MAGAZINE SPRING 2012 / ISSUE 15
£3.50
Elizabeth AND HER GERMAN GARDEN Isobel Maddison celebrates the second flowering of Elizabeth von Arnim’s bestselling novel
THE TITANIC
Erica Wagner examines our enduring obsession and the books it has inspired
counterculture at maggs bros. Carl Williams on how an august bookshop got into drugs
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The London Library Magazine / issue 15
14 We are at last waking up to the talents of the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, whose bestselling novel of 1898, Elizabeth and her German Garden, exemplifies her genius for social satire and descriptions of nature. Isobel Maddison, a long-time admirer, welcomes this revival of interest and offers an appraisal of the novel.
C ontents 7 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 8 Contributors E.M. Forster with one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s children, Nassenheide, c.1904. Reproduced by kind permission of Ms Ann E. Hardham and Random House.
17 That so many books are being released and reissued to mark the centenary next month of the sinking of the Titanic is testament to the event’s enduring fascination. Erica Wagner offers a personal response to the disaster and selects some of the best titles on offer.
The Library’s stock of volumes on the Dreyfus Case were valuable research tools for Piers Paul Read’s recent book on the subject
12 bibliotherapy Biographer David Waller finds consolation in the mesmerising verse of W.B. Yeats
14 A SECOND FLOWERING One of the Titanic’s anchors leaving the proving house of Noah Hingley & Sons, the Midlands. Courtesy the History Press.
20 Established in 1853, the Mayfair bookshop Maggs Bros. has a surprising aspect to its business: a Counterculture section. Carl Williams describes his activities in collecting and dealing in the literature and ephemera connected with figures from Baudelaire and Verlaine to William Burroughs and the Sex Pistols.
11 BEHIND THE BOOK
Isobel Maddison on the life and work of Elizabeth von Arnim, author of the bestselling late Victorian novel, Elizabeth and her German Garden
17 THE INTIMATE WELDING OF HISTORY Erica Wagner selects her personal choice of the books marking the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic
20 MASTERS OF ABERRATION AND DERANGEMENT Carl Williams of Maggs Bros. offers an insight into his work as head of Counterculture at the famous bookshop Original poster by Jamie Reid to advertise the Sex Pistols’ single Holidays in the Sun, for Virgin Records, 1977.
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22 HIDDEN CORNERS Giles Milton delves into the Library’s Safe Collections, including the category of ‘forbidden’ books formerly confined to the Librarian’s drawer
26 SPECIAL OFFERS
The Librarian’s drawer used to be home to books considered unsuitable for innocent browsers. Giles Milton investigates these forbidden treasures – from illustrated Aubrey Beardsley volumes to Flagellation and the Flagellants – and explores the Library’s collection of books still kept under lock and key for safekeeping.
27 MEMBERS’ NEWS
31 EATING OUT
Aubrey Beardsley’s Cinesias Entreating Myrrhine to Coition (detail), from Beardsley’s illustrated edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1896).
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FR OM T H E L IB RARIA N The London Library Magazine’s first issue for 2012 offers a mix of business and pleasure, wit and gravity, inspiration and consolation – not unlike the myriad ways our members make use of the Library. Indeed, one of the Magazine’s strengths, we hope, is its capacity to reflect the Library’s diversity: the varied uses members make of our collections and the pleasure they take from reading. This year’s centenary of the Titanic disaster has inspired a slew of new books on the subject, which Erica Wagner surveys with a critic’s eye and the heightened sensibility of someone who has walked among the victims’ graves in Nova Scotia. From survivors’ stories to a technical examination of wireless communications of the time, each book underscores the compelling vividness of this event in the collective imagination. Meanwhile, Isobel Maddison tells how a historical soap opera has been an unlikely catalyst for a resurgence of interest in Elizabeth von Armin, the Australian-born chronicler of life in provincial Germany. On a more surprising note, Carl Williams takes us inside Maggs Bros., one of the oldest antiquarian booksellers in the world, and explains how he uses the Library’s collections in his work as a specialist in counterculture literature and ephemera. Maggs Bros. describes itself as ‘serious about books without being stuffy’: a description some may also apply to The London Library, though Giles Milton, in Hidden Corners, highlights some amusing prudery in our past.
On the cover
William Burroughs outside the Académie française, Paris, September 1959. Photograph by Brion Gysin, courtesy of Barry Miles.
