Is This The Worst 19th C. British Novel?

by Stephen J. Gertz

It’s rarely a good idea to begin a novel with a Preface. It’s never a good idea to write a Preface as apology for what is to come. And what writer in their right mind would trust that their readers be indulgent and not too.critical of what they are about to read? Only a novelist who subconsciously knows that he is issuing a warning: Caution! Train-Wreck Ahead.

Santa left ashes in the author's Xmas 1893 stocking.

No such luck for The Author, one T. Duthie-Lisle. The reviews for this three-decker upon its publication were devastating; this may be the worst 19th century British novel ever published.


"The hardiest spirit may well quail before the stupendous task of giving any accurate idea of what is, apparently, the first-fruits of Mr. Duthie-Lisle's imagination" (The Saturday Review Dec. 30, 1893); "...obtrudes itself on almost every page as deficient in sense as of grammar" (The Academy Oct., 21, 1893); "...this incredibly foolish book" (The Speaker Sept. 16, 1893); and this dart to its heart: "One of the missions of the literary critic is to warn off intending readers from books that are utterly worthless, and 'The Heirloom' comes within this category" (The Athenaeum Sept. 9, 1893). 


Seventy-eight years later Robert Lee Wolff, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, declared it "...unbelievably awful as to style - antiquated, ungrammatical, melodramatic, like a parody of itself." 

Of the author, little is known; it is hoped T. Duthie-Lisle survived the reviews to live in hiding. It appears that this was TD-L's first and last foray into “the wildest schemes which his imagination [could] conceive, the marvelous combinations which a turn of the magic kaleidoscope of eventualities, and what we misname fortune may produce, are again and again out acted in real life.”


Why was this novel issued? It was not the sort of book that its publisher, Gay and Bird, usually published.

Wolff suggests that it was a “‘prestige’ publication.” If so, Gay and Bird’s standards for prestige were decidedly low; the book deals prestige a deadly blow. Could the brain trust at Gay and Bird have been so devoid of taste and discernment? Their publication of this novel strongly suggests that they possessed the editorial instincts of a cane toad, Australia’s answer to promiscuous publishing: cane toads will attempt to copulate with dead animals including dead female cane toads, dead salamanders, dead rodents, dead reptiles. Hence the dead on arrival publication of this dreadful doozy. 

Yet beyond its status as arguably the worst nineteenth century British novel, The Heirloom is significant as being among the last of the three-deckers, a format that ceased to exist by the end of 1894, with only an occasional three-decker published in the twentieth century, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the most notable example. This copy of The Heirloom was deaccessioned from a circulation library and that tells us a story.

Introduced in the early nineteenth century, three volume novels were expensive - the average retail price was 31 shillings.6 pence  - far too expensive for even middle class readers. But though three-deckers did indeed provide a measure of prestige to the publisher, author, and the book, because of their expense the major source of reading distribution was through a circulation library. Yes, you could buy inexpensive reprints in single volumes but if you wanted to read the latest "prestige" novels you had to borrow from a library. With low print runs (generally 1000 copies or fewer) and high price a publisher could earn a tidy profit. Ultimately, however, publishers of three-deckers had to bow to commercial pressures and began to issue single volume novels. Single volume novels were less expensive to produce, could be sold for less than a three-decker, and though their price was low, greater profits could be earned via dramatically increased sales volume.

At this point, you may be curious about the plot of The Heirloom. It is the sorry plight of the reader to plow through it. Three-decker novels typically possessed complicated plots, often dealing with marriage and property. The Heirloom cubes the complications,  throws in a lot of mush, and the result is a plot so convoluted that one is tempted to go full-Alexander the Great and take a sword to this Gordian knot. It would, alas, take a machete to hack through it but with no guarantee of success. 

It begins with the near-death ravings of Bertram Gonault, the presumptive hero of the story, as he lies in bed at Vernwood Manor. He made a fabulous fortune, and met a beautiful girl, who mysteriously vanished just prior to their wedding. As usual when a man loses the woman of his dreams, Bertram hit the road of dissipation that ended in deathbed delirium, an old man at 50 on page one, "at what a price!" A half hour after his feverish diatribe he was murdered. By the end of volume one, after an at best wearisome telling of the story of Bertram’s life, “the reader feels relieved when at the end of [that volume] he resumes his place in Bertram’s bedchamber” (The Speaker). You may want to get in bed with Bertie and take a quick nap before the murderer shows up.
 
The remaining two volumes are devoted to discovering the mystery murderer, finding a beneficiary for Vernwood Manor, the title's heirloom, and locating a mysterious ring, another heirloom to pad out the narrative. This is tantamount to asking readers to take a hundred mile hike with a hundred pound rucksack. Really, an army Ranger with a reading habit would be challenged to get though this book without giving up. 

Oh, lordy, this book's a doozy. And quite scarce.
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DUTHIE-LISLE, T. THE HEIRLOOM; or The Descent of Vernwood Manor. London: Gay and Bird, 1893. First (only) Edition. Three octavo volumes (7 3/3 x 4 3/4 in.). vii, (1, blank), 247, (1, blank), 16 (catalog); vii, (1, blank), 222, (2, blank), 16 (catalog); vii, (1, blank), 246, (2, blank), 16 (catalog) pp. Publisher's original gray cloth, gilt lettered title, sprig of leaves in black.  Cloth soiled, lt-mod. wear, a few sm tears to spine tails, spine exhibits library label ghosts, "Lorde Circulating Library" stamped in purple to preliminary blanks, offsets to preliminary blanks from bookplate of Britten Memorial Library, otherwise a Good copy of a genuinely scarce work. Wolff 1966. 

 

Sartain's Original Engraved Steel Plate Of Charlotte Brontë Portrait Comes To Market

by Stephen J. Gertz

The plate.
(Image surrounding engraved oval is a reflection off the plate while photographed).

The original steel plate of the mezzotint portrait of Charlotte Brontë engraved by John Sartain has surfaced.

Sartain (1808-1897), known as the "father of mezzotint engraving" in the U.S., produced the portrait, engraved after George Richmond's famous portrait in chalk, in Philadelphia c. 1857.

The 10 1/4 x 7 inch beveled steel plate, engraved with Sartain's signature (verso with dagger-and-S mark of John Sellers & Sons Sheffield, an English manufacturer of steel and copper plates for engravers, amongst other goods, with an office in New York), appears to have been made to accompany the long review essay, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, in the October 1857 issue of The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and Art, which Sartain had an early financial interest in. 

A print struck from the plate.

John Sartain was arguably the foremost American engraver of his time and inarguably the pioneer of the mezzotint process in this country. He popularized the intricate printmaking process when he emigrated to the United States from England in 1830. His mezzotint prints possess a strong and rich texture that heightens and intensifies their aesthetic character.

Sartain was born in London in 1808. Left fatherless at the age of eight, he became responsible for the support of his family.  At age eleven, he took a job as assistant scene painter to an Italian pyrotechnist working at Covent Garden under Charles Kemble’s management and at Vauxhall Gardens in London. 

John Sartain.

In 1823, Sartain became an apprentice to engraver John Swaine (1775-1860), with whom he studied and worked for seven years.  Sartain also learned to paint, studying miniature painting with Henry Richter (1772-1857). He moved to Philadelphia in 1830.

