I confess to a reflexive aversion to being told how to feel. Even if with the best of intentions, someone starts a sentence with “You should feel…” I am disinclined to listen. And by “disinclined to listen” I really mean positively truculent. So, when the holiday season starts and everyone begins to profess a sudden surge of gratitude – and to expect others to do the same – it all seems a bit too contrived.
Nonetheless, there seems some real justification behind the traditional, end-of-year gratitude trope. It is natural to take stock as the days get shorter and colder, as the pace and tenor of life changes and we gather (whether we want to or not) with extended family and friends, as we close budgets, change calendars, and orient ourselves to a new year, new challenges, and new intentions. And when we take stock, it seems natural to recognize and value what we have.
In short, whether I like it or not, in this traditional time of year to feel grateful, I often find myself feeling, well, grateful.
As long as we’re talking feelings, I have some mixed feelings about the work of the poet Billy Collins. But there is a poem of his that I have read every holiday season for a few decades now.
As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse
I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I sit in a ladder-back chair, a benevolent god presiding over a miniature creation myth,
and I begin to sing a homemade canticle of thanks for this perfect little arrangement, for not making the earth too hot or cold not making it spin too fast or slow
so that the grove of orange trees and the owl become possible, not to mention the rolling wave, the play of clouds, geese in flight, and the Z of lightning on a dark lake
Then I fill my glass again and give thanks for the trout, the oak, and the yellow feather,
singing the room full of shadows, as sun and earth and moon circle one another in their impeccable orbits and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
There are a lot of pictures from this year I thought of including with this post. My daughter’s first aurora borealis and her first snow as a college freshman in Maine. The glorious rainbow my ex and I saw together as we last-minute shopped for the one thing our kid forgot to bring to Maine – a good raincoat. A saucy picture of me and the gorgeously tolerant woman with whom I share my days making flirty faces at one another. But the one I chose is of my dog, Zira, with whom I share nearly every dawn, and who is ludicrously, uncomplicatedly, and unreservedly grateful every time I take her to the park.
Billy may not catch a ball like Zira does, but he does seem to get the idea. To my ear, Billy offers a lovely, non-sectarian, deeply and thoughtfully grateful epistle to the universe. Billy speaks with a bemused reverence to all the many things, great and small, nouns and verbs, certainties and questions, and yes even feelings, that confound and comfort us.
Which is a very long way of saying that I write today in gratitude. For all the opportunities I’ve been given. For the fortune of vitality and curiosity. For the fact that meeting my daily needs and responsibilities does not consume all of the former and that nothing ever seems to exhaust my supply of the latter. Gratitude for everything I am able to feel, however complicated, challenging, or – perish the thought – utterly common those feelings may be. And, not least, gratitude to any of you who may choose to share these words and sentiments with me.
If an item manages to endure time and circumstance and find its way to us, it often acquires a story along the way. A book, a letter, a document, or the like, can accumulate a compelling history independent of its original purpose and intent. Often, these stories are silent, untellable for want of any manifest record or clues. Sometimes – only sometimes – we are lucky and the story travels with the object. If fortune truly favors us, there is more than one story, these stories intertwining, encapsulated in the object. And if they are my favorite kind of stories, they tantalize us with knowns and unknowns, in equal measure.
This preamble explains why I love the object I’m writing about in this post.
On the surface, it is perhaps not so exciting. An undated, hand-written report from the First World War from a British lieutenant colonel to his superiors about night reconnaissance patrols to assess the state of German barbed wire defenses. But the officer signed the report, and his name was Winston Churchill.
Such ephemeral artifacts from Churchill’s January-May 1916 service on the Western Front, signed in his official capacity as Lieutenant Colonel in command of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, are quite rare.
The report, inked in 12 lines on a plain sheet, reads as follows:
“Submitted,
1. Patrol reports have already been forwarded.
2. Samples of wire obtained herewith.
3. I do not consider the patrols were successful
in obtaining samples from the neutral line of
the German wire, but ones from disused patches
in advance of it. It is therefore intended
to make a further reconnaissance tonight,
if circumstances & weather conditions are
favourable.
WS Churchill
Lt. Col. Comdg. 6 R.S.F.”
The report has two vertical creases and a single horizontal crease, as if once folded small enough to fit within a pocket. The ink is a little aged, but clear, the paper a bit toned, but clean. The simple survival of such an item – perhaps the very definition of ephemera – is sufficient cause for excitement. But there is more story here. Accompanying Churchill’s 1916 field report are two 1953 pieces of correspondence that provide provenance nearly as remarkable and improbable as the survival of this artifact.
The first is a 13 August 1953 four-page autograph letter from a “J. A. Fegan” of Edinburgh, Scotland to a “Mr. and Mrs. Gray L. Foster” of Manchester, New Hampshire. The letter indicates that the Fegans met the Fosters during the latter’s tour of Scotland, after which the Fosters sent gifts to the Fegans of sugar (still rationed in post-war Britain until September 1953) and books. It seems apparent from the correspondence that the connection was warmly heartfelt, but also both unplanned and short. Fegan calls it “all-too-brief”. Fegan states “We would have been very pleased for you to visit us – we get to know one another best in our homes – but fully understand that organized tours have little room for ‘side shows’”.
The thanks for the sugar sent by the Fosters from America is direct testimony to post-war austerity in Britain. Fegan writes “that sugar rationing is likely to cease about the end of next month, so you see we are gradually climbing the hill.” This, of course, eight years after the end of the war in Europe. Fegan’s thanks “for the books” is also intriguing, particularly the lines about Fegan’s reading “again Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and particularly the final paragraph, which is so appropriate at the present time ‘With malice towards none…” – testimony to the nascent Cold War which, once again, saw the U.S. and Britain aligned and allied. Of note, Churchill had a keen interest in the Civil War, toured Civil War battlegrounds with Eisenhower, admired Lincoln, and even invoked Gettysburg – twice – when addressing the U.S. Congress, both in December 1941 and again in May 1943
But page three of Fegan’s letter is what can cause a sharp intake of breath. There Fegan wrote:
“I would like you to accept one of my war souvenirs, which I feel will interest you. During the first six months of 1916, Winston Churchill commanded a Battalion – the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers – in the Division which I served. The Division for part of that time was holding a quiet sector of the line at Ploegsteert, after being badly mauled at Ypres, but local raids were made on the enemy lines from time to time. The enclosed report refers to a night reconnaissance made by patrols to find out the strength of the wire preparatory to making one of these raids, and I got the report from Brigade Head-quarters later. It is undated, but it was about the middle of May 1916.”
There it is. Not only provenance, but an explanation of why and how this particular report survived its fleeting momentary relevance amidst the veritable blizzard of such documents that undoubtedly crowded “Brigade Head-quarters”.
The second letter in the envelope is a typed copy of Mr. Foster’s 3 September 1953 response, thanking Fegan for his gift. Churchill would doubtless have appreciated Foster’s extravagant praise (“the greatest man living in my term of years”), but it is the last sentence of Foster’s first paragraph that might have made Churchill smile in quiet satisfaction. Churchill did much to cultivate, cement, and sustain an alliance among the world’s English-Speaking peoples, and actually coined the phrase “Special Relationship” to enshrine the Anglo-American bond. Of the gift of Churchill’s report, Foster tells Fegan “I have told my two daughters about you and your family, and it was their suggestion that we permanently keep your letter as proof that individuals can develop international relations on a high plane.” Foster’s letter closes “…I hope that in time to come you will be prompted to drop us another line. Certainly, a new friendship like this should not be allowed to lapse.”
Of the gift of Churchill’s report, Foster wrote to Fegan “…it touched me very deeply because I know how much this particular war souvenir meant to you. Mrs. Foster and I both felt that you are doing much more for us than you should in parting with this valuable memento. However, we want you to know that this is highly cherished and it is going into our safety deposit box. Also going into my safety deposit box is your letter of August 13th.”
