DOVER STREET DIARIES: “ANDY MARVELL, WHAT A MARVEL!”
A first edition of Andrew Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems, containing the first appearances of such poetic masterpieces as “To His Coy Mistress” and “The Garden”.
In the famous opening scene of my favourite film, Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the British WWII airman played by David Niven is heard, going down over the British Channel in a shot-out Lancaster bomber, attempting to chat up an attractive-voiced radio operating girl. Their conversation goes like this:
RADIO GIRL: Request your position. Come in, Lancaster. Come in, Lancaster.
NIVEN: Position nil. Repeat, nil. Age 27 – very important. Education violently interrupted. Religion – Church of England. Politics – Conservative by nature, Labour by experience. What’s your name?
RADIO GIRL: I cannot read you. Request your position. Can you see our signals?
NIVEN: “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, / My staff of faith to walk upon, / My scrip of joy, immortal diet, / My bottle of salvation, / My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,| And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.” Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that. I’d rather have written that than flown through Hitler’s legs.
RADIO GIRL: I cannot understand you. Hello, Lancaster. We are sending signals. Can you see our signals? Come in, Lancaster. Come in, Lancaster.
NIVEN: …… “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.” Andy Marvell – What a marvel! What’s your name?!”
Niven is palpably doomed, has got no parachute – but he gets her name (it’s June), and in the end defies his fate and gets the girl!
How much this is down to his quoting from Andrew Marvell’s notorious chat-up poem “To His Coy Mistress” might perhaps be overestimated – but it’s got to count for something. I’ve often found the poem useful myself – and in younger days used to keep as a sort of mantra its closing lines:
I hope this extract, and the salutary lesson of David Niven’s successful encounter above, goes to assert definitively that any person who thinks that the poetry of the 17th century can be of no conceivable interest or use to persons of the 21st is, clearly, a benighted churl. As for Marvell, there is, I think, something particular about his sensibility and his independence of spirit which marks his verses out as particularly attractive to the modern reader.
Such was my excitement and delight, then, when recently Peter Harrington acquired, from the extraordinary library of Robert S. Pirie, a copy of the poetry collection in which this great poem made its first appearance; Andrew Marvell’s posthumous collection, Miscellaneous Poems, collected by his wife Mary from manuscripts found after his death, and published in 1681. Also contained, and again making their first appearances, are other magnificent meditations on love and leisure, such as “The Definition of Love, Andrew Marvell”, and “The Garden”.
This is the first time I have encountered these in the original edition – and, as is the way with these things, it has been extremely interesting to learn more from this copy. Two features are of particular note; the presence of Milton and the absence of Cromwell. Marvell’s life was made extremely complex by the Civil War between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads and its fallout – he managed both to serve Cromwell’s Protectorate (as a civil servant alongside his friend John Milton) and yet also survive the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 – clearly he had a lithe mind, and might indeed be said to have seen both sides of the question; certainly he was a survivor, and moreover helped his (somewhat less politically flexible) friend Milton survive too, using his influence to save Milton from execution even after a writing career of vehement antimonarchism.
What is lacking from this copy (and there are only two copies known which have them) are some 20 pages of poems about Cromwell, most famous among them the “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”, which is in fact brilliantly equivocal in subtly and simultaneously lamenting the execution of King Charles I and hailing the rise of Cromwell. Nonetheless the latter part was enough to make the printer, Robert Boulter, suppress these poems for fear that they might tarnish Marvell’s reputation in the age of the restored King Charles II. They were not published until 1776. Boulter was himself a closet republican, and though he had taken precautions with Marvell’s Cromwell poems, he was nonetheless arrested later in the year of their publication for enthusiastically predicting the imminent fall of the monarchy.
He had also been one of the original publishers of Paradise Lost (1667). This is a nice coincidence, since Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems contains an intriguing poem in praise of his dear friend Milton’s magnum opus, “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost”.
It contains the brilliant image of Marvell worrying that blind Milton might, in attempting his overmighty theme “to justify the ways of God to man”, cock it up: “So Sampson groped the Temple’s Posts in spite, / The World o’erwhelming to revenge his Sight.” It also reveals Marvell’s rather touchingly jealous admission that his friend Milton might in fact have been the better poet – such a good poet, in the end, “so that no room is here for writers left, / but to detect their ignorance or theft.”
This superb copy is bound in a contemporary sheep leather binding with the gilt stamps of the Society of Writers to the Signet, the legal library to the Scottish (and hence at that time also the English) King – a compelling royal provenance for a complex political and poetical object. We also have in stock, by the by, another item of extreme interest from the same Signet library: a first edition of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. Connections…connections.
