February 2 was the anniversary of James Joyce’s birth (in 1882). A recent talk about the design history of Ulysses reminded me of this seven-minute selection of Joyceans brandishing their copies of the novel (sorry: the novel, I guess, to them), compiled for its centenary. Here are plenty of copies in the great read-to-bits tradition – also a copy in which somebody’s highlighted the dirty bits in the Penelope episode.
My own copy is the Penguin paperback edition of 1969, bought some time ago for £3; perhaps disappointingly, it’s free of fervid annotations and the spine hasn’t been ripped apart in a frenzy of close reading. The same could be said of my copies of Joyce’s other books, I’m afraid, although I did only invest in the smart Faber edition of his Poems and Shorter Writings last year, and there are a few curios in there to which I’ve turned more than once, so . . . give me time.
ICYMI: The new Antiquates catalogue is all about the Distressed Mind. Justin Croft’s recent acquisitions include Maria Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life (1809), the Golden Cockerel Canterbury Tales (1929–31) and an “amulet against sorcery, plague and natural disasters”. Those who think they know their Romantic poetry will want to test their knowledge against Arthur Freeman’s new catalogue, Unusual Poetry in English of the Romantic Era (I readily confess to having no idea about the existence of works such as The Splendid Village, The Eo-Nauts, or the Spirit of Delusion and Prison Pindarics).
Around 1930 the young A. N. L. Munby (who was to become one of the world’s outstanding bookmen) met Sir Thomas Phillipps (who had been one of world’s most infamous bibliomaniacs).
Not that Munby and Phillipps met in person: the latter, born in 1792, had died in 1872. Much more appropriately, the two men met through Phillipps’s library. It was a fateful encounter.
Munby and his father were staying at Cheltenham when they made the acquaintance of a “handsome old gentleman” called Thomas Fitzroy Fenwick. This was Sir Thomas Phillipps’s grandson. Munby senior, a scientist and architect, visited Fenwick at his home, Thirlestaine House, and returned enthusing about its “vast library infested by some of the most interesting dry-rot he had ever seen”. Munby junior, as a budding book-collector, was allowed to visit in turn. He didn’t see the library itself; instead, his host had some choice items brought to the drawing room:
He rang the bell and the butler carried in two trays laden with manuscripts, which he placed before us. “The ninth-century Bede, sir,” he said, handing a book to Mr. Fenwick, who explained to me about its script and decoration. In the course of an hour I handled a score of manuscripts from the ninth to the sixteenth century, many of them of the highest quality . . . I left in a kind of trance, bemused by the splendour of it all. So this, I thought, is what book-collecting is really like.1
Or rather, as Munby would later establish, it’s what book-collecting is really like if you’re filthy rich, foul-tempered and incapable of focusing on anything else. And Phillipps hadn’t just owned a score of manuscripts; he’d accumulated possibly 60,000 of them “and nearly as many printed books”. It was “more than double the size”, the librarian Henry Bradshaw noted in 1869, “of the whole of our Cambridge University and College collections of MSS put together”.
A collector from his youth, he had been let loose on the world with a fortune of at least £6,000 per year, derived from his Mancunian father’s calico-printing business. Over five decades, he proceeded to buy an average of “about twenty manuscripts and twenty printed books each week”. The aim, although the ODNB takes this to be a joke, was simple. “I am buying Printed Books”, Phillipps told Robert Curzon, “because I wish to have one copy of every Book in the World!!!!!”
Luckily for him, Phillipps had come into his inheritance at just the right moment to take advantage of the vast dispersal of books and manuscripts that took place in the wake of the French Revolution (but after the price-inflating boom of the early 1800s). He spent extravagantly, forcing him to borrow, and acquired an international reputation for his activities. He wasn’t alone in suffering from a mania for the acquisition and preservation of old books and vellum manuscripts (far from it). To many, there was an “aura of romance” about such materials, with their origins in barbarous days of yore. Dubbing himself a “Vello-maniac”, Phillipps seized on all the manuscripts he could, acted as his own librarian, and made his collection available to (certain) scholars for scrutiny (when he could locate what they were looking for); he also printed his own catalogues and transcriptions, with decidedly mixed success (and at the cost of much bickering with a series of hapless printers). This was an “all-consuming” passion for books, but also a decidedly belligerent one.