Apparently, ten years in the safety deposit box proved long enough. The report is framed in gilt wood with what appears to be a jute mat. We have not removed the item from the frame owing to what we found on the back. Affixed to the top center of the frame’s backing is the illustrated sticker of “The Old Print and Frame Shop, Inc” of “Boston 8, Massachusetts”. Hand-written on the sticker is a date of “63”. When the item was framed, a large envelope was affixed to the lower half of frame’s backing, in which the two 1953 pieces of correspondence from Fegan and Foster are preserved.
As you might imagine, we were keen to know the identity of both Fegan and Foster.
Thanks to The Royal High School of Edinburgh Roll of Honour 1914-1918 (Oliver and Boyd, Tweeddale Court, Edinburgh 1920) and the National Library of Scotland, we know that John Adam Fegan, born 1886, served nearly the entire length of the First World War. His service history: Private, 12th Royal Scots, August 1914; Sergeant, October 1914; Company Quartermaster-Sergeant, January 1916; 2nd Lieutenant, April 1918. Awarded Military Medal, April 1917. Mentioned in Despatches, June 1917 and January 1919. Wounded at Ledeghem, October 1918. Fegan would have been in his late sixties when he met and befriended the Fosters and gifted them this artifact from Churchill’s First World War active service. Remarkably, Churchill was still serving, albeit in a different capacity; at 78, he was in the midst of his second and final premiership, leading his entire nation during a difficult peace rather than a battalion during a bloody war.
It is a small but poignant reminder of the sheer scope of the First World War’s carnage that The Royal High School of Edinburgh Roll of Honour 1914-1918, which recorded John Adam Fegan’s service history, contains 929 names of those who served, of whom 174 fell. All attended just one high school in Scotland.
But back to our story. In fact, we have multiple stories. The story of the item itself, of course. The story of how it came to be preserved. And the story of how it came to pass, by way of reciprocal gifts, across the Atlantic, from British hands to American.
Equally intriguing is what we don’t know. None of the stories is complete.
We don’t know any more about John Adam Fegan other than his date of birth, service record, 1953 address, and apparent long residence in Edinburgh.
We don’t know anything about “Gray L. Foster” other than his Manchester, New Hampshire address. There is an intriguing clue in Fegan’s letter; when writing about the books received, Fegan said “Those issued by your company provide excellent thumb-nail sketches which I shall enjoy reading with ‘The American Canon’ in my hands.” In theory, “issued by your company” is an important clue, but not one that we have yet been able to exploit. We also don’t know whether the Fegans and the Fosters remained in touch. Or why, after ten years, Churchill’s report was framed and preserved in the company of these two letters.
Equally intriguing, we don’t know on what date Churchill composed and submitted this report, whether there was a follow-on report, or what, if any, action was taken as a result. In his 13 August 1953 letter, Fegan states of Churchill’s report “It is undated, but it was about the middle of May 1916.” Whether we attribute the error to the erosion of date-specific memory after more than four decades, or the fact that Fegan “got the report from Brigade Head-quarters later”, the “middle of May 1916” date is likely not *quite* accurate. The report was written sometime between 1 January and the first week of May, 1916.
This certainty results from history we all know. A quarter of a century before he served as British Prime Minister during the Second World War, Winston Churchill played a critical, controversial, and varied role in “The war to end all wars”. In October 1911, aged 36, Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty with the brief to change war strategy and ensure the readiness of the world’s most powerful navy. He did both before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Nonetheless, when Churchill advocated successfully for a naval campaign in the Dardanelles that ultimately proved disastrous, a convergence of factors sealed his political fate. Churchill was scapegoated and forced to resign, leaving the Admiralty in May 1915. By November 1915, Churchill had resolved to join the troops on the Western Front.
After training, On New Year’s Day 1916 he learned he would be appointed to command the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. The next day he received his commission as a temporary lieutenant-colonel, the highest rank he would reach in the army. Churchill spent nearly six months in the field, more than four of these months at Ploegsteert, Belgium, part of the Ypres Salient. Churchill briefly returned to London only from 7 to 13 March to attend Parliament, having remained MP for Dundee while in the field. Upon the news that his Battalion was to be dissolved, Churchill decided not to seek a new appointment and, on 7 May 1916 he returned permanently to Parliament.
Churchill’s political career would ultimately last two thirds of a century, see him occupy Cabinet office during each of the first six decades of the twentieth century, and carry him twice to the premiership. Documents and correspondence signed in his various official civilian leadership capacities are certainly collectible, many even precious, but not unusual given the eleven different Cabinet offices he held (three of them more than once). By contrast, official communications from this period of Churchill’s active military service are quite uncommon.
We welcome the opportunity to share this item with you and invite you to help us finish sussing and sharing its story.
This item is offered for sale HERE on our website.
I can see Dr. Seuss’s mountain from my front door.
OK, it’s what passes for a mountain here in coastal southern California, but still quite noticeable, peaking at 823 feet above sea level immediately adjacent to the Pacific Ocean with a commanding view of a marine reserve and conservation area. On top of La Jolla’s Mt. Soledad Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, lived and wrote and drew for more than 40 years. A five-minute drive, and I can walk the same streets he walked, see and experience the same views and physical perspective.
I read a lot of books packed full of nuanced polysyllables and grand ideas and festooned with literary accolades. And I enjoy them. But none sway me from my conviction that Dr. Seuss ranks among the most inventive and insightful literary minds of the 20th century. I’m going to write a lot more about Dr. Seuss in this post. I might even back up some of that bold assertion I just made. But first I should tell you what prompts me to write.
“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”
Recently, a gracious grandmother named Jill entrusted me with a collection of 21 Dr. Seuss titles. Each was inscribed identically for the same young mother, the same Jill, in 1963 at a bookshop one mile from Dr. Seuss’s home in La Jolla, California. And the story is too lovely not to share. With and within the books came a distillation of six decades of personal history, all centered around this beautiful little corner of the world that Dr. Seuss, Jill, a splendid bookshop, and I have called home.
First, the story. In 1959, Jill’s family moved from Los Angeles to Point Loma in San Diego. In July 1963, Jill had her first child – a boy, Jeff. For Jill’s birthday that November, her mom decided to give her a gift that she could share with her new baby. Jill’s mom was friends with Barbara Cole, proprietor of John Cole’s Books in La Jolla, and Barbara was friends with Dr. Seuss, who lived exactly one mile away from the shop. So, with Barbara’s help, Jill’s mom got Dr. Seuss to inscribe all 21 books we offer today to Jill in the fall of 1963. Jill read and reread these books to Jeff and his little sister, Lauren, born in 1966, throughout their childhood. In fact, the only writing in any of these books other than Dr. Seuss’s inscriptions are “LAUREN YOUNG” and “JEFF YOUNG” written in The Sneetches and Other Stories on the day they took this favorite to school to share with teachers and friends. Jill and her husband raised Jeff and Lauren in Point Loma, in the same house where, eventually, they read and reread these same Dr. Seuss books to their granddaughters, just as they had once read them to their children.
“My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”
Now, with both children and grandchildren grown, the books are offered to a new family for the first time since they were purchased for Jill by her mom and inscribed by Dr. Seuss in 1963. I’ll be honest. As a bookseller, I strongly considered the prudent course of selling the books individually. But I just couldn’t do it. So we offer these books together, as they have been for more than sixty years and three generations.
“I do not like green eggs and ham.”
What’s included? Dr. Seuss published 22 books for children between his first in 1937 and 1963’s Hop on Pop. Of these 22, only Green Eggs and Ham is missing from this collection. The books in this collection are:
Hop on Pop (1963, first edition)
Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book (1962, first edition in DJ)
The Sneetches and Other Stories (1961, first edition in DJ)
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960, DJ)
Happy Birthday to You (1959, DJ)
Yertle the Turtle (1958, first edition in DJ)
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958, DJ)
The Cat in the Hat (1957, DJ)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957, first edition).
