Author: bookramblings142

The Albatross Press

On By bookramblings142In Milestones in Publishing, Reviews8 Comments

I’ve been fascinated by The Albatross Press and their huge selection of books solely issued in the English language although printed and circulated only in continental Europe for well over twenty years, possibly thirty, from when I first became aware of their existence and the obvious influence the press had on Allen Lane when he came to found Penguin Books back in 1935. However until this book was published in 2017 information about Albatross was patchy at best and for my 250th blog I’ve decided to look again at my small Albatross collection along with reviewing Michele Troy’s excellent book. The Albatross Press books are difficult to find here in the UK as due to copyright restrictions they were not available in the UK, British Empire or the USA and indeed were seized by customs officials if anyone tried to bring them in, but they can be found occasionally and when I see one at a reasonable price I normally pick it up to add to my library. I’m going to split this blog into two sections, firstly a review of Michele Troy’s superb and phenomenally well researched book and then a piece about my collection which will give an idea as to the sort of titles published by Albatross from its foundation in 1932 until closing down soon after 1947. In fact it survived as an entity until 1955 but didn’t produce any new books in the 1950’s merely trying to sell its back stocks as it faced competition from a wave of American and British new paperback publishers all able to undercut Albatross prices.

Strange Bird – Michele K. Troy

As implied by the subtitle of this impressive volume 1932 was not a good year to start a publishing venture in Germany as Hitler along with his followers burgeoning censorship of books, sometimes for little reason, made operating there extremely difficult from his rise to power in 1933. Alongside the issues of Nazi interference as to what may or may not be published there was a significant problem with the business model for The Albatross Press and that was that there was already a well established publishing company issuing English language books on the continent and the German firm Tauchnitz had been in that market for over ninety years. The Albatross Press was an extremely complicated company, initially printing books in Italy and then moving that part of the business to Germany to get round Nazi regulations. European distribution was also run from Germany but the editorial team were in Paris whilst the funding came from Britain via a holding company in Luxembourg. It’s founding partners were John Holroyd-Reece a German born naturalised Brit who was half Jewish and German Max Christian Wegner who had recently been fired as Managing Director of Tauchnitz. Running the distribution from his existing company was another German, Kurt Enoch, who was also Jewish. You can see the problems that will rapidly start to accumulate under the rise of the Nazis. Holroyd-Reece also started numerous other publishing companies some of which owned shares in the other ones and it is frankly amazing that not only does Michele Troy explain this dense web of businesses but does so in a highly readable way.

Part of the reason for the complexity was a desire to present the company as German to Germans, British to the British and sufficiently international to confuse everyone else but you may wonder why there was not only a market for English language books on the continent and how such a market got started. Troy does her best to cover this as well, initially created by Tauchnitz partly in order to allow British and later American authors to obtain copyright for their works in Europe decades before international copyright was available. Well educated Europeans could also normally read English perfectly and having books in the original language is always seen as preferable to translations. By the mid to late 1930’s though the main thing that was driving the existence of Albatross and Tauchnitz, which by then Albatross had succeeded in getting editorial control over, was the need for foreign currency by Hitler’s government. This is another complicating aspect ably covered by Michele Troy as she digs into Nazi files and reveals the various sides trying to decide if Albatross, as a British firm, should be trading in Germany at all, especially when it turned out that the main British backer was also a Jew. Amazingly even after war broke out Albatross continued to trade until 1944 although it was largely concerned in selling it’s stored books.

What starts off as the history of a now largely forgotten publishing house turns into almost a detective story as she pieces together the surviving documentation despite both Albatross and Tauchnitz archives being destroyed during the war. The notes and citations alone run to fifty seven pages and the selected bibliography a further twelve pages. This is a major academic research project from the professor of English at Hillyer College at the University of Hartford and is well worth a read even if you have never heard of Albatross because it is so well written the story draws you in.

My collection of Albatross Press books

As has become clear to anyone reading my blog for a while I collect Penguin Books and have over 3,500 of them so Albatross are a logical side collection. The inspiration for Penguin Books was partly due to the press being named after a bird but mainly for the cheap but smart editions which are colour coded by subject matter, something that Allan Lane immediately adopted for his new enterprise. The chart shown below is from the dust wrapper of Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man.

Troy explains the importance of Tauchnitz and if anything volumes from this publisher are even more difficult to find in the UK than Albatross, I just have four, three of which are from 1879 and 1880 and the final one, ‘Twelve Men’ is from 1930 so shows the plain typographical covers that the bright and colourful Albatross were going up against to attract customers.

