Defining a Collection

The last part of this Blog described a particular author collection, specifically a Bronte collection. It is now time to lay down some rules. Let us assume you have chosen an author and wish to build up an impressive collection confirming your interest and the serious nature of your collecting ambitions. Let us further assume this is to be a literary collection.

The focal point of any author collection must be the works of that author. You may already have most of these in various forms; dog-eared paperbacks - hard backs without dust wrappers, with spines drunkenly leaning - odd volumes of a collected set of the author's works. You may even have a great attachment to these early members of your collection. But this is no time for sentiment. You are now into the serious business of collecting and must seek out the best possible copies of the major works. Depending on the author it may or may not be possible to make a strike for First Editions, particularly for the earliest works. But you must get as close as you can without blowing the whole budget. Thus, later impressions of the first edition with the same dust wrapper will sit on the shelves as comfortably as a true first, and only you will know the difference.

There must be one or two signed or association copies. These may have been 'flat-signed', i.e. a simple signature made in Waterstone's; they may be dedications to an individual. If the dedicatee has some connection with the author then this is very good ("To Bosie from Oscar"), but in most cases you will not be so lucky. Some authors signed almost everything, many in luxurious limited editions, before the 'trade' edition was published for the masses. As a true collector you may prefer the honest trade edition to such esoterica (particularly if funds are limited). There are exceptions: The Hogarth Press and Virginia Woolf are inseparable, early fragments of James Joyce's 'Work in Progress' are essential in a Joyce collection.

OK, now we have the books by the author, but then you become aware of various collected editions of the author's works that are generally referred to in coded references such as Cook and Wedderburn Vol XXXIV. To hold your head up in any assemblage of devotees of your author, it is really necessary to acquire such a set even if you never read it and leave the pages uncut and unopened. There is only one rule here, buy the best or none at all. The best is instantly recognisable from the cadence of it's title, reflecting all that is best about the author. So we have The Sussex Edition (Kipling), The New York Edition (Henry James), The Knutsford Edition (Mrs Gaskell), The Caerleon Edition (Arthur Machen). Such titles reflect a certain elegance and grandeur and pity the author who has not laid claim to his native town or adopted county in his collected works. You will search in vain for The Stoke on Trent Edition of Arnold Bennett.


Next Bibliography; how else can you confirm the completeness and importance of your collection? Here you are well served and should easily acquire the standard bibliography, i.e. the one everyone quotes. Classic examples are Michael Sadleir's Trollope bibliography and Slocum and Cahoon's James Joyce bibliography. There is something really affirming in proving that your copy of 'Dubliners' is actually Slocum and Cahoon 9, while your copy of Arthur Machen's 'The Secret Glory' is Goldstone and Sweetser 19e (variant issue). You somehow knew these books were important, but nice to have your instincts consolidated in this way.






And so to Biography; accepting that your author's autobiography, if it exists, is likely to be the least reliable record, this must be first on the shelves, followed by, maybe three or four others spaced out over the period since the author's first success, with at least one recent life of the author, to put to rest any suspicions that you are not keeping your collection up to date.

The next area is difficult; this is the area of literary criticism. You really need to demonstrate that you do not merely read your author - you study your author. Now, do not confuse this with Reading Circles or York Notes. I am not talking here of books that take a difficult work and simplify it for the average reader. I am talking about books that take a basically simple narrative and deconstruct it into layers of impenetrable complexity. These books on your shelves confirm that there are no boundaries to your study. Worthy additions to your collection would be books such as 'Ironies of Ulysses', 'Let me be Los: Codebook for Finnegan's Wake', 'Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works'. Feminist and/or Marxist criticism will confirm your lack of prejudice and willingness to embrace new interpretations.



Finally, it will come as no surprise that most authors were copious letter writers and that most people receiving their letters put them in a safe place, even more so once the author's fame was assured. Even less of a surprise is that the Collected Letters of some authors exceed their entire literary output and being seen as an invaluable part of the author's oeuvre have not lacked for enthusiastic editors. So, these, too we must have (usually in expensive editions emanating from universities in the American mid-west, which with enviable foresight and bottomless purses managed to purchase the actual letters before the rest of us caught on).

