The Joy of Dullness 1

Of late I have been assembling a collection of dull, curious or odd book covers. I wasn't really getting anywhere until I hit the collection of fellow Anglian dealer Robin Summers , a man with a whim of iron and one of the major contributor's to Brian Lake's magisterial Bizarre Books. So here they are, the scholarly ones are actually of some value and one even sold while I was putting this together, so does not appear -- a book on the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure entitled Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory. With the paperback selling at £50 the joke became too costly to hold on to. The collection is devoted to dullness mixed with the curious and the odd which includes the oddly dull and the curiously odd. Here goes:




A bundle of laughs. The puff reads ' By contrasting Pound's political values with those of Stein and Zukofsky, this study argues that these three different writers share a complex set of attitudes that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergence of corporate social forms.' Some jokers want £100 for this although the committed shopper can find it for £10.



A little light reading.



Part of a small but select number of works on the brassiere. Not dull, but curious (in the old biblio sense.)
Good Housekeeping's family doctor has the answers.




Yes but do you have anything on extinct horse furniture in the Brussels area?





Useful book. Useful name.




Anything on consonants in the late Neo-Babylonian era?



I need this one badly. Actually an online search revels no copies - so £899?



One man's quest.




Someone had to write it.





Slow down and learn the language.

[More to come!]

Book descriptions -- the bland, the bad and the ugly

Checking prices on the net I often see strange and misleading book descriptions. I was alerted by Angus, a Bookride follower, to this fine example. It is one of those catchall descriptions that the cataloguer brings up with a programme like Typeit4me or cuts and pastes from a palette of such phrases. In this example the seller uses the exact phrase for over 12000 book descriptions - "Remains particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and strong". It is not a bad phrase as they go, although 'remains' is an offputting word as it suggests the book is not in the best shape. This is slightly re-inforced by the word 'surprisingly' as if the cataloguer himself is surprised the book has survived at all. The whole thing has that upbeat, genteel, wheedling tone that is prevalent online. Sometimes this leads on to entreaties such as this:

" Excellent reading on the subject. A good book to enjoy and keep on hand for yourself, or would make a GREAT GIFT for the fan / reader in your life. Reading is one of the great pleasures in life."

One guy has "Seems like an interesting title!" in all his descriptions, however dull the book.

Sometimes such entreaties are aligned with somewhat lousy descriptions:

"Hard Cover. No Covers. Absorbent Brown Spine With Two Light Brown Ovals With Title Inside Of Them In Light And Dark Brown Letters, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Shelf, Edge And Corner Ware, Some Edge Tearing And Chipping. Hard Cover Cover BooK: Fine, 338 Numbered Pages, That Were Lightly Read, And Are Clean And Tight To The Spine, Slight Shelf, Corner And Edge Ware. This Expensive BooK, Is Hard To Find, Will Make An Excellent Addition To Your Own Personal Library Collection, Or As A Gift. "

I realise 'fine' can encompass very slight handling wear and is surpassed by 'like new' and even the slightly dubious 'mint' but it cannot be associated with tears and chips! Also what in hell is an 'absorbent spine!'


Capitalised descriptions (shouting) are often a sign of a less than experienced bookseller ('UNREAD AND AS NEW BOOK WITH MISSING TITLE PAGE - COVER WITH LIGHT DAMAGE - COMPLETELY UNREAD - EXCELLENT CONDITION - READ ONCE CAREFULLY.') A missing title page, often mentioned as if it is nothing, is to my mind an almost fatal flaw...also while we are on the subject an ex library book can never be fine.

The subject is endless and there is an excellent 5000+ thread at the ABE forum collecting and discussing naff descriptions, it is called 'Disgusting - Must we have this?' Internecine warfare sometimes breaks out when a seller spots his description and resolutely defends it, but it has some real gems. Likewise John Baxter collected some truly awful Ebay descriptions at the back of his Pound of Paper. My favourite are descriptions in what I call the Alain Robbe Grillet style. The great nouveau roman writer can spend 2 pages describing a man's face in such relentless detail that at the end of it you have no idea what the chap actually looks like.

You have web descriptions where every line begins "this book..." often rhapsodising about the sharpness of the corners and others where the greatness of the condition is emphasised by negation (' no fraying, no tears, no marks or soiling, no chips, no pieces missing, no wrinkles or creases...) but the real Robbe- Grillet person gets into serious details and minutiae. On a $100 Franklin Mint bound in their trademark spam leather a seller notes -'gilt edges which when held to harsh light at an oblique angle there might be seen a few tiny lines or striations, perhaps not visible in ordinary light, and deemed very minor...' Pyjama Bob at Chapel Books just down the road in Suffolk is a master of the ultra precise description, here is a fairly restrained description of a £60 Penguin.

"Slight browning to pages, contents otherwise clean and unmarked. A little faint foxing or soiling to covers and spine rather browned. Joints show a little rubbing and small (5mm) split to base of upper joint, but covers are firm. Faint creasing to corners and a few light indentations show up when they catch the light..."

I am reminded of the late and much missed Peter Joliffe -- he used to say he would never describe a book as fine, there was always some imperfection to note, however slight... [To be continued]

Musings on the market for autographed letters...

Apparently autograph collecting as a hobby goes back as far as the 1780s, and the sheer number of letters that have survived from this date and slightly earlier—compared with the small number dating up to this period would suggest as much.
However, most letters in the catalogues of modern manuscript dealers seem to date from around 1840 onwards —which suggests that the hobby must have begun to really take off soon after this date. It is surely silly to argue that MPs, public officials, men of letters, churchmen, scientists, artists etc wrote fewer letters from, say, the mid 17th century to the mid eighteenth century and many more from the accession of Queen Victoria. People have always had to keep in touch. In fact, it could be argued that letter writers should have been more prolific in earlier times for the simple fact that before the age of the telegraph, the telephone, the train and the fast coach, there were no alternatives to the letter.

Of course, the arrival of the Penny Post in 1840 did make the sending of letters cheaper and more convenient—but this doesn’t really explain why so many letters have survived from this date. After all, with more letters around there were more to throw away. The only explanation as I see it is that after a certain date more people began to keep letters---perhaps due to the cult of the celebrity, which began to flourish following the accession of the young and glamorous Queen Victoria, and grew stronger as the century wore on , thus strengthening the market for letters. I have seen a number of albums of letters and cut-out signatures (sometimes assembled with a collection of crests) which appear to date from the mid nineteenth century.

Certainly there were autograph dealers in the mid Victorian period (I have an envelope bearing the name and address of one of them) and there are letters replying to requests from autograph hunters from Victorian celebs (who were often soldiers, politicians and other public figures). Occasionally, a celeb might donate a letter or an autograph received from a more famous celeb (I have a letter indicating that the signature of Tolstoy, which the sender had asked for, had been enclosed), which for some reason the donor no longer wished to keep. There are perhaps grounds for supposing that , say , someone like a cabinet minister or a general might see such autograph hunting by the hoi polloi as a bit infra dig , but worth encouraging for its positive public relations value. A more recent example for me was a letter from Hugh Gaitskell to my uncle, Denis Healey, willingly given to me by Denis when I was aged 11, which was claimed back almost immediately after Gaitskell suddenly died. It would be nice to know if something similar occurred in the Victorian or Edwardian period.

