Blog posts of '2014' 'October'

Copperfields, my local second-hand bookshop has room after room stuffed full with overflowing shelves and books stacked on almost every inch of floor and is an endless source of curiosities and gems.  Yesterday, with a few minutes to kill in the town centre before trudging back up the hill to Wimbledon Village, I indulged in one of my favourite pastimes and, inelegantly navigating around piles of books spilling out from shelves, made my way to the ‘under the stairs’ area where there is usually a small selection of Victorian and Edwardian pictorial bindings. These books can be highly collectible, rightly valued for their attractive and decorative bindings. But they are just as often a happy hunting ground for the literary detective not least because they are the sort of books that were in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries presented to children as school, club and church-sponsored prizes.  Prize books often have elaborate, gilded and highly attractive prize presentation book plates which in turn may have intriguing details about a long-forgotten organisation or the lucky recipient.  Just a little digging can reveal fascinating glimpses of literary, local and social history at level which usually slips below the radar of more formal, traditional historical studies, exposing forgotten cultures of ordinary folk.  Yesterday’s visit reaped gold-dust and I left the shop with this seemingly unassuming copy of G A Henty’s In the Hands of the Cave-Dwellers (Blackie and Co, undated but likely to be a late 1920s or early 1930s edition). G A Henty, who wrote 120 or so historical adventures for young readers between 1861 and his death in 1902, will be a familiar name to those interested in decorative and pictorial bindings. From 1882 Henty’s novels were published in the UK by Blackie and Co, and the influence of Tawlin Morris, Blackie’s Art Director from 1893, promoter of the ‘Glasgow Style’ and a talented artist, can be seen in many Henty editions. Henty was tremendously popular in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, when his combination of fast-paced action adventure, wholly worthy young heroes (and occasional heroines), historical accuracy and correct if not fine writing style both appealed to children and was approved by parents and authorities.  He is credited with inspiring others, such as R M Ballantyne and W G H Kingston, to write similarly entertaining and educational rippingly good yarns. Henty's appeal waned in the post-war years, when his particular blend of Christian conservatism and pro-imperial history was more widely seen as jingoistic, elitist and racist and many of his books went out of print.  But in the last forty or so years, interest in Henty has revived, partly fuelled by the growing home-school movement where his books are widely used to inspire historical interest in children in an entertaining fashion.  Original editions of Henty’s books are collected by many and almost all are back in print. The Henty Society was founded in 1977. This volume, then, appealed in part because of the Henty cache and in part because, although certainly produced well after his death, its binding shows clearly the design influence of Talwin Morris. But the clincher was the decorative and intriguing presentational bookplate and associated insert.  The book was presented, on 28 July 1935, to one Arthur Brown as a “Progress Prize” when he was in Class IV A of St Helier No.7 J M School.  And tucked inside the front cover is Arthur Brown’s term report, showing his performance in reading, recitation, composition, arithmetic, handwriting etc, for the term ending 1 August 1934.  The book plate is pretty enough to be desirable – but what an unusual school name! The St Helier Estate straddles London’s suburban boroughs of Merton and Sutton. It was built between 1928 and 1936 by London County Council to re-house people from decaying and over-crowded areas of inner and central London.  It was the second largest of a serious of ‘out-country’ estates built by the Council in late 1920s and 1930s and covered 825 acres of arable land and pasture – much of which had previously been used to grow lavender for the already declining herb industries. The St Helier planners aspired to follow the garden city principles of Sir Ebenezer Howard although contemporary newspaper reports suggest that they may have fallen short in execution.  The huge St Helier Hospital where John Major, future UK Prime Minister, was born in 1943 opened in 1938 and still dominates the area both physically and economically.  To service an intended population of some 40,000, seven churches, two pubs and a 2000-seater cinema were built alongside 9,000 houses and flats. Sources vary on how many schools were planned for the St Helier Estate with estimates ranging from a high of 18 to as few as 10.  It seems though that only nine (Nos. 1 to 4 and Nos. 6 to 10 – School No. 5 was planned but never built) emerged as distinct institutions although some of these had junior and senior departments and some were segregated by gender.  Each of the schools was originally given a number, and seem to have been known by these numbers, only acquiring recognisable names later on.  