Month: January 2019

Daphnis and Chloe – Longus

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

It wasn’t long after starting reading this short book that I really wanted to slap both the protagonists. It’s a love story starting with two orphan babies that are separately found on the island of Lesbos with mysterious items that imply some history or maybe a fate from the gods for them however this seems to be largely forgotten as the story progresses. The two children are raised by families a short distance apart and Daphnis ends up as a goatherd whilst Chloe is a shepherdess and they grow up looking after their flocks together and slowly fall in love. What made them so frustrating though was their total naivety regarding sex, they look after goats and sheep for goodness sake surely they have noticed something over the years?

The book was written around 200AD, presumably on Lesbos, by a writer called Longus about whom nothing at all is known. There appear to be no other works by him and he has left no trace in history other than this short novel. Nobody even knows if Longus was his name or a even a real person or just something that has become attributed to the story. Through the tale the two of them suffer various calamities from being abducted by an invading army (Chloe) to falling in a pit dug to catch wolves (Daphnis) as they slowly progress from looking at the other one naked and getting all soppy (both of them) to trying kissing (oh this takes them ages to get round to) and very slowly finding out about sex (again both as it’s that sort of book)

20190129 daphnis and chloe 1

The main reason that I chose to read this though was to look again at translation and how styles have changed over the decades and this book is the only one where I have two different translations both printed by Penguin books but 55 years apart and where both translations are still in print. Above is the cover of the 2011 translation by Phiroze Vasunia when it was separated out as a single book in 2016 and below the original 1956 translation by Paul Turner.

20190129 daphnis and chloe 2

In ‘The Penguin Classics Book’ by Henry Elliot (review to come later) he writes

The 1968 reprint of Turner’s translation carried a notice “Former Penguin editions of this third century Greek novel, the prototype for all Arcadian love stories were we regret to say bowdlerised. Paul Turner has added the missing passages for this new edition on which the text is unexpurgated”

Now as I only have the 1956 original I cannot say what was put back in for the edition of 1968 but frankly the tale is not exactly controversial, certainly by today’s standards. In stating that I have to assume that the 2011 edition is not similarly censored but I cannot imagine that it would be. As I said at the start the story is so unrelated to sex that it defies belief for a large part of the book.

Along the way through the story they get increasing bad relationship advice, partly from men who want to have Chloe themselves and would be very happy to see Daphnis out of the way. It’s not really a give away to tell you that they do eventually get together, in the last few pages of the book and even their original parents are also revealed at this time. It is almost certainly the first example of a romance story and something that Mills and Boon would be very happy with nowadays, there are even pirates…

It’s been a year

On By bookramblings142In Book TalesLeave a comment

I have kept this weekly blog now for just over a year and I thought I would take the opportunity to look back at the entries and see if it can give me some ideas as to which books to talk about next. To my surprise the top five liked entries as I write this are all related to Scotland

20190122 it's been a year 1

William McGonagall wrote excruciatingly bad verse about Scotland and the people there and was a proud resident of Dundee, eventually Dundee has become proud of him as well. Iain Banks was another Scotsman through and through and the book I reviewed was his homage to the land of his birth. Shaun Bythell’s book was one of the first things I wrote about so his diary of keeping a Scottish bookshop going has had a whole year to accumulate its tally of likes whilst I only wrote about Elizabeth Cummings book about Scottish artist Sir Robin Philipson a couple of weeks ago and it has already made it to number five. You may have noticed I skipped Robert Service, he was also Scottish although found fame as a poet in Canada however I left him to last as he highlights another trend in popular posts here and that is poetry.

This is even more obvious when I look at the next five entries…

20190122 it's been a year 2

The Frogs is a classical Greek play in verse, Persian Poets is clearly about poetry and Under Milk Wood is a poetic masterpiece by Dylan Thomas, this makes half of the top ten liked entries are about poetry although there is nowhere near that percentage represented in the total number of essays I have produced so far.

The remaining two are interesting. The Royal Tour is a beautifully illustrated diary of a cruise around a lot of the then British Empire and Uncle Jim is a bit of a sleeper as it deals with the early output of fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett but without mentioning him in the title so you had to read the article to find out.