Perhaps many of the letters that come onto the market today are letters from others to the celeb that have been donated by celebs to collectors. Otherwise, unless there were many dealers in autographs and sales of autographs, how did these letters, many of which bear on matters often weightier than a request by a collector for a signature, come onto the market? Or it is equally possible that the ‘I can’t come to tea ‘letters (as I call them) were kept by admirers who knew the celeb professionally or personally, but at a low level. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that important letters would have been surrendered to a collector by the celeb recipient. It is more likely that such letters would have been kept by the recipient and to have remained alongside other important papers at his or her death-- to be sold off to book and autograph dealers, or sent to auction.
[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin
I once had a 'clipped' signature of John Keats in an old album -it read something like 'yours faithfully John Keats' and I wondered about the letter that it had been clipped from-- was it to Mary Shelley suggesting a fantastical character or to Byron swapping anecdotes of conquests? Or merely another 'can't come to tea' note...? Certainly it was a bloody sight more valuable than the clipping. Damn these early autograph hounds...

By the way the letter above is a Keats forgery by Major George de Luna Byron (ca. 1810-1882). He claimed to be the natural son of the Lord George Gordon Byron by a Spanish countess and was quite successful at penning and selling off fake letters of Byron, Shelley and Keats in the mid-nineteenth century. His forgeries are collected but they are worth a fraction of the real thing and cause much disappointment when unmasked. Below is a genuine Bruce Lee letter offering good advice to a young girl fan.

Early Books on Television: 1926 – 1939

British techies will boast that the origins of television can be traced to a room above a shop in Hastings ( blue plaque ) where John Logie Baird constructed the first TV receiver—generating moving images on a mechanical principle. Americans, however, will argue that their man, a certain C. Francis Jenkins, who was also involved in cinema technology , was doing almost the same thing six months earlier in1923. Unfortunately, neither of these pioneers can be said to have invented the television that we tune into today. Most of the credit for that probably belongs to Philo Farnsworth, the farmer’s son from Utah who in 1927, aged 21, produced the first electronic image. So, whatever way you look at it, the Americans invented television, just as they invented rock music.

Most of the collected works on early TV appeared before 1930. The first book on TV alone was Alfred Dinsdale’s well-known Television, or seeing by wireless (1926). For such a seemingly rare book (‘a rather rare book’, according to one dealer, who wants a toppish £2,490 for his copy) there are quite a few on ABE, ranging in price from a reasonable £350. Personally, I don’t see much point in paying an extra £2,000 or so for an especially good copy of what is essentially a superannuated pamphlet.

The second significant work, which appeared a year later is Television for the Home by Ronald Tiltman, whose frontispiece show the author being televised by John Logie Baird himself. Recently , there was a very nice jacketed copy of this on ABE for a sensible price. For its technical content alone, this seems a rather better investment than Dinsdale. However, if you hanker for a Dinsdale and can’t afford his Seeing by Wireless you could target a copy or a run ( if you can find one ) of his genuinely rare Television Journal (6d a month), whose July 1929 cover rather hopefully looks ahead to a time when the family might gather around the box of light on a winter evening--an extraordinary image for 1929, when radio was still in its infancy and TV broadcasting was several years away.




The more common Book of Practical Television (1935) by G. V. Dowding, an electrical engineer, is a pretty comprehensive technical exposition of 320 pages and many fascinating illustrations, which compares the mechanical and electronic versions of television and places them in a historical context. It even suggests how an enthusiast might build his own receiver. I paid a mere £1.50 for my copy a few years ago, but you’d be lucky to secure one for under £30 now. For historians of TV, issues of the Radio Times from c 1934 are valuable sources of information and can still be had for a few pounds. Copies of The Listener from 1936 to 1939 are equally useful and much cheaper still. Of the latter, look for transcripts of the live discussions by such pre-war TV pioneers as John Piper and Geoffrey Grigson--- and search out the wonderful set-to in 1939 between Grigson and Wyndham Lewis speaking on the side of modern art and the anti-modern defenders of the establishment. Pre-1939 copies of the BBC Yearbook, are also worth seeking out for about £10 each, though I’ve can’t recall ever finding a copy.
Incidentally, in 1936 appeared one of the earliest mentions of television in a literary work. In ‘ And if this mountain cease' from Poems (1936) by the poet and critic Michael Roberts we find:

‘ And if this mountain cease
If the rock-crystal breaks, and darkness comes
if the mind’s television ceases
if no one answers…. ‘

Still earlier mentions of television in literature are welcome via the comment box.
[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Early mentions of TV? A bit late but quite valuable is the literary magazine edited by Lawrence Durrell 'International Post' (1939) -- it had a TV critic and was full of promise but went to just one highly elusive issue. Value? Many hundreds of pounds, even though Durrell has become a little slow...

The Dinsdale, as you say, is not especially scarce. The problem with the book is it has several high auction records, in 1996 a jacketed but worn copy made $4800 and in 2008 the 'Richard Green copy' in rubbed d/j with tape repair on back panel made $16250. So some hapless collector had to pay nearly £10000 to carry the little book out of Christies New York. Sadly Richard Green was not the TV Robin Hood but an important collector of science books. It falls into the category of a book that is hard to buy (due to high levels of expectation) and hard to sell (because it is quite common.) In this same category are early BBC yearbooks which people want a lot for but are hard to sell for much over £20, even those with decoish covers. Last word on the unelusive Dinsdale. John Logie Baird's copy turned up last year. It made £1200 at Bonhams (1 plate shaved, some gatherings loose.) This may be a book that is not firmly in the ascendant, although a fine copy in jacket is offered at $9500 at History of Science.com citing the Green copy. Condition, as so often, trumps association...

Wiliam Waldorf Astor at the Villa Sirena

I found this art noveau style bookplate in all five vols of a 1900 English edition of Humboldt's Cosmos bound in leather (by Root and Son.) This bookplate set me off on a quest for where Villa Sirena might have been. My search took me to the siren haunted town of Sorrento on the Bay of Naples where Astor (then the richest man in the world) had bought several villas. None appeared to be now called Villa Sirena but this seems to be it; I quote from an amalgam of holiday brochures:

"...in the first century A.D. Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Emperor Augustus built aa fine villa in the same place where is now Villa Tritone (later Villa Sirena / Villa Dei Leoni) and Ovid was one of its first eminent visitors.
On this site in the thirteenth century a convent was built for nuns belonging to an enclosed order. At the end of the sixteenth century, after a destructive invasion by the Saracens, the place was rebuilt by Dominican priests, who started to cultivate the garden, bringing the first citrus fruits trees from the Middle East. At that time, in 1577, Torquato Tasso, Sorrento's foremost poet, author of "Jerusalem Delivered", shared his torments with the prior of the monastery.
In 1888 Count Labonia, a distinguished collector of antiquities and friend of Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, bought the site and began to build the present house which he called "Aux Roches Grises", recalling the grey rocks on which the house stands. At the beginning of the twentieth century, U.S. Ambassador William Waldorf Astor bought the house and, where the convent once stood, he designed the garden, behind the villa and on either side, encircled by walls and balustrades, to protect this private green oasis of palms, oranges, cycas, cypresses, eucalyptus, pines. He bought the Villa (then called Villa Syrene) in 1906 and made it a repository for his vast and ever-growing collection of classical, medieval, and Renaissance statuary. The convent was destroyed and a wall along the property’s seaward side was raised, where various openings were made and decorated with medieval ruins and Greek-style temples. Secret paths and allées run through the lush vegetation revealing statues, urns, fountains and glimpses of sea and sky through the windows cut out in the high wall along the seaward side..."