So that is it - all that is left now is to try to get even closer to the author by acquiring a manuscript letter from the author, or piece of ephemera belonging to the author. A personal letter would be best - 'Dear Nora, I am going to tell you what I am really trying to say in the Proteus episode of Ulysses ....', - but the best you are likely to get is a visiting card or an acknowledgement for a delivery of potatoes.



Reviewing the above, I see that I may be accused of straying into cynicism here and there. This is not my intention. A collection built on the principles stated will not only be a continuing source of pride and pleasure, but could, just maybe, grow into something important. Only two rules apply; collect the best you can afford and don't stop until the bookcase really is overflowing.





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"not yet, though vennisoon after" - when to read 'Finnegans Wake'

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, for all except a select band of devotees, in 'Finnegans Wake' James Joyce bequeathed as his parting gift to the world a book that is essentially unreadable. Yet any list of the world's great books would include Joyce's 'book of the dark' alongside his book of the day, "Ulysses". To its admirers it is the greatest book of the twentieth century; to others it remains a mystery as yet unexplored.


It is complex, deliberately made so, as Joyce expanded and revised earlier drafts, creating ever richer neologisms and portmanteau words and incorporating words from a variety of languages. It is the multiplicity of meanings and interpretations contained in each phrase (and often word) that makes 'Finnegans Wake' the magical work it is. This, in turn, has led to a veritable industry of commentators, annotators and critics who have subjected the book to possibly the most detailed examination ever accorded to a modern work of fiction.


This process began even before the book was published in its final form by Faber and Faber in 1939, as a result of the publication in the journal 'Transition' of extracts from what was then called 'Work in Progress'.


These extracts in fact comprise the bulk of the work and were published in 17 installments between April 1927 and May 1938, Joyce having commenced his 'Work in Progress' in 1923, the year after 'Ulysses' was published. 'Transition', published by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company contained alongside 'Work in Progress', work by other leading modernists, such as Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and even Franz Kafka.





Sections of the work were also published in individual booklets by private presses, such as the Paris based Black Sun Press and the New York Crosby Gaige. Copies of these, especially the signed ones, can be very expensive. The first of these was 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' (1928), the last (and most elaborate, including a hand coloured initial letter by Joyce's daughter, Lucia) 'Storiella as She is Syung' (1938).





Only two years after the first appearance of 'Work in Progress' in 'Transition' Joyce encouraged a group of friends to publish their responses to it. Thus it was that in 1929, Shakespeare and Company published 'Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress', containing articles by, amongst others, Samuel Beckett (to whom Joyce dictated parts of 'Work in Progress' as his eyesight failed) and William Carlos Williams, surely the only occasion on which a spirited defence of a book has been published ten years before the actual book was published. A significant number of Joyce's letters to his friends also contain explanations of various parts of his text.


But then everything about 'Finnegans Wake' defies the usual conventions; it is one of those works like 'Tristram Shandy' and 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' that changes the landscape of literature. For a start, since its original publication, successive editions have maintained essentially the same pagination, from Page 3 through to 628, enabling references in critical works to page and line numbers to have universal application. This is similar to the Bible, with its generic Book, Chapter, Verse references and, in my mind, 'Finnegans Wake' is Joyce's sacred book, since into it he poured not only his own life experience, but a view of life that is both universally valid and profoundly sympathetic. Joyce's writing style, in this work, has all the characteristics of a dream, with characters undergoing transformations both to heroic archetypes and to geographical features. But the identity of the dreamer is not certain.

Who are the characters? Essentially a family living in a public house in Chapelizod, on the banks of the Liffey west of the centre of Dublin, at which house, a party has assembled for the wake of one Finnegan, a builder who fell from a ladder. The family are the publican, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, their twin sons Shem and Shaun and daughter Issy. But these characters represent all of humanity.

