Books from Honiton

Apart from the table top sale mentioned at reference 1, Honiton also runs to at least two proper secondhand bookshops, one of each side of the road as you near the Exeter end of the High Steet, with one of them being the Graham York from whom I have bought on several occasions, and the other being High Street Books.

From the first shop, I was able to add to my collection of atlases, with the Citizen's Atlas of the World from  Bartholomew, first published in 1898, with this particular example being from the seventh edition of 1942 - it always being something of a surprise to me that book life went on to this extent when things were at a low ebb, this despite the fact that some of my father's once grand picture books about art, from Phaidon, date from about the same time. I associate to the memory of reading somewhere that Hitler, never getting a real majority and well aware of the strength of the left wing, not to say the Communists, in the years before he came to power, was careful not to squeeze the living standards of the working classes. Rearmament was paid for in other ways. Dissent was, of course, another matter.

A peculiarity of this atlas is the way in which the double page spreads are presented, cunningly pasted onto the bound stubs in such a way that the double page spreads open flat, with no irritating loss of map down the middle, in the way of a conventional binding. As it happens, the only other atlas that I know that does this is my Atlas of the Holy Land, prepared under the direction of J. G. Bartholomew, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.R.G.S., cartographer to the king, for Hodder and Stoughton, in 1915, in the middle of another war. The new atlas dates from an era when the Bartholomews were publishing in their own name and was the work of John Bartholomew, M.C., M.A., F.R.S.E, F.R.G.S. I have yet to work out how these two Bartholomews are related. Perhaps they coincide.

More family confusion in that the atlas carries the bookplate of Bernard Lord Coleridge, a gentleman who certainly exists, a nephew of some sort of the poet Samuel Coleridge and the head of an eminent Devon family in his time, but dying in 1927, fifteen years before this particular atlas was printed. And while the barony lived on, I have not tracked down another Bernard at the right time. Perhaps one of the successor barons carried on using the ancestral book plate.

Various lists of facts have been included at the front of the atlas, very Gradgrind and not at all the sort of thing that children of today are expected to know about. There is a school of thought that says that facts are a waste of time, one just asks one's telephone for that sort of thing. To which my response would be that without a good supply of facts in your head, you have no idea what questions are interesting, what questions to ask of your telephone. But that is something for another day. In the meantime I have learned that the area of Saudi Arabia is not that far short of that of India. Also that the largest country by area is Russia, a good way in front of Canada, the United States and Brazil, themselves somewhat in front of China and Australia. The pages of facts close with a chronology of the second world war, to January 1942, shortly after we lost the 'Repulse' and the 'Prince of Wales' off the east coast of Malaya. Having started in September 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria.

Apart from the maps of things like rainfall and temperature at the beginning, most of the maps proper have a rather bureaucratic flavour, with a strong emphasis on administrative boundaries, as can be seen from the example snapped above, although more important countries rate a lot more coloured subdivision, counties in the case of the United Kingdom, départements in the case of France, and I am not sure what in the case of Germany, with one entity, Anhalt, being made up of a number of small pieces.

But an excellent book to be browsed from time to time.

From the second shop, I bought the autobiography of Eric Gill, the chap who combined great artistry, conversion to the Catholic faith and scandalously catholic tastes in matters of sex, although this might not have been widely known outside of his immediate circle until many years after his death, perhaps accounting for Westminster Cathedral thinking that he was a suitable person from whom to commission their fine stations of the cross.

With this example coming from the third impression of 1941, having been first published in 1940, at about the same time as the author died, aged 58, of lung cancer.

Have not yet got very far with this one, beyond finding out that he gives a lot of time of ecclesiastical matters, personal and otherwise.

I have also remembered that I once nearly bought a fat book which collected together all his engraved works. This being the early 1980's and it was priced, as I recall, at £70. But the compilers had worked hard to collect up every scrap and, apart from a lot of it being art pornography, they would have done better to drop some of the second rate stuff. People with special interests can no doubt visit libraries, probably in the United States, if they really need access to the complete works.

While I learn this afternoon, that this fat book was probably that published by Christopher Skelton in 1983 and called 'The Engravings of Eric Gill. It fetches around £200 today - so not really kept pace with inflation over the same period, certainly not that of house prices. So far I have resisted buying the cut down version from Dover, to be had secondhand for just £10.

Further report in due course.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/table-top-sale.html.

Reference 2: http://www.gyork.co.uk/.