Lady into Fox & A Man in the Zoo – David Garnett

On March 14, 2023March 13, 2023 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

These two novellas by David Garnett include his first published work, Lady into Fox from 1923 with A Man in the Zoo coming out the following year. They are both fairly short, Lady into Fox being 24,514 words whilst A Man in the Zoo clocks in at 24,133 words. This undoubtedly explains why Penguin USA decided to combine the two in a book that is still only 135 pages long. Interestingly despite Garnett being English and several other later books by him being printed by Penguin UK I cannot find either of these stories in a UK released edition from Penguin Books. My copy is the Penguin USA first edition from December 1946 and it was later reprinted by Signet.

Garnett was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and indeed married Virginia Woolf’s niece Angelica Bell although she was then 23 years old and he was 50 which caused a considerable scandal. Although not as much as if it had been known at the time that in his twenties, and indeed during the time Angelica was born, he had had an, at that time illegal, homosexual relationship with her father, the artist Duncan Grant. As well as being a novelist he was heavily involved in the publishing scene in England being an original partner of the famous private press Nonesuch Press as well as being Literary Editor of the New Statesman for six years and a director of publishing house Rupert Hart-Davies. Along with his novels I have several of his factual works, of which he wrote many, including The Battle of Britain, written during WWII, and his edited collection of the letters of T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. From what little I have read of his fiction though he tends to the surreal and this is especially the case in his best known work Lady into Fox. ‘Aspects of Love’ which he wrote in 1955 was subsequently turned into a hit musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber with lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart in 1989 although I doubt that many people know that David Garnett wrote the original work even though he is credited on the posters.

Lady into Fox

Right, this is definitely an odd story about a woman who spontaneously turns into a fox whilst out for a walk in the country with her husband. This happens within a few pages of the beginning and the tale concerns how she initially retains her personality and intelligence but that both of these gradually fade away as she spends more time as a vixen. Immediately after the transformation it is almost as if she doesn’t realise what has happened to her and when her husband takes her home she tries to dress herself and wants to sit at the table when eating, they even find a way for her to play cards together. He dismisses their servants so that they won’t find out what has happened and explains that she has had to go to London for some urgent reason, he even shoots their two dogs as they just howl and bark all the time as they are aware of a fox being in the house. The deterioration of her humanity is expressed most strongly by her sleeping arrangements, for the first few days she sleeps in the bed with her husband but gradually she moves to the foot of the bed and then to the floor, before refusing to go to the bedroom at all. It is quite clear that she is becoming wilder and that he cannot keep her even as a pet tame fox. She also starts trying to escape from the house and garden until realising that she cannot be happy in captivity he lets her loose into the countryside to exist as best she can. I won’t go into the rest of the story but suffice to say that although he eventually regains contact with her it doesn’t have a happy ending.

A Man in the Zoo

Another strange tale, but no metamorphosis is required this time. The story begins with Josephine Lackett and John Cromartie walking around London Zoo as they were wont to do on a pleasant weekend. The pair had been dating for some time and John was keen to marry Josephine but they are having a row about it as her father didn’t approve, presumably due to the lack of money on John’s behalf. I have selected below the salient part of this argument which becomes the turning point in the whole story.

The next morning John Cromartie wrote to the head of the zoo with the proposal that he should be exhibited in the great ape enclosure and thereby complete the collection. This suggestion was received by the committee running the zoo with considerable disagreement as to whether this would be appropriate but ultimately, because the main objector was disliked by a large part of the rest of the group, they agreed to the idea and a meeting was arranged with Cromartie. It was decided that he should be exhibited in ‘his natural state’ i.e. dressed in his own clothes and with a simply but well furnished living room with his books and a bedroom and bathroom both not on view to the public and that this should be laid out in the cage between an orangutan and the chimpanzee enclosure and so Cromartie moves in with the following written on the sign attached to his cage.

Homo Sapiens
MAN
This specimen, born in Scotland, was presented to
the Society by John Cromartie, Esq. Visitors are re-
quested not to irritate the Man by personal remarks.

