Tag: Penguin Books

Madame Claire – Susan Ertz

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Although the author is probably rarely read nowadays, this novel by Susan Ertz is still in print although I think only by Zinc Read, a publishing house that specialises in printing books that would otherwise be no longer available. Other than that example I can’t find any other books by Ertz that are still in print, which is a pity as I have enjoyed this quite charming novel, I do have a copy of her book ‘Now East, Now West’ and will definitely look for others. Madame Claire is the eighty year old widowed matriarch of three children and three adult grandchildren, all from her eldest daughter Millicent. Her two other children are Eric, the eldest, now a prominent Member of Parliament and unhappily married to Louise, and Constance who is referred to as Connie throughout the book and is definitely the black sheep of the family having run off with a Russian concert pianist and then being abandoned by him. Millicent is married to John who is a well to do barrister and their three children are Gordon who is dating Helen, the daughter of Lord Ottway, Noel, currently unemployed due to losing an arm during WWI and Judy who doesn’t really know what she wants to do but feels trapped into the cycle of marrying well and settling down which frankly she doesn’t want to do. It took me a couple of chapters to get everyone sorted out in my head along with Stephen de Lisle, ex Home Secretary who was deeply in love with Claire, so much so that he asked her to marry him a couple of decades ago when her husband Richard died. Refused he took off for the continent and hasn’t been heard from since. However the book starts with Claire receiving a letter from Stephen…

That letter from Stephen was the first of many in the book and I like this way of pushing the story forward, Ertz uses them for exposition of the various relationships which would otherwise involve many more pages of scene setting and dialogue, instead she can simply have one character explain things to another in their letters. There is no doubt that Claire runs the family but without obvious interventions, rather she suggests options that help push things along such as getting Judy sent to Cannes ostensibly to see how Stephen was recovering from his minor stroke which was stopping his return to London and the resumption of a sadly extended break in relations with Claire. Yes this was partly the reason but Claire also recognised that Judy needed a break from the suffocating situation at her family home to think through what she was going to do regarding Major Crosby aka Chip whom she had fallen for after the car she has a passenger in had hit him crossing a foggy road. Unfortunately Chip had no money, wasn’t from a ‘known family’ and didn’t have a job so Judy’s parents didn’t regard him as marriage material for their daughter, Claire however liked him so was keen to help. Beyond Madame Claire Noel is the most interactive of the other characters, always willing to help his sister and most like Claire in his ability to make the best of a situation such as being able to deal with Connie when she re-appears, again at the instigation of Claire.

The various interactions between the assorted characters are well done and whilst Ertz does go a little flowery with her prose occasionally that is probably more to do with a hundred year old writing style than any real issue with the book, which to my surprise I have greatly enjoyed. I am usually wary of works by authors who have vanished to the degree that Susan Ertz has but I think she is greatly in need of a rehabilitation of her literary reputation and I’m surprised that Persephone Books hasn’t reprinted her works as I think she would fit well with their house style.

As can be seen from the full list below with their original UK publishers and publishing years, the first ten Penguin Books were an eclectic mix of titles and whilst several authors are still well known and widely read today a few have largely fallen by the wayside. They had mainly first come out in hard back in the previous decade so were very much current material in 1935 and Penguin was for the most part their first appearance in paper back. After the first printing dates I have added a number in brackets which gives the number of UK printings each book had had before being printed by Penguin, as you can see most of these books were very much in demand. The relatively low reprint numbers for the two crime novels are probably more due to the larger numbers printed for each edition for these than other genres.

  • Maurois – Ariel – The Bodley Head Ltd. – 1924 (8)
  • Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1929 (9)
  • Linklater – Poet’s Pub – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1929 (10)
  • Ertz – Madame Claire – Ernest Benn Ltd. – 1923 (14)
  • Sayers – The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Victor Gollancz Ltd. – 1928 (3)
  • Christie – The Mysterious Affair at Styles – John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. – 1920 (6)
  • Nichols – Twenty-five – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1926 (3)
  • Young – William – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1925 (2)
  • Webb – Gone to Earth – Constable and Co. – 1917 (21)
  • Mackenzie – Carnival – Macdonald and Co. – 1912 (11)

I’ve enjoyed reading the first four Penguin books over the last few weeks, and more books from the original ten will be featured on this blog over the coming months with the aim to have read them all by July 2026 so within their ninetieth birthday year. By the end of their first year Penguin had published fifty titles but were still an imprint of The Bodley Head and would not be a separate business until the beginning of 1937.

Poet’s Pub – Eric Linklater

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Of the four books that I am reading to mark the ninetieth birthday of Penguin Books this was probably the one I was looking forward to most. Eric Linklater was an established novelist by 1935 when Penguin began, with six of his twenty three novels published by then and a seventh coming out that year. Poet’s Pub was his second work (1929) and would be adapted into a film in 1949 although that version bears little relation to the original novel. I was already familiar with Linklater’s work from probably his best known novel ‘Private Angelo’ a comic satire of war based in late WWII Italy and published in 1946, which I first read and enjoyed a decade or so ago and probably should get off the shelves and re-read at some point. However I wasn’t disappointed with this also comedic book which at times, such as the extended car chase from the fictional village of Downish, north west of London, to Scotland and the aftermath of the Elizabethan dinner which provides the opportunities for the two thefts that push the plot forward, descends into near farce.