HCE is the archetypal flawed man, who has committed some sort of indiscretion in Phoenix Park, from which event much of the book's narrative action (such as it is) is derived. But he is also the mythical hero of his race, Finn MacCool, and a builder of cities and civilisations. His geographical counterpart is Howth Head, where the Liffey meets the Atlantic.

Anna Livia is all women and has her counterpart in the 'rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of' the River Liffey, Dublin's passage to the sea. She is a subject of gossip amongst the washerwomen down at the river but is the well spring of all life.

Shem 'the Penman' is the writer and artist (possibly Joyce), Shaun 'the Post' is the practical son (possibly Joyce's brother Stanislaus), deliverer of messages, while the lively Issy is every daughter.

Through these characters in their multiple avatars Joyce presents a view of all history, geography and literature. Finnegan's fall is Earwicker's fall is humanity's fall. Joyce was Influenced by the Italian philosopher Vico's theory of history as repeating cycles (successive ages of gods, heroes and humans followed by a period of chaos before the cycle repeats) and this cyclical pattern occurs thoughout the book, evidenced also by the first sentence of the book being the continuation of its final sentence.

I (perhaps like many others) read selected parts of 'Finnegans Wake' before attempting the whole book (which I have now done). To help I assembled a collection of, what have become standard 'companions' to the 'Wake'. Perhaps the best known of these is 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' by Campbell and Robinson (1944), which contains analysis and a paraphrase of its text.


My own favourite is James Atherton's 'The Books at the Wake' (1959), which is a detailed study of the literary sources Joyce used. These include Skakespeare (every play is incorporated), Swift, Lewis Carroll, The Bible (every book) and the Koran (all 114 suras). But Joyce also built in references to his favourite books, such as Le Fanu's 'The House by the Churchyard' and Thomas Moore's 'Irish Melodies' (all first lines and titles of the melodies are used). Atherton lists several hundred separate works which can be found in the 'Wake', including the 11th edition of the 'Encyclopedia Brittanica', which Joyce plundered for river names and other geographical and historical references.


Louis Mink's 'A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer' (1978) includes references to the thousands of place name references, arranged both in linear form (i.e. in order of the text) and alphabetically.


Add to these Clive Hart's massive 'Concordance' and McHugh's 'Annotations', which provides page by page analysis of every word requiring it, and you would be as well equipped as any previous reader.





There is a wonderful book edited by Burns and Gaylord entitled 'A Tour of the Darkling Plain'.


This contains letters exchanged between Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen over the period 1950 to 1975, in which they share their love of 'Finnegans Wake' and attempt to solve its mysteries. Glasheen went on to produce the wonderful 'A Census of Finnegans Wake' (1956), which lists the hundreds of characters, fictional and historical, who appear in the work, with suitable annotations. She later expanded this in second and third editions.

So, when to read 'Finnegans Wake'? Perhaps, as Joyce wrote it at the end of his writing life, it is best read late in your own reading life. It is the work of a mature mind at the very height of its powers.


And perhaps now is exactly the right time, as a New Edition of 'Finnegans Wake', the product of many years work on the manuscripts, has just been published in a sumptuous edition by the Houyhnhnm Press, Dublin. This has some 9,000 'corrections' from the previously published version and is perhaps the last word on the text. It will be available in Penguin shortly.

Why read it? Because hidden away you will find (as on page 328, line 29), lines that take your breath away:

"In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you're in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy.".

For a succint statement of life (and death) that is about as good as literature can get.


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Bookplates and the DIspersed Library

Unless you are a Samuel Pepys or Thomas Jefferson then it is almost inevitable that, however fine your library, there will come a day when it will be divided, sold, given away or otherwise dispersed. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since out of the debris of once coherent collections emerge new private libraries and new material for the great public collections. It is an endless recycling that is the wellspring of the collector's joy as long sought after books appear at auction, in bookshops and on on-line book sites.

