Hocus Pocus 1

Anonymous. HOCUS POCUS JUNIOR: The Anatomie of Legerdemain. Printed by T. H[arper] for R. M[ab],London 1634

Current Selling Prices
$25,000+ /£18000+

The object of great desire by collectors of conjuring books-- it is the first devoted exclusively to magic as a performing art. It was based on Reginald Scot's 1584 work on witchcraft, of which more anon. Subtitled '... the art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainely, and exactly, so that an ignorant person may thereby learne the full perfection of the same, after a little practise. Vnto each tricke is added the figure, where it is needfull for instruction.' The very rare first edition has 52 pages with woodcut illustrations, subsequent editions were somewhat expanded. There were many editions, even into the 19th century --all are valuable and surprisingly hard to find. Most copies are said to be in instititions. Various modern facsimiles have appeared, mostly now pricey.

I was alerted to this book by reading a report by the admirable saleroom correspondent Ian McKay. There aren't many people in this field, possibly the most noted apart from the fluting Godfrey Barker was Geraldine Norman (wife of Frank 'Sir, You Bastard' Norman.) Ian reported in 'Antique Trade Gazette' that a copy of this slim book appeared in an auction in July bound with 20 other items. It was a later edition from 1654 but still rare as hen's teeth. The other books and pamphlets were of some interest but the general consensus is that it was 'Hocus Pocus' that bought the £37, 500 bid. (£30K + £7.5K to Sotheby's for their pains.)

This brilliant result brings home the lesson that it is always worth examining bound collections of pamphlets. Many are sermons but even there treasure can be found. Uber runner Martin Stone found the great Churchill rarity 'Mr Broderick's Army (1903) in a bound collection of otherwise unremarkable pamphlets. If Joyce's 'Et Tu Healy' (possibly entitled 'Parnell') ever shows up it will probably be bound in with some Irish political tracts of the late nineteenth century. To be continued with inter alia an examination of what else was bound into this fat volume that might explain the fat price...

Rare Cricket books

Now that England have regained the Ashes, dealers in cricketiana will doubtless be rubbing their hands in anticipation of the expected surge of interest in cricket-related material . The football season has begun too, but although someone paid £19,000 in 2006 for an FA Cup Final programme of 1889 ( a record for any footballiana ), collectors of cricket books have always had the reputation of being more discerning than their soccer-mad counterparts, and also more willing to shell out big bucks . Most club chairmen would rather put their money into buying a new centre half than building up a collection of late Victorian programmes. Collectors, wealthy or otherwise, of cricket books seem to be more obsessive. In October 2005, for instance, the private library of the fanatical collector Desmond Eager brought some of the most ardent cricket fans to Christies’. Even those who expected strong bidding were astounded at the prices fetched. Celebs in the arts and entertainment figure strongly among the ranks of collectors and I suspect that agents for some (like Tim Rice and Charlie Watts ) may have been responsible for many of the inflated prices on this occasion.




The biggest money was reserved for early documents . Two modest looking and frayed pamphlets, one disbound, smashed records. These were the incredibly rare score-sheets of matches played in late Georgian England, when the bowling attack consisted of fast underarm deliveries. William Epps’ Collection of all the Grand Matches of Cricket in England (Rochester 1799) and Samuel Britcher’s Complete List of the Grand Matches of Cricket that have been played in the year 1795 ( London 1795) both made £90,000, which in the case of the Britcher works out at a cool £3,000 per page ! Not bad for ephemera that once cost a few old pence a pop. However, if you believe that the chance of finding any of these rarities in a job lot of pamphlets at your local saleroom are as likely as Ireland winning the next cricket World Cup, you should think again. Although the print run of each pamphlet was ‘probably small ‘, no-one knows exactly how many copies were issued, and it mustn’t be assumed that most ended up as charred paper on a Georgian fire grate.

If very early football programmes can turn up occasionally, there is no logical reason why one or more of these early records can’t be found either bound together in one volume or bound in with other related matter. Rare ephemera does survive and dealers make most of their money from such material. At present well known cricket book specialist Christopher Saunders has nothing so early ( though he does stock facsimile reprints of Britcher et al ), but he is selling for a jaw dropping £400 a Hampshire Cricket Club Guide for 1894 that once retailed for six old pennies.