Saturday Keith, named as such by his father as he was the seventh son and they had all been born on different days of the week is the eponymous poet and the Pelican Inn in Downish owned by the mother of Quentin, an old friend of his from university days, is the public house. Or more accurately the inn/hotel as the regular guests staying there along with the staff provide Linklater with his much varied cast of characters and few patrons of the public bar are even mentioned. It’s a setting that has attracted many authors over the decades from E M Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’ to Anita Brookner’s ‘Hotel du Lac’ and even Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ along with numerous crime classics, where else could you believably have such a diverse group of people in one place with no need to explain who they are and why they are there?

Keith took the job as landlord with the hope that along with a regular income, something definitely lacking for the vast majority of poets, he would have a quiet space to work on his magnum opus, the poem that would finally mark his breakthrough onto the public consciousness. The work running a surprisingly successful inn once it become known it is run by a literary gentleman, and thereby attracts a more upmarket clientele, means he struggles to find time to work on his epic and the assorted distractions both from Quentin and Joan Benbow, the daughter of one of the guests whom Keith has fallen madly in love with add to the comic possibilities. Quentin has likewise fallen in love only he is smitten by Nelly Bly who is working there as a maid but in reality is a part time journalist for a national newspaper that is hoping to get some interesting stories. Amongst other guests there is an American by the name of Mr van Buren who has invented a new method for processing crude oil and if I say that his paper describing the technique is in an identical folder to that used by Keith for his poem I’m sure you can see where confusion lies later on in the book. Throw in some industrial espionage, a missing secret recipe for a blue cocktail available in light and dark shades to represent Oxford and Cambridge along with a few other quirks of the people staying there and the story positively bowls along dragged down only by the overlong car chase but even that has its redeeming and indeed ridiculous features.

Poet’s Pub is still in print by Penguin, although it now comes under Penguin Classics which I think is only fitting for this excellent novel that has stood the test of time remarkably well.

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

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Book number two from Penguin Books’ first ten titles which I’m reading in the quite fragile first edition copies to mark their ninetieth anniversary is A Farewell to Arms. As mentioned in last week’s blog about Ariel all the original rear covers for these books refer to this book as Farewell to Arms but this was quickly noticed and corrected and after the initial distributed batch the ‘A’ was reinstated. I’ve never been a particular fan of Hemingway, but I have enjoyed this, his second novel, which is based quite heavily on his own experiences in Italy during WWI although with fictional military units and characters some of which are based on real people. It was first published in 1929 and was sandwiched between his first novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and a non fiction book ‘Death in the Afternoon’ both of which are concerned with bullfighting which was a passion of his and probably negatively coloured my original impression of Hemingway.

The book follows American volunteer Frederic Henry who is serving as a Lieutenant in an ambulance corps for the Italian army before the Americans actually joined WWI. He meets an English nurse named Catherine Barkley but is rebuffed when he tries to kiss her. Later Henry gets badly injured in one knee during a mortar attack on the front line, getting decorated for his bravery in assisting fellow soldiers and ends up being looked after for months in a hospital in Milan where he is treated by Catherine and a relationship develops. I don’t know why but I wasn’t expecting a romantic story from Hemingway and this it definitely is as the deepening love between Frank and Catherine during his recovery supersedes the war driven plot in the first section of the book. Only for the war to come back into the story as Frank recovers sufficiently to be posted back to the front just in time for the Italian army to retreat in the face of German onslaught. Later whilst hiding as a civilian he joins up again with the now pregnant Catherine and they make an escape to Switzerland.

Hemingway on the other hand arrived in Italy in June 1918, aged just eighteen, as a Second Lieutenant working as an ambulance driver. In July he was injured in a mortar attack and got decorated and promoted to Lieutenant for his bravery in assisting fellow soldiers and then ended up spending six months recuperating in a hospital in Milan where he met an American nurse named Agnes Von Kurowsky and fell in love with her. Rather than go to Switzerland to escape the war in reality the conflict finished whilst he was being treated and he went back to America in early 1919 expecting Agnes to join him later. Instead she got engaged to an Italian officer and the two never met again.

That Hemingway had first hand experiences of the scenarios depicted in the novel is obvious in the vivid descriptions both of the conflict and the life in Milan during Frank’s recuperation, which at times seems so far away from the realities at the end of the First World War. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of Frank and I was particularly drawn in by the later sections covering the retreat from the north where Frank and his crew were as likely to be shot by jumpy and trigger happy Italians as the advancing Germans. The text is accurate enough for me to follow their movements on a map of northern Italy and then his escape from actually being shot by a group of disaffected Italian lower ranks and Carabinieri because he is an officer leading to his abandonment of his uniform to avoid reprisals through to the ultimate night time row across the Swiss border.

Below is a photo of my first edition copies of the first ten Penguin titles issued together on 30th July 1935.