If I Ran the Circus (1956)
On Beyond Zebra! (1955, DJ)
Horton Hears a Who! (1954)
Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953)
If I Ran the Zoo (1950, DJ)
Batholomew and the Oobleck (1949, DJ)
Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose (1948, DJ)
McElligot’s Pool (1947, DJ)
Horton Hatches the Egg (1940, DJ)
The King’s Stilts (1939, DJ)
The 500 Hats of Bartholmew Cubbins (1938, DJ)
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937, DJ)
This collection of oft-read, long and well-loved, mixed editions is certainly no fastidious, condition-obsessed bibliophile’s dream. BUT, each and every one of the books is inscribed on the lower left corner of the front free endpaper verso in four lines “for | JiLL | with Best Wishes | Dr. Seuss” with a characteristic Dr. Seuss squiggle between the valediction and signature. And affixed to each lower left rear pastedown is (or was, just a few having been peeled by kid fingers) the illustrated bookseller’s ticket of “John Cole’s | Book & Craft Shop | 7871 Ivanhoe Avenue | La Jolla California”.
Which means that now I just have to talk about Dr. Seuss’s journey to La Jolla and about John and Barbara Cole and their marvelous bookstore.
First, Dr. Seuss’s journey to La Jolla and preeminence.
Eleven years before Jill’s family moved to the area, and just two years after John Cole’s Book & Craft Shop opened, in 1948 Dr. Seuss moved with his wife to La Jolla, which, like the Coles, he would call home for the rest of his life. In his study atop La Jolla’s Mount Soledad, Dr. Seuss wrote the majority of the books in this collection, which he signed in the Coles’ book shop just one mile from his house. La Jolla’s vistas, flora, and fauna often inspired and transmogrified into the fantastical constituent elements of his stories.
Theodor Seuss Geisel had begun in promisingly conventional fashion, matriculating at Dartmouth and then Oxford. But it was as an Oxonian that he became bored with “the astonishing irrelevance of graduate work” and “punctuated his lecture notebooks with drawings of fantastic beasts.” He abandoned academia to become an illustrator. As he professionally became “Dr. Seuss”, Geisel landed a lucrative contract with Standard Oil to draw advertisings for their insecticide, Flit. This and successive work for Standard Oil led to an invitation to illustrate Boners, “a sampler of British schoolboy hilarity” (not nearly as inappropriate for the future children’s book author as the title might suggest). The success of the book, “largely because of his artwork”, led Geisel to conclude that he could write as well as illustrate a book for children, which he did. “Because the thinking of the time dictated that children’s stories should be morally uplifting and educational, twenty-seven publishers rejected his first manuscript because its illustrations were too bizarre and its message too amoral.
“Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them.”
Luckily an old Dartmouth pal who had just become children’s editor for Vanguard Press loved the manuscript and in 1937 published it as And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” Geisel followed up with two more efforts for children before also publishing a humorous tale intended for adults – The Seven Lady Godivas – which flopped. The flop proved a boon. Geisel concluded that “Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them.” He devoted himself to children’s books, and to becoming the Dr. Seuss the world knows. In 1940, the same year he came out with Horton Hatches the Egg, Geisel ended his association with Standard Oil.
But there was one further interruption on the path. During the Second World War, as a U.S. Army Signal Corps captain, Geisel was sent to Hollywood where he worked with legendary director Frank Capra producing training movies and newsreels for the military. Geisel also worked with Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones, to create the cartoon character “Private Snafu”, who taught troops “everything from discipline to taking antimalarial pills.” Seuss even produced “an indoctrination film for the troops who would occupy Germany after the war.” The screening of this film in Europe led to his getting trapped for several days behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge. All of this wartime film work led Geisel to be awarded the Legion of Merit “for exceptionally meritorious service in planning and producing films.”
Two years after he was discharged, in 1948 Geisel and his wife moved to La Jolla, California. He would live there for more than four decades until his death in 1991. Home was fixed. But his career path was not yet quite so clear. Naturally, after the war Geisel continued his work writing movie scripts for Warner Bros. and RKO even as he returned to writing children’s books. Film work brought him success, including Oscars.
“Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.”
It was The Cat in the Hat that saved Dr. Seuss for his true vocation. “The Cat in the Hat was born in the mid-1950s amidst a national debate over growing illiteracy among children. More than one critic demanded a new type of school primer, one that was fun to read and creatively illustrated… William Spaulding, director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational book division, challenged Geisel to come up with a primer… and gave him a first-grade vocabulary list of 225 words, none of which were adjectives. Geisel struggled with the list for over a year, trying to find enough words to rhyme in order to write any sort of story.” In the end, of course, he did. The astounding, indeed revolutionary, success of The Cat in the Hat “launched Beginner Books, a division of Random House with Geisel as its president”.
“I’m glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone.”
By the time Dr. Seuss died in La Jolla, he had long since become “the most popular and influential children’s author of his day”. Dr. Seuss produced fifty-five books, “all inspired by a sense of imagination and playfulness” which “changed dramatically the way in which youngsters learn to read”. Many of his papers are now located just a few miles from his La Jolla home, in the archives of the University of California, San Diego, within the Geisel Library. UCSD’s Dr. Seuss Collection contains original drawings, sketches, proofs, notebooks, manuscript drafts, books, audio- and videotapes, photographs, and memorabilia, more than 20,000 items documenting the full range of Dr. Seuss’s creative achievements.
I know that may have sounded like a conclusion, but we’re not done just yet. You need to hear about John Cole’s Book & Craft Shop
“Sometimes you will never know the value of something, until it becomes a memory.”
John Cole’s Book Shop was a family-run La Jolla institution for more than 60 years, and Barbara Cole “the grande dame of booksellers”.
John had worked in the book business in a Chicago department store. It was in Chicago that John met Barbara, a native of Evanston, Illinois. Barbara worked for a while at a Connecticut bookstore while her husband was overseas in the Army. After the war, they chose La Jolla, intrigued by its beauty and climate, and there they made a life and livelihood in books.
The bookshop opened by John and Barbara Cole in La Jolla, California in 1946 persisted until one year after Barbara’s death, in 2005. “The Coles originally called their store John Cole’s Book and Craft Shop. Mrs. Cole, who had intended to sit at the front window and weave to catch the eyes of passersby, soon discovered that her husband needed her for more pressing duties.” When John died of a heart attack in 1959, the shop that bore John’s name became solely Barbara’s.
When these Dr. Seuss books were inscribed in 1963, the bookshop was still located on 7871 Ivanhoe Avenue and had not yet shortened its name to omit “and Craft”. But Barbara had already met Ted Geisel, the “Dr. Seuss” of children’s books who had moved to La Jolla in 1948. The Coles and Dr. Seuss became friends. “A scrapbook she kept of the history of her store shows pictures of Geisel dating to 1950.”
The bookshop was more than just a bookshop, to both Barbara and her community. The shop featured “homey charm with old furniture and fixtures and folk art. She would host receptions and poetry readings and display sculptures on the front lawn.” Barbara “knew what clients liked” and would write personal notes to customers, some of whom remained loyal for generations and “would bring their grandchildren into the store.” These multi-generational ties to the store extended to the proprietor; Susan and Charles, Barbara’s daughter and son, worked in the store, as did Barbara’s grandchildren – both Susan’s daughter and Charles’s son.
In 1966, after two decades on Ivanhoe Avenue, the store moved to the Wisteria Cottage at 780 Prospect Street, where it remained for almost four decades. When the shop closed in 2005, the cottage it occupied was turned into a museum by the La Jolla Historical Society, and remains so today..
Almost done. Just give me three more paragraphs…
Remember that I asserted that Dr. Seuss ranks among the most inventive and insightful literary minds of the 20th century? I have five words on which I’m willing to stake this claim – The Cat in the Hat. Seriously. Try it. Ask someone for a first-grade vocabulary list of 225 words, none of which are adjectives. Now use the list to make a book that becomes iconic and changes the way tens of millions of children learn to read. No, doesn’t just change the way kids learn to read, but increases their desire to do so.
Yeah.
