William – EH Young

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Continuing with my project to read the first ten Penguin books in first edition to mark the 90th year of Penguin publications I have now reached book eight, William by Ethel Hilda Young. Now almost completely forgotten Young was a popular writer in the 1920’s and 30’s indeed this book, first published in 1925, made its eighteenth edition when published by Penguin in 1935 which is a considerable number of copies produced in just ten years so she clearly had a readership. I continue to be surprised by how good the first ten Penguins are, obviously Allen Lane was trying to start off his new venture with as good a selection as he could put together but he struggled to get reprint rights from a lot of the existing publishers, this one was from Jonathan Cape who were co-operative. Like Susan Ertz and Beverley Nichols I had never heard of Young, but also like those I have greatly enjoyed reading the book and being introduced to a sadly neglected author. I have heard of both of the two remaining writers that make up the first ten Penguins, but haven’t read anything by either of them, so this voyage of discovery will be continuing for another couple of months yet.

William and Kate Nesbitt have five grown up children, one son and four daughters, and by the time of the book all apart from the youngest daughter have married and left the family home in Upper Radstowe, a fictional town but which appears to be based on Clifton, with the docks of Radstowe below being based on the city of Bristol and the foundation of William’s wealth with his flotilla of vessels providing goods shipping along with passenger carrying pleasure steamers. They met when he left the Merchant Navy and set up on his own gradually growing his fleet as the family grew. As the book was written in 1925, the Nesbitt’s clearly met and were married in the late Victorian era and it becomes clear as the book progresses that although William has embraced the changing times Kate’s moral compass is firmly stuck in the straight laced Victorian era and this would result in conflict between the couple that have grown comfortably familiar with each others routines and mannerisms over the decades. The first half of the book introduces all the characters and their inter-relations and builds up a happy prosperous family with each person having their own quirks and William as the father and grandfather to a largely adoring and expanding group of people. Indeed by about half way through I was thinking that yes I like these characters who are so well fleshed out by Young that you really feel you know them but what is going to happen as something must as it is too much happy families.

Then daughter Lydia made a surprising move, she upped and left her husband in London and moved in with an aspiring writer in an out of the way place in Somerset. The book then takes a dramatic turn with William, who has always had a particular soft spot for Lydia beyond his other children, defending her right to live her life as she chooses being against Kate whose Victorian upbringing cannot consider one of her daughters ‘living in sin’ and who attempts to turn the whole family against Lydia. The upsetting of the quiet life of the Nesbitts and the gradual resolution of the ructions within the family is beautifully drawn by Young and the reader is pulled in all directions as first one side and then the other takes precedence as Kate gradually works through her outrage at both Lydia and her lover and also at her abandoned husband who seems to be making insufficient effort to win her back.

Whilst attempting to do some research on Young for this blog I came across this article by Rebecca Hutcheon, Research Fellow at the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of South Wales, which I totally agree with and I’m pleased to see that my guess that Radstowe was based on Bristol is confirmed. I don’t have any other books by Ethel Hilda Young, indeed none of her other works were published by Penguin so although this title presumably sold well enough they weren’t inspired to print any others. The most recent published retrospective of her works was in the 1980’s and was printed by the feminist publisher Virago, however they only have ‘Miss Mole’ still in their catalogue but did have several more including ‘William’. If you can find a copy I do recommend the novel, it is very much of its period, but so are the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen and as Hutcheon points out in her article Young has much to recommend her amongst those great writers of relationships and family tensions, yet is closer to our own time so the characters are somewhat easier to relate to.

The beauties of a Cottage Garden – Gertrude Jekyll

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It is now March and thoughts turn to the great outdoors as the weather slowly improves with the first hints of spring. Sadly I no longer have a garden of my own so I get my joy vicariously from the woodlands that make up the sides of the gorge where I live and the gardens I pass on strolls through the town. I miss the small garden I had at my last house and am determined that my next move will bring a little bit of land back under my control. Until then I can dream and read books like this one by Jekyll or The Garden by Vita Sackville-West which I reviewed eight years ago at around this time, thoroughly enjoying its evocative poetry. ‘The beauties of a Cottage Garden’ is ten extracted chapters from Gertrude Jekyll’s classic 1899 work ‘Wood and Garden’ which was her first book and is a good introduction to her somewhat opinionated style and also the scale that she normally worked on in designing gardens for other people, of which she did over four hundred several of which can still be visited. A quotation is I think appropriate here:

The large lawn space I am supposing stretches away a good distance from the house and is bounded on the south and west by fine trees: away beyond that is all wild wood. On summer afternoons the greater part of the lawn expanse is in cool shade, while winter sunsets show through the tree stems. Towards the south-east the wood would pass into shrub plantations, and further still into garden and wild orchard. At the end of the lawn would be the brilliant parterre of bedded plants, seen both from the shaded lawn and the terrace, which at the end forms part of the design.

and so she goes on… The book starts with her growing love of plants and gardens from a young age with her own section of her parents garden and how she learnt what worked and what didn’t by practical application and reading standard references of the time (the 1850’s) her own works have become reference works for horticulture even up to today and it is Jekyll we have to thank for promoting the blend of colours in a planted border much as an artist draws together various paints to gain an effect greater than the individual parts. The chapter on flower shows clearly displays her distaste for the artificially contrived ways of presenting flowers at such events at her time, that this chapter is entitled ‘The Worship of False Gods’ speaks volumes in itself. She is also scathing with regard to ‘novelties’ especially the late Victorian love of dwarf varieties of plants she would much rather extend to their full beauty. “When a Zinnia has a hard, stiff, tall flower with a great many rows of petals piled up one on top another, and when its habit is dwarfed to a mean degree of squatness, it looks to me both ugly and absurd”, and as for messing with the natural balance of colours well she is not happy to say the least. She also has much to say regarding ill-educated gardeners of large estates who are stuck in their ways and are not willing to accept the idea of the masters of those properties.

Yes Gertrude Jekyll is a product of her time but nobody could deny her influence and her writing is definitely entertaining both for and against trends and fads in gardens and plants. Her own home has recently been purchased by The National Trust, not only for its important gardens but also for the house itself designed by the great architect Edward Lutyens whom she worked with many times to create grounds for his various houses across the country. Together they became one of the leading lights of the Arts and Crafts movement which flourished largely between 1880 and 1920. An interesting article from The National Trust on the thoughts on preservation of her home and especially its garden can be read here.

A is For Arsenic – Kathryn Harkup

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An absolutely fascinating read, Kathryn Harkup is has a doctorate in chemistry and for six years ran an outreach program for the University of Surrey producing work on science that would “appeal to bored teenagers”. This skill set is admirably suited to explaining the chemistry in a technical, yet easy to understand way when approaching the various poisons utilised by Christie in her novels. What I hadn’t known before reading this book is that Christie was herself a dispensing chemist in a hospital up until the publication of her third book in the early 1920’s and returned to this role during WWII after retraining to update her knowledge of the various substances to be found in a hospital pharmacy. It is this background that allowed her to accurately describe not only the poisons themselves but the dosages needed and the symptoms when taken in excess and Harkup notes that she was by and large very accurate with the few errors being largely down to lack of knowledge at the time especially of the more unusual substances.

The book concludes with a couple of appendices, the first is a list of each of Christie’s novels with both UK and American titles, it’s amazing how many were changed, and the method of how each victim was killed or was attempted to be killed. For example with Christie’s own favourite book ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ we have Arsenic, Veronal *, Stabbed. The asterisk indicates that this was suicide there is also ** for attempted murder, *** for medication withheld and **** for an invented poison of which there is just one example ‘Calmo’ in ‘The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side’. This appendix in itself is a massive piece of work, whist the second appendix gives the chemical structure of he various products referred to in the book. There is also a bibliography and a comprehensive index which underlines the scientific background of the author. Veronal by the way is one of the chemicals with its own chapter in the book and is a barbiturate and the structure of this chapter, which is mirrored by the thirteen others, will give you an idea of the thoroughness Harkup has approached her task:

Firstly we get some historical context which in this case points out that the use of barbiturates dates the books with them in as they were commonly used for suicides in the 1920’s and 30’s but have unpredictable dosages, a large amount can be survived but small doses can kill depending on various factors which cannot be accurately determined in advance. The second section looks at a real life example of the poison being used and how this may have provided a basis for Christie and compares that to the chosen book to represent the use. In this example the book chosen is ‘Lord Edgeware Dies’, which is one of several stories to have barbiturates mentioned, four of which involve murder and two suicide.. As I said before, the level of analysis of the books is really noteworthy and any Christie fan should really have a copy of this volume as they will find it fascinating. The third section looks at the history of barbiturates in general, from their discovery to their usage in medicine and beyond. This also includes an explanation of how the drugs work, how they interact with the body and the effects that will be seen both whist being administered, the aftereffects and detection at autopsy if possible if they are used to kill. There is also a section on how they kill rather than just provide medical assistance. this can be a bit technical but Harkup explains things in as simple a way as practical for the non-chemist. This is then followed by consideration of any antidotes or remedial processes from an overdose. We then look at other real life cases to better understand the problem of the poison administered and finally a look at Christie’s own experience with handling the drug. An excellent and comprehensive overview both of the poison itself and how it featured in Christie’s books and in the real world.