The astonishment in the visitors later that day on finding a human displayed at the zoo was palpable and this started considerable debate not only amongst the public but in the newspapers as to the probity of the exhibit, which led to huge crowds coming to see him much to the irritation of the orangutan and chimpanzee on either side who suddenly found themselves largely ignored and without the extra titbits it was common to feed the animals at the time. The story progresses with Josephine coming to visit him several times, initially with fury in case she should be identified as his former girlfriend and determination that he had gone mad but gradually things develop and unlike Lady into Fox this does have a happy if somewhat unexpected ending.

Of the two novellas I definitely recommend ‘A Man in the Zoo’ as worth a read, less so ‘Lady into Fox’ although if you like tragedies that one might appeal. Both stories are now pretty well out of print (I have found some print on demand editions and they are also available on Kindle) however they can be read on Project Gutenberg. Lady into Fox is here, and A Man in the Zoo can be found here.

Dangerous Curves – Peter Cheyney

On February 21, 2023February 20, 2023 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s three months since I last reviewed a crime book so definitely time for another one. In August 1949 Penguin Books published five of British writer’s Peter Cheyney crime books, of which I have four. This apparent keenness however clearly didn’t pay off as they don’t seem to have ever published any more of the at least forty more works by him and the five they did publish are long out of print. As I own four books but have never opened any of them it is definitely time to see what they are like and it turns out they chose across his styles, two books about American private detective Lemmy Caution, two about a London based private investigator named Slim Callaghan and one from what is known as his ‘Dark’ series which features various different lead characters. The first one I picked up was ‘Can Ladies Kill?’ one of the Lemmy Caution books but after around thirty pages I gave up on it. Caution is a cut price Philip Marlowe written in a poor version of ‘ American’ slang and consequently almost unreadable’

I like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe stories and this was so obviously a bad knock-off that I almost gave up on Cheyney all together but decided to give him another chance and next on the shelf was ‘Dangerous Curves’ and this time it was a Slim Callaghan novel. Now Callaghan is still very much a Philip Marlowe character but transplanted into London so the terrible Americanish language of the Caution books is dropped, although women are habitually referred to as ‘dames’ and other Americanisms keep appearing. The change of language style makes it somewhat more a bearable read but despite his obvious popularity from the mid 1930’s until the 1950’s (Cheyney died in 1951 and his books largely died with him) Cheyney is not a great writer, being seemingly stuck in formulaic styles both in language and plots. I did however finish ‘Dangerous Curves’.

This time I stuck at it and was glad I did. Yes the characters are mainly ciphers based on the works of better writers but the plot was certainly original and had enough twists and turns to make the 256 pages it takes up worth reading. One thing that should be pointed out from the start though is the misogynistic nature of Cheyney’s writing. With the possible sole exception of Effe, Callaghan’s long suffering secretary and office receptionist, all the female characters are treated as dumb beings merely there for Callaghan to twist round his fingers and to do what he wants with. Effe does seem however to have some independence of character but even she is at Callaghans’ beck and call seemingly no matter what hour of day he needs her. The story line of ‘Dangerous Curves’ is quite complex and I’m not about to reveal it here but Callaghan definitely feels more like an American private investigator out of place in London but with all the contacts that you would expect to be in his home town. Who has been taking ‘The Mug’ for all his money and feeding him cocaine and heroin to keep him quiet whilst doing so? Eighty thousand pounds in the 1930’s was a huge sum to lose so no wonder The Mug’s father was interested in finding out, then all of a sudden The Mug (yes that is how he is referred to throughout the book) is found on a boat shot through the lung with the man who has been bleeding his bank balance dry dead at the desk opposite. What happened and why? And equally important when? These are the questions Callaghan needs to solve quickly and with enough proof to hand it over to Scotland Yard. As for the title of the book, the Dangerous Curves are those of The Mug’s young stepmother which so attract Callaghan that he also plans to bed her whilst sorting out the case. I told you Cheyney had a downer on his female characters…

Peter Cheyney has, mainly deservedly, been long out of print but in 2022 Dean Street Press published twenty four of his titles with 1940’s/50’s pulp paperback style covers. I can’t say I recommend them however, especially not the Lemmy Caution ones, there are far better crime writers than Cheyney and if you want the hard-boiled American detective just read the original and best, Raymond Chandler.