I have managed to accumulate twenty three Albatross books, so roughly one a year since I started looking for them, and their immediate attraction is obvious even if the standardisation of colours is sometimes poor to say the least. Both ‘Journal’ and ‘The Arches of the Years’ are purple and ‘Journal’ isn’t faded as it is that shade on the spine and rear cover as well.

  • 16 – The Brothers printed in Italy in 193?
  • 19 – Ambrose Holt and Family printed in Germany in 1932
  • 31 – Apocalypse printed in Germany in 1932
  • 32 – The White Peacock printed in Germany in 1932
  • 52 – Journal printed in Germany in 1933
  • 203 – The Arches of the Years printed in Germany in 1934
  • 216 (Extra Volume) – All Men are Enemies printed in Germany in 1934
  • 236 – Pelican Walking printed in Germany in 1934
  • 240 – Unfinished Cathedral printed in Germany in 1934
  • 247 – Brief Candles printed in Germany in 1935
  • 260 – Music at Night printed in Germany in 1935
  • 310 – The Asiatics reprinted in Italy in 1947
  • 317 (Special Volume) – The Weather in the Streets reprinted in Italy in 1947
  • 326 (Extra Volume) – Aaron’s Rod printed in Germany in 1937
  • 359 – The Bridge printed by Collins in Scotland in 1938 as Les Editions Albatros, Paris
  • 377 – Juan in China printed in Germany in 1938
  • 390 (Extra Volume) – The Letters of D.H. Lawrence printed in Germany in 1938
  • 514 – Grandma Called it Carnal printed in Italy in 1947
  • 551 (Special Volume) – Operation Neptune printed in Holland in 1947
  • 556 (Special Volume) – English Saga printed in Holland in 1947
  • 558 – Siegfried’s Journey printed in Holland in 1947
  • 4802 – Lord Jim printed in Italy for Librairie Marcel Didier in 1947
  • 4975 – Memories of a Fox-Hunting Man printed in Italy for Librairie Marcel Didier in 1947

The massive leap in the numbering scheme for the last two books should not be taken to show thousands of new titles suddenly being released. Rather I suspect that this is to keep the Librairie Marcel Didier volumes well out of the numbering scheme of the existing Albatross Press books. Penguin did something similar when launching Penguin Inc in America during the war and starting their book numbering at 500. Penguin Inc’s managing director was Kurt Enoch having escaped the Nazi’s so this was his second publishing venture. In 1948 following disagreements with Allen Lane back at Penguin headquarters in England Penguin Inc was dissolved and Enoch started again with his third publishing firm this time as Signet and Mentor. As for the Extra and Special Volumes these are normally significantly thicker than ‘normal’ volumes and presumably had a higher price although 558 Siegfried’s Journey is a normal size so maybe Special Volumes had a different rule.

But why Albatross? Holroyd-Reece had several explanations but the one I find most persuasive is because the word is similar in a lot of European languages: Albatros in Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German and Spanish amongst many others, Albatro in Italian, Albatrosz in Hungarian and surprisingly Albatross in Estonian and those last two languages I know from personal experience are normally miles away from English. I’m still on the lookout for more volumes from The Albatross Press and have even added a sideline of want to be Albatross books including the Italian Corvi press, which is undated but numbered 4 in the series and looks to be from the 1930’s. This is a true polyglot of a title as it is a biography of a British Prime Minister written by a French politician and translated into Italian. Alongside is a book I picked up earlier this year in Budapest which is much later, 1979, but is clearly inspired by Albatross design and in this case is written in Hungarian but published in Bucharest, Romania. Fabre was a French naturalist and this is a translation of one of his books about insects.

All in all The Albatross Press produced some very attractive books from a wide range of significant authors so are well worth looking for and are a pleasant surprise when you do find one on a shelf in a second hand bookshop. As Michelle Troy’s incredibly well researched book proves they also had a fascinating history behind them.

The Symposium – Plato

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Like the situation with Hilaire Belloc’s works in last weeks blog entry I have several books by Plato but have never read them so he was an obvious choice for this week. Regarding the title, apparently a symposium meant something very different in ancient Greece to the way we use the word today. Nowadays a symposium would be “an occasion at which people who have great knowledge of a particular subject meet in order to discuss a matter of interest” but the ancients saw it as a drinking party held after a meal usually with musicians present. However in the case of the one described by Plato in this work the flautist is dismissed before starting to play and each person there is asked to give a short talk on a topic decided by the host, specifically the god of Love. It soon becomes clear just what different social mores the ancient Greeks lived by than we do today. Let’s take an extract from one of the early speeches:-