The chemicals looked at in this volume are the eponymous Arsenic then Belladonna, Cyanide, Digitalis, Eserine, Hemlock, Monkshood, Nicotine, Opium, Phosphorus, Ricin, Strychnine, Thallium and Veronal. There is a second volume already out in hardback but as I have ‘A is for Arsenic’ in paperback I will wait for the matching book. But I’m really looking forward to ‘V is for Venom’ which is due out in paperback on the 24th September 2026.

The Fall of The House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

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Another beautiful volume from the Vintage Collectors Classic series by Penguin Books and easily the most comprehensive collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories that I have read so far. Below you can see the contents list of this book, which includes thirty one tales including all the most famous ones such as the one that lends its title to this collection ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ along with ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and one of the very earliest detective stories ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. all of which I’ve read before but it was a delight to encounter them again after a gap of several decades.

Poe was an outstanding writer and very much out on his own stylistically in the early 1800’s, he was born in 1809 and died, appropriately in mysterious circumstances, in 1849 after he was found delirious and wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him, but was never sufficiently coherent afterwards to explain what had happened to him before he died. But back to 1831 and after his court martial from West Point military college, which he deliberately engineered as a means of getting out of the army, he turned to journalism to earn a living. He had been writing poetry since 1824 but his first short story was Metzengerstein from 1832 and that story opens this collection and is an indication of the horror/mystery style that would mark most of his subsequent works. I was surprised however by ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, which definitely falls into the category of comedy although with a satirical twist that only Poe would have thought of. I mentioned ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as an early detective story and in this collection I found the two follow up tales of Poe’s detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin of Paris, these are, the largely unsuccessful, and overly long, story ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and the much better ‘The Purloined Letter’. Dupin is so obviously a basis for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes including in Rue Morgue a passage where he interrupts his unnamed companion and narrators thoughts just as Holmes does in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ written in 1893, fifty two years after Poe’s tale, indeed Doyle references Poe in the story. ‘The Purloined Letter’ also has shadows of Sherlock Holmes but the less said about ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ the better, although it does have the distinction of being the first ever fictional detective story based on a real crime.

Still onto the contents list of this collection and a very well collated selection it is too:

I’m not going to go though all of these stories, I heartily recommend you have a go yourself, some are not as good as others, as you would expect from any book like this but almost all are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Gold-Bug’ which explains simply cryptology on its way to the discovery of pirate treasure and the humour in ‘The Sphinx’ which I cannot explain without giving away the whole story. ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ both deal with the concept of placing a dying man in a hypnotic state just as he was about to expire although the effects of such a trance is markedly different in the two stories. There are murders aplenty and vengeful spirits abound if you like your reading dark and unexpected then there is much in Poe to explore.

Below is the contents list for the collection I already had of Poe’s writings entitled ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ and published in 1938. As can be seen the best known works are all here along with ‘Hop-frog’ which is the only tale in this volume that is missing from my latest purchase, so I have quickly read again that short story and enjoyed the tale of the revenge of two captive dwarfs who were being abused and made to entertain a medieval king and his courtiers. Yet again Poe surprises with his imagination and this story more than holds its own with the ones in the new book.

This Way Up – Mark Cooper-Jones & Jay Foreman

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This largely highly entertaining book looks at maps and what happens when they are wrong for any of a multitude of reasons. It is written by Youtube creators Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman aka MapMen. If that first sentence appears to be hedged somewhat, that is because it is, and I will come back to why towards the end of this blog but first let’s look at the good bits which is the vast majority. I’ve read books on the same theme before, notably Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Phantom Atlas, which is listed as a source in the bibliography of this book and was clearly the basis of the section on The Mountains of Kong (Chapter 4 The Map That Made Up Mountains) and which I covered in my review of The Phantom Atlas.

