Graham Greene once said that if he hadn’t been a writer he would “most
happily” have been a second-hand bookseller; booksellers, he thought, were
“eccentric” and they were “friendly”. His 1959 play The Complaisant Lover
has one at its centre. Clive, flirting with Ann, the bank manager’s
daughter, says, “You would not understand how important a bookseller’s
catalogue is”. Ann replies: “It must be like writing a novel”. Clive: “Yes,
I think it is. One has to know what to put in and what to leave out”.
Another novelist attracted to second-hand books was John Fowles. From the
mid-1950s he was an habitué of Francis Norman’s bookshop in Hampstead, “a
shop”, he wrote, “which must rank as one of the dirtiest, most disorganized
and lovable in North London”, the place where he “learned a great deal more
about literature . . . than I ever did at Oxford”. If he were not a writer,
he “might well” have become a second-hand bookseller, he told Peter Straus,
the publisher-turned-agent, who also collects books. Fowles, who died in
2005, used to question Straus closely on book-buying matters. Straus
contributes a sensitive introduction to the latest catalogue, 56, from the
bookseller Charles Cox (River House, Treglasta, Launceston, Cornwall PL15
8PY), “John Fowles, The Collection: books from the library of John Fowles,
part i”. This first part contains 541 items, covering a broad range of
subjects: Dorset and the West Country, history, philosophy, natural history
and literature up to 1900. A second part will include earlier books, French
literature and the French Revolution. Fowles’s twentieth-century books are
being sold by Maggs Brothers (50 Berkeley Square, London W1X 6EL).
“I hate people who collect things.” Cox uses a line from Fowles’s 1963 novel,
The Collector, for his title-page motto. It is not Fowles speaking, of
course, but his heroine Miranda, the would-be painter who has been kidnapped
by Fred, the deviant butterfly collector. What she says is, “I hate
scientists. I hate people who collect things, and classify things and give
them names, and then forget all about them.” Later, she describes Fred as “a
collector. That’s the great dead thing in him”.
Why do book collectors collect? Books are written on the subject (and
collectors collect them). Undeniably, there is a primitive side to it.
People talk about book-“hunting”; indeed Straus commends Fowles’s “eagle
eye” in the “hunting down” of unusual items for his collection. For many,
the joy is in the chase, the excitement in the capture. Possession
thereafter may be a disappointment: the pleasure of gloating over your
trophies is hard to share. But Straus pleads that Fowles was a constructive
book collector – his collection was a symptom of his broody, quirky
curiosity, an aid and stimulant to his writing. If book collecting is the
collecting of books for their own sake, he may perhaps not be defined as a
book collector at all. “I collect [books],” wrote Fowles in his 1963 diary,
“for reasons that would make most bibliophiles spit – because I want to read
them.” Bibliophiles now, however, collect Fowles’s books just because they
were Fowles’s.
“Association” copies exert a particular fascination, even if the only evidence
of ownership is a small signature or a posthumous book-label. Fowles’s books
are attractive because he was an incontinent annotator. Like A. L. Rowse, he
couldn’t read a book without scribbling in it. (Maybe there is something
primitive in that, too – in the readers’ need physically to mark out their
territory.) He writes corrections in histories of Dorset, collates the
orthography of texts, appends an anecdote about a local farmer to an
archaeological offprint about a Roman villa, drafts a poem in a French
Baedeker, subscribes his homage to Thomas Love Peacock (“the secret
introduction to all Victorian literature”). He accumulates William Barnes
and Thomas Hardy, writes marginal commentaries on John Clare and Emily
Dickinson, parodies the manuscript journals of a Cambridge undergraduate
travelling to Rome in 1899. He also gathered association copies of his own,
books from the libraries of other writers, Swinburne’s Roswall and Lillian
(1822, offered by Cox for £85), Evelyn Underhill’s The Adventures of Mr
Verdant Green (1853, £70), Madame Bovary in William Rossetti’s copy (new
edition, 1862, £600), given him by his brother Dante Gabriel. His Thackeray
Rebecca and Rowena (1850, £250) is signed by the author, his Matthew Arnold
Poems (1885, £200) inscribed “with very kind regards, and cordial
acknowledgements of much help” to the librarian of the Athenaeum Club, Henry
Tedder.
The catalogue shows how deeply the writer immersed himself in the nineteenth
century, and identified with its bent towards antiquarianism, whether in
natural history and geology or archaeology, topography and climatology. He
was a devil for old detail, and that is the proper mark of the traditional
antiquarian bookseller’s miscellany – the surprise of the unknown, or
unknown twists to the already known.
