ANY AMOUNT OF BOOKS, CHARING CROSS ROAD BOOKSHOP, Rare books, first editions, modern literature, art, poetry, scholarly/academic books, antiquarian, leather bound sets, general stock.
News & Trivia
(and links to other book-related sites)
If you would like to see past items from News & Trivia, go to The Archives.
Items include:At The Bookseller's
International Book Towns
Sitwell Parody By E.V. Knox
BILLIONAIRE BOOK COLLECTOR
Shakespeare - 'Dead White Male'
Further Startling Results From A Search Engine
Priceless Books In Hampstead
Having recently bought two good large collections of books in Hampstead, I 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 . . . Congreve's 'Incognita,' 1692 (one of three copies known), and his 'Impossible Thing, A Tale' (of which the only other recorded copy is in the British Museum), Pope's 'Dunciad,' 1728 (large paper copy of the first edition), . . . 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. I doubt whether Hampstead, one of the wealthier areas of London, can still provide books like these. But as Cadillac Jack would have it : 'Anything can be anywhere.'
AMAZING BOOK WANTS CATALOGUE FROM 1920
We recently found this closely written 24 page catalogue of 'books wanted' put out by London bookseller Walter C. Spencer in about 1920 (date taken from BM copy.) We are publishing it almost in its entirety (long lists of Scott, Ainsworth and Dickens have been abbreviated.) Some of the books are now impossible to find, a lot were very rare even then - especially anonymous pamphlets put out by the Romantics and items such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's impossible first book 'Battle of Marathon'. Spencer's list encapsulates bookseller wisdom of his age and rarities passed down from 19th century book sellers. These were the 'sexy' books of his day and some of them are still appearing on wants list, some no longer wanted or easily found (e.g. Charles Lever, Frank Smedley, Walter Scott.) I will add a few notes in but time forbids me from identifying every anonymous and pseudonymous item. Occasionally he offers money for a book and one can multiply that by about 100 to get his modern price. It is to be assumed with some books that they are there because a valued customer had asked for them. For more info on Spencer see our item above 'Priceless books in Hampstead'. For information about books wanted in 2007, see our blog, Bookride.
BOOKS AND PRINTS
SPECIALLY WANTED TO BE PURCHASED
- BY -
WALTER T. SPENCER,
27, NEW OXFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.
(Opposite Mudie's Library and near the British Museum).
Telephone No. 5847 Central. Telegraphic Address- "Phiz, London." Private Address- CULVER HOUSE, THE ESPLANADE, SHANKLIN, ISLE OF WIGHT.
Bankers - LONDON & COUNTY (New Oxford St. Branch).
Any Parcels of Books sent, I willingly pay carriage both ways, if we do not come to terms.
Cash always sent by Return Post. Established 1884
→ Shall be glad to hear of Imperfect Copies or Odd Vols of any Books or odd plates in this List.
Absurdities In Prose Verse, 1827
Account of New South Wales, 1804
-Any Books published by him, with coloured plates
Actors by Daylight, 1838-9, 55 Nos.
Actors by Gaslight, 1838, 37 Nos.
Adair (J.) History of American Indians, 1775
Adam (R. and J.) Works in Architecture, 3 vols, folio, 1778, &c.
Addison (J.) Damascus and Palymyra, 2 vols, 1838
A Day's Ride, second edition
A Declaration of the State of Virginia, 1620
A Dialogue in the Shades, 1766
Click for the complete pamphlet...
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.
The Rings of Baron Corvo
An intereresting side note on the appearance of the great cult writer can be found in the speech by C.H. Pirie - Gordon (co -author with Baron Corvo of 'The Weird of the Wanderer' by Prospero & Caliban). The speech was delivered at the first banquet of the Corvine Society in June 1929. Take it away, Caliban:
"His Archblessedness the Grand Master has referred to the Baron's subfuse( sic) and sometimes revolting vesture. I cherish happier memories of his sartorial appearance. While he was our guest, sometimes he appeared in the purple habit designed and devised by himself for the Order of Chivalry, of which we were both members, a habit sumptuous and amaranthine: at others, when dining with the doubtless bucolic society, which marvelled at his conversation and his lore, he would wear a dinner jacket of soft bluish-grey velveteen, with his clerical collar and silk stock, while on his fingers would appear one or more of the massive silver rings which he had designed for himself. These he kept, when not in use, in a box of powdered sulphur in order that they might constantly be black: two of these were the famous anti-Jesuit rings, to which he alludes in one of his stories. They were of immense thickness, and each was armed with a spur rowel, so set in the thickness of the ring as to be capable of revolving. He used to explain that if a man, wearing these, were to meet a Jesuit, he could dash one of them across the Jesuit's forehead, and escape while the holy man was blinded by his own blood pouring from the wound scored across his forehead. Another ring he had, which he gave to me, made of electron, which he explained as being an amalgam of gold and silver in equal parts. This was engraved with a Crow..."
