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 Dadaiam, Oulipo or the Harlem Renaissance--this information will appear at a keystroke. Education, in some ways, will hold the dealer back and he or she can waste valuable time browsing obscure tomes out of whimsy or a misguided thirst for knowledge. An American friend and dealer recently met up with his old Harvard pals (now mostly stinking rich) at a reunion and told them he had become a bookdealer. Their reaction was one of pity, one even remarked 'what went wrong with your life?!'

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

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

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

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

Bookdealer types -- the Polymath

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



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

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

Fortune Press - Amis & Larkin etc.,

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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A collection of right wing books...

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

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

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

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

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

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

School of Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pics from the deathless Caspar David Friedrich.

Geoffrey Grigson. Legenda Suecana 1953.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

George Chapman. Shadow of Night, 1594

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

Current Selling Prices
£10000+ / $15000+

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

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

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

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

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

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

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

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

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

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

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

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

A Wonderful Time. Slim Aarons, 1974

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


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


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

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

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



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

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

The Shell Guides 1933-1984 (continued)

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

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

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

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



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

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




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

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

Buying or Selling? The Apprenticeship...

JENNINGS: We'll be quite pleased to take fifteen shillings for them. That's what you said they were worth.

MR BARLOW: Ah, if you'd wanted to buy 'em they would be, but if you want to sell 'em -- well, that's different isn't it?









We were visited recently by the young hopefuls from 'The Apprentice'. They had a box of books to sell and we made an offer and they went on to check out another shop in picturesque Cecil Court. Good publicity as the show (featuring Cro Magnon man Alan Sugar) seems to be watched by half the population. The next day our buyer Gill went on a house call and was immediately recognised by the seller who had seen her on telly the night before. At Cecil Court the contestants produced the commonest Bond book - 'Octopussy' and negotiated a price of £100 just for that. Slightly hard to swallow, as it can still be obtained fine/ fine for less than £90.

This reminded me of the above cartoon featuring the famous schoolboy Jennings, his mate and Mr. Barlow, a typically seedy bookseller of yesteryear. Like Jennings the Apprentice crowd didn't seem to have a clear appreciation of how dealers work and either seemed to want (and, oddly, get) full retail price or failing that any old price the buyer might name.

They were also shown doing their research with printed price guides, whereas the Web would probably be quicker and more accurate. They seemed to think that they might find end users for their bric-a-brac in pubs, even selling a skeleton to a toper for £150, also somewhat hard to credit. It was fun to watch and if you have to see reality TV it's probably the best--naked ambition, cunning, bastardry, massive unwarranted egos and the wit and wisdom of the Amstrad knight-- Sir Alan Sugar (in the States it's Donald 'bad hair' Trump.)

The Shell Guides 1933-1984 (continued)

...Shell Guides have become a national treasure , so it’s no wonder they are high prized . Prices ? Well, let’s start at the lunatic end of the market with Ken Deighton of Bournemouth . Is there some mind-bending ray given out by the Net ( like the ozone from photocopiers ) that turns otherwise sensible dealers into rapacious monsters ? Or could it be the sea air in Bournemouth ? On hearing of Deighton’s I was reminded of Deighton and Bell, a once famous antiquarian bookshop in Trinity Street, Cambridge fronted for many years by the late lamented and incomparable Patricia Huskinson, descendant of the first man to be run over by a train, friend of everything and everyone Polish and of poets, in whose home in Barley you were likely to find yourself having breakfast with Jon Silkin or taking tea with Geoffrey Hill, as I did.

I rang up old Ken in Bournemouth and asked if his shop had any connection with the much missed Cambridge premises . I was told that no, it didn’t, but he wished it did, such was the reputation of Deighton and Bell. Well, Ken, I can assure you that if Patricia H. had been asked by her boss to demand £950 each for what were basically remaindered copies of the original spiral bound firsts that Faber had inherited from Batsford, and had cased, adding a new jacket and a cancel title page, she’d have dropped dead with shame. If they feel that asking an extra £800 odd for a bit of seventy-year old board and a jacket is acceptable they must be living on the planet Zanussi.

Incidentally, I have two of these cased Fabers ( Cornwall and Somerset ) without the jackets, one of which I picked up in a Letchworth junk shop for twenty pence. If you look closely, you can see the join where the new title page has been stuck in. Yes, they are rare, even very rare, but if other dealers ( St Mary Books and Prints, for one) can charge sensible prices for similar copies, why can’t D of B?

Actually, Deighton’s seem to be exceptions. Most of the prices of Guides on the Net are not extortionate, though very few are cheap. There are some anomalies, though. Back in 1982 in Sussex I bought at a bookshop ( not a jumble sale, as Chris Mawson claims in his otherwise excellent Shell Guide site ) four of the early spiral bound Guides for 50p each, not realising back then that they were rare. But actually, not all are that rare. Take Bucks by John Nash. About 15 years later I bought another Bucks ( can’t remember where ) for just £1.50 and just a year or so ago there was at least copy on ABE priced at around £30 . Today Rota are offering a Bucks at $215, something of a rip. According to them this title is ‘ one of the least easily found volumes ‘, whereas in fact it is one of the more common ones. It’s also one of the best. The book is more valuable as a guide in its balanced view of the county, its presentation of facts, and its visual qualities than Hants, Derbyshire or Somerset. I have suggested elsewhere that it was while editing Bucks that Betch was inspired to write his famous poem ‘Slough ‘ and that the wonderful photomontage of Slough by the mysterious ‘ Cecil H Greville’ was actually assembled by wily old Betch himself.

Betjeman’s Devon and Cornwall aren’t as expensive as you would think, considering they are prime example of Betch at his finest ranting- against- suburbia phase. ABE have a Devon at $144.72. Kent and Derbyshire don’t seem to be particularly sought after and can be found for under £50 each. Wiltshire, compiled by Robert Byron in 1935, is another matter entirely. It used to sell many years ago for well under £50, but today is recognised as one of the more sought after titles, possibly because Byron, who was killed in the War, was also the celebrated author of The Road to Oxiana. When Faber took over publication David Verey was invited to update the text , but a good deal of what had appeared 21 years earlier, was retained, including much of the title page and Byron’s ‘ angry ‘ notes on Antiquities. If you are buying through ABE expect to pay anything from £150 to Deighton’s $379.30. If you can wait, you’d probably get a copy at some jumble sale somewhere for a quid.



Dorset by Paul Nash ( wrongly attributed to brother John in the list of ‘ other Shell Guides ‘ in Bucks, but corrected in the Hants of 1937 ) is the must have—a document of British Surrealism that is sought after by historians of the movement. I don’t yet have a copy, and am not tempted by an ex library copy priced at $208 on ABE. Hants by John Rayner is probably the most disappointing in many ways, mainly because of its very inadequate gazetteer. Rayner was only given the job because he was Betch’s editor at the Sunday Express. But the book, with its pink and green photographs, does show Betjeman’s willingness to experiment in design ,. If you are a completist, buy the thing, but don’t expect an interesting book. Thanks Robin. To be continued. It is worth noting that the Ipcress man has had these guides at daft prices since before Ken's congestion charge. If a book doesn't shift in 4 years it is either very overpriced or very obscure...

The Shell Guides 1933-1984

Another contribution from the estimable R.M. Healey, this time on these highly collectable guides. The early ones came out of our whimsical avant-garde and have the influence of surrealism albeit with a British twist. It has been suggested that W.H. Auden was keen to do one but the Faber crew were worried he might spoof the series. Take it away Robin...

Shell Guides are now so fashionable, so collected, that last year Middlesex University ran an exhibition on them at the MODA, near Cockfosters. . Naturally, as a Shell Guide writer myself , (Hertfordshire of 1982, if you must know ) I made a special effort to see it, despite the fact that I was a little miffed that no-one had asked me to take part in the planned symposium organised by the show’s curator, ‘ cultural historian ‘ David Heathcote. It was a well put together show by someone who is clearly passionate about the Guides. He has talked about them on Radio 4 and is now doing a book .

While I was looking for mistakes on the captions I saw a woman poring over one of the books generously supplied by the Museum for those not familiar with the Guides and their context. She had come from Thornton Heath or somewhere especially to see the exhibition and seemed impressed when I pointed out my own Guide in the case—but spoiled the mood when she admitted to also liking those horrible King’s England books with their revolting sepia photographs. I tried to convince her of the Guides’ superiority over any county guide that had appeared before or since, and then realised that I was in danger of getting pompous, so I shut up.

The Shell Guides are rightly revered and are obvious candidates for academic interest. Can you imagine any academic institution celebrating King’s England or those Edwardian Ward Lock Guides with their endless pages of ads for hotels and thermal spas ? I suppose Pevsner’s Buildings of England will be the next focus for another ‘ cultural historian ‘, possibly from the University of East Croydon. A whole book, Stylistic Cold Wars, has been written on the rivalry between the Shell Guides and The Buildings of England, and a very silly book it is too.

The Guides have many celebrated admirers today. One is Richard Ingrams, who is a fan of both Betjeman and John Piper —another the magnificent Jonathan Meades, champion of the even greater Ian Nairn. Both were happy to show me their collections when I interviewed them.

Indeed, the Guides have seemed to have a glitzy, show-businessy appeal from the start. John Betjeman, who began his broadcasting career in the mid thirties, founded the series in 1933 and thereafter tried to commission writers with a certain amount of glamour, or at least media appeal. Shell Guide writers have included big name artists like Paul Nash and Piper ;the avant garde playwright Ann Jellicoe co-wrote Devon with her trendy photographer husband Roger Mayne, and eccentric aristocrats, or near aristocrats like Christopher Hobhouse or Henry Thorold were roped in. Then there are those big names who were approached and who declined—like Geoffrey Grigson —and those ( how embarrassing ) who begged Betch to commission them, but who were rejected—like day-out- in- the country hack S.P.B Mais and Herts local history bore, R Branch Johnson. And of course there were the wannabe topographical tyros who sent in manuscripts only to have them rejected. Oh dear. To be continued with a consderation of Shell Guide prices, some immoderate, especially in the chines of Bournemouth...

Curries by Mulk Raj Anand, 1932

Mulk Raj Anand. CURRIES AND OTHER INDIAN DISHES. Desmond Harmsworth, London 1932.

Current Selling Prices
$80-$200 /£50-£140

COOKERY
This is a book that I used to see in almost any respectable cookery collection- it would go for less than £10 and a little more if nice in jacket because it was, after all, an early work by the mildly collected Indian writer. Now all is changed; at present there are only 5 copies online priced between £50 and £150, the latter price, as always, for the poorest copy ('standard used condition.')

An early work on the subject. Indian restaurants were rare in England in the 1930s. The only one I can trace is the still extant Veeraswamy's (established in 1926 off Regent Street 'by the great grandson of an English General, and an Indian princess.') A customer recalls going there in the 1940s when it was full of Colonel Blimps and an electric Punka was in operation. A current photo of its interior (below) reveals an opulent and sedate dining area, not suitable for poppadum frenzy or vindaloo excess. In America Indian restaurants were uncommon until the 1980s. I recall that there was not a single Indian curry to be had in Los Angeles in 1975; there may be now as may as a 100 such restaurants in the city and the suburbs of L.A.

Our author gives the names of two London suppliers of all the ingredients used in the book - Stembridge in Cecil Court (now a great book street) and C.A. Naidu in Lexington Street, Soho. Anand begins with a tribute to that grand man 'Uncle' Norman Douglas:-

'...with that subtle irony and happy wit characteristic of him, Mr. Norman Douglas once declared that "Curry is India's greatest contribution to mankind." Those whose lucky star has bought them under the spell of Mr. Douglas will understand the sense in which that epigram is true. I laughed heartily when I read the statement...'

Mulk Raj Anand also quotes Aleister Crowley, another great gourmet, with a more generous assessment of Curry power:-

'...Curries with their vast partitioned platter of curious condiments to lackey them, speak for themselves. They sting like serpents, stimulate like strychnine; they are subtle, sensual like Chinese courtesans, sublime and sacred, inscrutably inspiring and intelligently illuminating, like Cambodian carvings.'

In the matter of the deadly poison strychnine, which the Great Beast appears to have imbibed, Wikipedia notes 'small doses of strychnine were once used in medications as a stimulant, a laxative and as a treatment for other stomach ailments...'



Here is a simple recipe from this interesting book:-

DAL (LENTILS)
1/2 lb. lentils
1/2 oz. butter
1 small onion (sliced)
1/2 teaspoonful of black pepper
1/2 teaspoonfulred pepper
1/2 teaspoonful powdered turmeric
Salt to tatse.

Carefully pick the stones out of the dal and soak for about an hour in a panful of cold water.
Put it to boil in a panful of boiled water. Sprinkle in some salt and turmeric and stir.
When the lentils are tender, fry the sliced onion in melted butter with black and red pepper in a different pan. Pour this fried mixture into the pan containing the dal to the consistency of porridge over a gentle heat. Take care while putting in the butter to keep the lid partly on so that the liquid does not fly back to your face and hands.

A simple dal that might be improved with frying a small amount of cumin seeds and some chopped garlic. The orange dal needs no soaking, but some lentils require much longer than an hour and stones can still be found. To be continued with a consideration of other curry book values including the 'Glasgow Good Curry Guide' from 1988 priced at a spicy £400...

Only a bookshop but one more is gone... Part 2. Bibliocide.

STOP PRESS In last week's Guardian the actor, writer and bookshop frequenter Simon Callow wrote:

'...The bibliocide in the Charing Cross Road continues its depressing course apparently unchecked. The one gleam of light is the reinvention of Foyles, which has now become a very enterprising outfit, its stock, and indeed its general layout, informed by discernible individual taste. But a block further down the road, beyond Cambridge Circus, in what was once the heart of the book village, glumness is everywhere, the most recent losses being Murder Inc and Shipley's three excellent art book shops. Two Zwemmer's shops are long gone. In their places spring up Chinese herbalists, poster shops and coffee houses, all of which no doubt cater to pressing needs; meanwhile the character of the area is being fundamentally undermined. Soon, like the block it faces, it will be just another outpost of Oxford Street. The excellent Henry Pordes and Any Amount of Books hold up gallantly, with Quinto on the corner, but their backs are against the wall. The bitter irony of all this is that the block is owned by a charity, the Soho Housing Association, whose charter demands that it raise the most money it possibly can: it is by definition committed to trashing the area.

Further down Charing Cross Road, all traces of the bookselling trade have been eliminated, except for one astonishing enclave, Cecil Court, where, as if in a time machine, the book trade flourishes as it once did. There are several very good shops in it that don't sell books - an original poster shop; an excellent shop selling prints; Tim Bryars's antique map shop; Mark Sullivan's wonderful emporium of bibelots. But for the rest, there is richness to gladden any bibliophile's heart: Pleasures of Past Times, David Drummond's incomparable theatre bookshop; Nigel Williams's rare books; modern first editions specialists Tindley & Chapman; Marchpane, an Aladdin's cave of a children's bookshop; a very snazzy Italian bookshop; Watkins's esoteric bookshop (a little more new age than it was, but stocked to the rafters with genuine arcana), to name only a few. It stands as a model of what a commercial district can be: it celebrates what it sells; it is an entertainment in itself; every shop is run by an individual whose tastes are absolutely personal and identifiable; the love of the trade is palpable. Nobody here is making a fortune; to survive respectably is all anyone asks.

So naturally it is under threat. Though the government has backed off from raising the business rate by a full 5% this year, a 2% rise, to be followed by a further 3% in the next two years, will wipe out the tiny profit margin that keeps businesses of this sort alive. What these shops need is more meaningful business-rate relief. Write, urgently, to the local MP Mark Field, who is masterminding a campaign to save one of the capital's last oases of real bookselling.'

