Pauline Schol

Pauline Schol

Apr 7, 2022 | Articles, The Booksellers

Ever wondered about what the day-to-day of being a rare bookseller entails? Pauline Schol shares insights on her journey into the rare book world and her experiences as manager of a bustling Mayfair bookshop.

What does a normal day look like for you at Peter Harrington?

I am the shop manager of our Mayfair premises. My days are actually very varied. Besides assisting customers both in the shop and via telephone, I make sure the shops runs smoothly. This entails everything from keeping on top of our stock in the shop and making sure the shelves are stocked with new and interesting books, liaising with my colleagues in the Fulham Road premises about books that need to be shipped, books that need to be gathered for new catalogues or for book fairs, as well as addressing customer inquiries. I also ensure that our displays are looking beautiful and that the whole space is tidy.

Some of my more “behind-the-scenes” jobs include taking care of our service contracts (such as with our security provider), ordering supplies, planning staff schedules, liaising with the landlords, and generally keeping everything running smoothly. I also support our marketing and events team when hosting events here in the shop.

 

And what might an extraordinary day look like?

Any day can take you by surprise. We often collaborate with dealers and galleries in the neighbourhood and, one day, I got a phone call from one saying they’d be opening their doors sooner than expected after the lockdown and needed to install an exhibition of fine bindings by the next day. I created a list of books, gathered them from our shops in Chelsea and Mayfair, organised transport to the venue and put the exhibition together all within 24 hours.

In a less glamourous contrast, I recently walked into the shop to find we had a leak coming from the property above. Water damage is one of the worst things that can happen to books, so obviously this needed my immediate attention!

 

What was your journey into the rare book trade?

When I finished my undergraduate degree in literature and linguistics in the Netherlands, I had no clue where to go from there. I had always wanted to move abroad and, after a year off working in an archive, I eventually settled on the Master’s Degree in the History of the Book at London’s Institute of English Studies. As the course drew to an end, I still wasn’t any clearer about what my future would look like. One day, our course tutor announced that they wanted to trial a bookselling internship and I signed up. “A bit of work experience wouldn’t hurt,” I thought!

As it turned out, I absolutely loved my internship with Ash Rare Books and decided to see if I could make a

career out of this. I attended the York Antiquarian Book Seminar (YABS), a three-day intensive course where you learn all about what it entails to work in the rare book trade. When I got back to London I printed off about 50 copies of my CV and went on a tour of London’s rare bookshops. When I walked into Peter Harrington to give them my CV, I was greeted by someone I had met at YABS. A few days later I was asked if I would like to come for an interview.

 

What are some of the key learnings you took from your Book History degree?

The course has a very hands-on approach and focuses on the material aspect of books. It instilled in me the importance that books are meant to be handled. My colleagues at Peter Harrington share this belief and we encourage visitors to our shops to take the books off the shelves and handle them.

 

You had lots of interesting professional experience before joining Peter Harrington. Can you tell us a little about how you found some of these roles and what you did there?

Before moving to the UK and starting my MA I spent a year working at an archive where I worked on a digitisation project. This particular archive houses one of the most complete slave trade archives in the world and has been given UNESCO status. I helped translate transcriptions from 18th century Dutch to English, as well as do background research (https://eenigheid.slavenhandelmcc.nl/introductie-en/?lang=en). This was where I discovered my passion for handling original materials, which led me to apply for the MA History of the Book.

During my Master’s, I did the aforementioned internship with Ash Rare Books. I learned so much from

Laurence Worms, the owner, who taught me how to collate and catalogue books, database and website management, photography and anything else to do with running a bookshop. He also took me to my very first book fair and my first ever auction.

I also had two photography jobs at archives during my postgraduate degree. For one, I helped a university professor who didn’t live in the UK with research for his new book; I visited archives on his behalf and took photographs of the materials he needed. For the other, I took photographs at the National Archive for a big project called A Publishing and Communications History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-46 (http://www.moidigital.ac.uk/), which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I was given the first opportunity after being put in touch with the professor by a university classmate; for the second, it was my dissertation supervisor, a member of the Ministry of Information team, who approached me.

 

What are your top-three pieces of advice to anyone wanting to forge a career in the antiquarian book trade?

I would highly recommend taking a course in rare books. The Institute of English Studies Master’s course I did is available part time and perfectly geared towards working people. However, if you can’t commit to such a long course, the institute also offers summer courses, and the York Antiquarian Book Seminar is an excellent introduction to the trade, too. Besides learning more about rare books, these courses  are great ways to meet like-minded people, discover job opportunities, and your teachers will often be established booksellers.