School No. 7, which Arthur Brown attended, was originally a mixed school but later became girls only known as Winchcombe School.  Our Arthur, in 1934 and 1935, was in the Junior Mixed Department (the J M initials on the bookplate are spelt out in full on his school report.) Arthur’s report records that he was “a very good worker. [His] English is particularly good – it is a pleasure to read his compositions. He has also made good progress in Arithmetic. Conduct VG”.  We can also see from this report that he was top of this class in 1934.  The report is signed by D M Baker, as the class teacher, and has the head teacher’s, D M Lloyd-Carter, signature printed on.  It also has the signature of A H Brown – presumably Arthur Brown himself. The front free endpaper also has a book-seller’s blind stamp indicating that, when new, the book was originally offered for sale by “William Pile, Bookseller, Sutton and Wallington”.  William Pile Ltd was a local institution whose growth mirrored the development of London’s Surrey suburbs.  William Pile opened his first shop in 1870 in Wallington, with a Sutton branch opening in 1890 and a further branch in Epsom in 1916.  Pile, who is described in an article by Sutton’s Local Studies and Archive Centre as a “venerable, bearded figure”, also established a printing works in Hackbridge in 1878 and was one of the founders of the Surrey County Herald newspapers.  The print works produced, among other things, Pile’s local directories.  The Sutton shop, located at the junction of Sutton High Street and Carshalton Road and known locally as Pile’s Corner, grew from a small, single storey affair into a multi-department store offering stationery, fancy and leather goods and a circulating library with some 8,000-9,000 titles alongside book sales. All three branches closed in February 1963.  (Sutton Local Studies and Archive Centre have published a series of photographs of Pile’s Corner.) I love the personal history provided by these artefacts and can’t help but wonder what became of Arthur Brown. Did he get to build on his academic talents as a budding scholar? Or was his life cut short by the war that was only a few years away? Or did he have some other future? Regardless of his future, I’m delighted to have found his book. Do you remember the early days of the St Helier Estate? Did you go to school there – perhaps School No.7? Do you remember Arthur Brown? Or the head-teacher D M Lloyd-Carter? I would love to hear your memories or add to the history of this book.  And I’d be thrilled to be able to reunite the book with the Brown family. This copy of G A Henty's In the Hands of the Cave-Dwellers is available for purchase via ABEbooks at £20.00.    

Fast-paced, dialogue-driven and immediate, for me, I am Ella. Buy Me is reading firmly outside my comfort zone, a million miles from my usual fair of half-forgotten, almost-classics and literary mysteries. Slightly anxious about participating in my first blog tour, I was even more dubious when the book arrived.  Its design, shiny cover, unusual format, and open-type face all screamed “this is not for you”, very loudly.  So I didn’t embark on reading I am Ella. Buy Me with any expectation of pleasure or reward but rather somewhat fearful that I would hate it.  And for the first few pages, I did.  There is hardly a pleasant character in the novel, and the lovely Adam and the wise, warm and gentlemanly Wally don’t shine through until later on: I found it hard to warm to characters who measure their self-worth by the length of their car or who thought it acceptable to wash their smalls in the office. For all these initial misgivings, I am Ella. Buy Me won out as an enjoyable read.  It is at times incredibly funny. Crackling dialogue dances off the pages, bringing otherwise half-realised characters sharply into focus with depth and realism.  No book has made me laugh so much since reading Isabel Lodasa’s The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment, albeit in a very different way. And there are some cameo scenes to die for- such as Wally dressing up in Ella clothes and then teaching her to dance, or Ella and Adam in the kitchen scoffing the dessert that Adam’s stuck up girlfriend is planning to serve to the her dinner party guests! Ella is some ways a Bridget Jones of the 1980s: ambitious, confused, struggling to juggle priorities and overly concerned with cake and the size of her thighs.  Having pulled herself up by her bootlaces from a disadvantageous childhood, she’s on a trajectory to nowhere, single with a stalled career, and surrounded by a cast of decidedly obnoxious men out to use and abuse her.  Her affection and loyalty to her mother (who the reader never meets) is as touching as her inability to repel manipulation is frustrating.  Ella’s story plunges us back into an uncomfortably accurate, albeit stereotypical, aspect of 1980s London. Here’s fashionably shabby Soho throbbing with a young, cut-throat competitive, wannabe generation: a workforce fuelled by sexism, selfishness and alcohol and surrounded in smoke.  