Homer’s Odyssey, translated by T. E. Lawrence, designed by Bruce Rogers, printed by Emery Walker, and published in 1932 was an aesthetically magnificent book and a highly regarded translation. We could fumble with our own gushing words, but best to defer to American printer and publisher, typographer, and book historian Joseph Blumenthal, who called the work “indisputably amongst the most beautiful books ever produced… a work of genius…” produced “without tricks or accessory decoration, with a classic austerity akin to the timeless proportions of the Parthenon, with only type and paper and ink, with consummate skill…”

Only 530 copies of this masterpiece were produced. In the past year, we’ve had the freakish good fortune to be graced with two splendid copies connected to two of its makers. Our first bit of luck came when we acquired Bruce Rogers’s personal copy, inscribed by him to a noted collector and accompanied by the original publisher’s prospectus, an original order form, and an autograph note initialed by Rogers about the ink. Lightning struck again just weeks ago when a longtime client surprised us by entrusting us with yet another splendid copy, this one retaining the original slipcase, accompanied by the original prospectus, and inscribed by Emery Walker just three months before his death.

Ultimately, there will be just two new stewards for these, so, as they find their way to other shelves, we’re going to use this post to share. And, well, yes, maybe gush a little in our own words.

First the makers.

Bruce Rogers (1870-1957) was one of the most distinguished typographers and book designers of his time. In the 1920s, Rogers had a self-described “wish to print an Odyssey”. The problem was that “the available translations had already been produced in so many various forms that a new version seemed desirable if a suitable translator could be found.“ Inspired by reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Bruce Rogers persuaded T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia” to undertake a new translation.

Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935) achieved fame from his own remarkable odyssey as instigator, organizer, hero, and tragic figure of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, which he began as an eccentric junior intelligence officer and ended as “Lawrence of Arabia.” However, Lawrence’s literary and intellectual reach far exceeded the world and words of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The man Winston Churchill praised as having “a full measure of the versatility of genius” was an Oxford-educated solider-scholar-savant and proved an inspired choice for translator.

Rogers and Lawrence found reciprocal inspiration in one another’s involvement. Lawrence protested “There will be no interest in the book except as typography: that is as it should be, for it will be superbly printed… No one is ever likely to ask who was your scribe.” For his part, Rogers expressed a sense of rising to the occasion of Lawrence’s translation: “For one of the world’s classics in a new translation by one of the most noted Englishmen of his time, I thought a somewhat ‘monumental’ volume was called for.”

Having settled on the partnership, Rogers and Lawrence needed a printer worthy of their ambition. Rogers would design the book and Lawrence provide the translation. It owes its physical existence to the printer, Sir Emery Walker (1851-1933). “Emery Walker, friend of William Morris and co-proprietor of the Doves Press, had been one of the outstanding printers of the private press movement. Now in his last years, he continued to help Wilfred Merton, his successor at Emery Walker Ltd, until his health failed. The Bruce Rogers Odyssey was his final major achievement and by no means the least.”

Rogers and Lawrence sought Walker intentionally, with a clear sense of both the significance of their tripartite collaboration and the suitability of Walker’s participation. On 3 September 1928, the project still nascent, Rogers wrote to Lawrence: “Walker is now over 75 (though almost as vigorous as ever) and it would be a great pleasure to him to have his name on one more important book, before he stops printing for good – and in my eyes this will be the most important…”

What they created.

It has been axiomatically observed that it requires a lot of work to make something complex look simple. The “simple” and spare elegance of the Bruce Rogers / T. E. Lawrence / Emery Walker Odyssey is a par excellence exemplar of the axiom. The edition is unpretentiously beautiful, bound in unadorned full black Niger Morocco and printed on grey, handmade, watermarked paper with gilt top edge and untrimmed fore and bottom edges. From the paper selection, to type invention, to ink formulation, to painstaking illustration, the work is a showcase for book designer Bruce Rogers’s exacting genius.