This leads to my second recommendation: get to know people who work in the trade. This has helped me with my career tremendously. I found most of my jobs or internships through word of mouth. I often hear people say the rare book trade can be a bit intimidating at first – and it was for me, too – but we really are a lovely bunch and are always happy to help out. So go to the book fairs, go to talks, or just pop into a shop like ours and talk to the staff about your interests.

And lastly, don’t give up. Ours is a relatively small trade, people tend to stay in their roles for a long time and there aren’t always many jobs available. But it’s a growing trade, especially for younger people, and eventually something will come up!

If you could purchase any book in Peter Harrington’s current collection, what would it be?

I am a big fan of fantasy and science-fiction books and absolutely love some of the dust-jacket art for these books. The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula le Guin are books that I really enjoyed reading and I am always happy to see them on our shelves in the shop. We recently acquired this absolutely stunning US edition of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (150893), another personal favourite, and the dust-jacket is so striking. Another set of beautiful little books are the Japanese Fairy Tales by Lafcadio Hearn (149231). I find everything about this collection beautiful; the illustrations, the paper and the binding style.

I wrote my dissertation on George Orwell so seeing things like the publisher’s archive concerning the publication of Down and Out in London and Paris (131747) is also very exciting and provides a rare glimpse into the publication of such an important book. It’s a truly unique item and I wouldn’t mind owning something like that, either!

Hayek’s Neoliberal Legacy: The Road to Serfdom

Hayek’s Neoliberal Legacy: The Road to Serfdom

Apr 4, 2022 | Articles, Economics, Recent Articles

By John Ryan

If books change the world, The Road to Serfdom was a delayed fuse. Published in 1944, the book met a wide readership with numerous printings in quick succession, yet made little impact in a war-torn world.  For three decades following the war, the book lingered as the ghost at the feast, as the Western welfare states, led by interventionist governments backed with Keynesian macroeconomic policy, cemented their position in what seemed an unassailable new order. Yet over the 1970s, the book became something of a manifesto for the small group of academics, politicians, and commentators who sought to challenge the established order, and a foundation text of the surgent neoliberal movement. With the Thatcher and Reagan projects, Hayek’s ideas found their audience. The principles which had been so unwelcome in the 1940s were now put into practice; for better or worse, the individual was once again foregrounded in economic policy, and the state rolled back from the lives of ordinary people.

Hayek’s thesis was a historical study of specific events, tracing  previous  governments to their roots in welfarist policy, but it was also a universal theory of politics. In short, The Road to Serfdom holds that the tendency of government is to expand in power and influence and unless this expansion is checked by an intellectual alternative that prioritises personal and economic liberty, the endpoint will be “serfdom”, that is, total government control. For seven decades the book has proved controversial. It has been attacked from every angle; by socialists, modern liberals, and conservatives alike. Despite this, it  has remained an influential canonical text of political science reading lists.

Hayek wrote the work between 1940 and 1943. The outlook for individual liberty and limited government was not promising. Aside from the fact that during these years most of Europe had elected governments who administrated welfare states, Hayek recognised that the governments of the free world had massively expanded their scope and reach to fight the war.  He started to believe that perhaps even the peacetime governments would come to be unable, even if willing, to shrink the state back to its pre-war size. Besides, even discounting the effects of the war, the tide was moving in favour of a large state with social responsibility. The ideas of Keynes, supporting government intervention in the economy, were becoming increasingly popular; Beveridge was laying out his plan for the British welfare state to wide applause; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was cementing his New Deal in America; and, Clement Attlee’s democratic socialist Labour Party was soon to take power in Britain.

It was in this climate that the book was published in March 1944. Of the famous books in political science published over the centuries, few were so out of keeping with the spirit of the age. Nonetheless, the immediate reception was positive. The initial print run of 2,000 copies sold out within days. Over the next two years, seven impressions were printed, the publishers struggling to keep pace, given wartime paper restrictions, with the public’s demand; so much so, Hayek himself referred to it as “that unobtainable book”.  The American edition, which followed in September 1944 after being rejected by three publishing houses, met with similar success. Reviewers tended to commend the importance of Hayek’s thesis, but presented his case as grossly overstated, and as too black and white. Yet both supporters and opponents bought and read the book. Indeed, in April 1945 a truncated version appeared in Readers Digest in the US, under the title “One of the Most Important Books of Our Generation”, bringing the book to its ten-million strong readership.

