Month: January 2024

42 – edited by Kevin John Davies

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Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.

Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

OK, I haven’t spent fifteen years on this book as it only came out in 2023 but sometimes it felt like it, which is odd as Adams is one of the funniest writers I know of but this book seems to have things included just because it seemed a good idea at the time and the material was too hand. Things like his old school reports, although why on Earth Douglas still had those is beyond me, mine were binned years ago. Lots of the handwritten documents are transcribed, even if they are perfectly legible, but annoyingly the notes for Douglas’s first Doctor Who script, ‘The Pirate Planet, are not transcribed and I really struggled to read those so could have done with a typed version. The book looks great though with hundreds of documents from the life and career of Douglas Adams reproduced in pretty well chronological order so you can follow his development as a writer and also marvel at the mass of material represented here, the man doesn’t seem to have ever thrown anything away. From letters of apology to girlfriends to odd notes on ideas which may or may not have been used at some point to pages from scripts showing ideas being rejected or improved frankly it should have been more fascinating than I found it to be.

Douglas Adams was sadly taken from us at the age of just forty nine, dying of a heart attack whilst working out in gym so we never got to see what he would really have done with his unfinished work ‘The Salmon of Doubt’. It was intended to be the third Dirk Gently book but according to this volume it could have morphed into the sixth Hitch-Hikers novel. The problem with Adams was that he used to take an inordinate amount of time crafting each of his books or scripts and often would only actually complete something when absolutely forced to and as quoted in the posthumously published ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ which included what he had written so far along with various other articles by Adams and others.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Having said all I have earlier regarding the selection and sometimes presentation of what is included there is nevertheless much to enjoy in this book including a lot of not very well known material in the later sections detailing Adams’s work on the computer game Starship Titanic and his environmental endeavours with naturalist Mark Carwardine and also the charity Save the Rhino. Whilst I knew about and loved the radio programme, and book, he and Carwardine made called ‘Last Chance to See’, where they travelled the world looking for endangered animals I wasn’t aware before reading this of just how involved Adams had been with Save the Rhino. His involvement with rock band Pink Floyd was also a surprise and I would have loved to see the projected Millennium work outlined in this volume which I knew nothing about.

All in all this is probably a book for dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover and I’m sure I’ll enjoy reading sections again in the future but won’t attempt to read the whole thing again. It is also large (30cm x 21.7cm and 320 pages) and heavy (just over 1.8kg) so not a very comfortable book to hold, but it needs to be that big to reproduce the documents at mostly full size.

The editor certainly knows his stuff and worked on numerous projects with Adams over the years, from designing the Illustrated Hitch-Hikers Guide and directing for the BBC the documentary ‘The Making of the HItchhikers Guide along with a retrospective of the first thirty years of Doctor Who. The book is another crowd funded production by Unbound of which I have several examples now and will undoubtedly get more as they keep coming up with interesting production ideas.

Letters from Fairyland – Charles van Sandwyk

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Charles van Sandwyk was born in South Africa and raised in Canada; he taught himself calligraphy and intaglio printing as a teenager, his first self-published book appeared when he was just twenty, and won a national award. Since then his work has been archived by the National Library of Canada and rightly so as his art is truly beautiful. Van Sandwyk has produced illustrations for several Folio Society editions but this is the first one I have bought whilst taking advantage of the end of year half price sale they were running which meant that I only paid £25 rather than the £50 original. However having now got a copy I’m thinking about the ones I have missed, such as the limited edition of Alice in Wonderland which was published by The Folio Society to mark the 150th anniversary of the first edition and sold out rapidly. Sadly I can’t see me being able to obtain original books by Van Sandwyk as they are produced in tiny numbers and are mainly snapped up by collectors in Canada so the Folio Society editions will have to do.

The story goes that many years ago a young artist living in Canada received, out of the blue, a letter from a nine year old English girl, Miss Emma Gladstone. Emma had read some books about fairies which the artist had published and she was writing to ask his advice about the little people who she sometimes could see out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to invite the fairies to come and live in her garden, but she did not know how to make contact with them. The pull out letter is included in a folder, just the first of several items that can be taken from the book and examined by the reader and this is one of the many charms of this edition which includes the gorgeous Modigliani Neve paper that it is printed on which resembles a heavy duty watercolour paper and perfectly sets the beautiful illustrations.