The rondel illustrations heading each Book (26 in all) were “designs from Greek vases in black on gold leaf” though “only a few of the original compositions were followed at all closely; the others were made up from single Homeric figures in new combinations, illustrating some incident in each Book.” Once he settled on the rondels, it took Rogers “several months of experimenting… in producing the effects desired and making sure that the work was permanent.” In the end, Rogers conceived an elaborate, multi-stage process – “seven operations in all” – and “a specially thick gold was beaten out for the job.” Great pains were also taken with the paper. Rogers “had a low-toned paper made at the J. Marcham Green mill” featuring “a special watermark of a Greek galley” and a “slightly grey tone” which “held up the gold-and-black rondels better than a white or cream tint would have done.”

The text was printed in Rogers’s own “Centaur” type, which had brought Rogers “much prestigious attention and opened all sorts of professional doors for him.” Rogers’s attentive intentionality extended even to the ink; “I had an ink made from an old formula I found in Savage’s Decorative Printing, which called for balsam of copaiba instead of varnish. It was somewhat slow in drying but has still a pleasing spicy aroma, on which many people have commented when opening the book.”

Of course, Rogers’s conception had to rest on the firm foundation of an important and enduring translation. It does. T. E. Lawrence’s own singular life odyssey proved an inspired choice for translator. “Lawrence’s translation has been continuously in print” for nearly a century now. “By that yardstick it is second only to Seven Pillars of Wisdom among his literary achievements.”

Lawrence’s and Rogers’s Odyssey was one of the last major works printed by Emery Walker Ltd. while he was still actively involved in the company. In 1888, the year of Lawrence’s birth, it was Walker who inspired William Morris to found the Kelmscott Press. Morris in turn had inspired both Lawrence and Bruce Rogers to become interested in fine printing. In a sense, their magnificent 1932 Odyssey brought the story full circle. For Lawrence, Rogers and Walker were living legends.

This explains why it has been such a singular privilege to have two such important copies of this work in the span of a single year.

Bruce Rogers’s copy.

Imagine receiving a magnificently well-preserved copy of the Bruce Rogers Odyssey, but not just a copy, his copy. Imagine lifting the cover to find the personal bookplate of Bruce Rogers on the front pastedown. Imagine lifting and turning the front free endpaper to find Rogers’s inscription and signature, gifting this copy to an ardent admirer.

Rogers’s distinctive personal bookplate herein features a winged faun bearing a scythe with an “INDIANA” banner (homage to his Indiana roots) wrapped around the haft and “BRUCE ROGERS” printed at the foot.

The recto of the blank preceding the title page is inscribed and signed by Rogers in three lines in blue ink: “Inscribed with pleasure, for | Victor H. Borsodi | Bruce Rogers” with a flourish between Borsodi’s name and Rogers’s signature. Affixed to the lower front pastedown, below Rogers’s bookplate, is the only other previous ownership mark – Borsodi’s own bookplate, printed “V. H. B.” within a decorative border.

Fittingly, this copy is in lovely, near fine condition, and it came to us accompanied by three additional items of note. First is the original publisher’s prospectus, an elusive and collectible item on its own merits. Second is an original publisher’s order form, complete. Third is a small autograph note from Rogers, initialed by him, about the famous ink of this edition. The note quotes and cites Rogers’s description of how he formulated the ink from “Paragraphs on Printing page 150”. This citation by Rogers is significant; the cited book was first published in 1943, allowing us to speculate with some confidence that Rogers gifted this personal copy to the recipient sometime between 1943 and Rogers’s death in 1957.

The recipient of this magnificent gift from Bruce Rogers, Victor Howard Borsodi, Jr. (1915-1986), was a New York City bibliophile whose collecting interest centered on the work of Bruce Rogers. A collection of Borsodi’s Bruce Rogers material is now held by The Grolier Club of New York.

Emery Walker’s birthday gift to Violet Woodhouse.

Bruce Rogers’s copy of the Bruce Rogers Odyssey came to us in December 2024. Then, in October 2025, came more Homeric lightning.