After an overlong hibernation, my erstwhile blog has decided on a sudden to rouse and resume, in the light of the sun (which, we have learned, never sets on the Empire of the interwebs), its sporadic bibliomanic antics. So – fiat bux!
ALICE IN WONDERLAND IN PARIS
The Black Sun Press. The Black Sun Press. Rarely have I been so seduced by a publisher. I post notice of their 1930 edition of Alice in Wonderland not just because the book is strikingly beautiful inside (the impressionist illustrations by Marie Laurencin beat Dali’s for quiet weirdness) and out (the patterned paper on the binding and slipcase shows sickly red flowers festooned with spider-webs, gilt), but mainly as an excuse to tell the story of the Press’s founders, Harry and “Caresse” Crosby.
They were Americans in Paris. Her real name was Polly, née Jacobs. Back in the United States she had married a well-to-do man named Peabody, but his penchant for alcohol and arson drove her into the arms of Bostonian banking-heir, poet, bon-vivante and general heart-throb tearaway of the “Lost Generation”, Harry Crosby. They met at a picnic in 1920, had slept together within a fortnight and, until Polly’s husband agreed to a divorce in 1922, met regularly for trysts at her brassiere factory (she had, age 19, invented the backless bra). Immediately after the divorce was filed they eloped to Paris, where they embedded themselves in the avant-garde cultural scene befriending the likes of Dali, Hemingway and Cartier-Bresson, founded the Black Sun Press which helped to publish the early works of Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Hart Crane, and lived a life of utter dissolution off Harry’s inheritance which, when it ran out, had to be supplemented by telegrams to his banker father, such as the infamous, “PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LIVE A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE”, (to which the father, reluctantly but nonetheless amazingly, assented). Harry persuaded Polly to change her name to “Caresse” (though they had entertained “Clytoris” as well). Harry took a lot of cocaine and wrote very weird and forceful poems. Here, as a taster, is the close of one, “Assassin”, from his last collection:
I annihilate museums. I demolish libraries. I oblivionize skyscrapers.
I become hard as adamant strong as battleindurated with solid fire rigid with hatred.
I bring back the wizards and sorcerers the necromancers the magicians. I practice witchcraft. I set up idols. With a sharp-edged sword I cut through the crowded streets. Comets follow in my wake. Stars make obeisance to me. The moon uncovers her nakedness to me.
I am the harbinger of a New Sun World. I bring the seed of a New Copulation. I proclaim the Mad Queen.
I stamp out vast empires. I crush palaces in my rigid hands. I harden my heart against churches.
I blot out cemeteries. I feed the people with stinging nettles. I resurrect madness. I thrust my naked sword between the ribs of the world. I murder the world!
Their relationship (it may not surprise you on reading the above) did not survive the end of the decade; in 1929 Harry Crosby was found with Josephine (”The Fire Princess” of his poems, one of his many lovers), dead in the same bed, both shot in the head in what was either a suicide pact or a murder-suicide. Caresse’s life in no way diminished in drama, scandal or interest after the death of her wild husband, and she carried on the efforts of the Black Sun Press into the 1940s. Her memoir, The Passionate Years, was published in 1953 if you’re interested, which of course you should be.
This superb copy of the Black Sun Alice is one of the 50 printed on vellum, and has a fine provenance, being that of Harry F Marks, the Black Sun Press’s distributor in America. The binding is likely the publisher’s presentation binding (found on a few others copies), and was done by Whitman Bennett. We also currently stock a first edition of Caresse Crosby’s Painted Shores, 1927, an inscribed first edition of Crosby’s poetry collection Transit of Venus, 1929, and a set of the posthumous first collected edition, 1931, all three published by the Black Sun Press.
The Collected Poems. Chariot of the Sun, Sleeping Together, Torchbearer, Transit of Venus. Harry Crosby.
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY – SOLD
I am a lifelong devotee of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley – and I am generally very fond of left-wingers, particularly those of the vaguely compromised, champagne-stocked ivory tower variety. Beautiful books, too, I consider no bad thing. As such, here is a book almost achingly attuned to my tastes:
The Doves Press edition of Shelley’s poems, inscribed by the printer Cobden-Sanderson to the philosopher Bertrand Russell (author of, among many other things, the superb History of Western Philosophy, 1946 – recommended reading), and further inscribed by Russell to his then-lover the Bloomsbury hostess Ottoline Morrell.
It’s a wonderful association – Russell once noted that Shelley was “the poet I have loved best … he is constantly in my thoughts”. The print-date, 1914, is timely too. Russell, who shared Shelley’s uncompromisingly well-expressed conviction that: “Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform. He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder”, was imprisoned for his pacifism during the First World War. Ottoline Morrell was also a conchie-enabler, she and Russell notably helping Siegfried Sassoon to draft and distribute his explosive “Soldier’s Declaration” against returning to the Front in 1917.