It was Munby who traced the course of this extraordinary “career” in collecting, devoting several years to the study of Phillipps’s voluminous papers after they were removed from Thirlestaine House. The result was Phillipps Studies, a landmark achievement in the history of bibliography.2
Phillipps Studies shows how the collection evolved. Progress was continuous but uneven, it seems. A printed catalogue shows that he had, by 1819, accrued a library of 2,894 volumes (including only fifty-four manuscripts). But then there were some dramatic leaps forward. In 1836, for example, he bought up the entire stock of manuscripts from one prominent bookseller, Thomas Thorpe, for £6,000, “on condition that Thorpe did not oppose him at the Heber sale”. (Richard Heber being another extraordinary bibliomaniac, whose library took 216 days to be sold at auction; via one of Thorpe’s competitors, Phillipps purchased 428 of Heber’s manuscripts for a total of £2,500.) Dealers, librarians, fellow collectors: all were to be treated with high-handed hostility.
When Phillipps lived at Middle Hill, a house at Broadway in Worcestershire, sixteen out of the twenty rooms had to be given over by his collection; his wife, Henrietta, and three daughters were confined to the remaining four. The relocation to Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham, over a period of some eight months in 1863, derived from both the practical need for more shelf-space and a characteristic display of blood-mindedness.
Henrietta died in 1832, and he remarried ten years later. “As the companion of his later years”, Alan Bell writes in Phillipps’s ODNB entry, Elizabeth “showed (and needed) great forbearance in the face of his increasing eccentricity.”3 Although Phillipps could, no doubt, have afforded to stay put in Middle Hill and extend the building itself, something else happened in 1842 to increase the need for forbearance: his eldest daughter eloped with James Orchard Halliwell, the precocious Cambridge man whose antiquarian work Phillipps had formerly admired.
Depending on which account you choose to believe (or emphasize), their friendship was terminated by either Halliwell’s lack of a dowry to offer Phillipps’s daughter or allegations that he had stolen manuscripts from Trinity College. It was, in any case, irrevocably broken. And while Phillipps could not stop the scholar-scoundrel Halliwell inheriting Middle Hill, he could leave for Thirlestaine and take his precious collection with him. Moving all of the books and manuscripts took two years to complete. Phillipps was sure, in the meantime, to let his old home fall into as advanced a state of dilapidation as possible.
In that niggardly same spirit (Munby writes),
[Phillipps’s] outbidding of the British Museum and the Bodleian for items which they particularly coveted was much resented. He would never stand down in favour of a public institution, nor would he relinquish any volume which found its way into his clutches. Even when a manuscript, purchased by the British Museum at a sale, was despatched to him by accident, he resolutely refused to restore it to its legal owner.
Efforts were made to see the Phillipps collection of books and manuscripts bestowed on some suitable institution, but they “foundered on the sharp rock of the owner’s personality”, as Munby drily puts it. No deal could be cut that was acceptable to the collection’s irascible owner and Thirlestaine kept it, to be inherited by Phillipps’s youngest daughter, with various conditions about their use, at least until, long after his death, it was finally sold off.4
Sir Thomas Phillipps achieved something unprecedented, but was also (quite rightly, it seems) reviled and ridiculed. In A. N. L. Munby, he found a generous yet clear-sighted biographer and bibliographer, who saw his subject’s follies but also his accomplishments. Thanks to Munby, there is much more of the story to tell; this abridged version of it is, in part, prompted by my remembering visiting Broadway a while ago.
There I found that the small, pleasant museum concentrates on the history of the village for its coaching inns and visiting writers and artists (Lawrence Alma-Tadema, J. M. Barrie). But Phillipps? Not so much. You have to go up Broadway Tower, where he established his printing press, to get a tenuous glimpse of his world.
Middle Hill still stands, I believe, and remains in private hands. Thirlestaine House became part of Cheltenham College almost eighty years ago.
And those books and manuscripts have been scattered to their new homes, never to be reunited again . . .
Most of the facts, figures and quotations in this newsletter come from the useful summary supplied by Munby in a lecture given to the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association in the early 1950s; see Books and the Man (London: W. M. Dawson, 1953), 1–12. I’ve also incorporated a little information from Alan Bell, “Phillipps, Sir Thomas, baronet” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
A. N. L. Munby, Phillipps Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–60). Nicolas Barker then supplied a handy abridgement in the form of Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the world’s greatest book collector (London: Constable, 1967). Covering everything from Phillipps’s catalogues, family affairs, library formation and library dispersal, Munby only neglected to say much about how the Phillipps books and manuscripts were finally removed to London, in 1946. For an evocative account of this challenging task, see Philip Robinson, “Recollections of Moving a Library: or, How the Phillipps Collection was brought to London”, Book Collector (Winter 1986, vol. 35 no. 4), 431–442.
