About a Book

I have an interest in the Battle of Trafalgar, and I collect autographs and manuscripts from the 19,000 plus sailors from the British side who were there on that day. Too obvious a choice of subject for someone constantly looking for the unobvious perhaps, but as a schoolboy I was once Captain of Nelson House and it’s stuck.

Recently at a fair, Sarah Key pointed me towards an autograph letter I’d lazily ignored, written by Nelson’s chaplain, friend, and translator, the man in whose arms the Admiral expired, Rev. Alexander John Scott. The letter was unexceptional, written from Catterick in Yorkshire in 1819 but Scott, a bibliophile whose books Nelson borrowed, had left an amusing postscript:

“Went to Richmond on Tuesday last to buy a horse – went into an old book shop – bought books & left the horse – Books do not eat anything”.

Later that night at home, I lifted out my rare 1842 copy of “Recollections of The Life of the Rev. A.J.Scott,D.D. Lord Nelson’s Chaplain”, written by Scott’s daughter, the authoress Margaret Gatty. The book is a Scott family copy which I bought years ago, it has some annotations, and the ownership inscription of one Horatia Johnson. Read more »

I flicked through it hoping, but not expecting, to find some mention of books or horses, and I almost dropped the glass when I found an anecdote about a trip that Scott made, to Darlington, to buy a horse:

“When he arrived, however, he repaired, in the first instance, as was his custom, to the principal bookseller’s shop; and that at Darlington, as it happened, was stocked with old volumes of so rare and curious a kind that, before he left it (the temptation being irresistible, and the horse forgotten), he had spent every shilling of his money with the worthy bibliopole.....”

This was all good stuff, but the interest heightened because Darlington had been underlined in ink and “Richmond?” inserted. Even better was an old inscription in the margin which read:

“See letter belonging to Hester Sassoon dated 11.1.1819 to Thos Ryder Esq from A.J.Scott at Catterick in which he says – Went to Richmond on Tuesday last to buy a horse – went into an old bookshop – bought books & left the horse. Books do not eat anything.” I had brought the letter home to its rightful place.

Bought years apart, from dealers miles apart, it left me musing just how regularly amazing coincidences like this do happen in the rare book trade. And how they can take you on flights of unexpected interest...... The previous owner of the letter, Hester Sassoon, was the great grand-daughter of Rev Scott. But she was also the wife of Siegfried. He must surely have seen, and lived with, this letter, and an interesting line of enquiry would be whether he ever mentioned it in any of his writings. « Show Less

Sometimes I really can’t believe the extraordinary serendipity involved in finding books. A couple of years ago, I went into a bookshop in Germany and came across an attractive sketchbook of around 30 drawings made by an Englishman (or woman) in Italy, 1817–37. One drawing was signed ‘F.B.’, but there were otherwise no marks of provenance. I bought them, as they were appealing, and well-executed, the majority done in Frascati, depicting a number of the great papal villas and other places in and around Rome. Just over three weeks later, now back in London, I happen across a volume of, as it turns out, excessively rare privately published photographs: Views of Rome and the Environs, photographed from the original Drawings taken from Nature by Frances Baroness de Bunsen (no date). I open the book and my eyes grew wide: these are photos of the drawings I bought only weeks before. What are the chances? Read more »

The artist of the sketchbook, Frances Waddington (1791–1876), was a very international woman. The daughter of a Welsh country gentleman, she was spending the winter in Rome when she met the young Prussian diplomat and writer, Christian Carl (later von) Bunsen, and they married in chapel of the Palazzo Sevelli (the residence of the Prussian envoy to the papal court) in 1817, the date of the earliest drawing in her sketchbook. The marriage was happy, producing ten children, and their home in the Palazzo Caffarelli on the Capitol (Christian became secretary to the Prussian legation in 1818, and ambassador in 1823) ‘deserves to be mentioned as an international social meeting-point for artists and intellectuals. Visitors included, among others, the painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, the poet and scholar Giacomo Leopardi, as well as Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, Connop Thirlwall, Philip Pusey, and Sir Walter Scott from Britain’ (Oxford DNB).

