Books From The Roy Gold Collection

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION Nicholas of Hitchin and Shea Gold

Presenting a selection of 43 books from the library of ROY GOLD (19192009) each having been defaced by their owner, and with notes on these

by SHEA GOLD, his son.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION --Nicholas of Hitchin ON ROY GOLD --Shea Gold Roy’s son; and co-curator, The Roy Gold Collection BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION With notes on the books

by Shea Gold

Privately published 2012 by Nicholas of Hitchin © Nicholas of Hitchin 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book are available from the Central St. Martins library.

INTRODUCTION --Nicholas of Hitchin May 2012

I met Shea Gold when trying to authenticate George Razinsky’s HinduReich. Shea was recommended to me by a local bookseller who had failed to authenticate the book. Shea, he said, had been cataloguing his grandfather’s enormous library which had resulted in both the discovery of many rare and unusual books, and also in his making a large number of contacts in the book trade.

As it turned out Shea couldn’t help with HinduReich himself,

though he did put me in touch

with Bill Littlefield, an assitance for which I was most grateful.

However, it was during this

visit to Bedlands that I was introduced at first hand to the Roy Gold Collection — 30,000 books assembled over a lifetime, all systematically defaced. As we took one book from the shelf after another, with Shea showing me some of his particular favourites, I was overwhelmed and overjoyed in fairly equal measure..

The Roy Gold Collection is not open to the public: visits are made by appointment, and largely to academics. But with the HinduReich project by then fully underway I approached Shea with the idea of documenting some of Roy’s books for publication. Shea would hand-pick a selection of favourites from the library and bring them to Hitchin to be photographed.

And so he did. The 43 books shown here attempt to convey to the reader the history of a life lived as a student of improving books, and an improver of the books he studied. It is a pleasingly symmetrical discourse. And Roy could be improved by, or improve upon, a vast array of titles. That Georgette Heyer should nestle with Goethe evidently gave Roy no concern, who saw both authors fit for his library and his unique critical treatments.

Shea and I agree that Roy would probably have found the fetishising of his books absurd (and this despite his hobby; see Shea’s comments on this on the following page). So we have decided to show the books in no particular order other than what felt right to us. This strikes us both as being reflective of the chaos of Roy’s Collection, in which self-edification was not a linear process by any means. Instead the reader may browse the Collection as if they were day-trippers in Roy’s mind: a thought on Sperber here, a response to Freud there, and a few puerile explosions throughout.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

ON ROY GOLD

of the collection that those books without his additions take on the effect of being incomplete.

We don’t know when he first started defacing

--Shea Gold Roy’s son; and co-curator, The Roy Gold Collection

his books. The fact that so many of them were evidently bought second-hand means that the title pages are of little help. That the books are arranged so haphazardly is also problematic: no system of cataloguing has revealed itself, with multiple books by the same author on the same subject dispersed to the four corners of the

Roy Gold’s personal library in Cambridge contains over 30,000 volumes. Almost all of the covers are defaced by Roy in some way. He once said in an interview for Radio Four’s In House programme: ‘I am not interested in books. This is the great misconception about me. I am not interested in books. I am interested in stories, words, language; in ideas, in perception,

in imagina-

tion. These things are in books, but they are not books. Were I interested in books I would be a bookbinder.’

Roy’s disregard for books as objects is expressed in his collection. Even into his nineties he spent his evenings altering the covers with any materials that come to hand — paint, printed paper, pencil crayon, ballpoint pen. He seemed to us to enjoy defacing the books as much as reading them, and in this sense his disdain for books as objects rings a little false. Often the results of his efforts elevate the books rather than diminish them, and such is the extent

library. Nothing seemed to lay outside his interests: Morocco-bound Cervantes rub spines with Chevallier paperbacks; Freud with Dick Francis; Bacon with Ballard. (When cataloguing the books for the Collection we number them in the order they appear on the shelves.)

Roy Gold was born Karoly Goldman on June 10th 1919 in Lenti, Hungary, the only child of Alva and Elisabeth Goldman. Alva dealt in rare and valuable books, and from their Andrassy Street shop in Budapest, the family enjoyed a relatively privileged existence.

Young Karoly showed little interest in his father’s detective work; nonetheless he became a tireless reader, and took to working behind the shop counter. Here he spent many hours reading, and sometimes reviewing, the books by hand on little slips of bill paper which he would then insert between the books’ pages before replacing them on the racks for sale. Very occasionally one of these slips appears in a book in the Collection, and they make for delightful reading.