One of the things I liked most about I am Ella. Buy Me was the reminder it gave that, however much we may still be struggling to achieve equality in the workplace, and in life generally, there really has been a lot of progress since the yuppie days of Thatcher’s London. But I am Ella. Buy Me is click-lit and, true to its genre, it doesn’t dwell on the politics of Ella’s situation but rather remains firmly concerned with personality and relationships.  An easy-going, untesting read which, by relating the emotional highs and lows of a love-lorn and love-torn heroine, provides pure entertainment. About the Author Advertising copywriter, comedy writer, performer, lecturer - Joan Ellis has been them all. With a full-time job in a top London advertising agency and a new baby, she did what any right-minded woman would've done and set up a comedy club. She even appeared on the same bill as Jo Brand. Once. A career highlight was casting a black and white moggie as Humphrey Bogart for her award-winning cat food commercial. Other great performers who brought her words to life include Penelope Keith and Harry Enfield. As a lecturer, Joan taught comedian Noel Fielding all he knows about advertising before encouraging him to showcase his creative talents on a wider stage. Working for The Press Association, she tutored Wordsworth's great-grandson in the art of copywriting: Buy a host of golden daffodils and get a blue one, free! Suffering from swine flu and sweating like a pig, she moved from London to the Isle of Wight where she lives on cream teas with her beloved husband, daughter and two cats. ‘I am Ella. Buy me.’ is based on Joan's own experiences in top London advertising agencies   See what other reviewers are saying about I'm Ella. Buy Me by following the blog tour.

Howard Spring’s novel of political protest, Fame is the Spur, with its dense canvas of evocative scenes – snow on the Yorkshire moors – and memorable characters who punctuate Hamer Shawcross’s rise from the grinding poverty of a Manchester childhood to the rank of Cabinet Minister, was one of the defining books of my childhood. In 1982, the BBC serialised the novel as a TV mini-series (with Tim Piggot-Smith and Julia Sawalha leading the cast). I was so engrossed in the story that I couldn’t wait for the next episode to find out what happened so grabbed my father’s copy to read. My father, fearful that the language was too difficult for my gentle years and that struggling through would both put me off Howard Spring forever (as trying to read David Copperfield when I was six put me off Dickens for nearly 30 years) and mean that I missed much of the political and social significance of the novel, barred me from reading it. Instead, he announced, he would read it to me. And he did, every word. Every evening for some weeks, he read to me, with frequent pauses to discuss the issues raised or points of the novel. My father suggested that the novel was loosely based on the life of the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, but I’ve checked whether that is right. It was a very precious time – not just because I loved the novel, but because I got to spend evening after evening with my father, sharing his passion for literature, quite literally learning at his knee. So when my father passed away and I was invited to take whichever of his books I wished, I was determined to take this one. It’s so full of memories of my father, and those very special evenings we spent together. I am slowly adding those books I acquired from my father’s library to my own very disorganised accumulation, cleaning and inspecting each as I go along before cataloguing (more notes on this process). When I reached for this volume, out slipped this vintage bookmark, issued by Leeds Public Libraries. The bookmark is very 1950s in style and carries an advertisement from the Yorkshire Electricity Board, with the tagline “Electricity Makes Things Easy”. It shows a fashionable young woman, in classic 50s clothes, kicking back in an easy chair to read a novel, surrounded by electrical gadgets which make her life easy and pleasant- a television, an electric coffee pot and a standard lamp. The Yorkshire Electricity Board was created in 1948, when various electricity companies in the UK were nationalised, and ceased to exist in 1990 when electricity supply was privatised (again). But the style of bookmark, together with old-fashioned telephone numbers (STD area codes, which allowed national direct dialling without having to go through an exchange were introduced in the UK in 1958) suggest that the bookmark dates from between 1948 and 1958. This would tally with when my father was in Leeds, as he studied at the university there between 1955 and 1958, before emigrating to Sierra Leone in about 1959. The book itself was issued in 1964, a few years before my father returned to the UK. When I chose some of Dad’s books to keep, I hadn’t appreciated how illuminating they would be about his personal history and our family history. Now it’s one of the things I value most about them. Have you found something interesting wedged into the pages of an old book? Get in touch and share your find! Want to see more Lost Between the Leaves posts? Just click on the tag.