Penguin Marvel Classics collection

On January 17, 2023 By bookramblings142In Reviews, Sets and SeriesLeave a comment

On the 14th June 2022 Penguin Books embarked on a new series of titles with three books each simultaneously printed in hardback and paperback. The paperbacks, as can be seen above, were designed to look like the current iteration of Penguin Classics but noticeably larger at 252mm tall and 180mm wide as opposed to the ‘normal’ size of Penguin Classics which are 198mm tall and 129mm wide. This larger size makes the reproduced comic books in each volume far more legible. The hardbacks are larger still at 272mm tall by 198mm wide, their covers are very different and have gold page edges on all three sides. The hardback covers are illustrated below as each book is discussed in this blog. It isn’t the size of the books that strikes the reader as different when you pick them up though, it’s the weight. At getting on for a kilo each for the paperbacks and even closer to two kilos for the hardbacks, this is due to the high quality paper used in order to do justice to the full colour pages throughout the almost four hundred pages making up each book, these are clearly not books for reading in bed.

All the books have the same introduction to the new collection as shown below:

It’s an interesting idea to class early Marvel comics as Penguin Classics, after all that series concept began in 1946 and 1947 with translations of Homer’s Odyssey, Guy de Maupassant’s short stories, Sophocles’ The Theban plays and Voltaire’s Candide in the first two years, quite what E V Rieu (the original series editor) would have made of these comic books appearing in Penguin Classics can only be surmised but it probably wouldn’t have been positive. Having said that, the introductory essays do indeed set the comic art in it’s historical and cultural context so at least some attempt to hold to Rieu’s principles for the series has been made.

The Amazing Spider-man

I was interested to see how these editions differed from the Folio Society curated volumes currently being produced, see their Spider-Man launch video here. Penguin have gone for a very different approach to their selection of comics to the Folio Society as with Penguin you get an almost contiguous run of early comics rather than a selection over the years by former Marvel editor Roy Thomas which is Folio’s take on the subject. So in this volume you get Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy number 15 (August 1962) followed by the first four comics from The Amazing Spider-Man (March to September 1963). There then follows an essay about the characters development which also discusses comics five to eight and then the reproductions of the full comics continues with The Amazing Spider-Man comics nine and ten before another essay replacing issues then more reproductions and so on until the last comic included which is number nineteen from December 1964 by which time there have been twelve full reproductions. I actually really liked this way of doing it because at least you can follow story development rather than the more bitty Folio treatment and the three appendixes dealing with further aspects were really interesting as was the volume introduction by Ben Saunders. What you miss with the Penguin version rather than the Folio edition is a feel for where the character is going over the subsequent years however these are Penguin Classics after all so we should be looking at the early version of the character and even the hardbacks, at £40 are less than half the £95 of the Folio Society version.

Captain America

Captain America takes a similar way of selecting comics but with one major difference to the Spider-Man volume as although we get a reproduction of Captain America number one (March 1941) the rest of his largely propaganda driven World War II comic book stories are skipped. Because we get number one though we do at least get the famous cover illustration of Captain America punching Adolf Hitler. Instead we leap to Tales of Suspense number fifty nine (November 1964) and take the Captain from his relaunch including Tales of Suspense number sixty three (March 1965) which tells the origin story of Captain America. This had to be done as an entire generation had grown up without the character so who was this guy in the stars and stripes outfit? There are in total twenty two partial or complete reproductions of the comics, all but the first being Tales of Suspense which tended to have two, or more, separate stories in each edition and only the Captain America parts are reproduced here and he also didn’t appear in every edition so the last one included is number 113 (May 1969). Again unlike the Folio Society version we are focusing on one period of the characters existence rather than a more rounded overview and we also get essays that cover comics not included and provide more developmental background.