The artist replied with a letter to Miss Gladstone and the book goes on to tell the story of how he had received a summons from the Royal High Secretary to the King of the Fairies, commanding him to paint His Majesty’s portrait; how he had shrunk in size and travelled to Fairyland in a coach drawn by a mouse, and everything that happened to him there. The first edition of the book was published in an strictly limited edition of 200 copies which Van Sandwyk presented to members of an exclusive club, the High Branch Society, which unfortunately I have been unable to find out anything about. The double page spread above includes the finished portrait and an envelope containing fairy money which was apparently Van Sandwyk’s payment. The Folio edition explains that it is an expanded version of this original volume being twice the length but even so it is a very short book being just twenty four pages long, excluding the individual pull out items and it was this very shortness that made me originally hesitate to purchase it as it worked out at just over £2 a page. But it is so lovely that I should have really have got it sooner and treated it as an art purchase rather than a book.

Sadly the Folio Society sale has obviously tipped a few others into making the purchase so the stock of this, the 2020 first edition in this form has now sold out. If this little book has piqued your interest in Van Sandwyk’s work as much as it has mine then you may find the following link useful, I certainly had a great deal of fun exploring other works by this wonderful artist.

Collecting Charles van Sandwyk Artist Books

I Hate and I Love – Catullus

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A collection of forty three poems by Gāius Valerius Catullus, a Roman poet born in 84 BCE and who died in 54 BCE, but in his short life he wrote a number of poems, 116 of which have survived to the present day. Penguin published a complete volume translated by Peter Whigham which I don’t possess however this selection from that larger volume is part of the Penguin Little Black Classics all of which I purchased when they came out. Catullus’s poetry is normally categorised nowadays into three main subject types, those dealing with his friends, those about a woman he loves but refers to only as Lesbia rather than her real name which was probably Clodia Metelli and the rest are largely described as invective or works attacking other people, which was quite a popular style at the time. This volume is mainly poems in the ‘friends’ or ‘Lesbia’ categories with just seven of the ‘invective’ style represented although over fifty of the surviving works are categorised as ‘invective’. An example of the invective style is poem 43 which attacks the girlfriend of Formianus.

Apologies but photographing the poems without breaking the spine of the book has led to the distortions in the images. The next poem that I want to select to illustrate the tone of Catullus is one which describes his desire to travel now that the warmer weather is here. I have deliberately selected three of the shorter works although few are what we would regard as long, but the descriptions of personal experiences and desires is what marks Catullus as one of the writers known collectively as poetae nov or ‘new poets’ as poetry moved away from the epic heroic style favoured before then. The works of Catullus were almost lost to us completely as a single manuscript was found in the Chapter Library of Verona around seven hundred years ago. This document was copied twice before it was again mislaid and one of the copies was in its turn copied twice before being lost. So the 116 poems have come down the centuries due to these three surviving precious documents.

That one feels very modern with Catullus looking forward to a holiday in Turkey and hoping to meet up with friends there. For my third example it has to be one of the famous Lesbia poems although not the best known, which is poem 5, as that extends over a page in this edition so is difficult to include here. But poem 51 expresses his desire for Lesbia and how he feels when in her company although it is worth pointing out that poem 85 refers to her husband so Catullus was probably one of several men she had affairs with, including Rufus the subject of invective poem number 77 written after Catullus found out about their relationship.

A few others are quite ribald so I don’t feel I can put them on this blog. Although I have certainly enjoyed reading the collection it does nowadays probably need to come with a warning regarding adult themes, The title by the way is from the opening line of the very short poem 85, which is just two lines long:

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how.
I do not know. I only feel it, and I’m torn in two

Catallus 85 translated by Peter Whigham

The Madman’s Library – Edward Brooke-Hitching

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In July last year I wrote about the second book published by Edward Brooke-Hitching, ‘The Phantom Atlas‘, this more recent volume, first published in 2020 was a gift I received least Christmas, Brooke-Hitching is the son of an antiquarian book dealer and his love of books shines through in this guide to some of the oddest works ever produced from books like The Blood Quran which was written in beautiful calligraphy using around fifty pints of Iraqi dictator Sadsam Hussain’s blood as a major constituent of the ink in 1997 to ones that use arsenic as the dye for the covers so could literally kill the reader as the poison leaches from the boards. It is six years to the day since I started this blog and I think this book about books is an appropriate subject to mark this milestone of three hundred and fourteen articles and almost three hundred thousand words about books in my own library.