In keeping with the Library’s seriousness about books, we are serious about governance, and Members’ News includes an invitation for members to consider applying to be a Library Trustee. We also need help with the recruitment process, so if you see yourself as a candidate, or if you have recruitment experience, please turn to page 27 for more information. We are immensely grateful to all who put themselves forward and allow us to benefit from their time and expertise. Likewise, we are grateful to all of you who responded to our recent members’ survey. Analysis of the results is now almost complete and a future issue of the Magazine will feature a discussion of what we learnt from your answers. I hope you have noticed a brochure included as an insert in this issue, explaining Carlyle Memberships and the opportunities they open up for members who are unable to meet the full subscription fee. The Library is committed to openness and accessibility, and to nurturing talent as it has done for some 171 years: many of today’s acclaimed writers and thinkers joined us long before achieving prominence, and this tradition of giving raw ability the space and resources to develop is one we hold dear. If you feel able to help support Carlyle Memberships – or, indeed, if you would like to apply for one – please read this information and get in touch. Whether as donor or recipient, you will be a crucial part of the Library’s future.
Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 15 March 2012 © 2012 The London Library. The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.
Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Catherine Cartwright Research Georgia Mallin
Editorial Committee David Breuer Lottie Cole Aimée Heuzenroeder Peter Parker Erica Wagner
Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Hannah Jackson 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library Lottie Cole 020 7766 4716 Aimée Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734
Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to development@londonlibrary.co.uk
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CONTRIBUTORS
Isobel Maddison
joined the library in 1997
Isobel Maddison is Fellow, College lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She works on female modernism, especially the writings of Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson. She is also interested in the connections between popular and modernist literature. Her forthcoming book, Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (Ashgate), will be the first full-length critical study of von Arnim’s writing.
Giles Milton
joined the library in 1994
Giles Milton is the author of seven works of history, including Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999), White Gold (2004) and Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 (2008). He has also written two novels and two children’s books. His books have been published in 18 languages. His most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War, was published in paperback in 2011.
Piers Paul Read
joined the library in 1959
Piers Paul Read has written works of fiction, history, biography and reportage. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for his novel Monk Dawson (1969) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Season in the West (1988). His works of non-fiction include Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974); Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography (2003); and a history of the medieval crusading order, The Templars (1999). His book on the Dreyfus Affair was published last month by Bloomsbury.
Erica Wagner
joined the library in 1993
David Waller
joined the library in 1991
Carl Williams
joined the library in 2003
Erica Wagner was given a membership of the London Library as a wedding present and has been glad of it ever since. Her latest book is Seizure, a novel (2007), published by Faber and Faber. Her other books are Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (Faber and Faber, 2000) and Gravity, a book of stories (Granta, 1997). She is the Literary Editor of The Times and is at work on a biography of Washington Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge. David Waller worked for ten years as a journalist on the Financial Times. After the chance find of a treasure-trove of papers in a home-counties’ attic, he wrote The Magnificent Mrs Tennant, a biography of Gertrude Tennant (2009). His latest book is The Perfect Man, a life of the Victorian strongman Eugen Sandow (2011).
Carl Williams is a former trade runner and rare book dot-commer who runs the Counterculture section at Maggs Bros. Ltd, an old bookshop in Berkeley Square. He has also worked as a curator on secondment to the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library in Geneva. He trades in counterculture and its origins, and occasionally curates art shows of punk, agitpop and related stuff in Maggs Gallery. Carl also does short stints as a critic on the postgraduate architecture course at the RCA. 8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
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BEHIND THE
BOOK
The Library devotes a whole section to the Dreyfus Affair. Historian and novelist Piers Paul Read describes some of the valuable material he found there, while researching his book on the subject (published last month by Bloomsbury).
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Piers Paul Read’s The Dreyfus Affair (2012).