Ariel – André Maurois

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30th July 1935 was a very important date in the history of publishing, as that is when the first ten Penguin books made their appearance. Ninety years later these books in their first editions are somewhat fragile and definitely difficult to find, especially the crime titles. I do have all ten and seven of them still have their elusive dust wrappers as can be seen below, the wrappers have the 6d (six pence) price on the front cover. For August I’m going to be reading the first four, one a week, and the plan is to read five of the remaining six during the rest of the year, one has already been a subject of a blog so this will be linked to when its turn comes, I will probably re-read this one as well just to say I’ve read the set in a run. As the books are so delicate, and valuable, this is not something I have done before but it only seems appropriate as a means to celebrate Penguin’s 90th birthday. The books are colour coded with blue indicating biography, orange fiction and green crime, other colours would be introduced as time goes on. This was a concept started by Albatross Press in Germany, see my blog on those books for more details and the similarities between them and Penguin.

Before talking about ‘Ariel’ the book there is one other thing that needs to be mentioned regarding these first ten books and that is an error on the back of the very first versions of all of them. Book two, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, is missing its first word in the list of titles on the rear. This was noticed quite quickly but not in time to prevent the first batch of titles going out with this incorrect list. Subsequent batches of books from the first editions of all ten books were corrected and the full title appears, however another error happened with ‘Ariel’and this is clear on the front cover at the top of this log entry. The authors first name is André not Andre and this led to a third cover being produced for the remainder of the first edition run of this title, not a great start to a new publishing enterprise. The first edition is therefore available in three variants:

  • Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
  • A Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
  • A Farewell to Arms on the rear and André on the front

All three versions are shown below, the first book being the rear of the one used at the top of the page with the missing accent, the second book is also missing the accent on the front cover.

Another thing to add, as it is clearer at the base of the rear covers above, is that Penguin Books when it began was simply a paperback imprint of the publisher John Lane The Bodley Head which explains why all the books say THE BODLEY HEAD on their front covers. This would be the case for over a year with Penguin Books finally becoming a separate entity and references to The Bodley Head no longer appearing from the batch of books numbered 81 to 90 published in March 1937.

When reading ‘Ariel’ it becomes clear that its subtitle ‘A Shelley Romance’ is particularly appropriate, as whilst it reads as a biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley it is at least partially a novel with a lot of clearly invented dialogue with no documentary evidence behind it, rather than what we would regard as a properly researched scholarly work today. That said the general thrust of the book and the sequence of events is accurate and it is impossible to examine the extent of Maurois’ actual research due to the lack of notes, citations or even an index in the book. Maurois is clearly more interested in getting a feel for his subject and portraying him in a way that gives an impression of what it would have been like to know him rather than providing a definitive biography, but it is very readable and still in print, both in this translation by Ella D’Arcy and other more modern versions.

We follow Shelley from his time being badly bullied at Eton, going on to Oxford where he lasted just a few months before being expelled from the university along with his friend and fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg over the authorship of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ which he had mailed to the bishops in the area and the heads of all the Colleges. Whilst at Oxford he had met Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old school friend of his sisters whom shortly after his nineteenth birthday he eloped to Edinburgh with. This led to their considerable financial difficulties as both sets of parents were outraged and stopped their allowances. Shelley had two children with Harriet, the second born after he had run away to France with the sixteen year old daughter of William Godwin and her sister whilst believing Harriet had begun an affair. Mary of course became famous as the author of Frankenstein which was published and went on to write several other novels after Shelley’s death but Maurois completely ignores this side of her portraying her as a dedicated wife, they married just days after after Harriet’s suicide, but also covering domestic arguments mainly between her and whichever other people (usually other women) were living with them at the time. The lack of acknowledgement of Mary’s literary talents is possibly the greatest failure of this biography. During the coverage of Shelley’s extended time in Italy, until his death there at just twenty nine, the quality of the biography improves markedly with letters included and far more evidence provided for what Maurois states happened.

Sadly Shelley never enjoyed the fruits of his poetic labours, as at his death he was still barely read and his life too coloured by his socialist and atheist reputation to make him acceptable reading for anyone likely to see his works in print, which is ironic bearing in mind his status as one of the great Romantic Poets nowadays. By all means read this book by Maurois as a general overview of the life of Shelley, but if you are really interested in the poet I have to recommend ‘Shelley: The Pursuit’ by Richard Holmes, first published in 1974 but still the definitive work.

Closely Watched Trains – Bohumil Hrabal

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The first book to be featured on my blog of the ninety volumes published as Penguin Archive to mark the ninetieth birthday of Penguin Books on 30th July 2025 and oddly I have chosen this one because of the translator rather than the author. The book was translated into English from the original Czech by Edith Pargeter, better known by her pen name Ellis Peters and the author of the medieval mystery books featuring the monk from Shrewsbury Abbey called Brother Cadfael. Pargeter was born and brought up within a few miles of where I live now and died just a couple of miles away so I’m always intrigued when I come across anything different she worked on and until reading this book I didn’t know that Pargeter became fluent in Czech following her time in the country in 1947. The original Czech title is ‘Ostře sledované vlaky’ and in some English translations is given as ‘Closely Observed Trains’. The 1966 film that was based on the novella also seems to switch titles between the two options depending on where it was released. The film won the 1968 Oscar for best foreign film and was nominated for the 1969 BAFTAs in the best film and best soundtrack categories. The line on the cover ‘A Penguin since 1982’ refers to the first year one of Hrabal’s works was published by Penguin Books.