There can be no doubt of the common nature of Love which goes with the common Aphrodite; it is random in the effects it produces, and it is this love which the baser sort of men feel. It’s marks are, first, that it is directed towards women quite as much as young men; second, that in either case it is physical rather than spiritual; third, that it prefers that its objects should be as unintelligent as possible, because its only aim is the satisfaction of its desires, and it takes no account of the manner in which this is achieved. That is why its effect is purely a matter of chance and quite as often bad as good. In all that it partakes of the corresponding nature of its goddess, who is far younger than her heavenly counterpart, and who owes her birth to the conjunction of male and female. But the heavenly Aphrodite to whom the other Love belongs for one thing has no female strain in her, but springs entirely from the male and for another is older and consequently free from wantonness. Hence those who are inspired by this Love are attracted towards the male sex, and value it as naturally the stronger and more intelligent. Besides even amongst the lovers of their own sex one can distinguish those whose motives are dictated by this second Love, they do not fall in love with mere boys, but wait until they reach the age at which they begin to show some intelligence, that is to say until they are near growing a beard.

Extract from the speech by Pausanias in The Symposium by Plato

Yes the Love discussed by the various participants in this symposium is homosexual and specifically that between men and adolescent boys. I knew that the ancient Greeks were keen on pederasty but had no idea how much it was regarded as superior to relationships between men and women before reading this work. Speaker after speaker continues to praise the theme of ‘The Lover’ (a virile adult male) and ‘His Beloved’ (an adolescent boy or possibly young adult male) and denigrates love between men and women as clearly inferior until we at last reach the last speaker, Socrates. Not that he contradicts the previous speeches, but he does instead look to establish the nature of the God of Love himself and what the nature of love and desire is. It is worth mentioning that those men that take a particularly young boy as their Beloved are not rejected out of hand, but it is not regarded as such a high love as those that wait until the boy is fourteen or fifteen years old.

After Socrates has finished and at the very end of the book, a very drunken Alcibiades bursts in to the gathering and requests to be included, but then notices Socrates and becomes agitated as he regards himself as having been grossly insulted by him in the past. The nature of this ‘insult’ becomes clear when he is encouraged to speak in praise of Socrates and it turns out that he had so wanted to become Socrates’ Beloved that he invited him to his home several times in an attempt to seduce him. Socrates however clearly values intellectual over physical interactions and had rebuffed his attentions each time.

The problematic subject of the book is particularly an issue due to when my edition was published by Penguin Books, i.e. 1951, so sixteen years before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 which legalised sex between men (although definitely not between men and boys) was passed in the UK. It is therefore highly doubtful that a contemporary work dealing with the same subject would have been permitted and not banned under the Obscene Publications Act even though no homosexual acts are actually described in the book. Indeed in the introduction to the book, presumably written by the translator, Walter Hamilton, although not ascribed to him he writes:-

we must first face a fact which is so repugnant to the orthodox morality of our own times that there is a serious risk of it destroying the value and pleasure of The Symposium for many readers. The love with which the dialogue is concerned, and which is accepted as a matter of course by all the speakers, including Socrates, is homosexual love; it is assumed without argument that this alone is capable of satisfying a man’s highest and noblest aspirations, and the love of man and woman, when it is mentioned at all, is spoken of as altogether inferior, a purely physical impulse whose sole object is the procreation of children.

As is my usual habit I didn’t read the introduction until after I had completed the text, I don’t like the spoilers which are invariably included in this section and this would have been a big one. Walter Hamilton was master and honorary fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and translated several books of ancient Greek for Penguin Books, I have enjoyed this translation as it was very readable so I’ll definitely be pulling other works he has translated off my shelves for future blog entries.

Mr Petre – Hilaire Belloc

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I have five or six books by French author, but naturalised Englishman, Hilaire Belloc but apart from his book of humorous poetry ‘Selected Cautionary Verses’ I haven’t read any of them, reading this makes me want to pull the others off the shelves. My copy is the 1947 first Penguin edition, so 75 years old, and I can’t find any currently available editions which is a shame as it is a genuinely great read. Although written in 1925 it is set in the future of April 1953 and the basic conceit of being in the future, at least as far as the author is concerned, is that there was no longer the need for passports for British citizens entering the UK, although how you proved you were British and therefore didn’t need a passport is conveniently glossed over. It is vitally important for the plot however as the character we come to know as Mr John K Petre has no documentation on him with his name having arrived from America and losing his memory almost upon disembarking from the ship. He clutches at a barely remembered name ‘Petre’ as his own as he sinks into a nightmare of scratchily forming memories, but the name alone, whether it is his or not, proves his salvation, for it is a name of an eccentric multi-millionaire who thrives on being incognito.