Many collectors mark their books in some way to identify their ownership. This may be by a simple signature, or by the inclusion of a personal bookplate normally affixed to the front pastedown. First edition fetishists may recoil in horror at the thought of an otherwise pristine copy being defaced in this way, but to a true booklover such symbols of ownership become a new trail to explore. They also make a tangible connection between you and that other owner - you have both handled (and hopefully read) this very copy.

Over the course of our collecting life, both by chance and design, many books with interesting bookplates, or other signs of ownership, have found their way onto the shelves. Here is a sample:


The bookplate of John Quinn in Arthur Machen's "The Three Imposters" (John Lane, 1895). This bookplate was designed for Quinn by Jack Butler Yeats. Quinn was an American lawyer and eminent collector of modernist works. He was a patron of many literary figures, including W B Yeats, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, from whom he puchased the manuscript of "Ulysses" (now in the Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia). Quinn also successfully defended Joyce's "Ulysses" against obscenity charges. So, I now have in my hand a book from a collection that contained the manuscript of "Ulysses". Could it get much better?


The bookplate of novelist Dennis Wheatley in Forrest Reid's "Walter de la Mare: A Critical Study" (Faber and Gwyer, 1929). Wheatley's library was sold by Blackwell's in 1979 and this was Item 1806 in their catalogue.


The bookplate of comedian Barry Humphries in Arthur Machen's "Ornaments in Jade" (Alfred A Knopf, 1924).


Two for the price of one - the bookplate of novelist Hugh Walpole's Brackenburn Library and that of art historian and curator John Gere in J Sheridan Le Fanu's "Wylder's Hand (Hutchinson, no date). A pencil note by Gere says that this copy was purchased at the Christie's sale of Walpole's library on 11/2/46.


The bookplate of Harold Hulme Brindley, naturalist, in M R James' "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" (Edward Arnold, 1904). Brindley knew James at Cambridge and this copy contains a manuscript letter from MRJ to Brindley as well as illustrations of the scenes in the stories pasted into the book by Brindley, making it a very special copy - far from a pristine first but infinitely more interesting.


The bookplate of John and Myfanwy Piper in John Ruskin's "Modern Painters" (George Allen, 1888).


The bookplate of Isambard Brunel (son of the engineer) in John Ruskin's "Stones of Venice" (Smith Elder, 1851)


The bookplate of John Brent, antiquary and novelist in Henry Rowlands' "Mona Antiqua Restaurata" (Dublin, 1723).


The bookplate of Vincent Starrett, bibliophile, author and Sherlock Holmes afficionado, in his own book "Penny Wise and Pound Foolish" (New York 1929). This bookplate was designed by the illustrator Gordon Browne (son of H K Browne ('Phiz')).


The bookplate of bibliophile, collector and writer about books, Holbrook Jackson, loosely inserted in the copy of James Joyce's "Storiella as She is Syung" (Corvinus Press, 1937), presented by the owner of the press, Viscount Carlow, to Jackson when he visited the press on 12th April 1938. Interestingly, Viscount Carlow has written a suitable presentation inscription to Jackson in ink on a preliminary blank page, but Jackson, perhaps in deference to the beauty of the book, did not paste in his bookplate.


John Ruskin's Brantwood bookplate in Mrs Oliphant's "The Makers of Florence" (Macmillan 1877). Care is needed with Ruskin bookplates since, after the dispersal of his library, it is almost certain that some bookplates purporting to be Ruskin's were printed and inserted in books not from his library to increase their value. The story is told in James Dearden's "Facets of Ruskin". The example shown dates from circa 1890 and probably indicates Ruskin ownership of this book.

It has become a standard exercise now to try to compile lists of books in authors' libraries long dispersed. In our collection we have books with such lists for James Joyce's Trieste library, Ruskin's library, Lewis Carrol's library and H P Lovecraft's library.





There are recent books on Oscar Wilde's library and even Hitler's private library.