Just a few weeks ago we were entrusted with another lovely copy, this one housed in the original slipcase and also accompanied by the original publisher’s prospectus. That would be cause enough for enthusiasm. But this is a printer’s presentation copy, warmly inscribed by Emery Walker as a birthday gift to the renowned musician and cultural figure Violet Gordon Woodhouse

The inscription is inked in six lines in Walker’s unsteady hand on the upper right recto of the blank preceding the title page: “to Violet Gordon Woodhouse | from her affectionate friend | Emery Walker; for her birth-Day | April 23.1933; and in remem- | brance of April 14.” Violet was turning 62 years old. Emery, already 82, would not see another birthday; he inscribed this book just three months before his death.

The book was purchased a quarter of a century ago from the venerable London firm of Maggs Bros. Ltd. and has since resided in the same private collection.

The association of Walker with the singular personality to whom he inscribed this book is opaque to us, and perhaps all the more interesting as a result. Violet Kate Eglinton Gordon Woodhouse (1871-1948) was a prodigy keyboardist, known for her unconventional personal life, and for the cultural luminaries who visited her music salon. Originally a phenom pianist, Violet also became a foremost clavichord player and harpsichordist. In the words of her Times obituary, “the subtlety of her playing was infinite… when she began to play, one became… entangled in a golden web of purest sound.”

Violet’s “golden web” extended to men; she “lived with four ‘husbands’ only one of whom was her legal spouse.” From 1903, Violet and her four men “lived quite openly together until, one by one, death separated them.” She had many non-spousal devotees as well. “Among the admiring visitors to her salon were Lawrence of Arabia, T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Pablo Picasso, Serge Diaghilev, Auguste Rodin, and the cream of Europe’s musicians.” Obviously, Violet’s birthday prompted Sir Emery to inscribe this Odyssey to Violet, but the remainder of the context, including details of their association and the reference to “April 14” is not known to us; certainly their social spheres overlapped.

It will be our privilege to begin the process of finding a new steward for this copy when we offer it for sale in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we acknowledge our ingratitude; covetousness is the collectors curse, and we confess that we are awaiting a copy signed by Lawrence to accompany those signed by Rogers and Walker…

Cheers!

References: O’Brien A141 & A142; Haas, Bruce Rogers: A Bibliography; Warde, Bruce Rogers, Designer of Books; Wilson, Translating the Bruce Rogers ‘Odyssey’; Blumenthal, Bruce Rogers. A life in letters; Rogers, Paragraphs on Printing; Churchill, Great Contemporaries; Purdue University Archives; The Grolier Club; Jessica Douglas-Home, Violet: The life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse; The Times; ODNB

Double standards are enjoying something of a renaissance. These days, they are being vigorously applied to formerly powerful and respected men, who are retroactively diminished by contemporary standards. For women, there is nothing new about double standards.

Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman (1920-1997) has been called “The last courtesan.” This is a polite euphemism for the cruder implications. She has also been called “Ambassador” by presidents and “daughter” by The Winston S. Churchill and “mother” by another. Whatever may be said of her – and judgements abound – Pamela was indubitably Churchillian in her resourcefulness, her determination to define herself, and her will to engage the world.

Our post about Pamela is prompted by our recent acquisition of a remarkable book inscribed to her – the first edition of the sixth and final volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War, inscribed by Churchill to his former daughter-in-law.

The notably warm, playful inscription is inked in blue in six lines on the front free endpaper recto: “To | Pamela | from | Winston | by | Winston”.  This book is offered for sale HERE on our website.

On 4 October 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, 19-year-old Pamela married Randolph S. Churchill, the only son of Winston S. Churchill. Two years later, five months into Winston S. Churchill’s storied wartime premiership, she gave birth to his namesake grandson on 10 May 1940. By the time Churchill inscribed this volume to Pamela, she had long since divorced his son and was busy making a life for herself that would center on her own choices and involve a great many “great” men, as well as a few more surnames.