There then follows a series of chancy investments, mainly by accident, but where the name of Petre works as a guarantee with no real financial backing, the first of which nets almost eighty thousand pounds and the second over a million but without our hero having any real knowledge as to what he is doing. The first is a simple boosting of the stock market which follows the knowledge that the great John K Petre has invested in a moribund stock which massively boosts the value, at least for a few days at which point the agent he had met at a dinner party cashed in for him and simply sent a cheque for his profit to the hotel he was staying in. This has some of the least likely plot lines in the novel and also some of the most dodgy mathematics as try as I can I cannot get a profit as stated in the narrative from the vague hints as to what the story says happened. The depositing of the cheque into a random bank account set up to receive it is also highly unlikely as no evidence is either requested or presented that the cheque has not been stolen or that the depositor is indeed John K Petre. The second transaction is however, oddly, far more believable despite netting over a million pounds when the character had nowhere near the required collateral for the property purchase involved but as he sold it straight away for far more than the agreed purchase price I can see this as quite possible, it is just a matter of timing payments.

I don’t want to give too much away, these two transactions occur in the first half of the book and Mr Petre has far more to go through before the end, but it is a brilliant novel which really draws the reader into the plot line both in feeling for our hero, who clearly has no idea what he is doing and is just led along by advisers, and also joy in the sheer blind luck he has in getting away with random investments much to his own surprise. What really surprises me however is that this 1947 paperback appears to be the last edition available, searching though abebooks and biblio, which represent the vast majority of online second hand book dealers, I cannot find a more recent copy apart from print on demand. I cannot understand why such a superb book has been effectively out of print for seventy five years, please if any publishers are reading this can we have a more recent edition? If anything due to the financial shenanigans so prevalent nowadays the book is more relevant then when it was first published almost a hundred years ago. If you can find a copy I suggest getting and reading it you won’t be disappointed.

Eight Men and a Duck – Nick Thorpe

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Phil Buck is an American adventurer and admirer of Thor Heyerdahl who conceived of a plan to sail from Chile to Easter Island in a primitive reed boat back in 1999, something Heyerdahl himself never managed, and this is the story of how eight men (and a duck) amazingly made the 2,500 mile journey in 44 days starting in February 2000. Nick Thorpe was travelling round South America submitting pieces of journalism back to his home in the UK when he found out about this great adventure and wangled himself aboard on the basis of having a little sailing experience but more importantly being able to document the trip after the original journalist pulled out. The book, Nick’s first, is a surprisingly candid story of how eight men, from various nationalities and wildly diverse personalities came to bond together in adversity as their ship, the Viracocha (named after the creator god of Inca mythology), slowly became waterlogged and started sinking around them. That the boat was going to get waterlogged and either sink or break apart at some point was well known to all who sailed on her, the hope was that she would do so after completing the voyage rather than during.

The ship was just 64 feet long and 16 feet at its widest point so it was pretty cramped on board especially with all the provisions and extra reeds and wood needed to make emergency repairs stashed on board and this inevitably led to conflicts between the crew which needed to to be sorted out as soon as possible because of the lack of space and the need for everyone to work together as much as they could but largely the crew got on with each other although Nick doesn’t shy away from discussing issues that did arise between them. Having said that the book is largely positive and is a fascinating tale of daring do by a group of men who had little if any seafaring experience just a lot of determination to be the first to sail a primitive boat across the South Pacific in modern times, not so much to prove that it had been done in the distant past leading to the original settlement of Easter Island but to prove that it could be done. Sadly for the non human part of the crew they started off with two pet ducks but one escaped and jumped ship about a thousand miles from the South American coast so only one duck made the complete journey, hence the title of the book.

Phil Buck has since had two more goes at crossing the Pacific in reed boats, in Viracocha II (2003) and Viracocha III (2019) both of which intended to get all the way to Australia from Chile. The second vessel was damaged during launch but still managed to get to Easter Island whilst the third sailed for 86 days before being caught up in a storm and eventually abandoned as no longer seaworthy near Tahiti. Sadly there doesn’t appear to have been any follow up books documenting these voyages, Nick Thorpe wasn’t part of the crew for either trip and neither was anyone else on board up to writing a companion volume. Thor Heyerdahl would not have been impressed, his books led to his worldwide fame and whilst his theories about early migration are, to say the least, not widely accepted the books raised money and his profile to enable funding of further voyages and other projects.

This book was a paperback original published by Little, Brown in 2002.

Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman

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The third of The Folio Society’s editions of Neil Gaiman’s greatest works, after American Gods and Anansi Boys, is the first one I have purchased as I already have very nice editions of the first two. However I had somehow not actually read Neverwhere, although I was familiar with it having listened to the 2013 radio play version several times. Whilst reading Neil’s ‘Introduction to this text’ I was surprised to discover that it had originally been a BBC TV series back in 1996 which I had completely missed and that Neil wrote the original novel partly so he could save the bits he liked that were either impossible to film within the constraints of the budget or were subsequently being cut from the show. He further expanded the book and removed some of the more obscure London references for a later international version and the version here is what is now known as the ‘Author’s Preferred Text’ where in 2006 he went back to both earlier iterations and merged them, bringing back the bits cut and also writing yet more new text to blend them seamlessly. The cast list for the radio adaptation, which was my first introduction to the book, is frankly amazing as can be seen in the Wikipedia entry for it and it was because of this when it was announced as a title for this years Autumn/Winter collection by The Folio Society I bought it immediately.

Neverwhere is a dark fantasy set in London Above and London Below, Richard Mayhew is an ordinary office worker but one evening on his way to restaurant for a meeting with his fiance and her boss finds an injured girl lying on the pavement. Ignoring his girlfriend’s insistence to just leave her as they are already late for the meal he instead decides to take her back to his home when she refuses medical assistance. Later his fiance calls to break off their engagement but by then Richard’s life has changed completely for the girl is a lady from one of the great houses of London Below and he is now irrevocably caught up in her escape from assassins sent to wipe out her family and her plans to avenge them.

London Below is a hidden place from almost all the inhabitants of London Above, partly on the tube lines, partly in the sewers, partly on the rooftops of London as we know it and partly in huge caverns invisible to those above. Door, for that is the girls name, needs help to escape from the murderous Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar and asks Richard to find the Marquis de Carabas with the assistance of the Rat Speakers. A lot of the character names seem very familiar to anyone who knows London, an aged man living on the rooftops is Old Bailey, Earls Court rides a tube train in a carriage that nobody seems to notice and which resembles a medieval court inside. There is also the scary Night’s Bridge where people disappear into the darkness and the realm of The Black Friars. One touch I particularly liked was The Floating Market, which moves around London Above completely invisible to the people there. Richard first encounters it in Harrod’s then later on it is on HMS Belfast, this is a place for the inhabitants of London Below to gather with a truce between all peoples.

This version of the book also includes the follow up short story ‘How The Marquis Got His Coat Back’, written in 2014, which introduces the very dangerous Shepherds of Shepherds Bush and the Elephant who controls Elephant and Castle. It has also been confirmed by Gaiman that he is writing a sequel novel called ‘The Seven Sisters’ which is paused whilst he is working on TV adaptations.

It’s only four chapters in, and waiting for me to stop showrunning and start writing.

Neil Gaiman’s twitter feed 24th January 2019

The book is, of course, beautiful with seven full page and two double page illustrations along with twenty one chapter headings all produced by Chris Malbon and the chosen font, Mentor with Tommaso as the chapter headings, is extremely clear making the 392 page book a delight to read and I devoured it in just two sittings getting completely immersed in the story. The picture above is of Richard and Door’s first encounter with The Angel Islington. The Folio Society also produced a short video on the release of this book on the 1st September 2022, which can be found here.

I loved the book, and the short story, and can’t work out why it took Folio Society to publish this version before I finally got round to owning a copy and reading it, roll on The Seven Sisters.

Fern Hill – Dylan Thomas

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From the Phoenix Poetry 60 paperbacks of 1996 comes this great collection of Dylan Thomas poems featuring most of his most popular works other than ‘Under Milk Wood’ which I have covered in a previous blog back in 2018. There are thirty three poems in the collection including the brilliant ‘Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night’, a refusal to meekly accept death and of course the titular work ‘Fern Hill’ which describes an idyllic childhood, all life is here. What I love about Dylan Thomas is his wonderful sparse descriptive writing epitomised by the first poem in the book ‘Prologue’

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
First 14 lines of Prologue by Dylan Thomas

This small book is an excellent introduction to the works of Thomas who despite being Welsh wrote only in English and the cover illustration is a lovely portrait of him by Augustus John which now hangs in the National Museum of Wales. Despite this being just a short collection it took me several days to read as I kept going back over the poems, savouring the words and pausing over particularly beautiful phrases that caught my imagination. The subject matters are often dark, and death is a frequent topic making him a difficult read at times but well worth persevering with. The powerful verse will pull you in even though I sometimes had to read a poem a few times to fully pick up the rhythm and appreciate it fully before I discovered that as part of his broadcasting career with the BBC a lot of his works are available on youtube being read by him such as this example of Fern Hill.