So a distinguished place with 2000 years of history, serious literary connections and probably a fabulous library of which my vols (for which I paid £50 and hope to double) formed a tiny part. Through some route more strange and circuitous than the 'secret paths' of this villa the book ended up at Bradfield College Science Library and proudly bears their bold blue stamps. These lower the price but are fairly neatly applied. It is interesting to note from 1943 – 1945, the property hosted Benedetto Croce, turning it into a political crossroads for the rising Republic of Italy. The official signing of the declaration for the first Italian government after the war was signed in the room which is now used as a study. The place can be rented (8 bedrooms, sleeps 16 -- towels and beach towels changed every 3 days and bed linens once a week.) I doubt it is cheap.

Deeper research shows that William Waldorf Astor wrote a short story for the Pall Mall Gazette (which he had bought for £50,0000) of July 1906 called The Last of the Tenth Legion. It is of a decidedly occult/ theosophical bent beginning thus 'It was to his Villa Sirena, at Sorrento, amid its interbraiding shine and dark, that Vaini summoned me, in May 1895, for a psychical experiment...'Although it starts like Borges it does not quite have the great man's touch. In 1900 he published A Pharaoh's Daughter and Other Stories -- a Bleiler title, being a collection of fantasy stories including tales of terror and the supernatural. A fine copy can sell for £100. Oddly enough his cousin John Jacob Astor is also responsible for a Bleiler title A Journey in Other Worlds (Appleton NY 1894) describing the earth in the year 2000, along with journeys to Jupiter and Saturn. Another £100 book. One critic called it "..a pioneering work that is of considerable literary, historical, and social interest." In Villa Sirena's library one wonders if there was a large section of fantasy, vampire novels, interplanetary travel and occult detective fiction, possibly now sitting unclaimed in a Neapolitan warehouse or a storage room at Bradfield Science College...

Collecting True Crime 2

When I interviewed the Ruislip Bungalow Murder Man he told me that around 99% of the books in his huge collection dealt with murder --incidentally, why does Rumpole refer to the ‘Penge Bungalow Murders’, when there are no bungalows in Penge –unless anyone knows any better ? . Not only are there few books on fraud and theft in his collection, but many of those on murder are, as he is ready to admit, with refreshing candour, almost worthless from a scholarly point of view. For instance, among his hundred books on Jack the Ripper only a dozen are of historical value. He selects as one of the best A Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, which offers up just one name----that of George Chapman. One of the historically ‘worthless’ tomes in his library is William Stewart’s Jack the Ripper: a New Theory (1939 ),a book which, probably due to its small print run, is now ‘ a scarce and much sought after, early Ripper work’. Stewart, who appears to have been obsessed with his subject, even to the extent of making models of the murder sites from the original plans, argues that the killer was a woman—a midwife, no less. Today his book fetches tidy sums, and on ABE Harrington wants $1,253 for a jacket-less copy, a price high enough to stop it selling with any alacrity.

Books about executioners and particular executions are, he says, definitely worth searching for. The Victorian hangman, James Berry was one of the very few who left behind recollections of their time in office—indeed he published a book, My Experiences as an Executioner (1892), while he was still hanging people --- a deviation from correct practice which was frowned upon by the Home Office at the time and cost him his job. Bizarrely, some copies of the dull David and Charles reprint of 1972 cost more than the one single copy of the rarish first edition currently featuring on ABE at a reasonable $109. Copies of the memoirs of Albert Pierrepoint, who topped 435 murderers between 1932 and 1956, are common enough in paperback or hardback, but the actual diaries on which he based his book remained unsold at £15,000 by Jarndyce at the 2010 Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia. Perhaps collectors feel uncomfortable reading such intimate details of executions from the hand of someone so closely involved.

Books exposing prison conditions---the older the better—are worth searching for. One of my favourite is Jottings from Jail ( 1887) by London prison chaplain J. W. Horsley, who has a Mayhew-like approach to the prison underworld ( the book includes 35 pages of explanations of rhyming slang). There is also a rather striking illustrated cloth cover featuring chains, jemmies, bars and other symbols of punishment. I bought my rather tattered copy for 60 new pence at Ralph’s in Swansea around ten years ago, but today one online chancer wants $400 for his ex-library copy, while we are on the subject of criminal tendencies.

Books on unsolvable cases are appealing to True Crime fans. The case of Ronald Light, a ne’er do well who probably escaped hanging for the shooting of Bella Wright in 1919, occupies little space in most books on twentieth century crime , but H. R. Wakefield in his Green Bicycle Case (1930) managed to cobble up a book of 152 pages from it. This ordinary enough book should command less than £20 in most respectable bookshops, but for some reason some dealers are charging $125 and $175 for their jacketed copies. There seems be some agreement among dealers that older books on true crime must always be expensive, especially if they have striking titles. Certainly crime pays for them. Much better value is Mad or Bad ? (1950) in which John Woodiwiss discusses some famous cases that pose questions regarding the mental stability of miscreants. You can buy a jacketed copy, complete with typically creepy cover by Edward Pagram, for under $15 on ABE.



Finally, probably the most famous—certainly the most quoted in modern accounts of late eighteenth century crime—is Patrick Colquoun’s Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, first published in1796, but reprinted regularly for years afterwards. Colquhoun was a magistrate with a downer on petty pilfering and fraud and his statistics-heavy treatise laid the foundations for the establishment of Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. Read it and be amazed at the author’s most un PC attacks on certain reprobates, particularly the ‘ lower class of Jews’, who are described as a:
‘ depraved race … educated in idleness from their earliest infancy, they acquire every debauched and vicious principles which can fit them for the most complicated arts of fraud and deception, to which they seldom fail to add the crime of perjury … ‘

I found a copy of an early edition in the sale of the historian J. H. Plumb’s library a few years ago. This association meant that it went for a ridiculously high sum, but only months later through ABE I found a similar copy in Nova Scotia for a mere Canadian $80 in original boards, with a buckram spine and inscribed label, which on the flyleaf bore the signature of Robert Wilson, who I would like to think was the same General Sir Robert Wilson who was knighted at 24 ( surely a record ), became a radical MP and was drummed out of the army for being compassionate. I was probably lucky in this purchase. Today you won’t secure an early edition for much under $370, with firsts of this iconic book going for more than $2,000.