I can’t help it. There are still times when I try to introduce something like a sense of order to my bookshelves. Now the latest attempt has taken place, an impetuously undertaken chore among other chores; and in retrospect, I can see that it’s been yet another inglorious failure. Truly, the masterstroke of a simpleton.
I’m talking here about poetry pamphlets. (Or chapbooks? Call them chapbooks, if you prefer. I like both.) See above. I’m talking about the bookseller Simon Beattie’s translation of Gottfried Benn (still available from Beattie’s website, I see), as well as Stuart Calton’s sequence of forty-five itching, glitching quatrains (London: Barque Press, 2004) and Anne Carson’s paragraphs inspired by Marcel Proust (New York: New Directions, 2014).
I don’t possess anything like an exceptional collection of chapbooks. They’ve certainly accrued around me over the years, though, one way or another. Among the slim volumes on the shelf, they are the slimmer volumes that subvert the steady monotony of printed spines, stapled or stab-stitched, sometimes only a few pages long, sometimes making themselves known as nothing more than a colourful straight rule between their more ostentatious neighbours. But now I don’t know if this is the best arrangement or the way to guarantee losing track of the blighters completely.
Either way, all I meant to do was glance idly through one or two of them. But then I started taking the pamphlets off the shelves, just to confirm, more or less, what was there. But also: partly in the belief that they’d be better protected in a box or two of their own. A shoebox or two, maybe. At some point, this idea became more attractive than the prospect of filing them away again in their former locations.
Here are several of them, together with a few quotations and annotations, in the spirit of celebrating this small wonder of a format . . .
Rachel Curzon’s pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series (London: Faber, 2016); Will Eaves’s Small Hours (Brockwell Press, 2006); and T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (London: Faber, 1941), a third impression, a present from an English teacher and therefore a reminder of dim, early efforts to follow the echoes inhabiting the garden, etc. If I understand the chronology, this first of Eliot’s Four Quartets had already appeared in print before the Second World War, in Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936). But it was reissued separately, and both East Coker and The Dry Salvages were in print by the time this third impression of Burnt Norton was issued.
Festival Nights by Gavin Ewart (Leamington Spa: The Other Branch Readings, 1984), signed by the poet, characteristically rollicking stuff; The Angelsey Leg by Jo Field (Glenrothes: Happenstance, 2015), published to coincide with the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo (the limb in question being that of Henry William Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, who lost it while commanding the cavalry); and Ex Officio by Duncan Forbes (Hitchin: Cellar Press, 1973), an accomplished early poem by another former teacher.
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and other poems was first published in October 1956; I believe a signed first edition could set you back £12,500. I’d be surprised if my scuffed eighth printing (San Francisco: City Lights Books, September 1959) cost me more than a few quid. It’s been hanging around for a long time, to no great purpose. Also pictured: One man two women by Giles Gordon (London: Sheep Press, 1974), a sequence of thirteen poems that came with a short letter from Gordon to a friend (“Could you manage Wed, if you’d like to see A Finney in Sergeant Musgrave?”); and The High Tower by Frances Horovitz (London: New Departures, 1970), an elegant marred only by a fantastically clumsy ownership signature opposite the title page.
Late in a garden I turn each page.
The day’s evening waits in the wings
old words singing by heart almost
till I reach that roll-call in parenthesis:
(Enter . . . Cobweb, Moth, Mustard Seed).
(Angela Leighton, “Humming-Bird Hawk Moth”)
Here are three examples of pamphlets from presses doing interesting things, I reckon, in different ways: Sex 2 by Camille Kingué (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2024); Five Poems by Angela Leighton (Thame: Clutag Press, 2018); and Words and Music by Andrew McCulloch (London: Melos Press, 2023). Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls emphasizes “appropriative and procedural writing processes”. Andrew McNeillie’s Clutag aspires to “high but not precious production values”, and celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. William Palmer’s Melos has published six McCulloch titles, of which this is the most recent.
