When I was eleven or twelve my English teacher read aloud to the class the passage from T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone in which the young Wart first encounters Merlin. Already attuned to all things Arthurian from an earlier fixation on Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, I knew enough to be completely charmed by White’s play with anachronisms. I longed to read the book in its entirety. But where to find it? No copy in the rather dismal school library. No copy, or any hope of one, in the town public library. The local W.H.Smith’s was already well on its way to becoming a stationery store rather than a bookshop.

I resigned myself to a long wait and eventually read the longed-for book many years later as an adult. Similar long waits applied to books I’d heard dramatized on the BBC’s Children’s Hour. So I read books like Phillipa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden and White’s The Sword in the Stone in adulthood with a strange kind of double consciousness—part experienced adult reader and part naïve enthusiast.

The wistful frustration of those long waits for a much-desired book was shared by many young readers in the pre-digital age. Tom Stoppard remembers his yearning for more books by Arthur Ransome after reading Peter Duck and noticing the list of other books by Ransome on the flyleaf –“ . . . my method of searching for these books had a sort of dim pathos about it;  I simply went about picking up any book I saw lying about to see if it was called Swallows and Amazons. But it never was.”

In the digital age when hundreds of thousands of texts can be summoned on-line in seconds Stoppard’s melancholy search is an almost unknown phenomenon. But so is the way that the long-yearned-for book, once read, becomes fixed in the memory as a kind of lexical trophy.

One of the ways in which Osborne senior enforces his authority over the family is through Sunday evening prayers read “to his family in a loud grating voice.” The “pompous book, seldom looked at, and shining all over with gold” whose frontispiece appropriately depicts Abraham and Isaac, is an emblem of the Osborne’s family’s social weightiness.

Thackeray’s novel, published in 1847, but set in 1812, recalls a period when the heavy family Bible sat in a glass-fronted bookcase alongside Burke’s Peerage and the Gentleman’s Magazine to demonstrate the household’s wealth and importance. National Trust properties in Britain still reflect this practice of displaying sumptuously bound but unread volumes. The inaccessibility of these books to modern researchers has been the subject of a lively controversy in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement.

Library at Belton House, Lincolnshire. ©NTPL Andreas von Einsiedel

The Osborne”library” is a scanty effort whose pretensions come nowhere near the vast libraries of the families whose lineages are set out in Mr. Osborne’s copy of Burke’s Peerage. But weighty volumes with fine bindings operated as a signifier of social status at many levels.

By  the last decades of the nineteenth century large illustrated Bibles were being displayed very humble households, and, like the Osborne family Bible,  acted  as repositories of family records. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) the bankrupted Mr. Tulliver insists that his son Tom fetch the “big Bible . . .where everything’s set down” and inscribe a vow of vengeance in its opening pages.

By the end of the century, although family Bibles continued to serve as the formal record of genealogically significant events and to serve as signifiers of social respectability, they had become so ubiquitous that they no longer implied the level of social prestige comparable to that suggested in Thackeray’s novel.

The popular literature of the late Victorian period is full of illustrations of poor and pious family listening attentively to a father’s bible reading. In heavily didactic works, like the Sunday at Home periodical received in my grandmother’s family, the bible reading is often presented as a provocation to dramatic moral repentance.

Illustration from the serial, “Not By Bread Alone” in Sunday at Home, 1890

The  Bible’s force as an agent of moral exhortation in poorer households stemmed in part from its status as the sole book in the family’s possession. In one of my grandmother’s favorite girlhood novels, James F. Cobb’s The Watchers on the Longships, the heroine is desperate to rekindle the lighthouse’s signal lamps. She can only reach them by using the family Bible as a platform, “But to stand upon the Bible! She could never do that. Her mother had always taught her to treat the sacred volume with extreme reverence. It was scrupulously dusted twice a day. . . . to stand on it . . . seemed like sacrilege.” After resting her head on “the holy Book” and praying, young Mary’s hesitation vanishes and she stacks the Bible with other household objects to rekindle the lamps to send “their cheerful beams over the mass of raging waves.” The Bible is then restored to its role as “sacred volume” when Mary prays for mariners’ safety by reading the ninety-third Psalm evoking the “Lord on high . . . mightier than the noise of many waters.”