Born in England as Pamela Beryl Digby, she eventually became a naturalized citizen of the United States and ended her career, and life, as America’s Ambassador to France. When she married Randolph, Pamela had already “developed the charm and social skills for which she would become well known.” There was, however, more to her than charm; an indication of her intrepid nature could perhaps be gleaned from her horseback riding.

“Problems surfaced in the wartime union from the beginning, some perhaps attributable to Pamela’s own inclinations, but quite certainly attributable to Randolph’s “drinking, carousing, gambling, and generally boorish behavior.” Nonetheless, Pamela developed a strong bond with her father-in-law.” Certainly, part of that bond was Winston’s namesake grandson. Upon meeting Churchill in January 1941, President Roosevelt’s trusted advisor, Harry Hopkins, recalled “he showed me with obvious pride the photographs of his beautiful daughter-in-law and grandchild.”

While her husband served abroad and soused, Pamela had wartime affairs – notably with Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s envoy to England. “After Averell Harriman left England, Pamela began an affair with Edward R. Murrow, the CBS war correspondent, and also had a fling with his boss, CBS founder William Paley.” But not all of her connections were affairs; through Winston she met the publishing magnate Max Beaverbrook, who hired her as a reporter.

Divorce, a move to Paris, and more noteworthy affairs, mostly with prominent, married men, followed the war. These included Elie de Rothschild and the wealthy Italian businessman Gianni Agnelli, for whom she converted to Catholicism. Certainly, there was no shortage of affairs, but Pamela was also “cultivating friendships that she could use to her benefit later.” One of her lovers, Broadway producer Leland Hayward, divorced and, in May 1960, became Pamela’s second husband. In the years that followed, Pamela “made connections in both Hollywood and New York” and became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

After Hayward died, Pamela married her former paramour, Averell Harriman, “then seventy-nine, who had served as governor of New York and had run as a Democratic presidential candidate.” Pamela threw herself into Democratic Party fundraising and king-making, eventually supporting the presidential aspirations of Bill Clinton, who in turn appointed Pamela U.S. Ambassador to France. Pamela served from 1993 to 1997, dying in Paris just a few months before her planned retirement. “Her memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C, deemed by the New York Times the ‘closest thing to a state funeral Washington has seen in years,’ was attended by more than 1,200, including President Clinton.

“Russell Baker of the New York Times compared Pamela Harriman’s life story to ‘one of those bad novels in which women with gumption to spare come from nowhere and make the world their private property.’ The fact that she was able to succeed in this manner was to him wonderful, however, ‘because the world’s deck is so heavily stacked against real women’ (9 Feb. 1997). Today the great strength of the ‘real woman’ is generally not deemed to lie in the ability to seduce rich and powerful men to her advantage, but in the 1940s and 1950s the opportunities for ambitious women to succeed in public life were limited.”

Cheers!

References: Sonia Purnell; Martin Gilbert; ANB; The Times; New York Times

To say the last half a year has been bookishly busy would be a mammoth understatement. In short, we’ve been spending a lot of time with some lovely libraries.

In addition to our usual cycle of new acquisitions and listings, we have acquired much of the best material from three significant collections. It seems a good time to tell you a little about what we will be cataloguing over the next year or two, and give you a quick preview of what’s forthcoming from the Churchill Book Collector team.

Blog posts should not have lists. I have a dim memory from high school of being subjected to Thoreau’s grocery list in Walden. I think that’s when and why I decided to avoid subjecting readers to lists. But there seems an exception to every rule. Hence… yes, there’s a list coming… the following, a partial list of the authors whose works (many firsts, a good number signed or inscribed) we are preparing for your consideration:

Buzz Aldrin	David Lloyd George	Pliny the Younger
Nancy Astor	H. Rider Haggard	Paul Reynaud
Jonah Barrington	Alexander Hamilton	Hercules Robinson
Gertrude Bell	Thomas Hardy	Theodore Roethke
Elizabeth Bishop	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Erwin Rommel
James Boswell	Ernest Hemingway	Carl Sandburg
Frances Hodgson Burnett	Aldous Huxley	J. B. Henry Savigny
Robert Burns	John Jay	Walter Scott
Edgar Rice Burroughs	Thomas Jefferson	Robert W. Service
George Gordon Byron	Omar Khayyam	Dr. Seuss
George W. Cable	Martin Luther King, Jr.	George Bernard Shaw
John Carr	Rudyard Kipling	Upton Sinclair
Lewis Carroll	T. E. Lawrence	Edward Louis Spears
Rachel Carson	Sinclair Lewis	John Steinbeck
Miguel de Cervantes	Jack London	Robert Louis Stevenson
Geoffrey Chaucer	J. Ramsay Macdonald	Harriet Beecher Stowe
Winston Churchill	Fitzroy Maclean	William Makepeace Thackeray
James Stanier Clarke	James Madison	Dylan Thomas
Charles Darwin	John McArthur	Mark Twain
Charles Dickens	Cormac McCarthy	Jules Verne
Arthur Conan Doyle	Herman Melville	Alice Walker
Anthony Eden	Arthur Miller	Isaak Walton
Henry Fielding	Czeslaw Milosz	Chaim Weizmann
E. M. Forster	Bernard Law Montgomery	E. B. White
Benjamin Franklin	Thomas Moore	Walt Whitman
Robert Frost	Jawaharlal Nehru	Edward Whymper

It may occur to you that Winston S. Churchill is merely one among the many names listed above. Please know that we plan to continue offering the most significant and expansive Winston inventory in the world. Among the hundreds of Churchill items in our as-yet-unlisted inventory are roughly fifty items signed or inscribed by Churchill, including both books and correspondence. Many of these come from a truly marvelous Churchill collection, the curating of which was the work of decades by a thoughtful and well-resourced collector. In short, just what we haven’t yet listed will comprise the most significant collection of signed and inscribed Churchill material on the world market, spanning more than six decades, from the mid-1890s to the twilight of Churchill’s long life and career.

Perhaps nobody wants to see pictures of boxes any more than they want to read lists, but did I mention the team’s been hard at work?

Among the many authors other than Churchill whose work we will be offering, Robert Frost – four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration, and arguably “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” – merits special mention. Among our as-yet-unlisted inventory is an incredible collection of Robert Frost material. Like the Churchill material, the forthcoming Frost material was assembled over many decades by a diligent and discerning collector. Also like the Churchill collection, our Frost trove holds many dozens of signed and inscribed items, including some manuscript lines and poems.

It is a privilege to handle such material, and even more of a privilege to share it with others. We look forward to sharing these items – and a little of the excitement and wonder that appends to them. As always (and perhaps just now more than ever…), if you seek something which you do not find in our currently listed inventory, just ask.

Cheers!

80 years ago today, America’s 32^nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died on 12 April 1945 at the age of 63. What truly should have been no surprise given his long struggle with his health and his obviously diminished physical condition nonetheless proved a shock to his nation and to the world.

In November 1944, America had elected FDR to an unprecedented fourth term in office. It is hard to argue that it was anything but irresponsible of FDR to run for a fourth term, anything but reckless of him to choose an inexperienced and untested running mate to be his vice president, and anything but purblind for his people to elect him yet again. Yet to his nation, at that moment, it must have seemed impossible that the man who had led them longer than any other, and led them through both the world’s greatest economic crisis and the world’s greatest war, was suddenly and irrevocably gone.

Imagine.

A president able to help pacify and quell economic crisis rather than create it on purpose. A man brought to the presidency by a stock market crash, not a man who brought a stock market crash to the presidency. A president born rich, but capable of emotionally and materially supporting those less fortunate than himself. A president proud of the number of people he put to work, not fired. A president not above vexing the courts and testing the constitution with exertion of executive will, but who would ultimately heed the limitations of his legal authority. A president committed to strengthening and building alliances and of doing what’s right, even at the cost of American lives and treasure. A president presiding over the ascendance, not precipitating the end, of America’s cultural, political, military, and moral hegemony.