[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Sorry not blogging myself currently due to massive onslaught of books. It's murder. The misogynist poet JK Stephen used to be my favourite candidate for the Ripper but a researcher ruled him out using the train timetable from Cambridge to King's Cross. He was, of course, a cousin of Virginia Woolf and would have known her as a girl. Also apparently related to VW was the unpleasant Dennis Nielsen, the British civil servant who strangled young men at his Muswell Hill residence. When told by his biographer of his connection to Virginia Woolf he commented: "I don't like the sound of that. She went mad, you know."

Rock on Robin, I'll be scribbling something soon.

Same name, different game…..2

The second and last list of 'literary doppelgangers.'

D. H. Lawrence, author of Women in Love
D. H. Laurence, co-author of A Bibliography of Henry James. (1957)

T. E. Lawrence, motor-cycling author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Laurence, author of Do You Believe ?---an occult thriller.

Wyndham Lewis, major Modernist artist, novelist and theorist.
D. B. Wyndham Lewis, now largely forgotten compiler of ‘ humorous ‘ anthologies . If you want to annoy Lewisites pretend you have always thought that they were one and the same person.

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost
Jon Milton, author of Do Try this at Home (‘Punk Science’, apparently )

John Piper, unsmiling English artist, designer, poet, writer on art.
John Piper, American evangelical author.

Bernard Shaw, author, playwright
Bernard Shore, author of The Orchestra Speaks

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island.
Robert L Stephenson, author of The prehistoric people of Accokeek Creek (1959)

Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy
Lawrence Stern, author of the ever popular Stage Management

Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury novelist.
Virginia L Wolf, Associate Professor and author of the gripping A Reader’s Companion to A Little House on the Prairie (1996) and Louise Fitzhugh.



Then there are the names of famous authors that supposedly literate booksellers cannot spell, even when the book they are listing is in front of them. Booksellers, we know who you are !

Steven Spender
H. G. Welles
P. G. Woodhouse
Charles Dickins
T. S. Elliott
Rupert Brooks
William Falkner
Virginia Wolf
E. M. Forester

[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin, formidable research there. To the misspelled writers I would add Jane Austin, a common mistake and a sure sign that the person has not read the mighty Jane. To the doppelgangers I could also add Tom Wolfe, white suited author of 'Bonfire of the Vanities' not to be confused with Thomas Wolfe author of 'Look Homeward Angel' (1929) a rather valuable book when seen wearing a jacket. The other confusing name is W.H. (William Henry) Hudson, author of 'Green Mansions' and the anonymous sleeper 'A Crystal Age' + a few natural history titles. There is another William Henry Hudson, professor of English at Stanford University and author of books on the romantics and the novel 'The Strange Adventures of John Smith' (1902) and 'A Quiet Corner in a Library' and several other neglected works. I have some signed books by the wrong Hudson, a man now so forgotten that he has no entry in Wikipedia...

Same name, different game…..

A posting inspired by finding in Any Amount of Books, a few years ago, a slim volume bearing my name. I bought it, thinking that there would now be one less person who thought I was a New Zealand poet who had been born in 1937 and who had written a poem entitled ‘Pullover’:

‘I want to be your little black sleeveless pullover
so I can feel your ribs
pout gently for your boobs…’

Unfortunately, ABE currently has one copy of Mr Healey’s little book for sale, but I take some comfort from knowing that other more distinguished writers than myself have their literary doppelgangers (if that’s the right word ). Here are some I found.

Caveat emptor !

Iain Banks, cult Scottish author
Dr Ian Banks, author of the hardly cultish, Not Feeling Well ?

William Blake, poet, artist, mystic ( 1757 – 1827)
William Blake, author of A penknife in my pocket and Wayfarer, a voice from the Southern Mountains

William Boyd, British novelist, currently at the top of his game
William C Boyd, author of Textbook of Pathology (1970)

William S Burroughs, Harvard educated cult junkie, wife-killer.
William J Burroughs, author of Weather.
William E Burroughs, author of Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security.

Robert Burns, Scottish literary icon, peasant poet
Robert Burns, author of Seven Steps to Stop a Heart Attack

James Boswell, sex fiend, lickspittle to Dr Samuel Johnson.
James Boswell, 20th century book illustrator
James D Boswell, author of The Sower’s Seeds

John Clare, peasant poet .
John D. Clare, author of American Indian Life.

Thomas Dolby, early nineteenth century radical, author of Floristan
Thomas Dolby, indie musician and composer.

George Eliot, Victorian novelist
George Elliott, author of The Kissing Man
George P Elliott, author of Conversions: Literature and Modernist Deviation.

David Gascoyne, tall surrealist poet and Francophile
David Gascoyne, author of Let’s Visit Norway!

Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows.
Kenneth G. Graham, author of children’s classic, A Study Skills Handbook (1984 )

Graham Greene, English Catholic novelist.
Graeme Green, Canadian novelist whose first (‘scarce’ )novel was Six Legs (1969).

Henry Green, cult novelist, author of Moving, Living, Being..etc
Henry Green, author of Favourite Movie Themes

Thomas Hardy, gloomy novelist and poet
Thomas Hardie, author of Sermons (1811)
Thomas Hardie, author of the ever popular Higher Physical Education Success Guide

Robin Healey, author of Hertfordshire—a Shell Guide etc
Robin Healey, New Zealand alleged poet.

Henry James, American novelist
Henry James, author of The Farmer’s Guide to the Internet (1996)


David Jones, ethereal artist and war poet.
David Jones, author of Baboon

Charles Lamb, author of Essays of Elia (1823).
Charles W. Lamb, author of Essentials of Marketing (1999)

[Robin Healey]

Many thanks Robin...To be continued with the other T.E. Lawrence and the other D.H. Lawrence and many others. Let me add one of the most confusing doppelgangers-- Winston Churchill (the greatest Brit ever) and Winston Churchill (forgotten American romantic novelist). The unsaleable Winston Churchill is often taken for the good one and fancy prices are demanded especially on Ebay. Almost all his novels begin with the letter C. ('The Crisis' 'The Crossing' 'The Celebrity' 'Coniston' etc.,) Wikipedia has this on them: "The British Churchill, upon becoming aware of the American Churchill's books, wrote to him suggesting that he would sign his own works "Winston S. Churchill", using his middle name (actually part of his surname), "Spencer", to differentiate them. This suggestion was accepted, with the comment that the American Churchill would have done the same, had he any middle names." Winston S. Churchill did actually write a novel 'Savrola' (1900) which can command as much as £1000 in the first state (no copyright statement on verso of title). To add confusion both men were amateur painters...There is also a good poet called Brian Jones, not the drug friendly Stone and a writer on poster art known as Tony Curtis, not the screen idol...