Sadly Thomas died in 1953 just two weeks after his 39th birthday, primarily from pneumonia although his heavy drinking could not have helped, and with his passing the world was deprived of arguably one of its finest poets who had only just finished his famous play for voices ‘Under Milk Wood’. I want to finish with extracts from the poem that first brought me to Dylan Thomas and which shows the raw power of his verse probably more than any other of his works.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

…

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

First three and last four lines of Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s – Rachel Ferguson

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With a title like that how could I resist? For those of you unfamiliar with the Woolworth’s name it was a high street range of budget stores in various parts of the world starting in America and later arriving in the UK up until 2008 when the UK side of the business went into administration with over eight hundred shops closing just after Christmas that year. They sold everything from records to sweets, children’s clothing to household goods, toys to books, indeed Woolworth’s was the first big customer for the newly launched Penguin Books back in 1935. It is therefore inconceivable that the Brontë’s would have shopped there even if their timelines had crossed, but Charlotte, the last of the Brontë sisters, died fifty four years before American businessman Frank Woolworth opened his first store in the UK. So what is going on with the title?

OK, time for a confession, I wrote that opening paragraph back on the 24th May intending to read this relatively short book quickly, get this blog written and free up time around my birthday when I was going to meet a very good friend for the weekend whom I hadn’t seen for almost three years due to covid restrictions. As I write this paragraph it is the 25th June, my birthday is long gone, I am still only 84 pages into the full 182 and I hate the awful, shallow, self-centred characters that make up most of the story. The widowed Mrs Carne has brought up three daughters two of which are now adult, Deirdre is a journalist, Katrine starting on a career as an actress and Sheil, the youngest is only eleven. All four of them live fantasy lives still referring to talking dolls from the childhood of Deirdre and Katrine, writing letters from the dolls and sending them to themselves and making up stories about, and correspondence from, people they have met or simply read about as though they know them well. At this point in the book Deirdre has managed to insinuate herself into the home of Sir Herbert and Lady Toddington; a couple that all four of the dreadful Carne’s have obsessed about for three years ever since Mrs Carne did a week of jury service and Sir Herbert Toddington was the judge to the point at which Agatha Martin, Sheil’s governess, is convinced that they do actually know them.

Will I get any further into the book? It’s been haunting me for almost a month now since I put it down mid chapter totally frustrated by the characters and haven’t picked it back up apart from this morning to check the names for this entry.

Right it is now the 13th of July and I have finally completed the chapter where I gave up and the book is at last beginning to make a bit more sense, good job as I am now almost two thirds of the way through. The Brontë’s had even been discussed at the end of that chapter, if only rather disparagingly, with a comment by Sir Herbert that Anne Brontë never wrote anything quotable. So a quick reference to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (I have the 4th edition) to check this out only to find that none of the Brontë’s appear in this rather large volume, which as an English writing family probably makes them unique in that nothing any of them wrote is regarded as quotable. This book is a real struggle and if I wasn’t writing this blog then I would probably have given up long ago but it now feels like a challenge. This is also the first of these blogs to have become a sort of diary entry, I wonder when I will actually finish it?

Well I can now answer the question at the end of the last paragraph with the 2nd September finally seeing the conclusion of the book, and I would never have done it if I hadn’t looked up other reviews and found others with the same problem but saying that it got better. And yes it did with the last sixty pages if not flying by at least manageable in one sitting. The governess, Miss Martin, finally had enough of the family and left during this section and I knew exactly how she felt, but not before meeting the ghosts of Charlotte and Emily Bell, as they introduced themselves although they are clearly two of the Brontë sisters, when they came to visit the Carne’s. This is where the book completely pivots so that the reader isn’t sure what has been going on in the previous 150 pages as it is explained that whilst in Yorkshire the Carne’s had been holding seances and had contacted the entire Brontë family before rapidly leaving to come back south and this was them returning the visit. Are the fantasies of the family more than that? I don’t know and frankly don’t care enough to try to work it out especially when the Toddington’s start to completely step into the fantasy lives created for them by the Carne’s and all pretence of reasonableness from them also slips away. When Lady Toddington says, at the end of the Christmas party which is where the book also finishes, that she saw the Brontë’s in Woolworth’s the other day buying notepads I was half relieved that I could finally answer the question posed at the beginning of this review and half just pleased that I was at the end of page 179 of 182 so the end was near.