As far as I know he kept no commonplace book of his own. Rather his fondness for such texts was, I think, a way of placing himself among the kind of readers he admired—university educated men, easily familiar with classical literature as well as the “greats” of English literature.

As an undergraduate I kept one of those notebooks which Virginia Woolf assumes “we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning” in which “passages from the classics” are copied out in “strikingly legible hand-writing.” Looking at this relic of “youthful vanity” now, I’m struck by the way it both signals more mature literary tastes – Sir Thomas Browne, George Eliot and Henry James, as well as an adolescent yearning towards what then seemed profundities and which now seem banal. Most striking of all is the chaotic mix of handwriting styles—on one page slanting, and on another upright half-tending towards an imitation-italic.

Embarrassing as it now seems, with all its inconsistencies and pretentiousness, this notebook was evidently a way-station in progress towards a more developed reading self. In his essay on the history of commonplace books Robert Darnton suggests that the practice of keeping such books played an important part in Early Modern readers’ development of a “sharper sense of themselves as autonomous individuals.” The centrality of commonplace books in earlier reading practice is marked by the development of prescriptive rules for organizing their contents. A reaction to the “multitude of books” released by the print revolution, scholars like Erasmus began to devise systems for organizing both their own observations and the florilegia (“flowers of reading”) gathered from their studies. Such “active reading” evidently became sufficiently widespread to prompt John Locke to propose, in 1706, a “new method” for organizing the contents of commonplace books.

Most of the writers who have kept such books—E.M.Forster or W.H. Auden for example have employed organizational structures nothing like Locke’s highly rational system. The most famous of such twentieth century collections, Walter Benjamin’s vast Arcades Project, seems to shun organization altogether.

Walter Benjamin in the Bibiotheque Nationale, 1932

The labyrinthine vastness of Benjamin’s Project seems to prefigure the digital age reincarnation of Erasmus’s attempt to rein in the chaos of print—the book blog which garners florilegia on-line.

“We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson” argues Steven  Berlin Johnson in a Hearst lecture at Columbia  lecture extolling the potential of social media and the vast range of digital tools for replicating the old-fashioned commonplace book compiler’s task. But as Oliver Burkeman points out, the labour of physical transcription–the transmutation of printed text into one’s own handwriting–creates a personal “vegetable patch” quite unlike the “everything bucket” of materials scooped up by computerized cutting and pasting.

On the two occasions we visited London in the 1950s he spent several mornings in the various bookshops in Charing Cross Road, though I think these visits seemed more involved in inhaling the atmosphere of book-lined spaces rather than making purchases. On our infrequent trips to local towns like in Cornwall his sole mission was to visit the local bookstore. Generally he would buy only a single book, in some cases because of its binding rather than its contents.

Quinto Bookshop, Charing Cross Road.

My mother’s book buying took a quite different form. She only ever entered a bookshop to seek out my father. I never saw her scan bookshop shelves with any degree of interest. However, she considered it her duty to supply the family with a steady stream of books bought in box lots in auction sales.

Attending auctions was nearly her only form of self-indulgence and one that entailed skillful planning. The first sign that she had identified a promising auction would come early on a Wednesday morning when she would come into my room with a breakfast tray (both my brother and I were brought breakfast in our rooms to avoid our exposure to the shouting and door-slamming that marked our father’s departure for work). She would suggest that I was looking “a bit under the weather” and probably shouldn’t be going to school that day. I would placidly accept the diagnosis and spend the next hour or two lounging in bed reading, fancying that I did, in fact, feel rather unwell. She would reappear around 10:30 and observe that I was now looking much better and that an outing would do me good. We would then set off to catch the train for Hayle or Penzance and I would find myself spending the afternoon in a smoky auction room while she became entirely absorbed in the complicated dynamics of bidding on her chosen lots. My presence was not required because of any need for company but rather because, as a non-driver, it was useful to have another set of hands to transport her purchases.

On one occasion she was thrilled to find a lot consisting of a filing cabinet crammed with sheet music. No other bidder shared her enthusiasm and the sheet music with which she planned to delight my father was knocked down to her for a pound or two. The entire contents of the filing cabinet was crammed into shopping bags at the end of the afternoon, and we made our way to the station, arms pulling out of their sockets with the weight of the bags. On one of the many stops to rest our aching arms she looked more closely at her prize. “But this is all cello music,” she gasped. The canny auctioneer had evidently put the few pieces of piano music at the front of the drawers obscuring the less desirable cello music. Despite this catastrophe we lugged the weighty bags to the station and onto the train. By the time we reached home she had already a devised a plan to mitigate the disaster. She immediately began cataloging her purchases, placed an advertisement in the Exchange and Mart and then spent the next few weeks selling off her stock and happily mulling over the letters she received from “professional musicians in London” as she invariably described them.

