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A quick note abouta one day book fair this merry month of March at the Olympia Hilton (right at end of High Street Kensington). It is an innovative book fair run by Deborah Davis (consultant to Any Amount of Books.)Specialising in Modern Firsts,Illustrated Books and Children's literature. No books on trains, boats, planes or Arctic Exploration...not this time.Be there or be square. 11AM- 5PM Saturday 22rd March. 380 Kensington High Street London W14.Jean de Bosschere,12 Occupations, trans Ezra Pound, Elkin Mathews, Cork Street, London, 1916.Current selling prices 500+Collectors of early modernist literature are well aware of the rarestof Ezra Pound s first experimental imagist poetry (Lustra, A Quinzaine For this Yuleetc ). But this little pamphlet, a translation of an early work by the Belgiumpoet and artist Jean de Bosschere is so scarcethat it doesn t even get a mention in TheYoung Genius, 1885 1920 (2007),DavidMoody s monumental first volume,. Nor does it feature in other collections ofletters from Pound. However, in the recently published letters to his parents,De Bosschere s name does crop up several times, though I cannot find a mentionof 12 Occupations. Did the translatorsee it as mere hackwork done to pay the rent of his bedsitter in Kensington ? Itseems possible. He must have done a good deal of this sort of thing at thetime.Pound was a famous talent-spotter and De Bosschere was just the sortof multi-talented. artist/writer that he would have nurtured. Having, in 1900 graduatedfrom art college in Antwerp, De Bosschere paid several visits between 1901 and 1905 toParis, where he met writers interested in the occult. From 1905 he seems tohave supported himself as an art critic until the outbreak of the First WorldWar, and during this period became an admirer of symbolism and of the mysticCatholic writer Paul Claudel. In 1915 he fled the Great War for London where hemet, not only Pound, but also fellow Imagist poets like Richard Aldington andJohn Gould Fletcher, as well as D.H.Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. His own first collection of poetry ( Beale- Gryne ) had appeared in 1909 and he continued to write poetry andnovels throughout his life, although possibly because most of the latter wereseriously weird, they remainedunpublished at his death. Knowing that Pound was the go-to man in London, the Belgium showed himhis work( presumably both his writings and drawings )in 1916. At first, Pound didn tknow what to make of it. , but felt there was something or other figitingaround in his carcass, trying to get out in expression . De Bosschere himselfwas a great admirer of the drawings of Lewis and Gaudier.Pound did however submit the Belgium s verse to Poetryand De Bosschere in turn wrote a critique of Pound for The Egoist. In 1917 De Bosschere s persistence was rewarded when hereceived a three year contract to illustrate books for Heinemann, includingworks by Ovid and Wilde.In the following year Pound reported that an exhibitionof De Bosschere s paintings was comingon in the West End. By 1920 Pound had become a great admirer of his graphic art and the two men met occasionallyin Paris. De Bosschere s first novel, Dolorineet les Ombres (1911), had provoked charges of Satanism, and indeed he latergave himself the nickname Satan .However, the black and white illustrationsfor 12 Occupations seem more dark thansatanic. One illustration shows a strange bug- like creature turning amachine-tool wheel. In another, a man appears to be operating a contraption forhanging miscreants on the gallows. The accompanying descriptions in French are strongly declamatory in tone and the translations are admirably Poundian. Here is afragment from The Chair and Table-Maker :The chair-maker has democratized the throne By means of the table, he brings the food half-way to our mouths.For the table is the first floor of the earth, as heaven is its garret.Oh, admirable work of this man, which delivers the featherless bipedfrom the animality which lives on the earth.The Greek has not done better for our sublimity.God knows what Pound thought of the whole undertaking, though nodoubt he was glad of the money. For some reason, his name does not appear anywherein the book, but I doubt if he minded. There is no mention in his letters homeof any fee, nor how well the little book sold.Although 12 Occupationshas always been regarded as a rarity in America and the UK, in Europe they getfar less excited about it. In 2006 a copy appeared at auction in France with anestimate of 20/50 Euros. In February 2012 Bloomsbury sold a similar copy for 260. The 12 Occupations currentlywith Peter Harrington at an eye watering 2,250 is signed by the author, whohas also hand coloured some of the illustrations. Oddly, on 11 Oct 2012 atSwann Auctions in NYC a dummy