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Baron Corvo in the Ukraine

January 18, 2015, 2:26 pm
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Regular readers of some longevity may remember that way back in August 2013 I had a few spare copies of books by Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo and offered to send them out for free on a first-come first served basis to anyone who hadn't read one in the hope of 'spreading the word' and perhaps garnering some interesting responses. I am always fascinated by people's responses to reading Rolfe for the first time and so it's been interesting to hear back from some of those who received those books. Not everyone responded and that's fine but I just didn't think anything of it when a request came in for a copy of Stories Toto Told Me (not in the edition pictured above I'm afraid!) from Ukraine.. at the point of my sending it, there was no particular issue there big enough to make international waves. As you will see from the email below that I received just before Christmas, the book was sent into a peculiar and difficult situation and has had quite a life since I sent it out. Maryna, a 24 year old ex-air traffic controller, currently studying ethnography in Lviv and spending the rest of time reading Robert Aickman and watching Slavic folk horror movies, has kindly agreed that I can reproduce her email in full... I am very grateful for it and I hope you will appreciate it as much as I have.
 
 
 
Hello Callum,

it's Maryna from Luhansk - you sent me Baron Corvo's "Stories Toto Told Me", and haven't heard from me ever since :)

My failure to deliver a proper (or whatever) review probably needs an explanation. Last winter, the situation in Eastern Ukraine turned from unstable to hellish, so one day I had to grab my backpack and flee. I had been living in a rent apartment, so lamenting over a Lost Home was out of question - even though the feeling that I'd lost my hometown was, and is, still there. But the apartment had been full of books. I only managed to get them back recently, having visited the dreaded ex-hometown - it wasn't that bad, even though my Ukrainian accent, acquired after a few months of living in Western regions, infuriated the gunners now and then. I had to leave many books behind - a highly curious Russian four-volume Meyrink collection, for instance - but most of them I carried with me in great bundles like those which ex-USSR smugglers used to carry their merchandise. "Stories Toto Told Me" was in one of the bags.

When I finally got to read the collection, it reminded me of an obscure Hungarian movie, Angyali üdvözlet, or The Annunciation. All roles in it were performed by children: ten-year-old Adam and Eve leave the garden of Eden, and as the subsequent stories unfold, the film offers a pleasantly grotesque reading of the ancient and modern history. The magniloquence of the scenes' progression - there are tyrants, monarchs, revolutionaries (the latter category including Jesus and a pretty fair-haired Lucifer as well) - is subverted by the tyrants' lisp and the knights' and maidens' overdone "adult" acting, and that's precisely what makes the sight so fascinating. It's reductionist to call it a movie where the roles of adults are performed by children: it is a movie, in which the games of children are fashioned to fit the Great Narrations. "Aren't you bored?" - the crucified Jesus is asked. The characters suffer, because their Great Narrator, or their creator, is an ill-tempered grownup, and the games he invents are inevitably boring.
 
 

That's when a parallel to Rolfe's "Stories" comes to mind. The world of Toto's stories is a world where a benign adult, who reigns the kingdom of children, is an observer and an occasional playmate, not a capricious gamemaster or a toy store manager. I am not oblivious of connotations when I call Toto's demiurge benign, and even to a person who is unaware of Baron's biography, some digressions in "Stories" might give a rough impression ("they made the little divel kick and struggle, — just as I should, sir, if you whipped me naked with a whip of red-hot wires, instead of with the lilac twigs you do use when I am disobedient"). There's not a vestige of artificially preserved, idolized Youth - in these stories being young is not a more favourable condition, it's simply more natural than growing up.

"First of all, you must understand that the saints in heaven are always young; that is to say, if you are old when your life in this world comes to its end, you just shut your eyes while your angel takes you to paradise, and when you open them the next minute you are there, and you have gone back to the prime of your life, and so you are for always; but if you die while you are young you do not change your age, but remain at the age at which you died."

Eternal youth can be a damnation - when one's master is an old man, forever jealous of his servants' games. Toto's God addresses his angels as "little brothers" - maintaining the spirit of this delicately mischievous collection. Images of teenage saints appeal to me for various reasons, but mainly because folk-Bible stories tend to get exceptionally weird when they depict young martyrs. I remember being fascinated by a book on Ivan and Jacob, who are regarded as the most controversial saints in Orthodox Christian hagiography. It is believed that a five-year-old Ivan accidentally killed his two-year-old brother, presumably during a game, and then hid in a stove and was burnt alive - again accidentally - by his parents. And our local stories of the rescue of infant Jesus are outright creepy because of his weird transformations: "She took the old man into her arms and held him to her breast. And he turned himself into a small boy in swaddling clothes."