Maybe you’ve heard of Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word short story. It’s evocative, impactful, and impressive. But millions of kids have not worn copies of it to bits, reaching for it on the shelf over and over again. I understand why. I did something a little crazy with this amazing Dr. Seuss collection. I read all twenty-one of them. Not as the kid I was the first time I saw them, but as one of those “obsolete children” – a notional grown-up with well over half a century under my feet. What I felt was the various weights and encumbrances of those decades leaven and lighten. I appreciate Hemingway. I really do. But Dr. Seuss is a genius.
I have soft spot for subversive “children’s authors”. Sure, there’s the Golden Rule and a tree that gives and a spider named Charlotte. Lots of ways for kids to learn words and norms and values. But then there is Dr. Seuss, who spent his adult life connecting vitally and speaking uniquely, directly to all the best stuff that makes us kids. Not to tame or change that kid-ness, but to help it grow, tall and sure and just a little weird and wild. It takes something truly special to teach kids to learn, grow, have fun, and be decent, while at the same time being deliciously subversive. To also inspire all those young future citizens to be curious, to question authority, to see the world not just as it is, but as it might be. To allow all the color and chaos of life to be as sweet and silly as it is scary.
Cheers for the sagaciously and sensibly nonsensical Doctor!
Sources: American National Biography; University of California, San Diego Archives; San Diego Union Tribune obituary, 20 July 2004, by Staff Writer Jack Williams
Over the years, I’ve spilled a lot of proverbial ink writing and talking about books. Since I’m a bookseller, much of that is composition about books’ content or condition. But I’ve also been inclined to express – sometimes at length – a non-sectarian reverence for books. Books as physical objects that encapsulate intellect and insight, aesthetic and ambition, time and tide. Books for what they represent as much as for what they are. Sometimes I even indulge in reading books that share my reverence. And sometimes, as a writer, I’m forced to bow in deference to someone who expresses my thoughts better than I’ve expressed them myself.
So it was when I was reading the Epilogue of a most unexpectedly excellent book called The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth (Basic Books, New York, 2024). With this post, my words are only intended to preface and present a few of his. A caveat: this is not a review of this compellingly interesting book. Rather, I’ll just share some of what I found in the last 17 pages.
So here goes.
On the subject of stewardship, rather than ownership of books, Symth speaks of “the poverty of singular claims to ownership: books move on, passing out of one owner’s clutches – however possessive those clutches might be – and moving on to meet the next generation. In this sense, the book always exceeds us, and the best we can do is feel it pass through our hands.”
On the book as an object that transcends the information it conveys, Smyth writes “Books are themselves incredible objects whose beauty and complexity enriches the text being read. Peer closely at calligrapher Edward Johnson’s curling green ‘W’ at the start of the Doves Press Hamlet, or the crystal-clear, immaculately spaced lettering of John Baskerville’s Paradise Lost. These are works of art that contribute to the meaning of the whole.”
On the connection between a book and its maker, between its present physical reality and the past from whence it came to us, Smyth writes “Books are expressive objects which themselves possess an emotional range and which convey, in their material forms, in ways that are sometimes legible, the texture of what it meant for a particular bookmaker to be alive.”
Of the future of the physical book, Smyth asserts “…this isn’t the end of anything – least of all the book – because a physical book is a different proposition to an electronic text. Print and digital need not be placed in an antagonistic relation to one another. The question ‘Will the book endure?’ or ‘Is the book dead?’ or ‘Will the internet kill the book?’ is mistaken because the five and a half centuries since Gutenberg show the book to be a form that has continually adapted to new people, ideas, contexts, and technologies, while all the time maintaining its identity as a physical support for text.”
This is a lot of rarefied sentiment, to be sure. Smyth does not neglect the mechanical, technical, logistical, and even financial considerations of book-makers in his work, but he does beautifully interleave the practicalities and potentialities, exalting the latter all the better for comprehending the former. Perhaps the best example is the final paragraphs of his Epilogue, where Smyth quotes Whitman the poet writing lyrically as Whitman the book-maker. It turns out that “Whitman was a printer and a typesetter on Long Island, New York, long before his poetry collection Leaves of Grass…” Smythe quotes Whitman’s six-line poem “A Font of Type”. Smyth writes “Type, Whitman wrote elsewhere, ‘rejects nothing’. Type represents possibility… The tidy font of type – and we can widen the category of ‘type’ to include all the materials of book-making – is potentiality itself: a way of bringing as yet ‘unlaunch’d voices’ into the world.”
Yes, I recommend The Book. By which I mean all of them, Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers included.
On the morning of Monday the 26th of August, my daughter moved into her new dorm room at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Later that afternoon, we said goodbye and parents were ushered off of the campus and sent home so that their progeny could settle into their new life as college students. I spent a lot of the day looking upwards. Perhaps that’s because the late summer cloudscapes of coastal Maine are breathtaking and the trees are stately and tall. It might also be because when you look up, your eyes are less likely to leak and your daughter is less likely to notice that you are trying to prevent your eyes from leaking. Allergies, I’m sure, from all that exotic Maine pollen.
Anyway, there I was, at the Northwest corner of my daughter’s dorm building, hands on hips and looking up from her first-floor window, through which I had seen her unpacking and settling in. I could feel my eyes starting to water – you know, because of the pollen – so I looked up. There appeared to be an anomaly in the otherwise regular pattern of brick exterior interspersed with windows. A stone plaque was set into the wall below the window sill two floors directly above my daughter’s own. Once my eyes cleared (damned pollen) I could read what it said:
COLLEGE ROOM OF
LONGFELLOW
1823-1825
Assuming this was not just an extravagantly permanent homage to the physical endowments of a former student, my daughter now resides in the same corner of the same dorm occupied two hundred years ago by the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Looking up at Longfellow’s dorm room window, I remembered an early Second World War exchange between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill involving Longfellow.
When Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, the war for Britain was not so much a struggle for victory as a struggle to survive. Churchill’s first year in office saw, among other near-calamities, the Battle of the Atlantic, the fall of France, evacuation at Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain. Hitler intended the massive, sustained attacks by his Luftwaffe to achieve air superiority preparatory to an invasion of England. Sapping Britain’s Air Force and war-making capacity was of course a goal. But so too was the simple goal of terrorizing Britons and eroding their will to fight. As the year 1941 began, Churchill’s Britain had held on with remarkable resolve and resourcefulness, but her position remained tenuous. The United States would not formally enter the war until the end of the year, after the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the brutal interval, the Lend-Lease Act gave Britain both vital material aid and an equally vital expression of support. On Saturday, 8 February 1941, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Lend-Lease Bill by 260 to 165 Votes. It had yet to pass the Senate and be signed by President Roosevelt, but a major hurdle absolutely crucial to the British had been passed. Churchill’s broadcast address to Britain and the Empire the next day, 9 February, was his first broadcast for five months. He was well aware that a significant element of his audience was American public opinion. Near the end of his remarks, Churchill quoted verse from a Longfellow poem which President Roosevelt had written out in his own hand and sent to Churchill on January 27:
“Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.”
Churchill concluded his 9 February broadcast with his answer to President Roosevelt: “Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”
The United States enacted the Lend Lease Act in early March and soon thereafter extended its naval security zone several thousand miles into the Atlantic, effectively shielding much of the Atlantic convoy route.
The Lend-Lease Act was a clever, calculated, steely-eyed political balancing act. Roosevelt managed to provide essential aid to a stalwart future ally without yet overtly committing to war his nation, which was not yet committed to war. While Lend-Lease was a political masterstroke, it was hardly the stuff of rhapsodizing poetry. Why would Roosevelt send Churchill lines of verse – and in his own hand at that?
Perhaps because Roosevelt knew what the poet Mary Oliver later said of poetry – that a poem is not ‘wordplay’ but “something beyond language devices” with “a purpose other than itself… poems are not words… but fires for the cold, ropes to let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
Perhaps poets and poetry have always been, and always will be, more praised than read. But I’m reminded of another story, one closer to our own time. When the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney died in 2013, his funeral was widely attended by the good and great. But the tribute I found most affecting was the one given by football fans. A crowd of 80,000 in a Gaelic football stadium observed a full minute’s silence and then burst into applause in Heaney’s honor during a match between Dublin and Kerry.
