Greetings from Slightly Foxed where we’ve been rather busy in preparation for a spate of May Bank Holiday Mondays here in the UK. But fear not, dear readers, we’ve got lots to share with you to make up for our short absences in the coming weeks and to ensure you remain fully Foxed.
It’s safe to say none of the Foxes will be merrily Morris dancing our way through Monday, but rather taking the opportunity to curl up in a quiet, cosy corner somewhere with our current read. We thought it only fair to provide our readers with some most interesting and entertaining reading worthy of a three-day weekend, and Charles Elliott’s article on book forgery and theft – published in Slightly Foxed Issue No. 22 – certainly fits the bill on both fronts, charting a history of ardent book collectors and of their bookish obsessions.
In this spirit of library building and bibliophilia, we’re also providing you with some bookish recommendations to fill any gaps in your own libraries, particularly those in your Slightly Foxed collection. Please read on for bookish galore in the form of an extract from Charles’s article, with a link to the full article to read for free on the SF website, as well a soupçon of reading suggestions.
We’ll be back in the office on Tuesday 2 May ready and raring to pack up all the weekend’s orders and post them off to readers around the world. Meantime we do hope you’ll enjoy meeting Charles Elliott’s book crooks and that you all have a very jolly weekend.
With all good wishes from the SF office staff
Hattie, Jess & Jemima
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Book Crooks
CHARLES ELLIOTT
As obsessions go, book collecting ought to be one of the more innocent. I caught the bug as a kid, with the fairly broad-based ambition to collect any book published before 1860, figuring that anything that old must be rare. This first collection mounted to ten or eleven books, two of them Bibles, and starred a spineless tenth printing (1856) of Dream Life by Ik Marvel, which is probably still lying around somewhere. Since then, I’ve gone through several off-and-on phases of bibliophily, sufficient to learn that it isn’t a sport for the impecunious or anyone living in physically confined circumstances. I’ve also learned that, like less innocent obsessions, it can draw you in – seriously.
I’m talking here, you understand, about collecting rare books, not merely accumulating books in general. There is a distinction to be made. The true book collector develops (or is born with) a passionate yearning to possess certain volumes for particular reasons: first editions, copies signed or inscribed, associated documents, manuscripts and so forth. His rationale is often obscure, even to him; but it is intensely, sometimes overwhelmingly, powerful. It can lead him (and it is usually him – there are comparatively few woman book collectors) into some very strange actions.
Consider, for example, the case of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792– 1872). Heir to a fortune based on Manchester textiles, Sir Thomas devoted his life – and, willy-nilly, his family – to book collecting. His mania was so profound that by the time he was 28 he was in debt, and never thereafter out of it. Spending at the rate of four or five thousand pounds a year (at a time when even a gentleman could live on a few hundred), he eventually piled up 50,000 printed books, 60,000 manuscripts and a vast array of other literary flotsam ranging from maps to portraits. At the height of his passion, he declared: ‘I wish to have one Copy of every Book in the World!’ By the time of his death he had made a fair stab at it. What this meant to Lady Phillipps can only be conjectured, but she is on record as having complained that she was ‘booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other’.
Apart from sending several hapless book dealers into premature insolvency (one went to debtor’s prison because Sir Thomas failed to pay him), Phillipps does not appear to have resorted to crime to build his collection. The same cannot be said of his son-in-law James Orchard Halliwell, also a collector, who stole manuscripts from the Bodleian (and eloped with Phillipps’s daughter, so alienating him that he cut him out of his will). It is possible that had Halliwell resisted temptation he might have inherited all those books and somehow forestalled their enormously protracted dispersal – sales were still going on a hundred years after Sir Thomas’s death. In any event, history is studded with famous book thieves, collectors all, ranging from Pope Innocent X to Catherine de Medici, who is supposed to have stolen a whole library.
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From Homer’s Odyssey to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ex Libris covers a rich range of classics old and new. Literary critic Michiko Kakutani selects works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and writes essays on why each has had an effect on her life.
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Welcome to Sotheran’s, one of the oldest bookshops in the world (and our Bookshop of the Quarter: Spring 2023). This is the colourful story of life in a treasure trove of literary delights and a love letter to the world of antiquarian bookselling.
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Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence – from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion – the book explores style, voice and language, along with the subjectivity of reading.
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Growing up, Cathy Rentzenbrink was rarely seen without her nose in a book. When tragedy struck, books kept her afloat. Dear Reader is her moving, funny and joyful exploration of how books can change the course of your life, packed with recommendations from one reader to another.
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‘That absorption in the countryside is what makes these books so captivating. BB’s attention to detail . . . reminds us to notice such things again; things which once seemed magical but which in adulthood have become humdrum or ignored.’ Helena Drysdale, SF Issue No. 55
*Save <£20*
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‘Almost every page has a treat for the senses – wood smoke, the discovery of a an iridescent purple emperor butterfly, or wild swimming. And through the inadvertent, ecstatic discoveries of the grownups chasing the boys, BB shows how adults can rediscover these pleasures too.’ Patrick Barkham, Guardian
*Save <£10*
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*Save <£30*
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* Buy any 2 titles and save <£4 per book*
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