also the two buggered up book titles on its ‘ By the same author ‘ page.

With Betjeman, it seems that association is all----or nearly all. A presentation copy, especially with a jokey inscription, is always pricey. It would be interesting to see what the Elborn Fireman copies could make if they ever came up. Meanwhile, I’ll just continue to gnaw myself with envy for missing what was surely the Betjeman bargain of the century. Less than ten years ago I was in the saleroom when some Bartholomew maps used by Betjeman while he was editor of the Shell Guides were knocked down for a paltry £100 or so. I forget exactly why I didn’t bid for them, but maybe I hadn’t noticed that they were decorated with the master’s pencil notes and squiggles. At all events, some dealer did well that day, for the maps ended up in the British Library. [R.M.Healey]

Thanks Robin. Wise and pertinent words on this Spring Sunday. Every few years Betjeman is revived and prices go up. One wonders what Betjeman will mean to our ap-happy younger generation in, say, 2025. Will they care about a Death in Leamington Spa or Miss Joan Hunter Dunn and her '...strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand...' ? One hopes so, but I wouldn't bet on it. The highest auction record ever for Betjeman was $6000 in 1996 for the Onassis copy ( Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) of Summoned by Bells inscribed "Christmas 1960. For Jackie, with love on a memorable Xmas. John". This is closely followed by the great rarity Sir John Piers (Mullingar: Westmeath Examiner,140 copies) and ridiculously rare whimsiana such as Some Immortal Hours: A Rhapsody of the Celtic Twilight Wrought in Word and Water Color by Deirdre O'Betjeman (12 copies 1962). Just now I need these - ship and bill.

Odd vols / Odd bedfellows

I have finally got round to sorting out a five year accumulation of odd vols. The most common are odd volumes of Churchill's 'magisterial' The Second World War (Cassell 1948 to 1954 6 vols) followed closely by odd volumes of Proust's 'incomparable roman fleuve' the 12 volume Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu). Odd bedfellows. Churchill and Proust--the undisputed odd volume kings. Would they have got on? Proust had served in the 76th Regiment of French Infantry (see Powell's 'Proust as Soldier' in Weidenfeld's centenary volume) and was interested in military tactics, so there was some common ground. Somewhere on the web someone claims that WSC never read Proust ('the wrong kind of eloquence') and it is doubtful Marcel ever ploughed through The River War or even Churchill's only novel Savrola. Pic left of Proust in uniform--not exactly Audie Murphy.

Third in line used to be Toynbee's 12 volume Study of History but it is now of so little value that attempts to make a set are futile -odd vols get recycled, tossed or put in the £1 bin. This does not stop the entrepreneurial Bookbarn demanding £99 for an ex-library reprint of the ninth volume. There are a 1000 odd vols on ABE. Across the pond I am told that fellow dealers have to sort out sets of Lincoln and the Papers of John Adams. With Churchills WW2 there is a predictably logical process in their relative rarity. We have 210 odd vols and have made up at least 7 sets from very nice in jacket (£100+) to acceptable and sound sans jacket (£40). Volume one is the most common, closely followed by volume two, volume 6 being the most difficult. Beware- volume two is often a reprint. Churchill signed a lot of sets, sometimes in volume two--signed sets always command a £1000+ even in baleful condition. Fine and fault free sets are something of a rarity, the jackets tend to fade. They are routinely bound up and usually fetch over £400 for handsome examples. American tourists use to buy them almost as a matter of course. For serious money (£2000+) you need Gilbert's 21 volume official biography. Odds of the early Randolph Churchill volumes tend to accumulate but most of the money is in the 'Companion Volumes' (especially the fifth volume- parts 1,2,3.)

As for Marcel, I have 180 odds and made just 4 decent sets. The vast majority are the Philippe Jullian illustrated Chatto edition from 1957 onwards (£60 to £150), then there is the atractive smaller ink blue Phoenix Library edition Traveller's Library (1929 onwards) and the original Chatto / Knopf edition from 1922 onwards, often seen in limited edition. The complete 11 vol set can get into 4 figures (just) but the number punters wishing to pay that sum is unknowable. The newer Kilmartin translation is easily found in 3 fat vols but the 2002 Lydia Davis translation 3200+ pages in six vols is oddly elusive. We sold a copy last year at £150 within seconds of uploading. C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation still finds favour and other early works by him are also much sought after...