And yet, the immediate impact of the book on government policy was almost zero.  As the post-War welfare states grew and became entrenched, without any apparent ‘serfdom’, Hayek’s celebrity passed in the popular eye, and the book fell out of print. In the years 1947 to 1970, not a single edition of The Road to Serfdom was published in the UK. Hayek, depressed at this state of affairs, continued his work, but his publications were chiefly limited to an academic rather than a popular audience.

Thatcher and Reagan at the White House in 1981

Yet throughout this period, Hayek’s thesis retained a small band of fierce adherents. The Mont Pelerin Society, which Hayek founded, continued to promote economic liberty throughout the fifties and sixties. In the seventies, their efforts suddenly bore fruit. Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In the face of the perceived economic decline, industrial unrest, and high inflation of those years, more and more people turned once more to the free market thinkers, and to The Road to Serfdom. New editions were published (including  a new preface by Hayek) and the book returned to the centre of debate.  Margaret Thatcher had read the book as a young woman and later confessed that she had not thought much of it at the time. Advised to read it again by the free-market gurus to whom she turned as an answer to Britain’s plight, she was inspired, and it formed a crucial backdrop to her anti-socialist crusading. Thatcher referenced Hayek many times in her speeches, and he later presented her with the very first copy of the 1984 signed limited edition of the book; she in turn appointed him a Companion of Honour the same year.

Similarly in America, the Reagan movement was infused with Hayek’s work. Reagan cited Hayek in answer to the question of which philosophical thinkers most influenced his conduct as leader, and appointed twenty Mont Pelerin Society economists to his task forces over the years. By the 1980s, Hayek’s thesis, bolstered by his later writings and by those of the freemarket economists he inspired, was the guiding principle of British and American economic policy. Thatcher and Reagan both emphasised the neoliberal belief that, without economic liberty, personal liberty is impossible, and that without both, democracy will fail. This line of thinking has been acknowledged by some to be the  essence of The Road to Serfdom. By the end of the decade, the British and American free-market experiments were being repeated worldwide, and with the fall of the Soviet Union – a serf society, in Hayek’s eyes – the book had undeniably maintained its relevance. It has its critics to this day, but also, supporters who felt that the principles of the book should have been applied far more vigorously than Thatcher and Reagan ever achieved. Nonetheless, whether loved or loathed, The Road to Serfdom will always serve as an enduring example of how books can effect change, inspire popular movements, and transform politics, even if it can take decades to do so.

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Collecting The Road to Serfdom

 

First edition, first impression 

The first edition, first impression of The Road to Serfdom was published in London by George Routledge & Sons in March 1944, in a basic black cloth binding with gilt lettering on the spine. The first impression is easily identified, with the copyright page having no notice of further reprintings. Once identified, the collector should look for sharp copies, with the spine lettering bright, and without marking to the cloth or contents; the wartime paper stock means some light toning to the contents is forgivable.

Wartime paper shortages also led to the jackets being printed on thin, fragile paper, and most surviving copies have now lost their jackets. The collector should not begrudge paying a significant premium for a copy in a jacket, and an even greater premium for a particularly nice example. Repairs or restoration, darkening to the spine panel, chips and tears will all detract from this premium, but the rarity of surviving examples means that jackets in sorrier state need not necessarily be rejected. Of greater concern is the risk of a jacket being switched in from a cheaper later impression, whether by ill intent or not. The rear flap of the jacket is blank for the correct first impression, and was filled with reviews for later impressions. Similarly, the front flap has no impression statement for the first impression, added at the bottom for later impressions – a jacket where the front flap has been clipped should be checked carefully.

First edition, later impressions

As with all books, the price for later printings falls to a fraction of the first printing. Seven impressions were published by 1946. Each is readily distinguished on the copyright page by an impression statement and date, and with an impression statement on the front flap of the jacket.

Of note is the change introduced with the fourth impression, where the book was rechristened a “Popular Edition”, with a statement thus on the front panel of the jacket. The price was halved for this and the subsequent three printings, and a cheaper cloth was used without gilt lettering to save on publishing costs.

First American edition

Especially given the influence of Hayek in America, the first American edition (which was also the first foreign edition) is highly collectible. The first printing was published by the University of Chicago in September 1944, and is again distinguished by the same absence of later printing statements on the copyright page and jacket. John Chamberlain contributed a new preface for the edition. The jacket bears a striking chain design, and as with the first British edition is difficult to find, more difficult still in nice condition.