version, possibly from the publishers archives,made $3120 with a copy of the trade edition. The latter may be the one thatZubal are offering, because it wasn t there when I first looked a year or soago. R. M. Healey [Many thanks Robin - the Bloomsbury 2012 copy,from where the pic above came, was shabby at the edges. This used to be a sleeper, one of the 500 books a good modern first scout was seeking. Not many sleepers anymore.]Bookride has long had a quarrel with those Books on Demand publishers, with good reason. A few years ago they were as mild irritation that got in the way of the real book on Abe. They could be annoying, but you tolerated them. Today the situation is very different. They seem to have taken over the whole of ABE like some giant pulsating fungus out of Quatermass, or those giant PODS from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers . If this expansion continues they will push out all the real books, just as the replicated human clones from the pods pushed out all the real humans in the film.Did I say will ? In some cases they already have. Take the other day. For some reason I decided to check out copies of Ackermann s Repository of the Arts a publication venerated among design historians and for that reason famously expensive. Less than two years earlier, not long after I had bought a respectable 1809 volume from a bookstall in Ripon market for a bargain 5, I discovered half a dozen good copies at the usual inflated prices of 200 or 300 a piece. When I entered the book title again, there they were, the book clones. I scrolled down until I had gone through the whole list not a single real copy of the real Repository could I find all were Repressed Publications/Kessinger/Nabu clones.Then it occurred to me. Had I and other innocent seekers after real books been responsible for all those other alien life forms that were taking over the world of real books ? Was it possible that whenever an ABE user signals an interest in a particular (often rare) title this triggers a mechanism that registers this interest and relays it to a BOD publisher, who then reproduce it as a POD book ? How else can you explain why so many titles I have enquired after on ABE have soon after appeared as POD books? .Surely too, is it no coincidence that the rise of the POD has coincided with the rise of the postgraduate degree scam, which itself is partly a way by which the polytechnic-turned universities raise funds, possibly for their crappy libraries? I suppose it could be argued that if you are only interested in acquiring the text of a book, perhaps to aid your postgraduate research, the cost of a POD would be cheaper than paying for a visit to the British Library, if you live in Plymouth or Newcastle. But in the end, if demand for personal copies of rare texts continues to increase there is a real danger that dealers will be discouraged from advertising their copies of these real books online, for fear of having them swamped by the clones. In addition to the Repository, I ve looked up other titles that I used to see on ABE, and these too seem to have disappeared. Also, bizarrely, some PODS now cost more than the real books that they reproduce.I d like to quiz Mr Kessinger and his friends about their sales figures. How many PODS do they sell? After that I d like to meet some of those who have bought PODs of titles that are available as real books, either online or in the hundreds of second hand bookshops that, despite the Internet and Kindle, can still be found throughout the UK. Have they looked for these titles in these bookshops? If not, why they have rushed into buying a grubby little computer generated body snatcher of a book, barely held together, with misprints, a meaningless cover and smudgy illustrations, for only a little less, in some instances, than the real thing, which they could have had if they d looked a little further or waited a little longer.It all reminds me of people who will gladly spend more on a reproduction of a Georgian dining room table in perfect condition than they would on an identical table in the same saleroom that happens to have slight wear. These people are fools.So I say to anyone tempted to buy a POD, please don t. Use your brain. Be patient, or pay the going rate for the real thing. Some of these rarer titles will be good investments, whereas the PODs will never, ever, ever, be worth anything but a few pence.