Collecting John Minton

BOHEMIAN, NEO-ROMANTIC ARTIST/ SUICIDE

I guess most people’s introduction to the work of John Minton are those vignette line drawings in Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) or perhaps her follow-up, French Country Cooking, but I think I first came across his work when I was urged in the early seventies to look out for the bright covers of those Penguin New Writing paperbacks by a fellow student John Archer, who later ended up as head of BBC Arts TV in Scotland. I remember him rooting out three or four copies from a pile of dog eared paperbacks outside a junk shop in Balsall Heath, Birmingham. I took the hint and began myself to seek out copies, which back then seldom cost more than 5p each.




Minton belongs with those other British Neo-Romantic artists—Sutherland, Piper, Craxton, Ayrton, Colquhoun, McBryde, and assorted lesser lights, who seemed to dominate, not only the pages of Penguin New Writing, but just about every other little magazine of the period. All except Craxton have been the subjects of biographies —the two Roberts, Colquhoun and Macbryde, being the latest .The fact that Minton, who was essentially an illustrator, has had the rare honour of being chronicled by the acclaimed Bloomsburyite Frances Spalding, is a telling testament to his cult status.

His greatest influence was Samuel Palmer, though equally had Graham Sutherland not lived it is unlikely that Minton would have developed in the way he did. Unlike Sutherland, Minton would have been too young to have been inspired by the ground-breaking Samuel Palmer exhibition of 1926, though no doubt he came to know Palmer and his fellow ‘Ancients ‘ through the exhibition catalogue and indirectly through Sutherland’s pastoral etchings of the 1920s, which were re-interpretations of Palmer’s vision. And like all his fellow Neo-Romantics he saw the significance of Sutherland’s ‘Entrance to a Lane ‘(1939) as a symbol of an English romantic revival So, Minton’s present popularity seems wedded to that of Palmer-- and as long as the English continue to be in love with the pastoral dream, Minton will remain a collected illustrator. But there are other factors that make him attractive. He was gay and depressed/repressed with it. He had a private income ( scion of the famous crockery company ), which gives him an added allure and he was a veteran of the Soho and Fitzrovian drinking sets, which are also currently in vogue.

He is probably at the height of his popularity just now, if the prices in ABE are any indication. His most celebrated book is probably Time Was Away (1948), Alan Ross’s diary of a holiday in Corsica. Geoffrey Grigson ( who was ambivalent towards neo-romanticism) absolutely slated it in a review, but it cannot be denied that this unremarkable narrative is improved by Minton’s 52 full page illustrations, eight of which are in glorious colour. Expect to pay between £70 and £90 for a copy without wrapper, to double that for a copy with one, though any Corsican bandit might shrink from asking the £250 that Clearwater demands for their near-perfect copy. I think I shelled out forty pence for my wrapper- free copy, but that was thirty odd years ago.



Other high points include the charming vignettes of Arcadian epicurean bliss in the aforementioned A Book of Mediterranean Food by St Elizabeth of David, a perfect first of which retails on ABE at a tasty $1,200,though fans of the artist prepared to tolerate a second impression with or without grease spots could save a bit of cash. Minton also illustrated ( with Denton Welch ) Contemporary Cookery by someone called Doris Lytton Toye. Contemporary novels with Minton illustrations come in at around £40 - £60, though other, more celebrated fiction, such as Alan Fournier’s The Wanderer (1947) at $200 and Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1947 ) at $133 are visually a bit special. Also worth tracking down are copies of the forties arts magazine Counterpoint, which features work by all the usual forties suspects. Copies in poor condition can be had for £30 or less, but mint ones can cost as much as £ 80. But if you are just looking for Penguin New Writing, there are loads of copies around for £2 or less. Lastly, it’s worth keeping an eye out for a sleeper—certain dealers on ABE offering copies of the dull sounding Football Association Book For Boys (1949), for prices ranging from £5 - £30, don’t seem to have noticed that Minton was one of the illustrators. The only one who has noticed is the astute Peter Ellis, who asks a socking $140 for his copy. [R.M.Healey]



Thanks Robin. I always look out for Minton d/ws (mint in d/w). He seems to have done a lot. Above is his jacket for The Scamp by Roland Camberton, one of Iain Sinclair's favourites. Barry Miles has a new book named after the Clash's tedious song 'London Calling.' It is a good account of London's counterculture since the Second World War and John Minton turns up there as a member of the raffish hard drinking Colony Room crowd. Robert Irwin in his T.L.S. review, a sort of kindly hatchet job, says:-

'Miles presents Minton as a “character” who was better at talking than painting, and a man who could not hold his drink. According to Miles, “today no-one has heard of Minton”. Well, I have. I believe that he was a superb illustrator of books, and I do not regard book illustration as a minor art form.