Another of her purchases resulted in a more successful attempt at pleasing my father. She bid impulsively on a huge pump organ which was knocked down to her for five pounds. Like other large purchases, it was delivered by the local carrier who worked with the auctioneer. Named Ducky Lanyon, he had a wooden leg which didn’t seem to inconvenience him in moving huge pieces of furniture. No sooner had Ducky delivered the organ than a small deputation from a local church knocked on the front door offering to buy the organ to use while their pipe organ was going through repairs. For few days my brother and I (non-musicians both) “played” the resounding organ as soon as it was surrendered to us by our father, panting and red-faced from his “turn” at the huge instrument and its demanding bellows

Often whole suites of furniture would appear unannounced and I would return home from school to find that, not only had all the furniture in my room been entirely rearranged (which frequently happened) but had been completely replaced, the old furniture presumably having vanished in Ducky Lanyon’s same van which had brought the new set. Her book purchases at auctions were similarly quixotic. Acquired in unexamined box lots, we could find ourselves in possession of scores of mining textbooks—a common experience—or, more happily, on one occasion, a set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. “Sets” were considered to be the most desirable trophies. The hours spent inhaling tobacco smoke and mold spores in damp auction rooms were rewarded by the acquisition of sets of Dickens, H.G. Wells, Hardy and, to my father’s greatest satisfaction, Robert Louis Stevenson.  There was also a complete set of Shaw’s plays in the pocket edition published by Constable; really superfluous since my father had bought a one volume edition of the complete plays some time before his marriage, along with another volume with the complete prefaces. Shaw seemed a confusing figure to me: my father often had the heavy volume of Complete Plays on his lap in the evenings, but my grandmother remarked to me one morning that Shaw was in league with the devil. This observation was prompted by seeing his photograph in the newspaper alongside his obituary. As a six year old, I digested this piece of information with puzzlement, but never discovered whether vegetarianism, atheism or Fabian Socialism was the basis of his supposed pact with the devil. Instead, I formed the impression that it had something to do with his large beard.

Often the bulk of auction room book purchases was in the form of old Sunday School prize books. The large number of Sunday Schools in the early twentieth century and their practice of awarding prizes for the bare achievement of “attendance” must have been a significant influence on the character of popular fiction of the time. Only the presence of such a guaranteed market can account for the publication of the deluge of insipid novels from now-long-forgotten authors. As auction-room flotsam and jetsam half a century after functioning as Sunday School prizes, their book-plates and inscriptions offer clues to how they figured in young readers’ lives. Susan Warner’s The Wide Wide World, which had also been a favorite with my grandmother, bears a plate showing its origin as a prize for Frieda M. Jewell at the Brea Bible Christian Sunday School in 1905.

Frieda’s prize the following year, Constance Millman’s Aunt Sally must have come without its bookplate, prompting Frieda to improvise her own, noting that it was awarded for her “receitation” at the Brea Band of Hope.

Another case of multiple ownership–my 18 year old mark of ownership over that of my sister-in-law.

Did I imagine, then, that my location was somehow permanent?

Or did I merely want to fix my engagement with that particular book with a specific time and place? No need really—the flat-footed exegesis in the scrawled marginal annotations reveal the undergraduate hand and mind all too plainly. My urge to inscribe marks of ownership evidently faded with the passage of time. Hardly any of the hundreds of books I’ve bought in later adult life are even marked with my name.