Black Panther

Unlike the other two, Black Panther originally appeared in another series entirely and has The Fantastic Four visiting Wakanda, home of The Black Panther, at his invitation only for him to launch an unexpected attack on them. This takes place in Fantastic Four numbers fifty two and fifty three (July and August 1966 respectively) both of which are in this volume. Despite the initially unfriendly approach, Black Panther and the Fantastic Four end up joining forces to attack an enemy of Wakanda and them ultimately encouraging him to continue fighting for good as Black Panther. We then leap to his next appearance, which is Jungle Action number six (September 1973) and have an uninterrupted series of comics from there to Jungle Action number twenty one (May 1976) this time with no explanatory essays replacing the comics. The appendices are very different as well, this time we get the essay written by Don McGregor as his introduction to Marvel Masterworks: Black Panther volume one and the typewritten plot synopsis originally created for Jungle Action number seven also by McGregor. This is a very interesting document as it shows how stories were developed before any artwork had been started.

The first three volumes of the Penguin Marvel Classics collection are excellent and anyone interested in comic books or the booming graphic novel market should seek them out.

The Strange Case of the Sixth Penguin Book

On December 13, 2022January 4, 2023 By bookramblings142In Book Tales, Reviews3 Comments

The first ten Penguin books were all published together in July 1935 with an edition size of 20,000 books per title and launched a publishing phenomena. being a fraction of the cost of any other books available at the time, but there was to be a problem with book number six. It soon became clear that Penguin Books might not have the rights to publish a paperback version of ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ by Agatha Christie so despite it’s popularity, it was reprinted twice in 1935, the book was pulled from the list of available titles leaving a gap in the neat numbering system. What to do? Well by early 1936 Penguin definitely had the rights to another book by Agatha Christie, ‘The Murder on the Links’ and in March that year this replaced ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ but numbered 6A, see below.

Using an A to differentiate between the two books looked odd so in September 1936 the A was quietly dropped and ‘The Murder on the Links’ became number six. In the meantime however Penguin had sorted out the rights over ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ but this couldn’t go back to being book six without renumbering ‘The Murder on the Links’ and causing even more confusion so in June 1936 ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ was published again, this time as number sixty one. ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ as number sixty one is relatively easy to find but the book as number six is extremely rare despite the original print run. I have collected Penguin Books for over thirty years and only obtained a copy of this version in the last few days and fortunately didn’t have to pay the £750 that a similar condition copy apparently recently sold for. All of Christie’s first five books were published by The Bodley Head which at the time of publication was the home of Penguin Books whilst its Managing Director, Allen Lane, got Penguin started before leaving to run Penguin as a separate entity at the start of 1937. This interconnection between the two businesses is probably the cause of the confusion over rights.

So let’s look at the two books:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Originally published in 1920 this was Agatha Christie’s first book and introduced her most famous creation Hercule Poirot to the world. It was only when flicking through the book when it arrived that I realised that I hadn’t actually read it before, which was a considerable surprise. When we first meet Poirot he is with a group of other Belgian refugees from the First World War living in a house in Styles St Mary, a small village near the grand house of Styles Court. The man who would be Poirot’s chronicler and friend, Arthur Hastings, was staying at Styles Court whilst recuperating from being invalided out of the war. He is greatly surprised to find Poirot, whom he had met in Belgium before the war living so close and when Emily Inglethorp, the elderly owner of the manor house, dies, apparently of strychnine poisoning, he suggests getting Poirot involved in solving the case. The plot is surprising well constructed for a first novel and numerous family members and other guests at the house are suspected before Poirot explains the true solution in the final chapter. According to the rear flap of the dust wrapper the book was a result of a bet that Christie couldn’t write a detective story where the reader only discovered the true murderer in the last chapter. I have to say the final twist is most ingenious and yet the reader cannot say that any clues were not available to them in trying to solve the case themselves.

Poirot and Hastings would return to Styles Court in his last appearance, ‘Curtain’, only this time the house is no longer a family home but has been turned into a guest house.

And now for the second number six, this is one of only two times two completely different Penguin books shared the same catalogue number that I have been able to find in the almost ninety years Penguin Books have been publishing, the other being number 305 which was allocated to the first two volumes of Penguin New Writing before that was spun off into its own series. There are however several examples of books by that publisher being re-issued under a different number to that originally assigned so six becoming sixty one, whilst it is unusual and is the first such renumbering at Penguin is certainly not unique.