"Stories Toto Told Me" presents a brighter side of teenage martyrology. The naivete of that delightful lore which strips saints of their shining garments and dresses them in peasant clothes, is merged with Rolfe's delicate humor - and in the world which thence arises, cherubini are more impish than their pet "divels". Lately I've been contemplating Pelagia Horgan's article on the effect of religious art (Fra Angelico's in particular) on secular people. Rolfe's "Stories" are in no way "sacred" by these standards, of course, but the essayist's conclusion may be extended to embrace them: it's the artist's transforming gaze that matters. Baron Corvo/"Toto" animate solemn Christian images, and frescoes turn into lusty tricksters and young rebels who are simply too riotous to worship those stuffy pagan gods.

Kind regards,
Maryna
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Hiatus

January 30, 2015, 7:32 am
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Well...

My apologies for the break. And for the fact that it may continue for a few days yet.

I have been laid low by proper, honest-to-goodness flu and so I haven't been able to give blog or business the attention they are used to. 

Normal service will be resumed shortly but that may still be a few days away...

CJ
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Figures in a Landscape by Lionel Wiggam

February 22, 2015, 1:15 pm
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Back in June 2013 I posted a scan of a photograph I had acquired of a handsome young man called Lionel Wiggam. He was, among other things, a poet, and his first volume of poetry called Figures in a Landscape was published when he was only 19 and included a body of work that had been put together in the years before then. (It contained some rather fine woodcuts by Thomas W Nason, some of which are reproduced here) I confess - although back in 2013 I promised I would find a copy of his book and read it - I didn't.

 


Then a few months ago I was contacted by Scott who was connected, very loosely to one of Lionel's partners and who was glad to find the photograph on the blog. I promised Scott I would make good on my commitment to buy and read some of Lionel's poems and we agreed to both find a copy of Figures in a Landscape and report back. It is a very flawed book but this only made me more intrigued to know something more about the very young man who wrote it. Reports of the kind of man that Lionel became are very varied with some internet tributes talking about a warm and friendly man and a good neighbour, others suggesting maybe that there was a level of bitterness and cynicism and a rather prickly persona. But Figures in a Landscape is like a psychological mine to be dug through for a sense of a person. The first section is a sequence of poems which look back to a childhood, remembered landscapes and they are distinguished by their lack of emotional impact. There is a sequence which follows that contains poems about women. There is no excusing nor ameliorating the misogyny in that sequence. Women are generalized into a group of cold, unfeeling, twisted human beings. How anyone could have become quite so bitter about an entire gender by the age of 19 becomes a fascinating question and, in a way, reading those uncomfortable words it becomes much more interesting as a question than the poems themselves.

Biographical details are scarce though. The blurb on the dustjacket however, perhaps unwittingly, paints a picture of a boy for whom life has already been an unusual and rather unstable experience. "At twenty, Lionel Wiggam is a student in the School of Speech at Northwestern University where he is paying his own way with the help of scholarships, poetry readings, odd jobs and the pittance that accrues from selling verse to magazines. He was born in 1915 in Columbus, Indiana, the son of prize fighter and a farmer's daughter. The father, at one time welterweight champion, owned his own sideshow in a carnival, and the family travelled about the Middle West on his pugilistic tours, letting the boy pick up his education where he could. He entered Northwestern University at the age of fifteen but left it again for the following three years, playing in a stock-company, working on a road construction gang, modelling professionally, hanging wall-paper and working as a janitor to pay for night school classes." (It strikes me this blurb might itself be written by Wiggam, certainly there is something of a narrative being constructed there and it perhaps begins to hint at how some of the elements in the poems might have been generated from this rather chaotic childhood.

There are good poems in this collection. As individual works some of them are very finely crafted and one can see why, as a youth, he would have been seen as something of a prodigy. One poem in particular I thought spoke eloquently of the difficulties that Wiggam is attempting to articulate about his short life thus far...

Stuggle

Being less of man than elf,
A boy must overcome himself.
Let him flee, or let him fight,
Let him struggle through the night.

