Winter 2018

Summary by Editor James Fleming

Our leader is by John Murray, the seventh member of the family to run what was, for 238 years, the world’s most illustrious publishing company. In ‘Musings on 50 Albemarle Street’ he ponders on the foibles of their famous authors, on some of their great hits and how it felt to be in charge of a national treasure.

‘There are common rare books, scarce rare books, and rare rare books’ starts Robert Harding in ‘The Invention of Rare Books’ and then (changing the subject), Richard Owen, who ran The Times bureau in Rome for fifteen years, takes us through the wonderful tale of the pirated editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (illustrated).

Marie Korey, the great scholar, explains the background to Dibdin’s dispute with George Lewis, after which we learn from Ed Potten (‘Hidden in Plain View’) how the owners of England’s private libraries would make them that much more authentic by having fake books with humorous titles on doors, cupboards and shutters. Fascinating stuff!

In ‘James Weatherup’s Great Find’ we hear the story of how, in 1933, the Bay Psalm Book, of which a copy was sold in 2013 for $14,165,000, was bought in Belfast by a coal merchant for one penny (or two cents). Next, we get Stephanie Coane’s tale of how she handled setting up Eton College’s fabulous exhibition of ‘Voyages’, which segues neatly into Lauren O’Hagan’s account of the extent to which the quality of prize bindings at schools was determined by social class.

Nicolas Barker is with us again (‘Pindar and Theocritus in the 16th Century’), and Tony Edwards gives us a master-class in describing the Anglo-Saxon masterpieces in the current show at the British Library.

We have coverage of book auction sales, letters, obituaries, book reviews, current exhibitions (‘Yo Ho Ho’ at the Book Club of California, ‘The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill’ in London) and we have a poem: ‘I Met a Dragon Face to Face’. But we are not the dragon. We are just the best value book journal in the world.