The diners who throughout the meal had drunk larger and larger libations finally toasted the Baron in Corvo Gran Spumante and then "the meeting did not so much end as deliquesce..."
Found In 'Bayonets of Bastard Sheen' (1940's) by Amanda Ros
S Y N O N Y M S
Employed by
MRS. ROS
to Designate Critics
Apprentices to the scathing trade
Auctioneering agents of Satan
Brain-blighters
Brain-bruisers
Character-clipping-combination
Clay-crabs of corruption
Conglomeration of braying opinions
Cornerboy shadows of criticism
Critic cads
Critic Crabs
Critic Curs
Crowdrops
Crows
Denunciating Arabs
Drunken ignorant dross
Egotistical earth-worms
Egotistic atoms
Evil-minded snapshots of spleen
Gang of drunken swags
Gas-bag section
Genius-beetlers
Genius-scathers
Half-starved upstarts
Hogwashing hooligans
Intelligibles of bad-breedingMaggoty numskulls
Maggoty throng
Mushroom class of idiotics
Mushroom class of talent twisters
Poisonous apes
Poking hounds
Poor apes
Public character-tearers
Raging roughs
Random hacks of illiteration
Rodents of State
Scandalizers of books
Scandalmongering critics
Scathers of genius
Scathing circle
Scorchers of rare talent
Scribblers of thick witted type
Scurrilous scribes
Self-opinionated mortals
Starving critic cads
Street Arabs
Talent-pickers
Talent wipers of a wormy order
Tree of rebuffRave on, O rare Amanda!
Any Amount on The BBC!
This week (11/11/05) a reporter from the BBC world service ('Outlook') came by the shop to interview staff and customers about 'The Demise of the Second Hand Bookshop.' They made a very interesting programme interspersed with the obligatory quotes from Helen Hanff. There were interviews with American and European tourists as well as customers who come by almost every day. I think we managed to convince them that second hand bookshops still had plenty of life left in them!' You can listen to it below. It lasts about 10 minutes.
Click to download: BBC.mp3 (9.5 MB)
The Table Talk of T.S. Eliot
Eliot was at a smart dinner party of London intellectuals where the conversation was rather stilted because everybody felt they had to say something profound in front of the great man, who said very little. Eventually after an awkward silence the wife of an academic complained about her high electricity bills. The other guests were a little shocked that such trivial stuff was being discussed, however Eliot suddenly came to life. "Are you on the night tariff?" he asked the woman and proceeded to discourse knowledgeably about reducing household bills.
Another instance where Eliot succeeded in flummoxing high minded intellectuals was at the Wednesday Club in 1956 - the writer Paul Bloomfield reported the following. Asked for his favourite passage of English prose, the great poet at once replied, assisting his performance with the appropriate gestures:
'Well,' cried Boss McGinty at last, 'is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?'
'Yes,' McMurdo answered slowly, 'Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.'
After a bemused silence, in which none knew or, snobbishly, cared to admit the source, Eliot pleasantly revealed it: Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear.Any other instances of Eliot's table talk gratefully received.
'Oddballiana'
This covers a diverse group of writers. You could call them outsiders or marginals - even oddballs.
I'm thinking of Arthur Cravan, Amanda Ros, M.P. Shiel, Ronald Firbank, Montague Summers, Lautramont, Jacques Vach, Mary Butts, William Beckford, Robert Walser, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Natalie Clifford Barney, Lord Berners, Theodore Wratislaw, Edgar Saltus, Brian Howard, Count Stenbock, John Gawsworth. Some like Cravan, Vach and Howard are hard to collect (a few letters, periodicals, posters, etc.), some like Vernon Lee & Edgar Saltus are relatively easy. (Some of these authors are on our Wants List, many are mentioned at the rewarding Lost Club site.)
An obscure bunch you say? Well, I tested them on this here World Wide Web in the 1990s using Alta Vista (the scholar's friend). I was looking for web sites where these writers were mentioned. In 2004 I used Google -- the internet having grown many times since the halcyon 1990s.