Abridged and popular editions

Early foreign editions of the text, including the first appearances in each foreign language, represent a broad collecting avenue. The most striking of the early foreign editions was the first Australian paperback edition in 1945, with garish red, blue, and yellow wrappers proclaiming: “Stop! Look! Listen! Are the Democracies Moving Towards Totalitarianism?”. The contrast between this design, and that of the plain jacket of the original British first edition, could not be more conspicuous.

In 1946 an abridged edition was published, in wrappers. The price was around a quarter of the original, and represented the book in its cheapest and most fragile form. As a result, surviving copies are uncommon, and copies in nice condition particularly so.

Signed limited edition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the above abridged edition in 1946, no new edition was published in Britain until 1971, with Hayek’s ideas out of fashion. The new editions that follow in the 1970s and 1980s with Hayek’s resurgence are currently not much sought after by collectors, but nonetheless represent an important component of the book’s history. For most collectors, the end point, and for many the personal highlight, is the 40th anniversary signed limited edition which was published in 1984.

This special edition was produced in 200 copies, each bound in brown leather blocked in gilt, and each signed by Hayek himself. Hayek wrote a new preface, and must have been astonished how the book’s reputation had been so thoroughly resurrected to warrant such a luxurious edition. The very first copy was presented to Margaret Thatcher, and the significance of the book’s publication in 1984, the year where George Orwell predicted his own Serf society, was not lost.

The book presents the collector with a guaranteed authentic signature by Hayek, without any concern of doubt. Those who seek a signature on a first or earlier editions should proceed with extraordinary care, as Hayek is firmly in the sights of the forger.

Meet the Experts

John studied History and Politics at Oxford, before completing a Master’s degree in modern British and European history at the same institution. He served a brief stint in Blackwell’s Rare Book department in Oxford before joining Peter Harrington in 2017.

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Inexhaustible Life – A Modernist Centenary

Inexhaustible Life – A Modernist Centenary

Feb 2, 2022 | Videos

Literature specialist – Sammy Jay introduces our catalogue: Inexhaustible Life – A Modernist Centenary.

Our starring item, James Joyce’s Ulysses, was published at Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co – on 2nd February 1922. A hundred years on, the book is still fascinating and maddening readers around the world. This first edition occupies a central place in any modernist collector’s ideal bookshelf.

This 100-item collection features a superb array of Joyce’s works – and takes the centenary as an opportunity to celebrate the remarkable number of other modernist masterpieces originating from this literary annus mirabilis, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Discover more: https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/onl…

Nowhere to Go but Everywhere | Dior Menswear and Peter Harrington, Fall 2022

Nowhere to Go but Everywhere | Dior Menswear and Peter Harrington, Fall 2022

Dec 14, 2021 | Videos

Peter Harrington was honoured to work with legendary fashion house Dior for the Fall 2022 men’s collection. Artistic director Kim Jones drew inspiration from an epochal figure, the author Jack Kerouac, and his genre-defining American romance On the Road.

The first Dior men’s show to be held in London, the Fall 2022 runway was preluded by a recreation of the library of rare first editions and documents held in Jones’ own London home, curated by Sammy Jay, Peter Harrington’s Modern Literature specialist. The exhibition showcased items of major rarity and significance, and revelled in the far-reaching multidisciplinary explosiveness of Beat culture.

Sammy Jay

Sammy Jay

Aug 27, 2021 | The Booksellers

Interview by Lauren Hepburn.

How did you come to the rare book trade, and how have your responsibilities evolved in that time?   

My “origin story” is a bit crazy. About a decade ago, after tumbling out of my English Literature degree without much direction, I found a book on the bookshelves in my grandfather’s house that changed my life. 

I was looking through his library after he died, getting a sense of what he cared about (there was a lot of Romantic poetry, a connection I didn’t know we had – he was an economist), and on the top shelf, untouched and unnoticed for decades, was a first edition of Frankenstein, inscribed by Mary Shelley to Byron. Needless to say, this was a very significant and valuable book. My grandmother decided that it should continue its story, and be sold.  

That was how I encountered the rare book trade: the discovery opened the door to a whole world which I barely knew existed, peopled with dealers, collectors, and curators whose enthusiasm for all the things I cared about was what sustained them. So I jumped in with both feet and, after they handled the sale of Byron’s copy of Frankenstein in the spring of 2012, started working at Peter Harrington. 

Since then, I’ve worked at most aspects of the trade: packing and polishing in the post room, cataloguing mountains of books, holding the front line with the sales team during our Dover Street shop’s Christmas rush, tending the stand at book fairs in London and abroad and, in more recent years, moving into the buying side of things.  