You can buy a Minton painting for less than a 100th of a Freud and 200th of a good Bacon. Whether that is a good investment I'm not sure, art is tricky right now. Best to buy books. A propos des bottes the American bookdealer Breslauer destroyed a Lucian Freud portrait of himself because it was unflattering - he objected to the way Freud had painted his double chin. Breslauer was one of the richest dealers who have ever lived but art history will not look kindly on this act, nor his heirs.

The portait above is by Cecil Beaton. The image middle left is a London Transport poster by Minton from the 1950s.

Do judge a book by its cover...

Some gratuitous advice for dealers, collectors and people of the book -some of it untested and some possibly erroneous. Inspired by Nelson Algren's three bits of advice in his 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side -"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." The woman in question may well have been Simone de Beauvoir with whom Algren was in a triangulated relationship, the third person being Jean Paul Sartre. Whether she had more problems than Algren is a moot point. By all accounts Sartre and Algren got on well... Anyway here goes with some bookish advice, caveats and absolute no-nos.

I. Do judge a book by its cover. Don't spend ages looking through every book to see if it is worth buying, avoid the recent books of major publishers, off copies of books of this century, ex library, fat books, memoirs of celebrities, politicians and nobs. Avoid all book club, Reader's Union, Folio Society, Franklin Mint and Heritage books (unless foolishly cheap). Almost all recent novels can be ignored...

2. Don't judge a book by its cover. If you find something worthwhile look under the jacket (if it has one) and check contents for underlinings, non authorial annotations, torn or missing pages, stamps, remants of attempts to disguise their ex library status and simple things like missing rear endpapers. Also look for good things like an unnoticed association, loosely inserted letters, ephemera and $100 bills. Do not, as one of our customers used to do, start shaking books to see what falls out -he was after bus tickets.

3. Don't buy from dealers who threaten legal action in their catalogue descriptions. Can say no more. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.

4. Distrust dealers who describe books as 'extra fine.' 'Super fine' is equally problematic. In my opinion fine is as good as it gets, if you want to go one better 'as new' is acceptable. Books in new bookshops are fine, or 'as new' -it can't get any better; 'mint' is also suspect being associated with coins, sometimes comics.

5. Avoid exaggerated or ingratiating descriptions. Anyone who describes Churchill's World War Two as 'very rare' is seriously ignorant or misguided. We also know that WSC was 'a very great man.' Likewise any book where 20 dealers have fine copies is not rare. They may be expensive, in which case they fall into the category 'common rare book.' Anyone buying an expensive edition of Ulysses doesn't want to hear that it is "...perhaps the Greatest Novel written in the Twentieth Century and certainly one of the Rarest volumes sought by collectors. Ulysses is a work of towering genius and of inestimable importance." Resist such blandishments.

6. Take a walk on the wild side. In a new town if you are seeking books don't assume they are all in the main square or even in bookshops. Antique shops and junk shops have to be checked out. Avoid those with grubby old books with notices like 'appraised at $200.' Most appraisers are ignorant slimeballs.

7.Avoid dealers who describe a book as 'good for its age.' It almost always indicates a lousy copy. Condition standards do not change because a book is 50 years old. Even 100 year old books can turn up in fine condition.

To be continued. Suggestions welcome.

Céline, the Glitter paradox and writing in public...

I have the outlines of a piece somewhere about writers who wrote in public; sadly I cannot work up the enthusiasm to finish it so am using it here. The most famous is J.K. Rowling, writing and keeping warm in an Edinburgh cafe, then T.S. Eliot putting the finishing touches to The Waste Land in a seaside shelter (image below) now the subject of a preservation order -('On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing.') Samuel Beckett would write on the back blanks of post office forms while hanging out in Parisian post offices, Scott Turow wrote his first novel Presumed Innocent riding the commuter train to and from New York. The oddest example was told to me by a customer from the Medway town of Chatham. There was a cafe there where Louis-Ferdinand Céline had sat writing one of his novels. He had lived, even married in London, so it was possible. Maybe somewhere in London there is an old pie and mash shop where Rimbaud and Verlaine (residents here in the summer of 1873) wrote poetry.