Mary Oliver was a poet. It was no accident that she referred to “bread in the pockets of the hungry” rather than in the bellies of the hungry. We carry poetry with us, both culturally and personally, because what poetry can provide at need – encompassing perspective, edifying purpose, steadying reassurance and hope. These are fire, rope, and bread. These are necessities.
You may browse our current inventory of poetry HERE.
Yes, that’s a hell of a pretentious title. Or magnificently idealistic, depending on your perspective.
By happenstance, we recently acquired three works from three First World War leaders – all first-hand accounts of the ultimately ill-fated ideals threading the peace treaty that ended the First World War and the formation of the League of Nations. Both were intended to prevent a Second World War, the one that began only 20 years after the First.
Woodrow Wilson and The Hope of the World
This little book – quite uncommon in the dust jacket – chronicles the failed advocacy of President Woodrow Wilson, at the end of the First World War, to persuade the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the embryonic League of Nations. It contains “Messages and Addresses delivered by the President between July 9, 1919 and December 9, 1919”.
Before the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, President Wilson had sought to keep America out of the “European war” and “appealed to American citizens to ‘act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality.’” Yet even before a reluctant United States formally joined the war, President Woodrow Wilson pursued the idea of a League of Nations. “On 27 May 1916 the president announced his vision of collective security… calling for a new global community of democratic nations to preserve world peace and protect universal human rights.” Wilson anticipated that “a postwar League of Nations, … would replace Europe’s discredited balance of power and old alliances. ‘There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.’ This was his vision of a new ‘covenant’ among ‘democratic nations.’” At the Paris Peace Conference that convened in January 1919 at Versailles, Wilson “made drafting the covenant for this new international organization his top priority and insisted on its inclusion in the peace treaty.”
But while Wilson had an international constituency, he lacked a critical domestic one. “On his return home, Wilson presented the treaty to the U.S. Senate. Wilson’s 10 July 1919 speech presenting the Peace Treaty and League of Nations to the United States Senate for ratification is the first address in this volume: “We entered the war as the disinterested champions of right, and we interested ourselves in the terms of the peace in no other capacity”. He asserted “it was not easy to graft the new order of ideas on the old.” Wilson called the League of Nations “not merely an instrument to adjust and remedy old wrongs under a new treaty of peace”; it was, he said, the “only hope for mankind.”
The U.S. Senate, and particularly Henry Cabot Lodge, leader of the Republican majority, opposed Wilson and ratification. In the face of Senate opposition, “Wilson… decided to appeal directly to the American people and in September 1919 went on a speaking tour of western states.” However, Wilson “failed to mobilize public opinion effectively against Lodge and the Republican-controlled Senate. During the western tour, Wilson’s health collapsed. On 2 October 1919, back in Washington, he suffered a massive stroke.” With Wilson’s health, hope of U.S. participation also collapsed. “The Senate rejected the treaty on 19 November 1919 and again on 19 March 1920, thereby preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations – a critical absence that crippled the organization from its inception.
“A Practical Suggestion” from Jan Smuts
We were thrilled to recently acquire this copy of legendary South African and Commonwealth leader Jan Smuts’s book on the post-First World War Peace – thrilled because this copy was inscribed by Smuts in Paris in 1919.
Renowned South African soldier and statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950) served as both the 2nd (1919-1924) and 4th (1939-1948) Prime Minister of South Africa. He was an important figure in world politics, serving in the British War Cabinet in both the First and Second World Wars, and having a hand in the formation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Smuts was the only person to sign the peace treaties ending both the First and Second World Wars, and was the only person to sign the charters of both the League of Nations and of the United Nations. With respect to the former, “he may justly be called one of the principal progenitors of the League of Nations.”
During the First World War, “In the midst of his public duties, Smuts also re-established his ties with his Quaker, Liberal, and radical feminist friends… They… undoubtedly strengthened his liberal internationalism…. After armistice he was responsible for the demobilization plans of all the British departments and for compiling the British brief for the peace conference… Smuts’s experience of the South African War and the influence of his radical and pacifist friends deeply informed his opposition to the idea of total war, or indeed total surrender, and his keen advocacy of a new international order, embodied in his pamphlet The League of Nations, a Practical Suggestion… At the Paris peace conference, where with Botha he represented South Africa, Smuts continued to argue in vain for a magnanimous peace; he despaired that the Versailles treaty was ‘conceived on a wrong basis that… will prove utterly unstable and only serve to promote the anarchy which is rapidly overtaking Europe.’ He even threatened to resign as a delegate and lead a campaign against the treaty as ‘an abomination’… Nevertheless, when Lloyd George asked pointedly whether he was prepared to return the German colonies in south-west or east Africa, Smuts equivocated – and signed the treaty.” (ODNB)
In his work and in this book, Smuts had advocated that the nascent League of Nations “occupy the great position which has been rendered vacant by the destruction of so many of the old European Empires and the passing away of the old European order.” Smuts wanted the League to “be put in the very forefront of the programme of the Peace Conference and made the point of departure for the solution of so many of the grave problems with which it will be confronted.” Smuts’s vision was not realized. The failures of the post-World War I peace and the inadequacies of a League of Nations far more limited than Smuts had advocated helped precipitate the Second World War two decades after Smuts wrote this book. Smuts was destined to play an even greater role in that war and, in the wake of it, in the formation of the more robust and enduring institution of the United Nations.
David Lloyd George – a purpose rooted in “the present as much as the past”
The final work prompting this post is, like the two above, about the First World War settlement. But unlike the two works above, it was written on the eve of the Second World War.
This is a two-volume, first edition, first printing set of David Lloyd Goerge’s memoirs of the peace conference that ended the First World War. As British Prime Minister from 1916-1922, Lloyd George was a principal architect of the conference and peace. This set captured our attention for its exceptional condition, still housed in the original publisher’s slipcase and retaining most of the original glassine dust wrappers. But the set is even more noteworthy for timing than for condition. It is no accident that Lloyd George was publishing his memoirs of the peace settlement that ended the First World War in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. The extensive blurb on the slipcase concludes “an account by one of the three men who directed it of the entire bewildered drama that still has its echoes in the Europe of 1939.”
These two volumes were widely regarded as “the continuation and conclusion” to Lloyd George’s Memoirs of the First World War, published in six volumes between 1933 and 1936. In those six volumes, David Lloyd George was not just continuing, amid the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, to “debate on the strategy and ethics of the First World War.” He was “also implicitly arguing the case for a totally different approach towards Germany and international affairs in the 1930s. Their purpose was the present as much as the past.”
The same can be said of Memoirs of the Peace Conference. From 1936 on, “Lloyd George’s main preoccupation now was trying to reverse the effects of Versailles… As Germany fell into totalitarian dictatorship under Hitler, Lloyd George renewed his attacks on the reparations and unjust frontiers imposed on the defeated Germans. He was critical of the league and the failure to disarm as laid down in the peace treaties, and highly censorious of the French.” All of this was perhaps quite reasonable, but it was a time of great errors in judgement and Lloyd George was not immune. Lloyd George visited Hitler. Thereafter he wrote ecstatically of Hitler as ‘the greatest living German’, ‘the George Washington of Germany’ (Daily Express, 17 Sept 1936). It was a serious miscalculation… and did him much harm.” Nonetheless, “Right down to September 1939 he was a major political player.” Lloyd George “made one last great Commons speech, on 8 May 1940, when his devastating attack on Neville Chamberlain helped to bring the prime minister down and led to the succession of Winston Churchill.”
The presence of the past
The world learned at least something from the failures of the post-First World War peace. Although the world is riven with lesser conflicts, there have been no conflicts as internationally encompassing and devastatingly destructive as a world war for 80 years – four times the interval between the First and Second World Wars. The United Nations, successor institution to the League of Nations, has seen far more expansive international participation, and taken on broader and more robust roles in international affairs.