There are many map stories that I hadn’t come across before including the story of the remarkable navigation feats of the people of the Marshall Islands who can travel between the vastly spread out islands and atolls simply by noting the movement and pressure of the waves, well we think that’s how they do it, it’s probably a lot more complicated than that. Another fascinating story is of The Situationists, a small French anti-capitalist organisation who rejected traditional maps replacing them with diagrams indicating relationships between places. That Cooper-Jones and Foreman decided to illustrate this by trying to meet for lunch in London using maps of Paris is a suitably surreal experiment that failed but admirably made the point. The story of the television station map of the UK was informative and odd at the same time. I remember the various regions but had never really thought about how strange they were before now. Another tale I sort of knew was the IKEA world map that left off New Zealand but I wasn’t aware of just how common this is, to the point that maps with this geographical mistake have a dedicated reddit group. It should be noted here that chapter 3, where the authors use maps of Paris in London, starts with a QR code which links to a Spotify playlist to be listened to whilst reading, an idea I’ve never seen before in a book.

But let us look at a couple of places where the writers rather than the maps go wrong, the first one I spotted is a straight factual error. Chapter twelve, which ironically is about places being mis-located on maps, states that CNN produced a map that put the Libyan capital Tripoli in Syria for a piece about Colonel Gaddafi. and then later that chapter explains the mistake as:

Take for instance CNN’s map that misplaced the Libyan capital Tripoli in Syria. There is a Tripoli in Syria but it definitely wasn’t where Gaddafi was hiding at the time, and nor were CNN intending to suggest so.

Despite this assertion, in fact there isn’t a Tripoli in Syria, there is however the coastal city of Tripoli in the adjacent country of Lebanon which is presumably where CNN placed their map reference, not Syria at all. I must admit I picked up on this because I’ve been to both Tripoli’s, both in Libya and in Lebanon and whilst I liked both I wouldn’t recommend going to either currently for various geopolitical reasons.

For me though the biggest fault in the book is the longest chapter ‘The Deadliest Shortcut’ and it’s not for a factual error but rather for the badly misjudged tone of the chapter. Now I know this is supposed to be a humorous book, and yes it is very funny, whilst making excellent and quite serious points regarding maps and their use. But this chapter, written as a podcast, descends into almost slapstick jokes with people talking over one another, whilst describing the horrific ordeal of the 19th Century American settlers known as The Donner Party. For those people unaware of this story The Donner Party refers to a group of 87 settlers, including children, heading for California in 1846 who start falling behind the main groups and decide to take a shortcut shown on a map they had, but which crucially had been put there by somebody who had never actually made the journey. The group of families became trapped in the snow by what is now known as Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains and by the time they were rescued the following year only 48 out of 87 made it to California and the trapped group had largely survived by eating the dead, two of which were guides who were killed to supply food. Clearly a subject that should be handled with care and compassion, not with jokes and especially not in the cack handed manner exhibited here.

All in all I greatly enjoyed the book and with the exception of the aforementioned chapter ten I heartily recommend it.

Twenty-Five – Beverley Nichols

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Continuing my plan to read the first ten Penguin Books during the twelve months after their ninetieth anniversary of when they were published, I have now reached book seven and the second one in the blue covers of biography in that initial set after book one ‘Ariel‘. We wouldn’t see a new colour until book thirty one in March 1936 when the purple of Essays and Belle Lettres first appeared on HG Wells’ ‘A Short History of the World’ and there wouldn’t be another book classified as Essays until number 444 ‘The Times Fourth Leaders’ in July 1945. However back to this book, and I have to admit I knew nothing of Beverley Nichols, to the point that I was surprised to discover that he was male despite the more usually female first name. I was also not inspired by the idea of a twenty-five year old writing their autobiography, so was not particularly looking forward to the book, but I’m so glad I read it. Nichols started to win me over even in the foreword:

And meet interesting people he certainly did, by page fifty we have encountered US Presidents Wilson and Taft, along with poets John Masefield, Robert Bridges and WB Yeats and are about to have conversations with both GK Chesterton and then Minister of War, Winston Churchill. Nichols was born in 1898 and the narrative runs up until 1924, he was therefore involved in World War I, but luckily was not called up to the front rather his Oxford University education was interrupted by working in the intelligence section of the War Office and then as Aide-de-camp to Arthur Shipley on the British University Mission to the United States, which is how he met the two Presidents. On return to the UK he resumed his delayed time at Oxford and became president of the Oxford Union, which is how he subsequently met so many other people of note at the time and as it was normal for the president to take people to dinner before the evening debates he would spend several hours in their company. He also ran a student magazine, which Masefield, for instance, contributed to, so even in his early twenties Nichols was remarkably well connected. This is the joy of the book, it is not so much an autobiography but a series of reminiscences regarding the various people he met, you learn far more aout them than you do Nichols himself.