His cheek will grow a golden beard,
Symbol of the thing he feared.
His voice will find a lower note
And stifle boyhood in his throat.

Oh, he must overcome the joy
The laughter of that other boy
And beat him down, and see surprise
Rise in his stricken, loving eyes.

Until, articulate and sad,
He turns away the other lad;
And seeks a dark forgotten place
To hide his weeping face.

I should say I am very grateful to Scott, my correspondent, for prompting me to find and read the book and also for his insightful comments, even if his opinion of the poetry is somewhat more strongly negative. Despite the high praise that litters the rest of the dustjacket, Wiggam only wrote one more volume of poetry, twenty years distant from this first. I suppose the next step in my journey to understand him is to get hold of a copy of that and see where twenty years have taken us.

If anyone should stumble across this post because they are searching the internet for the name of their late friend Lionel Wiggam, please do get in touch: any biographical details would be very much appreciated.


 


Chase

We never dreamed the happy chase
Would end in that disturbing place:
Green, quiet cave with pines that were
A roof above its singular guest -
He with a faun's alarming face,
He with a boy's thin, angular breast
Subsiding into fur.

We thought to find a worried fox
Observing us with blazing eyes
Behind an ambuscade of rocks;
Until we saw the hounds withdraw,
Disclosing that small pointed head
And hoofs all torn: until we saw
A bleeding pixy-face, instead.
And then, like us, the hounds that were
Suddenly grown quieter.





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Thomas Burnett Swann

February 23, 2015, 3:27 pm
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It is often the way in this business that you are vaguely aware of an author's name, perhaps from an article or the internet, or someone has mentioned them to you and then months or years later suddenly you find yourself with a superfluity of their books. This happened to me just after Christmas when these five books by Thomas Burnett Swann (1928-1976) came out of a box I was sorting and I thought, 'ah, I've been meaning to have a look at this chap'.

And one of the silver linings of being unwell for a little while is that I have had some time to read a bit. I am no expert on Swann and for far better coverage I would direct you to the pages that author of gay erotica and Roman historical novels Steven Saylor has put up in Swann's honour. Swann's Wiki page talks a little about Swann's forward thinking approach to sexuality in his books and, although I have so far only read The Lady of the Bees and the title story of The Dolphin and the Deep, there is a very enjoyable frisson all the way through both of these books. 

Swann's main setting across a lot of his books was his own version of classical history in which he chronicled the downfall of the non-human races and the beginning of human 'civilization'. Characters run around in a state of semi or complete nudity much of the time and at the centre of both of the books I have read are same-sex relationships far more real and stronger than the heterosexual love interest. In The Lady of the Bees the abiding relationship is between a faun called Sylvan and a young man Remus (of "Romulus and...."). In The Dolphin and the Deep, despite the fact that the wealthy Etruscan adventurer-protagonist is on a quest to find love in the shape of Circe, a mythical and dangerous beauty who disappeared a hundred years before, he is clearly most smitten throughout the long story with the Merboy Astyanix, his companion on the adventure.

Swann doesn't write in the conventional mode of a psychologically driven novel, his stories are 'Tales' in the old sense, a strong narrative pervades and you feel you might be reading a classical myth rather than a 1960s fantasy novel. But I am finding that the little effort required to adjust to reading a different style is much rewarded. 

Next I shall be reading Green Phoenix, partly because it is in the same trilogy as The Lady of the Bees but mainly because the artwork of George Barr both on the cover and inside the book promises plenty of lissome fey sprites and hunky centaurs!







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George Barr Illustrates Green Phoenix by Thomas Burnett Swann

February 24, 2015, 7:54 am
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Yesterday I mentioned that one of the reasons I might be drawn to Green Phoenix next out of all the Thomas Burnett Swann books I have, was the attractive nature of the illustrations by George Barr. I thought maybe it was unfair not to share these.


 


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The Book Catalogues of Michael deHartington

February 28, 2015, 11:00 am
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Back in June last year I was delighted  to acquire for my own collection an almost complete set of the original book catalogues of Michael deHartington. If you think that the name has a slightly 'arch' sound to it, perhaps the ring of a tekinym, you would be right but who am I to puncture such a lovely legend. With typical speed and sense of urgency it is only now that I thought I would spend a little time going through them and making a note or two to share with you all about the items that stand out to me. I should stress the "to me": there are abundant goodies in these catalogues and I am only going to mention the things that catch my eye for some reason or another. The original catalogues are quite scarce now but if you want to read them yourselves then there was a facsimile reprint of 300 copies by The Elysium Press under the Asphodel Imprint in 1998.