Ashes material of a similar type and vintage is also as rare, though not as pricey as Georgian scorebooks Saunders wants £250 for a complete record of the 1884 tour and £350 for one dealing with that of 1909. But if you just want a contemporary magazine account of the Australian Tour of England in 1899 or 1902 he will sell you two disbound articles for a modest £10 each. As for Ireland winning the World Cup, the rarest item featuring an Irish team abroad went for £3,000 at Bonham’s in December 2005 . The Irish Cricketers in the United States by ‘One of Them’ was published at one shilling in 1879. Early biographies and autobiographies of famous players ( even W.G.Grace )can often be reasonably priced, though tipped in signed photos and association copies obviously add to the price of all such material.

It goes without saying that, with a few exceptions, post First World War items are easier to find and very much cheaper, although volumes of Wisden (especially the 1916 issue ) that listed the short careers of those who perished in the trenches command very high prices. Cricket books can be found in the most unlikely places, but generally, I found abebooks a disappointing source, especially of the more obscure material This is possibly because the site is dominated by American dealers and few dealers or collectors across the pond are interested in the game. They don’t know what they are missing. We are the Barmy Army ! [R.M.Healey]



OWZAT! Thanks Robin. I have made some good rewards from Wisden's over the years and even at one point had an early Cricket poem. I sold it to the churlish old bookseller of Richmond the late Eric Barton. Whenever I visited his shop he always asked if I had any eighteenth century Cricket books, so when I actually turned up with one he was knocked for six. I can't remember what he gave me for it but I recall it paid for a trip to Milan and beyond...

British Beatniks

I have been thinking about the Beatnik movement in Britain that flourished at the end of the 1950s and into the early 1960s. It produced very little literature, a bit of music, some art and a few headlines. Beatniks were harassed in St. Ives Cornwall for their unwashed appearance and could not get served in pubs or even tearooms. A search on YouTube will reveal Alan Whicker asking Beatniks questions like 'When did you last have a bath?" They turn up in movies and novels and can be seen in episodes of early 60s TV dramas like 'The Avengers' and 'Knight Errant.'

The very earliest Donovan songs 'Catch the Wind' and 'Josie' have a tangible Beatnik vibe--in 1963 he had taken a trip to St Ives with Gypsy Dave. We are talking duffle coats, existentialism and anarchy, the desire to be 'free', travel, hitch-hike, girls in pale make up, polo necks, berets, scraggy beards, longish hair and frothy coffee. Hancock's 1960 film 'The Rebel' satirises them and the contemporary art world and some of his shows have Beatnik poets and coffee bars. This is after the mid 1950s Angry Young Men - Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider' (1956) is a key influence but by the time the Beatniks came in Colin was enjoying fine wines and buyting property in Cornwall.

The wonderful Adam Faith movie 'Beat Girl' (1960) has parties in Soho and Chelsea and raves in church crypts. The very young Oliver Reed can be seen in many scenes but at the time was so little known that he is billed in the casting list as 'plaid shirt.' In one scene Faith upbraids a bunch of crypt ravers who are swigging from a bottle of gin: "Booze is for squares, Daddy-O." This was before drugs became ubiquitous and Beatniks appear to have been a reasonably temperate bunch--their kicks came from snubbing authority, freedom, free love, coffee, ciggies and jiving...Pic of the deathless Oliver below in his famous shirt.



Bookish collectables associated with this wiggy crowd are few. There is a good, somewhat spurious paperback with a glossary of their language 'Through Beatnik Eyeballs' (Pedigree Books, London, 1961). This can sell for between £40 and £50 and turns up now and then. John Peel had a copy and quoted the following scarcely credible lines from it-' I've driven in from birdland in my chariot after a dark four and I'm here in the frolic pad to lay some gut bucket on you loose gooses before I shake my reins and head for dreamsville.' Royston Ellis wrote a series of poems around this time that have a distinctly Beatnik flavour including the attractive looking booklet 'Rave' (1960.) This can go for as much as £50 in the signed limited edition and a little less than £20 in the trade version. There is slight evidence of a revival of interest in our Beatnik heritage, more on this in a day or two daddy-o...

Checking prices of French books on the net

In general it is best to stick to prices charged by French dealers, outside of France dealers tend to overrate these books and fail to understand condition standards and all the different states of the limited editions. Some have limitations as low as 2 or 3 copies, on vellum thick as Mother's Pride. Most book sites will not recognise signed books in French even if you tick the signed box so use words such as 'envoi' or 'envoi de l'auteur' in the keywords section.

Do not start booking holidays or ordering cars if you find a signed French book-- they are thick on the ground and values can be surprisingly low even with relatively major names. World class names such as Proust, Baudelaire, Rimbaud (mega), Lautreamont are cause for celebration if you come across books signed by them but you can occasionally find books signed by, say, Camus or Huysmans or Cocteau for low three figure sums. The ubiquity of signed literary books was once explained to me as being part of their salon system where writer and their readers enjoyed lively liaisons and literary intercourse...