The Murder on the Links

Agatha Christie’s third book and the second to feature Hercule Poirot must presumably have been already planned for publication by Penguin before it suddenly appeared as 6A, the book had been first published in 1923 and like ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ had gone through numerous editions before appearing in Penguin. This time Poirot and Hastings are trying to solve a murder in northern France, in the imaginary small coastal town of Merlinville-sur-Mer which is apparently an up and coming destination and is constructing a golf course and casino in order to attract more wealthy visitors. Poirot had received a letter from Paul Renauld at his home in London, showing a considerable step up from his shared refugee home in Styles St Mary, which requested his urgent assistance in France so off they both go only to discover when they arrive that Paul Renauld was murdered the previous night. The plot has the addition of humour with Inspector Giraud, a modern detective from the Sûreté in Paris, whose methods amuse Poirot and the obvious resentment Giraud has for Poirot leads to a rivalry in which a five hundred franc bet is made between the two detectives as to who will solve the case. The case is more complicated than Poirot’s first appearance showing a growth in confidence by Christie after the very positive reception of her first two novels and I enjoyed this book more than the first.

Poirot and Hastings are so often seen as a double act, clearly based on Holmes and Watson, that it is perhaps surprising that of the further twenty Poirot novels Christie would write Hastings is only in five of them and she would later rewrite two of those removing Hastings as she did so. Indeed she is clearly trying to get rid of him in this book as he meets his future wife during this case and subsequently moves to Argentina to run a ranch with her. I like Hastings, although he can be a bit irritating but I have definitely enjoyed reading the two number sixes from Penguins catalogue.

The Clouded Mirror – L T C Rolt

On December 6, 2022 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

L T C Rolt, also known as Tom Rolt, was one of the best writers on industrial history and the people who made it, and not only did he write about it but he was personally involved in saving a lot of Britain’s heritage from the Industrial Revolution from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for present generations to enjoy. In 1946 he was one of the three founders of the Inland Waterways Association, dedicated to restoring and making use of the long neglected canal network that criss-crossed the UK eventually leaving in 1951, by which time he had a huge new project to work on. He was chairman of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society which he helped found in 1950 and which was planning on restoring the old Welsh slate mining railway and turning it into the major tourist destination that it is now and it was through reading as a child his excellent 1953 book ‘Railway Adventure’ about his time rescuing the Talyllyn that I first became aware of him. Rolt died in 1974 having been more responsible for the preservation of what remains of the Industrial Revolution than anyone else and on top of the two organisations I have already mentioned he was a trustee and member of the Advisory Council of the UK Science Museum, joint founder of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, vice-president of the Newcomen Society, a member of the York Railway Museum Committee and helped to form the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust amongst many other things. He wrote ‘The Clouded Mirror’ in 1955 and this edition is from The Penguin English Journeys series published in 2009.

The Clouded Mirror is actually three works in one book, the first is acually called ‘The Clouded Mirror’ and surprisingly is concerned with two poets from the 1600’s who were based in the Welsh Marches, the border country between England and Wales with Herefordshire to the east and the Black Mountains to the west. Despite having given the book its title this was extremely dull and made me wonder where the rest of the book was going.

The second part, entitled ‘Kilvert’s Country’was an improvement but still a surprise given everything I thought I knew about the author as it is largely autobiographical and deals with his young childhood from the age of four when his family moved to the outskirts of Hay on Wye. This small town is in the heart of the Welsh Marches so this link at least partly explains Rolt’s fascination with the two poets in ‘The Clouded Mirror’. I know Hay very well as it was the world’s first booktown and I have been going there for decades looking for interesting works to add to my collection. Rolt’s childhood summers from 1914 sound idyllic as he gets older and explores the surrounding countryside. He writes with his customary gentle style beautiful descriptions of the places he gets to and his father sounds like a real character, having been in Australia, South Africa and even an unsuccessful prospector during the Yukon gold rush up in north western Canada. His shooting and fishing expeditions made sure that throughout WWI the family never went short of food and Rolt says that when war finished he realised that he had barely noticed that it had been happening as Hay was so remote from anyway directly affected by the conflict.