Catalogue number one, like nearly all of them is a  few pages of hand-Roneo-ed typescript. All the catalogues date from the early 1970s and number one was issued in 1972. Turning the first couple of pages one is struck in particular by short lists of books by Baron d'Adersward Fersen and Ralph Chubb: both of which are bearing prices enough to make one weep in 2015. Would you like, for example a copy of one of the 36 entirely hand lithographed copies of Chubb's The Heavenly Cupid in half green morocco with black corduroy boards for just £100? Also catching my eye in #1 is a series of original drawings by Gaston Goor, each about 19" x 14" and all six are separately described as depicting nude youths disporting themselves in various settings and priced at £50 for the set, less than £10 each.

In the section of 'Manuscripts and Letters' at the end of the list you might have been lucky to buy for just £5, '14 Queer Poems Written in the Summer of 1967' by Robin Maugham, "one of just four copies reproduced from typewriter script". If anyone visiting here knows where these now are please do let me know!



One of the books that stands out to me in catalogue #2 is one of 250 copies of Gerald Hamilton's Desert Dreamers, published under the pseudonym Patrick Weston (C. W. Beaumont, London: 1914). Hamilton was the real person on whom Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris was based in his 1930s Berlin novels and Desert Dreamers is one of the earliest novels to be published in the UK to concern itself with homosexuality. The extra interest in this copy though comes from the exlibris plate of C. R. Dawes. "The fine collection of homosexual literature collected by Charles Reginald Dawes was mostly bequeathed to the British Museum. Fortunately for collectors there was a discreet sale of duplicates ('The Property of a Gentleman') sold at Sotheby's and other items were sold direct to booksellers".  As of today there is no copy of the 1914 edition available on abebooks and copies of the 1966 reprint are being offered at over £100. This copy could have been yours for £17.50

Also in this catalogue appears one of the books by a favourite eccentric of ours Major R. Raven-Hart the obsessive canoeist. As deHartington comments, "It the times the word 'boy' appear in this book would equal the number of runs scored by England against Australia this year, we would surely retain the Ashes."




Much of the stock of Michael deHartington Booksellers came from the collection amassed by Timothy d'Arch Smith in his research and writing of his 1970 book about the Uranian poets, Love in Earnest. This third catalogues, the only one to be letterpress printed, contained the central portion of that collection. To anyone familiar with Love in Earnest it really requires little extrapolation. Here are association copies and ALS of some of the rarest items by the authors about whom d'Arch Smith was writing.

Item 67 was Horatio Brown's inscribed copy of John Gambril Nicholson's A Garland of Ladslove. In March last year I had the pleasure of cataloguing and selling the same copy thus:

"NICHOLSON, John Gambril. A Garland of Ladslove. Privately Printed [by F. E. Murray], 1911.
Signed and inscribed by the author to Horatio Brown, fellow Uranian poet and Venetian historian.
This is the same copy that was used by Timothy d’Arch Smith to write his seminal study Love in
Earnest and which was later sold as a part of the collection he amassed during the writing of the
book in catalogue no.3 (item no. 67) of Michael deHartington. The inscription is illustrated as
plate 10 in Love in Earnest. The book has d’Arch Smith’s bookplate by Gaston Goor. Also laid in
is a photograph of the author annotated “John Gambril Nicholson photographed by himself Dec
1894”. The photograph measures approximately 8.5cm x 6cm and is almost entirely obliterated
by silvering; however, held to the light and looking through the verso, the image of a young and
handsome Nicholson can still be seen. The photograph appears to belong with this copy as it has
“Brown” written in Nicholson’s hand on the verso in pencil. It seems possible this copy was never
sent to Brown or to Venice as it was acquired by Victor Hall from Murray’s estate as a part of a
pile of remainders. In a previous collection of poems Nicholson earned the ire and legal threats of
Frederick Rolfe by using material by him allegedly without permission; this current collection has a
poem subtitled “from the Italian of Baron Corvo”, perhaps Nicholson was concerned this might be
seen by Rolfe in Venice on Brown’s shelves and cause more trouble and so it was never sent. (for
the photo: FFEP 260214). Paper labels a little spotted and browned."