PLEASE WRITE TO:-

Mark Field MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA

The indispensable TLS picked up on this story and also warn of the threat to this 'uniquely bibliophiliac stretch of Charing Cross Road.' All power to Mark Field for working on this case, not necessarily a cause that will win votes but part of the the energy and dauntless spirit of London's centre and (let's not play it down) our heritage of the entire world of books, knowledge, wisdom and whimsy; no less.

A Shropshire Lad 1896

A. E. Housman. A SHROPSHIRE LAD. Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd., London, 1896.

Current Selling Prices
$2000-$5000 /£1300-£3500

POETRY
Housman published 'A Shropshire Lad' at his own expense after several publishers had rejected it (Bullen and Macmillan among them.) The 500 copies sold slowly at first, but the South African war of 1899 helped to make popular its mixture of stoicism, patriotic pride. pessimism and nostalgia. By the time of WW1 it was a best seller and is most commonly seen in its small vest pocket format. The actual first is an octavo (172 by 110 mm) in pale blue paper boards, white parchment spine and a spine label that can show up in 4 almost identical states (its down to the roundness of the Os and Us.)

The value of the book can be traced across the 113 years since publication. The book, in terms of the purchasing power of money, was worth a lot more in the late 1920s than now, although some copies since have made very serious sums. The copy presented to Moses John Jackson made £45,000 in 2001. Moses was the inspiration for the masterpiece. AEH had loved him and was forlorn when he left for India to get married. The relationship between Housman & Jackson is the subject of Tom Stoppard's play, 'The Invention of Love'.

Although Housman was a conscientious correspondent, responding to many fans and fellow writers, he seldom inscribed his books. To one collector he wrote '... I am afraid that you have paid an exorbitant price for the first edition of A Shropshire Lad and that you may wish to have it returned to you by registered post.' The price of the first edition of A Shropshire Lad, which had only been four pounds in 1919, reached $157.50 (divide by 4 for pounds) in 1923 and, by 1929, $625.00. My earliest Book Auction Records, a volume from 1948 reveals 3 copies in that year making £29 and £16 and £9, in the early 1950s two inscribed copies made $200 and £44.

By the 1960s it was making nearly £100 and in 1976 a signed copy with a signed photo & 9 ALs s loosely inserted made a stonking $1200 at Sotheby's New York, with regular copies making $500. By the mid 1990s unsigned copies were making $1000 and in 2002 copies started making over £1000. in January this year at Freeman's USA $2125 was paid for a copy described thus - 'Small 8vo, orig. 1/4 vellum & gray-blue bds; paper spine label, edges untrimmed; extremities discolored. Internally clean. Complete with 1/2 title. With the word "Shropshire" on paper spine label 33 mm wide. With 2 bookplates on front paste-down, incl. Rockwell Kent designed Frederick Baldwin Adams, Jr. book plate. In custom 1/2 morocco & cloth slipcase with red cloth chemise. Presentation copy from Louise Guiney to Rev. William H. Van Allen of Boston. Guiney had writted an enthusuastic (and unsolicited) review of the work for the Chap-Book.' Meanwhile on ABE there are 6 copies, none fine, over £3000, something of a noli tangere price and 5 more between £1200 and £2800.

OUTLOOK? Copies are rather thick on the ground at present, and poetry does not often sell with alacrity (with a few exceptions, mostly Irish.) Not a book to buy and lay down unless sharp and bought at about a £1000. With Housman presentations and letters go particularly well. There are some rarities among his other works- such as 'Praefanda' published in Germany in 1931--a collection of bawdy and obscene passages from Latin authors with a learned preface of 'solemn irony.' Almost unknown and possibly worth as much as £1000. Illustrated editions are collected, for example the 1940 Agnes Miller Parker edition. Although it can be procured in a nice jacket for £60 there are the usual suspects wanting over a £100, one with this amusing sales pitch in the 'suits you sir' mode for a copy at £200, a mind-boggling sum given condition-- '...RARE to find this most attractive edition in a slightly damaged but complete jacket. Foxing to the rear blank panel, and a lost corner, but nothing 'live' is missing. Now protected. The nicest edition of this wonderful poignant collection, with the brilliant wood engravings fresh and clear in their first impressions. A classic in every way...'



Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again...

Scouts in Bondage

Geoffrey Prout. SCOUTS IN BONDAGE. A Story of Boy Scouts in Strange Adventure.
Aldine Publishing Co. Goodship House, [London]. [No date / 1930.]

Current Selling Prices
$60-$300 /£45-£200

JUVENILE FICTION / BIZARRE BOOKS
Wandering through a local seaside down this Easter afternoon I spotted this excellent book in the window of a second hand bookshop. Knowing the uncanny canniness of the owner I was slightly worried about buying the book but a £20 note was exchanged. The internet reveals no copy at less than £100, several copies around £200 and no copies in dust jacket. Time for punching the air etc., Whether the book ever sells for significant sums is another matter. The book has no real use except to display in shop windows and face out on a shelf for a good, but brief laugh - and therefore in these glum times it may not necessarily translate into further folding money.

It is probably the ultimate 'bizarre' book title. There are two books about strange or inappropriately titled called 'Scouts in Bondage' and the book is featured on the cover of Russell Ash and Brian Lake's magisterial 'Bizarre Books.' Geoffrey Prout was also author of 'Trawler Boy Dick', also worthy of a chuckle. I am indebted to blogster Mister Roy ('...raised by wolves on waste ground in Portslade') for a summary of the plot.

A professor (who 'wore an old quilted black-satin dinner-jacket and a skullcap with a tassel on it'...) engages the Scouts to help dig up remains of a ruined chapel, seeking blocks of masonry with inscriptions. Assembled together these reveal the location of a secret treasure, actually a document which restores the rightful owners to the local mansion. Along the way, various lower-class 'wasters', 'hooligans' and even 'hobble-di-hoys' attempt to thwart them. Punches are thrown, rivers forged, cars crashed, tables full of pies demolished - and all is well in the end. It is an enchanting period piece. The text is punctuated with cries of 'Crumbs!', 'By Jingo!', Right-o!' and 'Well, I'm blest!' Prout was a Scoutmaster apparently and his enthusiasm for the movement shines through every page - it is in effect an advertisement for Scouting.

Scouts in Bondage is in the section of 'Bizarre Books called 'They Didn't Really Mean it' - other titles include 'Girls of the Pansy Patrol' (1931) 'Shag the Caribou' (1949) 'Explorations at Sodom' (1928) 'Handbook for the Limbless' (1922, foreword by John Galsworthy) 'Erections on Allotments' (no date) 'Penetrating Wagner's Ring' 'Enid Blyton's Gay Story Book' (1946) and 'Men who have Risen: A Book for Boys (1859).

OUTLOOK. Quite good, the taste for whimsy and bizarrery is probably growing in a post Python world, with the occasional wag willing to put money on the table for the stuff. There is probably a ceiling on values but the amount of bizarre, silly and zany titles is almost limitless. I heard sometime ago of someone selling a largish collection of these titles for a significant but not life-changing sum... Meanwhile on Amazon there is a jacketless copy in 'standard used condition' (whatever that is) at $265 ('LOW ITEM PRICE'.) The joke of the title is lost on Amazon's recommendation robot who suggests some DVDS -'... Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in Kidnapped Gagged Women or Beautiful Women Bound and Gagged!

Only a bookshop but one more is gone...

I am indebted to a story on the back page of the latest Times Literary Supplement for telling me what is happening on my own street. Naturally I knew that two venerable Charing Cross Road bookshops closed in the last few months but I had not noticed the 'blue plaques' displayed in their windows until the polymaths at the TLS pointed them out (and incidentally gave our shop a bit of a puff**.) Here are the 2 plaques below...

Hopefully with rents kept at their present levels ( surely this is a very bad time to increase rents with commercial property values in freefall) and shoppers still willing to put on their clothes and leave home to walk down the streets into real shops, the remaining bookshops will be here well past the Boris Olympics, and into the roaring 2020s. Farewell Murder One ( finally booked) and the great Shipley Art book emporium soon to re-open in fancier premises, I am reliably informed.




The Shipley plaque says - ' A mecca for art lovers frequented by the likes of John Berger, Peter Blake, Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag. After 25 years of trading it closed its doors at 70 Charing Cross Road on Christmas Eve 2008' and the Murder One notice reads 'The UK's first and only specialist crime and mystery bookshop owned by the acclaimed author Maxim Jakubowski. Here it thrived for 21 years before being forced to close due to internet competition.' However as J W Dunne was fond of pointing out 'Nothing really dies' and Shipley will continue (see above) and as the little yellow notes around Murder One's plaque proclaim - 'Don't despair call Murder One ... for collecting books at our new premises located at Hoxton Square...' Their website proclaims that '...we are only an online bookshop and mail order, and get books in only for customer orders. So, if you stop by looking for books, the best we'll be able to offer you is a cup of tea!' From bricks to clicks.

** '...under a blueish crowd, we reached Any Amount of Books. Once occupying two neighbouring shops, it is now crammed into one, but of the best kind: higgledy - pi=ggledy, serendipitous, bargain-bountiful. We could fill a bookcase with flotsam and jetsam from the pound-a-book barrows outside...' TLS 3/4/09. 'Higgledy - piggledy, serendipitous, bargain-bountiful...' As Smashie and Nicey used to say 'wise words indeed...'

Writers who were invalids...Clere Parsons & W.N.P. Barbellion

Another guest posting from R M Healey-- this time on writers as invalids. By the way Robin in his youth wrote the Shell Guide to Hertforshire (Faber, 1982) - copies can be bought on ABE at around £20 for sharp jacketed examples. He will survey this highly collectible series sometime soon. The illustration of the handwriting of the poète maudit Clere Parsons is from a small collection of books with his name (and occasional annotation) that I bought from a family member several years back, and have never got round to cataloguing. This inscription comes from his copy of 'Poems' by Geoofrey Dearmer published 1918 (some of them about the Great War and dedicated to a friend who had died at Suvla bay.) NB - the Macspaunday four are Macneice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis. Over to you Robin.

For someone with a morbid imagination like myself there is an engrossing site that lists all the medical conditions that contributed to the deaths of individuals featuring in the Wikipedia. So, for instance you can discover that Rex Harrison and Alan Bates both died of pancreatic cancer ( the list is dominated by actors ) or that Heinrich Heine suffered from MS. There seems to be a large number of celebs with both types of diabetes, and as a diabetic myself it was comforting to see a lot of writers among them. I already knew about H. G. Wells, who co-founded The British Diabetic Association , but I wasn’t aware that Ernest Hemingway and Mario Puzo were sufferers.

You won't find Clere Parsons in this Wikipedia list, although he perished of pneumonia, and a lack of insulin, in 1931 aged just 23. It has been said that had he lived he might have become as eminent as any in the MacSpaunday four, and is the nearest they have to a ‘ fifth Beatle ‘. Geoffrey Grigson, who was a contemporary at Oxford, knew him as ' tall, very thin, pallid, fair-haired, a trifle spotty, and aloof ...with lips which curled with a slightly curious authority '.

And it is Grigson who provides most of what we know about this invalid poet, who even while at Christ's College with Auden was always looking ill. His physical appearance was undoubtably a result of the debilitating effect of contracting type 1 early in life, probably before insulin was isolated in 1921. In those days loss of weight was symptomatic among those who managed to remain alive ( most with type 1 died within a few years of contracting the disease), but even with insulin therapy the legacy of his early illness must have effected his later health. Grigson, whose first wife was also an invalid (she died early of TB ), felt that his weakened constitution must have given him a sense that his time in this world was likely to be short, and inevitably many of his poems reflect a hedonistic, carpe diem attitude—poems like
‘Garden Goddess’ and ‘ Photogravure ‘.



But equally the possibility of a sudden end must also have occupied him, as we see in such a poem as ‘Sudden Death’ (‘ Stretch me upon your table, lay me bare ‘), and so it proved. Not long after graduating with a first in history he returned to a wintry Oxford, having been offered a job at the Bodleian. In cold digs he contracted a chill which turned to pneumonia, and though he was carted off to hospital, he died in a coma from lack of insulin, no-one, apparently being aware of his diabetes. This was many years before identity bracelets came onto the scene.

Parsons, alas is not well known, but deserves to be. Grigson called his poems ‘ exquisite, grave, artificial, and permanent ‘, but the only poem that features frequently on the Web is ‘Different’.

‘ Not to say what everyone else was saying
not to believe what everyone else believed
not to do what everybody did,
then to refute what everyone else was saying
then to disprove what everyone else believed
then to deprecate what everyone did,

was his way to come by understanding

how everyone else was saying the same as he was
saying
believing what he believed
and did what doing ‘

While Parsons was editing Oxford Poetry, Auden was making his own debut with the famous hand-printed booklet of 1928. Though at the same college, Parsons doesn’t seem to have had much to do with Auden, but he was acquainted with MacNeice, who mentions him in his autobiography, The Strings are False. After his death Herbert Read--so often a nincompoop—did at least one good thing when he got Eliot to publish Parson’s modest legacy of poems in 1932.

Entranced by Grigson's touching cameo of this tragic figure, I ignored the invocation to seek out Poems in the Bodleian or the British Library and instead scoured bookshops in vain for half a dozen years, only in 1994 to be given a copy, along with other volumes of thirties poetry, by the poet F.T.Prince, when I interviewed him at his home in Southampton. Prince, who was four years older than Parsons, may have bought this modest half-a-crown pamphlet, with its card boards and lemon- yellow jacket when it appeared in what must have been a very small edition. Just how scarce Poems is today I only discovered recently when I looked it up on the net. ABE has just one copy --modestly priced at £45**

Had Parsons been more prolific a minor cult may have grown up around him, but I suppose we must be content with what we have. It’s a pity his centenary went unmarked in 2008, but there you are.


Having Type 1 diabetes is bad enough, but writers with MS are rarer, presumably because the depredations of this disease are such that only the most resolute find the strength to write. One of these was Bruce Cummings (1889 – 1919 ), the Barnstaple-born journalist who became through sheer doggedness an entomologist at the British Museum.

The diary he decided to keep from 1904 was probably inspired by that of another invalid who died young, the artist Marie Bashkirtseff , and detailed all the stages of his decline as he daily endured debilitating physical pain with commendable courage and wry humour . This record was never meant to be published and was only prepared for the press when its author eventually learnt his fate and was determined to provide for his wife and children. The Journal of a Disappointed Man (published under the nom de plume W N P Barbellion) was an overnight sensation and plaudits were heaped upon its author, though this reception was marred somewhat by the refusal by a few rather stupid reviewers to accept that a scientist could be capable of such a brilliantly written literary testament. H. G. Wells and Daisy Ashford were names that cropped up as possible contenders, —though how anyone could attribute Barbellion’s rueful reflections on illness and death, and musings on the sensual life and on heterosexual lust, to the juvenile and lightweight Daisy Ashford-- is beyond me.

The Journal was reprinted several times from 1919 and Barbellion’s popularity remained constant over many years. According to Book Collecting 2000 the value of a first has stayed stable at $100 for at least a decade, which perhaps reflects that fact that no-one has thought to turn the book into a Hollywood movie. And though scandalously overlooked by The Oxford Chronology of English Literature, which can easily find places for those literary titans, Tony Parsons and Iain Banks ( incidentally, Clere Parsons is omitted too ), and despite the attempts by Eric Bond Hutton, Barbellion’s most articulate champion, to boost his reputation , Barbellion is probably destined, like his equally brilliant contemporary, Charlotte Mew, always to be unfashionable for whatever reason.