Hrabal worked as a railway labourer and train dispatcher during WWII, whilst waiting to complete his law degree in Prague as the university was shut down during the German occupation. The knowledge he gained from this experience is fully used in this 1965 novella which is set at a somewhat eccentrically run small railway station during 1945 as the Nazi troops were being forced back across Czechoslovakia. The main protagonist of the book is twenty two year old apprentice dispatcher Miloš Hrma, who at the beginning is about to start his first shift back at the station after attempting suicide by slitting his wrists three months previously. The eccentricity of the station can best be emphasised by the description of the Station Masters office:

The station master is as unconventional as his office, keeping his pigeons, which he exchanged from a German to a Polish breed at the start of hostilities, in the roof of the station and when upset shouting profanities into the ventilation ducts in his office. Miloš may be the apprentice dispatcher and his suicide attempt after failing to perform in his first foray into lovemaking with his girlfriend does mark him out but his senior dispatcher is also a man to be reckoned with. During Miloš’s time recovering Výpravcí Hubicka had had a bet with the telegraph operator and when she lost had used all the station’s ink rubber stamps to decorate her naked behind. Something that she simply finds as funny but has greatly upset not only the station master but the railway inspector who unexpectedly arrives to perform a disciplinary. As you can imagine the operation of the station is somewhat chaotic and that’s without the interaction with the occupying German troops.

The fighting on the Eastern Front and the subsequent traffic with trains containing fresh troops going east and injured and dead troops going west along with ammunition and equipment heading into the conflict seems to provide most of the movements through the station. These are presented as stark contrasts to the craziness at the station which flips between the wildly funny and the tragic, especially in the brilliant and unexpected denouement. I greatly enjoyed this book and will now try to search out the film.

The London Nobody Knows – Geoffrey Fletcher

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Originally published by Hutchinson in 1962 and reprinted as a paperback by Penguin in 1965 this is now really more of a historical document a a lot of ‘The London Nobody Knows’ could really be retitled ‘The London Nobody Knew’ if reprinted today as quite a lot of what is featured no longer exists or has changed so dramatically as to be unrecognisable. For example the chapter dedicated to Islington refers to bomb damaged buildings and shops still in need on preservation, definitely not the case nowadays where in 2024 the average price for a terraced house there was £1,600,000 and a semi detached home getting on for 2 million pounds. I love the fact that Islington could be regarded as part of London nobody knows.

The book marks the beginning of the over thirty years Fletcher wrote and illustrated a diary column for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. As a young man in 1945 at the end of WWII he came to London to study at the famous Slade School of Fine Art and later at the Bartlett School of Architecture and brought his knowledge and art ability to the fore in his columns and his books. He died in 2004 at the age of eighty one back in his birthplace of Bolton and wrote, along with his newspaper work, at least thirty books of which this was the second. Of the books I have found listed two thirds are about London and almost all the rest are about how to paint and draw so he was dedicated to his subject and it shows in this delightful volume. There are two very different styles to the forty two drawings included, three of which are of the cast iron gents toilets in Star Yard, Holborn which I’m pleased to say is still there as a remnant of Victorian plumbing although no longer functional. I have chosen two illustrations to show both the finished drawings and what must really be regarded as sketches, the first being St Anne’s church in Limehouse, one of three churches he describes in that locality, another being Christ Church, in Spitalfields which he comments is in danger of demolition but is definitely still standing today and in regular use.

The title of the book has had a few dissenters over the years as ‘The London Nobody Knows’ is somewhat condescending to the many hundreds of thousands of people that live in the parts of London featured and know all too well in some cases. Whilst researching this article I found one comment that it should have been called ‘The London Nobody Who Reads The Telegraph Knows’ as it mainly covers parts of London that the more wealthy readers of that newspaper would have frequented although now of course a lot of it has been gentrified over the years.

Sadly the building I chose to demonstrate the more sketch like drawings, the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre on Commercial Road, Whitechapel, was a bingo hall by 1962 when the book was written and was demolished in 1970. Whilst admiring the artistry of the more finished drawings I love the sketches as he captures the life of the people around the featured properties and you feel more drawn in. The suggested perambulations to find the buildings, or even lampposts and signs covered in the text are also a joy to read.

Annoyingly much as I would love to know where that multicoloured lamp is on the front cover, neither the photographer nor their subject is credited in the book, something at the time that Penguin Books were all to prone to do. Two years after my copy was published there was a documentary film of the same name based on the book where actor James Mason wanders round some of the places featured and parts of this are available on youtube including this bit about The Roundhouse, now a major music venue,and illustrated in the Camden Town chapter of the book.

The Mirror of Ink – Jorge Luis Borges

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2005 was Penguin Books seventieth anniversary and to mark the occasion they published seventy books at £1.50 each which were largely extracts from other works in their vast back catalogue as is this one although this is collated from several collections of short stories. With Borges though, as he is mainly a writer of short stories, you ended up with seven complete works in the book and as an introduction to his literary output this book is excellent. The art of writing a short story is extremely difficult as in a short space you must not only have a beginning, a middle, and an end but also express an idea or indeed several which will leave the reader satisfied and in all seven of these Borges has proved himself well able to meet those aims. Knowing that he was Argentinian I was expecting South American themes but instead the first two ‘The Mirror of Ink’ and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ are set in the Middle East, the third ‘The Library of Babel’ could frankly be anywhere and everywhere. The fourth ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ is in Ireland, ‘The Witness’ is probably medieval England, ‘Ragnarok’ could also be anywhere, whilst the final story ‘Blue Tigers’ is based in rural India. A linking theme, if there is one, is the somewhat mystical and fantastic ideas behind all of these stories, that and the definite quality of the prose. I hadn’t read any of Jorge Luis Borges before this slim volume and indeed this is the only book of his work that I possess but I definitely need to read more.