Perhaps we should not overtax our imagination and set our sights more modestly in light of current leadership limitations.

So perhaps imagine instead a president who could know the grammatical difference between an adjective and subject and could make a sentence using both properly. Think reassuring fireside chats rather than inarticulate fiery invective. A president who, even in the darkest of times, inclined to a winning smile rather than a belligerent scowl.

Smiling as leadership? Really? Yes, really. FDR smiled a lot. Hitler scowled a lot. Whose ass got kicked?

FDR was no saint. He contorted the constitution in pursuit of his policy agenda. He lingered too long in the job and made too little provision for what and who came after him. His commitment to “bold, practical experimentation” often lacked a consistency of ideology and rationale. Debate continues about whether he could have done more about the Holocaust. There’s no debating the fact that he interned American citizens based on their race and nationality. He was certainly capable of intentionally conflating his own political survival and his nation’s welfare.

But even in the most miserable and desperate times, on balance FDR elevated his nation’s conscience, character, and fortunes. He was more interested in what America could do to better the world than what it wouldn’t do. He left his nation better than he found it. Stronger economically, more stable politically, more secure militarily, better regarded by her allies, and more feared by her foes.

When he died, he was looking forward to addressing and supporting the nascent United Nations – an organization he had conceived with Winston Churchill to prevent future wars and promote human rights even before his own nation was ready to fight the Second World War.

Churchill, FDR’s ally and friend, was no stranger to frustration and failure. He wrote:

“The only guide to a man is his conscience, the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.” His rationale was not merely moral, but practical: “It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes; but without this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.”

Imagine a president literally incapable of walking, yet doing so “in the ranks of honour”. FDR was reportedly long embarrassed at never having been in a real uniform in time of war. (Imagine a president embarrassed for not having served in uniform in time of war…) 80 years ago tomorrow, FDR might have been proud that “his name, as commander in chief of the mighty and victorious armed forces of the United States, headed the… day’s official list of American war dead.”

It seems quite possible – even likely – that, had I been an adult citizen during his presidency, I would have opposed many of FDR’s policies. I might even have voted for one of his opponents.

It also seems likely that I would have respected FDR even when I opposed him. It seems likely that, 80 years ago today, I would have mourned the loss of his leadership and celebrated the purpose that animated his fragile, tenuous, hard-held, and well-spent life.

Cheers!

I started this post trying to compile an encapsulating list of all of Richard M. Langworth’s spheres of engagement and achievement. That only served to remind me that I am neither appointed nor qualified to communicate the full measure of Richard’s life, which was nearly Churchillian in its scope and diversity.

In the weeks and months to come, much ink will be spilled in just praise of Richard, who died on 20 February 2025. It is simply as a citizen of the world in which he loomed so large – the world of remembering and interpreting the words and deeds of Winston Churchill – that I share a few words about Richard from my own perspective.

The images I choose to illustrate this post are of books – just a few among his dozens – that Richard authored, edited, introduced, or returned to publication, all of which have resided in my library.

The reason I came to know Richard’s work is because in 1968, two years before I was born, he founded the International Churchill Society (ICS) and became the founding editor of the flagship ICS publication, Finest Hour. By the time I found Churchill, Richard was already a long-established authority.

There are myriad ways I will remember Richard, but, fittingly, the book on my desk has been foremost in my mind these past two weeks as I reflect on his loss.

I have been a specialist dealer in Churchill material for roughly two decades. Increasingly, my business finds itself in the position of being asked questions about Churchill’s works and life. But the person of whom I still asked questions was Richard.

Winston Churchill’s life was rich and varied beyond reasonable conception. Naturally, it draws, even now, endless referential consideration and comment. In the world of people who claim to know Churchill’s life and work, there is presumption and then there is actual erudition. Beyond, there is a further difference between erudition and authoritative expertise. There is a still further level, for which I lack suitably venerable superlatives, and which I expect was occupied solely by Richard.

Among his many endeavors and accomplishments, Richard was a specialist dealer in Churchill material – a business from which he retired before I even began in the antiquarian book trade.