There was a time when I was coming across copies of The Journal of a Disappointed Man regularly in second-hand bookshops, but today copies seem to be scarcer . ABE features just 29 copies of several editions, including a 2008 paperback at £39.45 and what appear to be two firsts at £20 and £12.99. Doubtless, Barbellion's low profile in the shops is a constant annoyance to Hutton, who has often complained that his completed ( or near-complete ) biography has yet to excite publishers. So far, only his anthology The Quotable Barbellion has appeared, and a follow-up, Barbellion and his Critics, though promised by his publishers, has yet to surface.

I used to rib Hutton for his almost obsessive devotion to Barbellion, though perhaps invalids do and should inspire such dedication. But in the year in which Edward Upward has died at 105 with a shamefully thin back catalogue of a mere three or four books, surely Barbellion’s unique, introspective, almost visionary work of great good humour, deserves to engage the attention of critics and collectors once again.

** The ABE copy is in undesirable condition although the book is vulnerable--it is the same format exactly as Auden's 1930 'Poems' but whereas the Auden is blue Clere is green (as I recall.) The Auden is also hard to find in acceptable condition. A sharp clean copy of Parsons 1932 'Poems' should command nearly a £100. I think Peter Joliffe, who liked him, had one at around this price - but I might be mistaken.

Joan Barton --a House Call

We posted an earlier poem by the late, great Joan Barton poet and bookseller (1908 - 1988.) This is probably the only findable poem about a house call--that is a bookdealer visiting someone's house to buy books. Often there is an element of pathos, especially when a death has occasioned the sale. A person's book collection often says a lot about them-their character, foibles, passions, obsessions, experiences and convictions. There will be many books given to them as gifts, books inherited from parents, school prizes, leaving presents and even books from their childhood with their name in a childish hand. In the pages of the books old letters, ephemera and photos will be found, sometimes snaps of old girl friends and long dead pets--in the earlier poem Joan refers to this - 'the ghost dogs in the vanishing gardens.' Sometimes there is a sense that the person did not have enough time to read and study even a small part of their collection. In one call, after I had given a substantial cheque--the grieving wife thanked me and said 'but it won't bring him back'. In tribute to the unknown owner of the books in Joan's poem, who spent his life as a clerk with the GWR I have put an image of Turner's great painting below 'Rain, Steam and Speed the Great Western Railway''

There is a feeling of finality when the books are carted out of the house and loaded in a van to be later priced and dispersed. Joan captures this, although in her case the widow is glad to see the books go. I have no idea who Williams the Hammer poet is -Google knows him not nor Allibone**. The H U L is the Home University Library (now unsaleable), Jefferies is the great rural writer Richard Jefferies. Thinkers' and People's Libraries are small self improving books also hard to sell these days. Everyman's and Nelson's Sevenpennies are mostly pocketsize classics and fiction. The little red Sevenpennies were much collected by Graham Greene and his irascible brother Hugh but hardly anyone else. Take it away Joan:-


A PASSION FOR KNOWLEDGE IN NORTH WILTSHIRE.

A red semi-detached in the Swindon suburbs
Where the milky westering plain
Flows out to the sky.
One of a hundred such in their tidy rows,
Privet hedge, London Pride, brown rep in the window bay,
All that was meet and bright
Those twenty years past-
But this one was crammed with books
While it went along with the rest.

"I suppose it was a sort of religion"
The widow who had summoned us said,
With questioning looks:
This clerk with the old Great Western
Scarcely retired then suddenly dead,
A man in a Swindon tradition-
Evening Institute and Working Men's College
Had been made for him,
To whom Jefferies and Williams the Hammer Poet
Were the closest kin.



All the masters and makers and leaders
Buttressed the bedrooms, landing, hall,
Thinkers' and People's Libraries,
Dim old H. U. L.,
Forgotten Nelson's Sevenpennies,
Ubiquitous Everyman*,
Crowding baths and dangling chain;
The attic was peaked to the roof,
Scarcely a fingerhold there;
The illumination of gods
Lit the dark bend of the stair.

"It wasn't as though he was lonely,
We had the boys and I was here,
But he cycled off every Saturday
And he kept bringing them back
Then they were everywhere."
("Not in my little sitting-room!" she had cried
Too late- it was soon engulfed
By the strange unstemmable tide).
"It wasn't as though we were rich;
And books breed dust" she said.

He had not time to read half of them
They were there in case,
In case he could grasp it,
For fear he should miss it, whatever it was,
So he thought of those Saturday trips
Under the hump of the downs,
Where the White Horses stamp at gaze
Harebells and lesser broomrapes
Thin on the old chalk bones,
By way of upland villages
To the distant towns.

"Yes, I want them all cleared out!"
She declared with something like passion,
And maybe she thought
"It will be as it used to be
When the books are gone."
So we ferried them all away,
Then she gave us tea
On the crochetted cloth
And mused over snaps of the children
While we stroked the cat,
At last, with puzzled goodbye,
Saw us off at the gate.

And we never knew what she found there
When it was swept and garnished again
When it was clean and bare and empty
And she could call it her own;
Was it peace and a devil exorcised?
Or questions echoing on,
The ghostly enemy answer
Still not known?


July 1971.

* A pleonastic play on words. Indeed Everyman's (which now sell for £3 or £4 each but seldom more) were once so ubiquitous that there is a persistent legend in the trade that after the war, possibly in the early 1950s a large group of British (or London) dealers tried to make them less common by each dumping or pulping huge quantities of these attractive little books. One imagines a bunch of dealers in Burberries and British Warms convening in a misty Essex field and solemnly dumping the books into a a great pit dug for the purpose. Later returning to London in their Dormobiles, Bedfords and shooting brakes. A scene from a Robert Hamer movie.

** I am now assured by Eclectabooks that this is Alfred Williams (1877 – April 1930) a poet who lived in the vicinity of Swindon, UK. He was almost entirely self taught, producing his most famous work, 'Life in a Railway Factory' (1915), at night after completing a gruelling days work in the railway factories. He was nicknamed The Hammerman poet.

A Conrad Ghost

We did a post a while back on books that are known as ghosts - a ghost is usually a work announced as a forthcoming book which never actually gets published. Sometimes this is because the book was never written, either because the author lost interest, got sidetracked or blocked, died or because the book appeared under another title or in a different form.

This morning I found a very decent condition World War 1 book 'The German Enigma' (Dent, London 1914) not especially scarce but distinctly uncommon in a jacket. On the back of the jacket some forthcoming publications are announced, including a new Henry James and a Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. However at the top the list is the new Conrad 'The Planter of Malata' stated as being 'ready shortly.' In fact it never appeared as such, the story 'The Planter of Malata' was one of the stories in his 1915 collection 'Within the Tides.' Conrad apparently made a lot of money from this story and was peeved that 'Chance' and 'Heart of Darkness' which he considered greatly superior were comparatively poorly rewarded.



That's it. A ghost is announced. Rejoice with me. Will take the book to the June Fairs in West London for a bit of minor boasting.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived 1955

Philip Larkin. THE LESS DECEIVED. (Hessle, East Yorkshire: Marvell Press) 1955.

Current Selling Prices
$500-$1100 /£350-£750

MODERN FIRST EDITIONS / POETRY
One of the great Brit poets, probably the finest since Auden. His early works are much collected and can reach 4 figure prices. He is outpaced in fame and value by Heaney and even Hughes, in my opinion lesser poets, but should hold his own way into the 22nd century, if man is till alive. We just sold a copy on Ebay and Tom, our noted cataloguer, described it thus (it is a book with 'points'):-

This is the all-box-ticking first edition, first impression, first state of Philip Larkin’s breakthrough volume of verse. Having abandoned the juvenile and derivative lyricism of his early book The North Ship (Fortune Press, 1945) only to find the first fruits of his mature style routinely rejected by publishers, Larkin at last found a champion in the enterprising Yorkshireman George Hartley, whose Marvell Press in 1955 published twenty-nine poems including some of Larkin’s best and best-remembered work. ‘At Grass’, ‘Church Going’, ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘Toads’ are all here. Hartley printed 700 copies but began by binding only 300: this is one of those ‘first state’ survivors, answering the following called-for points
Flat, rather than rounded, spine
Misprint of ‘floor’ for ‘sea’ in the first line of ‘Absences’
Dustwrapper with price of 6s and rear printed in black only
Printed list of subscribers on the (unnumbered) pages 44 & 45
Overall, the book and its wrapper are in very pleasing condition: not price-clipped, not inscribed, not nicked or chipped. There is some very faint browning to the endpapers; some very faint fading to the dustwrapper’s spine and rear upper panel; and the spine’s ends are just a little bumped.

It made a satisfactory $610 (about £460). Russell in his firsts guide 2008/9 rates a fine one at £750 and it can achieve that with a following wind but you can't count on it. His 'XX Poems' published in Belfast in 1951 can make £2000 and is rare--he posted copies to England but put the wrong stamp on and some reviewers refused to pay the extra postage so some copies of the pamphlet were destroyed.

Larkin's famous line 'Books are a load of crap' often occurs to me on house calls where the book collecton is lousy or worse. Might adapt it as a codeword for a house full of doggish books -- a Larkin. Larkin was a sort of punk avant le lettre immediately before 'Books are a load of crap' he suggests 'Get stewed...' echoed in Rotten's exhortation 'Get pissed, destroy...' Certainly there is an over reverence for books, often among those who read little. It is common especially in country bookshops for dim shoppers to drift in and remark 'I love books ...aren't these wonderful. I have never seen so many... etc.' Usually they leave fairly smartly buying nothing. Books per se are not wonderful; think of a large collection of Naziana books or collections of other poisonous ideologies (or a shelf of skin disease atlases.) Mawkish reverence for books is rife on the internet--see Library Thing or Shelfari for the sentimentalisation of books and book collecting, and all that bollocks about a 'gentle madness.'

According to John Betjeman the first punk was the 1890s poet Theodore Wratislaw--something to do with his desire to shock and upset the bougeoisie. His verse has overtly gay tones and is collected as such. However I once cleared a house in Earls Court where the old party there told me his father had known Wratislaw and the pale poet had even attended a soiree at that very house. On being given a drink he had asked his host to introduce him to 'the woman with the large breasts' causing some raised highbrows among assembled decadents, especially when he left with her. That was a house call that was most definitely not a 'Larkin' -- alot of Smithers, some Carrington erotica, a decent 'Silverpoints' and even a copy of the rare 90s drug novel published by Henry 'The Tide Ebbs out to the Night'* by Hugh Langley- a book I have more than one customer for...

* Catalogued thus by us back in 2000 (last copy seen):- Highly uncommon decadent novel in the form of a journal and letters, showing an infatuation with French Symbolism. There are descriptions of decadent London rooms and a good deal of drug-taking including kif, ‘hasheesh’ and morphine to which the chief character becomes addicted, when his love affair with a young woman goes awry. The number of decadent English novels of this period is very small: this books appears unrecorded by any of the 90s bibliographies and, although highly accomplished, seems to have attracted very little notice in its day.

'Literary treasures uncovered by the recession...' (Daily Telegraph)

Tougher times are boosting sales at second-hand bookshops, says Peter Robins.

This is an article by the excellent Peter Robins who interviewed me by phone -it came out in early March in The Telegraph (British broadsheet daily newspaper sometimes called 'The Torygraph' by Lord Snooty and his chums at Private Eye.) Frankly this thing of bookshops booming is erroneous, they are doing well compared to sellers of carpets or Jaguars, but some shops are hurting pretty bad and turnover very much depends on what books you have bought.

Through a combination of sheer luck, dedicated and unctuous networking and using various cunning stratagems learned from old and vanished booksellers, we have this year bought some exciting libraries, mostly devoid of dogs. Such is this 'bookshops are booming' thing in the news that an optimist phoned me up wanting to sell some books and said something along the lines of 'I imagine you can pay a bit more than usual because books are much needed in these difficult times.' The odd thing is he was being deadly serious.

Above is the photo they used with the byline 'Keen: a browser at Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Photo: Paul Grover.' Here is part of the article...

This has not been a good decade in which to own a second-hand bookshop, with discounted new books at supermarkets, growing competition online and from charity shops, and the rising rents of a long property boom. Now, however, there is something that, squinting hard, you might just describe as a ray of sunshine. It’s what the rest of us call a recession.
At Scarthin Books, a rambling independent shop with new and second-hand books in Cromford, Derbyshire, Dave Mitchell has grown used to things running against him. He says business was expanding nicely until about 1999. After that, with great effort, it has been steady. But this year his January sale brought its best results since 2003; “not back to the glory days before Amazon and Tesco started eating into sales, but certainly no 'downturn’ on the last few years”.
 
Mitchell does not separate his second-hand and new sales, but he sees two divergent trends in the second-hand trade as a whole. “For the traditional antiquarian shops, business is appalling,” he says. “But the big browsing shops are booming.” Other reports seem to bear him out. Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, and Richard Booth’s Books in Hay-on-Wye – heavyweight “big browsing” bookshops – each reported a strong 2008.
Some gains at the cost-conscious end of the market are also visible at Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road, London, where Nigel Burwood offers a bargain basement, discounted review copies and an eye for rarities that he also shows off at his blog, Bookride.com. “There are more people looking for savings, bargain-hunters and bottom-feeders,” he says. “And they are all very welcome.” He hopes that the weak property market might reduce rent pressures.
At the same time, he is coping with the other side of the equation: buyers for books with three or four-figure price tags have grown “very cautious”. “In my experience,” he says, “the rich shut their wallets just the same as the poor, if not more quickly.” And dealers seem to be buying much less from one another.
But there is one potential gain from the recession even for sellers of more expensive books. A weak pound brings eager internet custom from abroad.....For many people, charity shops have become an important source of second-hand books. Oxfam considers itself to be “the largest high-street retailer of second-hand books in Europe”; it has more than 100 shops dedicated to books or to books and music, and its online bookstore has about 50,000 listings. Barney Tallack, its deputy trading director, does not detect a recession-related sales surge “yet”. “But we are seeing sales levels ahead of last year,” he says, “which in the current context could be considered good news.” The recession is also a chance for Oxfam to find new shops.
Traditional booksellers are often sceptical about Oxfam, and will tell you that its prices can be higher than theirs. But Tallack does not see his bookshops taking trade away from traditional dealers – they bring more buyers into a given area, he argues – and says its prices are set by volunteers with local knowledge and specialist expertise.
But the character of a traditional second-hand shop is impossible to replace. It’s a question of serendipity. There is no online equivalent of picking up a battered-looking tome about “The Men of the Sixties” and discovering, on turning to the title page, that these aremen of the 1860s. Then there’s community. “The second-hand bookshop is the last oasis for eccentrics and outsiders and general antinomians,” says Burwood.
At the bargain end of the market, traditional shops can still compete on price. Although AbeBooks is starting to experiment with free-postage offers, a 50p or £1 book online is still frequently more expensive than a £2 or £2.50 book in a shop once delivery is included.
“We do think that we undercut the net by the time you’ve taken that kind of thing into account,” says Mitchell. In a recession, that could be a critical advantage. For full article click here.

Funny to see the word 'antinomian' in the Telegraph. We use it as workplace slang for unorthodox religious books and their collectors- occult, new age, Zen, spiritualists, Sufi, millenniarists, diabolists, Wiccan, pagan etc., Some hardbitten dealers refer to their New Age books as the 'touchy feely' section. In fact New Age is not the great seller that it was--in the field of religious books it is the scholalrly and academic tomes that sells and, of course, the occult (the blacker the better.)