The other thing to look for with French books, apart from colourful erotica and tomes with illustrations by modern masters such as Picasso, Rouault, Foujita, Man Ray or Braque, is exquisite bindings. Leather bindings that we might regard as very fine and elaborate are, by comparison with French efforts, ordinaire and at best worthy or merely competent. Left is a superb Bonet binding for Cirque an unpublished 1939 work by André Suares with illustrations by Ambroise Vollard. Livres d'Artistes in their elaborate boxes, chemises and slip-cases are another story to be dealt with at another time... The trouble with all this is that these books scream high values--they are very unlikely to show up undervalued. But not impossible. Never forget the wise and stirring words of Cadillac Jack --'anything can be anywhere.' Courage Fuyons!

Buying and selling French books

Many English language used bookshops won't buy French books because they feel they will not be able to sell them. Unless they are daft however they will buy valuable antiquarian and Illustrated books in French, but sadly most of these often go to auction. When was the last time you heard of a copy of Jazz (Matisse's supreme livre d'artiste--no change from 200000 euros) being bought over the counter? The reluctance to buy French books is not because dealers are thick and don't understand them but because unless you get the right stuff they are harder to sell than George Bush biographies. It was not always thus - in a New York magazine article about the town's book trade circa 1900 booksellers said that their best selling books were in French; certainly it is the French who emphasised the production of books produced exclusively for bibliophiles. Also the French were the kings of erotic book publishing, to the extent that in the 19th century mention of a 'French novel' implied something salacious and 'curious.' Erotic books, of course, always sell unless you price them prohibitively. The ruder the better when it comes to value...

Condition is paramount. The French have higher condition standards than their grubby roastbeef counterparts across the manche and will throw books that we might call "very good indeed" into the channel. They like limited editions on vellum or on complicated paper, sometimes so strange as to be almost unshelvable. We are talking editions du tete which if also signed can make megabucks (Jarry's Ubu Roi one of 15 copies signed 'Monsieur Ubu glorifie Laurent Tailhade / Bien amicalement / A. Jarry' made 200,000 euros in 2004 in a Bonet binding.) They take the internet pretty seriously and tend to overprice English language books. They do not seem to have the same respect as us for minor, unknown or obscure authors and tend to price them low even if theirs is the only copy. They had the internet in primitive form ('Minitel--see below') as early as 1982 so naturally progressed to the web with almost all dealers on it from 2000 onwards. There is a scene in Polanski's 'Bitter Moon' showing Peter Coyote searching for filles de joie on his minitel. Plus ca change etc.,




The photo above of French books in a window is actually a dress shop on the Rue de Rennes with books being used as a fashion prop. Fashion and books seem to go together in Paris -watches inspired by St Exupery, a shop selling decadent looking clothes called Dorian and another named after Colette. Jane Birkin's second daughter Lou Doillon is opening a shop bringing literature and fashion together in the bohemian 11th arrondissement in the fall of 2009--" We’ll have a mix of fashion, literature, modern and old, and it won’t be conventional,.." says Lou. If invited to the vernissage I'll get on Eurostar and report back... Is this the way forward?

Ian Nairn, Outrage, 1955

Ian Nairn. OUTRAGE. The Architectural Press, Westminster, (1955)

Current Selling Prices
$50-$1500 /£30-£100

When Ian Nairn died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1983 aged just 52 he was a largely forgotten figure whose best work lay many years behind him. Some may have remembered his column in the Sunday Times and his TV shows that saw him pootering around the UK in a Morris Minor. Many may have bought his brilliantly idiosyncratic book on London, or perhaps his similar guide to Paris. But all this, together with his work with Pevsner on guides to Surrey and Sussex, was part of his creative period. For nearly a decade afterwards he had done nothing but drink himself into an early grave.

But, the great, the pioneering Ian Nairn, has always had a small, devoted following, and thanks to people like Jonathan Meades and other devoted fans through the world he can be seen as one of the great prophets of environmentalism. As such, there has always been a demand for his books, and particularly for his debut polemic, Outrage (1955). In this astonishing indictment of post-war planning Nairn sought to name and shame all those ‘ agents ‘responsible for the shocking ‘creeping mildew ‘ that occasionally individuals, but usually local authorities, had visited on both town and countryside over the years. He called it ‘ death by slow decay ‘ and he coined the word ‘Subtopia … a compound word formed from suburb and utopia, i.e, making an ideal of suburbia ‘, to describe what this malaise produced.

