The original twerp

And the scarce Gruffalo, the unobtainable Graham Greene and the spinning Dylan Thomas

The rear cover of The New Woman with some fellow travellers and a few antagonists, Maggs catalogue 1517 (2022)

It sounds unlikely, I guess, but booksellers’ catalogues can make for good reading.

Not all of them – no, far from it. Some compilers of these basic tools of the book-selling trade just helpfully list their latest wares in the time-honoured, dry fashion; and if their subject is your subject, that may be enough to make them compelling. “New York, 1944. First American Edition. Fine copy in dust-wrapper.” That’ll be £15, please.¹ This approach seems in keeping with a preference for terseness that goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their catalogues for book auctions that have long frustrated researchers.²

Other compilers like to stretch the conventions of descriptive bibliography, introduce a good anecdote etc. (Let’s hear it for the bookseller as frustrated raconteur/stand-up comic.) Including generous descriptions of books or collections is sometimes enough to make a catalogue stand out: a story of sorts emerges, or a portrait of a particular place and time, particular minds at work, particular bookish tendencies.

Published this month, Richard C. Ramer’s “special list” of just ten works by António Botto (1897–1959), “the first openly homosexual Portuguese writer”, might count as an brief example of biblio-portraiture. One of those works is the second edition of Botto’s Canções (Lisbon: Olisipo, 1922; $1,000), a work that was apparently attacked and suppressed, but notably defended by Fernando Pessoa. Nine of these ten items are distinctively inscribed by Botto to his fellow writer (and “passionate bibliophile”) Albino Forjaz de Sampaio (1884–1949), whose Palavras Cinicas was arguably “the greatest bestseller in twentieth-century Portugal, with 46 editions by the time of his death”.

From a new catalogue from Jonkers, meanwhile, I learnt that Graham Greene’s unsuccessful third novel, Rumour at Nightfall (London: Heinemann, 1931), is “almost unobtainable” in its first edition and dust-wrapper (Jonkers is offering a copy for £37,500) and that you shouldn’t expect to see it reissued any time soon: “So disgusted was Greene with the work, he forbad its reprinting, a prohibition now laid upon his estate meaning that the book cannot be reissued until 2061”. Another Jonkers catalogue about children’s books may give hope to anyone who happens to have a first edition of The Gruffalo (London: Macmillan, 1999) knocking around: Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s famous best-seller might have sold over 13 million copies worldwide but the first edition is now “the scarcest and most keenly sought of all modern children’s literature”. Why it has become so rare is “hard to fathom”. Jonkers was asking £15,000 for a copy that has now sold.

If nothing else, such reflections on some books’ scarcity may help to explain their prices, as above. For a different kind of information, though, I’ve been enjoying catching up with the most recent catalogues issued by Paul Rassam, who specializes in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. In these picture-free compilations may be found delights such as an invitation card for Gertrude Stein’s address to a literary society at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1926 (£300); Stein’s talk was described by one entranced eyewitness as “his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason”.³ After that comes the copy of Lucky Jim (London: Gollancz, 1953; £2,500) that once belonged to Kingsley Amis’s model for Jim Dixon’s on-off girlfriend Margaret Peel: Monica Jones, the girlfriend of his old pal Philip Larkin. The neat Rassam summary tells of Larkin’s attempts to moderate Amis’s “unsparingly recognisable” portrayal and Jones’s 2,000-word reaction (“Some of it is very funny”), supposedly written in an alcoholic rage.

There is always plenty of literary rage to go round, to which the innocent-looking volumes that once sat on writers’ shelves bear witness. That same Rassam catalogue closes with Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate Country (New York: Doubleday, 1946; £350); only this is Raymond Chandler’s copy. Wilson had notoriously gone for Chandler in his essay “Why Do People Read Detective Stories” (in the New Yorker, January 1945), praising Farewell, My Lovely but judging the author to be “a long way below Graham Greene”, and guilty of writing a poor denouement (“one cannot help feeling cheated”). Chandler had motive and opportunity to make some vengeful comments when he read Memoirs of Hecate Country: he told his editor that its indecency lacked passion, likening it to “a phallus made of dough”. “His careful and pedestrian book reviews misguide one into thinking there is something in his head besides mucilage”, he wrote of Wilson. “There isn’t.” A later letter refers bitterly to “fat bores like Edmund Wilson” and a book called “Chronicles of Hecate Country” that has made fornication “as dull as a railway time table”.

Not all Rassam comments on his stock are long or concerned with scurrility. But they have character, all right. And they are often about characters, such as T. W. Earp, the author of The Gate of Bronze (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1917; £350):