In 1937, with Alva’s reputation for fairness and profit-making in the ascendant, he was offered an opportunity to catalogue and prepare for sale the extensive library of the Briton Sir Robert Shea, a task Alva assessed would take him three years. Sir Robert, patently a well-connected man, arranged for papers, and the family moved to Brighton in September of that year.

Elisabeth Goldman with Roy,

Roy and Evelyn Gold, far left, with colleagues

aged two, 1921

and wives, Cambridge University, 1947

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

Roy and Evelyn Gold, with Shea (left) and Elisabeth, c. 1953

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

Poems, on which is painted the single word DROSS. Others are purely illustrative and take on a number of styles from the baroque to the modern.

Some of them he would give to people — friends and enemies equally — others he would keep for himself. Some are cheap paperbacks, others extremely valuable editions, including a rare Traité des Arbres Fruitiers, which once caused a visiting academic to storm from the house in disgust.

Roy retired aged 83, his letter of notice painted on an ordinary university library copy of Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy, and died aged 90 at his home in Bedlands. We continue to catalogue his books, and every day we are presented with a graphic reminder of his humour, his exacerbations, his energy, his imagination. As a Roy and Evelyn at their wedding anniversary, Cambridge, 1965

souvenir of a life lived, it is all we could ask for and more.

Conscious of the anti-semitism so profoundly on the rise in Europe, the family changed their name to Gold, and Karoly elected to become Roy. After three unsteady periods at three different public schools, at seventeen Roy took a year out to teach before starting his degree at Cambridge. He passed from undergraduate to research graduate, published the controversial philological paper Demystifying The Konungasögur at 27, and finally settled as Professor of European Literature. He married his fiancée Evelyn, a Girton undergraduate, in the summer of 1945.

There followed some gossip that Roy was a spy for the British government, fuelled by his ongoing friendship with Sir Robert and, possibly, jealousy over his relationship with Evelyn. There is no evidence that this was ever the case; the only circumstantial connection being that he was well-travelled and friendly with a number of senior officials in the foreign office. Many of

Roy c.1978 (left) helping to build the extension to Bedlands which would eventually house the major part of the library.

these were Sir Robert’s acquaintances, but Evelyn was also the daughter of an admiral of the fleet.

Those who knew personally him thought the idea preposterous.

Standing at six-feet-seven in his white plimsolls, and with a propensity for explosive and expressive cursing, he cut a controversial figure as a professor at Cambridge. Often distracted and occasionally rambunctious, he was once accused by a prominent dean of being a disgrace. “I may be a disgrace,” he is reported to have replied, “but I intend to stay until I’m an outrage.”

Such anecdotes provide a neat shorthand for Roy’s personality type. But a more nuanced appreciation of his character can be found in these books with their elaborately altered covers. Some of them reflect his own perception of, or reaction to, the contents: the results may be irreverent, child-like, caustic, surreal. One contentious example is a paperback of Primo Levi’s

Bedlands from Back Field. The extension to the house can just be made out on the left.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION With notes on the books

by Shea Gold

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

1 WAU – E – 00254 – SG Evelyn Waugh Black Mischief Penguin Book, 1951 110mm x 180mm x 12mm Marker pen

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

2 FAR – N – 00092 – SG Negley Farson Behind God’s Back Victor Gollancz, 1941 130mm x 200mm x 25mm Paint pen

3 FRE – S – 00202 – SG Sigmund Freud Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Pelican Book, 1978 110mm x 180mm x 25mm Paint pen Roy took a great interest in Freud, but was suspicious of the unilateral uptake of his ideas both in the field and in popular culture. There are forty-seven volumes of Freud in the collection, and all but one are altered.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

4 FRE – S – 00203 – SG Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams Pelican Book, 1977 110mm x 180mm x 37mm Gouache

5 GAR – E – 02017 – WG Erle Stanley Gardner The Case of The Grinning Gorilla Heinemann., 1958 124mm x 188mm x 26mm Paint pen Evidently Roy liked to paint as he travelled.

This book is inscribed ‘To Julian, from Roy – Bhutan 1983’ on the inside cover, although as it remains in the collection, it was probably undelivered.

The image is of the Bhutanese Yeti.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

6 HUN – J – 00105 – SG John Hunt The Ascent of Everest The Companion Book Club,1954 120mm x 190mm x 33mm Gouache

7 GOE – JW – 00207 – WG Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Selected Verse Penguin Book, 1972 105mm x 180mm x 20mm Pigeon feathers Roy could be equivocal about Goethe: This German-English edition of selected verse is delicately treated with feathers; an edition of Die Wahlverwandtschaften is covered with elaborately drawn swastikas.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

8 TOR – G – 00009 – SG Guillermo De Torre La Aventura y El Orden Editorial Losada, 1960 115mm x 184mm x 14mm Colour pencil

9 HUG – E – 02774 – SG Elizabeth Hughes Hallett The Hostess Book John Grant, 1948 140mm x 215mm x 40mm Pencil This book was given to Roy’s housekeeper in 1964, as a reminder to cook more often his favourite pork chops.