Outrage would have been an astonishing debut for anyone in his forties with two decades of architectural training behind him, but Nairn was just twenty-five year old, an ex-RAF pilot with a degree in maths from Birmingham University and with no architectural qualifications whatsoever. Like Betjeman before him, Nairn’s lack of professional qualifications did not prevent him contributing brilliantly perceptive pieces to the Architectural Review in the early fifties and I have a theory that it was Betch’s famous diatribe on post-war England in First and Last Loves (1952) that was mainly responsible for Nairn’s excursion into polemics. Around 1954/ 1955, in the spirit of Priestley (1936) and Cobbett (1823), he decided to take a rain check on the visual state of England by taking his camera with him on a journey from Southampton to Carlisle and beyond. The result was a damning indictment of planning blunders and architectural solecisms and it duly appeared as a special number of the Architectural Review in June 1955 and was published as a separate book soon afterwards.

Looking at Outrage now, its tiny photographs and architectural graphics, it can read like a period piece; it is when one examines the tone of voice that Nairn’s prescience seems astonishing. His is the voice that was scarcely heard at that time—indignant, disrespectful, and yet so very rational and sane. And the book evidently made its mark, because a reprint was called for immediately. Less immediate was the response from planners ( who, let’s face it, are not the brightest ). Over the years, however, the influence has been greater among those with similar agendas to Nairn’s. Without Outrage and its follow up, Counter Attack and such works as Your England Revisited, there probably wouldn’t have been Private Eyes’s ‘Nooks and Corners’. The trendy psychogeography of Ian Sinclair and his imitators owes much to Nairn too, as does the more recent Crap Towns. Things have improved a little in the past forty years. We don’t allow a perfectly good Georgian country house to rot ; we would never allow a fine Georgian terrace to be bulldozed to make way for a shopping parade and we wouldn’t let the National Grid string a line of pylons across a scenic river valley; we are more aware of the creeping effect of ribbon development and the ugliness of concrete lamp standards. However, some of the general lessons that Nairn taught—particularly the value of keeping suburban sights out of the country and gentility away from town centres-- which to anyone of any aesthetic sensitivity whatsoever are no-brainers-- are still being ignored by planners, and visual blunders involving street advertising, road signs, mobile-phone masts, fencing, etc are being committed every minute of the day around the UK.,

Although Outrage remains the Nairn title that everyone wants, prices aren’t exorbitantly high for something so worth having. A friend recently (on my recommendation ) went in search of a copy in her local bookshop and found a reprint of 1956 in good condition for a mere £25.One copy of the first was recently s priced on the Net at around £100, but this has now gone and in the past year or so a number of copies have quickly been and gone, such is the steady demand. Counter Attack is much easier to find at around £20 -£30, though it is unlikely that a great many were printed. Other titles by Nairn are more common still. [R.M. Healey]

Paris in the Spring...

At the end of June I was in Paris and have just unpacked some books that I bought there. I may just get my money back after expenses. Breaking even is not good business and is basically the same as going broke. Sacré Bleu. Will have to regard my sojourn in Paris as a holiday rather a buying trip. Blame the Euro. Paris, which used to be so reasonable, was now ruinously expensive and French dealers seemed to charge as if we were in the middle of a Porsche and red braces boom. Recession (probably much referenced when buying) seems to mean nothing to them and books that we can get £10 for are routinely priced at 35 Euros (about £30). English books are always looked up on every database and then priced with a heavy hand, if not an iron fist. That being said there were a few chinks in their armour.



I bought a very nice limited edition set of Jane Austen, that had been in the library of Arnold Bennett, for about 750 Euros and hope to get £1300 for them - practically a double up. French dealers are more cautious buyers and tend not to touch anything they can't sextuple - they then price their books so magnanimously that they could take a couple of decades to sell. However I bought a small album of vintage "feelthy postcards" for a euro each (actually 85 of them for 50 Euros)- something of a snip. Picture below of a jolly nude in a library.



One of the great pleasures of going to Paris was visiting the book fair at San Sulpice (see above.) Few things are more enjoyable than looking for books in the open air even if bargains are rare. Bright sun all day, the gentle sound of the fountain, the shade of trees, good cafés nearby. There used to be a partly open air bookshop in Ojai California ( the guru infested town where they shot 'Lost Horizon') and several open air book markets in South of France. Info on any other open air book shops, markets and fairs is welcome.

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.)