After leaving university Nichols eventually became a theatre critic giving him access to even more people but before that he spent some time as secretary to Australian opera star Dame Nellie Melba and there are numerous stories relating to those experiences included in the book, which like a lot of his anecdotes are really quite funny. One I particularly like has Melba taking a dislike to the position of some stone vases in a hotel and deciding to move them to a more ‘artistic’ formation which she duly did by strenuously pushing them up towards a wall much to the confusion of the staff. Typically for the lack of significant information about himself Nichols doesn’t mention that he was Melba’s secretary he just seems to spend quite a bit of time with her in Australia with no context given. Nichols also met Rudyard Kipling whom he had disparaged in a letter a couple of years earlier and then to his horror saw Kipling enter a room he was in:

The book is great fun and if I did have to look up a few people whose fame has somewhat died down in the intervening century there wasn’t many of them and it was worth the reference time but it is well written, amusing and far better than I expected it to be. Let’s leave the final words to Nichols, who did go on to have a long life as an author of over sixty books, using the final sentences of the book:

Again – I have done. Twelve o’clock strikes. There really should be slow music playing outside my window, so that I might work myself into a frenzy of pathos at the thought that another day has arrived to carry me on to middle-age. I should rather like to stay, just a little longer. But then – better not. Accept the joke of life for what it is worth. It is not such a very brilliant one, after all. And was there not a man called Browning, who wrote. “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.”

The Bullet that Missed – Richard Osman

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I wasn’t planning to review another of Richard Osman’s excellent crime novels but there was so much in this, the third title featuring The Thursday Murder Club, that I felt I had to write something. If you want to read my reviews of the first two you can find them here and here, but I really recommend that you read the books especially if you like your mystery reading to feature well thought out plots doused with a sprinkling of often quite dark humour, whilst also being beautifully written. A quick example from page twelve of this book featuring Connie Johnson, the drug dealing villain from book two.

One of the things I like most is the re-appearance in subsequent books of not just the main characters but others that you thought had been specific to an earlier work and Connie gets to be a significant player in this story as well even though she spends the entire time in prison. At first reading the main theme of the book appears to be the Thursday Murder Club deciding to investigate the ten year old cold case of the death of TV journalist Bethany Waites whose car was found at the bottom of a cliff with blood stains and some clothing although her body was missing. Elizabeth doesn’t find that surprising, as she says “I once had to push a Jeep with a corpse sitting in the front seat into a quarry, and it popped out almost immediately”. That is one of the things that I love so much about this book, because as a parallel plot we get to find out so much more about Elizabeth as she is first kidnapped, along with her husband, and then set the task of killing Viktor Illyich, the ex head of the KGB in St Petersburg by a very tall but, at the time, anonymous Swede. The impression we get then is that Illyich was her opposite number as she was quite clearly very senior in MI6, we had established in book two that she is Dame Elizabeth, although doesn’t use the title, which was another nod to her seniority but equally that Viktor and Elizabeth know and like one another very well although haven’t met for twenty years so she has no intention of killing him.

Of course despite the quite disparate plot lines Osman finds a way of tying them together into a cohesive whole whilst also providing ongoing character development for not only the four members of the Thursday Murder Club but also the two police officers who have ended up working with them, Donna and Chris, both of whom are settling into new, and to them at least, surprising relationships. One of the great features in the book revolves around Elizabeth’s husband, Stephen, who is clearly undergoing fairly late stage dementia and is often struggling, although of course he doesn’t realise this. But whilst in the Swede’s library following the kidnapping spotted the very rare books surrounding them and from this, with help from a dealer friend, manages to work out who the Swede is as only one person is known to have accumulated such a selection. As a book collector myself it’s the little details that really make this observation and the fact that it was a first edition of Wind In The Willows that gave the first clue as I know this book is distinctive as I have owned a copy in the past, the other books mentioned are worth in the millions of pounds but Wind in the Willows even now is just a few thousand and my copy, which wasn’t in the greatest of condition, cost me in the late hundreds. Another thing about the tall Swede is that Chief Constable Andrew Edgerton estimates him as six feet six inches tall and I can’t help but feel that the references to height and difficulty in scale are there for the private enjoyment of six feet seven inches tall Richard Osman.