He then produced engravings for various American periodicals including Gentleman’s Magazine, The Casket, and Godey’s Lady’s Magazine.  Sartain, beginning 1841, made quite a few  engravings for Graham’s Magazine, and, in 1849, he, along with William Sloanaker, bought the magazine for $5,000.  They changed the title to Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Among Graham's noted contributors were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe (an assistant editor there, as well), who became a close, personal friend of Sartain.

Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, 1850.

George Richmond (1809-1896), in his youth a disciple of William Blake, was a painter and draftsman with 326 portraits to his credit.

Brontë's publisher, George Smith of Smith Elder & Co., commissioned this portrait in chalk of the novelist from Richmond as a gift for Brontë's father, who saw in it "strong indications of the genius of the author." Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell recalled seeing the portrait hung in the parlour of the Haworth parsonage, and a copy of it appeared in her biography of Brontë.

Only a handful of likenesses of Charlotte Bronte have survived,  Richmond's portrait is by far the most celebrated, and Sartain's mezzotint is the finest engraving based upon it.

The plate exhibits the mezzotint (half-tone) process very well. Mezzotint achieves tone variations by working the plate with thousands of little dots made by a metal tool with small teeth called a "rocker." In printing, the tiny pits in the plate hold the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean.  Subtle gradations of light and shade and richness in the print can be accomplished in skilled hands, and Sartain was a master of mezzotint, the first tonal process used in engraving, with aquatint to follow. Previously, tone and shading were possible only by employing hatching, cross-hatching, or stipple engraving, line or dot-based techniques that left a lot to be desired for nuanced effects.

There is no truth to the rumor I started that the Van Morrison-penned song, Mystic Eyes (recorded by Them, 1965), was inspired by the Richmond-Sartain portrait of Charlotte Brontë.

The plate is being offered by The 19th Century Rare Book & Photography Shop, of Maryland and New York.

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[BRONTE, Charlotte]. SARTAIN, John. Charlotte Bronte mezzotint portrait. Original steel plate, signed in the plate by John Sartain after George Richmond. N.P., [Philadelphia], c. 1857.

Original beveled steel plate (7 x 10 ¼ in.),  Light surface wear, a small tarnish mark.

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Brontë plate and print images courtesy of the 19th Century Rare Book & Photography Shop, with our thanks.

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Has An Unrecorded Thackeray MS Gift Book Been Discovered?

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hand-lettered titlepage.

A small manuscript book with original art purportedly written and drawn by William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), the great nineteenth century English novelist, has surfaced. There are no references to it in any bibliography, biography, or collection of Thackeray's letters.

Titled A Wonderfulle, Veritable and Trulye Delectable Hystorye; of a certain flock of sheep that went astray, during ye Shepherde his absence. Together wh. divers wondrous matters wh. are contained in thys little Boke, it was "published" in London by "John Snobbe Gent. at ye Inkpotte and Asse in Fleet Street" in 1848. In 2013 it appeared on my desk and, the object of near total Thackeray immersion, it has been under investigation for the last three months. The case for WMT's authorship is strong yet circumstantial and the jury remains out.

The book is composed of seven leaves of pale blue writing paper, each 7 1/4 x 5 3/16 inches (185 x 127 mm), with recto-only holograph captioning below colored drawings that were rendered on artist's paper, clipped, and pasted in. A gentle satire, with charming wit it tells the story of an English parson who visits the Continent but not before warning his congregation against being led astray by worldly vanities while he is away.  Compelling news from home returns him to England where he discovers that his flock has, indeed, flirted with the devil and succumbed to the vanities that contemporary society draws the unwary into.

The Shepherd, having perused 'the loving ballad of Lord Bateman,' is impressed
like that high-soul'd Nobleman with a desire 'some foreign countree for to see,'
he accordingly inserts his best blacks into a carpet bag -

and in a brief and improving discourse of two hours + fifty nine minutes
admonishes his flock against being led astray by worldly vanities during
his absence -

There are three possibilities as to the book's origin: by Thackeray; a Thackeray pastishe by an anonymous someone; or a forgery.

It is not a forgery; a forger would have signed Thackeray's name or initials in an attempt to deceive. There is no identifying signature, or initials.

He purchaseth an Alpinstock for the better ascent of mountainous regions, and
embarks at Kingstown in the 'Teakettle Royal Mail Steamer' -

On the voyage he meets the Great Sea Serpent, wife and family -

The Case For Thackeray's Authorship

The paper and ink are true to period. Internal text details nail the date to, indeed, 1848.

Thackeray's is known to have created little illustrated gift books for his friends or their children. In The Pen and the Album he wrote:

Caricatures I scribbled have, and rhymes,
And dinner-cards, and picture pantomimes;
And merry little children's books at times.

The title page is a riot of archaic and curious word spellings. From Thackeray's letters we know that he enjoyed playing with spelling, and he commonly used "wh." to abbreviate "with" and "which," as here.

The "John Snobbe" imprint is highly significant. In 1847 Thackeray serially published The Snobs of England; in 1848 a revised book edition was issued as The Book of Snobs. Thackeray created and popularized this class of individual and our current definition of snob is based upon Thackeray's conception. We can chalk-up the imprint's location - "at ye Inkpotte and Asse" - to Thackeray's self-deprecation and his negative feelings about writing. Like Dorothy Parker, he enjoyed having written but didn't enjoy the writing process. "At ye Inkpotte & Asse" is the lightly grumpy and sarcastic equivalent of slaving in the salt-mines.

Text:

In The Book of Snobs, Thackeray devotes a chapter to the clergy, and a clergyman is here the object of the satire.

The allusion to Lord Bateman in the second leaf's first line is significant. Thackeray was a fan of the traditional story of Lord Bateman and wished to adapt a version of his own. He shared this desire with caricaturist George Cruikshank, who warned him not to; Cruikshank was planning his own, and The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman was published in 1839 with notes by Charles Dickens. Thackeray, however, never got the story out of his head and later composed The Famous History of Lord Bateman, with his own illustrations and text variations.

The second leaf text refers to being "led astray by worldly vanities." We're in Thackeray territory here; Vanity Fair had been serially published 1847-48 and the book edition was issued in 1848.

In the forth leaf reference is made to a trip to Germany. Thackeray visited Germany in 1848 (he had spent time there earlier in life). The parson reading Galignani's newspaper is noteworthy: it was the leading English-language newspaper on the Continent and, significantly, Thackeray had been a contributing writer to it.

The reference to "news of a most horrifying nature" refers to the Young Irelander Rebellion, which occurred in late July 1848.

Reference in the fifth leaf to a Jenny Lind concert - We know from his letters that on June 3, 1848, Thackeray attended a Jenny Lind concert in London.

On the wall in the sixth leaf's illustration is a portrait of French minister Louis-Eugene Cavaignac, the de facto French head of state and dictator in the immediate wake of King Louis-Philip's abdication during the June revolution of 1848.

The final leaf's tableau presents a social scene worthy of Thackeray's wit: is the loud smacking sound that of a kiss or someone smacking their lips in satisfaction of eating a rich dessert? The illustration at far left is amusing - a man seems to be going in for a kiss with a young lady while simultaneously reaching behind her to grab something off a food tray.

IRELAND
FASHIONABLE INTELLIGENCE!