When my father, a biblioholic of the first order, passed away a couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to inherit a fair number of his books. Since then I have been slowing and steadily adding those books my book catalogue.  It’s a time-consuming effort, cleaning and inspecting each book as part of the process but one which unsurprisingly has become an emotional, sentimental journey. These books bring with them vivid memories of my father, his passions and interests.  There are touching, evocative inscriptions in many of the books from Dad’s friends and family, and more than once has brought laughter or tears.  And I’ve learnt a lot about my father too – about the way he read, keeping notes as he went along, about his interests as a younger man before I knew him, and about the way others thought of him. Sometimes, as I shelve one of his books alongside mine, I am saddened by the thought of all books he would have loved to read which I have found or have been published since his death.  I have also discovered that my father was an inveterate stuffer-of-things-into-books. When he was given a book as a present, he liked to keep any associated card in the book, using it as a bookmark as he read, and there’s the standard fare of used envelopes, reviews clipped from papers and magazines, the odd paper napkin, an old £1 note, train tickets and even a wooden coffee stirrer, and so on.  But there are a few ‘finds’ of more interest, such as these two postage stamp books found in an 1974 edition of The Right Way to Play Chess by D Brine Pritchard. [caption id="attachment_529" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Found in a copy of The Right Way to Play Chess by D Brine Pritchard[/caption] One of the stamp books is empty, all the stamps presumably used many years ago.  The cover is beautifully illustrated showing a Gloucester Old Spot Pig having a lovely time chomping away at the grass in a field edged with trees and stone wall – a very idyllic view of old England!  It was produced (according to the notes on the booklet cover) as the second of a set of four illustrations by Harry Titcombe of Rare Farm Animals, supported by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.  A little digging on the internet reveals that others in the series, which were produced by Royal Mail in 1983 and contained stamps to the value of 50p, featured the Orkney Sheep, a Toulouse Goose and a Bagot Goat. The second booklet still contains five stamps, to the value of 8.5p – at that time just 4p short of sufficient to second class inland letter.  But I was really struck by the reminder that we used to have halfpennies!  The halfpenny was demonetised in the UK in 1984 as inflation had made it useless. This makes it likely that my father was reading The Right Way to Play Chess in 1983 or 1984 which would be just around the time he was attempting to teach me the basics of the game.  I had no idea that he was surreptitiously studying as he did so! I’ve carefully replaced the stamp books between the pages and shelved the book alongside a much later edition of the same book which belongs to my husband. I can’t help but wonder, though, why Dad would need two stamp books to mark his place and why a man who never had two halfpennies to rub together would so casually leave unused stamps there. Have you found something interesting wedged into the pages of an old book? Get in touch and share your find! Want to see more Lost Between the Leaves posts? Just click on the tag.

Edward Trencom's Nose, debut novel from the popular history writer Giles Milton, is funny, witty in a neo-Wodeshousian sort of way and full of delightfully engaging characters. The Trencom family have been the acknowledged masters of cheese for 10 generations, running their London cheese shop since before the Great Fire of London and passing it down from father to son for over 300 years. Each eldest son also inherits a remarkable nose, a large aquiline nose with a prominent bridge and an extraordinary talent for smelling cheese, which Milton exploits hilariously and to capacity. Weight-watching cheese-lovers should avoid this book or the numerous evocative, aromatic scenes describing the finest cheeses from around the world will have you diving to the fridge for more than one or two wee morsels. This is a novel fashioned with style and elegance. An elaborate plot structure is interwoven with an account of Greco-Turkish conflict and delicately balanced with a narrow group of amusing, if somewhat one-dimensional, characters. The plot develops as Edward, the current owner of Trencom's Cheese Shop and possessor of the finest nose in generations, finds a bundle of old family papers in the cellar. His discoveries, together with the machinations of friends and foes, start him off on a path of adventure – adventure, that is, in a very 1960s,  middle class sub-urban style - which eventually both exposes and ties him to the fate of his forbearers. And here we come to the weakness of the novel: the way in which Edward's adventures play out is utterly, utterly ludicrous and the farcical denouement is deeply unrevelatory.  It is a brave and not wholly unsuccessful attempt, one suspects, to match the well-conceived plot to the mindset of its average players. Yet the overall result is unsatisfying. Make no mistake, this is a good and fun book to read, with lots of laughs and lots of cheese throughout, but the ending just doesn't quite live up to expectation. Read the book for the pleasure of the journey, but don't expect to enjoy the party when you reach your destination. Read and reviewed in 2007