Tell us about your current role at Peter Harrington.  

I look after the Modern Literature at Peter Harrington – though “modern” is a loose term, and my enthusiasm for Poetry in particular often has me reaching further into the past. Really, my passion is for literature in general, any feat of human imagination in word form. Essentially, if it didn’t happen, I’m interested.  

What this entails is a lot of buying – my main activity is scouring the globe in search of great books to fill our shelves, mostly through the internet these days, but we look forward to the return of book fairs and road trips. We have two shops to fill, and many ravenous customers, so I’m busy. But I absolutely love it. Making house calls is something I particularly cherish – seeing books in their “natural habitat” and helping people uncover the rarities is a delight, not least because you get to meet such lovely and interesting people. I work with our team of cataloguers to process what comes in. They’re always surprising me with their own discoveries and interpretations. 

Relationships with customers is also a big part of what I do; finding the right home for any given book is really rewarding. After almost a decade, many customers are by now old friends – I enjoy keeping them up to date about anything that might come in “with their name on it”, as it were, and it’s a pleasure to have some involvement in how their collections grow and develop – witnessing the unfolding of whatever story they’re trying to tell. 

 

You have responsibilities both buying and sell books, as well as curating catalogues – how do these roles intersect?  

Every year the process of buying culminates in a printed catalogue or two from the literature side. I set the theme for these and curate the selection, which I find personally extremely involving, and which sometimes presents an opportunity to reflect on current events. For example, last year’s Fantasy & Science Fiction catalogue came out during the dystopian nightmare of the first lockdown, and stories like E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops took on a renewed relevance. It’s very energising to me, the way in which all these treasures of the past can still speak to us today. It’s like T. S. Eliot said: “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”. 

So I suppose when I’m out buying I’m often, consciously or subconsciously, thinking about the next catalogue, as well as looking out for specific rarities which customers have asked us to hunt down. There’s an imaginary wall of “Wanted” posters in my head – and when you encounter one at a book fair it’s a question of shoot on sight! 

 

Tell us about one of your weirdest and most wonderful experiences working with Peter Harrington.   

I had a wonderfully bizarre half hour when a man walked in and sat down asking me whether we had any books “about either Richard II, or Abraham Lincoln”. “Two very specific and not obviously related people”, I replied, “What connects your interest?” At which he grinned widely and revealed to me that he was in fact the reincarnated person of them both. 

I think of this whenever people ask me “why do people collect books?” There are so many varied reasons! Plus, if anyone asks who the biggest celebrity we’ve ever had in the shop, I know my answer – Abraham Lincoln. 

The travel side of my work can also take me to unexpected places – there was a brief trip to Hawaii where we bought a huge collection of Hawaiiana, and we were woken each morning by a dawn chorus that sounded extra-terrestrial to ears used only to the cooing of London pigeons.  

  

What do you think the role of book dealers is in preserving items of historical significance? 

It’s a good question – sometimes we do get people seeing the things we have and saying, “but that should be in a museum!” I would challenge the assumption that items being in private hands is in some way inimical to their preservation or even, necessarily, their accessibility. Byron’s Frankenstein, for example, was purchased by a British private collector, but they have several times allowed it to be included in public exhibitions around the world. 

Dealers working with collectors play their part in recognising (and thereby raising) the value of books and manuscripts, which has the knock-on effect of making their owners more careful with them. The number of books which we spend significant money preserving with judicious repair work, or for which customers order fire-proof solander boxes from our Chelsea Bindery, is worth remembering, too. 

It’s a sad thought but if these sorts of books weren’t worth money, many would end up in the skip. As it is, however, people who discover interesting items at home bring them to us, and we set to work finding appreciative new custodians for them. I hope that arrangement is good for everybody, including the books.

We do have great relationships with various libraries and museums too, and when we find something that really should be in a particular institutional collection, we do what we can to facilitate that.

 

You recently helped curate an exhibition to accompany a Fendi fashion show – can you tell us how this came about and what your contribution was? 

Yes, it was very exciting – and unexpected! The connection to Fendi came through their Artistic Director of Couture and Womenswear, Kim Jones, who is himself a great collector of books. During the pandemic we enjoyed chatting about books together, and one of his great passions is Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. When it came to his debut couture collection last January, he themed it around Orlando and the great love story between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and he asked me to help curate an exhibition of books and manuscripts from his personal collection in a side-room at the show. It was a thrill to see rare books thrust into this kind of limelight – the video for the show stars Demi Moore gingerly leafing through the first edition of Orlando which Woolf inscribed to Sackville-West. It was also very gratifying to see how collecting can be a creative process: old creations giving inspiration to new.

