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

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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

The Old Man of the Moon – Shen Fu

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Very little is known about Shen Fu other than what he said in his book ‘Six Records of a Floating Life’ written in 1809 in China, of which only four sections were ever actually published in the 1870’s, the other two were either lost in the intervening decades or were never actually completed. Nothing definite is known of him after his book was written but he is believed to have died around 1825. What is known is that he was born in 1763 and married in 1780 to a cousin Chen Yun and earned his living as a governmental private secretary. The extract I have, entitled ‘The Old Man of the Moon’ by Penguin for this book, is largely from the first of the four surviving sections ‘Wedded Bliss’ and covers his life with Yun from their first meeting to her tragic death twenty three years later. The title of the complete book is presumed to come from the works of the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai—“Ah, this floating life, like a dream…True happiness is so rare!” Whilst the title chosen by Penguin for this selection is a quote from about halfway through the book itself:

“People say that marriages are arranged by The Old Man of the Moon”, “said Yun. “He has already pulled us together in this life, and in the next we will have to depend on him too. Why don’t we have a picture of him painted so that we can worship him?”

What comes out most if the enduring love between the couple and his admiration for her skill in embroidery amongst other things. Initially their marriage was happy and they had two children and the book is full of simple pleasures that they enjoyed together such as sitting watching the moon at night whilst drinking wine and talking about poetry and art. But money worries overtook them especially after Shen Fu lost his job and resorted to opening up part of their house as a shop to sell his paintings and when that was not enough their possessions also were sold. Unfortunately Yun managed to get on the wrong side of her parents in law and they determined not to see her again, which along with the poverty the couple had been reduced to meant they had to move away leaving the children behind. Yun already had been ill, probably due to the stress she was in, and whilst she did make somewhat of a recovery in their exile in a better environment than they had living near Shen Fu’s parents she would relapse and die by the end of the book.

It’s a sad tale, lifted by the evident joy they had with each other before Shen Fu lost his job and difficulties engulfed them and I’m really glad I read it. Apparently the other surviving parts of ‘Six Records of a Floating Life’ are happier, and it is really good that the manuscript was discovered on a second hand book stall and recognised as a significant work by the brother in law of Wang Tao, who ran Shen Bao (a newspaper in Shanghai). Wang Tao published the manuscript in 1877 and it was an immediate hit.

Count On Me – Ann Cavlovic

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This, the first novel by Canadian author Ann Cavlovic, is something I’ve been reading as effectively a book proof although it doesn’t have any indication that it is a copy from before the official release date printed within it. The book was published on 1st October last year in its native Canada and I’ve had a copy since September, but most of us here in the UK have to wait until the 8th January 2026 to be able to get a copy. Originally I planned to write this blog before the book was released in Canada but as that would have been four months before its availability in the UK it has been delayed until now, a few days before its release here.

I initially struggled to get into the book, probably as the scenario is so far from my own experience but as the story developed I came to enjoy the book more and more. Without giving too much away we learn of brother and sister Tia and Tristan whose mother really needs to go into a care home and their father isn’t far off being incapable of looking after himself. Tia has problems of her own, recently divorced and with a one year old daughter she is struggling to look after her child and hold down her job and dealing with her parents problems as well just becomes too much. Tristan in the guise of caring for their parents is actually pushing their father out of the family home so that he and his partner can take over and is financially abusing the joint bank account which he has access to via power of attorney. He has also taken and/or sold various items from the family home along with his mothers jewellery which had been promised to Tia and taken out a $20,000 loan against their security. How Tia confronts him about this and starts to put things right whilst still managing to look after her daughter as a single mother and all the issues that position alone puts her into is the plot of the book. Reading that back it sounds like a dark nightmare but the book has enough lightness and humour to make the plot still enjoyable as you watch Tia struggle and ultimately get legal and personal assistance to counteract her brother’s attempt to grab everything including the house.