Finally there is ‘Canal Crusade’ and this is the section that made the book all worthwhile, for me anyway. It tells some of the stories from the early days of the Inland Waterways Association with Rolt travelling up largely derelict and weed clogged canals to highlight the poor state that this important transport network had reached following decades of neglect. This is Tom Rolt at his best, campaigning and writing about industrial heritage, forcing the railway companies that largely owned the canals in the first half of the twentieth century to finally maintain what they were responsible for. It seems amazing to me now, with the excellent condition that the canals are largely in now and their considerable use by holidaymakers that the stories of silted up waterways, collapsed bridges and what seemed terminal conditions are from just seventy years ago so the Inland Waterways Association must be congratulated in its work even if a major disagreement amongst the three founders meant that only one of them was still there by 1950. Fortunately by then Rolt had the Talyllyn to occupy him.

In short the book is worth reading for the second and third pieces but I won’t bother with the first part if I pick it up to read it again.

Case for Three Detectives – Leo Bruce

On November 15, 2022November 12, 2022 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

Leo Bruce was the crime writing pseudonym of amazingly prolific writer Rupert Croft-Cooke who wrote well over a hundred books under his own name from 1920 until 1975, along with over thirty crime novels as Leo Bruce and numerous short stories under both names. This is the first of his crime novels and along with it being a really fun parody of other writers it introduced his plain speaking Sergeant Beef who has no time for the amateur detective so beloved of so many other authors. Indeed the three detectives in this book are very thinly disguised famous other detectives Lord Simon Plimsoll is clearly Dorothy L Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Monsieur Amer Picon is Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Monsignor Smith is Father Brown by G K Chesterton, this will be the first, and presumably last, time all three will work on the same case but they do not work together.

The crime occurs in a large country house, home of Dr. Thurston and his wife Mary who are hosting a group of their friends for the weekend. After the evening meal, which had featured a discussion about murder mysteries, Mrs Thurston goes to bed at about eleven o’clock. Shortly afterwards there are some screams heard, the guests rush upstairs to the Thurston’s room and discovering it bolted break down the door and inside find Mrs Thurston lying on the bed with blood all over the pillow. A brief search is made but nothing relevant found so how was she killed inside a locked room? A car is sent for the local village police sergeant along with the Dr Tate the village’s general practitioner as the phone line to the house is cut, the doctor confirms that Mrs Thurston is definitely dead from a cut throat and Sergeant Beef checks the scene and states that he knows who did the murder but being just the local copper is completely ignored by everyone else. The book is written in the first person as though by one of the guests to the house party.

Quite early the next morning those indefatigably brilliant private investigators, who seem to be always handy when a murder has been committed, began to arrive. I had some knowledge of their habits and guessed at once what had happened to bring them here. One had probably been staying in the district, another was a friend of Dr Tate’s, while a third, perhaps, had already been asked to stay with the Thurstons. At any rate it was not long before the house seemed to be alive with them, crawling about on floors, applying lenses to the paint-work and asking the servants the most unexpected questions.
First paragraph of chapter five

The three detectives seem a little put out at first that all of them were there but agree to apply their own methods to solving the case, having a good look round not only the house and grounds but spreading their investigations to neighbouring villages as well. they convene that evening to question the guests and the servants at the end of which all three claim to be on their way having theories about solving the case and Sergeant Beef is getting more and more exasperated as he explains that the ain’t got a theory as he don’t need one as he knows who did it. Everyone continues to ignore and dismiss him as he is just a lowly village sergeant so what would he know?

On the second evening the group gather again to hear the three detectives explain how the murderer go in and out of a locked room and whom it was, why they did it and the name of their accomplice that was needed in order to effect an escape via ropes that were found secreted in the water tank in one of the top rooms of the house. Each solution is more and more ingenious and of course the three detectives give completely different solutions and alternative suspects, all of which fit the clues as we know them, whilst ruling out their compatriots reasoning. In the following confusion it is finally down to Sergeant Beef to explain what really happened.