[R. M. Healey]Rave on Robin! I second that emotion. Btw that is my distant cousin below...FCD (FrancesCornford). The Holtbury Idyll. (No name, No Place, No Date but circa 1908)Current selling price $2,000 Anyone who has read an anthology of English poetry will remember thevery short poem which contains thefollowing lines:'O fat white woman whom nobody lovesWhy do you walk through the fields in glovesMissing so much and so much ? It can be found in Poems (1910)the debut collection of Frances Cornford, a member of the famous Darwin familyof Cambridge (Charles was her grandfather ),who had just married a youngclassics don, also confusingly called Francis. He went on to write on Socratesetc.,while she published further slim volumesof witty Georgianesque verse that sometimes recalls Betjeman, while the couple,distinguished only by their respective initials (hers were FCD), went on toestablish at their home in leafy Millington Road, a refuge for the intelligentsia of the sort that seems peculiar to Cambridge. Fat White Woman was an instant success, but its notoriety was to plagueCornford throughout the rest of her life. Its critics attacked her forpresuming that the woman she had viewed from a train was unloved. Housman andChesterton both parodied the poem Housman probably for academico- politicalreasons (Mr Cornford was a rival in classical studies at Cambridge) Chesterton for socio-religious reasons (as a Catholic he opposed the atheismof Cambridge rationalists among whom the Cornfords moved). Even today,bloggers are divided about the poet s view of the outside world. Was Cornford anintellectual snob who observed lesser beings from an academic ivory tower, or isthere irony in her poem ? Personally, knowing the Darwin set, which stillexists in an exiguous form at Cambridge, I favour the former. What is certainlyknown, but not presumably by the bloggers, is that Poems was not Cornford sdebut volume. This turns out to be The HoltburyIdyll (1908). The confusion is easy to understand. Google The Holtbury Idyll and you will get nothing. A trawl throughabebooks will produce nada. The title isn t in Copac. Alan Anderson, whose 19page Bibliography of the Writings ofFrances Cornford (a cool 150 from Peter Ellis) has Poems as her debut collection. And yet, flick through Ahearne and you will find The Holtbury Idyll listed under FCD,that is, Frances Crofts Darwin. I think we should trust the word of theAhearnes, assume that the book does indeed exist, and tick off Mr Anderson fornot doing his research.But it is a puzzle. TheUniversity of Cambridge online catalogue failed to turn up a copy. David s, thebest known bookseller in Cambridge, hadn t heard of it-- even the man who hadworked there for 25 years-- though he did say that they had a copy of Poems for sale. When I remarked to him that a living Darwinmight know of it, or even own a copy, he hinted that one who might haveinformation was no longer around, which didn t exactly help. I mentioned in passingthat I couldn t find a single Darwin in the Cambridge phone book so hesuggested that I try Darwin College, which I did. The secretary to the Bursarwas friendly and promised to get back to me if she found anyone who could help.I am still waiting.Other books by Cornford are quite thick on the ground. There areseveral copies of Poems on Abe thathover at around $70. One that might be nice to have is Spring Morning, which appeared from the Poetry Bookshop in 1915,complete with wood engravings by Gwen Raverat ( another cult figure in smartCambridge circles ). The Woolfs, doubtless guests at Millington Road, brought out Cornford s Different Days in 1928.Perhapsthe biggest puzzle is why the Ahearnes place such a high price on a slim volume(probably a pamphlet ) published by a poet whose work, apart from Fat WhiteWoman , hasn t lasted. For $2,000 you could buy a copy of John Gray s Silver Points or Hilda Doolittle s firstbook Or a lot of other interesting firsts, for that matter.[R. M. Healey]Many thanks Robin - looking out for that one. It will probably show up in the library of a relation - a Darwin, Raverat, Wedgwood, Cornford or Keynes. Although the much liked poetry collector Quentin Keynes does not appear to have had one.Until the early 1970s R. Murray Gilchrist (1868 - 1917) wasknown mainly for some unremarkable regional and other novels together with afew bog standard topographical books on Yorkshire and the Peak District, none of which have everattracted the attention of collectors. Then, in the 1970s his horror fiction beganto be anthologised and before long this Yorkshireman was being hailed as a undeservedlyneglected master of the Decadent and Gothic, worthy to rank with some of thegreatest masters of the genre. Over the past forty years stories from his debutcollection The Stone Dragon have beenanthologized more than a dozen times and the book has been reprinted in 1984,1994 and 2003. Because of this interest demand for first editions of his mostacclaimed book has escalated enormously in recent years.Frustratingly, little is known about the life of Gilchrist.It seems that he was born in Sheffield in 1868, where he attended the grammarschool there, and apart from a short sojourn in Paris soon afterwards, he remainedin the Peak district for the rest of his short life, living for some time nearHolmesfield, in