I thought it was high time I posted an update on one of our filming locations - Cecil Court in central London. It's been a surprisingly long time since I wrote about its fascinating history and even longer since I blogged about the shoot at Goldsboro Books and David Drummond's shop.
On Friday I happened to be in the area, so I thought I'd return.
The latest issue of The Spectator (13 April 2013) contains a long article by Professor James Carley about a remarkable group of books which has miraculously found its way back to Lambeth Palace Library after many decades.
Early in 1975 the Lambeth Palace Librarian noticed a troubling gap on the shelves where some important books had been kept. The books could not be found and a search of the rest of the Library showed that this gap was not unique.
“The booksellers’ stalls are the meanest in appearance of all the bazars, and the effendy, who lord it over the literary treasures, are the least prepossessing, and by no means the most obliging of the many crafts that abound within this vast and diversified emporium. They sit grimly upon their cushions, and appear to pass a negative existence, neither inviting nor repelling customers. Their stores are open; books are placed on their sides, upon the shelves behind, or in inner recesses, and present nothing inviting to the eye. Catalogues are unknown to them. Each sahhaf carries a list of his stock in trade and prices in his head.
[…]
Printed catalogues of printed books do not exist. One of the trade offered to procure for me a written catalogue, but it required a month’s labour and proportionate expense. It was then found to be inexact as to dates, sizes, and number of volumes. Upon remonstrating with the worthy bibliopolist, he exclaimed: “You know these things better than we do, apparently! Of what use, then, is a catalogue? Why not write down the title of any books that you require? I will then procure them. You Franks [Westerners] possess registers of all books, in all tongues. To ask me for a catalogue is to laugh at my beard”.
From Charles White, “Three Years in Constantinople” (1845) – with thanks to Angus O’Neill (Omega Bookshop).
In 1493, the same year that Columbus’s discovery of the New World was announced, a man named Hartmann Schedel was creating his own world. Using the latest technological advances, he put together the most magnificent book of the era: the first printed illustrated history of the world.
The project was called the Liber Chronicarum, though it is better known as…
“A mere antiquarian is a rugged being” opined Dr Johnson, succinctly and meaningfully, to Boswell in 1778. What’s in a name? – and what of the decidedly un-mere antiquarian bookseller? A work in progress this – something which began in various desultory and ongoing e-mail conversations with Nicolas Barker and James Fergusson of The Book Collector, Simon Beattie and others.
This intriguing title is the subject of a day event hosted by the Institute of English Studies on Saturday 16 February, with papers on the armed forces, Jane Austen and the male mind, Jane Austen’s clergymen, and the marriage market and changing fortunes of the landed class. Senate House Library agreed/offered to support the event with a small display of books from within its special collections – and very challenging it was.
We were delighted this week to host a visit by students on the Institute of English Studies’ MA in the History of the Book course, in the suitably bookish surroundings of the Durning-Lawrence Library. A mouth-watering buffet of books was laid out on the table, ranging from the 1471 edition of the great compendium of medieval science De Proprietatibus Rerum ('On the properties of things') which William Caxton helped to print during his visit to Cologne - complete with elegant hand-coloured initials in blue and red - to 1930s drafts and redrafts of poems by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing the creative process from first trials to the printed page.
Peter Harrington, the fabulous Chelsea-based book dealer, who has been my downfall many a day, currently has for sale some of C. E. Brock's original watercolours for the 1907 edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.(They also have many other wonderful Austen related items:click here to see)
The 13 original signed illustration for the "Pride and Prejudice" were published in 1907 as part of the "
We are delighted to report an exciting new arrival in Special Collections – a beautiful copy of the first edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations recently gifted by alumnus Stuart Leckie, OBE. The Wealth of Nations hardly needs introduction – it is regularly described as one of the most important and influential books ever written and, as the…
Emilie Berrin’s bilingual French and German Secretair der Liebe first came to our attention as a rare and exquisite item during a project in 2001/2 to catalogue the Durning-Lawrence library, to which it belongs. Its beauty attracted the cataloguer, and its rarity was apparent when searching other library catalogues for cataloguing purposes: this turned out to be the only copy in Britain, with just one other copy of this edition recorded in Europe, in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