In the Age of Dawkins and Hichens it is good to see these sections thriving. An Antinomian, as every schoolboy knows, is one who denies the obligatoriness of moral law, one who believes that Christians are emancipated by the gospel from the obligation to keep the moral law, faith alone being necessary.' (Chambers.) Ed Sanders at one point calls Charles Manson an antinomian--in the sense of one who invents his own religion. (Pic left- a late work by Austin Osman Spare- a drawing from memory of Crowley done in 1955.)

The Road to Oxiana (revisited)

Robert Byron. THE ROAD TO OXIANA. Macmillan, London 1937.

Current Selling Prices
$1500-$3000  /£750-£2000  

MODERN FIRST EDITION / TRAVEL WRITING
This is a redoing of a posting from November 2007 with the values edited and some new info on the 'Byronic character' mostly from D J Taylor's masterpiece of research 'BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE; The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918 - 1940.' Robert Byron greatest travel writer of his day,  aesthete and leading member of the Brideshead generation and connoisseur of coloured architecture. The Road to Oxiana, describes his journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34. 20 years ago the book was known to a few collectors only, although RB pretty much invented the modern literary travel book. Paul Fussell insists that "what Ulysses is to the novel and what The Waste Land is to poetry", Byrons book is to travel writing. 
 After it appeared in a catalogue for £500 and sold, one over zealous dealer travelled the length of Britain looking for it  (they had  quite a few shops back then) and asked every seller if he had a copy. It is not an especially rare 'rare book' so he found a few. The book was then wide awake and later started to achieve spectacular results in auction and is no longer fun unless you find it at the bottom of a tea chest in a sale that somehow has eluded being listed on the web. Trouble is they are  all listed and they don't use tea chests anymore, and even the dimmest and most chinless book auctioneer has heard of the book.

Robert Byron is referred to (by Philip Hensher) as a 'High priest of Camp' mainly from the set he ran with at Oxford (Hypocrites Club etc.,) His taste, sometimes called kitsch,  was  for things that others at the time disdained - like Byzantine art and Persian architecture, Georgian buildings, Victoriana etc., He was said to resemble Queen Victoria and occasionally dressed up as her for parties. He never gave up his youthful enthusiasms or his desire to shock; he lost friends over his insistence from the start that Hitler would have to be fought, and that the Munich agreement was a disgrace. He did not get on with Evelyn Waugh.  He was surprisingly rugged, his journey into Tibet in 1929, for instance, was by any standards extremely harrowing and physically taxing. This is covered in a useful work 'First Russia, Then Tibet' (Macmillan 1933)--not uncommon but can command a £100 note and a lot more in the jacket. His signature  is highly uncommon, earlier this year we bought a couple of presentation copies --including one of his first book 'Europe in the Looking-Glass. Reflections of a Motor Drive from Grimsby to Athens' (1926). We described it thus:

'Signed presentation from the author --'Mrs.Harrod - if only I had seen her more- Robert Byron.' This is Lady Wilhelmine 'Billa' Harrod who was married to the economist Roy Harrod and co - authored the Shell Guide to Norfolk with  John Betjeman, to whom she had been briefly engaged. In 1937 as Billa Cresswell she had been the secretary and only employee of the Georgian Group with which Byron was passionately involved; he said of her '...she would make a wonderful agitator.'  On her marriage to Roy Harrod in 1938 she gave up the job and this inscription obviously refers to that. Billa Harrod continued to agitate for the saving of beautiful buildings all her long life, Robert Byron was killed in the war in 1941.'

It was not a nice copy but went to a collector fairly smartly at £800.

VALUE?  A copy of 'Oxiana' in a decent jacket made £1400 + premium in 2004.  A fairly decent copy is on sale as we speak at £2000. The book may (apres le deluge) go up gently if modern travel writing becomes more collected. Recent auction records for less than great copies have been well under a £1000. The great proponent of Byron was Bruce Chatwin who has turned him into something of a cult. Meanwhile Chatwin's own 'Oxiana',  his first book 'In Patagonia' has declined in value--at one point it was knocking on a grand but can now be found for less than £500 'fine/fine' -- there are  too many about and it is possible that he is less admired than he was in the 1990s. There are several other Robert Byron rarities and 'sleepers' that I might address at some point...in fact the main one is 'Innocence and Design', a 1935 novel he co-wrote with Christopher Sykes (under the name Richard Waughburton). Interestingly the Macmillan's clothbinding is a pastiche of the patterned cloth often to be found on nineteenth century Oriental travelogues. I once found a copy in the one pound book room of a Suffolk mansion--the jacket was rubbed but it was quickly converted into a £500 note. Now worth twice that for sharp jacketed copies.

  The 'Byronic Manner'.  Waugh was known as being difficult, prickly and abrasive but in the bastard stakes he was a household tabbycat compared to Byron. Basically a rageaholic - as DJ Taylor notes 'a railway journey invariably meant a quarrel with the guard or an altercation at the ticket office.' At least once he was arrested for 'insulting behaviour' (trouble in a cinema queue- fined 19/6). As DJT demonstrates the BYT's were an insolent and troublesome bunch and he was their star performer, a supreme put down artist, master of the 'sarcastic backhander,  the thinly veiled threat...' Vide his treatment of Harry Melville. Melville was well known to the BYTs although he was well into his anecdotage--'last of the professional diners out' (Osbert Lancaster) he had been a friend of Wilde and had known Proust- he embodied all the 'fabled sophistication of the 1890s.' During one of the veteran raconteur's reminiscences Byron is said to have shouted at him 'Can't you shut up, you hideous old relic of the Victorian age.'

On his trip to Albania his travelling companion observed that he 'spent most of the time cursing. He cursed almost everybody who did not speak English, sometime violently, but more often in a pleasant conversational monotone, as though he were discoursing on the beauty of the countryside.' Oddly enough Chatwin was also had his farouche side and could resort to force if countered; Byron was keen on threats of legal action especially against editors who dared to propose changes to his text.

Martin Parr. Bad Weather, 1982 + the world of the Photobook (according to Parr).

Martin Parr. Bad Weather. Zwemmer, London 1982.

PHOTOGRAPHY
A mere 62 pages in soft wraps with 54 b/w photos. Text includes a commentary by cult status weatherman Michael Fish. Parr is a highly collected and gifted Brit snapper (born 1952) who at some point was inducted into Magnum to the disgust of vieux humbug Cartier Bresson who described him as being from "a different solar system." MP is also responsible for the droll collections of 'boring' postcards, now up to 3 books -they have practically become a franchise. Parr has a 'whim of iron' as Powell said of Betjeman. Both top photos from this superb book.

Current Selling Prices
$250-$450 / £200-£350

VALUE? Copies on web are mostly £200 +, seldom less. Signed copies are more expensive but Parr is the Edward Heath of signed photo books, signatures add little. 'Bad Weather' is the kind of book you might find at a boot sale under a cold British sky for buggerall - it looks like nothing. Its value has stayed at this level for 3 years now. One prominent dealer says of Parr '[his] influence in contemporary British photography is unparalleled, but it is his contribution to the understanding and importance of photographic literature that may be his most profound legacy.' They are talking about his magisterial 2 vol 'The Photobook' which sits on a shelf beside me as I type.




Looking at the 'photobooks' I have covered in the last 3 years there has been, in most cases, an ineluctable rise in price. Possibly this is now stalling but so far it is holding its own. One caveat--in my experience when you are selling photobooks on the net it is often hard to actually get anywhere near the supposed value of these books unless you have very sharp copies of known rarities. Many photobook collectors are not burdened with money and need serious discounts and even time to pay; the core of richer buyers (often NY based) are probably feeling less cushy than in 2007, a few may even have been wiped out. Also it is safe to say that many modestly pitched items sell rapidly and silently against the higher prices; some dealers actually need money coming in...

Here are some notes:-
Carnival Strippers by Susan Meiselas. (1976)
Was $600 about 2 years ago now at least $800 (up circa 30%)

Sumo. Helmut Newton. (1999)
Was $8500 late 2007. One of 10,000 signed and numbered by the photographer. A book so large that it comes with its own metal folding stand, engraved with the author's name. Still goes for about the same money, or as much as 25% less due to the state of the dollar. Some surrealists want $14000 and even $25000. Dream on!

David Bailey's Book of Pin-Ups, 1965. Sixties flared trouser cockney sparrow pointedly ignored by Parr ( they have probably had bidding wars as Bailey is also a great photo collector.) Was $7500 in mid 2007. A copy made $7000 mid 2008 but it had made $14000 in 2005. Probably standing still in price, not esp rare but hard to find complete (36 pics) and in good nick.

P.H. Emerson. Marsh Leaves. 1895.
$5000 mid 2007. Not really tested since but an unpleasant copy on ABE at slightly more than this seems to have sold in late 2008 and would now expect a decent copy to nudge into five figures at auction (with the juice etc.,) One of the greats.

The Book of Bread. 1903
Was $800 early 2007. 2 copies on ABE now -one at $3000 and one not so nice at $4000. Freakish book of which the mighty Parr wrote "one of the humblest, yet most essential of objects is catalogued as precisely, regorously and objectively as any work by a 1980s Conceptual artist" Not a book to buy at these levels but to find somewhere overlooked (in the cookery section.) Probably sells regularly at half these prices. It's appeal is essentially whimsical. 300% increase.

Robert Frank. The Americans. (1959)
$7000 early 2007. In 2008 it made $15K (fine in slightly used d/w) and $32K (F/NF) and was bought in at $3k in an unpleasant jacket. All at Swann NY except the $32K which was at Christie's NY where it was described as 'A FINE COPY OF FRANK'S MASTERPIECE, and rare in this condition. (Quotes Parr) "The most renowned photobook of all... none has been more memorable, more influential, nor more fully realized... it changed the face of photography in the documentary mode".

El Morocco Family Album. Zerbe, 1937.
$1000 in early 2007. Bad copies now at $1100 better at $1700, a chancer at Amazon wants $2400. Society photography, social document tend to be beneath the Parr radar, below Parr- as it were.

Takashi Homma. Tokyo Suburbia, 1998.
$850 early 2007. Can now be had at under $700 and from Japan at slightly less than $600 as 'supply and demand' takes over. His 'Babyland' from 1995 can be had for less than $300.



Bruce Weber. Bear Pond, 1990.
Was $400 early 2007.
Still $400 and on some days less. Parr still has no time for Weber.

A Wonderful Time. Slim Aarons, 1974.
Was $250 early 2007. About the same price now, sometimes a bit more for F/F copies, suspect they occasionally go cheap on Ebay. Pictures of the very rich enjoying themselves could now be a little de trop for some. In Parr - he normally eschews social snappers. (Image below)



Ballet. 104 Photographs. Brodovitch, 1945.
Legendary photobook. $3500 in early 2007. Early 2008 a superior copy went through Ebay at $3500 or a bit more, rather used copy on ABE now at $3950, carriage trade dealer wants an unfriendly $9500 for a very nice example, a similar copy can be had at $4950 and top of the pile a midwest Video shop wants $11000 for the least good of the 4 copies for sale. As often happens the worst copy is the dearest (the mad hatter principle.) Book has gone ahead by as much as 60% in 2 years but is proving less scarce than was thought. "...One of the most cinematic and dynamic photobooks ever published..." (Parr)

Outlook? . Not an area I would like to wade into with credit cards flying right now, but there may be further life in the market especially with the incunabula of photo and proven geniuses like Emerson and Sander. The problem with most photobooks is you don't get much for your money. Their value derives from their iconic significance, sometimes $3000 gets you a small thin glossy book with a few printed b/w snaps. As one wag once observed (paraphrasing Veblen) 'modern art is a rich man's way of making poor people feel stupid.' So in this spirit the fact of a book looking insubstantial and even insignificant is no bar to its being valuable--in fact it helps. The 'mere man' cannot possibly appreciate this stuff. You demonstrate wealth and status by possessing it and recognising its true value. This may change - as it has before.

A. E. Waite / Divination / Bibliomancy

BIBLIOMANCY

Found in A.E. Waite's 'Occult Sciences' (1891) between Belomancy and Capnomancy (divination by smoke) this method of detecting witches and sorcerers and also using a Bible for prediction etc., Belomancy, by the way, is divination by arrows...

"Occasionally the forms of divination exceeded the bounds of superstition, and passed into the region of frantic madness. There was a short way the sorcerers which was probably the most potent discoverer of witchcraft which any ingenuity could devise. A large Bible was deposited on one side of a pair of weighing scales. The person suspected of magical practices was set on the opposite side. If he outweighed the Bible he was innocent; in the other case, he was held guilty. In the days of this mystical weighing and measuring, the scales may be truly said to have fallen from the eyes of a bewizarded generation, and to have revealed " sorcery and enchantment everywhere."

Bibliomancy, however, included a more harmless practice, and one of an exceedingly simple character. This was the opening of the Bible with a golden pin, and drawing an omen from the first passage which presented itself. Books like the Scriptures, the "Following of Christ," and similar works, abound in suggestive and pertinent passages which all men may apply to temporal affairs, but declares that he had recourse to it in all cases of spiritual difficulty. The appeal to chance is, however, essentially superstitious.

By the way A. E. Waite is a useful writer to find books by but not in the same league at all as the Great Beast. His most expensive work is likely to be his first 'An Ode to Astronomy and Other Poems (100 copies, thought to be 1877) or his second 'A Lyric to the Fairyland.' R B Russell values these at £3000 and £2000 respectively, possibly taking the price from the air. His rarest is undoubtedly 'The House of Hidden Light' written with Arthur Machen and published in 1904 in 3 copies. Russell has this at £1500. The 2 authors are pictured below, Machen on the left (uncharacteristically.)



Waite's work was mainly on the occult and mystical (he was Grand Master of the Golden Dawn in 1903) and, although one sees some of these books at giddy prices (£1000+) they are seldom worth it and he is hard to sell at ambitious prices. Signed copies are often seen marked up as if he was Yeats or the Beast but are not especially uncommon and do not double the price. One of his works on the web 'The History of Magic (1913, translated from Eliphas Levi) turns out be Aleister Crowley's copy, signed by him and with his extensive (and scornful) annotations throughout. Crowley and Waite had an acrimonious falling out, a bit in the Naipaul /Theroux or Beaton / Waugh mode + he claimed to be the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi, and many of his own writings were inspired by the French occult author and Mage (pic left). Priced at the palindromic and "beasty" price of $11666.11. Toppish in price but not completely unthinkable, although a bit worn and shaken with the odour of cigarette smoke (possibly the strong shag that Crowley liked) it had also belonged to Peter Warlock the composer with his ownership signature dated 1916. Crowley punters are unlikely to be put off by the odour of baccy but it could be a good bargaining point. A distinguished and important association deftly catalogued by the mighty Powell's of Portland.

Never been to Powells --I imagine it is like the Strand Bookshop in New York but on a gargantuan scale. I would like to go there. Martin Stone, uberscout and lover of fine books, was unimpressed by the condition of the good stuff there when he passed through with the good Baxter on their legendary road trip. He also did not dig their slightly anti dealer vibe. You sometimes get this in bookshops- they cannot appreciate that dealers are often among their best customers. All I know is when I have ordered from them they pack the books lightly-- belonging to the majority school who believe you merely have to put a book in a bag to send it; bubble, packaging and protection not needed (allright, some dealers go too far the other way with 7 layers of hurricane proof wrapping.) Apart from all that they are one of the world's top shops, with more books than the Bodleian, the tower of Babel and the library of Babylon.