My father, on the other hand, continued to pencil his name on the flyleaf of any newly acquired book throughout his life. But this practice wasn’t associated with possessiveness about the books themselves. I frequently availed myself of books from his collection during my years as a student. His Everyman two volume edition of Middlemarch testifies to the complexity of book ownership in the family during that time. He must have purchased it in the late 1950s, appending his customary penciled signature to both volumes. I scooped it up to use in my first year at university, penciling my own name over my father’s signature on the first volume and on the board paper of the second. My mother evidently imagined the book was likely to be coveted by other students and, while I was out for a walk, used an indelible marker to inscribe the board paper of both volumes with my name in inch-high letters. On the same occasion she took the opportunity to append my name in similarly large letters on the front cover of the Pelican edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader and even on the foredges of The Second Common Reader, in each case using my initials and surname rather than the full name with which I usually signed. Her choice of site for the large-lettered imprint of ownership mimicked that of professional librarians who generally select “the inseparable portion of the artifact” –whatever part of the book which can’t be removed without catastrophic damage—for their library stamps. Librarians, however, favour discreet embossed stamps or institutional bookplates rather than giant cursive script made with a grocery marker. Half a century later, these “marks of ownership” with their fierce permanence makes these books seem not to belong to me but to exist in some other dimension.

Quite aside from the traces of contested ownership that such marks show, they testify to a relationship between reader and books that’s rapidly sliding into the past. The e-book in every reader’s hands remains indistinguishable from all its fellows and dissociated from the reader’s place on the planet.

1941 Ministry of Supply poster (Source: Imperial War Museum)

In any event, our family seems to have resisted archiving past issues of the periodicals to which we subscribed.  There were, however, a couple of exceptions. The Artist, a large-format monthly targeting a market of amateur painters, was never thrown away, but back issues were stacked inside a long window seat in the front room. They formed a broad stack at one end next to the four or five high piles of piano sheet music. At the other end was a stack of decades-old issues of the arts and crafts movement magazine, The Studio, which my father had preserved from his own father’s collection. Although these two journals were carefully preserved, I don’t recall that they were consulted often, if at all.

My own archival efforts were strangely systematic and selective. With motives that I can no longer recall, I began in my mid-teens to cut out all poems published in John O’London’s, The Listener and Times Literary Supplement and to tape them into scrapbooks.

Sample page containing poems by Benet Weatherhead, Norman McCaig and Alan Ross

The first volume of these scrapbooks, now lost, included articles and other clippings from these publications, but its two successors concentrate almost exclusively on poems, except for occasional line drawings which seem to have taken my fancy. The third scrapbook is the most systematic—a fat hardcover notebook previously used by my brother for his university chemistry lecture notes—it even incorporates a five page index which must have taken many hours to compile. Looking now at the index of over a hundred and thirty individual poets, it’s striking that so many are still considered notable names in the poetry of the period. The TLS and Listener editors’ preferences seem to have been weighted heavily in the direction of the “Movement” and the later “Group” poets whose influence first derived from their inclusion in Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology in 1956.

New Lines, 1963

For the most part, these writers recoiled from what they thought of as the rhetorical excesses of Dylan Thomas and revert to the more measured tones they admired in Hardy. The surviving scrapbooks contain multiple poems from these groups, notably Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, D.J. Enright, Donald Davie, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Peter Porter, and Davil Wevill. The later pages include poems by the differently-influenced Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Theodore Roethke. Neither The Listener nor the TLS seems to have had much truck with the emerging performance-orientated British Poetry Revival or the Mersey Beat poets, though I notice a single poem by Christopher Logue and one by Ian Hamilton. Judging from my almost total recall of several individual poems, I must have pored over these scrapbooks, repeatedly re-reading some entries often enough to commit them to memory. Underlinings and asterisks in the index also provide clues to what seem to have been particular favorites, though the determinants of these choices now seems obscure. Looking now at the asterisked selections, several of which have lodged fairly permanently in my memory, I think that many of them appealed to a young reader’s love of rhyme and emphatic metre more or less regardless of subject matter. Why else would Adrian Mitchell’s “Ode to Money”—“Man-eater, woman-eater, brighter than tigers, /Lover and killer in my pocket,/ In your black sack I’m one of the vipers. Golden-eyed mother of suicide, /Your photo’s in my heart’s gold locket” appeal to someone whose contact with money extended no further than the small change of weekly pocket money?