The book starts with a fascinating history of books and their precursors such as clay tablets or Sumerian foundation cones along with parchment scrolls including one that was used to wrap an Egyptian mummy. Then there are books that conceal other things such as one with a built in gun for self defence or astronomical equipment or objects that look like books but are actually boxes made from a specific wood with leaves and seeds from the tree inside them. I was reading about these and thinking it would be interesting to own one when the author pointed out the smell of decay that goes with them which somewhat put me off. There is also a long section on literary hoaxes such as biographies of people that didn’t exist or travel books of journeys that never happened several of which I am tempted to track down examples of.

There are further sections on books of the occult and religious oddities which include some of the strange animals depicted in medieval manuscripts and then examples of tiny and gigantic books. I have a love of tiny books, see my blog on the Lilliput Press so this section was particularly interesting and whilst I do have huge books such as the Folio Society’s Temple of Flora I don’t have anything like the atlas made for Charles II which is 1.76 metres tall and 2.3 metres wide when opened and is truly spectacular. There is a special mention in this section for the classic Audubon work ‘The Birds of America’ which exists in several editions but which is most prized for the version where all the birds are depicted life size which as this includes pelicans and flamingos gives some idea as to its immensity.

All in all this is a really interesting compendium of literary oddities, some of which I knew about but a lot that I didn’t and like the other books by Brooke-Hitching is again richly illustrated and it’s well worth a space on the shelf of anyone who loves books.

A Stroke of the Pen – Terry Pratchett

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The first of the books I received for Christmas to be reviewed is this collection of stories written by Terry Pratchett whilst he was still learning his trade as a writer and working as a journalist for the Bucks Free Prres in Beaconsfield. These stories however were mainly written for the Bristol based Western Daily Press so Pratchett wrote under the pseudonym of Patrick Kearns, Kearns being his mothers maiden name. The stories were rediscovered by Pat and Jan Harkin during a massive trawl through the British Library newspaper archive in search of a story they knew existed ‘The Quest for the Keys’ and in doings o they came across the other works by an unknown writer Patrick Kearns that sounded and felt familiar as they used places and characters from the tales written by Pratchett for the Bucks Free Press under the name of Uncle Jim which have now been collected in four volumes, the fourth coming out after I wrote my original review of those books. Apparently the fourth book is to be the last but ‘A Stroke of the Pen’ adds another twenty short stories by the young Terry Pratchett for us to enjoy and yes they do feel like the Uncle Jim stories and indeed one of them, ‘Mr Brown’s Holiday Accident’ did originally appear in the Bucks Free Press as by Uncle Jim.

The scale of the archive work done by the Harkin’s can only be appreciated when you know that despite being very short each of the stories were published in multiple parts with the longest, and the only one to be credited to Terry Pratchett in the Western Daily Press, being ‘The Quest for the Keys’ which appeared in thirty six individual sections from 30th July to the 13th October 1984. Also nobody knew about Patrick Kearns as a pseudonym so it was only the style and content that tipped them off that here was an until then unknown source of Terry Pratchett works. Also although ‘The Quest for the Keys’ was known to exist, because of the way it was clipped from the newspaper and saved the dates and indeed the newspaper which printed it were lost so they had to go through four possible newspapers archives from the earliest probable date (1972) up until 1984, when Terry’s first Discworld novel, ‘The Colour of Magic’, was printed, in their search. Fortunately they decided to work forwards rather than back or they would have found ‘The Quest of the Keys’ a lot quicker and probably not stumbled on the works of Patrick Kearns.

Enough of the history, what of the stories themselves? Well I love the Uncle Jim stories and these are more of the same, indeed there are a couple of reworked Uncle Jim tales under the name of Patrick Kearns which provides confirmation, if any was needed, that this is indeed the same author. The first story included is clearly inspired by Roy Lewis’s ‘The Evolution Man’ with its stone age man main character discovering major advances such as fire. My personal favourite of the ones in this book however is ‘The Fossil Beach’ in which the curator of Blackbury museum is taken to the beach by a local geology student where they find a fossilised deckchair, radio and a copy of today’s newspaper in the mouth of a small dinosaur. How these all got there is a mystery they are determined to solve. Pratchett is clearly already a very competent fantasy writer by the time he wrote as Patrick Kearns, not as good as he would become but definitely worth reading.

Sadly I cannot recommend this hardback book as it currently exists, as it has been announced that there is a story missing from it which Colin Smythe, who had commissioned the Harkin’s to undertake their quest, accidentally omitted when he sent the text to the printers which means that the paperback, due out in April this year will be the complete book and anyone who has the hardback first edition, like mine, will have to buy the paperback as well in order to read the missing tale.