A Bookseller Poet

Bookseller poets are not especially scarce or rare but they seldom write about bookselling. Joan Barton was a bookseller. She was also an accomplished poet somewhat in the style of Larkin and Betjeman but with a lyric tenderness entirely her own. She was born in England in 1908 and died in 1988. When illness curtailed her studies at Bristol University she began her working life as a bookseller. Later she was employed by the BBC and by the British Council where she was a director of a department during World War 2.

In 1947 she and her partner Barbara Watson started the White Horse Bookshop in Marlborough, but after twenty years sold it and moved to Salisbury, where they issued catalogues of modern first editions and children's books from their home. She reviewed for the New Statesman and contributed poems to many magazines including WAVE. Early in her writing life she owed much to the encouragement of Walter de la Mare. In her final years she had struggled with failing sight but she gained some recognition through a feature on US radio, a published interview and in 1979 an article on her in the American Journal Women in Literature. She was also included in several anthologies including Poetry Book Society Christmas Supplement, 1974 (ed. Philip Larkin) and the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse.

She published about 6 little collections of poetry some of which can be bought online for modest sums, amongst them was a poem that referred to her work. There is another about a house call, a beautiful poignant poem which I shall air at a later date--meanwhile, take it away Joan :-

LOT 304: VARIOUS BOOKS.

There are always lives
Left between the leaves
Scattering as I dust
The honeymoon edelweiss
Pressed ferns from prayer-books
Seed lists and hints on puddings
Deprecatory letters from old cousins
Proposing to come for Easter
And always clouded negatives
The ghost dogs in the vanishing gardens:
Fading ephemera of non-events,
Whoever owned it
(Dead or cut adrift or homeless in a home)
Nothing to me, a number, or if a name
Then meaningless,
Yet always as I touch a current flows,
The poles connect, the wards latch into place,
A life extends me-
Love-hate; grief; faith; wonder;
Tenderness.

From 'The Mistress'. Sonus Press, Hull 1972.

Carnival Strippers by Susan Meiselas.

Susan Meiselas. CARNIVAL STRIPPERS. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY 1976.

PHOTOGRAPHY.
Desirable photo book, not uncommon but seldom shows up as a first, jacketed hard back. Cover is silver. In the early 1970s Meiselas travelled with some small New England and Southern "Girl Shows", including the Club Flamingo, the Star and Garter & the Club 17. Pictures and text from 100+ hours of interviews. Not a salacious book, somewhat noir and poignant, some photos are said to shock. A journey into the darker side of American life. A great photographer, she won the Robert Capa Gold Medal, the Leica medal for excellence, and The Photojournalist of the Year etc., Her book 'Nicaragua' is in Parr's definitive 'The Photobook' and this book is in in Andrew Roth's Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century.'

Current Selling Prices
$800-$1200 / £500-£800

VALUE? Hardback copies in jackets are avaiable at $1000+ but are attainable at less, one hopeful wanted $750 for the paperback, but it can be found at under $200. Kind of book you might find in a slightly curled jacket at a flea market (priced at $10 for its sleaze factor) if you got there at dawn. It has gone up in value over the last 2 years as a hardback. Hard to know whether photobooks are still a good investment bought at these levels. Their values, which crashed in the 1980s have gone up and up and a correction is almost inevitable especially in a market that is otherwise troubled. Will examine this question further as I have records of values of photobooks from 2/3 years ago.

A re-issue appeared in 2003 which has a CD of some of her interviews and added new pix - it can be bought signed at $150 or less. The publishers (Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Steidl Verlag of Göttingen Germany) say this of it:

"From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. As she followed the girl shows from town to town, she portrayed the dancers on stage and off, photographing their public performances as well as their private lives. She also taped interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers, and paying customers. Meiselas's frank description of the lives of these women brought a hidden world to public attention. Produced during the early years of the women's movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterized a complex era of change....essays by Sylvia Wolf and Deirdre English reflect on the importance of this body of work within the history of photography and the history of feminism."

Booksellers and the Big Crunch 2

More uninformed and subjective notes on how the recession is affecting the trade in rare and used books. It's funny but as a retailer with a shop in the dead centre of London I am now continually asked by concerned friends 'How is it going?' Like someone inquiring of the health of a patient with a long, lingering and potentially fatal illness. I usually reply something on the lines of 'mustn't grumble' 'keeping my head above water' or 'not too bad.' It is not a good idea if it is going well to boast about it (apart from inviting the wrath of the Gods, it tends to annoy) and if it is going badly you don't want to bring people down, or accelerate the process by spreading the news. Considering we are in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the South Sea Bubble it is actually going pretty much as normal, possibly with slightly more poor days than 2007 and 2008. Confidence is generally low, especially among American dealers, and there is talk of a coming serious 'buyer's market' with sellers overwhelmed with 'borassic'* collectors trying to raise money. If I see hoards of impecunious book collectors advancing on Charing Cross I will let you know. The last time it happened was when the shop on the corner took a large 'books bought' ad out in the Daily Telegraph - but that's another story...

Even the internet is still just about holding up. My theory is that its use for retail is still growing fast and that is making up for slower sales -two and a half paces forward two and a quarter paces back.

Some notes.

1. Reports are coming through that 2009 book auction results are 30% down on the first two months of 2008. A difficult one to call as it depends on the quality of goods offered and it is likely that owners are holding back from consigning really good books. If I hear of further drops I shall start going more frequently, but lately I have found the process of viewing, bidding and clearing tiresome.

2. A high end American dealer reports (in an interview) that nowadays 3,4,5 days can go by without him getting a single internet order. He has 8000 books on the web and should sell about 4 a day (1 per 2000 per day). It used to be 1 per 1000 per day but has now migrated to 1 per 2 thousand and may be heading towards 1 per 2500. This is very general - if you have cheap books well selected and attractively priced and you are on Amazon, Alibris and ABE it can be much higher and they will know you well at the post office. Looking at this genial dealers stock online I found that even for relatively common books he is usually the most expensive - this might explain poor sales. Confronted with a list of books in similar condition the buyer chooses from the least expensive end of the list - a strange, perverse quirk and hard to explain.

3. I read an article about how to survive the recession (Harvard Business Journal). It used the Muhammad Ali - Foreman fight 'The Rumble in the Jungle' as an analogy. Ali apparently won by being able to absorb more punishment than his opponent and by being more agile. The Harvard bloke said these are the 2 qualities needed right now for financial survival - absorption and agility. Sounds fair enough. I have written the two words on a card and stuck it on the mirror so I see them every morning. Got to remember that absorption does not mean being able to absorb a ton of bad books. These are best avoided with some clever foot work. Basically you have to box clever...

4. I was in a shop the other day in a town which I shall call Seatown, a name out of 'Mass Observation.' The shop, not large, had plenty of punters and in the half hour I was there the guy took about a £100 and I then spent £65 which he rounded down to £50. The prices were very modest but the stock was very good and well chosen and there was what appeared to be plenty more of it coming out. The secret is that Seatownman has always been modest in his pricing and hasn't suddenly turned into a decent type after being a bastard all through the boom years. He is well known throughout the large extended coastal community, turns no one away, listens to the tales of the 'talking wounded', the bores and bullshitters -even makes a cup of tea for some of them. He is not going to end up with a Camargue or a Cayenne or a Cadillac but he is also not going to go broke and can buy his round, even take the occasional extended holiday.

5. There are no green shoots visible but people are now getting used to the recession. In the initial shock people zipped their wallets tight, went home and avoided non essential shops. That may be over, unless like an earthquake, there are further shocks...

*borassic = financially embarrassed, broke --rhyming slang where borassic lint = 'skint' = broke.

Zang Tumb Tuuum! (1914)

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. ZANG TUMB TUUM (Adrianopoli, Ottobre 1912 : Parole in Libertà.) Poesia, Milan, 1914.

Current Selling Prices
$3000+ /£2000+

SOUND POETRY/ FUTURISM / ARTIST'S BOOK
The kind of book you could theoretically find in the foreign language section of a doltish bookseller ignorant of modern art, poetry and European literature - plenty of chaps like that + the book is not on the net. This might trigger some sort of high pricing response and they might go for something extravagant like $375, a fairly typical bookseller's price for a book that is 'not on net.' Of course it's a marvellous piece of work by the great Italian futurist (alright he was a bit of a fascist) and remarkable for 1914. At 225 pages it is not a pamphlet but not a fat book. The BM lists two sizes 19cms tall and 28 cms tall.

The book had appeared in excerpts in journals between 1912 and 1914 and is one of the very first manifestations of the modernist avant-garde, well before the Cabaret Voltaire bunch launched DADA in 1916 and even the Vorticists and their fabulous puce BLAST manifesto (1914.) In FUTURISM by Caroline Tisdall & Angelo Bozzolla (T & H 1977) they say this of it:-

"[The] masterpiece of Words-in-freedom and of Marinetti’s literary career was the novel ‘Zang Tumb Tuuum’... the story of the siege by the Bulgarians of Turkish Adrianople in the Balkan War, which Marinetti had witnessed as a war reporter. The dynamic rhythms and onomatopoetic possibilities that the new form offered were made even more effective through the revolutionary use of different typefaces, forms and graphic arrangements and sizes that became a distinctive part of Futurism. In ‘Zang Tumb Tuuum; they are used to express an extraordinary range of different moods and speeds, quite apart from the noise and chaos of battle.... Audiences in London, Berlin and Rome alike were bowled over by the tongue-twisting vitality with which Marinetti declaimed ‘Zang Tumb Tuuum.’ As an extended sound poem it stands as one of the monuments of experimental literature, its telegraphic barrage of nouns, colours, exclamations and directions pouring out in the screeching of trains, the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, and the clatter of telegraphic messages"

OUTLOOK/VALUE? Futurism was in the doldrums for a while but recent records show some highish prices. An inscribed 'Zang Tumb' in slightly shabby shape made £2600 at Bloomsbury last May, a better inscribed copy sold in 1993 also at Bloomsbury (to a dealer called Gidal) for a paltry £250. Before that the Tate Gallery bought a copy for £65 just 30 years ago (also inscribed-- Marinetti was a great signer.) Meanwhile the chef d'oeuvre of Futurism, albeit after the event (1932) 'Parole in Liberta Futuriste Olfattive Tattili Termiche' sometimes known as 'the tin book' (see below) made $70,000 in 1993 and the BM bought a copy this year for a generous £83000. It consist of 15 thin metal sheets in various colors and will be on display. This price was paid to another institution and rather like collector-to -collector sales may have been toppish especially in these times. 25 years ago it sold for £4000- a sound investment.

Marinetti's 'La Cucina Futurista' (also 1932) is not without interest -full of outlandish ingredients and bizarre combinations. He even dared to attack pasta - he insisted that it induced 'fiacchezza, pessimismo, inattività nostalgica e neutralismo' ('lethargy, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity, and neutralism'). This anti - pasta cookbook might also be found in our imaginary doltish bookshop in the cookery section for $10 but it can make $1000 + for smart copies. I have a customer for one...

Sheridan Le Fanu - the 'Invisible Prince.'

Idly reading Colin Wilson's "The Strength to Dream' this morning I came across his piece on Sheridan Le Fanu. Talking of dreams, I have long dreamed of finding one of his 3 deckers, the nearest I have got to this recently was finding in an island bookshop, practically mint, a first of his posthumous 'Evil Guest' which, when I got it home, sold like a bullet for a monkey (£500).

Some of his 3 deckers can go for the price of a new (and loaded) Lexus. Colin writes that Le Fanu is the only great writer of the supernatural that the UK has ever produced and that his 'Green Tea' is the most convincing ghost story ever written. The curious thing is that Le Fanu actually collected ghost stories himself. I fantasise that somehow the collection stayed together and is to be found in a huge trunk, unclaimed in a Dublin furniture repository. One day, a mere 136 years after its owners demise, they open it, check on Google and email me that it needs shifting a-sap 'for a fair and reasonable price.' Madness.

The great Colin writes that Le Fanu '... spent the day indoors, emerging in the late afternoon to wander round second hand bookshops. looking for ghost stories...' The basis of this is most likely to be A.P. Graves 'A Memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.' Graves wrote that after Le Fanu's beloved wife's death he entirely vanished from Dublin society -

'... so entirely that Dublin, always ready with a nickname, dubbed him ‘The Invisible Prince;’ and indeed he was for long almost invisible, except to his family and most familiar friends, unless at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square; sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop poring over some rare black letter Astrology or Demonology.

To one of these old bookshops he was at one time a pretty frequent visitor, and the bookseller relates how he used to come in and ask with his peculiarly pleasant voice and smile, ‘Any more ghost stories for me, Mr. ——-?’ and how, on a fresh one being handed to him, he would seldom leave the shop until he had looked it through. This taste for the supernatural seems to have grown upon him after his wife’s death, and influenced him so deeply that, had he not been possessed of a deal of shrewd common sense, there might have been danger of his embracing some of the visionary doctrines in which he was so learned. But no! even Spiritualism, to which not a few of his brother novelists succumbed, whilst affording congenial material for our artist of the superhuman to work upon, did not escape his severest satire...'

J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 - 1873) died after completing his last novel, strangely bearing the title ‘Willing to Die.’ You might say that in his later years (wait for it) - 'he haunted second hand bookshops...'

Baedeker Madeira 1939.

'Representatives of most of the hotels come on board and will (for a fee) see to the landing of the luggage. The custom house is near the Cais and the officials are normally very lenient to tourists. Passengers who have not booked rooms should send their luggage to the custom house, land and choose their hotel, and instruct the hotel porter to collect their luggage...*Reid's an hotel de luxe situated on a basalt cliff and commanding fine views, with restaurant (dancing), tennis courts, bathing place and small swimming pool (lift) R 155, L 8, D 10...' (landing at Madeira)

Karl Baedeker. MADEIRA, CANARY ISLANDS, AZORES , WESTERN MOROCCO. Karl Baedeker, Publisher, Leipzig. 1939.

Current Selling Prices
$1200+ /£800+

TRAVEL GUIDES
A wonderful book to find. Not to be confused with the 1934 German language edition which is still valuable but relatively common. The clue is it doesn't look like the familiar blood red soft cloth fat little handbooks, more like a small slim paperback - but the cover is the same shade of red. It is worth so much you could actually pack it in a case and set off to Madeira with it, even take in the lost isles of Atlantis (o/w known as the Azores.) Sell it on return to finance the trip.

I used an old Baedeker in Venice a few years back and not much had changed. For many parts of the world, however, they represent life when, as Waugh put it, 'the going was good.' Looking at KB's Madeira there would now be a greater emphasis on the now highly touristed Canary Islands. Fuerteventura gets you half a page ('most of the island is rough pasture and is grazed mostly by camels') and in Lanzarote, often known as Lanzagrotty, camels abound, a decent white wine is produced and motor cars may be hired to get to Yaiza, where a guide will take you in 3-4 hours to the top of the Montanas del Fuego. That's about it. Things had changed when in this century the unhinged genius Houellebecq wrote of his holiday on the volcanic isle - basically a Rioja fuelled shag-quest. The lovely Canary sland of Gomera, where natives still communicated with 'the old whistling language', ( Silbo) is described as mainly agricultural. Only in the last decade have they put in an airport.

Our copy is catalogued thus:

'...Small 8vo. pp xx, 128. 17 maps, 6 town plans. Original publisher's red illustrated thin card wraps with lighter red linen spine. Sound vg copy with slight handling wear ... Very decent acceptable example of the very rare (some say the rarest) Baedeker. Most copies were said to have been destroyed on a bombing raid on Leipzig in 1945, a few got to the Baedeker's London agents Allen and Unwin and a few to Scribner's in New York just before the war.' £1100.'