The book is written in the first person from Tia’s perspective as she tries to make sense of what is going on and protect their parents from Tristan and his girlfriend, who seem determined to gain as much a possible and get the parents out of the way into homes as soon as he can without regard for the best outcome for them, only the way that suits him the most. After initially having problems getting into the book I’m glad I persevered and by mid way I was cheering Tia on as she fought for the best resolution for her parents and to stop Tristan riding roughshod over not only their wishes but the rest of their lives as he tried to get them into the cheapest possible home regardless of the awful reviews the place had received and the general manipulation that he has imposed over them. It is Cavlovic’s first novel, although not by any means her first piece of fiction, you can find more about her at her website.

Many thanks to River Street Writing for supplying my review copy.

The Quest for Corvo – A.J.A. Symons

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Following on from last weeks Christmas book of a hundred letters from the somewhat mysterious Frederick Rolfe, who styled himself as Baron Corvo, to publisher John Lane, this book tries to get to understand the man as much as is possible. Symons had developed his interest in Corvo following a visit to Christopher Millard in 1925 when Millard asked him if he had read ‘Hadrian the Seventh’, a book that Symons had never heard of by an equally unknown author Fr. Rolfe. Unusually Millard lent him his copy, he rarely let his books out of his home, and Symons read the novel and then in astonishment read it again. How could such an extraordinary book have escaped his attention and why had he never heard of the author, presumably a Catholic priest by his name, writing about a poor Englishman who unexpectedly rises to the papacy after the cardinals are unable to agree on a candidate amongst them at the conclave. This is theoretically possible as there is nothing in the rules around the selection of a Pope that says he has to be one of the cardinals tasked with making the choice. I haven’t yet read ‘Hadrian the Seventh’ myself but Symons’ enthusiasm for it suggests that I will hunt down a copy and read it before long, just checked and it is available as a Penguin Classic with the author given as Frederick Baron Corvo (Fr. Rolfe) and here we get to one of the problems with Symons study of the author, his regular changing of the name he is known as depending on circumstance. For consistency I’m going to normally refer to him as Corvo as that is how I first came across him and it is the name he is nowadays best known as.

It soon became clear to Symons that Corvo was dead but not long ago and many of his correspondents and also his brother were still alive and this is where Symons starts. The biography is unusual in that for the first two fifths of the narrative it is told as almost a detective story with Symons following leads and describing how he progressed from one to another rather than a finished biography where we would get a fully researched story from the beginning. I rather enjoyed this style and missed it when it was abandoned around the time Corvo first met John Lane, but as Symons explains it was getting rather too complex by then with more sources becoming available and a fuller picture appearing of the strange Baron Corvo a man who seemingly cultivated enemies everywhere, usually from the very people who were trying to help him and indeed had helped him until he took umbrage at some perceived slight or other. The following passage gives some idea of the man Symons was starting to reveal.

The picture you get from the numerous letters included in this book is a man probably suffering from an un-diagnosed persecution mania, nothing that happens is ever his fault it is entirely caused by malignant outside influences and his ever growing list of enemies who are determined to keep him down. He also has a gross overestimation of his own works worth, for example whilst living rent free in Wales he starts work on a series of paintings and banners for the local catholic church, originally as payment for his free lodging but gradually he ‘forgets’ the charity he is living off and demands payment for his work and what’s more the sum required is far above the value of what he has done at £1,000 (well over £100,000 today) when he is offered far less, the still generous £50 (£5,300) he refuses and starts spreading malicious stories regarding his then benefactor in the local press. The sum of £1,000 occurs several times in this book regarding Corvo’s valuation of his works and sometimes he manages to convince others and uses this figure as surety against loans which he has no means of paying back. To know Corvo even for a short time would often prove expensive and end up at the receiving end of vitriolic usually libellous letters.

This paints the man in a negative way, and he regularly deserves it, but by all accounts before the inevitable break down of a friendship he would be a fascinating companion with much apparent erudition whilst not able to understand the limits of his own learning. For instance he once agreed to work on a Greek translation whilst having little knowledge of the language and intended to drag the work through textbooks and piece together what he understood to be the meaning. The Rubaiyat mentioned in the previous blog entry apparently did actually appear but sold badly as it was a poor translation, unsurprisingly as Corvo knew absolutely no Persian and yet still undertook the translation.