Rachel Ferguson wrote at least eight other books, according to the back flap of the dust wrapper, but Penguin only ever published this one. As you can probably gather I don’t recommend reading this book and her entire oeuvre is probably worth avoiding.

Elisabeth Sladen the Autobiography

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2005, My first day on the new job.
…
I took my place in front of my little paper sign and glanced around the table. And there, just across from me and down to my left, a face from my childhood leapt out from among the throng.
Sarah Jane Smith was quietly leafing through a script and composing herself for the afternoon ahead
…
If Sarah was here, there was nothing to worry about. Later that afternoon she would be calling me Doctor. The little eight-year-old in my head (who was frankly reeling at the fact I was in that room at all) was soothed, and of course thrilled, that the Doctor’s one true assistant was there to look out for him.

Extracts from the Foreword of this book by David Tennant

The final book in my August selection of Sci-fi autobiographies had to Elisabeth Sladen, best known for her role as Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who in the mid 1970’s, but who re-appeared in David Tennant’s fourth broadcast episode (but the third filmed) as the Doctor in 2005 and later went on to have her own programme ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ which ran for five series up until 2011. David Tennant was clearly a fan, and so was I, although not to the extent of having posters of her on his childhood bedroom walls as he did. This book was a joy to read and despite its 334 pages plus the foreword and acknowledgements from her daughter Sadie it positively flew past it is so well written. The final draft of the book was delivered for her to read through just before Christmas 2010 but family was always more important than work for Elisabeth so it was put in a drawer and she was always so tired recently. The scripts were coming through for series five of the Sarah Jane Adventures and she need to prioritise those before her own project but in February 2011 she was diagnosed with cancer and just two months later she died aged only sixty five. In a heart breaking final chapter her husband, Brian Miller, and her daughter describe picking the book up some months after her death and reading it, then deciding that it had to be published, I’m so glad they did.

The book is far more than her involvement with Doctor Who, Elisabeth was an established theatre actress for twenty years before getting the role that truly made her name and that part of her career is given proper coverage as she learnt her craft, met and married Brian and toured all over the country with occasional TV, radio and film parts. We also get her time post Doctor Who back in theatres and various TV roles as well as the times she spent in America on the convention circuit with her first Doctor, Jon Pertwee, where she was always a popular speaker. Unlike Tom Baker’s autobiography which I reviewed first in this brief series Sladen does focus on her time in Doctor Who. She was cast for the role by Barry Letts and also worked on the first two series of Tom Baker’s Doctor and frankly we learn more about the start of his time in the role from this book than in his own autobiography. The story continues up until she decides to retire from acting in the early 2000’s as the roles simply weren’t coming through, then in 2005 she gets a call from Russel T Davies who had restarted Doctor Who after more than fifteen years off the TV screens and suddenly she ended up busier than ever.

It’s a fascinating book and her memory for details going back decades adds a lot to the enjoyment of reading it but is sadly out of print. I bought my copy when it first came out and read it then and it was fun to get it back off the shelf eleven years later. Frankly I’ve been building up to this book all month, deliberately including Tom’s and Barry’s books and finishing with Elisabeth’s. I was eleven when her first Doctor Who story, ‘The Time Warrior’, was broadcast and she was in a total of eighty episodes in that first time in the role so for me she will always be, as David Tennant put it in his foreword ‘the Doctor’s one true assistant’ and so sadly taken from us when her career was blossoming all over again.

I, Robert – Robert Rankin

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I, Robert is not so much an autobiography but rather a series of loosely connected anecdotes which when read as a whole coalesce into an autobiography. It is by no means in true chronological order, apart from the second half of which more later, but rather a series of chapters, each just a handful of pages long, which deal with one or more aspects of his life. The title is of course based on the Isaac Asimov short story I Robot and the cover picture shows Rankin as Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet so you get two puns for the price of one which is very much in Rankin’s style. I have read a lot of Robert Rankin’s works in the last two or three years and have even reviewed his first book ‘The Antipope’ on this blog back in April 2019. Reading my way through Rankin’s books was the perfect antidote to sitting at home during the coronavirus lock downs, I own a shop so my business was closed down by the government for long periods of time, his humour largely helped to keep me going so I was really looking forward to reading this book and I wasn’t disappointed.

I, Robert was self published as a limited edition in 2015 and at the time of writing he still hasn’t sold out of the 5000 copies that were printed so if you are interested it can be found here.

