Spring 2021

Little is as pleasing as an unexpected success! We refer to our competition to describe in 1,000 words a Fantasy Banquet for Bibliophiles. We thought that even making allowances for a very handsome prize (£500), we’d be doing well to get fifty or sixty entries. In fact the total was 542. Second and third will be published online in April and the winner in print in our next issue.

Here, in the meantime, you’ll find the account of Julian Pooley’s astonishing stamina, detective work and pure good chance in tracking down the family archive behind the Gentleman’s Magazine. It started in 1982 in Keith Fawkes’s Hampstead bookshop late one Friday afternoon in February. The only way he could read a diary’s tiny handwriting was by holding it up to the window. It was dated 1823-1834, full of daily engagements, activities and expenses - fascinating material. But the price was £6 and Julian was a student. However, over the weekend, the sum grew less intense in his mind and he was waiting on the doorstep when the bookshop opened on Monday. His article for us is entitled ‘The Book That Changed My Life’. No one should miss it.

Scarcely less extraordinary is the story in our last article on the Linnean Society of how, when the collection was being digitised, the photographer, Gladys Brown, was stung on the arm by a specimen of a stinging nettle (Urtica), dried and mounted 200 years earlier. Her ‘arm showed a definite blister, apparently similar to that produced by a fresh specimen’. It’s details like that make a subscription to this journal worthwhile.

Kenneth Cooper has written for us on collecting guides to English Country Houses, a subject made even more invaluable by the apparent decision by The National Trust to dismiss many of its curators and become, in effect, a keeper of municipal parks. Moving onto safer ground is Alan Klein’s account of Wallace Stevens’s relationship with his publisher, that most adventurous firm, New Directions. Another great adventure story, told by Nicholas Parsons, is that of Norman Douglas, libertarian, writer and prime coiner of edgy limericks, which is followed by an erudite dissection of a piece of Asian erotica by Hartmut Walravens. Toby Burrows tracks the travels of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Matthew Haley of Bonhams talks us through the auction theory that recently won a Nobel prize and Clarinda Calma takes up the cause of Laurence Alma Tadema and her benefaction to the Sikorski Museum. To end with, two great pieces: Stephen Clarke’s analysis of the library of Edmund Burke and Victoria Dailey’s description of the copy she owns of Charles Warren Stoddard’s Poems, which is notable for being a presentation copy to Lord Tennyson, for having wood engravings by William Keith and for containing the first published poem about Yosemite.