Festivities At Clontarf  Splendid reunion……..
Rank and fashion….elegance and beauty….light fantastic…
Salon de danse…polka…valse…on dit…
Hon. Charles M….hymnal altar…lovely and accomplished…
fair fiancée…eighteenth year…amiable as beautiful…
gallant bridegroom…splendid prospects…immense estates in the Moon
demise of his granduncle the Man thereof…&c. &c.

Arrived at Schmdttronichbrandtt he reads news of a most horrifying
nature, -

Which causeth him to return instantly by Special Extra Express Train -

The Illustrations:

At first glance they appear to not be by Thackeray. They are more developed than is usually the case with his illustrations. Thackeray was, in his mind, first and foremost an artist; it was his first love, what he did for pleasure, and his ambition in life was to become a painter; writing was a chore he did strictly for the money. But as John Buchanan-Brown's The Illustrations of William Makepeace Thackeray demonstrates, Thackeray's artwork varied from simple line drawings to more elaborate compositions. (His draftsmanship and technique were limited; he had to quit his art studies after he squandered his inheritance and had to earn a living, pronto). Given the time and motivation it is entirely possible that he created these illustrations.

Noteworthy in respect to technique is that when he designed crowd scenes or groups of people their facial features were generally rendered as simple dots or dashes, as seen in the second leaf. This same detail is found throughout Thackeray's illustrations.

So, too, Thackeray's variation of visage, often caricatured but sometimes, as here, somewhat straight without exaggeration or grotesquerie.

The Banshee not going fast enough, a boat is sent ahead to help
her on + by which means he gets back in something less than no time!

He goes in search of his flock + finds some of them at Jenny Lind's concert

Provenance

Purchased by John Ruston of the Horace G. Commins Bookshop located at 100 Old Christ's Church Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, from the Chadwick family of Sherborne, Dorset.

Purchased from Ruston by Jack Joseph of E. Joseph Booksellers of London in 1965.

In descent from Jack Joseph to his nephew, bookseller David Brass.

Maj. James Chadwick was an old friend of Thackeray's. Thackeray created his Alphabet Book for Chadwick's son, Edward.

others coortin'!

The Case Against Thackeray's Authorship 

At first glance, the handwriting is not what we expect of Thackeray. Though the penmanship here is as minute and precise as found in Thackeray's letters, there are a few details which concern. Thackeray's downstems (below the line, as "g" or "y"), for instance, are typically straight; here they curve to the left with a flourish.

The illustrations are too well-done.

Thackeray was too busy during 1848 to create this little book. He was up to his inkpotte & asse writing Pendennis.

Counter:

Thackeray used a standard pen nib when writing his letters. The designer here uses an artist's pen with thin nib, allowing for flourish. These illustrations are finer than most that we see of Thackeray's and he might very well have artistically varied his handwriting to suit the occasion.

Variations in penmanship style - sometimes for amusement purposes - are found between his letters, and between captions to his illustrations.

Thackeray used a straight and slanted handwriting style. Both are present here. 

While it is true that Thackeray was deeply immersed in writing Pendennis during 1848 and perhaps too busy to devote his energies elsewhere, it is also known from his letters that Thackeray quit Pendennis for brief periods of time. Again, writing was toil for him and he might very well have taken time to do this book simply for diversion and relaxation to reinvigorate his creative powers.

•  •  •

The question arises: why would someone anonymously create a one-off Thackeray pastiche in the first place? It's too good to not wish to be associated with it; pride of authorship is warranted. Thackeray had no need to sign it; as a gift the recipient (a member of the Chawick family, possibly James) knew who did it. How would an anonymous author (and clearly trained artist) have known of Thackeray's interest in the Lord Bateman ballad? His affection for unusual spellings? His Galigani connection? The Jenny Lind concert? Too many coincidences; the circumstantial evidence piles up.

And some, it is whispered, have been suspected (oh my eye! my eye!)
of kissing under the Misletoe!!, but owing to its being dark at the
time, and a violent cachination caused by the sudden appearance of
a rummy Old Gentleman on the wall the Informant was not able to
declare positively whether the noise heard was the mundane vanity
of a kiss, or that peculiar smack which is oft-times given to express
the satisfaction felt after the mastication of a rich Tart or the like,
and of which description of the period in question - and thus ends this
strange eventful history! -

The flock have now gone back to Sermon and Tract,
There's none of them courted, there's none of them smack'd;
Thus a Proverb's come true we have oft heard rehearsed
Things are certain to mend when they've come to the worst!

What the Scholars Say

John Aplin, Thackeray family biographer and curator of the Thackeray Bicentennial Symposium at Harvard's Houghton Library in 2011; Victorian literature scholar Kurt Harris, Ph.D; and Peter L. Shillingsburg, general editor of the Works of W.M. Thackeray; author of William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life, etc., were consulted.

Mr. Aplin is sanguine about Thackeray's authorship. Dr. Harris wrote, "The drawings and handwriting in the images you sent me appear to be those of W. M. Thackeray." Mr. Shillingsburg is dubious: "I have seen a number of iffy manuscripts and this one did not convince me but 'attributed to' is accurate."

In 1972, Gordon N. Ray (1915-1986), editor of Thackeray's letters, was consulted. It is reported that he glanced at the book's second leaf for a moment and without investigation declared that it was not by Thackeray. The handwriting was, apparently, all he needed to see and he didn't instantly see Thackeray. I am told, however, that Ray, at this point in his life aging, irritable, and cantankerous, was a bit of a cuss about the matter, refusing further and deeper examination of the book. With all due respect to Ray, however, experts after their great successes can sometimes mutate into rigid doctrinaires inflexible to anything that might contradict their experience. Mr. Ray may have been correct. But he may have been completely wrong.

The provenance should definitively settle the issue but, alas, there is no paperwork to document Ruston's purchase from the Chadwick family, nor a bill of sale from Ruston to Jack Joseph. There is no smoking gun, just the scent of gunpowder and traces of it on Thackeray's hand.

I admit to scholastic bias; I want this to be by Thackeray; it excites the latent academic and ignites the thrill of exploration and discovery. It is so very cool. And, without putting too fine a point on it, if accepted as being by Thackeray it's a book whose value is in five-figures. 

The matter is now left to academics, bibliographers, and collectors. Whatever the result, this is one of the most fascinating pieces of Thackerayiana to appear in a very long time.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks. This item is not currently for sale.
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When Brontë Met Thackeray: The Puncturing Of Inflated Expectations

by Stephen J. Gertz

This is what introduced Charlotte Bronte to William Makepeace Thackeray:

This is what introduced William Makepeace Thackeray to Charlotte Brontë aka Currer Bell:

 "There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital - a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of 'Vanity Fair' admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst who he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time - they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.

"Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day - as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterize his talent. They say he's like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humor, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humor attractive, but both bear the same relation, to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud, does to the electric death-spark his in its womb. Finally: I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him - if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger - I have dedicated this second edition of Jane Eyre. Currer Bell Dec. 21st, 1847."

This is what Thackeray thought of Brontë's tribute:

"January 1848

My dear Mr. [William Smith] Williams,

I am quite vexed that by some blundering of mine I should have delayed answering Currer Bell's enormous compliment so long. I didn't know what to say in reply; it quite flustered and upset me. Is it true, I wonder? I'm - But a truce to egoism. Thank you for your kindness in sending me the volumes, and (indirectly) for the greatest compliment I have ever received in my life.