With thanks to Alice Malone for the loan of this book.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

10 HAU – G – 00301 – CG Gerhart Hauptmann Die Weber Verlag Ullstein, 1981 115mm x 178mm x 17mm Paint pen Die Weber translates as ‘The Weaver’. This is an unusual book in the collection as Roy’s design continues onto the back cover. With thanks to Gerhart Bohm who returned this book to the family after Roy’s death.

11 ABE – TB – 00017 – WG TB Abell The Stability and Seaworthiness of Ships University Press of Liverpool, 1926 140mm x 224mm x 18mm Paint pen Roy’s seasickness and consequent hatred of boats was legendary amongst his family and colleagues, and it occasionally restricted his travel plans.

Whether this book was bought as an attempt to remedy his aversion, or to justify it, we can only speculate.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

12 DUM – A – 00013 – SG Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers Frederick Warne & Co., 1929 126mm x 188mm x 30mm Paint pen With thanks to Alison Titchner who returned this book to the family after Roy’s death.

She writes: ‘This 1929 edition of the Dumas classic was much desired by my father, who collected Dumas, and who was a fellow professor of Roy’s at Cambridge. After several years refusing to sell, Roy eventually gave it to him for Christmas in 1977 — defaced.’

13 BEL – S – 00914 – SG Sally Belfrage A Room In Moscow Pan, 1959 110mm x 180mm x 10mm Marker pen

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

14 DUM – A – 00216 – CG Alexandre Dumas The Man In The Iron Mask Collins Clear-Type Press 105mm x 115mm x 22mm Colour pencil

15 MAD – S – 00911 – WG Salvador De Madariaga La Jirafa Sagrada Editorial Hermes, 1953 123mm x 185mm x 18mm Marker pen

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

16 ANS – PF – 00343 – SG Peter F Anson How To Draw Ships The Studio, 1941 138mm x 173mm x 8mm Gouache and colour pencil Another example of Roy’s antipathy towards boats and sailing.

How To Draw Ships is a typically sardonic depiction of two liners sinking into frigid depths.

17 WIL – RAW – 00076 – SG Richard Albert Wilson The Miraculous Birth of Language Guild Book, 1946 110mm x 182mm x 57mm Gouache Roy at his wickedest.

Some family members feel that the careful alteration to the word ‘GUILD’ is a spiteful comment on the author, whose academic territory Roy shared. Others feel it is merely a puerile pun on the title of the book.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

18 TRE – R – 00196 – SG Raleigh Trevelyan Grand Dukes and Diamonds Secker and Warburg, 1991 158mm x 242mm x 46mm Colour pencil (Not actual size) In stark contrast to No. 18, this book is delicately drawn with a carefully blended diamond pattern, evidence at least that Roy’s sensitivities could move freely between the violent and the pacific.

19 ? – 00611 – SG Unknown Author Unknown Title 95mm x 130mm x 30mm approx.

Rubber bands This pocket-sized book has been the subject of much speculation. It is completely secured, and obscured, with red rubber bands. No clues to its identity are revealed, though suggestions include a bible, a hymn book, and a dictionary.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

20 SAL – JD – 00002 – SG JD Salinger The Catcher In The Rye Penguin Book 110mm x 180mm x 14mm Marker pen It is interesting to note that Salinger insisted that no images ever appeared on his book covers. Roy seems to have honoured this desire in a typically perverse way.

21 HOF – L – 02000 – CG L Hoffer Chess George Routledge & Sons 124mm x 182mm x 26mm Gouache and colour pencil

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

22 LES – RM – 00332 – SG Reginald M Lester The Observer’s Book of Weather Frederick Warne & Co. 1962 90mm x 146mm x 15mm Gouache

23 HMSO – 00016 – CG HM Stationery Office Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy HM Stationery Office, 1931 150mm x 244mm x 57mm Paint pen Further evidence of Roy’s distaste for the open sea. This official Admiralty Handbook is defaced with a transcription of Longfellow’s Wreck of the Hesperus – in morse.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

24 GAS – E – 01569 – SG Mrs. Gaskell Cranford Thomas Nelson and Sons 110mm x 162mm x 16mm Colour pencil The barber’s pole is probably a reference to the book’s character Mrs. Pole, although it is also suspiciously and, rather typically of Roy, phallic.