There are other statistics available that don’t display on the front page so aren’t visible to readers of the blog and from those I can see that Deep in the Forest – Estonian Folk Tales is looked at more often than any other entry and it is viewed from all over the world, as opposed to my other Estonian review of the Apothacary Melchior books which also gets quite a few readers but 90% of these are in Estonia or Finland. Only one entry has not been read by anybody according to the statistics available and that is The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Sorry Will although I have all your plays several times I don’t think you are going to be featured here again.

So what does all this tell me? Well poetry is definitely popular here and that’s good as I also like poetry and have quite a few more poets to write about, one of which will probably be in the next four weeks. Bearing in mind the Scottish bias as well I suppose I had better get the volume of Robert Burns I have from 1946 out and reread that soon.

The Frogs by Aristophanes was a surprise hit, to me at least, so we will see how next weeks entry, which is also classical Greek, goes down. I have a lot of ‘the Classics’ and am also planning a review of a book dealing with the subject of what makes a classic in the next month or so. Art and Design has also been popular and again this is something I have a lot about in my library so expect more of those subjects in the coming year.

But is there anything you would like me to write about? Not specific books, as according to the rules I set myself I have to own the title to write about it so you would have to be really lucky to hit one of the 6,500 titles on my shelves, but general subjects. I haven’t done much on Travel and Exploration but what has been done has been generally well received, should I do more? Any suggestions would be good either as a comment below or as a message through the site.

The Temple of Flora

On By bookramblings142In Book Tales1 Comment

One of the most ambitious books ever printed was a publishing disaster twice over but also one of the most beautiful books about flowers that exists, even if in far fewer numbers than was intended by either of its publishers.

20190115 temple of flora 1The sheer size of the book can be glimpsed from the clamshell box that my Folio Society edition comes in. The book weighs in at 27½ lbs (12½ kg) so is definitely in literatures heavyweight division and at 22½” x 18¼” (57cm x 46½cm) is a true giant of a volume. The original was the brainchild of Robert Thornton in the second half of the 18th century and it rapidly attracted royal patronage from not just Queen Charlotte (wife of George III) but also her son the Prince of Wales and other members of the British royal family.

20190115 temple of flora 4

He sold it as a subscription edition from 1797 at a guinea per part (roughly £165 in today’s money) and there were planned to be lots of parts and he did keep going for several years. Thornton’s ambition was to create a botanical book that would be a National honour

which in Point of Magnificence is intended to exceed all other Works of a similar Nature on the Continent.

it was never to be finished…

20190115 temple of flora 5

but what he did get produced is magnificent, the flower paintings are of the finest detail and there were plans to have far more than the twenty nine that were ultimately produced before Thornton was driven into bankruptcy by the sheer scale of the venture. It has to be said that the text chosen is odd, lots of long and rambling poems rather than a scholarly text which would have been preferable in my view but it is the pictures that makes this incredible book.

20190115 temple of flora 6

There are long sections of text which presumably were intended to be broken up by the missing paintings but when you do get to the pictures the text doesn’t matter; what is important is the art, and in his way Thornton was trying to match the beauty of the flowers with literature which he perceived as equally beautiful. The fact that to modern readers the poems simply aren’t very good doesn’t mean that I don’t get a huge amount of pleasure from the book even if it is so unwieldy to actually get out and read.

20190115 temple of flora 7

The craftsmanship that went into each painting was unbelievable expensive, Thornton commissioned the best engravers and also used the new techniques of mezzotint and aquatint which allowed a true wash of colour to be reproduced rather than relying on cross-hatched engraving which had been the standard method up to that time. Quite often his artists would use all three techniques on the same plate which vastly increased the cost especially as after printing each print was hand coloured so every page is unique to the volume that it appears in.

20190115 temple of flora 8

You can properly judge the size of the book by the picture above which has a twelve inch (30cm) ruler resting on the open pages. The Folio Society edition that I have is the first time anyone had tried to reprint the book at its original size with all the plates in colour and as I hinted at in the opening sentence even the publishing experts of the Folio Society couldn’t make this book pay. They bought an original edition at auction and took it apart in order to do high resolution scans of each image before finally publishing this massive undertaking in 2008 in a planned edition of 1980 copies. The books were quarter bound in Nigerian goatskin with cloth on board sides with the front cover printed with a design taken from one of the pictures “The Night Blowing Cercus’.