Startling Results From A Search Engine
Results can be deceptive when searching the Web for authors. Of the 14000 (400 in 1997) or so sites that mention Cyril Connolly, 100s are there because he is featured in a Monty Python sketch (Fish License). With Amanda Ros (the 'so bad she's good' Irish writer) there are 88 sites some of them concern a woman of the same name involved in US politics; not the author of Delina Delaney. There is an Australian heart specialist called Ronald Firbank and a few Texan women named Mary Butts with home pages. Ms. Butts, the writer, owes her presence on the Web chiefly to her association with Aleister Crowley (the great beast gets 100,000 hits-the occult being very big on the web.)
Results can be gratifying. I just checked out Julian MacLaren Ross (fascinating forties writer and the original of Anthony Powell's X. Trapnel.). I came up with 570 Web sites, one showing that he wrote additional dialogue on the 1957 film "The Electronic Monster." Not a lot of people know that.
You get led down some very strange byways researching on the Web, but here goes with the results:
Author
January '97 April '98 July '04 Natalie Clifford Barney
20 220 2310 William Beckford
65 220 8230 Lord Berners
49 130 3160 Mary Butts
14 90 1900 Arthur Cravan
31 70 2450 Ronald Firbank
40 120 2130 John Gawsworth
18 90 1220 Comte de Lautréamont
700 1350 3600 Vernon Lee
12 580 750 Edgar Saltus
2 11 600 MP Shiel
14 70 4000 Count Stenbock
5 15 395 Montague Summers
81 285 5150 Jacques Vaché
22 70 290 Robert Walser
90 400 20,100 Theodore Wratislaw
2 5 250 NOTES. Brian Howard has been omitted due to a proliferation of similar names.
Samuel Beckett 187,000
Charles Dickens 600, 000
Stephen King - 1,300,000
William Shakespeare 2,000,000
Britney Spears 5,100, 000
Amand Ros now has her own website - a "shrine' called The Oasis of Futurity.Vernon Lee results are especially unsound because of the Vernon Lee district but there is surely no other Count Stenbock, M P Shiel or Theodore Wratislaw.
Google is very variable statistically and some sites have very little to do with the author or duplicate other sites. The biggest gainer in popularity has been the pale M.P. Shiel closely followed by crazyman Robert Walser, rich boy William Beckford, and musical millionaire Lord Berners.
JOAN BARTON. POET AND BOOKSELLER.
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, if she is still around she will be 95*. It's a goodish bet as book people can last practically forever - vide Andrew Block, Charles Traylen etc., 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 has reviewed for the New Statesman and has contributed poems to many magazines including WAVE. Early in her writing life she owed much to the encouragement of Walter de la Mare.
She published about 6 little collections of poetry some of which can be bought at abebooks.com, amongst them was the only poem of hers that I could find that referred to her work. 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.
*I heard from Mary Michaels in May 2004 with the sad news that Joan Barton had died in 1988. 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. It would also be good to hear from someone about Joan as a bookseller.
Minor Characters...
I am starting to add some minor characters to this site. They are generally people who are footnotes to literary history and are totally ignored on the miraculous web. You can't get much more minor than my first character--Alfred Charlemagne Lambart (1861-1943).
I am indebted to John Adlard's book "Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties" (Woolf 1969) for information on Lambart and any quotes emanate from him. Lambart was related to the Earls of Cavan and appears not to have followed any particular profession. He was "improvident, intelligent and amusing". Apparently he thought he was rather like Byron. He seems to have spent most of his time abroad, he had friends in the literary and artistic world and he knew Max Beerbohm who drew a caricature of him. This caricature can be seen in Hart-Davis's "Letters of Max Beerbohm to Reggie Turner" (1964--opposite page 284.) He was married twice and divorced twice. His second marriage, to Lady Mexborough "seems merely to have been for his own maintenance". It seems, in the end, that Lady Mexborough settled him in some comfort at her villa near Florence while she instituted costly divorce proceedings. It is known he was a friend of the decadent poet Count Eric Stenbock (1860-1895) who left him £200 in his will. I surmise, as they were both about the same age, that they were at Oxford together. However a preliminary search of Oxford records reveals no Lambart. Stenbock was up at Oxford in 1879 at the same time that Gerard Manley Hopkins was living there. Adlard says "we know that (Lambart) was a crony of Eric's only from Eric's will. He was a tireless correspondent and kept almost all his letters; but when he died his daughter burned the lot. It seems a very great pity."