The book is great fun especially if you are familiar with the three detectives being parodied here as their mannerisms and styles are so well sent up. I had no knowledge of Rupert Croft-Cooke aka Leo Bruce before reading the book and didn’t know I was in for a very funny parody when I got the volume off the shelf, it was a green (therefore crime) Penguin book and that was what I felt the need for at the time and expected a much more serious tale but I loved it.

The Albatross Press

On October 18, 2022October 17, 2022 By bookramblings142In Milestones in Publishing, Reviews2 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 Brontës Went to Woolworth’s – Rachel Ferguson

On September 6, 2022September 3, 2022 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

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.

The Greek Coffin Mystery – Ellery Queen

On July 5, 2022 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

As a lover of mystery and crime novels it is perhaps surprising that this was my first time reading Ellery Queen and the fact that I have started at the fourth book is due entirely to this being the only Ellery Queen that I possess. Let’s get the somewhat complicated back story of the authorship out of the way first and then dive into this surprisingly long (363 pages) crime novel. Ellery Queen is given as the author as well as the name of the private detective featuring in the book, in fact it is the work of two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who also individually wrote crime novels under those names. To add to the confusion both those names are also pseudonyms; Frederic Dannay’s real name was Daniel Nathan whilst his cousin Manfred Bennington Lee was really Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky. Between them they wrote over thirty Ellery Queen novels and collections of short stories and there were also a few later books which were ghostwritten by various other authors and supervised by Lee.

What to make of this book though? It features Detective Inspector Richard Queen and his private detective son Ellery, who improbably gets to sit in on all meetings and interviews, along with visiting crime scenes just as if he was an actual member of the police force, he can even apparently make arrests. Indeed it took me some time to realise that Ellery Queen was, unlike his father, not actually an official part of the police. The story initially is simply the case of a missing will following the death of an elderly art dealer in New York. When it is worked out that the only place the will could have been put in the short time available from when it was last seen to when it was discovered to be missing is in Georg Khalkis’s coffin before the lid was screwed down an exhumation is ordered. The coffin being opened however is found to have two bodies in it, Khalkis and a mystery corpse and the case becomes murder and the problem is not just who killed the unknown victim but who are they… With thirty nine characters (including the police and Ellery) it can get complicated and I was glad of the list of people at the front of the book when trying to sort out the different relationships between them all.

The story is split up into two books, the first ending with the arrest of yet another incorrect suspect but with the police apparently satisfied that this time they have got their man. The second book details the collapse of the case against the arrested person and the slow discovery of the clues leading to the true murderer and thief. One thing I really liked was at the end of the thirtieth chapter where there is a break in the story for Ellery Queen to speak directly to the reader and make clear that at this point you have read all the clues needed to solve the case and that there is only one solution that fits everything you know. With almost sixty pages still to go it provided a break where I could go back in my mind over what has happened in the first three hundred pages and try to solve it. I have to admit that the actual solution was so surprising that I didn’t get it but yes everything fitted once you knew who did it.

This edition of The Greek Coffin Mystery was published as part of the Penguin Drop Caps series of twenty six books each with an author starting with a different letter and it is particularly appropriate for this to be Ellery Queen book chosen for Q as the chapters in this one are titled as an acrostic spelling out the titles and author. First published in 1932, the first Penguin Books edition came out in May 1957, this hardback was published in 2013 for the American and Canadian market only.

As I said at the start this was my first Ellery Queen mystery and whilst I enjoyed it I did find the character of Ellery Queen rather annoying. Reading about later books in the series he apparently does calm down a lot as the series progresses with far fewer irritating build ups to an incorrect accusation than occurs in this story. Maybe I ought to read one of the later books to see if I like him better.

A Shropshire Lad – A E Housman

On June 21, 2022June 18, 2022 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

I have lived in Shropshire for the past eleven years and have seen copies of A Shropshire Lad numerous times in various bookshops across the county but never bought it. I think mainly because I knew that Housman never visited Shropshire before writing this collection of poems celebrating the county and he only came here briefly after becoming permanently associated in the public’s mind with Shropshire so doubted that he would have much insight into this extremely beautiful part of England. Sure enough whilst reading it became clear that even geographic details, which he gleaned from a tourist guidebook whilst writing the poems in London, were incorrect but the poems are not really about Shropshire anyway but about war and the untimely death of youths both in conflict and otherwise, including suicide. It cannot be described as a cheery read.