20190115 temple of flora 3

Fortunately for the Society with fine limited edition books like this they bind them as customers place their order as orders did not flow in. Three and a half years later in June 2011 the Production Director wrote to all purchasers of the book explaining that the edition was being cut. Far from 1980 copies just 600 actually got bound and even then they were left with books to sell from the severely truncated limitation. The remaining 1380 sets of flower prints were sold off in a buckram and cloth portfolio as an un-numbered edition. Presumably the remainder of the pages including the five decorative (non floral) plates were pulped.

20190115 temple of flora 2

I doubt anyone will attempt to print this book at it’s original scale ever again. Collins had a go in 1951 but their edition is smaller and only twelve of the plates were colour. The Folio Society edition includes two extra loose plates intending for framing, Tulips and the Egyptian Lily both of which are shown above as they are bound within the book.

Enter The Saint – Leslie Charteris

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

Just before Christmas I purchased a collection of ‘Saint’ books partly as a nostalgia feast. I had grown up a small boy watching Roger Moore as Simon Templar aka The Saint on television; a series that eventually had almost 120 episodes and ran from 1962 to 1969, so I only saw the later ones unless earlier episodes were repeated. It was through playing The Saint that Moore was offered the role of James Bond, a similar action hero, although the Saint ran his own ‘organisation’ and was more of a Robin Hood character being happy to use criminal means to get the results he wants. The Saint also pre-dates Bond by twenty five years with his first appearance in ‘The Saint Meets the Tiger’ dating from 1928 whilst ‘Casino Royale’ which marks Bond’s debut was published in 1953.

20190108 enter the saint

The collection I bought was a bit of a bargain at £20 plus postage for thirty books, half of which were hardbacks (only two with dust wrappers) and most printed in the 1950’s. In later years Charteris was dismissive about Meets the Tiger and regarded Enter The Saint as the first ‘proper’ Saint book; an attitude that was followed in the most recent reprint of the titles in 2013/4 by Mulholland which left out Meets the Tiger completely so that is why I am starting my reading of the books with this one. My copy is the 1957 hardback from Charteris’s long time British publisher Hodder and Stoughton, it’s missing its wrapper and has clearly been well read in the sixty years since it was printed so looks nothing like the edition I have used to illustrate this article as it has plain blue board covers (not very photogenic). The picture is actually a beautiful first edition copy currently for sale by Lucius Books in York for £2940, so not a copy I’ll be purchasing any time soon but lovely to see. Below is the title page from my copy featuring the calling card of the Saint.

20190108 enter the saint 2

In total there were fifty Saint books printed in the UK during Charteris’s lifetime although only the first thirty six were written by him, after that numerous other authors (including science fiction writer Harry Harrison) actually wrote the books, with Charteris mainly reducing his role to editor although his name continued to be the main (and sometimes only) one on the cover. All but five of the ones I got last year are from the first thirty six. Most of the books are collections of novellas or short stories and Enter the Saint is a good example consisting of three novellas.

I – The Man who Was Clever – 67 pages

MR “SNAKE” GANNING was neither a great criminal nor a pleasant character, but he is interesting because he was the first victim of the organisation led by the man known as the Saint, which was destined in the course of a few months to spread terror through the underworld of London – that ruthless association of reckless young men, brilliantly led, who worked on the side of the law and who were yet outside the law.

So begins the first tale in this book and quite an introduction it is and within three pages Snake had duly become that first victim. This however was just a minor diversion for the Saint from the main events of this story. He is working to disrupt a cocaine smuggling business run by a crooked gambling club owner and whilst at it help out a young man who had become a victim of their illegal casino to the tune of thousands of pounds.  This he duly achieves with a mixture of guile and outright violence whichever is appropriate at the time. The Saint is a highly accomplished and powerful fighter but not above throwing a chair to improve the odds when throwing a punch is out of range.