One wonders why his letters were burnt, although it was and still is a not uncommon practice. His connection with the 1890s decadents may have been deemed shameful. Even when I was very young in the 1950s Oscar Wilde was spoken of in hushed tones. Any further information would be appreciated.
Dogs I Have Known
Slow-selling, common used books are often referred to (with a curse) as "dogs." The biggest dog in Britain has to be 'The Scallop' published in 1957 by Shell Oil Company. It is an attractive 4to book dealing with the iconography of the scallop and would be quite valuable if it were not so incredibly common. Copies were sent to every Shell shareholder and were (possibly) given out at petrol stations. A copy can be seen on our home page.
In England one can still come across shops with 5 or 6 copies. I have seen it priced anything from £1 to £15. Other unsaleable books include works by Thomas Armstrong, F. W. Bain, Ann Bridge, Thomas B. Costain, Galsworthy, Francis Parkinson Keyes, C. E. Montague, Walter H. Page, Cecil Roberts, H. M. Tomlinson, Morris West and Humbert Wolfe (although his 'Circular Saws' is always wanted as the d/w is by Evelyn Waugh).
Also worth avoiding are Donn Byrne, Lloyd C. Douglas, the American novelist Winston Churchill (not to be confused with the British Prime Minister), Howard Spring & Frank Yerby. In the USA, Rod McKuen heads the list, I am reliably informed.
Any information leading to the identification of slow-selling common books will be greatly appreciated. I would particularly like to find out about more recent 'dogs.'
Robert Hamer-Film Director/Poet
It is not generally known that Robert Hamer, the director of films such as 'Kind Hearts and Coronets,' 'The Long Memory' and 'Father Brown,' was also a poet. He was published in 'New Verse' and also while at Cambridge in 'Contemporaries And Their Maker' (along with the spy Donald MacLean). His poetry is very much of its time, but it has style and promise. This is not his best poem but the only one I can lay hands on at present. Hamer (1911-1963) was described by one earnest film guide as 'the greatest miscarriage of talent in the British Cinema.' He had, as they say, a problem with alcohol. However his films form a marvellous body of work, probably the greatest being the Kent based 'noir,' The Long Memory based on the novel by Howard Clewes.
Torch Song
The ring-fence aloofness
Of loved as loving richness,
Not designed for outside yes,
Admits no signal of distress;Does not with the bankrupt know
How the shut mouth's steady no
Is the trap's refusal also,
Which growth will not overthrow.The fence between here and here
Still separates mouth from ear
And good will cannot make clear
When hear is overhear.From being to much said,
From being too much read,
The usual words are dead
And buried in the head.While I try to draw the power
For an unconditional flower
From the synthetic our
Of a conversational hourAlways the dumb siege is stirred
By the mescal-eater's almost heard
Omnipotent transcendental word
To make why and because absurdTo build rhythms into one
To harness the latent sun
Plan out the work undone
Tell the blood how to run.p. 1934 Robert Hamer
Brian Howard
Brian Howard wrote very little. He seems to have burnt himself out quite early and is now remembered mainly for his influence on other writers. Waugh used him, more than once, as the basis of a character. Ambrose Silk in 'Put Out More Flags' and Anthony Blanche in 'Brideshead Revisited' are both based on him, the latter with an admixture of Harold Acton. Henry Green & Cyril Connolly also used him. Edith Sitwell published his earliest poem in "Wheels.' It is called 'Barouches Noires' and is under the pseudonym 'Charles Orange.' Howard was 16 and at Eton. His poem 'Nausea' was also published by A. R. Orage in 'New Age.' The only book on him is called 'Portrait of a Failure' edited by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, 1968.
I would like to post one of his poems on this site-not because he was a great poet, but because his poetry is almost unobtainable. I have never seen his poems anthologised and his one book('God Save The King') ww in editions of 150 in the early 30s by Nancy Cunard at her Hours Press in Paris. It is always £150 or more except for nasty copies. Take it away Brian Howard:
I remember I remember The light of lemons, a child's light
Open the history book in the silent north
and it shines like a child.And yet I see each bough's a finger
scratching the thin wind's skin
each finger has a nail, each knot of fingers
holds a small knife I used to know.Ah, the war in the south is ever hateful
the islands of light in the sky, travelling fast
and for me, whose big head's always cracked with thirst
my English house is a sweet glass of water.But must I always remember my soldier childhood
the knives in the trees?
Nore. 1929.
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