Adrian Mitchell in the mid 1960s

While perhaps two thirds of the poets appearing in these scrapbooks remain recognizable names from the twentieth century, others, often represented only by a single poem, have passed into literary obscurity.  In at least one instance, though, an individual poem has managed to take on a life of its own beyond the printed page.  Published in 1961, Jenny Joseph’s “Warning”— “ When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
/With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
 . . “ has been absorbed into popular culture and was voted as the UK’s most popular post-war poem in 1996. The poem, or more frequently, its first eight lines, has been reprinted endlessly on posters and greeting cards, and has even spawned an organization for older women, the Red Hat Society. This organization, with its multiple international “chapters” and its on-line shop of society knicknacks, greetings cards and jewelry, must be one of the oddest examples of “escaped literature” &of recent times. Joseph’s poem is cited in the society’s material as the inspiration for its founding, though the society’s structure of membership dues, organized chapters and so forth is strikingly at odds with the more anarchic elements of Joseph’s poem—“I shall go out in my slippers in the rain/ And pick flowers in other people’s gardens/And learn to spit.” Odd as it is, the survival of Joseph’s poem in its many transmutations both in print and in cyberspace is an example of how ephemera can endure quite unpredictably in forms completely detached from their original publication or even from their author. Perhaps no odder than the survival of two of the three original poetry scrapbooks through half a century and a score of house movings.

Complete runs of publications like the National Geographic, Punch, The Listener or the Times Literary Supplement continue a kind of ghostly existence in the stacks of large libraries, consulted only rarely by either specialized or quixotic researchers. Most of the other periodicals, daily, weekly or monthly, that flowed into our house in such regular tides in the post war years barely exist anywhere except for odd caches of microfilm or digitized files. But the hypnotic power they exercise at first reading ensures their persistence in the reader’s memory. The flotsam and jetsam from these tides of print can persist in memory for decades. Etched still deeper in Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” recording her seven year old self transfixed by the National Geographic and finding, fifty two years later,  a nearly total recall so that “it was still the fifth/of February, 1918.”

It was the First World War rather than the Second that resonated most with my father’s sense of history and continued to rumble away as a kind of ground bass in his consciousness. All three of my father’s older brothers had enlisted and two of them died in their early forties from the effects of being gassed. Many years later I learned that his mother

At her oldest son’s wedding 1919

My father (L), Jack (Centre) and Morley( R) in 1914

may have managed to prevent my father’s enlistment when he turned eighteen in September 1917. It seems, according to local legend, that she took the bus to the recruiting office and announced, “You’ve had three of my sons and you’re not having another,” with sufficient emphasis to keep my father out of the war. Whatever grain of truth belongs to the legend, it appears that she was reluctant to see a third son sacrificed to the war, despite the  deluge of propaganda urging mothers and wives to send their men to war. However, his father seems to have had a taste for the iconography of military propaganda. He devoted some of his spare time to meticulous reproduction of some of the militaristic images in vogue during the war. Years later, one of these efforts—presumably a copy from a poster or newspaper drawing––dominated one wall of my brother’s bedroom.  A framed, poster-sized coloured drawing showed a mounted cavalry officer in the mid-nineteenth century uniform of the 17^th Lancers trampling a dragon underfoot. The caption, borrowed from the Lancers’ regimental motto, “Death or Glory” proclaimed, “No surrender! Death or Glory!” It mirrors the typical imagery of the innumerable posters propagandizing the First World War, though the uniform shown harks back to the style worn by the regiment at the time of the catastrophic Charge of the Light Brigade.

“Charge of the Light Brigade,” James Edwin McConnell (detail)

The painstaking copying of such a piece of military propaganda seems an odd choice of hobby for a man who was to outlive two of his sons—their health irrevocably destroyed by an industrialized form of warfare quite unlike the prancing cavalry triumph in the picture. Odd too that my father would have chosen to preserve and display such a piece of sentimentalized homage to military force. Probably though, both father and son saw little or no connection between such iconography and the carnage of the First World War. For most of my grandfather’s adult life popular culture was suffused with the cultural ephemera of imperialism and his taste for militaristic iconography was common enough at the time. In South Riding (1936), Winifred Holtby describes the Beddowes family placidly sitting at the “well-spread table below photogravure pictures portraying those scenes of carnage so popular in Edwardian dining rooms. Horses lashed about in agony, soldiers fell face downwards in the snow unable to answer roll call, cavalry charged across the trampled corn . . . but the Beddowes family ate with excellent appetite, quite undisturbed by hate and slaughter.” Images like that of the “Death or Glory” poster abounded in advertisements, newspaper illustrations and cigarette cards.