A Cézanne Haibun by Maitreyabandhu (Sheffield: Smith Doorstop, 2019), to which I was led by the aforementioned author of Small Hours; The Column Inches by Tim Wells (London: Tangerine Press, 2014), consisting of three wry poems in commemoration of “Britain’s legendary sex goddess” Mary Millington; and At Raucous Purposeful by J. H. Prynne (Talgarreg: Broken Sleep Books, 2022). The most beautifully printed of this trio is the Wells, a classic Tangerine product. The other two are serviceable if not beautiful.
*
ICYMI: Any Amount of Books is looking for a deputy manager. Also a part-time bookseller. Further evidence of the long-standing British obsession with the Classics may be found here. A mere $3,500 would buy you the copy of Edith Wharton’s Artemis to Actaeon and other verse (New York: Scribner’s, 1909) that Wharton inscribed for Frances E. Thayer, the woman who “almost certainly” typed up the book for her.
Fire engines at the Los Angeles Central Library fire, 1986
A grim side note to the news: when the Getty Center opened in Los Angeles in December 1997, it held an exhibition about fireworks; a complementary book duly appeared (Incendiary Art: The presentation of fireworks in early modern Europe by Kevin Salatino); but no actual fireworks were set off to mark the occasion. I don’t suppose anybody paying attention to current events – or familiar with the seasonal dangers to which LA is prey – would be surprised to hear that.
Nervous questions are being asked about how safe a repository the Getty really is for its unique collection of artworks, although reassuring noises have been made about its state-of-the-art fire defences. In San Marino, meanwhile, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, where there was a small fire caused by a defective light fixture some years ago, has lost a few trees and is closed at the time of writing, but is planning to reopen soon. “Our HVAC systems continue to maintain safe collection storage environments, including the filtering of outside air.”
Not so fortunate was the Palisades Public Library, which burnt to the ground last week. “One more devastating loss for the inhabitants [of this neighbourhood] to come home to”, as somebody remarked on Instagram, “whether their individual homes survived or not.” Likewise, Catherine Kanner of the Melville Press, which produces illustrated fine press limited editions, has lost both her home and “the vast majority of her inventory” to the Pacific Palisades fire. Contributions are sought to support her and enable the reprinting of her latest title, a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
And then, as Colm Tóibín wrote in the London Review of Books, there’s Gary Indiana’s personal library – a collection of books that had stood “three-deep on his shelves” in his East Village apartment. Indiana’s books had the terrible misfortune to arrive at their new home in Altadena just as the winds were rising:
If they – the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured – had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday . . . there was still an address.
It takes a lot to keep books safe. Not only investment and technical know-how, that is: sheer good luck plays its part, too.
(A side note to this side note: the Los Angeles Central Library was well prepared when what seems to have been an incendiary fire broke out on an April morning in 1986. Everyone was out in five minutes; the firefights arrived in another five; the only casualty was someone who tripped over a hose; and although 400,000 volumes were destroyed, “out of over 1.2 million books that were in the library at the time of the fire, only 350,000 received any fire or water damage”.)
The destruction of books probably isn’t the first thing on everyone’s mind in LA right now. While writing this, I’ve learnt that the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, due to take place in early February, has been cancelled: FEMA and the Red Cross have taken over the Pasadena Convention Center in order to evacuate those displaced by the fires, for the coming month.
Under the circumstances, that some books have survived at all seems remarkable. The century-old Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center burnt down; but its thirteen Torahs were rescued, including one “a Sephardic scroll, heavier than the rest, encased in silver etched with the patterns of a long-lost homeland . . . donated by a congregant who [had] fled Iran”. Elsewhere in Pasadena, a rabbi revisiting the rubble of his home apparently has found, of all things, his copy of Sacred Fire (“a collection of essays on the Torah and Jewish holidays by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Grand Rebbe of Piaseczno in Poland”) intact, “in perfect condition” on a pile of ash.
In a similar vein, the BBC has photographs of a woman who returned to her home and found the singed fragment of a page from one of her books. “Whither the Future?”, it reads, above a section on “personal goals”. (She’s standing in the midst of the wreckage of her “dream home”.) “I read a lot of books on self growth and empowerment”, she explains. “This must be a divine message for me to keep going.”