Celine is of course a towering figure in world lit -Bukowski wrote "'first of all read Céline. The greatest writer of 2,000 years." He was championed by the Beats -both William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg visited him in his Paris apartment during the 1950s and he is regarded second only to Proust among French writers. He became virulently antisemitic - in his 1938 work L'Ecole des Cadavres he calls for a Franco-German alliance in order to counter the pact between British intelligence and "the international Jewish conspiracy". Here you have what I call the Gary Glitter paradox -- do we stop listening to his music because of what we now know about his life? In the case of Celine, his antisemitism has not stopped him being admired by Jewish writers like Ginsberg and George Steiner. In the TLS of 12/2/10 with Celine on the cover ('Once again, Celines hour') George Steiner reviews a new Gallimard volume of his letters. He invokes an amazing story from WW2, possibly apocryphal although Celine is known to have claimed that Hitler was Jewish- it is a scene worthy of Mel Brooks or more likely Quentin Tarantino with the part of Celine played by a demented Cleese:

"At a soirée in the German legation, he leaps to his feet and performs a dazzling imitation of the Fuhrer's voice and gestures, and instructs his terrified hosts that Hitler will lose the war because he is not anti-Semitic enough! The assembled dignitaries are said to have scattered in panic…"

What of Celine values? In my cautious judgement he is a buy and will rise in value. As time goes by the ghastliness of a person's life tends to matter less, and can even enhance interest, he also appears to be joining the list of the giants of the last century along with Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Kafka, Joyce etc., He was admired by Queneau, Jean Genet Le Clézio, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Billy Childish, Henry Green, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey. A Canadian dealer wants a gamey £10,000 for a trade first edition of Voyage au bout de la Nuit inscribed to surrealist publisher George Reavey. Although not in good enough condition to tempt French collectors (who are less impressed by signatures than us) it is not totally unthinkable it might sell. In a 1971 George Sims catalogue a Celine manuscript (5 pages from a late work heavily revised) appeared at £35, then the equivalent of £650. If sold now it could make £5000, representing an impressive return. Steiner singles out Celine's late works as masterpieces with scenes which ('using the word with care') can be qualified as Shakespearean.

Collecting Enid Blyton

Current Selling Prices
£3 to £3000+


Enid Blyton is still one of the most read children’s authors. And that’s official. Although her heyday was fifty or more years ago, children are still lapping up her books, despite the efforts of the PC apparatchiks, including the BBC, who apparently blackballed her ( ‘ fourth-rate, don’t you know ‘) for thirty years. More significantly, adults are still collecting firsts of her titles, which have sold more than 600 million copies worldwide and have ( according to one source ) been made available in 3,544 translations. So, Blyton has answered her critics, at least in terms of sales, even J.K. Rowling, Jacqueline Wilson Helen Cresswell and Roald Dahl have some way to go.

Born in 1897 above a shop in Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London (blue plaque), the daughter of a cutlery salesman, Blyton trained as a teacher and it was during this period that she published her first story in Teacher’s World aged 20. Blyton’s middle name was versatility. She began with poetry, then in the late thirties turned to adventure stories that catered for all age groups. At the same time she was producing countless fairy stories, pop-up books and other material for pre-school and early school-aged kids, including her best known creation, Noddy. Much of her huge output is not well known and indeed the full Blyton bibliography cannot fail to impress even the most sour-faced anti-Blytonite. It suggests that the woman just couldn’t stop writing, which may explain why she never had time for her own children.