I'm afraid to say that whilst you might have bought this book in the 1970s from Michael deHartington for £30, I sold it very quickly at £400.

 

A rather fun cartoon illustration graces the front of catalogue #4. On the very first page the things that catch my eye are three pamphlets by Oswell Blakeston: The Furious Futures Dying (1967), Before the Encounter and Afterwards: A Squence (1966), and Jeremy and Others (Undated). All three now vanishingly scarce and worth considerably more than the 50 pence each asked for them in the early 70s.

Towering above all else in this catalogue though was the holograph MSS of Ralph Chubb's The Book of Visions of Nature and Supernature Solar and Lunar from 1930. The MSS was bound and included a full-page watercolour as well as a watercolour vignette and other decorations. It was never published. Just £200.

 

The cover of catalogue #5 comes from the book Gergorio Prieto: Paintings and Drawings which has featured here on FFEP before.

This catalogue illustrates very nicely the way in which older catalogues like this are useful to the collector today: they introduce you to books you might otherwise not hear about.  

Holiday by Michael Power (1962), "Adolescent's traumatic encounter with a pederast adds to his summer holiday problems." 

The Partnership by Barry Unsworth (1966), "Two young men go into business making plaster pixies and the discovery by one that the other is homosexually attracted to him causes the gradual disintegration of the partnership. A subtle, humorous first novel which seems to have been quite forgotten".  

A Prison Song in Prose by G. K. Van Het Reve (1968) "A sadistic fantasy with graphic illustrations" (and one of the few books whose 1970s price is about the same as you would pay today).


The only rarity that jumps out at me from this list is a copy of the photographic book Ortil's Canoe Pirates by Hajo Ortil (1966) selling here for £3.45 and now not short of one hundred times that amount.

But again, more items are described with just enough detail of plot to make them interesting, Latitudes of Love by Thomas Doremus (1961), "Dying man's last romance with a sixteen year-old boy" (and not expensive today).

The Frauds by Michael Hastings (1960), "Saga of a family including a boy, Tommy, and his discovery that he is homosexual".

La séduction inachevée by Anne-Marie Heuber (1972), "Boy who is having an incestuous affair with his sister becomes infatuated with her boyfriend as well" (sadly never translated to English as far as I can ascertain).


I confess, my interest in straightforward public school fiction is limited, so at first sight it appears this particular list might have passed me by. However, one has to note the copies from the Diary of a Boy series by Aubrey Fowkes which would make anyone trying to collect a set now weep to see them at two or three pounds each. Also a copy of Tim by Howard Overing Sturgis for just £6. A curious item is Auerbachs Deutscher Kinder Kalender 1938 catalogued as a "Nazi Boys' Annual".


After a couple of list which have been somewhat lighter shall we say, catalogue #8 contains over 200 items but on slightly closer inspection many of them have appeared in previous lists. Among them two John Gambril Nicholson rarities, The Romance of a Choir Boy (1916) and Rydal Mount Plays (1922) which are the short plays that Nicholson wrote for his boys at the Rydal Mount school where he taught for many years. At £15.15 and £7.65 respectively, one winces a little to think what prices are attached to them now, when you can find them.




This is a actually catalogue #10, I am missing number nine and, whilst I could look it up in the Asphodel facsimile, I'm sticking the to the originals I have in front of me here. Most of the first part of this list marks a bit of a change from previous lists and concentrates very hard on non-fiction sexological works concerned with homosexuality, most of these in German or French and most of little interest today. One notable exception though would have to be the one of the 125 copies of the 1908 edition of E. P. Stevenson's The Intersexes written as by Xavier Mayne for £75 and E. P. Warren's three volume A Defence of Uranian Love written under the name Arthur Lyon Raile, "one of the rarest of all books on this subject" for £80.

There are certainly other highlights in these catalogues that I have missed or which might simply appeal more to those of a more refined taste than mine. Reading through them is a real pleasure, beyond the grumpy references to what prices books used to be catalogues like these provide signposts to follow towards books previously unknown... what could be better.

Mr deHartington, I salute you...
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A Boy in the House by Mazo de la Roche

March 1, 2015, 1:55 pm
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This rather charming drawing on the front of a 1952 novella by once famous, now overlooked author Mazo de la Roche is rather charming I thought. It is uncredited on the jacket and unsigned as far as I can see. 