The rare first book by an almost ubiquitous figure of the period, whose friends included Nancy Cunard, Nina Hamnett, Aldous Huxley, Augustus John, and Wyndham Lewis, who drew his portrait for Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait. “He had wonderful hair”, remembered Hamnett in Laughing Torso, “which sometimes he allowed us to stroke. It grew straight up like grass and felt like a doormat.” Rich, witty, and generous, he was a particularly formative influence on the young Roy Campbell, who regarded him as “the uncrowned King of Oxford”. His college sub-rector was less enthusiastic, jotting the word “freak” against his list of Earp’s failed attempts to pass “Divvers”, the scripture exam that Oxford students had to pass. According to E. R. Dodds, Earp escaped military conscription by “his unique talent for twitching his eyebrows, wrinkling his nose, and waggling his ears: when called up he exercised this to such horrifying effect that the tribunal found him unfit for service”. As co-editor of Oxford Poetry 1915, Earp was responsible for the first publication in book form of work by Huxley, Dorothy L. Sayers, and another friend, J. R. Tolkien [sic], whom Earp twice defeated in debate by arguing against the motions that “This House deplores the signs of degeneracy in the present age” and “The cheap ‘Cinema’ is an engine of social corruption”. In a letter to his son in 1944, Tolkien identified Earp as having been “the original twerp” . . . He didn’t quite live up to his extravagant early promise. As Michael Holroyd puts it, in his biography of Augustus John, it was not long before Earp had “taken his lack of ambition to the extreme of becoming an art critic”.

T. W. Earp caricatured, 1919; see Peter Gilliver’s essay “In Search of T. W. Earp and the Origin of ‘Twerp’”

I’ll close with a much more celebrated figure (but one who also knew Earp in later years): Dylan Thomas. Sometimes the bookseller hoping to make an impression or amuse the browser just a little simply has to give in and quote from the relevant material at length, as Rassam ends up doing with Thomas (and I’m doing in turn). So here’s the Sitwellian vision of the Welsh poet (“who sounds an utterly impossible but quite fascinating person”) and his wife Caitlin, as reported by Sacheverell to Edith, in a letter of October 25, 1942 (£750):

His wife, I am told, is dressed like the trainer in a boxing ring, with about seven jerseys one over the other, and is trained to knock him out when he comes home. The other day, she went “berserker” herself, in a night club, her arms worked like flails; she broke the arm of a young girl called Virginia Gilliatt, who has just been married, and a little casualty clearing station had to be opened in the basement to deal with the persons she had injured. But Dylan Thomas’ great exploit was at the “Gargoyle”, a night club owned by David Tennant, and frequented by Dick [Wyndham], Peter Quennell, etc, Constant [Lambert] etc. It is decorated in glass and gold mosaic, with many mirrors, with a staircase leading down into it, so that it is just the place for a drunken entrée, and in fact exactly like the scene at the end of Fledermaus and in the third scene of La Vie Parisienne. The other night, when the Gargoyle was full and the band was playing, Dylan Thomas made his appearance, and came spinning down the staircase so quickly that Ivan Moffatt (who told me the story) says his figure could only be seen like a series of circles, as in a comic drawing. Once on the dancing floor, (he was “poetically” dressed in tweeds, with curls of hair like Bacchus, shoes, but no socks) he ripped off both shoes and danced barefoot, for a while, in a sinister but distracted fashion. Then his purpose became evident. He moved up to the table where David Tennant was sitting, drinking a valuable bottle of claret, poured it into his own shoe and drank it, finished the bottle, and then with an extraordinary gliding movement like a sea serpent, traversed the entire floor to the far end of the room, and landed on the divan, nestling his head against the thighs of Harold Nicolson, whom he hates. After that, there was general furore, and a sort of pêlemêle struggle, of which the results were long in doubt, owing to the extraordinary bravery and resource of Mrs Dylan T. Eventually, much to the regret of many persons, they were ejected. It shows infallible taste and instinct, doesn’t it?

Thanks for reading this week’s Bibliomania – please consider subscribing and/or sharing this post with anybody you think might enjoy it! All being well, I’m off to Cambridge for the book fair tomorrow, and hope to report back from that some time next week.

1. This is how Elizabeth Myers’s novel A Well Full of Leaves is described in The Powys Family & Their Circle – Myers was a tragically short-lived member of that circle – which is Bertram Rota’s Catalogue 244 (1987). Knowing my absurd obsession with T. F. Powys, a friend kindly gave me a copy of this catalogue last year. It judges the Powyses to pose “an intriguing challenge to collectors”. Fortunately for me, I’ve never wanted to collect the lot. But there is a book by “TFP”, An Interpretation of Genesis, first privately printed in 1907/8 “in an edition of 100 copies, at least half of which are reported to have been pulped”. The second edition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929) will have to do . . .

2. “Any investigation which takes the eighteenth-century British book collection as its primary focus must necessarily sooner or later become an exercise in the study of book lists . . . Unfortunately, however, they also tell us rather less about book-collecting as such than might at first appear. Horace Walpole, no less, vividly illustrates the danger of inferring too much from such sources. For while we know which books he possessed it is far from obvious that he had chosen all of them himself or even that he particularly liked them. After all, his library contained the Annals of Scotland by the Scottish historian Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, in a copy actually gifted by the author when the first volume appeared in 1776. Worse, while Walpole had dutifully worked his way through it, we know in this case that he disliked it intensely since what he took to be its violent Tory prejudices provoked him to add a series of hostile Whiggish annotations to its pristine pages. None of this, however, stopped Walpole from keeping this fine autographed presentation copy of the Annals in his collection, and nor should this surprise us.” David Allan, “Book-Collecting and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain”, The Yearbook of English Studies , Vol. 45, The History of the Book (2015), pp. 74–92, 75.

3. See Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1948).