Book destruction has a long history; all too much of it deliberate. Accidental fires are bad enough – one at Sotheby’s, in 1865, obliterated most of the 17,000 annotated (and uninsured) volumes from Alexander Humboldt’s library. When the Turks ransacked the Hungarian royal palace in Buda in 1526, after the victory of Suleiman the Magnificent at the Battle of Mohács, they destroyed and dispersed what had been the “second largest library in Christendom”. In England in the sixteenth century, the Reformation did something comparable to the country’s monastic collections, severing a vital link with the past: “A mid-fourteenth-century archidiaconal survey of the 350 or more churches in the Archdeaconry of Norwich shows them to have had a total of about 4,000 books; not a single one is known to be extant”.
I’m quoting here from essays in Lost Libraries: The destruction of great book collections since Antiquity, edited by James Raven (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). But other books about book destruction are available – see Fahrenheit 451 (1953), by that devout Angeleno Ray Bradbury, for a dystopian-fictional example, or Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary, edited by Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (also Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), for further essays. It would be quite possible to make a gruesome collection of volumes about this unfortunate aspect of bibliography.
Such a collection would have to make room for another, more ambiguous outbreak of fiction, besides Bradbury’s: “The Comte de Marnay”, a short story about a pyrrhic victory by the eminent bookman A. N. L. Munby.
(Do not read on if you resent a spoiler! But do if you don’t mind one by way of a taster/my means of recommending Munby’s recherché fiction.)
Munby’s story tells of a Parisian collector who manages to build up a library that “far surpassed that of many a wealthier collector”. He privately prints a catalogue, and is flattered into presenting a copy to a “young German librarian”, Herr Hofmann, who visits him in the autumn of 1936. He even inscribes the catalogue for his guest: “In remembrance of a pleasant visit from M. Hofmann – an ambassador who does much to dispel the misunderstandings which have existed between our two countries”.
Perhaps you can guess what’s coming next.
The war brings the smug Hofmann back to the Count’s door, this time accompanied by a German army officer. De Marnay’s library is to be “removed to Berlin and housed in the Preussische Staatsbibliothek . . . And if it should occur to you to mislay any of the choicer items, you will perhaps recall that I have a catalogue of it”. The Count considers his situation and decides to act:
A little past midnight a passing police officer noticed smoke pouring from one of the first floor windows. The street door was locked, the concierge away, and there was some delay in forcing an entry. By the time it was effected the upper part of the house was well ablaze and the fire brigade concentrated its energies upon saving the ground floor and the surrounding buildings. By dawn the fire was under control, by midday it was possible to place fire escapes against the gaping windows of the gutted first floor. Herr Hofmann, who had been on the scene since ten o’clock, insisted upon mounting, and he peered into the smouldering ruin within. The floor, which was of stone, had survived, but part of the roof had fallen in, and the chaos was indescribable. He could see enough, however, to be certain that the Count had perished with his library. The little the fire had spared was irretrievably ruined by water. The blackened remnants of manuscripts lay still smoking on the floor, unconsumed fragments lay blistered and scorched, or fantastically warped and crinkled by the firemen’s hoses.
The thwarted Hofmann is left to contemplate writing a report to his superiors. “As they were intolerant of failure, it would require careful drafting.”
ICYMI: On February 4 Pierre Delsaerdt happens to be giving a paper about “book seizures in Belgium and the Netherlands and on the Left Bank of the Rhine during the French Occupation, 1794–1795”. A dose of confiscation to go with the book destruction . . .
As every Janeite knows: the author of Pride and Prejudice was born on December 16, 1775; and so this year marks the 250th anniversary of her birth.
I’m taking that anniversary as an excuse to embark on an overdue re-reading of the novels, tackling them in leisurely fashion (or at least that’s the idea) over the course of the coming year. Six novels, published over a mere six years, from Sense and Sensibility in 1811 to the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which appeared together in 1817 . . . meanwhile, in contrast to Austen’s artistic ingenuity, glancing through my copy of Persuasion, I see that some of my teenage notes (“Objective correlative”, “time + past”) are going to prove galling entertainment in themselves.
Fame and acclaim were not always Austen’s lot. In contrast to the modern age of screen adaptations, tourist traps and tea towels, her books sold unevenly during her own lifetime. Pride and Prejudice was enough of a fashionable hit to require a new edition in its first year of publication (1813). By contrast, John Murray printed 2,000 copies of Emma in 1815 but had to remainder just over a quarter of them five years later. And although Emma was published in the US in 1816, and a few French translations appeared in Austen’s lifetime (starting with Raison et Sensibilité, 1815), serious international popularity would only come along much later.