Charles Cox knows what to put in and what to leave out: his notes point out
the connections with the published novels and, also, with the published
Journals. Occasionally he allows himself a personal note. Of Fowles’s copy
of Dorothea Hughes’s biography of her aunt, Memoir of Jane Elizabeth Senior
(Boston, 1916), he writes: “The marvellous Jeanie Senior is one of the
unsung heroines of Victorian England”. Senior, sister of Thomas (Tom Brown’s
Schooldays) Hughes, was appointed in 1873 as an inspector of workhouses, the
first woman government inspector. Cox prices the book, never published in
Britain and not obviously in any major British library (nor mentioned in
Senior’s ODNB entry), at a modest £85.
Like many serious collectors, Fowles commissioned a bookplate, allegedly from
Reynolds Stone, also based in Dorset, though it is not very characteristic
of Stone’s work, and many of the books in Cox’s catalogue bear it; others
have a circular blind stamp, “John Fowles / Lyme Regis” (he also had
another, "John Fowles Bibliomaniac"). Britain’s greatest expert on the
history of bookplates was Brian North Lee, who died in February this year.
An English teacher who had once trained to be an Anglican priest, Lee almost
single-handedly turned the collecting of bookplates from an obscure sideline
for amateurs into a serious occupation for historians of taste – and not
only taste, but heraldry and genealogy, too, and the fine art of printed
ephemera. He was, in 1972, a co-founder of the Bookplate Society, for many
years editing its newsletter and, often under its imprint, producing a
stream of books, including works on individual designers – Simon Brett,
Claud Lovat Fraser, Leo Wyatt, Richard Shirley Smith and Rex Whistler – and
studies such as British Bookplates: A pictorial history (1979), British
Royal Bookplates (1992) and Scottish Bookplates (with Sir Ilay Campbell,
2006).
Lee amassed a large collection of bookplates, mounting them in Stanley Gibbons
“Devon” large-capacity, peg-fitting stamp albums. His neat captions are
complemented by his research notes, letters, drawings, or proofs. At
Bonhams, New Bond Street, the bulk of his surviving collection was sold on
November 13, in twenty-three lots comprising thousands of bookplates,
fetching a hammer price of £29,180 (£35,016 with buyer’s premium) against
estimates of £6,750–£12,300. Lee was not happy about the way institutions
treated collections and intended his own to be broken up. His forty-nine
albums of miscellaneous British bookplates, classified alphabetically but
divided into ten lots, made £9,600 against estimates of £3,900–£5,900; his
seventeen albums of “royalty”, amounting to some 800 princely bookplates but
also including Coronation tickets and other royal memorabilia, did best at
£6,200 against £800–£1,200; four albums containing 350
bookplates relating to India made £1,800 and four containing 500 relating to
the West Indies £2,200. One album was devoted to a living bookplate
designer, the artist and illustrator John Lawrence, once a London neighbour
of Lee’s. It vividly demonstrates the process of creation, supplying some
forty bookplate sketches each for Marjorie Moon and Brian Alderson, both
experts on the children’s book, and went for £1,400.
Lee cheerfully sold items from his collection as he went along: his was a
working collection, mined by him for his prodigious output of books and
articles. His working library has been broken up in a 735-item catalogue,
178, from the booksellers Claude Cox (College Gateway Bookshop, 3 & 5
Silent Street, Ipswich IP1 1TF), “The Bookplate Library of Brian North Lee”.
John Blatchly, in an introduction, pays tribute to Lee’s “infectious
enthusiasm” and “scholarly achievements”, both of which are exemplified in
the material on offer, which includes books on American, Canadian, Danish,
Irish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Welsh and Yugoslav bookplates, scrapbooks
and albums compiled by him relating to the arts patron Christabel Aberconway
(£450) and the collectors Horace E. Jones (£220) and George Heath Viner
(£260); a collection of royal letterheads (£120); thirty-nine items by or
about Joan Hassall, to whom Lee was literary executor (£8–£450); a set of
eighteen bookplates designed for him by Hassall, John Lawrence, Simon Brett,
Hilary Paynter and others (£15); and more than 100 items by or relating to
him – books, offprints, even (at £100) his 2003 grant of arms.
James Fergusson is preparing a biographical book catalogue on the
bookseller, missionary and publisher Robin Waterfield, 1914–2002.