25 CAR – L – 00175 – SG Lewis Carroll The Complete Illustrated Works Chancellor Press, 1982 150mm x 215mm x 55mm Colour pencil

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

26 FLA – M – 00835 – WG Martin Flavin El Hechizado Editorial Sudamericana, 1948 123mm x 185mm x 27mm Mixed media This book is remarkable as it is not, as it were, conventionally defaced. It has been mailed by Roy to himself from Liberia.

Rather than wrapping the book, he has simply stamped it, secured it with tape, and added an address label.

27 SPE – D – 00109 – WG Dan Sperber El Estructuralismo en Antropologia Editorial Losada, S.A., 1975 118mm x 178mm x 9mm Paint pen With thanks to Paulo Tarkalov who returned this book to the family after Roy’s death.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

28 STI – A – 00207 – CG Adalbert Stifter Abdias Universal-Bibliothek, 1970 95mm x 150mm x 6mm Felt-tip pen This little edition of Abdias is a rather painful but cheerful pun on Adidas. It is one of several covers dedicated to Roy’s plimsolls, which he claimed to believe lucky, and which were a constant and unremitting feature of his attire whatever the occasion.

29 PAR – B – 01911 – SG Bertram Park Roses The National Rose Society, 1963 120mm x 184mm x 7mm Colour pencil Roy was a rose enthusiast and his garden contained almost no other flowering plants.

The collection holds 37 volumes of books on roses, all quite lovingly defaced.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

30 PAR – B – 01731 – CG Bertram Park The Collins Guide To Roses Collins, 1956 142mm x 213mm x 23mm Gouache

31 STE – J – 00620 – CG John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath Penguin Modern Classics, 1968 110mm x 180mm x 12mm Paint pen

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

32 DEA – A – 00133 – CG Anthony Deane-Drummond Return Ticket The Popular Book Club, 1954 120mm x 188mm x 20mm Gouache, gold pen

33 FRE – C – 02208 – CG Cecil Freeman Gregg The Fatal Error The Thriller Book Club 126mm x 186mm x 17mm Colour pencil This and No. 33 are two of several discoveries that, at first sight, appear to be designed as a twodimensional pattern but on further inspection reveal themselves to be illustrative: No. 33 an aerial landscape; this a precarious system of roof ladders.

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

34 REY – ES – 02113 – WG Ernest Septimus Reynolds Hygiene For Beginners Macmillan, 1936 120mm x 177mm x 11mm Paint pen Once again Roy uses a technique that implies pattern but is in fact closer to illustration, this time a green cover teeming with clashing red microbes.

35 POW – EB – 01392 – SG Edward B Powley A Hundred Years of English Poetry Cambridge University Press, 1940 105mm x 172mm x 18mm Correction fluid and correction tape

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

36 HAW – N – 01010 – CG Nathaniel Hawthorne Passages from the American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. I Smith, Elder and Co. 128mm x 194mm x 26mm Correction fluid Hawthorne was a tireless racist. This white triangle may be a reference to both the hood of the Ku Klux Klan and the dunce’s crown. It seems that Roy had a period of painting triangles on books (see No. 7, Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest); several others punctuate the collection.

37 WYN – J – 00227 – SG John Wyndham Chocky Penguin Book, 1975 114mm x 180mm x 7mm Paint pen

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

38 HEY – G – 00053 – SG Georgette Heyer The Reluctant Widow The Book Club, 1947 124mm x 187mm x 15mm Gouache

39 WYN – M – 00615 – WG May Wynne The Smugglers of Penreen The RTS Office, c.1940 120mm x 190mm x 24mm Correction fluid

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

40 LYT – N – 00811 – SG Neville Lytton & Others Winter Sports The Lonsdale Library 140mm x 220mm x 38mm Gouache and pencil

41 BRY – A – 00994 – SG Arthur Bryant Samuel Pepys: The Saviour Of The Navy The Reprint Society, 1953 125mm x 185mm x 20mm Pencil

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

BOOKS FROM THE ROY GOLD COLLECTION

42 AA – 00724 – SG The Automobile Association The Illustrated Road Book of England & Wales The Automobile Association, 1961 190mm x 252mm x 45mm Paint pen (Not actual size)

43 VER – J – 03725 – SG Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Dean & Sons Ltd. 130mm x 190mm x 20mm Marker pen (Not actual size)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With thanks to Elisabeth Gold and all the Gold family for their help, cooperation and willing; to Will Hill, for his ongoing support; and to Artemis Albert for her ongoing interest.

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