This makes for an interesting publication history, to say the least – and I confess that the proverbial lottery win would probably send me off in pursuit of some of the more notable old editions of Austen’s works. (To read by the pool, of course.) There’s no shortage of decent options on the market at the moment – this “stunning box set” (£400), say, or this illustrated pocket edition of the 1900s (£1,250). Not forgetting the first edition of Sense and Sensibility in one volume (London: Richard Bentley, 1833; £3,500), the third overall; or the first edition of Pride and Prejudice in three volumes (London: T. Egerton, 1813; $175,000).
It seems that Austen prices haven’t exactly dropped in recent years. In December 2022, the BBC reported, five first editions of Austen’s novels sold at auction for just over £181,000; half of that total went on the copy of Pride and Prejudice, which sold for £92,000. (The least expensive, on this showing, was the combined first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which sold for £6,400.) These copies’ previous owners had bought them for £5,000 or so, during the 1970s and 80s – ie, even adjusted for inflation, a fraction of the sum realized.
A year later, Austen’s own copy of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1791) went under the hammer at Sotheby’s; signed by her on the title page, and sparsely underlined in pencil, it sold for $215,900. The estimate had been $100,000–150,000.
Maybe these are exceptional cases. But they are still a far cry from the situation in the 1930s, when Virginia Woolf bought the five volumes of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso from Austen’s library for 15 shillings (c. £45 in today’s terms), as a Christmas gift for John Maynard Keynes. Woolf inscribed it for the recipient on the flyleaf (its previous owner’s name being inscribed on the facing page). Keynes eventually donated the book to King’s College, Cambridge (which has both a substantial Austen collection and a prior Austen family connection).
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Boston: Limited Editions Club, 1940; illustrated by Helen Sewell)
Building an Austen collection could be less challenging, however, than the headline-grabbing items of the past few years might suggest. For those who can afford it, there are nineteenth-century editions of the novels that sell for smaller sums (think three to five figures rather than six); and those of us who can’t might console themselves with related lines of pursuit, such as the tradition of Austen sequels and spin-offs that may be traced back to the continuations of her work by two of her nieces. (Only one was published: The Younger Sister by Catherine Hubback, 1850, based on The Watsons. The other was an earlier attempt to complete Sanditon, by Anna Austen Lefroy.) Or rather than shunning the egregious film tie-ins, how about chasing them up?
Pride and Prejudice again (London: Collins Clear-Type, c. 1940)
Another possibility: Valancourt Books has reissued the “horrid novels” celebrated in Northanger Abbey – The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons, The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom etc – but it’d be interesting to fossick for their earlier incarnations. The first edition of one of these Gothic shockers, The Necromancer, sold at auction last year for £12,500.
Money – that all too Austenian subject – isn’t everything. A recent interview with a young collector of editions of Pride and Prejudice, Vera Jiā Xī Mancini, reveals a wholly different approach to building an Austen collection:
My most extensive collection consists of copies of Pride and Prejudiceby Jane Austen in various languages worldwide. However, I only collect copies from friends and family who bought the book while in the country whose language the book is in. I do not purchase copies online, as that defeats the purpose of the collection, which tells many stories of international travel and relationships.
This may be a collection that, as yet, only numbers thirteen books from twelve different countries, but isn’t there something admirable in its emphasis on sociability and forging connections across language barriers? One of those thirteen books is an Arabic edition from Cairo:
When I was fifteen, my father went to Cairo, Egypt, on a trip sponsored by the State Department with an NGO called Hands Across Egypt to give talks and educate people about working with differently-abled people. While there, he met with a young woman at a university who mentioned she was attending a book fair later that day. He told her about me and my growing love for literature, and she told him she shared my passion for Pride and Prejudice. She helped him get me a copy in Arabic from the local book fair. I love the artwork of this copy, with a hand-painted artistic style and the interpretation of Elizabeth Bennett as a woman with darker skin of Southwest Asian or North African descent with clothes resembling styles of the earlier half of the twentieth century. I feel connected with the young woman my father worked with, this depiction of Elizabeth Bennett, and this specific book in a unique way that I cannot fully articulate.
ICYMI: The sociologist Paul Gilroy has donated several hundred books to the radical bookseller Housmans near King’s Cross; the books go on sale on January 18 and “As with all our booksales we try to keep prices as low as possible with nothing over £5”. Elsewhere, Peter Harrington’s January sale is quite a sight. But it only lasts until January 13 . . .