If any of you knowledgeable readers of FFEP has read this book I would be really grateful if you could email me using the link to the top right of this page.

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Some Nudes by Donald Friend

March 2, 2015, 12:04 pm
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I was cataloguing and flicking through a couple of books by Donald Friend today. A twentieth century Australian artist and diarist, Friend is accepted as a major artist in the Australian canon although he sits there somewhat uneasily given his decided bias towards languid depictions of beautiful youths. His draughtsmanship is astonishing for the way he captures mood and meaning as well as line and shape. It is notable how many of his nudes have a 'tropical' sense of lethargy: the quality of a dream or a daydream is never far away from them.

None of these here come from the books I was looking at today. Rather, I got a little carried away in my surfing of the internet and found these all already online: many from auction houses where Friend's works can no command many thousands of pounds.
















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Crucifixion by Georges Desvallières

March 4, 2015, 11:58 am
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One of the joys of writing a blog like this is that people from all over the world are constantly getting in touch because of something they have seen here or to share things they think I would like to see. Which is why it was a complete delight the other day to hear from John and Nick, readers and occasional customers. 

John has been collecting French Scouting calendars and found, in a 1950 calendar, the above reproduction of a very beautiful painting of the crucifixion. A little research led him to the artist George Desvallières (1861–1950) who, it will be noticed died in the year of this calendar. Desvallières is well known in France and beyond as a painter of primarily religious subjects. In 1919 Desvallières founded a studio to promote religious art and this painting is in the style of his work from this time. 

There is no doubt it is a beautiful depiction of Christ on the Cross but an added level of meaning was given to it when John and Nick discovered that Desvallières lost his son Daniel at the beginning of The Great War at the age of 17 and they tracked down this small photo of Desvallières with his son (below). I agree with John and Nick that it's not fanciful to see a resemblance between Daniel and this youthful Christ: a long very straight nose and perhaps larger than expected ears on the Christ seem to me features they share.

Sadly the painting is reproduced in monochrome and it seems that the original is not to be found on the Internet yet. Granted that we can't at the moment know the artists original colour choices Nick, who is an illustrator, has I think made a very fine job of enhancing the image and that is the purple and gold version below. (I couldn't resist also including the St Sebastian that John and Nick found and sent me too!)

Many thanks to John and to Nick for sharing first with me, and then with us all, this rather poignant image. 



 



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Frederick Rolfe and the "Princess Alice"

March 7, 2015, 2:03 am
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"The Princess Alice" is the paddle steamer you can see in this painting being cut in half. I came across this image recently in a local auction house. It is a naive paining on glass and probably dates to just after the disaster itself, that is, about 1878.

I have written about the connection between Federick Rolfe Baron Corvo and this disaster before and you can read about it here but having been reminded of it by stumbling upon this auction lot I thought I would share it again.
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Grace Lodge Illustrates Karik and Valye by Yan Larry

March 7, 2015, 8:26 am
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These rather extraordinary illustrations are from a peculiar book called The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya by Yan Larry (Hutchinson, London: [1945]) which was originally written in Russian and appears to be something of a cross between Alice in Wonderland and The Water Babies with an creepy-crawly theme. Brother and sister Kriak and Valya can't resist drinking a 'potion' they find in the Professor's house, and as a result they are shrunk to tiny and spend the rest of the book having adventures with dragonflies, spiders and other various bugs.

There are black and white illustrations in the text as well but unusually for me, it is the colour ones that appeal more in this instance. The book is somewhat scarce, particularly in its jacket and as a translation from the Russian is something of an oddity among children's books.






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Vintage Swim and Others

March 8, 2015, 8:02 am
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A gentle stroll around an antiques fair today and I have come home with three new items for my own collection. One of the nice things about the digital world is that you can take the small images on postcards and scan them with lots of magnification and see lots of details. So here we have a postcard of what looks to be the beginning of a swimming race.. although with trees that bare it must surely be mid-winter... brrrr.... Then, regular readers will know I have a soft spot for faded or damaged old photos, there is a real photographic postcard of a group of scouts at their swimming pool. And finally a football team of a group of young chaps that I might not have bought but for the fact that on the back we discover that the sender Jack (who seems to be showing off a little to 'Lizzie') is pictured on the front: I like the idea of guessing who he might be.