An Austin Osman Spare exhibition 1955

As someone who used to deal in Austin Osman Spare art and books I was intrigued by a rare exhibition catalogue that I discovered last week in a box. It was for a show at the Archer Gallery in Westbourne Grove (London) in October 1955, six months before Spare's death at age 70. The introduction is by Kenneth Grant, an occultist and writer who is himself highly collectable. Having written an introduction to an AOS art catalogue myself (early 1980s) it was fascinating to see how Grant went about it. Such pieces are without exception enthusiastic, even celebratory, sometimes with elaborate claims being made for the artist. I praised his 'courageous originality' and talked of comparisons with Durer, Goya, Rops and Hokusai. Grant goes somewhat further in his claims, as you will see...

Frank Lechford, an old dealer in military books and a friend of AOS, used to say that something weird always happened around Spare and sure enough at our 1980s exhibition a fight broke out, unpleasant but short. One wonders who attended the 1955 exhibition and what strangeness occurred there. Here is an abridged version of Kenneth Grant's introduction ('An Appreciation'):

The spirit which permeates the artistic creations of Austin Osman Spare may not be easily ensnared or examined, for it is exceedingly tenuous and elusive, as fugitive as the odour of a rose and as cloyingly nostalgic.

Those who would read into his flowing arabesque line and into his haunting modulations of light and shade the speech of usual things will step back baffled by the hint of wild and unknown things which are here presented to view. It is as if a corner of the veil of inscrutable mysteries were suddenly lifted before our eyes ...It is the nostalgia of remembered remoteness; the anguish of things lost and all but regained, but which slip yet again from the memory's grasp; the disquietude that comes from the knowledge that Spare has unerringly captured for us what we ourselves are unable to shadow forth from the dark deep confines of our latent being...

[talk of Atavistic Resurgence and of his Sidereal paintings…' peculiarly dynamic and enigmatic sidereal semblances…']

...here are not only the creations of an artist gifted beyond the normal, but these very creations themselves are the true delineations of a realm of being existing here and now at a level of awareness veiled to the uninitiated vision of the generality of men. One might almost say that far from being fanciful products of a highly trained and vivid imagination, these works represent faithful recordings of those latent levels wherein and wherefrom proceed the motivating causes of all the complex and inscrutable mentations, fragments of which only appear within the limited orbit of the so-called 'rational' activities of the mundanely conscious individual.



We have to understand not only the mysteries of dream and of sleep, of waking consciousness and the mechanism of desire, but also we should have direct experience of the 'knower' of all these various states of consciousness before we can begin to understand the fugitive essence of Spare's enchanted creations. For even as the universe is a glamour cast forth from and by the mind of man... so also these creations subsist as realities within a deeper consciousness than is manifest in the everyday waking activities wherein the human machine lives and moves. From regions which make these activities seem merely automatic reactions to external phenomena, Spare brings the tenuous thread of his dream into the reality of day, and makes the dream-intrusion into waking awareness a subtle perichoresis of two worlds as remote and apart from each other as the outward form and appearance of man himself is to the soul which exists in the veiled sanctuaries of his unknown realities.

This perichoresis is what Spare has achieved and it is the greatest witness to the power of his magic that such interpenetration does not result in confusion but in unity, not in distortion but in beauty, not in conflict and pain but in perfect balance and intensity of rapture. All these things form the thread of the bright tapestries wherewith these walls are hung. If we do not fail to lose the central thread of all, we shall pass from picture to picture as from delight to delight, relishing a bliss that is rarely given to mortal man in his hour of upheaval, disharmony and corruption. To Spare- as for the individual who is able to stay possessed of this central thread- none of these imperfections exist, and we are brought to a vision of transcending beauty, seeing the perfection of the whole in the true relation of its myriad parts. [Kenneth Grant 1955.]

As for 'perichoresis' (which Grant is using metaphorically) some definitions are the length of a short story and there is even a video about its meaning and pronunciation, but put simply it is a term used in the theology of the Trinity to indicate the intimate union, mutual indwelling, or mutual interpenetration of the three members of the Trinity with each other. By the way--the pamphlet must be worth £50+ and works by Grant can go for up to £400. The colour Goddess image was later used for 'Man Myth and Magic' in the 1970s. One of the few collectable part-works...The portrait of Freud was item 151 in this 1955 catalogue of 221 works and was priced at 10 guineas, probably worth a little north of 2000 guineas now (he's not Frank Auerbach) but a decent investment. Thanks to the Cabinet of the Solar Plexus who display this fine slightly sidereal painting.

Big books and big prices

A book affordable only by the likes of Jensen Button and Lewis Hamilton, and weighing in at 37kg, which is slightly more than Bernie Ecclestone, the Official Ferrari Opus Enzo Diamante has just been published at a whizzing £155,000, which is £10,000 more than the company’s cheapest car. Ferrari only plan to allocate one copy to each country in the world of this deluxe, diamond-encrusted tome, signed by every living Ferrari F1 champion. If you are too poor to buy one, or don’t relish moving to another country—say Mali or Niger—to obtain a copy, you may have to get by with one of the cheaper editions-- the ‘Enzo’ model at £20,000 and limited to 400 copies---or the dirt cheap ‘Classic ‘—which retails at £2,000, and is limited to 4,100 copies worldwide. What all customers get for their money are 852 pages of detailed specifications on every Ferrari ever made, oodles of knock-out glossy pics plus notes on every Ferrari driver. As ABE feature none of these volumes at present, cheapskate petrolheads may have to make do with Alessandro’s Sannia’s Ferrari—Icon of Style, which came out this year and costs around $13 on ABE

Is the Diamante likely to be a clever investment ? One wealthy Australian thinks so. He has already bought his nation’s allocation of one copy. I cannot possibly comment on his taste in books, but instinct says it that his may have been a wise buy, seeing that fast cars, unlike fast art ( vide Richard Prince, Koons, Hirst ) will never go out of fashion as long as there is enough petrol to fuel the damn things. Are the diamonds and celebrity signatures worth the extra £151,000 ? Not in my view, though rarity does count for something.


The Diamante is not particularly heavy in the champion book stakes. If we discount the 14,300 ancient stone tablets inscribed with Buddhist scriptures, which is by far the heaviest ‘ book ‘, and one likely to remain in an edition limited to one, Bhutan: a Visual Odyssey Across the last Himalayan Kingdom (2003) at 133 lbs is much heavier. It is also larger, at 7 foot by 5 foot, and is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the largest in the world, though for all its size, it is cheaper than the Diamante. One copy has been acquired by Special Collections at the University of Washington, where it is on display outside the Graduate Reading Room in Suzallo Library. Pages are turned once a month. There are a few ‘trade ‘editions on ABE. One bumped ex-library copy is priced at $297, but if you wish to buy the dearest mint condition copy you will get exactly 5 cents change from $2,500.