The second half of the book is a series of chapters each about some aspect of one of his books in chronological order. Here he tells stories about how the books came to be written, problems with publishers and who the various characters in his books were actually based on. Rankin himself is apparently Jim Pooley, a long standing character from the Brentford series of books that is about to reach its twelfth (and apparently final) volume with Normanghast. In total thirty four books are discussed in some depth written between 1981 (The Antipope) and 2012 (The Educated Ape and Other Wonders of the World). There is also a section at the end where he discusses losing his contract with Orion and deciding to self publish, which is what he exclusively does now, and also the final ‘contractual obligation’ book when Orion realised that right at the beginning of his contract with them he had been paid for three books but only written two. This was actually by agreement with his editor at the time but she had moved on and they wanted their pound of flesh so in 2013 his final mainstream published work (The Chickens of Atlantis and Other Foul and Filthy Fiends) came out, it’s not bad but not one of his better works.

There are also tales of misidentification in the book including spending a remarkably quiet three week signing tour in New Zealand because they had booked the crime writer Ian Rankin but the publishers had sent Robert leading to all publicity about the tour being hurriedly removed at the book shops he was going to and hardly anyone turning up. Some time later the two writers met and Robert told him about his lovely all expenses paid holiday with his wife and apparently Ian Rankin was not amused. This leads to the final page of the first half of the book which I will just leave here as it is pretty well explanatory apart from knowing that the picture on the left is the Marquess of Bath whilst Robert Rankin is on the right.

Who & Me – Barry Letts

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Barry Letts was an actor, writer, director and producer for decades, mainly for the BBC, and is most famous as the series producer of Doctor Who from Jon Pertwee’s second story in 1969 to Tom Baker’s first in 1974 returning as executive producer at the end of Baker’s long run in the part in 1980. He also directed several stories for Doctor Who starting with the Patrick Troughton story ‘The Enemy of the World’ and wrote others although this was done using pseudonyms as the BBC at the time did not approve of the series producer also writing episodes. The front cover shows Barry, in the striped shirt, and Jon Pertwee, in full costume as his dandy Doctor Who leaning on a dalek. Terrence Dicks, who wrote the foreword, was script editor on Doctor Who between 1968 and 1974 and these two men formed a strong partnership which drove the programme back out of the doldrums of the end of the Troughton era and up the viewing ratings. Katy Manning played Jo Grant, one of the Doctor’s companions during this period.

The book doesn’t only cover Doctor Who but delves back into Barry Letts’ decades long acting career and how he progressed into a writer, then director before finally being persuaded to be a producer, which he would only do if he was still allowed to direct the occasional story line. It is worth noting for anyone who only knows the modern re-invention of Doctor Who that back in the 1960’s there would be over forty episodes a year, every year, and stories would normally be told over four, five, six or even seven episodes rather than the at most two episode individual stories in modern Who. The workload was tremendous and Letts was responsible for improving the process by reducing the number of episodes to twenty five a year along with recording episodes in pairs so reducing the need for constantly building and taking down sets so allowing more time for recording along with other changes to scheduling.

Letts is brutally honest about his successes and failures over the years and readily admits things he got wrong such as his first directing job on ‘The Enemy of the World’ which lacked pace in numerous parts especially in the one surviving episode which definitely drags out the material. I watched this again after reading the book and can see why he really wasn’t happy about the end result. In complete contrast he was also responsible for possibly my favourite story of ‘classic Doctor Who’ which was ‘The Daemons’ which came to its climax around my ninth birthday and with it’s story about black magic and the raising of a demon absolutely enthralled and terrified me as a young child. It also has probably the best line for The Brigadier in all his appearances instructing one of his soldiers “Chap with the wings there, five rounds rapid!“. Along the way he explains a lot of what both the director and producer actually did on TV programmes of the time and this was really interesting as it a side of the making of TV that isn’t covered very often. He also covers the work of Terrence Dicks in just how a script comes to be agreed and written from the initial ideas to outlines, then initial script, leading to fine tuning with cuts and additions to make each episode not only the right length but also to maintain the flow of the story.

So here we are at the end of our second season which is where I always intended to end this first volume.

Start of chapter 22 of Who & Me

The final chapter of the book starts with the words above, but sadly Letts didn’t even live to see this volume get released as he died in October 2009 aged 84, shortly before publication, leading to a final short postscript by his family thanking people for their good wishes after his death was announced. The book was an interesting read and he dropped so many hints of things that he wanted to cover in a later volume eventually leading up to Tom Baker’s first story as Doctor Who which would have tied back nicely to the first book in my August Sci-fi autobiography readings. It is such a pity that the cancer he had been suffering from for years got him before he could even start on the second book as I’m sure we would have learnt a lot more about the jobs of producer and director.