But the binding cords of international accord visibly fray. Disarmament treaties expire without being replaced. Longstanding treaties promising mutual aid among democratic nations falter or fray. Alliances among aggressor nations strengthen. International trade norms and rules are likewise flouted or dismantled. Efforts at new, multi-lateral trade agreements fall short of their potential as the United States suffers radical political oscillations and flirts with protectionism and isolationism. International courts issue indictments and warrants for wantonly belligerent heads of state, who shrug them with impunity. Freedom of speech and of the press and even citizen preference for, and confidence in, self-government precipitously declines.
When institutions and norms and values and even good will fail, there is history. To remind us that hope is the responsibility of each successive generation. That each generation is burdened with imperfection, ugly compromise, and failure. That relentless effort to achieve a comprehending awareness is not an esoteric intellectual pursuit, but a necessary foundation for constructively engaging and shaping the world. That books remind us. They fill shelves and rooms and whole libraries with the weight of what we have thought and tried. All so that we might remember and understand and, perhaps, be able to do better when we try again.
For those of you unfamiliar with polemic German, that translates “Churchill the World Liar.” This subtle and gently nuanced critique, below an unflattering original caricature of Winston S. Churchill appears to have been inked by a German soldier on 3 October, just a month after the Second World War began. This ostensibly unique, hand-drawn poster survived nearly five years of war before it was recovered from captured German barracks by an Allied solder.
The piece measures 12.25 x 8.5 inches (31.1 x 21.6 cm). The drawing features a slightly demonically-rendered countenance of Winston S. Churchill wearing a hat high on his head, cocked to the right with a stylized, gloved hand clawing around the brim. Churchill’s eyes are slightly asymmetrical and horizontally elongated, the roundness of his face slightly and unflatteringly exaggerated, his mouth open. The net effect is oddly evocative of an inebriated, rotund, clumsily malign and yet simultaneously ridiculous German burgher. The drawing, measuring 4.5 x 3.5 inches (11.4 x 8.9 cm) and framed by two border rules, occupies the upper center of the paper below a prominent, underscored title labeling the image “Unser Feind!” (“Our Enemy!”). Lightning-shaped arrows originating from the underscoring beneath the title point unsubtly to either side of the image – just in case the identity of the subject “Unser Feind” is in question. Centered directly below Churchill’s image are two further lines: “Churchill, | der Weltlugner”. (“Churchill, the World Liar”). At the lower right corner, just inside of a single border rule, the image is dated “8 Okt. 1939” and signed by the artist. The signature is indecipherable.
Condition is very good, particularly given the age and wartime experience of the piece. There are pin holes at the corners, a small hole in the second “h” of Churchill’s name, and a small vertical hole, wider at the center and pointed at the ends, in Churchill’s upper right forehead; it requires little imagination to perceive the shape of this hole as consonant with a knife point. There are five small circular stains adjacent to the upper and lower vertical center, some light spotting to the blank lower portion of the drawing, light overall soiling, the soiling heavier to the upper verso, where we also note a small paperclip rust stain.
Clues to provenance are tantalizing. 3 October, when this piece was drawn and signed, was an optimistic day for the Wehrmacht; on this day in 1939, French forces completed their withdrawal from advanced positions in German territory and the last significant units of the Polish army surrendered, allowing German forces to begin redeploying from Poland to western Europe. Two days prior, on 1 October, Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty, made his first wartime radio broadcast.
Of course Churchill was not yet wartime Prime Minister and the stern rhetoric that characterized his wartime speeches was perhaps somewhat tempered. Even so, any German solder listening would have rightly regarded Churchill as “Our Enemy!” Even as Britain’s allies were falling with shocking speed, Churchill spoke of resistance, resolve, and implacable opposition to Germany’s ascendant Fuhrer. Churchill told the British people to “…prepare for a war of at least years. That does not mean that victory may not be gained in a short time. How soon it will be gained depends upon how long Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption, can keep their grip upon the docile unhappy German people. It was for Hitler to say when the war would begin, but it is not for him or his successor to say when it will end. It began when he wanted it, and it will end only when we are convinced that he has had enough.”
We do not know what befell the artist who created this poster, or the soldiers who had it in their barracks four years, eleven months, and fifteen days after it was signed and dated. Nonetheless, we can be sure that the world and the war looked much different to Germany and her soldiers than it had on 3 October 1939.
At the upper left of the poster’s verso is a dated notation in pencil in four lines: “18 Sept 44 | The Jerries left this | behind at their now our | barracks.” Below and in a different hand, also in pencil, is a translation of the poster “Our enemy | the world liar”. Pin holes at the center of circular thumbtack indentations at each corner make it seem more than probable that this poster was displayed informally. Perhaps that is how it was discovered by the presumed allied soldier who made the notation on the back of the poster. The term “Jerry” to refer to the Germans was used generally by Allied soldiers and civilians, but originated with, and was most used by, the British. We cannot be sure of exactly where or by whom this poster was found, but in the European theater in mid-September 1944, Operation ‘Market Garden’ – involving one of the largest airborne operations in history – was underway. On Monday, 18 September 1944, British ground troops linked with U.S. 101st Airborne Division in Eindhoven, Holland.
The juxtaposition of the sentiments with which this unique artifact was drawn at the beginning of the war, and the manner in which it was discovered and claimed almost five years later, limn the brutal arc from the heady initial blitzkrieg of German ascendance to imminent, ignominious, and utter defeat.
This piece was once part of the extraordinary collection of Philip David Sang (1902-1975). Sang donated manuscript collections to Brandeis University, Yale University, the Illinois State Historical Museum and to Southern Illinois University, among others. He also loaned items from his vast collection to many museums and libraries for historical exhibits. Following his death, his widow, Elsie Olin Sang, sold many of his remaining manuscript and archival collections. This piece thus made its way to a colleague in the book trade, who held it for a number of years before conveying it to us.
As for the subject of this caricature, the artist hardly needed to go to the trouble of identifying his subject as “Churchill”. Prolific and almost instantly recognizable caricature would characterize most of Winston Churchill’s long life. Years before this particular caricature was drawn, Churchill said “cartoons are the regular food on which the grown-up children of to-day are fed and nourished. On these very often they form their views of public men and public affairs; on these very often they vote… But how… would you like to be cartooned yourself? How would you like to feel that millions of people saw you always in the most ridiculous situations, or portrayed as every kind of wretched animal, or with a nose on your face like a wart, when really your nose is quite a serviceable and presentable member? How would you like to feel that millions of people think of you like that? – that shocking object, that contemptible being, that wretched tatterdemalion, a proper target of public hatred and derision! Fancy having that process going on every week, often every day, over the whole of your life… But it is not so bad as you would expect. Just as eels are supposed to get used to skinning, so politicians get used to being caricatured. In fact, by a strange trait in human nature they even get to like it. If we must confess it, they are quite offended and downcast when the cartoons stop…” (Thoughts and Adventures, 1932) So recognizable did Churchill become that for his final political campaign in 1959 his poster was a simple, solid blue profile of his instantly recognizable countenance, with the inevitable cigar protruding – the alleged Weltlugner become instead a Weltfuhrer.
Robert Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon (1897-1977) famously resigned his Foreign Secretary post in the British Cabinet on 20 February 1938 in protest of the Government’s appeasement policies. “Although Eden had resigned over the appeasement of Italy rather than Germany, there was no doubt that he was also frustrated and irritated by the pro-Germans in Chamberlain’s Cabinet…” (Roberts, Walking with Destiny, p.423)
Like his fellow anti-appeaser, Winston Churchill, Eden was out of step with both his Party leadership and prevailing public sentiment in his assertion of the imperative to rearm and to resist the rise of European fascism. But unlike Churchill, Eden was not already in political exile, instead risking his career with his resignation. The following year, in a Strand Magazine profile of the once and future Foreign Minister, Churchill praised Eden for his “readiness to sacrifice unhesitatingly his great position for the sake of his convictions … even the most hostile critic must recognize the strong fibre of his nature, and the resolute purpose of his mind.”