Players Cigarette card, 1915

Both my grandfather and his sons had spent countless hours in Methodist chapels, where, since the 1860s, the favorite non-conformist hymns fused Christianity with militaristic rhetoric. “Christian soldiers” were urged to “Fight the good fight” and “Soldiers of the Cross” were exhorted to “obey the trumpet call” and “Stand up for Jesus.” With such rhetoric and iconography so all-pervasive, no wonder that that it became detached from the reality of war. “Play up! Play up and Play the Game!” my father would expostulate in any number of contexts, sometimes associated with sport, but always remote from its original source in Newbolt’s  “Vitai Lampada” in which the lessons of the public school cricket pitch are transferred to bloody desert warfare in the Sudan,“. . .the regiment blind with dust and smoke./The river of death has brimmed his banks,/And England’s far, and Honour a name,/But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:/‘Play up! play up! And play the game!’”

World War One is now seen as the most literary of all wars of modern times. Its relationship to literary culture has been extensively analysed  by such critics and historians as Paul Fussell. The brilliant work of Fussell and others has tended to focus our attention exclusively on the writers such as Owen and Sassoon who exposed the futility, cruelty and squalor of the war. However, as Peter Buitenhuis has shown in The Great War of Words, a cast of established writers (H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett,  Galsworthy,  Masefield, John Buchan, Edith Wharton and even Henry James) systematically  generated jingoistic texts at the British government’s behest, lending a degree of sophistication to the crude imagery of recruitment posters. The theme of the propaganda was the necessity of defending British “decency” and civilization against the onslaught of the brutal “Hun.” It would have been difficult to remain entirely unaffected by this barrage of propaganda from both widely revered “bookmen” in addition to the ubiquitous militaristic imagery. My father’s eldest brother, Wilfred, who was never posted to the front, would refer cholerically to the “Hun” in reminiscences for the rest of his life. The other brothers, Morley and Jack, both severely injured by gas, the latter much decorated for bravery for service in the non-combatant R.A.M.C. in the Somme and the Battle of Ancre, maintained a life-long silence about their war experiences.

Jack in uniform, 1915

On the back of the postcard of Jack in his Royal Army Medical Corps, in what looks like my father’s handwriting, are the lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses:”

                … that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Allen Lane seems to have thought that in founding Penguin books he was reaching a public not in the habit of purchasing books, and claimed that his new series was a “means of converting book-borrowers into book buyers.” But many Penguin customers were probably, like my father, already owners of shelves of Everyman books, for whom the low-priced Penguins were irresistible. He had begun buying Penguins as soon as they began to appear in the mid 1930s. Survivals from this time are the two volume collection of essays on “The Great Victorians” edited by H.J. Massingham (1937)  and  sixpenny edition of Browning’s Selected Poems and Thoreau’s Walden (1938) in the short-lived orange-covered Penguin Illustrated Classics series. He bought numerous blue-covered Pelicans of belles lettres and history as well as many of the purple and white covered Penguin Classics series once they began to emerge under E.V. Rieu’s editorship in the mid 1940s. Much more rarely he bought an occasional orange-covered Penguin edition in the fiction series, but never one of the numerous green-covered crime novels.

Original Pelican cover design by Edward Young (left) 1949 re-design by Jan Tschichold (right)

Penguin and other major paperback publishers so effectively changed the landscape of the book world in the post-war years that it’s difficult to re-imagine Allen Lane’s

Allen Lane in 1935

project as the gamble it once appeared. Not surprisingly, the massive tectonic shift in the publishing scene has given rise to numerous origin legends. The most frequently repeated is the tale that the notion of mass market quality paperbacks came to Allen Lane suddenly as he stood on the platform of Exeter Station in 1934 faced with a bookstand offering nothing but penny dreadfuls and shoddy Victorian reprints. But significant upheavals in publishing were already in process across the channel with wealthy Americans like Caresse Crosby and Nancy Cunard publishing fine editions of Modernist writers.

In the 1970s I came to know Wyn Henderson who had worked as a typographer in Paris at Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press for part of her remarkable life. She told me that when she returned to London in the 1930s Allen Lane invited her to become one of the partners in his plan to introduce quality paperbound books to a mass market in Britain.