his mother s house, the largelyTudor Cartledge Hall, with a male companion, which suggests that he may havebeen gay. In the early 1890s his Decadent tales featured in W. E. Henley s National Observer, a mainly non-fictionmagazine that also published Yeats and Kipling. In 1891, his first novel, Passion the Plaything appeared, butalthough this and two further novels, Frangipanni(1893) and Hercules and theMarionettes (1894) were not a great critical success, reviewers were muchmore enthusiastic about his first collection The Stone Dragon which came out in 1894.. Thereafter, Gilchrist was in demand and he publishedfurther stories in more mainstream magazines, including The Idler, Pall Mall Magazineand Windsor Magazine.It has been remarked that the critical neglect of Gilchrist sincehis death in 1917 has been mainly due to his unevenness as a writer. Writingmainly of his novels one critic of the time described his work as 'incomplete,elliptical, mannered and uncontrolled'. Elsewhere the same critic, afterpraising the good qualities of one particular novel, condemned him as a writerof 'great moments and appalling weaknesses.' These remarks, which were echoedby other critics, seem to have contributed to Gilchrist s critical fate.The storiesin The Stone Dragon, however, appear tohave escaped these critical reservations, despitethe fact that some of them share some of the stylistic failings of the novels.It s the themes treated by Gilchrist in this Decadent fiction that attract themodern sensibility. Stories that address same-sex passion, the lust for youth, andfeminism, predominate and it is perhaps no coincidence that the resurrection ofGilchrist followed directly on from the sexual liberation of the nineteensixties. In the title story, for instance, the hero has to choosebetween two women one boringly conventional and submissive and the other eroticand unconventional, with the stone dragon itself acting as a symbol of emotion frozenfor all time, just as in a conventional marriage. Other aspects of gender andsexuality that occupied so many writers and artists of the 1890s (one thinksimmediately of Beardsley and Swinburne) are explored with imaginative power in The Stone Dragon and in latercollections. If you want some first or early editions of Gilchrist for afew poundshis topographical guides areeasily available. Most bookshops will stock Riponand Harrogate (1914) and The PeakDistrict (1911) for around 5 each, though one chancer in East Moseleywants a very silly $244 for The PeakDistrict because it retains its dust jacket ( he must have been readingTanselle on book jackets !). The bigger prices are reserved for Gilchrist snovels, a handful of which are available online. One of the cheapest seems tobe Damosel Croft at $83 (PeterEllis), with the undated Pretty Fanny sWay going for $164.39. Most of the other novels hover around $90.Not surprisingly, TheStone Dragon claims top spot. There is an wonderful inscribed copy of this 'legendarily scarce' title on sale from Adrian Harrington at a decadent $4,152,but if you have a horror of paying over the odds, one dealer in Australiawill sell you a copy in only slightly worse condition for $1,250, which seems abargain to me. Incidentally, if you can somehow find the Colonial edition ofthe same book it should cost you even less. [R. M. Healey]Many thanks Robin. This is a book I have never seen although one customer has a copy down Bexhill way. Mustcheck him out when next in God's waiting room.G. Thomas Tanselle.BookJackets, their history, forms and use.Oak Knoll, 2nd edition 2011. 45.How many academic books sell out in months? This onedid. Around a year ago I ordered a copyof the first edition and the publishers told me that they had sent it. I neverreceived the book and was later sent a second edition. Perhaps some bookcollecting postal worker took the first to be sent. If any work in the field of bibliophily is likely to become a new must have for collectors dealers and auction cataloguers alike, this is it.For one thing, it s a labour of love by arguably the world sgreatest authority on book jacket history. Secondly, it is based on theauthor s own collection, which was begun in 1968, and is soon to be lodged inan American library. This catalogue is supplementedby Tanselle s decades-long correspondence with fellow enthusiasts in the field,notably Tom Congleton, who used to write a column for Rare Book Review. Thirdly, the book has the distinct appeal ofcutting edge research, albeit in a subject that for many non-bibliomaniacs, hasalways been regarded as the source of loud belly laughs.Forget all that. Book jackets are no longer a joke. To laughat book jacket is to pass up the opportunity to make big money. There are manyexamples of a jacket being worth more than the book without it. For instance, afirst edition of The Great Gadsbywith the jacket will