What projects are you currently working on?   

We’re right now putting out our latest catalogue on the broad theme of “Poetry”. It’s a question of coming full circle for me, as that was the subject of my very first catalogue for Peter Harrington, five years ago. There’s some incredible things in there – our first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which I dearly love) has promotional broadsides stuck in by the poet himself, and holding it gives me full-blown ASMR. It was one of the very first copies ever to cross the Atlantic for a British readership, being a promotional copy sent to the editor of the Edinburgh Review.

 

If you could have any book in Peter Harrington’s collection for yourself, what would it be? 

There are long-since-sold books which I sometimes remember with a pang – we had a copy of the Rubaiyat which Dylan Thomas owned as a drunken teenager, or Aubrey Beardsley’s own copy of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, owned before he started work on his illustrated edition, with a drawing of Merlin in the front. Those sorts of things set my imagination on fire.

But right now, the book that blows my mind is actually the 1488 first edition in Greek of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, printed at the height of the Florentine Renaissance, before the French war and Savonarola turned things sour for anyone fond of poetry or pagans. For me, it marks an exciting moment in history when two unrelated forces met: the technology of printing (introduced in Europe only three decades earlier) travelling south into Italy from Germany and encountering waves of Greek scholars moving west after the sack of Constantinople, bringing with them their language, their learning, and their manuscripts.

I don’t know where I’d put it, though – the two huge folio volumes bound in bright red leather would look rather out of place in my flat. Still, I wouldn’t say no!

Sammy’s Picks

LE GUIN, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. £1250.

WHITMAN, Walt. Leaves of Grass. £295000. 

This rare English issue of the first edition of Leaves of Grass was one of the first copies ever to cross the Atlantic for a British readership, being a promotional copy sent to the editor of the Edinburgh Review – the literary scene of the Old Country was hardly ready for Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”. What really moves me (aside from the poem) are the broadsides stuck in by the poet himself, touting his own brilliance.

THOMAS, Dylan. Selections from his Writings Read by the Poet – Volume I. £2750.

This record has Dylan Thomas mischievously inscribing “my name rhymes with villain!” for a fan in New York, while he was on his alcoholic downward spiral. Recordings like this that capture of the voice of the poet are so valuable for posterity, and I could listen to him reading, or rather incantating, “Fern Hill” anytime.

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. Adonais. £1500.

This is edition of Shelley’s eulogy for Keats, which was really a pre-emptive eulogy for himself, is in a lovely little Arts & Crafts binding. Also: “Life, like a dome of many coloured glass, / stains the white radiance of eternity” – I’m still unpacking that

SAPPHO; WHARTON, Henry Thornton (trans.) Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings. £675.

This scarce edition marked an important moment in making Sappho – the idea of her as well as the few gleaming fragments that remain of her poetry – accessible to the general English reader. Wharton prints the original Greek alongside his own literal translation, and selects from several prior poetic interpretations. If you care about poetry of any kind, having a sense of Sappho is essential – she was the original poet.

OLIVER, Mary. Twelve Moons. £750.

Mary Oliver has been a constant companion over the past few years, and I have been enjoying watching her growing in popularity, particularly in the rare book market! This is early collection is scarce and has some great poems – try “The Night Traveller”.

KEROUAC, Jack. On the Road. £3250.

On the Road is a book I love. I took my own cross-country American road trip at the age of 22, in pursuit of the myth Kerouac conjured up in these pages – seeing this volume on the shelf always brings back memories.

FROST, Robert. Mountain Interval. £3750.

This copy has a really meaningful inscription. Mountain Interval has Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” in it, a meditation on the fork-in-the-road decision taken by his friend the poet Edward Thomas, who chose to go to the front (where he was soon killed), versus Frost’s own decision to return to America from England at the outset of the war, and take up a teaching position at Amherst College. This copy was inscribed by Frost to one of his Amherst students, who then chose to sign up and go to fight in Europe, and so many Americans did. I wonder what Frost thought – did his student read “The Road Not Taken” correctly?

COHEN, Ira (ed.) Gnaoua. £2250.

This scarce little one-shot Beat magazine from Tangiers was one of several hipness-heightening nick-nacks artfully strewn around for the cover photograph of Bob Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home. You can see it on the mantelpiece!