Faithfully yours,

W.M. Thackeray"

What happened when the two finally met face to face was a textbook case of romanticized notions of an author's greatness deflated upon meeting the superman; he was merely human and nothing at all  like Brontë had built up in her imagination. Her hero was just a guy; the glorious prophet in print was pedestrian in person, a holy man defrocked by reality and stripped of his sanctity. Lewis Melville, in his biography of Thackeray, tells the story.

"It has already been mentioned that 'Currer Bell' dedicated the second edition of 'Jane Eyre' to Thackeray, and Thackeray later acknowledged the compliment, before even he knew her name or sex, by sending her a copy of 'Vanity Fair' [first edition in book form, 1848] inscribed with his 'grateful regards.' Charlotte Bronte had been much disturbed by the widespread rumour that she had drawn Thackeray and his wife [who was mentally ill and institutionalized] as Mr. and Mrs. Rochester, though she was indifferent to those other lying reports that said she had been a governess in his family and subsequently his mistress; and when she came to London in December 1849, she eagerly accepted the offer of George Smith [1824-1901, partner in Smith, Elder & Co., publisher of Jane Eyre, The Cornhill Magazine, and Thackeray's friend], to introduce Thackeray to her.

Thackeray's inscription on his presentation copy to Brontë of Vanity Fair.

"When they did meet, she was much astonished. As the dedication to the second edition of 'Jane Eyre' shows, she had expected to find a fervent prophet, and Thackeray was simply a quiet, well-bred gentleman, with nothing in appearance to distinguish him from hosts of other men. A delightful story has been related of their meeting. It is worthy of being repeated, for, though probably apocryphal, it is amusingly true of the lady's attitude to her hero.

"'Behold, a lion Cometh up out of the North!' she quoted under her breath, as Thackeray entered the drawing-room. Thackeray, being informed of this, remarked: 'Oh, Lord ! and I'm nothing but a poor devil of an Englishman, ravenous for my dinner.' 

"At dinner. Miss Bronte was placed opposite him. 'And,' said Thackeray, 'I had the miserable humiliation of seeing her ideal of me disappearing, as everything went into my mouth, and nothing came out of it, until, at last, as I took my fifth potato, she leaned across, with clasped hands and tearful eyes, and breathed imploringly, 'Oh, Mr. Thackeray! Don't!'"

"Oh, Mr. Thackeray! Don't!"

"Thackeray was an enigma to Charlotte Bronte; she could not understand him; she was never certain whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest; but she was determined to take him seriously.

"'All you say of Mr. Thackeray is most graphic and characteristic,' she wrote to Ellen Nussey, on December 19 [1849]. 'He stirs in me both sorrow and anger. Why should he lead so harassing a life? Why should his mocking tongue so perversely deny the better feelings of his better moods?…Mr. Thackeray is a man of very quiet, simple demeanour; he is, however, looked up to with some awe and even distrust…Thackeray is a Titan of mind. His presence and powers impress one deeply in an intellectual sense; I do not know him or see him as a man. All the others are subordinate…I felt sufficiently at my ease with all but Thackeray; with him, I was fearfully stupid.'

"Charlotte Bronte came again to London in the following June [1850], and Thackeray called on her at George Smith's house, and the host, who was alone with them, afterwards described the interview as 'a queer scene.'

"'I suppose it was,' the lady wrote to Ellen Nussey. 'The giant sat before me: I was moved to speak of some of his shortcomings (literary, of course); one by one the faults came into my head, and one by one I brought them out, and sought some explanation or defence. He did defend himself, like a great Turk and heathen; that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself. The matter ended in decent amity; if all be well I am to dine at his house this evening (June 12).'

"The dinner, it must be confessed, was not a success. The party included Mrs. Crowe, the Brookfields, the Carlyles, Mrs. Procter and her daughter, and Mrs. Elliot and Miss Perry, and it should have been a bright gathering. Instead it was a gloomy and silent evening, conversation languished, the guest in whose honour all were assembled said nothing, and Thackeray, too much depressed by the failure of the entertainment, but little. Mrs. Brookfield made an effort.

"'Do you like London, Miss Bronte?' she asked; then, after a pause, the other said gravely, 'Yes — no.'

"Charlotte Bronte was the first to leave, and so soon as she had gone Thackeray slipped out of the drawing-room, and his eldest daughter was surprised to see him open the front door with his hat on.

"'He put his fingers to his lips, walked out into the darkness, and shut the door quietly behind him. When I went back to the drawing-room again, the ladies asked me where he was. I vaguely answered that I thought he was coming back,' Lady Ritchie [Thackeray's daughter] has written. 'Long years afterwards, Mrs. Procter, with a good deal of humour, described the situation — the ladies, who had all come expecting so much delightful conversation, and the gloom and constraint, and how finally, overwhelmed by the situation, my father had quietly left the room, left the house, and gone off to his club. The ladies waited, wondered, and finally departed also; and as we were going up to bed with our candles, after everybody was gone, I remember two pretty Miss L 's, in shiny silk dresses, arriving full of expectation…We still said we thought our father would soon be back, but the Miss L's declined to wait upon the chance, laughed, and drove away again almost immediately.'

"Once more Charlotte Bronte and Thackeray met, and again a letter of the lady tells the tale.

"'I came here (London) on Wednesday, being summoned a day sooner than I expected, in order to be in time for Thackeray's second lecture, which was delivered on Thursday afternoon. This, as you may suppose, was a great treat, and I was glad not to miss it,' she wrote to Ellen Nussey, on June 2, 1851. 'As our party left the (lecture) Hall, he (Thackeray) stood at the entrance; he saw and knew me, and lifted his hat; he offered his hand in passing, and uttered the words, 'Qit'eii dttes-vous?' — a question eminently characteristic and reminding me, even in this his moment of triumph, of that inquisitive restlessness, that absence of what I considered desirable self-control, which were among his faults. He should not have cared just then to ask what I thought, or what anybody thought; but he did care, and he was too natural to conceal, too impulsive to repress, his wish. Well! if I blamed his over-eagerness, I liked his naivete. I would have praised him ; I had plenty of praise in my heart; but, alas! no words on my lips. Who has words at the right moment? I stammered lame expressions; but was truly glad when some other people, coming up with profuse congratulations, covered my deficiency by their redundancy.'

"Indeed, though intensely appreciative, Charlotte Bronte proved so severe a critic, both of himself and his works, that Thackeray was not quite pleased with the various letters (printed in Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life') in which she expressed her opinions, and he said so much in his 'Last Sketch,' prefixed to 'Emma,' when, under his editorship, that fragment appeared in the Cornhill Magazine.

"'I can only say of this lady, vidi tantiim. I saw her first just as I rose out of an illness from which I had never thought to recover. I remember the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes. An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterise the woman. Twice, I recollect, she took me to task for what she held to be errors in doctrine. Once about Fielding we had a disputation. She spoke her mind out. She jumped to conclusions (I have smiled at one or two passages in the 'Biography' in which my own disposition or behaviour form the subject of talk). She formed conclusions that might be wrong, and built up whole theories of character upon them. New to the London world, she entered it with an independent indomitable spirit of her own; and judged of contemporaries, and especially spied out arrogance or affectation, with extraordinary keenness of vision. She was angry with her favourites if their conduct or conversation fell below her ideal. Often she seemed to be judging the London folks prematurely; but perhaps the city is rather angry at being judged...