The Thursday Murder Club books are maturing nicely with Osman coming up with new and surprising adventures for his protagonists. I just hope that this isn’t the last we hear of Viktor Illyich or even the very tall Henrik Mikael Hansen.

Notes from an Island – Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä

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For twenty six summers from their late forties until their early seventies Tove and her life partner Tuulikki retreated to the small island of Klovharun in the Gulf of Finland where they could escape from city life and work and relax in relative peace and quiet. This book tells the story of the building of their cabin and some aspects of their life on the island with extracts from Tove Jansson’s diary, log entries from Brunström, a fisherman who with a couple of colleagues did most of the actual construction of the cabin including the dynamiting of a huge boulder out of the way, and of course Tuulikki Pietilä’s (Tooti) beautiful aquatints mainly done in the 1970’s. Originally published in 1996 in Swedish this is the first English translation, published by Sort Of Books in 2021. The lovely cover is a map of the island drawn by Tove’s mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson (Ham) who was a frequent visitor well into her eighties and was the inspiration for Moominmamma. Tooti was also to be immortalised in Jansson’s Moomin books as Too-Ticky; who has a lot of the characteristics of the real Tooti including practicality and a love of the sea.

This short book is an absolute delight, the first section deals with the decision of Tove and Tooti to seek another island as their own hideaway after Tove had shared the family retreat on the island of Bredskär with her parents, brother and eventually her niece. The construction of a cabin was done without formal permission as Brunström had pointed out that getting agreement from everyone who could be involved would almost certainly never happen but if they just built it and then asked the fait-accompli would probably just get passed, and so it turned out. Building on such a remote skerry which up until then had only been home to seabirds proved to be difficult and there are numerous log entries where Brunström (his first name is never given) couldn’t get materials out to the island due to the bad weather and high seas. Life on the island is covered more deeply in Tove’s work for adults, especially her best known ‘The Summer Book’, where Brunström is renamed Eriksson, but this is, as the title suggests, ‘Notes from an Island’ rather than the complete stories, with a blend of fiction and fact, found in the more famous book.

Tove introduces herself as a lover of rocks as is fitting for a sculptor’s daughter and many a tale is told of moving stones from one place to another throughout a summer to improve some aspect of the island only to find, when returning the next year, that everything had simply been moved back by the sea. Tooti is the daughter of a carpenter and her love is wood so maintaining the jetty and boat fell to her with less good wood being chopped up by Tove as firewood and the best pieces that floated by the island being saved for use in Tooti’s art. She was also more practical especially with the generator they would take a day coaxing into life or the temperamental propane fired refrigerator which was mainly used to store fish to feed their cat. Tove was also determined to have flowers growing on the island and cleared a small meadow for sea grass and also looked after that most Finnish of home features the rowan tree against one corner of the cabin.

I’ll close with a small section covering the time that Tove and Tooti made it out to the island before the surrounding ice broke up which will give a flavour of the narrative and the sheer joy these two ladies took in each others company:

The cabin had that closed in chill that Brunström would have called “cold as a wolf’s parlour”, and someone had burned all the firewood. We found a couple of wooden crates in the cellar and got them to burn and dragged in the sawhorse and some ice-covered timbers to thaw.

We were exhilarated by change and expectation and ran headlong here and there in the snow and threw snowballs at the navigation marker. Tooti made a toboggan out of thin strips of wood and we rode it again and again from the top of the island far out across the ice.

When we tired of that game, we sat down and took stock. The sea was chalk white in every direction as far as the eye could see. It was only then that we noticed the absolute silence.

And that we had started whispering.

The Angel’s Game – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The second book in the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ series by Zafón is mainly set in 1929 in Barcelona just a few of weeks after the World Fair had been held there and several of the passages refer to the fair, with the cable car up to the top of Montjuic hill, which was built to get people to the events, being featured several times including in the final fight between David Martin and Inspector Victor Grandes. I really enjoyed ‘The Shadow of the Wind‘, Zafón’s first novel and so was greatly looking forward to reading this but sadly I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first book, I felt that the plot was more than a bit muddled, especially at the end where a new twist appears to happen every other page, although having said that I still got through the five hundred pages quite quickly, so if I hadn’t read ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ and knew what Zafón was capable of I may well have enjoyed it more. There is an enormous body count in the book as well, very few significant characters make it to the end and a lot of the deaths are quite gruesome which also wasn’t particularly to my taste. I now have a dilemma, do I give up here with Zafón or try his third book ‘The Prisoner of Heaven’ and hope that his undoubted literary skill shown in his first book hadn’t been abandoned after that?