A decade later, Churchill recalled receiving a phone call late in the night of February 20 “as I sat in my old room at Chartwell… that Eden had resigned. I must confess that my heart sank, and for a while the dark waters of despair overwhelmed me… During all the war soon to come and in its darkest times I never had any trouble in sleeping… But now, on this night of February 20, 1938, and on this occasion only, sleep deserted me. From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways; but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation… Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.” (The Gathering Storm, pp. 257-8)
A Marvelous Artifact
We were recently reminded of this pivotal pre-Second World War moment by a marvelous artifact of the moment. This exceptionally rare volume from the first month of the Second World War is the privately printed, finely bound, limited, and hand-numbered edition of future British Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s 26 April 1938 “England” address. This anti-appeasement speech was given at the Festival Banquet of the Royal Society of St. George just two months after Eden’s resignation. Not only is it one of just twelve copies, but it is also compellingly inscribed by Eden during the Second World War and further accompanied by a wartime autograph presentation letter signed by Eden’s foreign office secretary.
Edition and Condition
The edition is hand-numbered “5” of only twelve copies. Per the Colophon: “This speech was printed privately, in hand-set Centaur type on hand-made paper, by Peter Harvey, at Coed y Maen in the County of Montgomery. It was completed in September 1939, and bound by Nesta Williams Wynn. This edition is limited to twelve copies, of which this is number 5.” The limitation number is hand-written in black.
The binding is full orange Morocco goatskin with raised, blind-rule framed spine bands. The sumptuous paper on which the contents are printed is water-marked and bound with untrimmed edges and decorative endpapers.
As lovely and rare as it is, what renders this item most compelling – not to mention truly unique – is the inscription and presentation letter.
Inscription and Presentation
Eden’s inscription is inked on the recto of a preliminary blank in 11 lines:
“To Paul | who was one of the first to see that | “The danger signals are up in many colours | and in many lands”, | in recollection of much | stress of mind and toil | endured together in abortive | attempts to awaken the appeasers, | from | Anthony | November 1942”.
The recipient, Paul Vychan Emrys-Evans (1894-1964), was “Educated at Harrow and King’s College, Cambridge. During the First World War, he served as a lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment (1914-17) and was wounded in France in 1916. He worked for the Foreign Office from 1917-23 and was later a Conservative MP for South Derbyshire from 1931-45. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary successively at the War Office and Dominion Affairs in 1940-41 and thereafter, from 1941-45, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs. (Gilbert, V, p.903)
Laid in is an autograph note signed on Foreign Office stationery from Foreign Office secretary Valentine Lawford dated “Nov 23rd 1942”. The note reads “Dear Emrys-Evans, The Secretary of State has now inscribed your copy of Peter Harvey’s Edition of his speech on England; and I return it, herewith. Yours sincerely, V. Lawford”
The secretarial letter is written and signed by Valentine Lawford (1911-1991), who entered the diplomatic service in 1934 and was assistant private secretary successively to Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden, and Ernest Bevin. He attended the Moscow, Quebec, and Yalta conferences and was appointed to the United Kingdom delegation to the United Nations in 1946, leaving service in 1950.
The Speech
It is difficult to imagine a more quintessentially English venue for Eden’s speech. “The Royal Society of St. George was founded in 1894 with the noble object of promoting ‘Englishness’ and the English way of life.” Eden’s speech was an eloquent effort to connect Englishness to the imperative of resisting fascism at a time when both his government and prevailing public sentiment were still substantially pro-appeasement.
In his speech, Eden praises England’s greatest bequeathal as “the art of self-government by a free people.” Eden’s speech is relatively short, but almost Churchillian in its invocation of social, political, and historical perspective in order to provide validating contextualization for a resolute course of action. In Eden’s case, the cause is preservation of constructive democracy and the need to arm and, if necessary, be prepared to resist, the belligerent aggressiveness of rising European autocracies – namely Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
“For us” Eden asserts “freedom is a condition of true international understanding. There can be no lasting peace without freedom.” This Eden asserts as the foundation of an anti-appeasement argument. After touching upon the horrors of the First World War – in which he notes he was a combatant – Eden sets the desire and expectation of “old ways of life with the old security” against the fact of living in a period when society “has rushed forward at a pace which could not be checked or controlled.” Eden speaks of the difficulties of democracy, which can degenerate “rapidly into licence… or repressive restrictions upon liberty” as soon it is deviates “from the narrow path too far either to the left or to the right… either of which inevitably leads to tyranny.”
Echoing an anti-appeasement clarion, Eden quotes Jan Smuts, former Prime Minister of South Africa (who would return to lead his country during the Second World War in September 1939, the very month this volume was published): “’The issue of freedom, the most fundamental issue of all our civilization, is once more squarely raised by what is happening in the world, and cannot be evaded. The danger signals are up in many colours and in many lands.’” It is this line which Eden quotes in his inscription to Emrys-Evans in this volume. Pointing out the rise, accomplishments, and appeal of autocracies, Eden asserts that “A united effort for the spiritual and material rearmament of the nation is the need of the hour.”
The Man
The rest of Eden’s career would be spent serving and succeeding Churchill. Eden would not remain long in the anti-appeasement wilderness, but would nonetheless endure a very long wait for his own opportunity to lead, which would prove both bitter and short when it came. Eden was destined to become one of the most eminent, qualified, and frustrated political lieutenants in British history before he finally became Prime Minister.
Educated at Eton and Christ Church Oxford, among his panoply of accomplishments, Eden served on the western front from 1915-1918 and was awarded the Military Cross. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1923-1957. His posts included Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Foreign Office (1931-1933), Lord Privy Seal (1934-35), Minister for League of Nations Affairs (1935), and Foreign Secretary (1935-38, 1940-1945, and 1951-1955).
With Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, war came to Britain. “On 3 September, when war was declared, Eden accepted office in the National Government as dominions secretary. Churchill returned to the Admiralty, but unlike Eden as a member of the war cabinet. Although Eden was disappointed with the division of the spoils, he regarded it as his patriotic duty to serve.”
When Churchill became wartime Prime Minister in May 1940, Eden returned to power and, in December, to the Foreign Office, where he remained until July 1945. In November 1942 – the same month Eden inscribed this book – Churchill also made Eden Leader of the House of Commons, “an almost insupportable burden in addition to his duties in the war cabinet, on the defence committee, and in running the Foreign Office.” (ODNB)
A reasonable expectation might have been that, when Churchill’s wartime coalition government fell in July 1945, Eden would succeed Churchill as Leader of the Opposition and eventually become the next Prime Minister when the Conservatives returned to majority. But such were Churchill’s stature and inclinations that Eden was not given the reins until Churchill resigned his second and final premiership in April 1955.
Eden’s long-delayed premiership proved both brief and fraught with challenge, including the Suez Crisis, and showed Eden prone to reveal “irascibility, his inability at times to delegate, and his touchiness in the face of criticism.” Nonetheless, the passage of time sees Eden “increasingly recognized as a serious and patriotic figure who worked under the most appalling pressure for nearly three decades at the front line of British and world politics.” (ODNB) Eden was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 1954 and created 1st Earl of Avon in 1961. Many honors accrued to Eden, and he was an active chancellor of Birmingham University for nearly three decades.
Recently, I went to a record store with my teenage daughter, where she showed shiny-eyed reverence for old vinyl records – objects that I would have been unable to unload at a garage sale just a few decades ago. I pointed out that she has a subscription to multiple music platforms, each with enormous, on-demand song catalogues that stream with high fidelity through the device of her choice. I pointed out the aesthetic and practical inefficiencies of spinning a frisbee under a needle as a means to consume music, not to mention the silliness of filling shelves with heavy, fragile vinyl discs. Then, I remembered how many bookshelves we have in our house. And, yes, I bought her some vinyl records. Let’s acknowledge that there is much about book collecting that makes no sense.
While I’m at it, I’ll also acknowledge that, at the end of the year I tend to get a bit reflective. Hence this post, which revisits and connects a number of perspectives I’ve shared over the years and also shared in our new 2024 catalogue. (Click HERE or on the adjacent image to view the catalogue.)
But I was talking about book collecting and how it makes no sense. So back to it.