The only other time I have had this book was when we cleared 10,000 books from the offices of Allen and Unwin. There were two. We came out top in a 'private treaty' sale organised by Sotheby's. Publisher's file copies are the holy grail although in the case of A & U they kept back all the books of their star author and cash cow JRR Tolkien (also Arthur Waley and Bertrand Russell.)

VALUE? In an piece in the New Yorker 20 years ago they wrote - '... Bernard J. Shapero, the London rare-book dealer, published a Baedeker catalogue in 1989 ...it quoted the rarest Baedeker as "Madeira, Canary Islands, Azores & Western Morocco" (1939) at $:600, followed by "St. Petersburg & Um gebung" (1913) $:500, "Indien" (1914) $:450 and "Russia With Tehran, Port Arthur & Peking" (1914) $:450.' This is still pretty much the case. There are many copies of 'Indien' still available (at a price) a few St Petesburgs and a dozen Russia with Tehran but only two Madeiras -one at £1750. Look out also for 'Lunar Baedeker' by Mina Loy, a modernist poetry work published in Paris by Contact Press, 1923 and worth as much as any red Baedeker. Worth a detour.

OUTLOOK. Probably healthier than most, Baedekers are not really tied to the book market and are collected across the board and in many countries and in several languages. As late as 2005 a man touted a box full of clean Baedekers around the Bay Area looking for buyers, he found none until he got to Moe's - take heart, they can go unnoticed.

A Book Collection in Hampstead

I have bought quite a few vanfuls of books in Hampstead this century and was intrigued by a piece in a bookseller's memoir entitled "Some Priceless Books In Hampstead". This was from "40 Years in my Bookshop" by Walter C. Spencer (London 1923). Spencer whose dates were possibly 1860-1952 (unknown to Wikipedia, Google, etc.) was a major book seller of his time, a friend of Thomas J. Wise, but at the time of writing presumably ignorant of his darker side (we're talking forgery.) His shop was at 27 New Oxford and he dealt in prints, plate books, bound sets, the Romantics, Americana, first editions of his time (Wilde, Conrad, Galsworthy, etc.). A big Dickens man, popular with visiting American plutocrats like pickle king Henry J. Heinz and numbering among his customers, Sir Henry Irving, Gladstone, George Meredith, Andrew Lang, Gissing, Pater, Swinburne, and Richard Jefferies.

Spencer visited the library of Wise in Hampstead and quotes from Richard Curle's introduction to the catalogue of the Ashley Library - as Wise like to call his ridiculously valuable collection. The catalogue ran to 11 volumes, Wise was exposed as a forger of rare pamphlets in 1934 by biblio sleuths Carter and Pollard. The books went to the British Museum in 1937. Curle, something of a gun for hire in the rare book world, was also the author of several good travel books and works on Conrad who he knew well. He writes:

It seems invidious to pick out for special note any particular books, and yet I cannot forbear to draw attention to certain things of singular rarity and interest in the following short but representative list. 'Welth and Helth,' 1557 (only one other copy known), 'Gammer Gurton's Needle,' 1575 (the earliest English comedy of which any perfect copy is extant), Spenser's 'Faerie Queen,' 1590-6, Nashe's 'Terrors of the Night,' 1594 (only one other copy known, and that a poor one), Lyly's 'Woman in the Moone,' 1597 (only two or three copies known), Dekker's 'Satiro-Mastix,' 1602, Ben Jonson's 'Sejanus,' 1605 (only one other known on large paper : this is a presentation copy), Middleton's 'Roaring Girl,' 1611, Chapman's 'Widdowe's Teares,' 1612, Milton's 'Comus,' 1637 (the finest copy known), Herrick's 'Hesperieds,' 1648 . . . Blake's ' The Gates of Paradise,' 1793 (the only large paper copy known), Byron's 'Fugitive Pieces,' 1806 (one of three known perfect copies), Landor's 'Idyllia,' 1815, Lamb's six separate 'Tales from Shakespeare,' 1807-11 (of none of these booklets are more than two other copies known), Shelley's 'Necessity of Atheism,' 1811 (one other perfect copy known and with a presentation inscription)...."
[Spencer writes] I suspect that a list like the foregoing would take some equalling, but what if we add to it a dozen books, of which Mr. Wise possesses the only known copies in existence ?
"Prior's "Pindarique on His Majesty's Birthday," 1690, Pope's "God's Revenge against Punning," 1716, Gay's "To a Lady on her Passion for Old China," 1725, Landor's "Iambi," 1800, and his "Letters by Calvus," 1814, Coleridge's "Remarks on Sir Robert Peele's Bill," 1818, Byron's " The Irish Avatar," 1821, Fitzgerald's "Translations into Verse," 1829, Tennyson's "The Birth of Arthur," 1868, D. G. Rossetti's "The Streams Secret," 1870, and Swinburne's "Russia, an Ode," 1890.
Mr. Wise's set of Joseph Conrad's publications is a series of gifts from the author, wtih a signed explanatory note on the blank fly-leaf by Mr. Conrad himself...

And so it goes on, pure biblio porn. I suspect some of the latter one-only-known books may have been Wise's own forgeries. The only modern books that I can think of that would trump the above are Ian Fleming's first book-- a slim volume of verse that he rigorously suppressed or Waugh's The World to Come: A Poem in Three Cantos, privately printed 1916 or Corvo's The Attack on St Winefride's Well (only 2 known). Can Hampstead still provide great treasures? As Cadillac Jack would have it : 'Anything can be anywhere.' I have heard that many of the bigger houses are now owned by Russian oligarchs, not known for their literary taste. Times have changed. In the 60s Hampstead was the haunt of cranks, vegetarians and well heeled leftists. Just over 60 years ago a decrepit and malodorous Aleister Crowley could be seen walking down Rosslyn Hill - one of our customers used to see him there when he lived in Hampstead as a teen.

French Bibliomaniacs (CBS Sunday Morning)

Well worth a watch. One wonders whether the Great Gatsby than John Baxter holds to camera is the real thing, if it is he can take a couple of years off - it was mint. This CBS six minuter also has Martin Stone -a legend in his own lunchtime - and various bouquinistes , wheelers and dealers and some good stuff on French pulps and series noirs........by the way --that's Martin on the left in characteristic pose... amor librorum nos unit...

Booksellers and the Big Crunch

Having just done the California Book Fair I should be in a position to pontificate about the effect of the crunch on trade. Surprisingly it was fairly reasonable with dealers still buying from one another, something I had feared might be completely curtailed; even the public showed some enthusiasm and produced cash, cards and cheques. True, everybody wanted deeper discounts than ever, anything that was ambitiously priced was ignored unless it was God's own copy, breathtakingly desirable, ballsachingly trendy or in effulgent condition.

Some higher end dealers sold very little but there were also reports of a few very high takes. Ephemera seemed to be doing well, prints less so. Some optimists said during the last recession that the book trade was the last to be affected and the first to recover; this time there have been signs that the more modest and user friendly end of the trade is weathering the storm or even profiting by it. The jury is still out but meanwhile here are some interesting but contradictory lead indicators, straws in the wind (no green shoots though!)...

1. Advert in 'Private Eye' 23 January 2009. "The Eye' is a UK satirical, whistleblowing fortnightly with a large and affluent readership. I found this in the 'Eye Needs' classified ads section which is full of the broke, the needy and the redundant looking for donations. Please help an antiquarian bookshop survive credit crunch 119100 01057770. The figures are bank account details in case you are minded to pony up. Not a good sign at all...

2. Thrift shops (charity shops) are reporting higher turnovers-- as much as 10% over last year. Given the fact that in the UK many charity shops charge more for their books than secondhand shops this is a hard one to interpret, but at least the money is going to good causes and is not being wasted by booksellers on Volvos, Real Ale, fine wines, single malts, bibliography, corduroy jackets and Apples etc.,

3. Article in 'The Daily Telegraph' 10 January 2009 - Frugal readers give second-hand bookshops a lift. The thrust of the article was that booksellers had a bumper year in 2008 'as cost-conscious readers cut back on buying new titles.' One shop, Barter Books in Northumberland, reported a 10% rise and Richard Booth in Hay reports an 'excellent year.' (One caveat to bear in mind is that turnover in second hand bookshops very much depends on the quality of books bought; I know of a seller who took £40K in 2007 and £150K in 2008 because he hit a stunning collection in his area, if the economy had been more buoyant he could have taken more.) Booth even supplies a slightly risible list of the Top Ten Used Books:

1. Kilvert's Diary 1870-1879, by Francis Kilvert
2. On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin
3. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
4. Self-Sufficiency, by John Seymour
5. The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
6. The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton
7. The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
9. Food for Free, by Richard Mabey
10. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

Given the randomness of book buying by dealers such lists are going to be site specific, subjective and highly unreliable but they may have some significance. King Richard's list has a Welsh bias. Our top seller is '84 Charing Cross Road', when we can get copies (£1 offered for clean examples.) At the bottom I append US giant Powell's 'Top Ten Used Books' ** list which reflects more American concerns. A spokesperson at Booth's said "We are having a great year. Despite the downturn, sales are up significantly. There are a number of factors. We are selling a lot more on the internet, and I think people are wanting to save money. They are probably not buying new books so much so they are turning to second-hand books instead." Good, encouraging stuff but alot of this info comes from earlier in 2008 before the recession really started to bite... to be continued with other factoids and news of one seaside shop where they are taking money hand over fist...



** POWELL'S TOP TEN USED BOOKS
1. James Bond: The Legacy by John Cork and Bruce Scivally
2. The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Artie Bucco

3. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
4. A People's History of United States by Howard Zinn 

5. Emily Post's Etiquette by Emily Post

6. Emily Post's Wedding Etiquette by Peggy Post

7. Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani 

8. Larousse Gastronomique: The World's Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia by Librarie Larousse

9. When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden by Bill Maher 

10. What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert L. Wolke and Marlene Parrish

On Collecting Books by Tramps 2

Second and final part of a guest blog by R.M. Healey. No puns about 'came to greeff' by the way, and God Bless the King of Hay for giving the man a square meal. Take it away Robin....

The Canadian Paul Potts is linked to Gawsworth in some people's eyes. Both slept alfresco, though Potts was a lot shabbier and smellier. Friends used to speak of the Potts stink , which accompanied him wherever he went. Of his three or so books Dante Called You Beatrice, which I have mentally subtitled ' the longest whinge in literary history ' ( OK, perhaps Hazlitt's Liber Amoris is another contender ) is the best known. The dozen copies of the very common Readers Union edition in ABE all fetch around £3, but some joker has priced his at £14. Instead of a Sonnet is more difficult to find and a signed copy for £39 in ABE is probably worth a punt.

Both Potts and Gawsworth came to mind quite recently when I thought I spied another homeless writer examining some of the bargain book tables in Cecil Court. I wish I’d hailed him, but I wasn’t sure, and to save possible embarrassment walked away. Francois Greeff was someone I’d interviewed three years before for Mensa Magazine,but for some reason the editor had spiked the piece. But Greeff is an interesting character. After leaving South Africa, where he’d witnessed a close relative being shot in fron of him, he’d escaped for his own physical and mental health to England and after years of living rough ( often is his car ) from Cornwall to Bournemouth, but mainly in London, he finally settled down and started a course at Kingston University, which is where I interviewed him.

If homeless Colin Wilson wrote some of his The Outsider in libraries Greeff preferred the various day centres for the homeless dotted around London. Here, he would grab his chance to tap out his first book , The Hidden Code of Cryptic Crosswords, on the house computer,saving the data onto a floppy. He would then seek out a sleeping place. He shared Wilson’s liking for Hampstead Heath.

Problems with the computers in the different day centres drove Greeff ‘scatty’. But at length the book was complete and not long afterwards Foulsham brought it out. Greeff then borrowed twelve pounds to set up a website to promote his magnum opus and the praise he receive from grateful readers prompted him to travel to Hay to sell his book at the Festival. It was while he was sleeping under a fir tree near the town's electricity sub station that he met someone who introduced him to ‘ King ‘ Richard Booth, who invited him to dinner.

You can buy a copy of Greeff's debut paperback for a mere $1 on ABE, but the same site has another at $27.78. (Copies on Amazon UK at 1 penny but also at a stratospheric £111 with Galaxy Books. Ed.) A one hit wonder ? . Well perhaps, but my money is on Greeff writing his memoirs, which should be as racy and as embitterd as Potts '. So what that his debut volume was a book on crosswords. H.G.Wells's first book was a biology textbook.

Our pics shows a suited Francois signing his book at The Hay festival for newly knighted Sir Terry Pratchett, also for 2 fans. Insert shows Lord Bragg, sadly uncollected as far as I know.

On Collecting Books by Tramps

Et tu Healey? I was talking to the writer R.M.Healey. He had read our recent piece about Colin Wilson and told me that Wilson was not the only writer to have slept by night on Hampstead Heath and written a book by day. This lead to Robin writing the piece below on homeless writers, tramps, hobos etc., I first met Robin when he interviewed me for Rare Book Review. This long piece was posted here in several parts as 'Tales of the Uncollected.' We had talked of the supertramp W.H. Davies and the legendary tramp/hobo Jim Phelan....


Some other homeless writers may be worth collecting. Knut Hamsun, as a notorious WW2 collaborator and supporter of Quisling, has gone out of fashion a little, and perhaps he was never homeless for very long, but in his teens he did trek across America as a tramp and a pedlar, which must have furnished much autobiographical detail for his debut novel Hunger (1890).Actually, to my shame, I had never heard of Hamsun when I came across the first English translation, published by Leonard Smithers in 1899. I found it in a a jumble sale over 20 years ago . It was the board illustration that first attracted me –a sort of Beggarstaff Brothers line drawing of an emaciated face with a hopeless, downtrodden expression. On the flyleaf was a tipped-in signature of its translator, ‘ George Egerton ‘, which I later discovered was the pen name of a young Irish writer called Chavelina Dunne, author of Keynotes , whose correspondence with a number of fin de siecle writers was collected by Terence de vere White in 1958.

Copies of the Egerton translation, which remains current today, are very thin on the ground. I seem to recall there were a couple in ABE a few years ago, but I couldn't locate any the other day. Nor does ABE feature any of the Norwegian first, which the 2000 edition of Book Collecting prices at a measly $350 (shurely shome mishtake). However, paperback copies of the English transalation are legion and cheap enough, though some Aussie blagger has the cheek to ask £60 68p for a paperback published in 2007.!! My Egerton first , with its tipped in signature, must command quite a bit more than even the true first , but I think I’ll keep it. Hamsun won the Nobel prize, after all, and has been called the father of modern literature by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who compared him to Kafka. I can't think of anyone else who was writing quite like him in the late 1880s.

I doubt whether John Gawsworth ever troubled the Nobel judges, but if the notoriously unreliable Derek Stanford is to be trusted, he seems to have been as rebarbative as the gifted Norwegian in many ways. Often drunk and with a reputation for physical violence and boorsishness he alienated many fellow poets by his behaviour. Nor does a glance at his verse, or at his many anthologies, inspire one to defend him. All that King of Redonda tosh bores me senseless , but I know many who love it.

Is ( or was ) Gawsworth collected ? His unsigned volumes of poetry rarely fetch much more than £10 on the Net and a lot less in shops. Signed copies are a different matter. A copy of Poems of Today, an otherwise dull little collection, rockets to £70 in ABE because Gawsworth has written a poem in it. Likewise another bookseller ask £80 for his ' Very Rare ' copy of Flesh of Cypris, with its ' loosely inserted note ' from the poet. But for real vicarious bohemianism you must go to the two volumes of Gawsworth's personal diaries in manuscript, the only items that truly deserve the label ' very rare '. You'll have to pay Richrad Ford of London £1,500 for these . Incidentally, does anyone remember a TV feature on Gawsworth following his death in 1970 ?. I seem to recall him wearing a filthy and tattered overcoat as he picked his way through bargain boxes in Charing Cross Road ( or perhaps it was Farringdon Road ) while a voice-over narrated his fall from grace—from respected editor of Poetry Review to vagrant. The film ended with Gawsworth reciting one of his own poems which ended with the exclamatory ‘ Damn you, poetry ! ' Those last words have stuck with me through the years---a cri de couer from the mouth of a mediocre literary flaneur. .