"An austere little Joan of Arc."
The ecdysiast edition for Kindle.

"'I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebutting our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure and lofty, and high-minded person. A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me'" (Melville, The Life of William Makepeace Thackeray [1899], pp. 310-314).

• • •

While we know what Brontë and Thackeray thought when they met we have no idea what the designers of the above modern editions of their work were thinking when they met these two classics of English literature. We only know that when Brontë and Thackeray met modern packaging travesty ensued and bore two further examples of the death of civilization as we know it, whether through ignorance or a good case of bad taste while trying to breathe new life into old bones and resuscitate the once lively now near dead for 21st century readers.

But it appears to be fact of modern life that until a product of culture is sexualized it hasn't truly been integrated into the culture that produced it. In that regard, the sexualization of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair for sales purposes may be, however dubious, the greatest compliment that can be paid to these old standards. 

"The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name" (William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair). Thackeray, the great social observer, would have been, it seems, in Playland in the 21st century; so much to satirize. His challenge, of course, would be how to satirize a society that is already a parody of itself, the modern humorist's dilemma.

"To those who think with their heads, life is a comedy, to those who think with their hearts, life is a tragedy" (Henry Miller). That's the difference between Thackeray, the cool satirist, and his contemporaries, Dickens, the warm sentimentalist, and Brontë, the suffering gothic naturalist.

“If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist, it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God" (Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn). And cry hard. While we shed tears over the perversion of culture we are amused by it. It is not unreasonable to suspect that Thackeray would have shared that view. Sorrow is the root of comedy and to be able to laugh in the midst of tears is the best defense against utter despair. 

And so, painful though the prospect is, I look forward to Jane Erred and Venery Fair, proof-positive that there's still life in these old cougars pathetically porned-up to attract younger partners. Brontë, the judgmental moralist, would be appalled. Thackeray would be appalled, too, but the temptation to slit his wrists would be tempered by wit, the folly of human behavior trumping stern righteousness.

That's the conversation I'd have enjoyed eavesdropping on when Brontë met Thackeray, if only Thackeray had stopped shoveling potatoes into his mouth long enough to participate. She was hungry for wisdom. He was just plain hungry.

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Hey, Rare Book Guy! What Happened To Dickens & Thackeray In Parts After Publication?

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

Hey, Rare Book Guy:

You know how Dickens and Thackeray were originally published in installments? What happened after that - are surviving copies usually bound together into a complete book? Is it possible to buy a single installment sometimes (maybe even with the original wrapper?). I have tried a few search engines but couldn't get an answer - thanks!

David

Dear David:

It's Friday the 13th. This is your lucky day. 

I know about Dickens and Thackeray novels published in their original parts and first editions in book form. Correctly collating a complete set, checking if all advertisements (including slips) and first state engraving points are present, and checking all text points with a first book edition requires care. If you get things wrong you either leave money on the table or an unhappy client leaves you. A bookseller can always blame their cataloger. Booksellers who catalog on their own do not, alas, have this excuse to proffer; the client thinks they're an idiot and credibility goes out the window. We're supposed to know what we're talking about.

Simultaneous with issuing the last parts of each novel, Dickens' and Thackeray's publishers routinely removed the ads that appeared at the beginning and at the end of each part, removed the illustrated  plates found together after the ads and before the text, replaced them at intervals within the text, then bound-up the remaining, continuously paginated parts and published them in cloth-bound book editions. Collectors seek the book editions with stab-stitch holes deep in the gutter margin - evidence that the book is composed of the original parts, which were stab-stitch bound; stab-holes are absent in later printings of the book editions. Once that is established, then you have to check for the earliest issue points.  David Copperfield, for instance, has twenty text points to consider as well as points for each of the forty engravings that originally appeared in the serialization - etched twice for a total of eighty. You want to know what distinguishes each from its duplicate.

If you're looking to buy individual parts to complete a set it can be done but they are very difficult to come by and expensive. Depending upon the Dickens or Thackeray title you might have to pay upwards of $1,000+ if you can find one; you may have to wait. And wait. And wait. Individual installments to the first American edition of David Copperfield in parts (New York: John Wiley/G.P.Putnam, 1849-1850), however, are currently available online at $150 each. With twenty parts in nineteen volumes the price for a complete set would be $2,850. Compare that to a set of first U.K. edition Copperfield in parts in fine condition without repair currently online at $17,500. Even a set lacking a few advertisements and with repairs and foxing is being offered at $5,500.

I don't have quite as much experience with Thackeray in the original parts as I do with Dickens but his publisher followed the same plan.

If you're serious about collecting Dickens or Thackeray in original parts or first editions in book form I strongly suggest that you get a hold of the appropriate bibliographies so you are armed and prepared on the points to look for. For Dickens in the original parts that's Hatton and Cleaver's Bibliography of the Periodical Works of Charles Dickens. For the books, it's Walter E. Smith's Charles Dickens in the Original Cloth, which supercedes John C. Eckles' The First Editions of Charles Dickens. For Thackeray, it's Shepherd's bibliography.

A word about provenance. The most desirable sets of original parts are those that came from a single original owner with signatures to each part or proof of provenance. The majority of sets, however, do not have this identification (or not all parts signed) and many are likely composed of parts brought together from various sources to form a complete set. This is not a crime. The parts were never meant to last and booksellers and collectors who built complete sets in the past were doing collectors in the present a favor. Without positive markings to indicate otherwise there is little way to distinguish an original complete set with one put together at a later date, beyond obvious variances in color or condition of the wrappers, whether by seller or collector. It's not an issue to sweat; the parts were read to bits by the original owner and friends they passed the parts along to, and we're lucky that any have survived.

It was not unusual for booksellers to insert individual advertisements (in the form of variously colored slips) from parts beyond redemption and sale into a same, otherwise salable part lacking them. Performed correctly there is no way to tell if this has been done without tearing the installment apart and, using forensic science, determining if the glue used is period or modern. This matters only if you're an obsessive purist on the verge of a nervous breakdown with a lot of money in search of a perfect, untouched set, otherwise refer to last paragraph, final sentence.

Concerning condition, the flimsy wrappers to the original parts are commonly found with some sort of restoration, usually along the easily damaged spine and/or at the corners. If the job is done well it's very difficult for the untrained eye to discern the repair. Reputable booksellers will declare the extent of restoration. If you have concerns, you can view the parts under a black light and most repairs will be evident.

It can be very frustrating to collectors with an interest in Dickens and/or Thackeray to get into first editions in parts or cloth; they are expensive. To those aspiring collectors I suggest that you collect Dickens or Thackeray in their first American editions. It's an area of collection just beginning to emerge now that Walter E. Smith has published his bibliography of Dickens' American editions (2012) and bibliographical sense has been made of the heretofore chaotic subject. First American editions are available and reasonably priced.

To find original parts or book editions the best online resources are ViaLibri and AddAll, rare book search sites that aggregate results from all others worldwide; one-stop shopping.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice

by Stephen J. Gertz

 Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
- William Hazlitt

We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
- Herbert Spencer

It was pride that changed angels into devils...
- Saint Augustine

Pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
- Alexander Pope

I think Charley Pride has been one of the best things to happen to country music...
- Loretta Lynn.