It was in Peter L Stern's superb bookshop in Boston that I had in my hand H P Lovecraft's copy of M R James' "A Thin Ghost and Others" with both Lovecraft's bookplate and his signature. Sadly I replaced it on the shelf to await another traveller in the realms of phantom libraries, or, to be perfectly honest, we couldn't afford it.




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The Pleasure of Long Books

The number of books that can be read in the average lifetime is necessarily limited; the urge to collect more books continues undiminished for many years. Therefore choices have to be made as to which books to read now and which can be safely deferred for a few years longer. This choice becomes particularly acute when the books in question are long, and by long I mean of the order of 1,000 pages or more.

However, the rewards of total immersion in a long book can be incalculable, as you are sucked into the world of its characters and the book you are reading seems to be the only book you have ever read. I want to write about several such books that have made a deep impression on me and to indicate others on the shelves as yet unread.

"War and Peace" has become almost a catch-phrase or generic name for books that over-awe by their length and reputation. I bought my copy in W H Smith in Chester in the summer holiday after completing my first degree. It seemed a good use of time before commencing further studies leading to a PhD. And so it was; from the very beginning I was totally absorbed in the events of the time and the lives of the characters, Pierre, Natasha, Nicholas, Andre, Sonya and the rest, so that when the final page was turned there was a genuine feeling of loss. I have read the book twice since that first reading, in the same Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, but it is that first encounter with Tolstoy's brilliance that has left the permanent impression.



That was some 40 years ago, but it was last early last year that I finally got round to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain". I expected this to be a "difficult" book, but I was wrong. For a few weeks I lived with Hans Castorp in that sanitorium, high in the Alps. With Hans I took long walks and rest cures, learnt how to wrap myself in a blanket and followed him to dinner, hoping to avoid the 'bad Russian' table. With Hans, I was a fascinated, if somewhat perplexed, listener to the interminable debates between the Jesuit Naphta and the rationalist Settembrini, that are only brought to a conclusion when the former blows his own brains out in their duel. There was a sadness when I finally left the sanitorium with Hans to face an uncertain future as the Great War took its toll.



Early last year we were in Cracow and in the excellent American Bookstore there I found a copy of Pawel Huell's "Castorp". This is a short book, but is a sort of prequel to "The Magic Mountain", as it tells the story of Hans Castorp in Gdansk, where he was studying marine engineering, a period briefly alluded to in Thomas Mann's book. This book is so well written that for a short time I was taken back to Castorp's world.



Another central European classic is Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities". It was its marvellous opening line - 'A barometric low hung over the Atlantic' - that attracted me to this book when I picked it off the shelf in the sadly now long gone Borders bookstore in Preston. The setting is Vienna a year or so before the outbreak of the First World War and, with the eponymous hero, Ulrich, I attended the endless receptions and meetings to plan the celebrations to mark the 70th anniversary of the accession of the emperor Franz Josef. It is all so pointless, which I suppose is the point of the book.



Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is really several books, but it is better read as one long work, a task I completed one summer. By the end I felt I knew Swann better than those in whose company he then mixed. Time passes in these books; by contrast the action of James Joyces' "Ulysses" takes place in but a single day, but what a day! From the outside perhaps not eventful, but from the perspective of Leopold Bloom a day packed with incident and adventure, best experienced by turning up in Dublin on Bloomsday and just going with the flow.



"Gone with the Wind", "Les Miserables", "Middlemarch", the list could go on, but it is now time to pay homage to those long books as yet unread on our shelves. There they perch, like 'Angry Birds', waiting to sink their claws into me should I be so reckless as to disturb their slumber



A quick scan of the paperback shelves reveals the following:

"Infinite Jest", by David Foster Wallace (for debunking the American Dream);
"Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand (for learning about Objectivism);
"Life and Fate", by Vasili Grossman, set in war-time Stalingrad (not much fun there);
"The Count of Monte Cristo" (for when I am falsely accused, whilst planning my daring escape from prison).



There they are, some 5,000 pages awaiting my attention, but first I will read some haiku.


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