Bunsen was subsequently appointed Prussian ambassador to the court of St James, in 1842, and they moved to London, where they enjoyed close connections with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. ‘As in Rome, Frances’s active support of her husband’s ambassadorial career, evidenced in the warm hospitality received by their many guests, put the couple at the centre of a wide social and cultural network: their London home in Carlton Terrace was a popular meeting-place for celebrities from many European countries’ (ibid.). They left London in 1854 to settle in a villa near Heidelberg, where Christian continued his scholarly pursuits and Frances maintained a network of friends and family across Europe. After his death in 1860, Frances wrote A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, drawn chiefly from Family Papers (1868), ‘published in German and English and showing her linguistic and literary talent. She moved to Karlsruhe, where she looked after the children of her deceased daughter Theodora. Her family and friends were dispersed in many European countries; she kept in touch with them in visits and letters, which showed her intimate knowledge of the political and cultural events of her time. She died in Waldhorn Strasse, Karlsruhe, surrounded by many of her children and grandchildren, on 23 April 1876, and was buried next to her husband in Bonn’ (ibid.).

The Bunsens’ summers in Italy were spent in the countryside around Rome. ‘The glorious subjects in the Alban Hills and at Rome … gave constant employment to the artistic powers of Madame Bunsen. Thorwaldsen said of her sepia sketches of Rome and its environs that he “knew no artist, whether professional or amateur, who then equalled her in exact representation, from her power of choosing a view which made a complete picture, without adding or abstracting from the reality before her”’ (Augustus J. C. Hare, The Life and Letters of Frances Baroness Bunsen, 1879, vol. I, p. 113).

It is the connections between people, their lives, and their books, that I have always enjoyed about being a bookseller. Book fairs, such as Chelsea, are a fantastic place to make such discoveries. You never know what you might find. « Show Less

Whether it was my first book I do not know, but it is certainly the earliest to have survived. It is called All the Mowgli Stories in other words Kipling’s Jungle Book in a large-print children’s edition. I was brought up on these stories - my father used to read them to me in bed every night; but there was always a problem, he would insist on starting a new story each night even though we hadn’t finished the previous one. It was my mother who finally solved it. She came in one evening and said “What are you doing, still reading, can’t you see he’s fast asleep?” - “Yes I know” said my father “but I wanted to finish the story.”

One of my habits in gathering books is to read a book perhaps in a paperback edition and having ‘assessed’ it, either put it back into stock, keep it on my shelves, find a hardback edition to replace it, or, ultimate accolade, find a first or fine edition. [André Gide summed it up when he said “Book collectors do not buy books to read - they buy books because they have read them”]. Some twenty-five years ago in the Carnegie Bookshop in New York Dave Kirschenbaum showed us the finest pair of “Jungle Books” any of us had ever seen. Read more » Having bought them I said to my father - “You know where those are going don’t you? Home beside All The Mowgli Stories.” -- And here is an interesting thing that serves to counter those who ask “Why spend money on a first edition when it is available in paperback?” When I sat down to read, in the original 19th century edition, the stories I knew almost by heart, they were suddenly given a fresh flavour - the flavour of 19th century India and the British Raj, simply through reading them in the original edition. « Show Less

Is it a book?

One of the nicest things about having a bookshop is that just sometimes a customer will make a chance remark about some family item they want to sell and it turns out to be something really interesting.

Recently just such a thing happened to me. I had just purchased a collection of modern books on Stained Glass Windows and someone walked into the shop whilst they were still piled on the floor by the door. He asked if I bought older material on glass as one of his relatives, from the 19th century, had been a salesman for stained glass and he had inherited one of his sale brochures that he thought he might sell. Read more »

The next week he brought it in. This turned out to be a catalogue of Heaton & Butler, Stained Glass artists, before Bayne joined the firm so dating it to about 1860. Is it a book he said? It comprises three parts, a short essay on window design, images of windows by the firm and some testimonials and other bits of ephemera architected together possibly by the salesman himself – well used but with added value because of the little story which gives an unusual insight into how stained windows were sold commercially. We agreed a price and I was thrilled to have a little bit of history to relocate somewhere useful.