The book is difficult to summarise because by the end you’re not sure that even Zafón knows what is going on. With all the twists and turns and contradictions throughout the story you are left with the abiding thought that despite the tale being told mainly in the first person by David Martin he may well be an ‘unreliable narrator‘. Early on we are told that he has an inoperable brain tumour which will kill him in a matter of months but mysteriously this is ‘cured’ and he goes on to have a series of bizarre experiences and encounters with a strange character who may or may not exist; but whom nevertheless apparently commissions him to create a religion and write the book of that belief system. But it is highly possible that the whole thing is a manifestation of the delirium caused by his medical condition and the final epilogue reads more as a hallucination rather than a satisfactory culmination of the strange gothic horror plot so who knows.

Over all reading this book was an unsatisfactory experience, which was sad after the genius of the first novel but it was good to revisit the booksellers Sempere & Son and The Cemetery of Forgotten Books even if we don’t spend much time there. The various aspects of Barcelona were also interesting, that Park Güell, which I visited with friends back in 2020 was intended to be a luxury housing estate which failed financially and was turned into the Gaudi inspired park it has become, but at the time this book was set was a largely abandoned and a dangerous place to be at night. Several other places I recognised from travelling around the city with Anna which made the often ridiculous plot seem more believable as at least it was grounded in reality somewhere.

Pelicans USA and the Birth of Mentor Paperbacks

On By bookramblings142In Milestones in PublishingLeave a comment

This month marks the eightieth anniversary of the first books that became the Mentor imprint, which would grow to be a major factual book publisher in America. Stepping forward a couple of years we see in 1948 two new paperback imprints first appear in the USA, Signet and Mentor, at first sight these series closely resemble the UK Penguin main series and Pelicans with Signet largely being fiction and Mentor for the most part factual. This is due to them both growing out of the wartime Penguin books printed in America to avoid shipping across an increasingly dangerous Atlantic Ocean. In 1948 Penguin decided to pull out of American publishing and their assets were purchased by Victor Weybright and Kurt Enoch both of whom had been running Penguin Books Inc based in New York since 1942 when the American Penguins were launched . Enoch had previously been head of Albatross Books, so knew how to run a publishing business, and was already in New York, having escaped Nazi Germany in 1940, whilst Weybright had been recruited by the owner of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, from the US Office of War Information back in London and returned to America to help Enoch. The two men formed New American Library of World Literature (NAL) in 1948 when they bought the American Penguin operation, but crucially not the name, and gained, at least in theory, 164 titles to start Signet and 24 to get Mentor going. I’d like to concentrate on Mentor as this grew out of a far less well known series in America which had taken the name of its UK equivalent, Pelican and which began eighty years ago this month in January 1946. The full list of titles, with their first published dates, as at the time of the takeover were:

  • P1 Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann – January 1946
  • P2 Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict – January 1946
  • P3 You and Music by Christian Darnton – January 1946
  • P4 The Birth and the Death of the Sun by George Gamow – January 1946
  • P5 An Enemy of the People: Anti Semitism by James Parkes – March 1946
  • P6 What Happened in History by Gordon V Childe – March 1946
  • P7 The Physiology of Sex by Kenneth Walker – March 1946
  • P8 Mathematician’s Delight by W.W. Sawyer – March 1946
  • P9 The Weather by George Kimble and Raymond Bush – May 1946
  • P10 America’s Role on the World Economy by Alvin H Hansen – April 1946
  • P11 Heredity, Race and Society by Theodosius Dobzhansky and L.C. Dunn – November 1946
  • P12 The Story of Human Birth by Alan F Guttmacher – January 1947
  • P13 Thomas Jefferson on Democracy edited by Edward C Linderman – January 1947
  • P14 Introducing Shakespeare by G.B. Harrison – February 1947
  • P15 Emerson – The Basic Writings of America’s Sage edited by Eduard C Lindeman – March 1947
  • P16 The Personality of Animals by H Munro Fox – April 1947
  • P17 Human Breeding and Survival by Gut I Burch and Elmer Pendell – June 1947
  • P18 Is Marriage Necessary? By George H Bartlett – July 1947
  • P19 Good Reading edited by The Committee On College Reading – September 1947
  • P20 An Introduction to Modern Architecture by E.B. Mock and J.M. Richards – September 1947
  • P21 The Odyssey by Homer – trans E.V. Rieu – October 1947
  • P22 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R.H. Tawney – November 1947
  • P23 Heredity, Race and Society by Theodosius Dobzhansky and L.C. Dunn – November 1947
  • P24 Sweden: The Middle Way by Marquis W Childs – January 1948
  • P25 Philosophy in a New Key by Susanne K Langer, – February 1948