The Doves Press edition, it must be admitted, pulls Shelley’s more political punches, printing mainly his lyrical poems of love and sublimity. I hope above all that Shelley’s irresistible pick-up poem, “Loves Philosophy”, worked its magic for this love-struck philosopher.
A MOOMIN ODYSSEY
We recently acquired a treasure trove of Moomin first editions, some in the original Swedish. Like all things Moominous, the books are joyous and disturbing in equal measure. None more so than this vividly illustrated story (appropriately entitled Hur Gick Det Sen?, meaning “What Happened?!”), which uses cut-out pages to give a “down the rabbit hole” feel to the progressing adventure. Should you dare to follow Moomintroll and that incorrigible termagant Little My on their surrealist odyssey, here are some pictures:
Seriously, what happened?!
“THE SEDGE IS WITHERED FROM THE LAKE, / AND NO BIRDS SING.”
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is a hugely influential book, and should be more so. She kick-started the environmentalist movement with this urgent popularisation of a relatively new realisation: that mankind had the capacity to seriously damage the environment. She showed how this was beginning to happen, particularly in the decimation of the bird population (hence the title) through the use of DDT and other pesticides. This revelation shook (or at least attempted to shake) the triumphalist foundations of post-war capitalism. It’s over half a century since Carson’s book came out – and its lessons are only just beginning to be learned. Here’s a signed copy (quite uncommon since it was published in the year before her death) of the first edition – one of the many excellent books in our recent Summer Catalogue.
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
The Hidden Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s classic novella “Heart of Darkness” is justly respected for its ability to punch your soul in the solar plexus. It also spawned the equally devastating (and superb) Kubrick film ApocalypseNow, staring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando, and provided T. S. Eliot with the perfect epigraph for what is probably the #1 poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead”.
No surprise then that interested book collectors often come to us looking for “the first edition of Heart of Darkness”.
These often find themselves at the tail-end of a hopeless search, bashing in “Heart of Darkness” into search engines and getting no good results.
The problem is that the first appearance of Heart of Darkness in any book was as a subsidiary story in his 1902 book Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories. So, let this blog stand as a hopeful signpost to those frustrated pilgrims. Right now, at 43 Dover Street, we have a superb first issue copy of the book, on display as one of the many treasures in our just-issued Modern Literature Catalogue.
What Remains of Nimrud
Every now and then a book comes along that makes me actually a little proud of, rather than just quite pleased with, what we do; when these dusty artefacts, so often side-lined in or sequestered against the march of modern history, attain a renewed significance in the light of recent events.
That may sound a touch pompous but hear me out. The ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud, in the Mesopotamian plains of Nineveh, was recently ransacked and then destroyed by Islamic State – it was a very thorough operation, utilising sledgehammers, pneumatic drills, bulldozers and explosives. I won’t waste words decrying the act – the catastrophic affront to civilisation by any measure of sensibility is obvious.
Not all is lost, however. In the British Museum you can still see the enormous human-headed bull (or lamassu) gateway guardians that were taken* from Nimrud by Austin Henry Layard (1817-94) in his excavations of the site in 1845-51. He also wrote best-selling books about his excavations, of which Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853) relates the latter of two. This is a first edition copy of that book, full of archaeological plans and engraved illustrations showing his finds at, and travels between, sites such as Nimrud and nearby Kouyunjik. Another victim of Islamic State’s ahistorical monomania, the Yezidis, a fascinating religious group with theological links to Zoroastrianism and Sufism who worship Melek Taus the Peacock Angel, makes repeated appearance in Layard’s narrative – thus part of their now endangered culture (including even some of their music) is also preserved in this book’s record.
(*Or stolen, if you like – but hindsight must nonetheless accredit it a fortunate felony.)
The important textual and visual content of the book are not all that make me somewhat proud to handle it, however; this copy has a presentation inscription to it that gives the book a powerful association: “Lady Davy, from the author”. Lady Davy, née Kerr, was an impressive woman. In 1812, already once a widow, she remarried, taking as her husband the great inventor Sir Humphrey Davy. She and Davy established an important literary and scientific salon in London (her distant cousin Sir Walter Scott described her as a “leader of literary fashion”), though she often lived independently from Davy, travelling extensively, and becoming acquainted with the novelist Madame de Staël (reputedly as the model for her character Corinne). A striking indication of Lady Davy’s character is to be found in another estimation by her cousin Scott: “as a lion-catcher, I would pit her against the world”.
