Special books
Sep. 13th, 2007 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmIf it isn’t an official meme it ought to be, but strictly speaking I’m just picking up the baton from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lady_schrapnell, intertext and sartorias, and listing a few of my favourite books – books as physical objects, that is. This may be a continuing series…
Two of the books were prizes, of a kind. First up is my Arden Hamlet, given me as a prize for the top (and, as it turned out, only) entry in a quiz on Spenser in my first year at college. I was offered a choice between Hamlet and a bottle of wine, and chose the wine, but somehow they ended up giving me the book anyway. I guess they knew what they were doing, though. I still teach from it every year, and doing that competition was what originally got me into Spenser, so that’s a double win.
At the other end of my college career I won the Edmee Manning prize, which consisted of a very useful cheque and short memoir of Edmee Manning (an old girl of Royal Holloway) by her husband, Courtenay de Vaux Newbery Hatch-Anderson-Pelham. It’s a short book, full of photos of Edmee and her husband, and I always find it rather moving – and the more so for not being very well written. For people who like name-checking there are some interesting glimpses of the fairly famous. Edmee’s sister was Ruth Manning Sanders, the writer and folklorist, for example; and at one point an elderly Aleister Crowley was the couple’s tenant (which is why I was looking him up on Wikipedia [see last post]). I record this for posterity, as it shows a side of the Great Beast that doesn’t often make it into the literature:
“He was a like a lovable naughty little boy. He adored shocking people at any cost—he revelled in it. When one sees a person in a small house at all hours of the day and night, one is naturally able to sum them up. If there had been anything lurid of a melodramatic nature occurring I would have known. There were no wild pagan parties, no wicked sex orgies or black magic rites and delicious debauchery. These things existed only in the fertile minds of Fleet Street Writers. How he laughed at them! He was respectable as a church Verger.”
So now you know…
The most physically impressive book I own is the 1722 two-volume folio edition of Camden’s Brittania, which I bought on one of my rare mad impulses in the mid-90s in a junk shop near Reading. It lacks the county maps, though it has all the other illustrations – including an engraving of Stonehenge which sets it in a curiously mountainous landscape with a walled city clearly visible in the background (I don’t think it’s Amesbury!). If the maps had been present I could never have afforded it at all, and it’s still a wonderful book to feel and read. As a bonus, its Georgian updaters have thoughtfully put square brackets around their own contributions, so that one can pick out Holland’s Jacobean translation of Camden’s Elizabethan original, and see what changed in the following hundred years. The Britannia definitely deserves a post of its own some time.
At the cheap end of the range, we have an octavo Temple Classics edition of Dante’s Purgatorio, inscribed to R. F. Gore Brown, a British officer in a POW camp in Stralsund, September 1915. It always struck me as a very appropriate gift, and I hope Gore Brown enjoyed it as much as I did.
I also have many of my grandfather’s books, in and about Esperanto. I think my favourite is the Himnaro Esperanta which he sent my father in 1967, when he was in his eighties, having had it printed by private subscription. In the back I found a rather sad letter in which he discusses his career as a composer, and how few of his works have ever been performed. The same fate befell his own father (my great-grandfather) whom the letter reveals to have been fond of writing in obscure mediaeval modes (who knew?). Such is the curse of the Butlers.
I’d write more, but now I must go to the airport and meetlady_schrapnell off the plane – yay!
lady_schrapnell, intertext and sartorias, and listing a few of my favourite books – books as physical objects, that is. This may be a continuing series…Two of the books were prizes, of a kind. First up is my Arden Hamlet, given me as a prize for the top (and, as it turned out, only) entry in a quiz on Spenser in my first year at college. I was offered a choice between Hamlet and a bottle of wine, and chose the wine, but somehow they ended up giving me the book anyway. I guess they knew what they were doing, though. I still teach from it every year, and doing that competition was what originally got me into Spenser, so that’s a double win.
At the other end of my college career I won the Edmee Manning prize, which consisted of a very useful cheque and short memoir of Edmee Manning (an old girl of Royal Holloway) by her husband, Courtenay de Vaux Newbery Hatch-Anderson-Pelham. It’s a short book, full of photos of Edmee and her husband, and I always find it rather moving – and the more so for not being very well written. For people who like name-checking there are some interesting glimpses of the fairly famous. Edmee’s sister was Ruth Manning Sanders, the writer and folklorist, for example; and at one point an elderly Aleister Crowley was the couple’s tenant (which is why I was looking him up on Wikipedia [see last post]). I record this for posterity, as it shows a side of the Great Beast that doesn’t often make it into the literature:
“He was a like a lovable naughty little boy. He adored shocking people at any cost—he revelled in it. When one sees a person in a small house at all hours of the day and night, one is naturally able to sum them up. If there had been anything lurid of a melodramatic nature occurring I would have known. There were no wild pagan parties, no wicked sex orgies or black magic rites and delicious debauchery. These things existed only in the fertile minds of Fleet Street Writers. How he laughed at them! He was respectable as a church Verger.”
So now you know…
The most physically impressive book I own is the 1722 two-volume folio edition of Camden’s Brittania, which I bought on one of my rare mad impulses in the mid-90s in a junk shop near Reading. It lacks the county maps, though it has all the other illustrations – including an engraving of Stonehenge which sets it in a curiously mountainous landscape with a walled city clearly visible in the background (I don’t think it’s Amesbury!). If the maps had been present I could never have afforded it at all, and it’s still a wonderful book to feel and read. As a bonus, its Georgian updaters have thoughtfully put square brackets around their own contributions, so that one can pick out Holland’s Jacobean translation of Camden’s Elizabethan original, and see what changed in the following hundred years. The Britannia definitely deserves a post of its own some time.
At the cheap end of the range, we have an octavo Temple Classics edition of Dante’s Purgatorio, inscribed to R. F. Gore Brown, a British officer in a POW camp in Stralsund, September 1915. It always struck me as a very appropriate gift, and I hope Gore Brown enjoyed it as much as I did.
I also have many of my grandfather’s books, in and about Esperanto. I think my favourite is the Himnaro Esperanta which he sent my father in 1967, when he was in his eighties, having had it printed by private subscription. In the back I found a rather sad letter in which he discusses his career as a composer, and how few of his works have ever been performed. The same fate befell his own father (my great-grandfather) whom the letter reveals to have been fond of writing in obscure mediaeval modes (who knew?). Such is the curse of the Butlers.
I’d write more, but now I must go to the airport and meet
lady_schrapnell off the plane – yay!