Bhutan may be the largest book in the world, but it is by no means the heaviest. This distinction belongs to the informally titled Ethiopian Book of Signatures and Vision Statements, a compendium of ‘ 30 million vision statements ‘ of Ethiopians around the world, including street children. In 2007 the publisher, Gana Seb Trading, a paper manufacturer, said the book will comprise three volumes, each measuring a metre in height and weighing 500 kgs. ( therefore totalling 3,300 lbs ), and would be transported by forklift. Three kgs. of silver will be used to cover the spines.

From this description the book sounds rather like a modern-day Domesday Book, or more accurately, a gigantic autograph book. It was begun in June 2007 and has may have been completed by now. It is not known whether the book will updated every decade or so; or whether it will be published in a ( presumably ) condensed form and made available to reference libraries. But the basic idea is an appealing one. Perhaps instead of a census, the UK could do something similar in 2022.
[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Very fat art books used to be known in my part of the trade as 'thicks' but these are in a new category. I thought Helmut Newton's 'Sumo' was a bastard to lift but the Bhutan book would need two strong men, possibly three. It is about the size of a Ping-Pong table and weighs more than Robbie Coltrane. It came out of an Adobe MIT/Microsoft iCampus initiative so presumably Bill Gates and a few other digerati have copies.

How do you shelve a book like that! ? I have met miniature book collectors but have never heard of a collector of outsize books; there are enough now being produced to spawn a few punters. If you want to start with a big one the Bhutan book is $10000 (most of the money goes to charity) however delivery charges might be a little more.

Fictional Guidebooks

One of these books does not exist at all, two are imaginary books from movies and only exist because they have been subsequently published and one is a regularly published book.
Well done if you spot them all correctly.

Answers.

Handbook for the Recently Deceased is the book seen in the movie 'Beetlejuice'. It is used by the dead couple (killed in a Volvo crash) who haunt their old house. A movie memorable for the performances of Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse and Winona Ryder as the beautiful young Goth who is able to see the dead couple. Versions of this handbook have actually been published, possibly several, and it is not valuable.

The Traveller's Guide from Death to Life is a real book. I photographed the cover then gave it away so I am not sure what it is about. I suspect it is a modern abridged edition of the 100 year old book by Mrs. Menzies published by the British Gospel Book Association. There have been many editions. It appears to use travel as a simile for the life of salvation:

"...As the railway passenger finds the line laid, the stations built, the ticket printed, the train ready for him, and he has only to present the price named for his ticket; so in the journey to heaven, all is done for him even to the price of his ticket, which he has but to ACCEPT as a free gift from God to him, and his Salvation is perfectly secure."

The book is rare in this edition but probably of modest value. The cover is enigmatic. Who are these ramblers and why is the young woman resting her foot on a rock? My theory is that the world has ended and they are the only ones left alive.

Tobin's Spirit Guide is of course the fictional guide book from the movie 'Ghostbusters'. It provides information about miscellaneous ghosts, spirits, spectres, demons, deities, etc.and is used by the ghostbusters to look up the history, strength and weaknesses of supernatural beings. A useful book that has spawned several terrestrial books. It can be bought for £20 or less but there are copies (print on demand) at £800+ with outfits like Aphrohead and Quarter Melon.

The Orange Catholic Bible has nothing to do with the protestant Ulster order but is a fictional book from Frank Herbert's Dune. Created in the wake of the crusade against thinking machines known as the Butlerian Jihad, the Orange Catholic Bible is the key religious text in the Dune universe and is described thus in the glossary of the 1965 novel:

ORANGE CATHOLIC BIBLE: the "Accumulated Book," the religious text produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. It contains elements of most ancient religions, including the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism and Buddislamic traditions. Its supreme commandment is considered to be: "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul."

As fas as I know it has never been published but I found this mocked up image at the Naomi Bardoff blog (thanks) which is related to the Invisible Library.
Last word from the Dune bible: 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.' Tell that to them in the valley...

Collecting books on the early history of cinema 1.

First lesson. The USA is a better place to buy and sell rare books on the Cinema. Fact. Elliott Katt, who before his recent retirement, ran the world’s largest performing arts bookstore in LA, convinced me of this twelve years ago. But I thought I’d try an experiment anyway. A couple of years ago, having failed to find a half decent Cinema bookshop in the UK, I approached Bloomsbury Auctions, who estimated my impeccably provenanced typescript of a ‘Kes’ screenplay at £50. As I had already been offered five times that by a US dealer, who even volunteered to pay carriage, I walked away and on returning home accepted this earlier offer. Are most British auction houses and dealers sniffy about books on the Cinema ? You bet.

But they shouldn’t be. Collecting in film history is a growing field, with early material being the most sought after. One of the pioneers of the moving image, Eadwerd Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) has recently been recognised with a major exhibition in London and his Animals in Motion, which lay the foundations for cinematography, has always been in demand. All early editions are sought after, but are often in poor condition through constant use. I paid just £2 for my rather dilapidated ( but complete ) copy of the 1902 edition over 30 years ago, but presently ABE has a good copy for $572 and two of the 1907 edition at $250 and $225. Not excessive prices, really, for such an important book.

Other early technical works on cinematography are collected, and many are priced on the low side. Katt told me of a collector in Los Angeles—a tool and die maker by trade-- who had managed to fill his modest three bedroom home in the suburbs floor to ceiling with books of all kinds, and had stuffed his garage full of cinema books, some of which were very early technical works on cinematography. One in this collection was The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison which W.K.L Dickson, a prolific inventor in Edison’s laboratory, had brought out in 1894, the year in which he also demonstrated the world’s first modern motion picture projector. At present ABE is not short of copies of this particular title —all of which are located in the States—and prices range from a competitively priced but well thumbed ex-library copy at $80 to one in fine condition at $297. Today, Katt believes that the collector with the largest haul of early technical books is Mark Ulano, the Oscar-winning production sound mixer on the film ‘Titanic’, who has published a book on the technical side of early cinema. Another pioneer on the technical side, C. Francis Jenkins, an American rival to John Logie Baird in the TV stakes, started his career in movies. His very rare Animated Pictures of 1898 is about the painterscope. Katt revealed to me that he had only ever handled two copies—the last he sold for $5,000—a little steep even for this legendary rarity. At present ABE have a couple of grubby ex-library copies at under a $100 and two lovely copies at $750 and $1,000 plus. It would seem that the book has become less elusive in recent years.

Books on or by early film makers are avidly collected and are a little pricier. The life and work of D. W. Griffith, director of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) is well documented, but this pioneer also went into print himself early in his career, though you might spend a lifetime locating a copy of the exceptionally scarce Biography of David Wark Griffith and a Brief History of the Motion Picture in America (c1920), which appeared in the form of a 36 page pamphlet from ‘ D. W. Griffith Service/Exhibitor’s Trade Review ‘. A dealer in West Virginia wants $3,500 for his lavishly illustrated gem. This works out at around $95 a page !!