Pride and prejudice are eternal but while pride made the list of deadly sins, prejudice, curiously, did not. It wasn't, evidently, considered a lethal enough transgression in the ancient world; you will look in vain for references to "prejudice" in ancient writings. It was not considered a fault worthy of comment. But Jane Austen thought differently, prejudice as harmful a social trespass as pride.

2013 is the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice, Austen's second novel. It has, along with each of her other five novels, become a classic, and has sold some twenty-million copies since its initial publication on this day, January 28, in 1813. It is the rarest of all Austen novels to find complete in its first edition within a contemporary binding. Regency-era binders routinely removed the half titles; copies with all half titles present are scarce: Sadleir, Keynes, and Chapman's copies lacked them, and the half-titles are missing in the copies at the Bodleian and Cambridge University libraries. 

Half-title.

"The first draft of PP, under the title of First Impressions… (printed as False Impressions by Lord Braybourne)…was written between October 1796 and August 1797" (Gilson p. 23). Austen made significant revisions to the manuscript for First Impressions between 1811 and 1812. She later renamed the story Pride and Prejudice. In renaming the the novel, Austen probably had in mind the "sufferings and oppositions" summarized in the final chapter of Fanny Burney's Cecilia, called "Pride and Prejudice," where the phrase appears three times in block capitals. It is possible that the novel's original title was altered to avoid confusion with other works. In the years between the completion of First Impressions and its revision into Pride and Prejudice, two other works had been published under that name: a novel by Margaret Holford and a comedy by Horace Smith.

"It was not fully revised until 1812, and the author records on January 29, 1813, that she has successfully 'lop't and crop't' the book" (Keynes). Both Gilson and Keynes suggest that only 1500 copies of the first edition were printed. The book was published at 18 shillings in three volumes on  January 28th in 1813. Austen sold the copyright to Thomas Egerton, publisher of her first three novels, for £110, not anticipating that it would become an instant hit (if not a fully critical success), the first edition selling out very rapidly with a second edition issued in the same year.

I recently had an attractive and complete first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice pass through my hands. Though I cannot be certain, I strongly suspect that the "Charlton" gilt ownership stamp to its contemporary binding is that of Charleton House, Montrose, the home of feminist writer and philanthropist Susan Scott Carnegie (1744-1821) from her marriage in 1769 until her death in 1821.

Jane Austen is  one of the few authors whose entire oeuvre has attained classic status as masterpieces of ironic social satire streaked with proto-Feminism that have only increased in popularity since their publication.

Of Austen, Virginia Woolf wrote, "a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface...[possessing an] impeccable sense of human values" (in The Common Reader, Hogarth Press, pp. 102, 104).

Jane, wherever you are, make a wish and blow out the candles on the cake without prejudice. This is your day; enjoy it with pride.

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[AUSTEN, Jane]. Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. In Three Volumes. By the Author of Sense and Sensibility. London: Printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall,  1813.

First edition, following all points in Gilson and Keynes, and complete with all half titles present. Three twelvemo volumes (6 5/8 x 3 7/8 in; 168 x 97 mm). [iv], 307, [1, blank]; [iv],  239, [1, blank]; [iv, [323, [1, blank] pp.

Contemporary speckled calf, blind-tooled board edges, edges sprinkled red, original light brown endpapers. Expertly rebacked with the original spines laid down. Later green morocco gilt lettering labels on spines. Gilt stamped "Charleton" to upper boards of each volume.  Edges to a few leaves professionally and near invisibly repaired. Occasional light foxing. An excellent and complete copy in its original and contemporary binding.

Gilson A3. Keynes 3. Sadleir 62b.

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All images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, currently offering this copy, with our thanks.

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Thomas De Quincey Writes While High As A Kite

by Stephen J. Gertz

"I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking: and, what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it: -- and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: -- this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me -- in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea - a [pharmakon nepenthez] for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach" (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater).

At an unknown date post-1804, the year that he first tried opium at age nineteen, Thomas De Quincey, famed author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (anonymously published in London magazine in 1821 and in book form in 1822), was working on a draft of an as yet unidentified or unpublished essay.

In 250 words over eighteen lines with numerous cancellations and insertions, De Quincey, apparently after chug-a-lugging laudanum (tincture of opium), to which he was addicted, took flight and soared to Xanadu as a  phoenix ecstatically lost in the ozone and content to be above it all, a mummified skeleton lying in a blissful state. That one-page, drug-addled manuscript has now come to auction.

It reads, in part:

"In a clock-case housed in a warm chamber of a spacious English mansion (inevitably as being English, so beautifully clean, so admirably preserved, [noise there is none, dust there is none, neither moth nor worm doth corrupt] how sweet it is to lie! – If thieves break through and steal, they will not steal a mummy; or not, unless they mistake the mummy for an eight-day clock. And if fire should arise, or even if it should descend from heaven is there not a Phoenix Office, able to look either sort of fire (earthly or heavenly) in the face ... Mummy or anti-Mummy, Skeleton or Anti-Skeleton, the Phoenix soars higher above both, and flaps her victorious wings in utter defiance of all that the element of fire can accomplish—making it her boast to ride in the upper air high above all malice from earthly enemies...."

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, Write high, edit sober. It appears, however, that De Quincey, never completely free of opium's grip, remained stoned through the editorial process. This is is an opium-soaked apparition, a fantastic proto-Surrealist Gothic phantasmagory. It must have seemed to De Quincey that he had broken the boundaries of prose and ascended to that enchanted place where reveries take flight onto paper without volition or physical exertion, highly automatic writing while under the spell of the Oneiroi, the dream-spirits who emerge like bats from their deep cavern in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness beyond the rising sun, the infinite night that day cannot break. Don't mess with the Muse, feed Her. Judging by his penmanship there was laudanum in his inkwell.

This De Quincey manuscript, an early example of high-lit. during the Romantic period demonstrating the effect of opium on literary creation, is being offered at Bonham's Fine Books & Manuscripts sale, February 17, 2013, in San Francisco where it is estimated to sell for $800-$1200.

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Manuscript image courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.
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A Checklist Of Goliard Press (London 1965–7)

by Alastair Johnston

Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part II. 

Tom Raworth by Barry Flanagan (from ACT, Trigram Press, 1973)

If Matrix Press can be considered Raworth's incunabular period, the Renaissance flowering of his career as a printer began when he started collaborating with artist Barry Hall at Goliard Press in 1965. 

For those old enough to remember, the "Summer of Love" was a transformative time. As a teenager in England I divided my non-school time between marching with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, rehearsing with my rock band, protesting the Vietnam War and attending poetry readings. They converged occasionally, as when there were benefit readings in support of striking coal miners or teachers -- big rallies featuring poets (Tony Harrison, Tom Pickard, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Barry MacSweeney, Adrian Mitchell, Bob Cobbing, Tony Jackson, et al.) instead of agit-prop rhetoricians. Swinging England was turned on to poetry, and these poets were working class. If they went to college it was art school. If they listened to music it was rock on Radio Luxembourg, late at night. In 1965 the Wholly Communion event at the Royal Albert Hall featured Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the USA, and many European poets reading their poetry to a packed house. Christopher Logue, Adrian Mitchell and the Scots novelist Alex Trocchi also read, showing that Britain was producing powerful performance poets. I was most impressed with Mitchell and the Austrian concrete poet Ernst Jandl.