Sketch of Wyn Henderson by Augustus John in mid 1930s when she was managing the Guggenheim Jeune gallery. (Source: Guggenheim Museum, Venice)

Thinking perhaps of the ubiquitous paperbound books that were the norm in France, Wyn confidently rebuffed his scheme: “The British public will never want paperbound books. I’m starting a fine art publishing house –Aquila Press.” Predictably, Aquila foundered into bankruptcy after producing a handful of books. At the end of her life Wyn was fond of recalling this decades-old example of catastrophically bad financial judgement. Interestingly though, she didn’t particularly regret missing becoming part of one of the most lucrative publishing ventures of the time. Instead, she mourned that she herself no longer owned even one of the fine editions published by her Aquila Press.

A sourer mourning note was sounded by Ezra Pound whose Cavalcanti translation Wyn had agreed to publish. In 1950 in a letter from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital he complains to Wyndham Lewis he complains about his “text wot the fat lady [Wyn] with her AQUILA press left hung in mid air” fifteen years earlier.

The Public Library Act of 1850 had little direct impact on Cornwall. By 1890 only Truro had established a rate-supported free public library. The libraries that were established in the last years of the century were the product of private philanthropy rather than civic initiative.

The man responsible for those libraries, Passmore Edwards (1823-1911), the “Cornish Carnegie” had been born only a few miles away from the farmhouse where my grandmother wept over East Lynne. Sadly, none of the public libraries he founded lay within walking distance of her home. In his autobiography, A Few Footprints (1906), he recalls desperate attempts to find privacy for reading not unlike the young Mary Nicholls bent over the pages of East Lynne:

“. . .hundreds and hundreds of times I pressed my thumbs firmly on my ears until they ached, in order to read with as little distraction as possible. In this way I managed frequently to entertain myself and pick up fragments of knowledge. These recollections of early days, fresh and vivid as those of yesterday, have encouraged me in after years to promote the public library movement, so that poor boys and girls, as well as men and women, may enjoy educational or recreative advantages denied to many during the early and middle parts of the last century.”

Edwards also recalled the print famine of his boyhood. The only literature that came into the village of Blackwater where he lived as a boy consisted of “one newspaper and a penny magazine brought into the village by a man named Davies.”

In later life as a newspaper publisher Edwards amassed a considerable fortune which he dispersed into various philanthropic projects, mostly hospitals and libraries. Eight of the libraries he founded were in Cornwall and Edwards was impressed by the reception to their opening. In A Few Footprints, he notes that while library openings in London were formal and perfunctory, in Cornwall they were accompanied by public holidays, banquets and even music, fireworks and “a carnival.”

Although Edwards’ philanthropic efforts were aimed at relieving what he deemed the “monotony” of village life, the libraries he founded were, necessarily, situated in the towns. For most villagers “the library” consisted of the small collection of books housed in the local chapel for the use of Sunday School pupils. A near contemporary of Edwards, John Harris (1820-1884), the autodidact “miner poet” drew up a study plan for himself in which one day a week was devoted to “history, or such books as I may have from the (Sunday School) library.” Secular reading was in particularly short supply and Harris depended on the goodwill of such local gentry as were willing to open their “library doors” to him. Harris’s autobiography documents, not only the scarcity of printed books but also the shortage of writing materials. As a boy Harris seems to have used almost any available smooth surface as a substitute for paper—pieces of plaster, wood, even his own hat. Discarded “tea-wrappers” sometimes became available as paper and blackberry juice served as ink.

Small wonder that newspaper accounts of the time attribute vast social change to the advent of free public libraries. More surprising is the way that the founding of a library not fully funded by a philanthropist like Passmore Edwards met with opposition.

In 1885 many Truro ratepayers questioned the tax increase incurred by the proposed foundation of a free public library. Proponents countered by warning that such opposition would class the community with “small stagnant towns, devoid alike of intelligence and common sense.”

The Quiver, 1888

They held out the model of the beneficial effects of free public libraries in large centres in providing “wholesome” entertainment for the working class.

Not to be beaten, resentful ratepayers argued that the increase in rates was unfair to “lady” ratepayers since they would not be library users. Library advocates responded that the library would be open to “every man woman and child in the city.” However, it appears that in many cases the public space of the free libraries was occupied almost exclusively by the “working men” whose leisure was being directed to self-improvement.

Bethnal Green Public Library, The Quiver, 1888