Sadly Borges suffered from fading eyesight for many years and became blind at the end of the 1950’s however he continued to write, dictating stories initially to his mother who took on the role of his secretary until her death. The last two stories in this book were written after his blindness and there is certainly no diminution of the power of his writing. I just want to pick out a couple of the stories that I particularly enjoyed:

‘The Library of Babel’ is an exploration of the concepts of infinity in that the library described contains all possible books that are exactly 410 pages long with a fixed format of forty lines per page and eighty characters per line where a character is one of twenty two letters of the alphabet, a full stop, a comma or a space and all combinations of these appear at least once in one of the infinite series of books stored in the apparently infinite number of replicating hexagonal galleries that make up the library. The concept of a library that because it has all combinations of the twenty five characters and therefore contains books of apparently complete nonsense but must also due to randomness have every book that could possibly exist expressing every theme and also arguing both for and against every idea is beguiling. The impossibility of ever finding a specific work is also clearly spelled out along with some of the oddities of infinite series in that a revolution in the past had destroyed countless volumes but that this didn’t matter because books survived elsewhere in the library which differed from the vandalised editions by as little as a punctuation mark somewhere within them.

‘Blue Tigers’ also drew me in with a weird mathematical theme, the tigers are not flesh and blood but a collection of odd blue disks that the narrator finds on top of the plateau of a sacred hill. These discs are uncountable, initially he thought he had around ten of them but when examining them found far more. Sometimes there would be as little as three but holding these few and then letting them fall could reveal hundreds. The narrator spends nights trying to find a pattern to the ever increasing, and decreasing, quantities without any success and eventually, to save his sanity, he gives them to a blind beggar who seems to understand in someway that he is the fitting custodian.

Naturally the four mathematical operations – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing – were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty disks, divided, might become nine, those nine in turn divided might yield three hundred. I do not know how much they weighed, I did not has recourse to a scale, but I’m sure their weight was constant, and light. Their colour was always the same blue.

As 2005 was the seventieth anniversary it is clear that this year (2025) is the ninetieth and again Penguin have marked their birthday with a set of books, this time ninety of them at £5.99 each, some of which will be featured in this blog as the year goes on. The actual anniversary is the end of July so I am dedicating my August theme this year to the first four Penguin titles, which I will be reading in their first Penguin editions something I don’t do often due to the fragility of these ninety year old paperbacks.

The First Penguin Handbooks

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Last week saw the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and this week sees the eightieth anniversary of VE Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe, as this post goes live on the 6th May 2025 two days before VE Day itself. Whilst last week I read Felix Greene’s excellent summary of the first half of the Vietnam War, this week I’m looking at eight books produced as part of the Penguin Specials series which were designed to help the population feed themselves during a time of food shortages and rationing. Penguin Specials were intended to be books dealing with issues of the day and they had rapidly multiplied during WWII with such titles as ‘Aircraft Recognition’, ‘Nazis in Norway’, ‘How Russia Prepared’, ‘Signalling for the Home Guard’ etc. The books were produced far quicker than titles in the other Penguin Series so that they were relevant to the issues of the day, but before the designation of some of them as handbooks there had also been some concerned with making best use of the food supplies however these were in the more usual red covers for Specials. These included ‘S90 The Penguin Book of Food Growing, Storing and Cooking’ (May 1941), ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ (January 1942), ‘S119 Soft Fruit Growing’ (December 1942) and ‘S127 Wartime Good Housekeeping Cookery Book’ (February 1943).

The dates shown below for most of these handbooks may seem quite late in the war for those of us born after the end of shortages and rationing, but it should be noted that general rationing in the UK continued until July 1954 although some items such as bread (1948) did come off rationing before then.

S132 Tree Fruit Growing – Apples – December 1943

Raymond Bush had already written one book for Penguin, as can be seen above, but the two handbooks detailing tree fruit growing took us to his main speciality which he had adopted following a bad accident in 1914 and being advised that an outdoor life would be better for his health than the poster design his company had been doing prior to the First World War. He was a commercial grower from 1915 up until 1935 when he started advisory work on the subject for various scientific committees. The book is a wide ranging guide to growing apple trees with notes where similar methods are appropriate for other fruits such as pears and almost a third of the book is dedicated to pests and how to get rid of them, but it is based on Bush’s determination that the wartime population should not be derived of wholesome fruit. As he says in his introduction “Well my amateur friends, once again you must sit back and watch the Ministry of Food collect most of the fruit to make jam go several times as far as it has any rights to go by the judicious addition of apple pulp, swedes, mangolds and what not. That is unless you grow your own fruit and make your own jam.”

S137 Preserves for all Occasions – April 1944

This book admits that it will soon become out of date as ingredients become more available after the war ut nevertheless it provide a lot of useful information on the varying ways of preserving food. Not just the expected jams and chutneys but syrups, bottling means of drying fruit, vegetables and herbs and how to store fresh produce for the longest time. Unlike other books on preserving that I own it doesn’t include recipes but instead concentrates on good techniques and means of avoiding common mistakes.