Within a few years the younger generation of British poets had infiltrated the establishment, so regulars on the poetry circuit like Logue, Patten, Pickard and Spike Hawkins stood up alongside Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and William Plomer to read the poetry of Ezra Pound at the gala anniversary of the Poetry Society in 1969. I think it was at the Royal Festival Hall. Pound was too frail to attend but sent a note and then his works were delivered by the superb performers on stage including Bunting, Logue, Smith and Pickard.

More Americans came through Britain to read and some stayed: Jack Hirschman and David Meltzer because they were friends with expatriate printer Asa Benveniste at Trigram Press (established in London in 1965 and publisher of many of the same writers as Raworth, including Hirschman, Heliczer, Hollo, Meltzer and Raworth himself); others like the young Tom Clark to attend university (Raworth recalls, "I think he was a student of Jeremy [Prynne]'s at Cambridge, as Andrew Crozier was. They were at Essex probably doing their postgraduate stuff and almost certainly because of Donald Davie whose intention was to make the Essex literature department more interesting than Cambridge."). Clark stayed to ridicule the establishment of George MacBeth, Edward Lucie Smith, Peter Porter and Ted Hughes (in his 1979 roman à clef, Who is Sylvia?). Anselm Hollo was actively involved in the scene in London, bringing manuscripts to the press. He and Raworth would be joined with John Esam in the Trigram Press book Haiku, 1968.

So Outburst had set in motion a whole trans-Atlantic migration, not only of writing, but of writers. Charles Olson came through: Raworth found it hard to take the endless monologue. Ginsberg and Corso were caught smoking hash on a train to Newcastle and told the guard they were smoking Turkish cigarettes (at the time Turkish cigarettes contained 1% hashish, as I discovered in Istanbul). Through the American publisher of Jargon, Jonathan Williams (who had come to England for a year), Raworth met Barry Hall. The meeting of Raworth and Hall brought the work to a new artistic level.

Announcement for a show of Barry Hall's paintings at the Batman Gallery, San Francisco, 1961

Raworth's partner, Barry Hall (born in Westminster, 1933), was a commercial engraver (having served a 7-year apprenticeship to learn the trade) and an artist. When he died in 1995, Raworth wrote his obituary for The Independent. He had studied at St Martin's School of Art in London, before going to San Francisco in 1961 for a year, where he exhibited at Batman Gallery and met the poets & painters of the San Francisco renaissance (Batman's publicity was printed by Dave Haselwood at Auerhahn Press). He returned to England, and, as Raworth wrote, "we co-founded the Goliard Press in 1964 in a ramshackle stable in West Hampstead, and hand-set, printed and published books by Elaine Feinstein, Charles Olson, Aram Saroyan and others: many for the first time in Britain. Other small presses benefited from our skills: we printed the first edition of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts for Fulcrum, and produced many volumes for Bernard Stone's Turret Books.

"Goliard was so successful that in 1967, through the efforts of Nathaniel Tarn and Tom Maschler, it came under the Jonathan Cape umbrella as Cape Goliard. Hall continued working, producing a list that included Neruda, Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, J .H. Prynne, Gael Turnbull and Ted Berrigan, until one day, bored, he left the rollers halfway across a page of type, walked out, and went to America.

"For many years he was on the move. Breeding quarter-horses and making movies in New Mexico. Writing scripts in London. Filming Dale Herd's Dreamland Court in Los Angeles. Recovering from a severe illness in Newport, Rhode Island. Making a television film on Kerouac. Working again (briefly) as an engraver in London. Then he visited Africa, fell in love with Kenya, and moved there."

Elsewhere, Raworth wrote about the beginnings of Goliard: "In 1964 I met Barry Hall, one of the only two people I've ever been able to work with, and we decided to start Goliard. We got a larger press, a guillotine, a variety of type and set up in a cobble-floored stable off the Finchley Road. We worked together for a few years, then when Jonathan Cape wanted to get involved, I left."

Goliard Press books, London, 1965-7

Further light was shed on Goliard (and the difficulty of making a living as a small press) in a discussion about British poet Jeff Nuttall, when Raworth recalled, "Val, Barry and Jackie Hall and I ran into Jeff forty years ago at a party (home-grown marijuana, laboratory-made drink, candles and Dylan Thomas records). He asked us if we knew anything about a William Burroughs someone had told him of. We met a few times, he began to do My Own Mag, we were evicted, stayed for a while with the Hollos, then in December 1964 moved to High Barnet (a flat, strangely, in the street where the party had been). Jeff and Jane (and those four Calder-invisible children) lived a few streets away, and as Jeff passed our flat twice a day to and from his teaching job we spent quite a lot of time together. He got involved with Trocchi and the Sigma stuff, Barry and I struggled with Goliard. I wonder if anyone else remembers Priscilla and The Woolies. We saw one another less frequently after I left Goliard and we moved to Colchester: but we stayed in touch then, and through our years in the USA."

When I wrote commenting on the prolific output of Goliard during this time, Raworth replied: "How it mounts up. I'd really forgotten the amount of stuff we did in those basically couple of years before the Cape. I wonder we had time to drink and take drugs."

Goliard Press Checklist

1965 Broadside

Tom Raworth
Weapon Man
15 copies. Light olive green paper printed in black on front of folded sheet.
Notes: the image was reused from the cover of Outburst 2 where it was credited to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (It is a reversed image from Hans von Gersdorff, Fieldbook of Wound Surgery, Strasburg, 1519).

TR: The first item ever printed by Goliard was the small broadside Weapon Man, a thing of mine I wrote in the stick...

1966 Broadside
Tom Raworth
Continuation
Illustration by Barry Hall. 15 3/4 x 9 1/8" Cochin type
Handset, printed and published ... in an edition of 150, 25 copies numbered and signed, plus 15 copies printed on handmade Japanese paper.

Books

September 1965

Michael Horovitz
Nude Lines for Larking in Present Night Soho
7 3/4 x 6 1/5" 8 pp bond paper, stapled into flesh-colored (Caucasian) textured card stock. 36' Verona type on cover, four different text types.
Colophon:
Designed and printed by Barry Hall and Tom Raworth
Published in an edition of 160 copies in September 1965
Copyright Goliard Press  10a Fairhazel Gardens  London NW6
Note: (first book of the press).

TR: The first little booklet was Michael Horovitz' "Nude Lines for Larking in Present Night Soho". Nude was from mis-reading his writing and should have been "Rude". As far as I remember I did all the setting and it was all letterpress.

1965
Anselm Hollo
The Claim
10 1/4 x 5 1/8" 8 pages, sewn into plain beige covers with a printed dustjacket on speckled Japanese paper; yellow tissue endpapers.
Set in 12 point Goudy Old Face. Much better typesetting and printing than the preceding work. 150 copies of which 50 signed & numbered. Cover display in 36' Verona type. The image is a reproduction of a medieval woodblock from the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550) repeated 5 times in red.

Note:
 T.R. There was probably some nice japanese paper from time to time..
A.J. yes, cover of the claim by anselm. my copy signed "to Barry & Jacqui from Anselm" with a poem added, $8 thanks to peter [howard]
T.R.:  i think I have a rare unsigned one somewhere

1966 July
Charles Olson
West
9 7/8 x 6 1/2" 18 pp laid paper, sewn into coated paper with glassine frontispiece portrait and Japanese paper overlay, glued-on wrappers of brown Japanese paper. Title in 36' Verona type, text in 12' Caslon with Cochin italic.
Colophon: "This book has been set in Caslon Old | Face and printed by hand on Glastonbury | antique laid paper at the Goliard Press, | 10a Fairhazel Gardens, London NW6 | in July 1966. This edition consists of | 500 copies in japanese Nagaragawa | wrappers and 25 copies hard-bound, | numbered and signed by the author."