[R.M.Healey]

To be continued...Many thanks Robin. I'm keeping an eye open for the Wark Griffith pamphlet -- it appears to be 9 by 12 inches, so not small, and comes with an illustrated gray paper dust jacket with a drawing of Griffith on the front panel. At $3500 the dealer appears to have come up with a price large enough to stop all buyers from buying. This is the holy grail for many dealers who hate to see a good book sell - but in the meantime his price could be a useful comparison marker for other copies selling at slightly less. This may happen on a regular basis but it seems unlikely as WorldCat cites just 2 copies...

Collecting early bibles in English 2

Price guide $3,000 - $2m

The first versions of the Bible in English were manuscripts created from the 1380s by Dr John Wycliffe (1328 - 84 ), a professor of theology at Oxford University, and his followers. Wycliffe’s main gripe was with the unethical practices of the Church, such as indulgences and relics, and with its stout resistance to any version of the scriptures being available to English readers. For his attempts to remedy this failing he managed somehow to escape the horrible fate of those Tudor theologians who were to follow his example, but the Pope exacted a kind of revenge 44 years after his death by ordering his bones to be exhumed, crushed and scattered in the English Channel.

A later follower, Jan Hus, a Czech theologian and dissident, was not so lucky. In 1415 he was burned at the stake for his support of Wycliffe’s teachings, and it has been reported that some copies of the offending bibles were used as kindling. One would rather like to know how many of these manuscripts were produced over the years and how many survived the flames. Presumably, those copies distributed originally by Wycliffe and his helpers were read in private and then secreted away, so a few must have survived. Until very recently, the Great Site ( of the Bible Museum Inc) boasted that it had a single copy for sale at over $1m. This has now gone, but the Site hints that it has the means of obtaining other copies, providing the buyer has up to $2m available.

With the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 the scriptures remained in Latin but the Great Site recognises the world-altering significance of this particular book by charging $120,000 for each page it offers for sale from a well documented broken up copy. But it reserves its greatest acclamation for the man who did most to spread the gospel by printing the first English version. William Tyndale, a scholar and intellectual, brought out his New Testament of 1525-6, from the safety of Germany. For this act of defiance a sizeable price was placed on his head, but Tyndale, protected by fellow Protestants on the continent, managed to supervise the smuggling out of copies ( often in bales of cotton and sacks of flour ) of his often reprinted work to England throughout the 1530s, although anyone caught with a copy here risked certain death. In the end, after eleven years on the run, Tyndale was finally cornered by bounty hunters in Holland and shipped back to England, where he was strangled before being burnt at the stake.

Over this period many Tyndale New Testaments must have been seized, or even legitimately bought and subsequently destroyed, by the authorities. Because of this, only two copies of the first edition are known to have survived. Even later editions of the 1530s command six figure sums. After his death Tyndale’s work was carried on by two devotees, Miles Coverdale and John Rogers. It was Coverdale who could be said to have published the first complete Bible in English, since in 1535 he added his own translation of the Old Testament to Tyndale’s New Testament. The Great Site has one of these at $445,000. Two years later, Rogers produced the second complete English Bible-- the first to be translated from the original Greek and Hebrew sources. One US dealer, who like the Great Site, described this edition as the ‘Tyndale Bible’ wants $750 for a single leaf, a sum which makes the Great Site’s single leaves of Gutenberg appear cheap. And as there are fewer that 15 copies extant, the $275,000 that it asks for the whole book also seems good value. Three years after Wycliffe’s execution, Henry VIII put the royal seal of approval on the English version by authorizing the publication of what became known as ‘The Great Bible ‘. Such a volte face on the part of the king, who by now was happily dismantling the monasteries of England, can only be seen as an attempt to cock yet another giant snook at the Vatican. For this particular Bible expect to pay a mere $200,000, perhaps a reflection of the fact that no one had to die for having published it.

[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Noble words. I should say that prices charged at these bible sites tend to be absolute and final end user prices and then some, often such items can be seen at auction at considerably less. An Italian dealer once told me that his father had been offered a Gutenberg bible (on vellum) for $2000. He was sitting in his shop in the early 1940s when a monk appeared with the books under his arm. He was probably fleeing the war in the north. The fugitive monk needed the equivalent of $2000 for the great Bible of Mainz - which sadly the dealer could not muster. The coweled figure disappeared never to be seen again. Current value --more than an oligarch's mansion in Hampstead. Last word on bibles-- at a lower level old bibles of medium size tend to sell well, the great big clasped ones take much longer--presumably a question of portability. Sometimes we have half a dozen weighty bibles waiting for buyers. In the meantime they add an air of gravitas and spirituality, especially in this atheistic era of the shrill Dawkins.

In the Key of Blue...

I bought some books at a house yesterday, show biz stuff some signed and rather Ebayable and some rubbish (Jeremy Clarkson, books on Bros and Rod Hull and his Emu.) All in a day's work-- 20 boxes in the back of the battered Volvo. The seller showed me some of his own collection (this stuff had belonged to an uncle) and I took a shot of that-- a pretty stunning thematic collection of blue books. The photo does not do them justice, they had a kind of glow from the Victorian indigo-- hints of Royal Azure, Cerulean and Ultramarine. Out of shot were some Strands and Punches (sometimes seen in blue rather than red.) Impressive and quirky, self indulgent - but in a good way (and NOT FOR SALE, dammit!)



He did not have a copy of the lovely 1890s book by John Addington Symonds In the Key of Blue (1893). The interesting thing about this book is that it is normally seen in cream cloth or if you are lucky vellum with a gilt pattern of laurel and hyacinths by Charles Ricketts. The first copies were actually blue but when Ricketts saw them he protested that the colour had to be changed because the critics would otherwise be tempted to refer to the binding as "Ricketts blue." This is a reference to a very old product which was used for washing clothes -- 'Reckitt's Blue' sold by the Carbolic Soap Company. Quite a few blue copies got through but it can go for $500 + and more if limpid.

Books by Murderers 5

John Selby Watson ( 1804 - 1884 )


The Life of George Fox $20
Biographies of John Wilkes and William Cobbett (1870) $20
The Reasoning Power in Animals (1867) $50
Life of Sir William Wallace $25
Life of Richard Porson (1861) $25
Life of William Warburton (1863) $26

Translations

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius Carus (1851) $20
Justin, Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius ( 1853 ) $10 - $495 !!
Cicero on Oratory and Orators (1855) $25
Sallust, Florius and Vellius Paterculus $20
Quintillian’s Institutes of Oratory (1875) $85

The notorious Reverend John Selby Watson, who killed his wife, may well have been the inspiration for Dr Thorneycroft Huxtable, the pompous headmaster in the Sherlock Holmes story The Priory School, who insisted on reminding his hosts that he was the author of Huxtables Sidelights on Horace. The Watson case was a cause celebre at the time and Conan Doyle, as a medical man with an interest in forensic science, would have known about the trial. Also, is it incidental that Holmes’ companion shared a surname with the criminal? There are also two obvious similarities. John Selby Watson too was a headmaster ----of Stockwell Grammar School in south London—and he also edited classical texts to supplement his meagre living.

