What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Logic by Wilfrid Hodges Pelican 1977
A birthday present for my precociously brilliant, philosophically inclined nephew, in the hope that he would return the copy he nicked from me. Which, to do him credit, he did. It may or may not be significant that he stole Logic but left behind J. L. Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.

Granta 89, Spring 2005: The Factory
I gave up on regular reading of Granta years ago, but this issue contained pieces by a number of writers I like, including Luc Santé, Tessa Hadley and James Lasdun

In Hazard by Richard Hughes Chatto & Windus 1948
Again, I needed a reading copy: this is very plain and shabby. Name (?) on fly-leaf: lE STRANGE (sic)

Wise Children by Angela Carter Vintage 1992
Earlier this year, sorting out short stories for No. 1 daughter to read for her A-level English course, I came across The Bloody Chamber and remembered how important Carter’s books had been to me in my teens and early twenties. A few weeks after, I read or heard somebody fiercely recommending this, her last novel, so I had been vaguely on the look-out for a copy.

In Hazard by Richard Hughes Penguin 1967
I’d already bought the reading copy, but this was cheap and I liked the cover - designer and illustrator not credited, but it seems to be uniform with the edition of A High Wind in Jamaica I posted about here, so I’m assuming this drawing, too, is by John Lawrence.

The Inheritors by William Golding Faber 1965
The one about Neanderthals: I’ve been nursing a notion about the representation of primitive man in literature and, coincidentally, my friend Shaun Whiteside mentioned this book in glowing terms; classic Faber cover, though somewhat creased. Owner’s name, in a showy hand: B. A. Harding.

A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations by Paul Hindemith Doubleday Anchor 1961
A beautiful paperback, with a nice cover by Henry Wolf - a photo of Hindemith’s face sitting on top of a semi-abstract music stand, against a dark green background; and because I’m fond of Hindemith’s music. In Edmund Crispin’s Oxford-set detective story The Moving Toyshop, Gervase Fen, under circumstances I can’t be bothered to check, bluffs his way through a choral rehearsal in the Sheldonian Theatre by introducing his companion as the eminent German composer Paul Hindemith. Thought I’d throw that in. Owner’s name: M. H. Allard.

The Heckler by Ed McBain Penguin 1966
First Penguin edition; enjoyably creepy cover photo, which to my mind justifies owning a second copy. Perhaps not to anyone else’s mind, though.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay Fontana 1962
I’ve always wanted to read beyond the first sentence: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass”. Did that combination of orientalism and ecclesiastical knowingness inspire Anthony Burgess’s opening to Earthly Powers?

Man Meets Dog by Konrad Lorenz Penguin 1964
The whole dog thing; attractive cover design by Keith Burns. But Lorenz’s ideas about dogs are rubbish: for example, he insists that the domestic dog is descended from jackals rather than wolves. And he was perhaps not a pleasant man: the biographical note includes the information that “in 1940 he became professor of General Psychology at the Albertus University of Königsberg”; in East Prussia in 1940 academic posts went along with political allegiance, or at least acquiescence.

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy Penguin 1968
Scientist saves ape from rocket experiment. The jacket says: “the most deeply funny, sparkling serious satire since Animal Farm”. Well, you can’t pass that up. Plus, I had had apes on my mind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Project Nim). The novel is also, I suppose, a relic of the British space programme. The cover - the title breaking through the bars of a cage - is by Michael Levey: Brophy’s husband, former director of the National Gallery and author of the Penguin book Early Renaissance.

Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay by Louis Macneice OUP 1968
Beautiful reprint of a 1938 book: over the last couple of years Macneice has become my favourite poet, and I’m trying to put my finger on the reasons why.

Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann Penguin Modern Classics 1982
Everybody keeps telling me how good Lehmann is. You can all stop now.

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker Granta 1990
There’d been all this stuff in the press about his new book, House of Holes. I didn’t notice that the cover has a quote from Salman Rushdie about how funny it is, which is as useful as Paul Gascoigne's view of Baker as prose stylist.

The Church of England by Paul Ferris Pelican 1964
Something about the sheer irrelevance of this drew me; that and the Jane Bown cover photo, which appears to show a working-class man alarmed at being accosted by a vicar.

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark Penguin 1963
Finally read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie this year, and swooned at its brilliance; now reading Memento Mori. This copy has a pleasingly grotesque cover illustration by Terence Greer; I had a yen for something both strange and cruel (don’t ask why), and Spark generally manages both.

The Squirrel Book by Phyllis Kelway W. M Collins 1946
“Uniform with this book: The Otter Book”. Account of finding and bringing up two baby red squirrels, Nuffles and Yump; charming drawings by Newton Whittaker, photographs by Kelway. I have passed this on to my friend Jen Franklin, for obvious reasons.

Cannery Row / The Pearl / The Red Pony / Tortilla Flat / Sweet Thursday / The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Penguin Classics 2000
Never read any Steinbeck: this was a job lot, in uniformly excellent nick, in the Scope charity shop at Fakenham.