The book on my desk is not one of the many Richard authored or edited. Rather, it was one about which I had a question that I thought only Richard could answer. Asking him was on my to-do list, the book sitting on the corner of my desk as a reminder and prompt, when news of his death arrived.

There will be no answer to my question. I should put the book away, but there it remains, reminding me of the significance of Richard’s loss.

It was Halloween last year. I’d risen early in upstate New York, where I’d arrived the day before from home in California. A long flight, short sleep, and now a drive, further north and east. Just after dawn I was on the road, and by mid-morning, I was arriving at the home of my friend and former customer in a little town in New England.

Former home, I suppose. Patrick had died a little less than two years previously. So instead of meeting Patrick, I was meeting his widow. My job was to assess Patrick’s library and begin the process of helping the items therein find new shelves and new stewards.

Were I talking to Patrick, I’d have told him that his cramped library at the top of the house was a mess. So I’ll say the same to you. It was a mess. It had remained untouched since his death, and the accumulation of dust and crawly things that like neglected spaces had done nothing to improve Patrick’s unique sense of… ahem… organization. Books piled in tottery towers on the floor. Books stacked vertically and horizontally, two-deep on the shelves. Precious objects – Second World War posters, photo collections, correspondence – stuffed in random tubes and boxes and envelopes, these higgledy piggledy on any available horizontal surface, stuffed into any nook. An incredible wartime album from Nazi-occupied Jersey – the contents clearly clandestinely compiled at personal risk and then signed, after liberation, by both Churchill and Montgomery – was found on the floor behind the upholstered fringe of Patrick’s tatty easy chair. The overall aesthetic effect was neglected attic meets the National Archives, the mashup impossibly crammed into an area not much bigger than a largish closet. Imagine if entropy became a sentient force, wilfull, and grumpy.

In a word, it was Patrick. Only I did not see it right away. I only had the day, so I only saw the work. That we started right away, laboring – and I use the term literally. We spent much of the day on our knees, on a tiny patch of floor repeatedly cleared and filled, and cleared and filled again. We kept at it, breaking only for the bathroom, until late in the day, sussing, sorting, listing, and packing, conveying heavy boxes, one by one, down the stairs and out to the car for shipment.

At the end of the day, with the last box packed and Tetris-fitted into the car, I went back up to the library to have a look for anything left behind and for a general tidy-up. The latter was impossible. Patrick’s Catholic heart might have relished the loaves-and-fishes miracle; even fifteen large boxes lighter, the library still looked unreasonably full.

Standing there, the day’s work done and about to close the door to the room – that’s when I finally saw Patrick. I finally saw the library not as a space, but his space. Saw my friend occupying his space. Nesting in it, professorially, like an unkempt owl, surrounded by piles of the things he’d digested. I looked at his desk, at the old chair in the center of the room, under which he’d stuffed treasure. I realized that this was likely the very spot where he’d sat as we talked and debated for hours over the phone, compressing a continent’s worth of physical distance.

So, car packed, ready to go, I just sat in his chair for a few minutes. I’d not been able to say a proper goodbye – assuming there is such a thing. The illness revealed itself late and took him swiftly. We said goodbye via text. His last text to me had expressed “Grateful for everything.” So I told him – told him in a quiet few moments spent in his space, sitting in his chair.

But that wasn’t it either. That was not yet the moment I wanted with him.

Patrick was many things. Among them he was well and truly and for a very long time an ardent collector. I am now entrusted with hundreds of the books and artifacts he collected. He wanted, sought, acquired, and touched every item I now handle, regard, describe, and seek to pass on. So, in a way, over these past months I’ve had that extra time with Patrick I didn’t get. I’m having the grace of an extended communion with a kindred spirit. And this is being followed by the opportunity to distribute things he loved among others who will continue to love and appreciate them. There might be no better goodbye.

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.

Cheers!

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 6^th 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 13^th.”

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.

Cheers!

“Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting…”

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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

Cheers!