Corvo died in Venice in 1913, where he was living on credit and piling up even more debts, a lot of which were settled by his brother when he came out to oversee his burial. He was without doubt a fascinating character which I would have loved to have met, whilst remembering to never lend him money, and this book by Symons does its best to be fair to the man showing his positive aspects whilst not shying away from his self destructive negative features.

Without Prejudice – Frederick William Rolfe (Baron Corvo)

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Another of the Allen Lane Christmas books is my featured work for Christmas week. This time the book consists of one hundred letters from the self styled Baron Corvo to John Lane, the founder of The Bodley Head Press. It was sent as a very limited gift of just six hundred privately printed copies in 1963 as can be seen from the enclosed sheet of paper from Allen Lane which is reproduced below.

The paper for the book is hand-made with the distinctive ragged edges that such sheets often have if not trimmed which gives the book a lovely look and feel and it would be a pleasure to read is it wasn’t for one issue which I have mentioned before about another book. That is that the very helpful notes are all combined at the end so the reader is forced to use two bookmarks or repeatedly thumb through the pages looking for information. That these notes are necessary is due to the elusiveness of Corvo himself and the fact that what he did write about himself is not to be trusted, so you are regularly searching for context within the letters.

Frederick Rolfe aka ‘Baron Corvo’ was a strange and difficult to pin down person. He claimed the title from time he spent in Italy with an Italian nobleman who apparently granted him the name Baron Corvo but this is probably not true. That he had talent as a writer and artist is however undisputed but often his abrasive and wildly changing personality caused conflicts with those whom he most needed for support and he definitely endured considerable periods of hardship. Looking back over more than a century he is fascinating but not somebody I would have wanted to have anything to do with.

The book includes two of the letters as facsimiles, including the example below where you can see his bold handwriting but also his odd choice of red ink for correspondence. Indeed Corvo used a wide selection of coloured inks for his letters and if all the letters had been in facsimile the book would have been a positive rainbow.

But let’s get to a proper selection of the letters which concern initially possible printing of more of Corvo’s ‘Stories Toto Told Me’ tales, several of which had been well received when published earlier in volumes seven and eleven of ‘The Yellow Book’, which was a Bodley Head i.e. John Lane publication. Over the years a possible illustrated edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was also mooted and the letters become more concerned with that. As the book is rare I have included a few letters so you can get to have a feel for the man, beginning with this letter chasing payment, and all too familiar theme in all of Corvo’s correspondence, from July 1896.

A year later, July 1897, and this is the second half of a letter which is happier in that he had received payment, which he had then given away principally in order to annoy the priest that gave him the money. I will go into more about what had happened here and some of the basis of his feuding with religious authorities next week when I dig more into the man behind these letters.

By May the following year Corvo was still in dispute with the church in Wales, but is also still trying to follow up what is happening with his Toto stories and is getting increasingly frustrated with Lane’s lack of replies to his numerous letters. It should be noted that a long silence from Corvo would only be a matter of weeks as he was a prolific sender of letters.

The next letters I have chosen from the hundred in the book are three years later, from 1901 where we see the first of numerous chases for what is happening with the Rubaiyat but also in the second one here a firm statement of his intention to remain private. It is this secrecy, and indeed the choice of different names he would use not just in print but whilst living in locations where he wasn’t already known, that makes tracking down Corvo and what he was actually doing from time to time so difficult.

The start of the next letter, December 1902 has the familiar complaints of lack of response and more chasing of the Rubaiyat, I don’t think this was ever published however. In Lane’s defence he was known to be poor at replying to letters and the sheer number he was getting from Corvo was likely to make him even less prone to keep up a two way correspondence.

Finally I have chosen this letter from 1903 which is one of the sources of the title of this book, he uses the phrase ‘without prejudice’ several times whilst in disputes on various occasions.

So there it is, an unusual book for Christmas giving an insight into a distinctly unusual person published fifty years after his death. But who was Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo, aka Frank English, aka Frederick Austin, aka Fr Rolfe (giving the deliberate impression he was in the priesthood), aka ‘A Crab Maid’ etc. well more will be revealed next week when I review ‘A Quest for Corvo’ by AJA Symons.