Lives of the Later Caesars, translated and introduced by Anthony Birley Penguin Classics 1976
From Nerva (reg. 96-98AD) to Heliogabalus (reg. 218-222), drawn from The Augustan History, a book of dubious authorship and authenticity. Ancient Rome is a theme that bothers me these days: its excesses of ambition, power and wealth, and its failure, seem to mirror something about now. Perhaps every age has thought that.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Penguin 2010
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was good, if annoying, and I admire the way Eggers has parlayed literary fame into social entrepreneurship and the whole McSweeney’s enterprise (also good, if annoying). Felt it was about time I read something else by him. This is what I think they call a non-fiction novel about a Syrian immigrant and his American family living in New Orleans in 2005, at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Turns out the novelistic style is annoying and not especially good.

The Bafut Beagles / The Drunken Forest / Encounters with Animals by Gerald Durrell Penguin, 1960s
Durrell is an important figure in zoo history - which, despite the paucity of blogging lately, remains a focus for me - and these have elegant, almost stark photographic covers.

The Appleby File by Michael Innes Penguin 1978
The really misspent part of my youth was the years devoted to reading Michael Innes’ detective novels - what was I thinking? He writes well, but my dears, the class consciousness, the intellectual snobbery. In The Bloody Wood, a house-party plays the game of finding quotations with nightingales in them: one girl is dismissed as a bimbo because all she can come up with is reciting Keats by heart. Still, I needed this one for my collection.

Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood by Gwen Raverat Faber 1960
A somewhat shabby paperback, but a friend had enthusiastically recommended the book a few weeks earlier.

The Misfits by Arthur Miller Penguin 1961
Film tie-in cover - Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable: Gable died 12 days after shooting finished; Monroe killed herself in August 1962, never having made another film; Clift - by now suffering the effects of a terrible car crash - made three more films before his death in 1966. “Complete and unabridged” the cover says, but it is hard to say what that means: it’s a weird hybrid piece, somewhere between Miller’s original short story and a screenplay. Watch the film, though.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam Abacus 2005
"Filth" being an acronym: Failed In London, Try Hongkong. Because Maria Farrell says it’s terrific.

Stories, Essays and Poems by Hilaire Belloc Everyman 1957
Belloc on Englishness and the countryside is mad and vaguely fascist, but seems to speak to something fundamental in this country's sense of itself.

On the Constitution of the Church and State by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Everyman 1972
I’m interested in the Romantics as politicians - unacknowledged legislators. Having said that, this is self-evidently dreary and obscure to the point of unreadability. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Life of the White Ant by Maurice Maeterlinck Dodd, Mead & Company 1939
Maeterlinck has a peculiar position in literature - Nobel laureate in 1911, important enough to be ennobled by the king of the Belgians, wrote the plays Pelléas et Mélisande (which inspired Schoenberg, Fauré, Sibelius and Debussy) and The Blue Bird (from which we get the image of “the blue bird of happiness”). This is one of three (I think) books on entomology that interpreted natural processes in philosophical, spiritual terms; the French documentary Microcosmos (1996) is one recent descendant. The Life of the White Ant - about termites - was, apparently, largely plagiarized from the South African author Eugene Marais. This copy has a particularly attractive inscription: “Bought in Delhi & read on a journey from Sholapur, Deccan to Kandy, Ceylon”. There folllows a full itinerary of the trip, including railway gauges; a signature, Anthony Ball or Bull; and the dateline “Suisse Hotel, Kandy, 10.xi.44”.

The Faber Book of Aphorisms, ed. W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger Faber 1954
First British edition, though a little bit shabby, with markings from Thurrock Public Libraries. I already have a nasty 1970s paperback; this is much nicer.

I also received the following books as presents:

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal Chatto & Windus 2010
The Observer’s Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore Frederick Warne & Co Ltd, rev. ed. 1974
The Observer’s Book of Dogs, ed. Sonia Lampson Frederick Warne & Co Ltd, rev. ed. 1966
The Observer’s Book of Old English Churches by Lawrence E. Jones Frederick Warne & Co Ltd, rev. ed. 1969

Not all the books are on the photo above.

So here's my question: do you think I buy too many books?

Comments

[JRSM]

Wow, that's a lovely haul. With Steinbeck, start with Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. And The Inheritors is wonderful. The idea of a COMEDY by Brigid Brophy has me intrigued. And I need to give The Towers of Trebizond another go, having stalled at page 30...

That seems the right amount of books. For a start.

[Charlie Hall]

When my classroom was refurbished last term the maintenance department told me I should look on it as 'an opportunity to get rid of all those books.' I like the sound of the book of aphorisms; I recently came across a compendium of proverbs from 1640, and have been working steadily through them - only to discover that none of my students actually knew what 'a rolling stone gathers no moss' means (only a handful of them had heard the phrase)- so I may be aiming too high.

[Jaffer789]

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