Going against the trend a little, the earliest Blyton titles can be cheaper than firsts of the middle period , rare editions of which in good condition are breathtakingly expensive. Copies of Teacher’s World can be had for a mere £8 and in you can find them, £35 or so will buy you issues of Nash and Pall Mall magazine, where her work appeared in 1917 and 1918.Not surprisingly, her first published book commands a high price. The one copy of Child Whispers (1922), a pamphlet size collection of her verse, in a wrapper is listed in ABE at a very adult $2,400. Skip a year to her second book and the price plummets. Real Fairies is almost identical in format and size, has the same publisher ( Savile & Co ), but there seem to be more copies around and on ABE prices range from £60 for a poor copy of the hardback to £141 for a ‘ super copy ‘ from the Blyton specialists Rose’s & Stella’s Books, who also ask £132 for a ‘super copy ‘of Silver and Gold (1927), another verse collection featuring truly charming black and white drawings by Ethel Everett, a truly gifted artist who deserves to be better known.


Blyton’s greatest creations were of course, The Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Noddy. I was shamelessly brought up on all three, and can still visualise the Eileen Soper illustrations that accompanied the Famous Five books. Most of these adventures were actually published during the last world war, when doubtless children liked to be thrilled by rumours of spies and tunnels to caves and double agents posing as shopkeepers, and mad scientists - all hilariously parodied by The Comic Strip chums on Channel Four ('hot buttered crumpets and lashings of ginger beer') and now sent up in Viz magazine. Most of the stories have dated rather charmingly. I remember being astonished to read around 1962 that the Famous Five had to watch TV in someone else’s house because Uncle Quentin didn’t have a set. We’d had ours since 1951 !

Presumably it’s the well heeled baby-boomers who are now buying the firsts in these series. Five on a Treasure Island (1942) was the first Famous Five adventure, but as with most sought after firsts, on ABE you have to plough through innumerable horrible library copies of sixth, seventh and eighth editions, crayoned-in copies of ditto, charmless paperbacks etc to get to the very few really nice copies in wrappers, all of which fetch big bucks. A dealer in Leicester, an undoubted specialist in this field hass two copies described as having ‘ highly skilled archival restoration.' They ‘ show well ‘, to use his regrettable jargon. He rates this title as ‘very scarce’ and wants a stupefying £3,250 and £3,750 for his copies , two grand more than the price quoted in the current Rare Book Price Guide 2010. Perhaps it’s time the Famous Five investigated his fiendish plans for the Blyton market.

The Secret Seven series seems to be slightly less popular. At Seaside Cottage is rated at a mere £30-40. Others, depending on condition. command modest sums of between £5 and £40.The much collected Mystery Books are similarly cheap, even with wrappers, except for the first title, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, which is rated for some reason at £650 – £750 with wrapper and a risible £10 without-- a good example of the Brighton Rock Syndrome (BRS)—an incurable condition characterised by an irrational obsession with wrappers ( more of this in a later blog ).



And if you are a true fan of Blyton you’ll probably also want to own some of her less well-known titles. You could, for instance, thrill to the adventures of Jo, Bessie, Fanny and Dick in the queer lands at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree (1943), although you’ll need £1,718 to read about them in one first edition from ABE. Until recently Jonkers had another, which despite a ‘ small swirl ‘ in green biro on an endpaper was priced at around £2,000.

But if all you can afford is a first of Noddy you can secure one for the appropriately small price of £8. The same can be said of the many other more common titles by Blyton, especially if they are child-damaged. The plain truth is that most of her huge output is cheap enough and most bookshops with a children’s section will have firsts, albeit somewhat battered, for £3 or less. [R.M. Healey]



Wise and timely words Robin. I am old enough to remember the fuss about Jimmy Edwards remark that he "liked to curl up in front of the fire with Enid Blyton." It was echoed recently by a row about remarks by Frankie Boyle about another national treasure, Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington, ("like someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon" and worse ). I once had an estate agent's brochure for a mansion that Enid had owned, it was a good size but nothing like Galsworthy's Kingston Hill palace, Hardy's country house or Edgar Wallace's villa. It was bought by a developer, torn down and replaced with flats. No blue plaque there. I used to subscribe to the DNB which tells you how much each person left in their will (especially those who died in the last 100 years). If anyone subscribes, or has the 60 volume set (now only £1500) about their person, they might let us know what Enid left (and Galsworthy while you have the book open.)

I remember being surprised that Agatha Christie left less than £1 million. Possibly Sir Max Mallowan, as an archaeologist, was high maintenance. Edgar Wallace left nothing but debts all of which were paid off within 2 years from royalties. Best selling writers have little motivation to save, as the money rolls in for years, way after their death. We used to have an Uncle Quentin who came in the shop, but that's another story...