Notes: The frontispiece portrait of Red Cloud (supplied by Ken Irby), printed on glassine, has a guard sheet of translucent Japanese paper which seems to have its own "red cloud" in the paper.
Slight notes, with Duncan & Blaser manifestations intercut into scribblings from the Report of the Board of Indian Commissions (1870) etc., as the Big O says in the preface: "So I have here a much larger story than would appear."

TR: Olson bombarded us with letters about West: move this here, move that there, do this, do that -- until we stopped opening the mail, did the book the way we thought, and on publication received an ecstatic telegram of thanks.
(Second printing 1969)

1966
Elaine Feinstein
In a Green Eye
Photographs by Al Vandenberg
9 3/4 x 6 1/2" Cover title in Westminster type, perfectbound in coated wrappers. 36 pp of wove paper. Text in Caslon O. S. with headings in Verona.
500 copies on chromo; 30 numbered & signed.

Note: Today, Feinstein is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature: this was her first book. She began writing poetry influenced by Pound, Williams and the Objectivists, and was one of the first women to attend Cambridge University. Olson wrote her a letter defining "breath prosody" in which he famously addressed her as "Dear Mister Feinstein." Subsequently she wrote numerous poems, novels and five biographies, as well as plays and translations from the Russian. Vandenberg was a successful London photographer.

Not seen: Broadside prospectus, "For the baiting children in my son's school class..." 150 copies, of which 25 numbered and signed. Drawings by Johannes de Cuba. Pale tan paper printed in grey, browns, yellow-green and black.

Christopher Logue
Selections from a Correspondence between an Irishman and a Rat
3 3/4 x 6 1/2" 16 pp Glastonbury paper sewn into tan covers with a green wrapper printed in green and black. Poem set in 30' Placard Condensed (Monotype 1958). Cover drawing of rat & potato (?) by Hall(?)
150 copies*

*most destroyed by Barry Hall after a dispute with Logue. One of the worst situations a publisher can be in is to have a falling-out with the author after the book is printed. This happened famously with Jonathan Williams and Asa Benveniste over Imaginary Postcards at Trigram Press, and with Jack Spicer's circle over his Heads of the Town up to the Aether published by Auerhahn Press.

1966 broadside
Bill Butler
Twenty-four Names of God
large poster, tan paper printed in black and orange. Limitation unknown.



1966 broadside
Ron Padgett
Sky
white cardstock, folded to 9 x 4 1/8". A prose poem. Cochin type with a square of blue tissue paper glued on. 325 copies, of which 25 numbered and signed.

1966 Christmas
Aram Saroyan
Sled Hill Voices: 13 poems
4 7/8 x 6 1/2" Drawings by R. G. Dienst
30 pp wove paper sewn into plain card covers with a Japanese paper wrapper. Set in 24' Cochin italic, printed in multi colors. Imprint in 11' Engravers Roman. Drawings printed on tipped-in colored papers. 450 copies. Note: Minimalist pantheism from the minimalist poet. The author's first book.

1967 January
Tom Raworth
The Relation Ship
Illustrated by Barry Hall.

10 x 6 1/2" Set in Goudy Old Face
60 pp (unpaginated) of Glastonbury laid paper includes 3 illustrations and 3 additional leaves tipped in. (These tip-ins might have been conceived as tissue guards except they come after the images.) The images were offset-printed, then blind-embossed and hand-coloured. 450 hardbound of which 50 signed & numbered, plus 6 specially bound. Cover title printed in gold Westminster type on glassine wrapper.

Note: The major work of the press. Raworth's first book, and winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize from the Poetry Society of London. Second edition, without monoprints, Cape Goliard/ Grossman 1969

1967 February
Tom Clark
The Emperor of the Animals. A play.
6 3/8 x 4 3/4"
16 pp of wove paper sewn into yellow cover stock printed in brown and green with Ultra Bodoni caps. Set in Cochin italic, Goudy Old Face and Westminster (for stage directions). Colophon: 300 copies of which the first 35 are numbered and signed by the author and all other members of the original production, and contain two illustrations of the sets.

Note: This play was first performed privately in London on January 14th, 1967, with the following cast:
Edward -- Edward Dorn
Benedict -- Robert Creeley
Howard -- Charles Olson
Helga -- Panna Grady
Janet -- Helene Dorn
Norma -- Valarie Raworth
Sets & costumes by Barry & Jackie Hall
Music by Tom Raworth
Directed by Tom Clark

Note: Clark doesn't recall whether there were signed copies or not. He adds, "As to the details of production, that remains a secret between me and Tom R."

1967 March
Zoltan Farkas
The Baltimore Poems
7 1/4 x 6 1/4"
20 pp of laid paper with tan Glastonbury laid endpapers, sewn into white card covers with Japanese paper wrappers. Printed cover title. 500 copies of which 35 are signed & numbered. Set in Goudy Old Face. Illustrations by Richard O. Tyler.

Sheet of coated stock bound in with sepia photo of the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe (in Baltimore). Note: Anselm Hollo brought the manuscript to the press.

1967 broadside
Jack Hirschman
Wasn't It Like This?
12 1/2 x 7 1/2" 100 copies printed, 25 numbered & signed. 3 colours. Westminster type. The famous Flammarion engraving (from 1888) used here, was also used by the UFO club and for the spring 1967 benefit for International Times in London, that featured Pink Floyd, Lennon & Ono, Soft Machine and other bands. The event known as the 14-hour Technicolour Dream was held at the Alexandra Palace.

1967
Jack Hirschman
London Seen Directly
4 x 6 1/2" 16 pp sewn into yellow card cover with green Japanese paper wrapper, title printed in red. Text set in large Westminster printed in brown with yellow ornaments on each page. Re-uses Hall's rose from "Continuation" broadside.
150 copies of which 50 signed & numbered.

Note: The design shows the art nouveau influence which was big in the Swinging London/ Carnaby Street era.

1967
Various
"before your very eyes!" (cover title)
12 x 8"
Images lithographed in brown ink, printed on white card stock and stapled. Handset in Cochin and 24' Westminster Old Style.
Price: 7s 6d     $1     5 NF   "Unsolicited manuscripts will be burned without ceremony."

A magazine anthology, larger and more ambitious graphically than Outburst. Back cover reprints Corso's drawing of Nelson's column from Hollo's History. Hall's image of rat & potato overprinted to create abstract glyph with another splatter-like illustration. Contributions from Olson, Aram Saroyan, Hollo, Hirschman, Raworth, Ron Padgett (on his Max Jacob kick), & James Koller. "The pictures are from Rose Birth by William Jahrmarkt." (Billy Jahrmarkt was the proprietor of the Batman Gallery in San Francisco, which had shown Hall's work, and was the key location for the artists of the Beat Generation in North Beach and the Fillmore district. Unfortunately he was a heroin addict.)

(Note: Part III will contain Goliard Press jobwork).
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Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part I: A Checklist Of Matrix Press (London 1961-4).
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