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Callum James Books: Short List #16

March 10, 2015, 5:35 am
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Last night I was very pleased to send out Short List #16 to people on my mailing list. Unlike any full-length catalogues I may issue, these Short Lists are only available by being on the mailing list and they contain anywhere from 20-40 items that I have selected specially and which are always new stock acquired recently and not offered for sale by me before.

The Short List items always sell fast, over half of the items in this list have sold overnight for example and many of them have been requested multiple times and I have had to disappoint people so it becomes something of a sport to get an order in as quickly as possible for the best items.

If you would like to see this Short List, receive all future ones at the same time as everyone else on the mailing list and have access to lists 1-15, all I need from you is your email address.. There is a link at the top right of this blog which enables you to email me and just let me know you would like to be on the mailing list.
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Ten Vintage Faces

March 11, 2015, 3:06 pm
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I bought (and posted) some new postcards for my collection the other day and in the process found myself flicking through the album. I noticed in amongst the vintage swimming photos I seem to have accumulated a number of faces.. portrait photos. Some or all of these may have appeared on FFEP before but I make no apology for that. I took the first ten I found in the album to share.
 










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Hendrick Van Loon's Marvellous Maps

March 13, 2015, 3:19 pm
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Hendrik Willem Van Loon is much better known in his native Netherlands I think than in the rest of the world. He was a prolific author and, in some cases illustrator, mainly of books for children and young adults. Today I picked up a copy of his 1932 book The Home of Mankind. The Story of the World We Live In. It's a delightful book and similar in style and idea to his more famous The Story of Mankind. But he illustrated these himself and, because this book is a mixture of geography and geology, a book about The World, there are these wonderful maps. The style is so fabulously naive, it looks like a child has coloured in a printed map with their felt tips, but they work so well. I was charmed by them.








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Jessie Marion King illustrates Eric by F. W. Farrar

March 14, 2015, 5:54 am
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Well, my work here is done... My lovely husband came home yesterday with this book. Jessie Marion King (1875-1949) is well known as a book illustrator, jewellery designer and painter of pots, but it can be surprisingly hard to find her work. This is a copy of Eric or Little by Little by F. W. Farrar. It was published by Collins and is undated but my best guess would be this is just pre-WW1, certainly King was doing very similar work for the publisher T. N. Foulis at that time.

This is one of a series of books published by Collins under the title Collins Bumper Presentation Books and they were clearly designed to be cheaply bought by schools to be given as awards. Sadly, this has translated into the quality of the production and, as you can see with this copy, the paper covered boards and the thin hinges have not survived well. This is probably why I cannot find a single reference to this edition online anywhere: I imagine very few have survived. Also notable is that there is a list of titles inside 'uniform with this volume', Alice in Wonderland and Hans Andersen at least were published using the same illustration with different titles. An indication of what kind of publishing job this was is that the only illustrations inside the book are a coloured frontispiece and title page vignette of the most dull and traditional Victorian type. The title page gives the publisher's impression as the Collins Clear Type Press of London and Glasgow. Clearly, the new cover design by King was the only expense Collins was willing to go to in these books as the inside seems an entirely recycled affair from editions they had previously issued.

It is, like most of King's work, a striking, stylised and colourful design. Regular readers I am sure will be able to see a similarity between this style and some of the work of FFEP favourite Albert Wainwright.

(NB. If you have found this post searching Collins Clear Type Press, please DO NOT email me asking about the date, value, or details of your book. I don't wish to appear churlish but I know no more about it than you do.)




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Richard Siken: War of the Foxes

March 15, 2015, 12:35 pm
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Ten years ago, Richard Siken won the Yale Young Poets Award for his debut collection of poetry, Crush. It was a brilliant tour de force of language and personal revelation and raw emotional states described in ways that felt new and revealing. So every year or so I would check about to see if there had been another collection.... not until now!

... And it's being crowd funded.

Watch the video above and then go to the Indiegogo page and put your money where my mouth is.
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Laurence Scarfe Illustrates Three Ghosts

March 17, 2015, 12:35 pm
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Laurence Scarfe has been mentioned on Front Free Endpaper before, about two years ago when R and I visited Poole Museum and saw some screenprinted tiles from the Poole Pottery from the 1960s, some of them by Scarfe. He was a Yorkshire born lithographer, mural painter, book illustrator and a graphic and commercial artist. He was the art editor of The Saturday Book and a regular illustrator for The Radio Times and whilst he trained at the Royal College of Art, his longest full-time post was as a lecturer at The Central School of Arts and Crafts.