It’s an interesting mix of subjects, much like the UK originals. I said earlier that there were 24 titles to form the basis of Mentor yet the list above has 25 books, however careful checking will reveal that P11 and P23 are in fact the same book issued a year apart, yet inside both claim to be the first time this title was published. It is almost as if the publishers had forgotten they had already printed this book in 1946 so simply did it again exactly a year later in 1947. Of the twenty four titles ten had been originally printed in the UK, mainly as Pelicans, whilst the remaining fourteen were originals to the American Pelican imprint, the ten reissues are as follows:

  • P3 – Originally UK Pelican A68 – July 1940
  • P5 – Originally UK main series 521 – August 1945
  • P6 – Originally UK Forces Book Club – November 1942 then Pelican A108 – December 1942
  • P7 – Originally UK Pelican A71 – July 1942
  • P8 – Originally UK Forces Book Club – April 1943 then Pelican A121 – August 1943
  • P9 – Originally UK Forces Book Club – September 1943 then Pelican A124 – November 1943
  • P14 – Originally UK Pelican A43 – May 1939
  • P16 – Originally UK Pelican A78 – December 1940
  • P21 – Originally UK Services Edition SE18 – 1945 then Classic L1 – January 1946
  • P22 – Originally UK Pelican A23 – February 1938

Bizarrely two of the above had also passed through the American Penguin numbering before reappearing as American Pelicans, P7 had already been 507 (1942) but this change seems highly sensible as it is not a work of fiction, whilst P21 had first appeared in the USA as 613 (November 1946). Quite why The Odyssey moved from the fiction main series to the factual Pelicans, becoming by the way the only American Pelican Classic almost twenty years before the UK business came up with this series name is a mystery as it seems to make no sense. After 1948 the rights to the EV Rieu translation of The Odyssey were not part of the transfer of intellectual property so when Mentor came to reprint the now renumbered M21 they used a different translator, W H D Rouse, where it became the first Mentor Classic and went through 47 reprints by 1976 including at least one renumbering ending up as ME2519. All the other P series Pelicans were simply reprinted unchanged apart from the P becoming an M for Mentor although later on Mentor introduced sub categories so for example P13 ‘Thomas Jefferson on Democracy’ became M13 when first reprinted and then this was later changed to MD13.

The first four books published as Mentor from March 1948 were actually initially indicated on the cover as Pelican Mentor to help inform the general public regarding the change of name before dropping the Pelican part when they came to be reprinted. Enoch and Waybright also did this with the much more prolific main series as it morphed into Signet only in this case seventeen new books and a small number of reprints bore the imprint of Penguin Signet for a few months. I haven’t yet found any evidence of reprinted American Pelican titles being listed as Pelican Mentor, only the four new books appear to have had that designation. It is worth noting that the few books originally published as Penguin but reprinted as Penguin Signet and then later simply as Signet, which include 615 Lady into Fox, command far higher prices as the Penguin Signet reprint version than as either the Penguin or Signet versions alone. The four Pelican Mentor titles are:

  • M26 American Essays by Charles B Shaw – March 1948
  • M27 Biography of the Earth by George Gamow – April 1948
  • M28 Science and the Modern World by A.N. Whitehead – May 1948
  • M29 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by J.W. Johnson – June 1948

As can be seen the covers feature bold designs, so much more enticing to their target American audience than the simple blue and white that would be the trademark of the UK Pelicans for decades. It was the use of full colour laminated covers, especially on the main series, that would be one of the primary falling out points between Penguin Books Inc in the USA and Allen Lane back in the UK, where typographic covers would reign supreme as the Penguin identity for many years to come. Although it was almost certainly tax difficulties between the two countries that ultimately prompted the split in the end.

Interestingly New American Library was bought out and became part of Penguin Publishing Company in 1987 neatly bringing the whole enterprise full circle. But confusingly there is also an Irish publishing company that calls itself Mentor Books which started in 1979 and specialises in educational works but has nothing to do with the American company which predates them by thirty one years and was well established by the time the Irish firm started