S138 Tree Fruit Growing – Pears, Quinces and Stone Fruits – December 1943

Volume 2 of Tree Fruit Growing concentrates much more on the individual varieties of a wider range of crops than I was expecting. I hadn’t realised that almonds were not true nuts but were in fact relative of the plum and peach where we eat the seed and discard the rest as a direct opposite to the two fruits. Bush admits to not having grown them himself and struggled to find any information but put together what he could. There is also a section on laying out an orchard and a substantial chapter on bees at the end along with the inevitable chapter on spraying for pests, a subject clearly on Bush’s mind a lot.

S140 Rabbit Farming – June 1944

Inspired by the success of ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ which as Goodchild explains in the introduction to this book was “giving all the practical hints I knew on rabbit keeping under wartime conditions in order that many newcomers could make a success of rabbit meat production”. This book on rabbit farming is however a very different work as it is aimed at a larger scale operation and includes use of the fur in coats and other clothes necessary to make a living from the business. Goodchild himself came from a long line of farmers and along with his partner ran the largest rabbit farm in England producing not just meat but from it’s manufacturing division coats, gloves and other assorted fur products. The photographs, presumably taken at his site near Crawley in south east England, show an extensive operation which must have been very useful to wartime food and clothing supplies.

S144 Poultry Farming – May 1945

The second of the books split off from ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ took almost a year longer to write than the first. Alan Thompson was amongst other things the editor of the monthly magazine ‘The Poultry Farmer’ which had started in 1874 as ‘The Fanciers Gazette’ and was eventually bought by the publishers of ‘Poultry World’ in 1968, so he was ideally suited to write the book. The book is not aimed at people wanting to keep a handful of chickens in their garden or allotment which was the point of S101 but instead those planning to run a commercial operation and early on mentions a figure of £2,000 (£73,500 in today’s money) for initial outlay if you want to have a hope of making a success of such a venture. The book goes into considerable detail not only on housing and selecting your chickens but also the finances of such an operation with several pages of photographs along with many line drawings to illustrate various points. My copy has clearly been well used.

S145 Trees, Shrubs and How to Grow Them – January 1945

Uniquely in this collection of eight books we have a title not covering food preparation or production and it is also, for me anyway, the least interesting of the titles. It goes into considerable detail about the various trees and shrubs in the UK, with guides as to what to plant and where, such as hedgerows and because Rowe is trying to impart so much information in a book just short of two hundred pages it is not particularly readable. That’s not to say it isn’t useful but just not for the general reader.

S146 The Vegetable Growers Handbook – Volume 1 – May 1945

All the other handbooks were commissioned by Penguin especially for this series and my copies are therefore true first editions whilst S146 and S147 are first editions in Penguin. The Vegetable Growers Handbook by civil servant Arthur J Simons however had first appeared in 1941 published by Bakers Nurseries Ltd of Codsall, Wolverhampton. Simons had written it during a period of quarantine he had undergone after contracting “a succession of childish but contagious diseases during the air raids”. In it you learn the basics of preparing the ground, improving the soil, using manure, compost and chemical fertilisers and this takes up the first third of the book. You then progress on what to grow, how to sow the seeds and raise the plants successfully initially in open ground and then a short section on using greenhouses and frames before a final chapter on pests and diseases and what to do about them. All in all a pretty comprehensive guide and I’m sure customers of Bakers Nurseries found it very useful.

S147 The Vegetable Growers Handbook – Volume 2 – May 1945

The second volume doesn’t have a first published date, but it doesn’t appear to be a Penguin original so I’m guessing this also first appeared from Bakers Nurseries. This volume deals specifically with the various crops you can grow, when to sow them and how to ensure a long cropping season with various vegetables ripening throughout many months. Like the first volume there are suggested plans for gardens or allotments to make maximum use of the space without wastage from gluts in certain weeks. Simons refers to letters he received after the first volume with suggestions which prompted this second book and despite the focus on wartime household needs these two books would even now be useful for a keen vegetable grower.

After the war it was decided to create a series of its own called Penguin Handbooks, the first new title of which was The Penguin Handyman which came out in November 1945 and was assigned the number PH9 with the obvious intention to move the existing eight books into this new series, however it all became more complicated than that, as it often does with Penguin Books. In fact PH1 is a 1945 reprint of ‘S119 Soft Fruit Growing’ but in the green cover of Penguin Handbooks rather than its original red. PH2 was assigned to the reprinted ‘S132 Tree Fruit Growing – Apples’ and PH3 became the reprint of ‘S138 Tree Fruit Growing – Pears, Quinces and Stone Fruits’, both of which are covered above and these would ultimately be combined into a single volume ‘PH83 Tree Fruit Growing’ in September 1962.

Despite the assumed plan of simply renumbering the existing handbooks into the gap left at the beginning of the new series we already have one book which hadn’t previously been issued as a handbook and just two of the originals occupying the first three numbers and this gets worse as numbers PH4 and PH5 were not in the end used and neither was PH8. This leaves just two numbers PH6 which became a reprint of ‘S145 Trees and Shrubs and How to Grow Them’ in 1951 and PH7 which combined S146 and S147 as the ‘Vegetable Grower’s Handbook’ in 1948.