He comes from the same artistic garden as the likes of Ravilious and Bawden but, because he survived them both, and perhaps because of the necessities of his commercial work, his style moved with the times and his work from the 1970s in particular has a real feel of the decade about it.

This little paperback is called Three Ghosts. As well as the illustrations here, there are also some delightful and detailed black and white work in the text which show more clearly his links to Ravilious et. al., and may yet find their way onto the blog. The three ghosts in question are from three stories, "The Red Room" by H. G. Wells, "Rats" by M. R. James and "The Return of Imray" by Rudyard Kipling. I like them because they manage to be both lighthearted and eerie at the same time.




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Comrade Loves of the Samurai by Saikaku Ihara

March 20, 2015, 1:43 pm
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This little book has been on my shelves a couple of years waiting for the right time to be taken down. This week I have been working in London most days and so the train journey back and forth has provided the perfect environment for a book of short stories like this one.

Saikaku Ihara (1692-1993) was writing in Edo Period Japan, the time of Samurai warriors and Shoguns. I am no expert in Japanese history and literature but I can appreciate that these were not written as 'historical' fiction, but rather as contemporary observations with a little humour and satire thrown in. This collection of thirteen stories was first translated and published as one of the 12 volumes in E. Powys Mathers' great anthology from the 1930s, Eastern Love, sometimes called The Eastern Anthology. These are tales extracted from Saikaku's oeuvre and drawn together by their theme of same-sex love and romance. The copy above is the 1970s paperback printing by Tuttle.

In Edo Period Japan the dominant ethos of homosexual love was that of a grown man with an adolescent boy, very similar to the pattern more familiar in the west from Greek civilisation. These stories are not pornography, they are charming and beautifully observed tales of devotion, love that makes men do mad things, of honour and of eternal love that continues beyond the grave. The titles of the tales give something of the flavour: "The Soul of a Young Man Smitten With Love Follows His Lover On A Journey", "All Comrade Lovers Die By Hara-Kiri", "A Samurai Becomes A Beggar Through His Love For A Page."

Having suggested a comparison with the model of Ancient Greece there is suggestion in these tales that the model wasn't so strictly adhered to in Japan. We have even in this small selection, stories of life long devotion and of relationships between young Samurai of the same age. In one story, "They Loved Each Other Even to Extreme Old Age", the rather self-explanatory title suggests a relationship well past the boundaries of pederastic love and, whilst there is regret expressed for the loss of youth and beauty, it doesn't stop the depiction of a loving and devoted life-long homosexual relationship. 

The stories all fall within what is known at The Floating World genre of Japanese literature of the period, of which Saikaku was a founder and exponent, a genre set in the 'floating world' of urban life, of samurai and merchants, theatres and prostitutes: very very roughly perhaps a 'bohemian' setting. The Japanese word for 'floating world' is also an ironic play on the homophonic Japanese term meaning 'sorrowful world', that is, the earthly plane from which Buddhists seek to escape. That tension between the 'sorrowful' and the 'floating', between the eternal qualities of love and honour and the earthly qualities of passion and bodily beauty is, perhaps, one of the things which makes these tales so affecting to read.

There is a very slight undertone of the supernatural in some of the stories which only goes to strengthen the impression, from the lightness of touch and the lilting narrative, that one is reading a collection of fairy tales. And the collection does not lack for humour either, though it is of the most gentle sort. Beautiful boys are described beautifully in every tale, but you will find nothing much more explicit here than, 'they lay down together for the night'. To be honest I found that rather refreshing to read. Fifty Shades it ain't! If you would like to try something a little different in 'gay literature' that is enchanting without being demanding and yes stays with you a long time after you put the book down, I can't recommend this little paperback enough.

(Whilst we hear there are other booksellers out there, Callum James Books do, of course, try to keep some copies to hand, please ask if we have one currently in stock)
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Three Ghosts Illustrated by Laurence Scarfe Part II

March 21, 2015, 12:35 pm
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A couple of days ago I posted the colour illustrations from Three Ghosts by Laurence Scarfe. As threatened, here are the black and white drawings from the text that I also rather enjoyed.










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