Author Nicholas Basbanes wrote a lovely book about the afflicted, aptly titled A Gentle Madness. That title derived from an affectionate description of Isaiah Thomas, the Revolutionary War-era printer, publisher, and author who founded (and contributed his entire, considerable personal library to) the American Antiquarian Society – a still-extant repository for printed records of the United States. Isaiah Thomas was eulogized by his grandson as “touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania.”
What was “mania” then is certainly no less now, in our age of almost instantaneously available and nearly infinitely portable information. Sorry Alexandria – one can now carry a literal library on a phone. So why fill shelves with books?
Books are a tenuous combination of perishable materials and discordant chemistry – various types of ink and paper, glue and string and cloth, materials that may be animal, vegetable, synthetic, or all three. The constituent elements of books court entropy and conspire to decohere almost from the moment they are bound together. For the vast majority of books, their purpose is fulfilled in being read and wrecked.
But a very few live a different life. Collectible books transmogrify, becoming something precious, a lingering signal amid the static, objects with a greater purpose than their consumption. And, often, the longer they endure, the better they are regarded.
Here’s something even less sensible. One may pay lots of money for rare or collectible books. But one shouldn’t own them.
That’s right. This bookseller is telling you that you shouldn’t own what you buy.
OK – a clarification so we don’t hear from an attorney… We encourage you not to regard your collectible books as if you own them. We respectfully suggest that your job as a discerning collector is to make sure your collection outlives you and your custody thereof. Relish, of course. Covet, obsess, and even, if you must, brag a little. But foremost, serve as a diligent and conscientious custodian. Take care to preserve what is in your custody. And make sensible provisions to ensure that your charges find a successor custodian with commitment and sensibility equal to your own. Your job is to ensure that what comes into your possession eventually passes from your hands to the next with as much defiance of age and injury as possible.
Why? This is a reasonable question to ask given the assertions above.
Many answers occur. Just to keep things interesting, here’s an answer from a book about… falconry:
“I once asked my friends if they ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with 3,000 year old thumbprints in the clay said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from World War II. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate. They gave them the sense as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. “You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there” one friend told me. “It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them somehow.” History collapses…”
(from H is for Hawk byHelen Macdonald)
Nested within a greater dialogue of what it means to heed and hold a hawk is this rather lovely explanation of why one might wish to have and hold a book. Ms. Macdonald’s passage is an explanation of what a mere thing can convey. In certain books there is a sense of connection embodied in the physical object that exists simultaneous with, yet apart from, the words therein. For some of us, a book can be a small miracle of ephemeral, sentient alignment that we are compelled to conserve. Stewardship of these items is not mere collecting, but an act of safeguarding fragments of our collective, evolving humanity.
Yes, there is a market for rare books. And that market is just as ancient, enduring, and capriciously evolving as the learnings, loves, and lusts that drive us to possess books. But there is also something beyond mere collecting and commerce.
Among and between the pages and stacks and libraries and those who tend them, there is a conversation – a ranging, intermittent, and only vaguely coherent, but nonetheless constant conversation about the conceptions and expressions of who we are and who we hope to be as a species. As the books and ideas therein age and stratify, so too does the conversation. It becomes a susurration, a sort of quiet cultural undercurrent, consistently masked by the prevailing daily tides and wind and weather. But that doesn’t mean the conversational current is either irrelevant or unnecessary. Want of it, one feels, would still the great ocean of our experience, losing it by failing to gently stir its depths while the majority of our energy is always focused on disturbing the surface.
May you be afflicted with “the gentlest of infirmities” and an abundance of shelves.
We recently had the good fortune to acquire a worn but complete and fully intact ex-library set of the 1900 first edition, second printing of Winston Churchill’s The River War. This is Churchill’s second published work, the lengthiest from his time as an itinerant cavalry officer and war correspondent during the waning days of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Perhaps – understandably – this does not elicit a collector’s “Wow!” Second printing. Worn. And ex-library? But before you turn up your nose, maybe you should ask which library. This particular set was acquired within months of publication by the Robben Island Public Library, on 9 July 1900.
Tiny, 2 square mile (just over 5 square kilometers) Robben Island, off of South Africa’s western cape, began use as a place of imprisonment or exile in the mid-1600s, but gained worldwide fame as the prison that held Nelson Mandela for 18 of the 27 years of his imprisonment. During the second half of the twentieth century, Robben Island was used by the South African government as a prison for political prisoners and convicted criminals. It ceased to be used as a prison in the mid-1990s, concurrent with the fall of Apartheid and during the inaugural presidency of Nelson Mandela under a multi-racial South African democracy. South Africa declared the Island a National Monument in 1996 and the island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.
Provenance of this set is unequivocal, the oval stamps of “Robben Island Public Library”, most featuring the stamped “9 JUL 00” date of accession and one, on each title page, inked by hand “D.1./00.” Dated accession stamps are found on the Volume I half title, frontispiece recto and verso, title page, first Contents page, first page of text, p.166 portrait, and each of the maps. Dated accession stamps are found on the Volume II initial blank recto, half title, frontispiece recto and verso, title page, all maps, p.270 portrait, and p.301.
There is one further bit of provenance within the set. Each lower front pastedown features the tiny, gilt-printed sticker of “T. Maskew Miller, | Bookseller, Publisher and Stationer | Cape Town & Bulawayo”. Miller (1863-1930) established his eponymous business in Cape Town in 1893, initially importing books and stationery, later expanding into publishing. His Bulawayo branch was established in 1897. It seems virtually certain that Miller originally supplied these books to Robben Island’s Library.
There are no external library marks, no card pockets or chronicle of use, and no deaccession markings. This is consonant with the fact that the library was surely a modest affair. According to the Robben Island Museum, the Robben Island Library dates from the early 1890s, during which time the island was being used to quarantine lepers and “a library was opened in a ward formerly used for the chronic sick.” The Museum states that the small population of Robben Island still supported a library in the 1920s.
Of course, any speculation regarding whether this set was ever read by Mandela is so unsubstantiated as to be fanciful. But we do know that Mandela was a voracious reader and can certainly speculate that this “tale of blood and war” and colonial subjugation of Africa would have fallen within the scope of his literary appetite. Moreover, we know that Churchill was an affecting presence during Mandela’s time at Robbin Island (1964-1982). Mandela recounted, in the late 1960s, having passages of Churchill’s wartime speeches recited to him and his fellow prisoners by an Anglican priest and, in the late 1970s, watching a documentary about the WWI sinking of Prince of Wales. Of the film, Mandela recalled: “What moved me most was a brief image of Winston Churchill weeping… The image stayed in my memory a long time, and demonstrated to me that there are times when a leader can show sorrow in public, and that it will not diminish him in the eyes of his people.” (Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom)
It requires no speculation to note the fascinating timing of this set. In October 1899, the second Boer War erupted between the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa and the British. Churchill, an itinerant, adventure-seeking young cavalry officer and war correspondent, swiftly found himself in South Africa with the 21st Lancers and an assignment as press correspondent to the Morning Post. Not long thereafter, on 15 November 1899 – only 8 months before the “JUL 1900” accession date of this set – Churchill was captured during a Boer ambush of an armored train. His daring and dramatic escape less than a month later made him a celebrity and helped launch his political career.
Following his escape, “For the next six months, he encountered fire, took part in the bloody and unsuccessful battle of Spion Kop in January 1900 and, as the war turned in Britain’s favour, was present at the relief of Ladysmith and the occupation of Pretoria.” (ICS) The very month this set of books was stamped in the Robben Island Library – July 1900 – Churchill arrived back home in England from South Africa. Churchill spent the summer campaigning hard in Oldham, where he won his first seat in Parliament on 1 October 1900 in the so-called “khaki election” on the strength of his status as a hero of the war.
While their paths were incomparably disparate in most respects, it can be said of both Mandela and Churchill that their paths to the leadership of their respective nations passed through South African prisons.
Though Churchill’s escape proved swift and salutary, this particular artifact of Churchill-as-author served a longer sentence. We are fortunate that these books improbably survived their term on Robben Island to find us now, oceans and continents and a century and a quarter removed from their first home.