Oddly ‘S137 Preserves for all Occasions’ did get reprinted as a ‘proper’ handbook as PH12 in July 1946, why they didn’t use one of the abandoned numbers I have no idea. ‘S140 Rabbit Farming’ and ‘S144 Poultry Farming’ were both discontinued in favour of their original base work ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ which came out as handbook PH14 in June 1949 making these two some of the most difficult to find Penguin Handbooks.

English Folk Songs – Ralph Vaughan Williams and A L Lloyd

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Continuing the bucolic countryside and doomed love themes from last week’s ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ I was drawn to this book of English folk songs, which was Vaughan Williams’ last book as sadly he died just before it was published. Ralph Vaughan Williams was of course one of the great English composers of the first half of the twentieth century, he died in 1958, and was heavily inspired by English folk songs although he also wrote nine symphonies and four concertos along with his numerous song cycles and choral works. He qualified as a Doctor of Music from Cambridge University and it is as Doctor Vaughan Williams that A L Lloyd refers to him in his ‘Note on the Presentation of the Tunes’ at the start of this book. The selection of songs is quite widespread, although biased toward tunes gathered in the south of England as that was where Vaughan Williams lived so it was easier for him to travel round collecting material in that part of the country although there are a small number from the north. Vaughan Williams was inspired to start collecting English folk songs by contemporaries such as Cecil Sharp and the collections he made helped to preserve a rapidly dying art form as well as influencing his own work.

If I have one criticism of this book it is not in the choice of songs, which provide a spectrum of styles but in the structure of the book itself with the songs in the first part and the accompanying text in the second half which means that you need two bookmarks to keep track of where you are as you continually skip to and fro to read the context and history of the song you have just read. I would have much preferred the descriptions to be interleaved with the music as that would have been far simpler to read.

Before the couple of examples I have chosen, I must explain that the copy I have has a very tight spine and to avoid splitting it I have been forced to hold it open as much as I dared but that has led to somewhat distorted photos of the pages.

Although listed as collected from Somerset, the earliest versions of this song are known from Newcastle Upon Tyne, so the opposite end of the country, and these date back to the late seventeenth century. The lyrics included are a mix of at least three versions into a harmonious whole presumably by Vaughan Williams when collating this book.

The Green Bed follows a theme common with other songs of the period of a sailor who arriving at lodging he has used before claims to have lost all his money in a disaster and is turned away but when he shows that actually he has plenty of money all of a sudden beer and bed are available and the landlady is quite happy to include her daughter in the bed. However the sailor spurns the offer as it is clear that both of them are only interested in the money he has. Again the example comes from the south of England but versions of this song are also known from Warwickshire, in the English Midlands and therefore a long way from the sea.

I really enjoyed this exploration of English folk song and I have various other collections of traditional music which would also be worth exploring at a later date.

Seven Famous One-Act Plays – Second Series – John Fergusson (Ed)

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It was a long time between the first collection of one-act plays published by Penguin and this second selection, the first volume was published in November 1937 whilst this one came out in November 1953. Part of the sixteen year gap can of course be explained by the onset of WWII but Penguin wouldn’t publish any more collections of one-act plays until 1965 and the establishment of Penguin Plays as a series of its own. Which is odd if the blurb on the rear of the book is true as this suggests that one-act plays are particularly popular with amateur dramatic associations. Popular or not I’ve largely enjoyed this collection even if, just over seventy years after it came out, I recognise the names of just two of the playwrights of the seven ‘famous’ plays and there are three I would really like to see performed. Taking them in the order they appear in the book, rather than the front cover:

Villa For Sale – Sacha Guitry

A noted French actor, playwright and film maker, Guitry was prolific in both his production of plays and films, often acting, producing and directing in the same film where he also wrote the script and in 1936 he performed all four roles in four separate films. Villa for Sale is translated from the original French, although no translator is given in the book, and it was quite enjoyable as an entree to the collection. However it isn’t really satisfying as a story as the characters are quite lightly painted possibly due to the restrictions of the length of the play but as my favourite of this set is only a little longer I’m less inclined to give Guitry the benefit of the doubt with this. The story concerns a French lady who is trying to sell her villa for 250,000 Francs but would take 200,000 at a pinch, the villa is in an up and coming neighbourhood for the French film industry so should be in demand but has been on the market for a while, however she has a viewer this afternoon. A couple arrive and are welcomed but the husband is clearly bored of looking at villas and doesn’t really want to buy anything. Whilst his wife is upstairs being shown around it becomes clear that this couple are not the expected buyers but have turned up on spec when the real potential purchaser arrives, mistaking the man as the seller of the property she offers 300,000 Francs and provides a cheque straight away as she wants the place immediately ready to start working on a film. She leaves just before the real owners comes back downstairs and the husband writes a cheque for 200,000 Francs to buy the villa. All in all a rather tawdry story and not one I would rush to see performed.

We Were Dancing – Noel Coward

The play that for me has aged least well in the book, this comedy of manners based around a woman who feels that she has suddenly fallen in love with the man she was dancing with despite being married for many years to another man she loved once but over time it has become more habit to be together rather than love. I had high hopes for this as I had never read a play by Noel Coward, and at times the interactions between her husband and her new infatuation did work but frankly for the most part it left me bored and the clip I found of Coward performing the song included in the play does little to improve my opinion of the play.