II – The Policeman with Wings – 57 pages

The second story provides more of a leading role for one of Templar’s ‘associates’, Roger Conway, part time manager of the Golden Eagle Hotel in St. Marychurch near Torquay in Devon. That he is also a part time member of the Saint’s organisation is not so well known. Roger had met a young lady in Torquay who told him an odd tale about her uncle. He had recently been offered a lot of money for his house and when he turned it down a shot had been fired at him in the garden and the brakes of his car tampered with. He had been driven off by a policeman a few days ago, ostensibly to give a statement, but policeman, car and uncle had vanished and the police had confirmed that none of their officers had visited him to do any such thing. Why does somebody want the house so much and is the young lady safe now that she is the only person living there? Cue dramatic car chases, kidnapping, diamonds and the appearance of a very nasty piece of work known as Spider, for such a short novella it certainly packs a lot in.

III – The Lawless Lady – 59 pages

This story features another of the Saint’s lieutenants, in this case Dicky Tremayne, and also gives some idea as to the long term planning that the Saint was willing to use to put a criminal out of business whilst at the same time obtaining a significant sum for charity less his 10% for ‘professional fees’. This operation is something that Dicky has been working on for a year and we join the action just a few days before the main crime is to be committed. The plot that Tremayne and Templar are to counter is quite ingenious; the gang led by Audrey Perowne has set up a fake private cruise for a group of wealthy businessmen, Dicky has been working for the gang across Europe gathering potential victims. Their plan is to take the men and their wives, who would of course all be looking to outdo one another with the level of jewellery on display whilst the men are ready to spend big in Marseilles and Monte Carlo part way through the trip and then rob and dump them somewhere remote. Back in 1930 this may well have been a valid option but nowadays with modern communication methods this really has dated badly. Nevertheless can Dicky maintain his cover within the gang and how will the Saint turn the tables? It’s all very exciting…

Charteris himself was an interesting character, born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in 1907 in Singapore (then a British colony) he was educated at a private school in the north of England and went to Kings College Cambridge but left after a year when he started to get published. In 1926 he changed his surname by deed-poll to Charteris. and in 1932 he moved to America, or at least tried to, but being half Chinese he was blocked from residency by the Oriental Exclusion Act so had to keep leaving when his six month visa expired all this whilst working on films and radio series about The Saint. At the end of 1942 a law was passed in the US specifically so that Charteris and his daughter Patricia could live in America and in 1946 he became an American citizen. Near the end of his life he moved back to England with his fourth wife and died aged 85 in 1993.

I’m going to continue working my way through the other books I bought at the same time as the year goes on although unless one strikes me as particularly interesting I expect this will be the only time I write about The Saint on this blog. Seek him out if you like uncomplicated thrillers now that he is available again in quantity for the first time since the mid 1980’s although do bear in mind that the early books are very much of their time and feel rather dated now. Charteris was himself well aware of this and kept intending to do rewrites but in the end decided to leave them as period pieces.

Robin Philipson – Elizabeth Cumming

On By bookramblings142In Reviews2 Comments

This is the first of my ‘what I got for Christmas’ posts and this book was a wonderful surprise from some very good friends. I first saw Robin’s art at their home and loved it straight away so that I have bought several pieces over the ensuing years, some of which I am using to illustrate this essay rather than images from the book itself.

20190101 Robin Philipson 1

Sir Robin Philipson RA RSA FRSE RSW to give him his proper title was a major name in Scottish art through the second half of the 20th century; not only as a creator of beautiful works but as a teacher for many decades at the Edinburgh College of Art. There have been a couple of biographies before, along with pamphlets to accompany exhibitions, but this is easily the most comprehensive biography so far. Cummings has spoken to lots of members of Robin’s family including his widow Diana and also his nephew who gave me this lovely book.

20190101 Robin Philipson 2

As this was a Christmas present it is appropriate to start with a couple of Robin’s Christmas cards on my walls. What can be immediately seen is his bold use of colour, as Dr Cumming says in her book.

…colour was always a principle tool in Robin’s art, and it evolved throughout his career; he was one of Scotland’s major colourists. It was this as much as technical experiment which drove all his work; whether easel painting, printmaking or his involvement in textile enterprises…

Robin produced a Christmas card every year from the late 1960’s, not only painting the original but also printing the cards, en masse they look fantastic, I only have three but hope to add others to my collection as time goes on.