The facts are these. Having been dismissed in 1870 from his poorly paid Headship on the grounds of age and falling numbers, Watson was left in poverty--with no pension and with only the dribble of royalties from his many schoolbooks to sustain himself and his wife, who would frequent taunt him on his failure to provide, and for his sexual impotence. On October 8, 1871, just a few weeks after he had finished writing his History of the Papacy to the Reformation, a servant found Watson unconscious . He had taken prussic acid. In a note dated two days earlier he explained that he had killed his wife due to provocation. Her body was found in a bedroom with its head smashed in by the butt of his pistol. An ex-pupil at Stockwell, the writer F. Vincent Brookes later testified in his autobiography that Watson ‘ was a man of absolutely uncontrollable temper and quite unsuited for a headmaster ‘.

At his trial Watson pleaded insanity. The judge rejected this excuse and the jury found him guilty, but recommended mercy. The judge chose to ignore this plea and sentenced him to death. However, following reports and recommendations by leading medical men, the judge admitted that the clergyman in a temporary fit of insanity had killed his wife. Watson’s death sentence was commuted to life and he was sent first to Woking jail hospital, and then on to Parkhurst, where he died thirteen years later, aged 80, following a fall from his hammock.

The novelist Beryl Bainbridge based her speculative work, Watson’s Apology (1984), on the crime. Bainbridge’s novel renewed interest in Watson’s writings for a while, but although one chancer in the USA wants $495 for a bog standard copy of Justin, Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius, few could argue that with prices for most of his books hovering around $20, he has become a collected writer. Having said that, it would be nice to find the unpublished manuscript of Watson’s History of the Papacy to the Reformation. Was it sent to the publisher---or did it end up among the murderer’s papers?

Krystian Bala ( b1973 )

Amok (2003) $10

A perfect example of art imitating life. Famous travel writer and intellectual Krystian Bala boasted anonymously in an e mail to the Polish ‘ Crimewatch ‘ that he had committed ‘ the perfect crime ‘ when he had brutally murdered Dariusz Janiszewski in 2000. The police, however, could do nothing until a detective received an anonymous call five years later urging him to read the crime novel Amok, which had appeared three years after the murder. The detective found a copy and discovered that the details of the murder exactly matched those in the novel.

Bala was hauled in for questioning but denied any part in the murder, explaining that he had relied mainly on press reports for his material. With no real evidence to convict him he was released without charge. Before long, however, the police had the evidence they needed. It was discovered that four days after his disappearance, the victim’s mobile phone had been sold on the Internet using an account belonging to Bala. However, without sufficient evidence of his direct involvement in the killing Bala could only be convicted of ‘leading the murder ‘, although he was duly sentenced to 25 years. It would seem that Bala had reason to suspect that Janiszewski had had an affair with his estranged wife.
When the story broke there was a clamour for Amok in Poland as readers tried to find clues in the book that matched the facts of the murder. As far as I know, the novel hasn’t been translated, but it ought to be, as it has been optioned for a film. [R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. You might say that when the Bala story broke the customers ran amok...A signed copy would be good for the ghoulish collector, I guess. Selby Watson sounds like a Casaubonical figure -- but Casaubon on a very short fuse.

Ian Fleming. Rebel without a cause...3

In his  biography of Fleming, Andrew Lycett reveals that in 1928 Fleming self published a book of poems The Black Daffodil - a 'slim, black volume'. He showed it to his best friend from Eton Ivar Bryce but, as Lycett says '...later became so embarrassed by its juvenile contents that he rounded up and burned every copy.' Bryce, who came up with the anagram 'Fine Lingam' for Fleming's name, also house hunted 'Goldeneye' in Jamaica for him and in the TV movie Goldeneye is played by Patrick Ryecart. If alive he would be about 103 and could well have a copy. Other possible holders of the book would be Fleming girlfriends of the time. Young men tend to publish slim volumes to impress girls (or boys) or because they are in love -- one account of the book refers to the poems as 'romantic.' At this time Fleming was very keen on Rupert Hart Davis's 'beautiful, doe-eyed' sister Deirdre (later Deirdre Bland). In an unlikely connection with the yellow 90s she had, at the age of eight, attracted the notice of the poet Arthur Symons in the Cafe Royal. He wrote these lines for her: 

She had taken my hand, then turned
Her eyes on me, pure as the sky.
If ever a man's heart to her yearned,
Mine did, I know not why. 

At the age of 18 Fleming sent her several poems including these agonised lines 'If the wages of sin are Death/ I am willing to pay...I am so weary of the curse of living/ The endless, aimless torture, tumult, fears.' Such lines possible made it into The Black Daffodil. Fleming was undoubtedly (as The Times obituary said of Dodi Fayed) a 'chick magnet' and at that time was at university in Geneva and frequented the ski resorts of Megeve and Kitzbuhel Switzerland. It is not impossible that he gave copies of his book to one or more of his lovers there...must check the English sections in the old bookshops around Lake Geneva. Another huge rarity would be a bound copy of a translation Fleming had made of Klaus Mann's Anja and Esther. Fleming's mother was so proud of this piece that she had it typed up and bound in 'handsome black card' with Ian's name on the cover as translator. Lycett does not state whether there was more than one copy made but says 'Ian's first publication had been completed...'

Somewhere on the web I found this claim made about the genesis of Casino Royale:

'Its origins can be traced back to his first book, which was about as far removed from James Bond as possible — a collection of romantic poems called The Black Daffodil. He destroyed every copy, believing the contents were worthless compared with the mature output of his brother Peter, who was intellectually brilliant in a way he could never match. (If any example escaped the cull, it would be worth a fortune.) A sibling rivalry developed, particularly after Peter went to Oxford, whereas Ian, deemed B-stream material by his demanding mother, was shunted off to Sandhurst. Later, Peter wrote witty books about his travels while Ian vegetated…'

As mentioned in the last post Aleister Crowley may well have been an input in the creation of Fleming's first great villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. When in WW2 Fleming was working in Naval Intelligence he had conceived the idea of using the Great Beast's assistance in the interrogation of the nazi Rudolf Hess (something of an occultist) who had parachuted into Scotland in 1941. It was overruled and came to nothing, but his first biographer Pearson had sight of a good letter from Crowley to Fleming on the subject. Fleming had tracked him down to a place near Torquay, where he was 'living harmlessly on his own and writing patriotic poetry to encourage the war effort.' Aleister Crowley's brief letter to Ian Fleming went thus:

'Sir:
If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in case he should not be willing to do what you wish. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant, Aleister Crowley.'

With the letter Crowley apparently enclosed a copy of his 1939 penny tract England Stand Fast. This is a one page broadsheet privately Issued by the O.T.O. that now sells for about $100. Signed to Fleming it would surely command well into four figures...

In the ill fated 1966 David Niven movie of Casino Royale (Woody Allen as Bond's cousin Jimmy Bond etc.,) the part of Le Chiffre was played by Orson Welles who, in his later incarnation as stout bon viveur, would have made a good Crowley, come to think of it. [END]