Master Dudley – Philip Johnson

In third place of the plays I would like to see performed is this one, although the chance of any company even hearing of the play never mind putting it on are very low. Over fifty of Philip Johnson’s one-act plays appeared in the Samuel French catalogue of published plays of 1951 – more than any other author. In the comparable catalogue of 2005, his plays had disappeared without trace. At the start of the play Dudley’s aunt Stella had just arrived from America to provide support to her sister’s family as Dudley was on trial for murder, however as she arrives he is sensationally acquitted, It becomes clear as the play progresses that there has been a grave miscarriage of justice…

Interlude – Paul Vincent Carroll

Irish playwright Paul Carroll was well known in Ireland and wrote many works including for the National Theatre and this almost makes it into my list of plays I would like to see performed as I suspect that done well it would make great entertainment. The play is set in the office of a money lender in a small market town in Northern Ireland, Judy Tippin and her husband have come to Farrelly’s office to try to get an extension on their loan which was actually due to be settled the day before. Judy and Farrelly have history and she is hoping to use this to soften the heart of the famously stern money lender. The use of ‘defective’ electrics in the office which cause the lights to flicker occasionally and then ultimately go out leaving the performance by candlelight for a short-while has Judy almost convincing Farrelly to forget the debt in lieu of happy memories but then the lights come back on and in the harsh light the hard-hearted Farrelly takes her money leaving her and her husband with nothing.

Although Carroll was lauded in both Dublin and New York as a major new theatrical voice, virtually none of his work has been in print since his death in 1968 until Colin Smythe published a significant collection in 2014 as the sixteenth volume in his series of Irish dramatists, with six complete plays (although not including this one) and overviews of many of his other works.

A Husband for Breakfast – Ronald Elwy Mitchell

Top of my list for plays I would like to see performed from this collection is this one, yet annoyingly Mitchell is the author I can find least about on the internet, other than born in Camberwell, Surrey in 1905 and died in Dane County, Wisconsin, USA in 1986. Nothing he wrote appears to still be in print yet from this short play he was clearly an excellent writer. The play, set in a small Welsh village, is full of humour. It starts early morning as Aholibah is starting to prepare breakfast for her and her husband Isiah, who is still asleep, but is surprised by the arrival of a neighbour who is clearly expecting some sort of show. It becomes clear that Isiah had been in the pub the previous night and when it came to his turn to pay for the drinks he hadn’t any money. Trying to think of anything he could sell or barter for his round he was constantly thwarted by people pointing out the items he came up with belonged to Aholibah. Eventually he struck a deal with Moses Roberts to sell Aholibah herself to him for the price of the drinks. Various villagers were therefore descending on Aholibah’s cottage to see how she reacts. Eventually Moses Roberts himself arrives seeking the return of the half a crown he had paid Isiah but Aholibah sensing a way to profit from this instead sets him to work around the house as her new ‘husband’ much to the amusement of the other villagers there. Moses Roberts is then desperate to get out of the bargain as can be seen below and a trade is proposed for Roberts to buy himself out of the ‘contract’ which starts with two bushels of wheat but quickly escalates:

The Rose in the Cloister – Margaret Luce

Later Lady Margaret Luce as her husband was knighted when he became Governor of Aden in 1956 she is also one of the grandmothers of English actress Miranda Hart and wrote a book about her experiences in the Middle East ‘From Aden to Gulf: personal diaries’, which covers 1956 to 1966 and is a book I will definitely be looking out for. The play is well written and is also by far the shortest work in this collection being just nine pages long yet it manages to tell a complete story and even deliver a moral. It starts with a monk just concluding his sermon in the cloister of the monastery during which he points out a rose bush with a single flower and warns that “Only he whose heart is true as steel and without sin may pluck that rose from its stem: if any other dare to make the attempt his hands as they touch the stem will be burned”. This greatly excites his listeners but one resolves to take the rose and give it to his true love in place of the rose he has already brought for her.

The Will – J M Barrie

Second in my list of plays I want to see is this one. Barrie is probably most famous as the creator of Peter Pan and this is beautifully written as we see the effect of the years passing with the simple expedient of altering the set dressing, and presumably some quick changes on behalf of the cast. It is set in a solicitors office and a young couple arrive to set out his will in favour of his new wife. Once this is done the curtain falls ut rises again just ten seconds later to reveal subtle changes such as the portrait of the monarch going from Queen Victoria to King Edward VIII. The couple return, a little older, and revise the will, he is obviously doing much better than anticipated yet the beneficiaries other than his wife are getting less. The curtain falls and rises ten seconds later again, the portrait of the monarch has altered to King George V along with other small changes. The couple return and again revise the will, he is now wealthy but again the changes show even less regard for others. The curtain comes down and back up for a third time and this time just the man arrives as his wife has died, this time he wants to revise to will to pay back those people he had taken advantage of on his way up in society. The play is really well done as not only are the changes in the couple elegantly drawn but the father and son pair of solicitors also evolve over time.

One thing I would have liked included in the book is a brief biography of the various writers, I assume it is missing as they would have been well known at the time, but only Coward and Barrie have lasted the decades as names I recognised so I’ve had to do a little research to identify the authors.