sell for many times more than a copy without one. In 1999a copy of The Hound of the Baskervillesin a jacket made 80,700 at auction. A copy of Kipling s Just So Stories (1902) in its dull brown jacket made 2,600 at Sotheby s in 1986, thecataloguer noting that the book on its own would sell for about 100.But why do so many collectors insist on a jacket ? Simple. Ifthe history of book jackets can now be traced back to around 1830, as Tanselleargues, surely it is not too much to ask that a book printed in, say 1930,retain its jacket and to be worth more by having it, especially as the jacketmay contain important information not available in the book itself, such asreviews in obscure magazines, illustrations, and remarkably, extra material onthe reverse surface of the jacket. And although most early jackets were dullbrown paper affairs that simply reproduced elements of the title page in blackink, a jacket, however uninspiring, must be seen as part of the book. Does anycollector of LPs throw away the sleeve notes on acquiring a new addition to hisrecord library? But this new collecting trend brings with it new dangers.Tanselle warns us that modern technology has meant that laser- printed facsimilescan be passed off as the real thing by unscrupulous dealers. The old consolationthat exceptionally rare modern books can t be copied convincingly probablystill applies, even in the age of the computer printer, but jackets are adifferent matter. With four figures sums at stake collectors must now be veryvigilant.Half of Tanselle s treatise is taken up with such matters,including, of course the history of the jacket, which we learn was a naturaldevelopment from the first protectivedevices for fragile books, which were slip cases made of card. The firstexample listed dates from 1779, but doubtless others will be discovered soonerrather than later. After all, this is cutting edge stuff. Tanselle is good tooon the rationale of the book jacket in the twentieth century and he rehearsesall the silly reasons proffered by librarians and so called book-lovers for dispensingwith them at the earliest opportunity. This is all very illuminating , but themeat of the book resides in its second half, which is a chronological list ofjackets up to the end of 1900.Why 1900 ? For Tanselle this seems a reasonable cut-off date.By 1900 the number of jacketed books listed has crept from 2 in 1871 to over137 in the year 1900. And anyway, have some finishing point has to be laid down, howeverarbitrary. Why do incunabula end in 1499 ? For collectors of book jacketsTanselle s list is a wants list , especially to American collectors. Thosetitles included in it are around 80% American imprints, because, after all,Tanselle is an American who lives and works and buys books in the States.However, the power of the Internet has enabled him to correspond withcollectors and dealers all over the world , with the result that many Britishand a sprinkling of exceptionally early European jackets/slip cases, are alsoincluded. Many of the British books theycover seem to be illustrated editions of classics or verse, with Andrew Langand Kate Greenaway featuring frequently. Others are rather dull or obscurebooks for which no sane person would think of shelling out three figure sums ifit wasn t for the jackets that come with them.There are some exceptions. We learn that the first edition ofDickens Edwin Drood (1870) wasissued with a jacket and as such is well documented in the literature on theauthor. No price is mentioned, but you can be sure that it will be high. LewisCarroll s The Hunting of the Snark(1876) is a more famous example of a jacketed classic. Another gem in a jacket is a work edited byTheo Marzials, one of John Betjeman s favourite poets. His Pan-Pipes, a Book of Old Songs (1883) was priced at a cool $350 in1989.[R. M. Healey]Many thanks Robin. Sorry you actually had to buy the book to review it, that doesn't happen at the TLS! The biggest price differential on a jacket I can think of is for Greene's Ministry of Fear (London, 1943) a book that can be obtained in decent condition sans jacket for 40 but wearing a smart jacket 8000 is achievable (more if you believe web mall prices.) That's 200 times, I guess if Drood, a sort of 200 book, was to sell for over 40,000 in d/w, which seems entirely possible (although unfinished and posthumous) Dickens would take the biscuit...PLEASE NOTE WE ARE NO LONGER ADDING TO THIS BLOG. We have moved to a new style of blog at Jot101. Try it once - or try it at once...What's it all about? It's mainly a guide to wanted and collected books. There is some evaluation of why the book is wanted, what it is worth - with a range of selling prices, some trivia, apercus and bon mots, a few anecdotes, so called jokes and occasional rants. burwoodrarebooks@gmail.com

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