A tip of the battered bowler hat to you Robin! To be continued with Paul Potts and Francois Greefe.

Powys. The Second Hand Bookshop Rant 2

Plato, that poetical enemy of poets, would certainly recommend his philosopher-kings to abolish second-hand bookshops. A second-hand bookshop can blow sky-high the machinations of centuries of first-hand politicians. It sets the prophet against the priest, the prisoner against society, the has-nothing against the has-all, the individual against the universe!

Here ends Peter Eaton's Book-Mark piece... Powys continues in strident tone-

"... It is as heavily charged with the sweet mischiefs of sex as the privy-walls of a railway station, or the imagination of St. Anthony.

Here are the poisons to kill, the drugs to soothe, the fire-water to madden, the ichor to inflame, the nectar to imparadise! The infinite pathos of all the generations lies here, their beatings against the wall, their desperate escapes, their triumphant reconciliations. In the Beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God--and the Devil stole the Word out of the cradle. The everlasting contrariety, whereby creation is stirred into movement, seethes and ferments in books, in all books; and from the cold glaciers of books plunge down the death-avalanches of ultimate negation that whirl us into the gulf... we escape from it into the architectural spaces of the public library of our town, where matriarchy prevails, and where the mad reasonings of the sons of men are kept in complete control by the aid of catalogues and dusters. But after all one has only to think of those old, great, heroic bookworms of the early times, with their voracious, insatiable maw for everything written, only to think of Rabelais for instance, who certainly would have been caught invading those forbidden shelves, to be led back to our second-hand bookshop."

Such writing can seem somewhat overwrought, jejune, bombastic, even unhinged. Some regarded him as a windbag. Certainly It has a touch of the pulpit about it. His idea that women belong in libraries rather than shops would not play well now. Many of his ideas, however, are still relevant- second hand bookshops have become oases of sedition, eccentricity, obscurity and unashamed intellectual fervour in an increasingly conformist and dumbed down world.

Powys is good on 'browsers' - the great bookseller Simon Gough, now retired, used to chuck people out of his shop if they said they were 'only browsing' -he was once heard shouting at a customer. "If you want to browse, go and do it outside - get out"!!!!! If Simon liked you, however, he would offer you a 'dish of tea'. Another East Anglian bookseller Bob Jackson (oddly enough a former member of the Powys society) offers tea to all customers and often leaves them browsing while he goes off on a house call asking them to pay for their books in an honesty box.

I mentioned in the last posting that Peter Eaton's Powys Book Mark may have led to an amazing book buy. On the back (see pic) he asks for 'old books before 1860. Old letters, postcards, journals, also office waste, account books, bills etc..... It was the phrase 'office waste' that probably led to some clearance merchants (in some versions rubbish collectors) turning up one day at his shop with a van full of papers from the study of the orientalist and poet Arthur Waley (1889-1966)-- a lifetime of manuscripts, letters and journals, said to have been worth a fortune. Waley would have had fabulous material - he had been Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum where he taught himself Chinese and Japanese and translated classics and poetry from these languages and was also on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. Also what may have helped was Eaton's well known mantra 'don't throw anything away...'

John Cowper Powys. The Second Hand Bookshop. A Rant.

"What a history of human excesses a second-hand book-shop is! As you 'browse' there– personally I can't abide that word, for to my mind book-lovers are more like hawks and vultures than sheep, but of course if its use encourages poor devils to glance through books that they have no hope of buying, long may the word remain!–you seem to grow aware what a miracle it was when second-hand book-shops were first invented. Women prefer libraries, free or otherwise, but it too often happens that the books an ordinary man wants are on the 'forbidden shelves'. But there is no censorship in a second-hand book-shop. Every good bookseller is a multiple-personality, containing all the extremes of human feeling. He is an ascetic hermit, he is an erotic immoralist, he is a Papist, he is a Quaker, he is a communist, he is an anarchist, he is a savage iconoclast, he is a passionate worshipper of idols. Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind.

It is for this reason that a bookshop--especially a second-hand bookshop--is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reactions. And just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority.

In a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altarwhere all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can takerefuge! Here, like desperate bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. A bookshop is a powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drug store of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.



Of all the "houses of ill fame" which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with his minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.
[Adapted by the great old Holland Park bookseller Peter Eaton in the late 1960s for a Book-mark ('Old Books Bought' added) from essays of J.C. Powys in his 1938 work 'Enjoyment of Literature.']

OLD BOOKS BOUGHT

More to follow including the spicier climactic end of the rant omitted (for reasons of decency, length and commerce.) It is possible that this bookmark lead to the call of a lifetime. Watch this space.

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Oscar Wilde.THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. Ward, Lock & Co.,London, New York and Melbourne. 1891.

Current Selling Prices
$2000+/£1300+

CLASSIC LITERATURE /DECADENCE/ FANTASY

Wilde's only novel, considered by some to be his greatest work. One of the very few examples of decadent English literature, also a fantasy (listed in Bleiler as MX7- i.e. 'Magical Objects / Allegory, Symbolism). Oscar Wilde, chiding a hostile and prurient newspaper critic wrote- "Leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that it deserves" and insisted in his preface "...there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That's all." Dorian Gray first appeared in Lippincott's simultaneously in Philadelphia and London, on June 20, 1890. This publication was immediately followed by publication of an unauthorized, pirated version of the tale, printed June 22, 1890 in New York by M. J. Ivers & Co. Wilde then substantially revised the work and added six new chapters and this the Ward, Lock 1891 edition is the normal first edition that you see (there is also the one of 250 Large Paper copies signed by the great man.) There is a simple issue point on the trade first edition,the first issue has the word "and" misspelled "nd" on page 208 eight lines from the bottom.

The plot it is summed up in this piece of pre publicity for the new 'Dorian' movie due to hit screens on 11 September 2009 - 'A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty eternally, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all.' It stars Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton, the aristocrat who corrupts Gray and one Ben Barnes as the beautiful Dorian doomed in the Faustian pact. Apparently it is being done as a horror flick. It has been filmed several times notably the 1945 movie with George Sanders as Wotton --a b/w fim that bursts into Technicolor whenever the portrait is shown in close-up (as I recall.)



VALUE? The book has made over £25000 in auction inscribed. In 2006 a copy inscribed to Lady Dorothy Nevill (Sotheby's, July 13) made £22,000 (then $40,480) without the premium. The book is in Stuart Mason's bibliography as item 328. This copy varied from Mason in that there was a full stop after Dorian in the title and there is no final blank. Possibly an early issue of the first issue or a one-off printer's error. Lady Dorothy Nevill (1826 - 1913) was something of a grande dame, friend of Whistler and Disraeli and as a horticulturalist she is known to have supplied Charles Darwin with rare plants for his researches. She wrote four books of her memoirs ('Under Five Reigns' etc.,) some of which are still asked for but none of which are valuable.

The 1891 signed issue of 250 copies seldom makes less than £5000 in auction and dealers tend to want in excess of £8000 for it, even rebound. The regular edition is hard to find for less than £1500 unless in lousy condition; it has shown up wearing a green oil cloth dust jacket which added much value. The Lippincott magazine edition although considerably shorter than the book can make over a £1000 if decent and nearly a $1000 if a bit shabby. We sold an embarasssingly bad one (all faults shown) on Ebay in 2006 for a gratifying $550. They may be cheapskates and bottom feeders over there, but they are at least tolerant of a book in shagged out condition. Wilde prices shot up noticeably in the late 1990s and have remained high and may have now levelled off. The new movie might bump start Oscar prices once more.

TRIVIA. In 1943 Ivan Albright was commissioned to create the title painting for Albert Lewin's film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray which came out in 1945. His realistic, but exaggerated, depictions of decay and corruption made him very well suited to undertake such a project. His brother was chosen to do the original uncorrupted painting of Gray, but the painting used on the film was from Henrique Medina. Ivan made the changes in the painting during the film. This original painting currently resides in the Art Institute of Chicago. (Thank you Wikipedia)

British smack pack novelist, the gifted and amusing Will Self, wrote a modern version recasting Dorian as a 1990s Zeitgeist figure -druggery, buggery, thuggery, cruelty, betrayal, disease and all the newer nastiness--the New Yorker said it was '...as if Nancy Mitford and Johnny Rotten had decided to collaborate.' Lord Henry, a deeply unpleasant cock, was said to be based on a London figure, probably less than happy in this role. The book was received glumly by most reviewers. The CD, read by Self himself, is very good for a longish car journey.

It is generally assumed that Oscar's Lord Henry was based on Lord Ronald Gower a sculptor and known homosexual of the time. He sued a paper that mentioned this and when the Prince of Wales sent him a letter accusing him of being "a member of an association for unnatural practices", Gower wrote an angry reply along the lines of 'How very dare you!' John Addington Symonds, who stayed with him once, stated that Gower "saturates ones spirit in Urningthum of the rankest most diabolical kind."

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892—27 September 1940) German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, philosopher, aesthetic and cultural critic, flaneur, luftmensch, dabbler in Qabbalistic mysteries, eater of hashish, modernist, Ur post modernist, Francophile, psycho-geographer, translator of Proust and Baudelaire, victim of the Nazis and general European brainbox, egghead, polymath, hero, lover and genius. He is enjoying a fruitful afterlife on the net and in bookshops. His 'Arcades Project' book is a very large unfinished collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, concerned with the iron-and-glass covered "arcades" (known in French as Passages). It has much on Baudelaire, Balzac,Poe, Saint-Simon, Hugo, Fourier, Marx and Engels, Gautier - also commerce, fashion, photograpy, the flaneur, prostitution and Haussmannization. A great work of scholarship and speculation - for dipping into rather than reading for hours on end, in my experience. He left this manuscript with Georges Bataille at the Bibliotheque Nationale when he fled Paris in 1940. He died in slightly mysterious circumstances, possibly suicide, on the Spanish border later that year. It is thought that he felt (with some justification) that the perfidious Spanish douaniers were about to hand him over to the Gestapo.

One passage interested me as I was looking at my paperback copy this morning -a piece about the general dealer Fremin:

'' " We have no speciality" - this what the well known dealer in secondhand good, Frémin, "the man with the head of gray," had written on the signboard advertising his wares in the Place des Abbesses. Here, in antique bric-a-brac, reemerges the the old physiognomy of trade that, in the first decades of the previous century, began to be supplanted by the rule of the specialité. The "superior scrap- yard" was called Au Philosophe by its proprietor. What a demonstration and demolition of stoicism! On his placard were the words: "Maidens do not dally under the leaves!" And: "Purchase nothing by moonlight!"'

That is all we get about this oddball trader Fremin, apart from Google Books citing this passage the web knows him not. Possibly there is more info on him buried in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where Benjamin researched the work. The lives of dealers generally go unrecorded apart from listings in directories and occasional mentions in newspaper, diaries and memoirs. Benjamin's father was a dealer in antiques in Berlin (at one time rich) and may have talked of Fremin. Pic of Palace des Abbesses below--now a very trendy area of Paris. As a generalist (albeit within the speciality of books) I salute him across the years. I used to see a notorious general dealer, possibly Irish, around at Phillips 2 when it was at Bayswater (occasionally accompanying Bob Geldof, then an antique dealer and known in the trade as 'dirty Bob' on account of his unkempt look). It was said that he would deal in absolutely anything and once bought 5000 tins of catfood as well as 500 cat books in the flat of a deceased catlady.

Collecting Benjamin? 'The Arcades Project' as a fine US first in hardback from 1999 can be had for $50 or less. Benjamin' s 1928 doctoral thesis 'Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels' (Origin of German Tragedy) published by Rowohlt can go for $1000 and a lot more in d/w. One dealer has his second publication from 1923 'Charles Baudelaire/Tableaux Parisiens', a rare 12 page book, said to be beautifully produced, at a gamey $6000, although it is 'as new.' A very nice find. He will, I hope, continue to be collected, read and savoured until Armageddon and beyond.

Colin Wilson. The Outsider, 1956

Colin Wilson. THE OUTSIDER. Gollancz, London 1956.

Current Selling Prices $200+/ £125+

MODERN FIRST EDITION / PHILOSOPHY
The key work of the Angry Young Men, a now slightly forgotten fifties movement akin to the Beats and preceding Hippies and Punks. The book is portentously subtitled 'An Enquiry into the Nature of the Sickness of Mankind in the Mid-Twentieth Century.' Colin Wilson, 'the Angries' best known advocate, is said to have slept rough on Hampstead Heath and written the book (age 24) in public libraries in a time of Existentialism, black polo necks, frothy coffee etc., He had been forced to quit school and go to work at 16, although his aim was to become "Einstein's successor." After a stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a laboratory assistant, but he was still in despair and decided to kill himself. On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an insight: there were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager and the other a thinking man, his real self. The idiot, he realized, would kill them both. "In that moment," he wrote, "I glimpsed the marvellous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons." The peak moment, as detailed by William James. This vision has never left him and can be seen throughout his work - many of his later works dwell on the occult. Eckhart Tolle had a very similar moment and went on to sales in the tens of millions.

We had a copy in 2000 described thus:

'8vo. Signed presentation copy to Stephen Spender:-’For Stephen, whose work was one of the main influences on forming the sensibility that produced this book, although it cannot be responsible for the mis-spellings and mis-quotations. With affection...’ A remarkable association copy of the author’s chef d’oeuvre. Top edge sl dusty, sp sl cocked else near fine in vg or better d/w, sl soiled and a little creased and frayed at top edges. £400.'

The book is now on the web at $6750 (£4800) in a nicer jacket--something of a 'dream on' price that may be achieved by, say, 2030. What I and subsequent cataloguers failed to play up was the association of one generational figurehead to another, the torch being handed on--rather as if Johnny Rotten had signed his seminal work 'No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs' to Donovan or possibly Wilde had inscribed 'Dorian Gray' to Walter Pater.

I console myself that my £400 re-invested in good books in 2000 and working on a 50% annual mark up (ie selling for £600 in 2001, reinvesting and selling for £900 in 2002 and so on) would now yield £10000. On this basis the buyer asking £4800 will, even if he sells the book in 2012 make a loss of £15000. Clive of Bohemia wrote a book on this kind of re-investment, the problem is finding (and being able to sell) the right books every time.

Another copy presented to no one in particular is much more overpriced at £2500, probably by a factor of 10, however it comes with 'provenance' something useful to have when re-selling on Ebay. Signed copies can be at £200 or less--even to recognisable names.

The UK first is basically a £100 book and twice that for limpid copies. The American first can make about $80 -which is the price a guy wants for one described thus: '...yellowed endpapers with tape ghosts. Otherwise, NOT price clipped, NOT BOMC, no underlinings or plates. About as close to fine as you can get for a 50-year-old book...' An interesting sales pitch making a virtue of things that the book is not, and clinching the deal with the deluded 'good for its age' ploy. Collectors in my experience make no allowance for age, especially a mere 50 years; age is hardly a factor until you go back to Victorian books (which can still show up 'as new.')