The book’s cover picture is entitled Brenda Spring Portrait, she was his first wife, they married in 1949 a couple of years after he took up his first role as lecturer at the Edinburgh College, and he painted her several times. The Summer and Winter portraits are also included in the book along with a very interesting study for the Spring portrait. One of the joys of this volume is the inclusion of studies for works along with pictures of Robin in his studio which gives an opportunity to see how he went about some of his pieces.

The book is split into several sections, part one looks at his early life and how he came to be in Scotland in the first place; he was born in Cumbria in 1916. Part two is the longest and takes us from starting teaching and his marriage to Brenda, to his discovery of the joys of print making and the introduction of three of his main themes, cock fighting, kings and cathedrals.

20190101 Robin Philipson 4

My largest piece and one that hangs above my desk can be seen above, limited to 50 and signed by Robin it is also my favourite in it’s bold use of colour and dynamism of the subject.

20190101 Robin Philipson 5

The book is copiously illustrated and includes a significant number of works that are held in private collections so not generally seen, it also gives me a chance to roughly date the art I have collected as style and themes develop through the book as we move through Robin’s career.

He designed the posters and programme covers for the Edinburgh Festival in both 1958 and 1959, the book includes examples of both programmes and in my collection I have an original (and highly fragile) poster for 1959 which is a really good example of his style at the end of the 1950’s.

Part three takes us from the early death of Brenda from a brain tumour in 1960 which led to a period where very few works were produced and those that did appear are dark and angry in tone to meeting Thora Clyne who was to become his second wife in 1962. This seems to have led to a blossoming of Robin’s art and he also took up the appointment of head of Drawing and Painting in the early 1960’s so became very busy.

20190101 Robin Philipson 3
I have a couple of versions of Peasant, which dates from 1958 and are different sizes, only one of which is signed, I really like this happy character and he also hangs above my desk where I am writing this.

He did manage to fit in a trip to Colorado in the summer of 1963 as a visiting Professor of Art in Colorado. During this time he became influenced by native paintings and also Mexican churches, there is a truly beautiful painting of a yellow altar towards the end of that section.

The fourth section of the books sees another theme emerging in Robin’s art as we complete the 1960’s and that is depictions of crucifixion. This is a logical extension of his works depicting church interiors , specifically rose windows, and the altars he had started painting in the early part of the decade. Again Cummings takes us through the change in his art against the changes happening in his life and explains how they fit together.

The fifth part covers most of the 1970’s, from his surgery for colonic cancer whilst on a trip to France to study tapestries through his divorce from Thora and marriage to Diana. This was a period not only of great creativity and more new themes to his work such as ‘human kind’ which depict inter-racial couples in various settings to his numerous paintings of ‘women of pleasure’; but also of much greater recognition in the world outside of the Scottish Art scene. He became president of the Royal Scottish Academy, a post he held for a decade and from that a fellow of the Royal Academy in London. In 1976 he was knighted for services to art and all whilst heading up the Drawing and Painting department at the Edinburgh College of Art. He would continue to have bouts of illness throughout this period but his workload and artistic output hardly seemed to let up.

The final section deals with the last fourteen years of Robin’s life up to his death in 1992, this was still a highly busy and productive time with yet another theme to his art appearing, the wonderfully delicate poppy still life paintings.

20190101 Robin Philipson 7

I have a couple of these prints, both signed, as my representations of this period and there are three originals reproduced in the book with various backgrounds which demonstrate his total mastery of colour. Sadly the cancer first detected in the 1970’s was to claim him just when it looked like he was reaching another peak in his creativity. I have more pictures by him than I have used in this short review and am always looking for more to add to my small collection especially now I have seen some of the works in this beautifully illustrated book.

All in all this is a major retrospective of the life and work of a man who became very important figure in Scottish art for several decades and hopefully it will help raise his profile again twenty five years after his death. The main body of the book (excluding chronology, notes and index) is 138 pages long, sixty nine of which are made up of full page (and indeed double page) illustrations and a large proportion of the text pages also have a picture or two on them, this really is a magnificent review of Robin’s works and for the most part is extremely readable. My one criticism is the impression you get that Cummings wants to prove she has done her research which leads to whole paragraphs which seem to consist of nothing but lists of names and dates which you hit like boulders in the stream of an otherwise flowing tale. Having said that I very much enjoyed the book and will finish this overview with my only Philipson original, a small pastel still life.

20190101 Robin Philipson 6