It is almost a book, I thought, as he left the shop!

This item will be at the Chelsea Book Fair. « Show Less

Have you read The Hundred and One Dalmatians? If you’ve only seen one of the various gloopy films that Disney has made of it over the years, you won’t have any idea of its charm. Dodie Smith also wrote I Capture the Castle, which I didn’t read until I was an adult – it’s really a novel for young women, but can appeal to all ages and genders. I then went on to read Valerie Grove’s biography, published in 1996, and was specially struck by the account of her affair with Ambrose Heal, initiated by Dodie herself when she was working at his shop in the Tottenham Court Road in the early 1920s. The liaison continued for several years – even when Dodie suddenly became a successful West End playwright (‘Shopgirl writes play’) – but petered out when she met her future husband, Alec Beesley, in the 1930s. Nobody except the three of them knew about the intrigue.

I was surprised and delighted, therefore, to find some years ago – in a junk shop in Henley, marked £2 – a copy of the first edition of Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins, with a shaky italic inscription inside: ‘Given by Dodie Smith to Ambrose Heal. Xmas 1953’. Read more » The hand is probably that of Dodie herself: inspired by Heal, she began experimenting with calligraphy at about this time. Even at this time she was still under his influence, and had recently written to him that she thought of him every day, ‘morning and evening, and often in between’.

The book sold quickly enough from a catalogue, for about twenty times what I paid for it: I was a little sorry to see it go. But some years later the collector who had bought it needed more space: he had enjoyed reading the book but it was outside his real scope. Would I, he asked, like to buy it back? Well, I did, for the same as he had given me for it a few years before – and it now sits at home on the ‘not for sale’ shelf, mute witness to a long-dead liaison between a great writer and a great designer. « Show Less

Some years ago a colleague in the trade, knowing my interest in Gypsy books, showed me a sixteenth century folio in full contemporary vellum; Albert Krantz's history of Saxony, in Latin, containing one short paragraph mentioning the appearance of a wandering tribe of Gypsies in the fourteenth century. It's a pretty rare book and he was asking quite a lot of money for it, so given the limited appeal, I took details and mentioned it to my best customer. He knew the book but had never even seen a copy and was desperate to buy it. I delivered it to his house the next time I was in London and he cursed me because of its size; it was too big for his shelves and it would have to go on the spare room bed.

Some years later, after his death, his son asked me to buy the library. Every room in the house was full of books of quality; duplicates or unmentionables were boxed in the garage, and there, on the second floor, on the spare room bed, was Albert Krantz's history of Saxony...

I failed to find another Gypsy customer so enthusiastic for that one small paragraph, and the book ended up in the shop on the bottom shelf of a cabinet with other old and unwieldy tomes...until one morning. Read more » A brand new Porsche pulled up across the road and a very fashionably dressed young man breezed in, scanned the whole shop in a few seconds, spotted Krantz in the cabinet, fished it out, glanced at the price, asked me the best cash price, made me a lower offer, counted out the twenties, explained that his family had been dealing in sixteenth and seventeenth century oak furniture for years and he liked to have some contemporary props laying around, and then he was gone.

About a year later he returned - did I remember the book, would I be interested in buying it back, business was quiet, he could hear his father's voice scolding him for spending so much money on a book that just sat around...but he didn't want money, he wanted to swap it for some volumes of Avray Tipping's English Homes, which he thought would be more interesting. Okay, it's my book for the third time, and it goes to the next Olympia book fair, where a colleague from Saxony, no less, takes a shine to it. He didn't want to part with any money, but would I be interested in swapping it for some old Spanish books that he couldn't sell? Well, only on the condition that he offers it back to me if he can't sell it - I'm still waiting... « Show Less