Let’s tackle a couple of the poems with more glaring geographic issues first just to get these out of the way, starting with one of the few poems to have a title rather than just a number, XXVIII The Welsh Marches which starts

          High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
          Islanded in Severn stream;

Well Shrewsbury may be built in a loop of the river Severn but it certainly isn’t on an island, indeed Shrewsbury castle stands guard on the northern side of the river defending the land entrance to the town. The poem continues in it’s fourth verse with

          When Severn down to Buildwas ran
          Coloured with the death of man,

Buildwas is roughly seventeen miles (27½ km) from Shrewsbury and the river has a significant volume by then so there is no way that blood from a Saxon battle, which would have involved hundreds rather than tens of thousands of combatants at that period of history, would still be visible in the water by the time it got there. The most obvious error though is in poem LXI Hughley Steeple, I don’t even need to quote the poem as Hughley church has a timber framed belfry but it certainly doesn’t have a steeple. But that doesn’t stop Housman giving it one with a prominent weather vane on top, which it also doesn’t have.

Ludlow gets mentioned in five of the sixty three poems and Wenlock Edge, which is a nineteen mile (30 km) long escarpment appears twice. Although even in, probably the most famous poem from the set, known as ‘On Wenlock Edge’ although not actually titled, geography isn’t Housman’s strong point as it mentions the Roman city of Uriconium, the ruins of which are fifteen miles (24 km) from Wenlock Edge. But the poem is a really good example of the style of the collection and has been set numerous times to music, most notably by Ralph Vaughan Williams who included other poems from the set as well in his song cycle On Wenlock Edge.

          XXXI

          On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
           His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
          The gale, it plies the saplings double,
           And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

          'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
           When Uricon the city stood:
          'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
           But then it threshed another wood.

          Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
           At yonder heaving hill would stare:
          The blood that warms an English yeoman,
           The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

          There, like the wind through woods in riot,
           Through him the gale of life blew high;
          The tree of man was never quiet:
           Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

          The gale, it plies the saplings double,
           It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
          To-day the Roman and his trouble
           Are ashes under Uricon.

As said above most of the poems don’t concern Shropshire in particular but rather the perils of war and death. The collection was first published in 1896 but didn’t really start to sell in significant numbers until the start of the Second Boer War and massively rose again during the First World War when the death of young soldiers was so keenly felt across the country. The overall body count across the series of poems is surprisingly high and it is nearly always young men who are speaking from the grave (a common theme of the poems) to those yet to die. I don’t really know what I expected from the poems as I genuinely didn’t know anything about them apart from the title before I came to read the book but I can’t say they particularly appealed to me. There is however a brief glimpse or two of albeit grim humour amongst the largely unrelenting gloom.

          XXVII

          "Is my team ploughing,
           That I was used to drive
          And hear the harness jingle
           When I was man alive?"

          Ay, the horses trample,
           The harness jingles now;
          No change though you lie under
           The land you used to plough.

          "Is football playing
           Along the river shore,
          With lads to chase the leather,
           Now I stand up no more?"

          Ay, the ball is flying,
           The lads play heart and soul;
          The goal stands up, the keeper
           Stands up to keep the goal.

          "Is my girl happy,
           That I thought hard to leave,
          And has she tired of weeping
           As she lies down at eve?"

          Ay, she lies down lightly,
           She lies not down to weep:
          Your girl is well contented.
           Be still, my lad, and sleep.

          "Is my friend hearty,
           Now I am thin and pine,
          And has he found to sleep in
           A better bed than mine?"

          Yes, lad, I lie easy,
           I lie as lads would choose;
          I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
           Never ask me whose.

My copy is from the 2009 series of twenty books by Penguin called ‘English Journeys’ and I do have the complete set, all of which have very attractive covers. If there is any of these that you would like me to cover in a future blog entry then please send me a comment.