New wave of old tide

ON the horizon, we were warned, was a coming tidal wave of  HG Wells’s works published again. The occasion is that this year he will come out of copyright. Riding the wave will be the excellent editions of Oxford World Classics.

HG Wells at Sandgate, and soon with you again 

          The news came at a reading-aloud of Wells’s short story The Door in the Wall about a man who keeps seeing the same tempting door in the same wall but in  different parts of London.   At the lectern was Robert Lloyd Parry, the actor-producer exponent of one-man

Robert Lloyd Parry: warning of HG Wells tidal wave
photo courtesy Nunkie Productions
re-enactments best-known for his M.R James ghost stories. The night location was a mysterious public house tucked away down an obscure historic alley  in the city of London.

Titles with a head start

THE Sherlock Holmes stories are off to a head start with the reader because of their gripping titles--especially the startlingly descriptive. For instance, The Blue Carbuncle, The Crooked Man, and The Red-Headed League. Even if you don’t finish the story, out of curiosity you’ll definitely start it. I’d be surprised if you didn’t also want to finish it.

Good in part

THINKERS have had some great ideas. Penguin have been inspired by the saying cheap is superior (£4-99 at present).  They have taken great ideas and called the series Great Ideas. Retrieved from each thinker’s major works are neatly distilled sections that have made him or her famous or notorious. I’m trying Darwin and Maistre. Both caused a stir in their times. Darwin opens saying that Nature we admire is constantly eating itself to recreate. Maistre, coincidentally, but not till his page 86, points out that every second violence is going on somewhere, and man is the greatest exponent.

     There is more to these two, and other ideas

Good to look at, very good to handle. See page 86 for the famous  Maistre passage

 are presented in aesthetically designed small editions, with embossed covers. Their spines (the books’, not the thinkers’) are thin, but skilfully coloured to catch the eye on the shelves.

Cheap is the new superior

WORDSWORTH--the publishers, not the poet-- have raised the status of the cheap edition to superior. No longer can you look down on such a paperback. They even have introductions, the absence of which in a cheap edition used to be a sign of  cost-cutting.

Wordsworth paperbacks appear on  our library shelves in the endearing clear-plastic protective covers, filling gaps that other, older volumes have left by their absence or  banishment to reserve stock.

When I wanted Sherlock Holmes stories, collections now  not always deserving of a place on the shelves, there was a worthy Wordsworth edition of his Adventures and Memoirs,   shining with

Not even his adventures and memoirs, but  here the complete Sherlock Holmes

the admirably gaudy  cover of the great man in red smoking jacket and puffing his pipe. Inside, of course, an introduction and notes. The stories about a man who tries to stay young by foul means not fair, and the original  dog in the night-time, and others,  inhabit the pages.

No price, as a matter of interest, is printed anywhere, but  probably so the seller can charge less, not more, if we’re talking bargain books and not library. In the 1990s, when they started, Wordsworth sold each book for £1.

Diary entry

DIARY  10 March 2016

I heard good things about the 16^th century French essayist Montaigne, about his being easy to read and detesting cruelty as if he were in the 21^st century. Borrowed his complete Essays, a fat library paperback, but it was overwhelming. Despite my worries about selected works (see this blog), Montaigne’s The Essays: A Selection, edited by M.A. Screech, is better. Less is more.. I have  more strength  to consider his multitudinous views on cats, Roman tyrants and almost everything else. For someone who died more than four centuries ago he is, as the Editor says, ‘utterly readable’.

The select few

A book title or description Selected Works has for a long time caused a peculiar reaction in me.

     Ever since adolescence I can’t help thinking of someone selecting a gift. You are supposed to have trouble selecting the right gift. Sometimes you get it wrong. I’m led to thinking the person who selected the Selected Works might have got it wrong. The older we get, the harder we are to please. I approach a Selected Works ready to be disappointed. What if the editor left out a favourite poem, or, as has been known, refers to a poem his Introduction but excludes it from the book! If it is a gift, I feel sympathy for the giver, and guilt if the gift is not exactly what I wanted.

     I prefer a Collected Works or a Complete Works. My preference abruptly reverses if the item is a bulky volume or  more than two volumes. A  Selected Works in the rucksack is not so bad after all.

Books outlive us

MANY of the books in Swiss Cottage Library Reserve Stock outdo us humans. Some are a hundred years old and more, but are still at work, leaving the shelves and going into borrowers’ homes like young book do. Admittedly, they have had cosmetic surgery and been rebound. Some of  the  re-bindings have  that delightfully old-fashioned and hard-as-nails green or dark red covers. They’ll outlive me.

Diary entry

Diary  5 March 2016  There is more to tell about the Hampstead Central Library, and that mysterious vacant space next to the building, corner of Finchley and Arkwright Roads, London NW3.

From photographs of bomb damage I thought I’d worked out that the empty site was where the rest of the Hampstead Central Library stood before it was in part destroyed by enemy planes in the Second World War. Further research tells me that there was a ‘bomb site’ (UK Post-War talk) next door to the library, which was reported to have been purchased by the Library. What exactly does that mean? The Library had part of its own building turned into a bomb site and it bought another bomb site next door to their own bomb site?

          Obscure historical references in newspapers and documents can be confusing. Anyway, I had better visit that vacant block, which the present occupiers of the former library site, an arts centre, use for outdoor events.