OUTLOOK? Wilson may possibly undergo a revival. He is now rather neglected--his works don't turn up in '1001 books you must read before death' and similar lists. He is not listed in price guides. He is still saleable but not really known to the current under 40s unless they are into the occult. He also wrote exceptional thrillers with Crowleyesque villains and even Science fiction and fantasy of a Lovecraftian / chthonic bent all of which has its collectors. One of his thrillers has a serial killer who leaves quotations from Blake on his victims--a Blake scholar solves the case. There is even a fanzine/ bulletin for his admirers. Meanwhile 'The Outsider' has stood still at the same price for a decade. Sell or hold but don't buy unless well cheap and in great condition.

Grossly Over Priced Web Operators / Rant du Jour

ENTER THE GOPWO
The overpricing of some books on internet malls is commonplace and almost to be expected. The initial reaction to those who complain is 'get over it...' However when overpricing is grossly high and when it is allied to a poor or catchall book description (or none at all) then you can enjoy some righteous indignation.

My father, who flew a bomber in WW2, used to utter a bit of old RAF slang when confronted with annoying bastards--he called them Gopwos - it stood for Grossly Over Promoted Warrant Officer -a sort of self important little man quite common in the services, possibly even a Widmerpool (but that's another story.) I have appropriated this term to describe very high chargers on the net -'Grossly Over Priced Web Operators.'

For example, recently I found a 20 page modern pamphlet called 'Fundamentals of Fiddle Teaching' by one Barbara Chipper (published Essex 1981). Someone has priced the book at £1247.90 ($1,838.28). It doesn't appear to be a mistake as they have many similar books at vertiginous prices. Until I put my copy up it is the only one on the net--this tends to leaves the seller full reign for their imagination and it is surprising that they stopped at a mere £1247. The clincher is the catchall description used by the seller for this and tens of thousands of their books:-

"No major defects: clean, complete, not falling apart; some light wear. A perfectly good reading or reference copy."

Not falling apart! --at this price one would expect Nigel Kennedy's own pristine copy with two 500 Euro notes laid in and a long letter to him from Yehudi Menuhin loosely inserted! It is hard to imagine a circumstance in which someone might pay this price--possibly if If Barbara Chipper was a preudonym used by Sylvia Plath when she wrote violin teaching manuals or possibly Jean Rhys (aka Barbara Chipper) taught the violin in old age or if Warren Buffet or George Soros or the Google twins had been taught by Ms Chipper and wanted a memento to cherish or maybe someone needed the book in a multi million dollar lawsuit to prove a point or a major rock star demanded a copy in his dressing room as part of his contract...actually there are many reasons but the odds of the book selling are, say, 10,000 to one. How to price my copy I am not sure, at £100 it still looks barmy and I may be accused of being a 'Gopwo.' Of interest in the book is a piece about the effects of taking Oxprenolol for stage fright--Ms Chipper advises against it.

The image above of the insouciant young woman standing on a bookpile, about to be arrested, comes from the Dutch blog
Occam's Razor. Many thanks. Occam's is possibly a neo-dadaist hangout --putting some Dutch words beneath the image through Babel it translated thus:-

ah, who sweet little girl that within a negligible number of year zo' n harry pot-delicate heart also without wand, however, break can and - for the fratsen of the boeboeks, there we it occur, and such as above the voordeur the gegrift stands ' everyone leest' , and as long as everyone reads that, is we glad, glad and joy-full. our actions do not go unnoticed. we do not work in ijle. not today, and also yesterday not!

Fairly typical Babel gobbledy gook or Stanley Unwin goes Dutch!

Is there anyone here who knows anything about books?

The above is from Helen E. Hopkinson's 'The Ladies God Bless 'Em!' (Dutton NY 1950) value probably less than twenty bucks. H.E.H. was a wonderful New Yorker cartoonist portraying privileged female life on The East Coast. The UK equivalent is probably Pont or Anton (although Anton has a crueller streak.) Many of Ms Hopkinson's cartoons involve a large lady, often in furs, asking infuriating question in shops (mostly about wine, hats, shoes or books.) At the box office of a theatre she earnestly inquires 'Just how funny is Milton Berle?' Like New Yorker cartoons today they raise a smile rather than a belly laugh. A glimpse into a vanished world.

Joseph Heller. Catch-22. 1961.

Joseph Heller. CATCH-22. Simon & Schuster, NY 1961.

Current Selling Prices
$2000+/ £1500+

MODERN FIRST EDITION
Yossarian has to be one of the greatest characters since Oblomov etc.. The book is on Anthony Burgess's list of 99 best modern novels, a more reliable list than Waterstone's or Richard and Judy. There is an issue point on the jacket, you want a price of $5.95 and definitely no blurbs on the back. Blurbs are useful for spotting reprint d/ws (e.g 'Dead Cert' by Dick Francis) but are not infallible, sometimes the book is sent out in proof and when praise is forthcoming blurbs are printed on the first state jacket (e.g. Spy Who Came in From the Cold.') Trivia-- book was originally Catch 18 but Leon Uris's Mila 18 came out and title had to be changed, J.H. based the plot on the Iliad with Achilles as the inspiration for Yossarian.

VALUE? Not especially scarce but fine/ fine copies seem to command close to $3000 and sometimes more for almost faultless copies. Not rare signed as Heller did many signings for later books, early 60s presentations are less common. The U.K first ed (1962) in its attractive green jacket used to be buyable for a few hundred quid but a respectable dealer (not one of the usual deranged overpricers) wants $4000 for a nice but not stunning copy. It would now be hard to find a limpid example for less than a £1000. There is a point on the green jacket --the first issue carries on the lower panel an excerpt from the book which was soon to be replaced by American reviews.



OUTLOOK. Book has risen in value over the last 18 months. It may now have levelled off and may dip slightly. A remake of the movie might help. Books whose titles have entered the language are generally a good bet. Imnsho one to hold.

Tales of the Uncollected...4

{a couple of years ago]...he began looking at Wants List on the net. This led to a notebook filled with scribblings on which books people around the world wanted. The opposite of sleepers, these are not necessarily rare books, but are useful. Pulling out the notebook he reads out a random selection of the entries.
'Here, for example, is Vic Hurley, Jungle Patrol, 1938. It's the story of the Philippine Constabulary. Twenty-five people want it. £100. Van de Elskin, Foto Jazz, 1959. It's just pictures of blokes playing jazz in cellars with groovy European girls looking on by the Dutch guy who did Love on the Left Bank. It's Juliette Greco, black polo-necks, etcetera. Goes for about $700 and 20 people want it. Jet Planes of the Third Reich, 1982. Fat book. Twenty-five want that. Susan Brookman, Ladies Man, Bantam. Many of these trashy romance novels go for piles of cash. Gerald Kersh, Jews Without Jehova. That was suppressed, I think. Julian Cope, Krautrock Sampler. All about Kraftwerk. A hundred quidder in paperback.
Here's a genuinely rare item. La Poupee by Hans Bellmer. There is a legend about that particular book. Apparently, there was a copy of it in a window of a shop in New York City for a whole year. A mate of mine went in and asked how much it was, to which the owner sardonically replied, "Fifty bucks," as if to say "F**k off, you can't afford it." So my friend said, "I'll have it." He went away with it under his arm and sold it for 20 grand.'
So far the name GA Marlowe and his remarkable novel I am Your Brother hasn't been mentioned. Having come across this book in Mclaren Ross's Memoirs of the Fourties, I had tracked down a copy in Cambridge University LIbrary and was actively looking for one myself. Fat chance. For obvious reasons, this weird mystery story written in a bizarre cinematic style had attracted a cult following and was near impossible to find at less than £300. Marlowe's shady background and mysterious disappearance added to the appeal. Burwood had written about Marlowe on his Bookride website and he now had goodish news.
'They're starting to gather on the web now. There are about five copies for sale. Marlowe's a bit like that author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre- B Traven. A slightly mysterious figure who disappeared suddenly, never to be seen again. Another who vanished in odd circumstances was the Dadaist Arthur Craven. He had just married the poet Mina Loy when he possibly drowned in South America. He edited a magazine called Maintenant, which is worth a lot of money today.'
But books can disappear too. Some were spirited away, usually burnt or otherwise destroyed by scandalised keepers of the public morals, but sometimes by authors who were ashamed to have written them. I have covered some of these examples in a previous article, but the subject continues to fascinate. Burwood recalls some cases that have caught his imagination.
'Gordon Bottomley- Gordon Bumley, as we call him- was one. He is, or was, a vaguely collected 90s figure and he tried to suppress his first book. Another is George Moore, who tried to destroy all copies of one of his books. Then there was Arthur Bryant, the celebrated popular historian. His Unfinished Victory of c1940, revealed distinct Nazi sympathies, that is to say, that Mr Hitler was not such a bad bloke and we should try to come to some accommodation with him. Well, the climate of opinion changed and Bryant tried to gather up all the remaining copies of his book. Consequently, the book is now scarce and a jacketed copy might fetch as much as £200. Anyway, Bryant's efforts succeeded and he became the most patriotic historian of his day.'

We are sitting in what he calls his internet room, but I detect a tinge of regret in his voice when he talks about the days before the net changed everything. But is it necessarily true? Surely, there are still bargains to be had. He doesn't think so, but he does feel that today rare items are more appreciated by their owners.
'The era of finding treasures for a few pounds is all over, but on the other hand the internet has bought books to the surface. You might actually get the book you want, even though you will have to pay more for it. In the old days you'd find, to take one example, The Gent From Bear Creek for a pound and you'd sell it for two grand. But this would only happen once in a decade. But thanks to the net, some of these elusive items are showing up.
'Because of this, some books are no longer considered rare. A good analogy is this. A friend collects pilgrim's badges. These are little items- usually made of lead- which mediaeval pilgrims picked up for a few pence as a souvenir of their pilgrimage to Walsingham or some other shrine. For centuries they were rare- until the invention of the metal detector. Now, they are comparatively common.
'I compare the internet to the metal detector. Due to changes in technology many rare books are no longer hard to find. Some of course remain determinedly elusive. You won't find copies of Bromo Bombastes every day, but others are more easy to find and the Henry Music anecdote proves that rare items can be brought to the surface thanks mainly to the net.' THE END.

Damien Hirst. I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere...1997

Damien Hirst. I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, 1997.

Current Selling Prices
$900+ /£500+


ARTIST'S BOOK
The last copy we sold was signed and we described it thus:

Large 4to. As new in publishers cloth in like dustjacket (taken out of the publishers shrink wrapping merely to check signature was present). Original faux leather boards embossed and gilt decorated. 334pp. Illustrated throughout in colour including 7 pop-ups, gatefolds, die cuts and other special features including ephemera laid in and poster at rear. SIGNED by Hirst; highly collectable in its signed form as Hirst (the Duchamp of our time?) has become unapproachable especially with a big book under your arm.

You really need brand new copies as the parts often fall out or quickly get defective. We sold another copy still in its shrink wrap with a 'signed' label -- some collectors prefer their books untouched and still sealed 'like a virgin' ( e.g. Madonna's Sex always worth more unopened.) The full compliment is 7 gatefolds, 23 die-cuts, 7 pop-ups, ephemera and other special features, plus one folded poster laid in. 'Extravagant' 'innovative' and 'provocative' are words frequently used around this book. I have heard it said that some books have different ephemera...

The Hirst industry started to get slightly silly last year. Below are the contents of a goody bag (aka 'doggie bag') given out at his 2007 party/preview ('Beyond Belief') at the Dorchester to launch his $100,000,000 diamond encrusted skull sculpture. Diamonds are a skull's best friend (tabloid headline.) One delaer wanted £700 for his night's haul, another a risible £375 for the chocolate skull covered in silver sparkle ('one of the few that got away uneaten.') The seller assures us that 'they taste terribly good.' At the Lyon and Turnbull sale of 27/9/08, the first of the sales of recent British art to significantly bomb, a goody bag and book were offered described thus:

GOODIE BAG + BOOK
Complete 'Goodie Bag' given out by Damien Hirst and White Cube at Hirst's 'Beyond Belief' exhibition. It contains a 'For the Love of God' T-Shirt, a Smythson customised leather skull note book, a CD of The Hours, a white chocolate and glitter skull sweet and five pairs of HoloSpex glasses to view the artist's diamond encrusted work - 'For the Love of God'. Sold with a signed and inscribed copy of Damien Hirst's book, 'The Death of God'.

They failed to reach a reserve of £600. The earlier £100,000,000 sale of Hirst art at Sotheby's also in September is now being seen as the apex of a market in swift decline, a sort of dead cat bounce deftly directed by Jopling and Hirst. Real artistry there.

OUTLOOK. Hirst is unlikely to suddenly implode, too many people are invested in him and he is still the greatest talent of the Brit Art crowd. Hard to buy a signed one at less than £1000. A copy at £1600 has been on the web now for 3 years. Prices will probably remain good for unmolested examples of the book. Even though the Gordon Burn essay is of a high order it is best to read it elsewhere or with great care. 'Goody bags' are best avoided -many major stars would not have been to a reception this century where there wasn't a goody bag and might require sessions of therapy if the goody bag wasn't good enough, as it were. I haven't heard of significant collectors of the items-- they may well be traded on Ebay?

A Lion Called Christian...

Anthony "Ace" Bourke and John Rendall. A LION CALLED CHRISTIAN. Collins, London / Doubleday NY 1971.

Current Selling Prices
$200-$600 /£140-£400

Slim book (94 pages) that was resuscitated by the amazing YouTube video of the author's moving reunion with the pet lion in the wilds after a long separation. An example of a book that was suddenly desirable because of a YouTube video. It appears in Bookfinder's list of the 10 most searched for books of 2008.

Back in Swinging London two groovy Aussies straight out of Austin Powers were living in Chelsea and decided to buy a lion cub at Harrods. They gave him the witty name of Christian and took him out to restaurants in the back of their Bentley. He never bit anybody--this was the era of peace and love. After a year, Christian had grown from 35 to 185 pounds and it was suggested by actors Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna that they take it to Kenya. They had just finished filming “Born Free,” the famous story of Elsa, a real lioness who was reintroduced to the wild. This was based on the Adamson's 1960 best seller (decent jacketed firsts £10). Soon Rendall, Bourke and Christian were all on a plane to Kenya, where they and George Adamson introduced Christian to his natural habitat.

When they knew Christian had a new family and a safe territory, they went back to Europe, but kept in touch with Adamson and made a few return visits to Kenya to see Christian in the wild.

Their first reunion was in early 1972, a year after Bourke and Rendall left Christian with Adamson. It is this event that is shown in the grainy colour film that has become such a sensation on YouTube. It shows the cat approaching the two men, cautiously at first. Then, as recognition begins to dawn, the lion picks up his pace and leaps into the arms of his old mates. We see two young guys in flared jeans and shaggy hair, and a very large lion. When he recognises them he hugs them and tumbles with them. It is very moving with an underlying feeling of possible danger. 6 million have watched it. Two other versions of the video on YouTube have drawn another 6 million hits combined. Inevitably a few people want the book.



VALUE? There are three copies on ABE at £105 (a very unpleasant ex lib reprint) £210 (a 'good' ex-lib - probably bad, an unqualified good usually means bad) and £380 (reasonable copy in chipped d/w). All seem too much for what they are, especially as the book is about to be reprinted and can be ordered at Amazon for March 2009 (pic below) at £6 -fully revised and updated by the authors. Prices tend to collapse on a reprint, e.g. an applied art book currently touted at £2K+ is about to be reprinted at £50. Caveat Emptor. Generally the new revised edition is preferred.

OUTLOOK? Choppy, uncertain and probably murky. A nice signed copy of the original is probably a good investment, as always avoid ex library copies. Check out the short video here.