If an old book can be said to be defiant, this book, which preserves some portion of what has been recently destroyed, is defiant – doubly defiant, indeed, because of its connection to a lady whose extraordinary biography of spunky independence flies in the face of the strictly delimited fate prescribed to women within al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate.
Oh Goodie, Tanks!
This unusual piece of Soviet propaganda is disturbing on so many levels. It dates from 1969, and glorifies the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, tanks rolling into Prague and putting an end to the Prague Spring. I can see why a Soviet artist would, for propaganda reasons, depict a road enthusiastically strewn with flowers – but why they would not perceive the symbolic irony presented by those flowers lying on the imminent point of being crushed by fifty tons of tank must remain a mystery.
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
A complete set of Milne & Shepard’s Winnie the Pooh books, each copy signed by Christopher Robin – SOLD
When We Were Very Young; Winnie-the-Pooh; Now We Are Six; The House at Pooh Corner.
As I mentioned before in my last blog about Huysmans’s A Rebours, one of the more exciting adventures of the rare book world is to be found when what had previously seemed pure fiction leaps into reality, in a readable (and indeed purchasable) form. If you’re a fan of A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard’s much-loved quartet, comprised of two collections of nursery rhymes, When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), alongside the two books Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) relating the adventures of Pooh-bear, Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit, all their friends in the Hundred Acre Wood, and of course Christopher Robin, then all these characters might seem somehow real to you, as they do to me. After all, one of the great games of life is assigning to friends, family and colleagues their pertinent Hundred Acre Wood character.
Any observant person commuting to work in London will spot at least three Eeyores and a Rabbit. Kangas tend to work in HR. And so on.
What you may not know is that Christopher Robin was a real person – he was based on Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne. He was hugely fond of his father and the books, that is, until he went to school and was brutally bullied. Later, as a soldier in the Second World War, he again found himself the target of general mockery, and became increasingly embarrassed and embittered by the hyper-nostalgic heritage that had been imposed on him by his father.
It is interesting, then, that in 1974, the year in which he published The Enchanted Places, part one of the autobiographical trilogy in which he revealed and analysed all the problems his father’s books had caused him, it was also the 50th anniversary of the first of them, When We Were Very Young. The publishers Methuen issued a special Golden Anniversary limited edition of 300 copies for each title, and asked Christopher Robin Milne to sign them. Strangely, wonderfully, he acquiesced, allowing us to present to the world this superb complete set of the Golden Anniversary edition, each copy signed by Christopher Robin himself.
“This useless piece of bibliomania” – Larkin’s poem Aubade inscribed to John Wain – SOLD
Philip Larkin is usually considered a “depressing” poet, and this is no misconception. His poem Aubade, a 4am moody meditation on death, is perhaps his most notoriously unforgiving:
“Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People of drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
Pretty grim. It must be said that Larkin’s poetry does have rare flashes of light and warmth that are all the more valuably real for flaring up in such a gloomy atmosphere. That side of him, however, does not appear in Aubade; the whole thing is 50 lines of cold shudder.
The first printing.
The poem was first separately printed in 1980, using an inconspicuous, suitably grey, envelope format (suggestive of the poem’s closing line – “postmen go like doctors from house to house”), in a small signed limited edition of 250 copies. This copy, however, has more to it. Open the flap, remove the booklet, turn to the first page, and you encounter Larkin’s inscription to fellow poet John Wain:
“For John, this useless bit of bibliomania – with love from Philip”
“For John, this useless bit of bibliomania – with love from Philip”.
A superb association, sure, but still… This useless bit of bibliomania.
So Philip Larkin frowns darkly upon my way of life, and there’s another cold shudder.
Conservatives love cats – Nicholas Bentley spoofs the General Election – SOLD
“Fortunately he’s a great lover of cats.”
Here is a superb early piece of political satire by Nicholas Bentley, an original drawing from our excellent archive of his work (all available for browsing here, or in store at 43 Dover Street) through which, over three decades of newspaper cartoons appearing in the Daily Mail and Sunday Telegraph, he observed British popular and political culture with waspish yet amused urbanity.
Here he find him spoofing a riotous hustings from the General Election of 1945 (70 years ago, in which the Conservatives were beaten by a landslide), with the Conservative candidate (conceivably a caricature of Major-General Sir Edward Spears) defiantly batting away another projectile feline.
The chairman of the debate leans over to the nervous opposing candidate, reassuring him of his opponent’s great compassion, at least when it comes to cats. Comparing this uproarious scene to the Election Debates of today makes one almost weep that things could have come to such an anodyne (albeit more animal-friendly) pass.
Recent Comments