My book The Dreyfus Affair is a factual account of the miscarriage of justice in France in 1894 when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was wrongly convicted of spying for the Germans and sentenced to life imprisonment on the French penal colony Devil’s Island. The subsequent cover-up brought France to the brink of civil war. Five Years of My Life by Alfred Dreyfus, trans. James Mortimer (London 1901). H. Dreyfus Case. Dreyfus was wholly innocent, separated from his wife and two children and tormented by the atrocious conditions in which he was held on Devil’s Island, and his own account of what he endured is poignant but betrays his limitations. ‘What a pity we can’t choose someone else for our innocent,’ remarked the Dreyfusard salonnière, Geneviève Straus: Marcel Proust put the same words in the mouth of the Duchesse de Guermantes in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). La France juive: essai d’histoire contemporaine by Edouard Drumont (2 vols., Paris 1886). H. Jews. An abusive diatribe against the power of the Jews in France. Painful reading, but essential for understanding the build-up to the Affair. The book was a phenomenal success, selling over a million copies and going through 200 printings in 25 years. The essayist Léon Bloy said that Drumont had realised that ‘by far the easiest way to influence and to please people is to fill their bellies with their favourite swill’ . Drumont claimed that he ‘only committed to print what everyone was thinking’ . L’affaire sans Dreyfus by Marcel Thomas (Paris 1961). H. Dreyfus Case. A superb dissection of the complex conspiracy against Dreyfus by the Army’s
intelligence service and High Command. Thomas points out, quite rightly, that there are no new facts to be uncovered but there is scope for different takes on the Affair, which have significant implications for many of the quandaries we face today. My Secret Diary of the Dreyfus Case 1894–1899 by Maurice Paléologue, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London 1957). H. Dreyfus Case. Paléologue was the Foreign Office liaison with the French Secret Service and was in on the Affair from the start. A highly cultivated man with an ear for salacious gossip, he thought Dreyfus guilty until the very end. Alfred Dreyfus: L’honneur d’un patriote by Vincent Duclert (Paris 2006). H. Dreyfus Case. A 1,200-page book on the Affair. Exhaustive research on Dreyfus the man: Duclert is indignant that he should be found uninteresting. A secular hagiography. Conflicts in French Society: Anticlericalism, Education and Morals in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Zeldin (London 1970). R. Church & State. An important collection of essays for the understanding of the loathing of the Catholic Church felt by free-thinkers and Freemasons, among them many Protestants and Jews. Particularly relevant is Robert Anderson’s study of the conflict over education. It exasperated the
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anti-clericals that the Catholic schools remained so popular and successful. Church and State in France, 1870– 1914 by John McManners (London 1972). R. Church & State. Again, vital for understanding the ‘culture war’ being waged at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Was Dreyfus the victim of anti-Semitic prejudice, or was he simply caught in the crossfire between Left and Right? Thanks to the Affair, the anticlerical Dreyfusards were able to abolish Catholic schools and expel Catholic religious orders from France. The Truth about Dreyfus from the Schwartzkoppen Papers, ed. Bernhard Schwertfeger (London 1931). H. Dreyfus Case. Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was the German military attaché to whom Dreyfus supposedly sold secrets. A charming, suave, adulterous bisexual, he left a posthumous account of his dealings with the real spy, the louche, treacherous, audacious, adulterous Charles WalsinEsterhazy. Georges Picquart: Dreyfusard, proscrit, ministre. La Justice par l’exactitude by Christian Vigouroux (Paris 2009). Biog. Picquart. An up-to-date study of the Dreyfusard hero, Colonel Georges Picquart, who refused to go along with the cover-up. A complex man.
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BIBLIOTHERAPY
David Waller finds in the poetry of W.B. Yeats a life-affirming challenge to the chaos and uncertainties of the world
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF W.B. YEATS
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was first introduced to the poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) at school more than 30 years ago. We parsed the works of this mystical Irish poet, understanding very little but mesmerised by his verse, the strangeness of his language and imagery. I still possess the yellow-covered volume of his Collected Poems (1979), complete with my schoolboy scrawls of incomprehension alongside such poems as ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ , ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ . I turn to this whenever I am looking for the nearreligious consolation of perfect beauty in language. Some of his early poems are exquisitely melancholy, such as ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (1899), about a poor man who has no riches to cast at the feet of his beloved, so he spreads his dreams at her feet. ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams, ’ he says. I defy anyone who listens to Ian Bostridge singing this to music by Thomas Dunhill, or indeed Benjamin Britten’s 1943 setting of ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ (1889), not to be moved to tears. Other poems have attained the status of near-cliché now, like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1888), where the young poet found ‘Peace comes dropping slow’; or the Irish airman foreseeing his death, who ‘balanced all, brought all to mind’ , in coming to the conclusion that a lonely, exalted end in the ‘tumult of the skies’ was far better than a long life of mundane mediocrity. Yeats remains a controversial character: he flirted with fascism and in old age had an operation to restore his
Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1933), 1979 edition.
libido, supposedly involving the insertion of monkey glands (hence earning himself the nickname ‘the gland old man of Irish literature’). He had some plain loopy ideas about the spirit world. But put aside doubts about his politics and the details of his personal life, and you will find a poem for virtually every mood. His writing combines the intensely intimate, with the
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I defy anyone who listens to Ian Bostridge singing “Cloths of Heaven” not to be moved to tears
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arcane and the public. If forced to choose, one favourite is ‘The Second Coming’ . This great poem of 1919 starts with the famous line ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ , and ends with the despairing question: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ Often interpreted as a prophecy of totalitarianism and the Second World War (in reality, too early for that), to me it captures all the uncertainty and instability that we still feel in the world today – whether we look at the state of the economy or merely the book trade. The poem does not offer any answers except to demonstrate the power of art to create meaning and beauty where otherwise there is chaos or, worse, pure evil. Another is ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ (1918), written to commemorate the Irish airman who was the son of his muse and mentor Isabelle Augusta, Lady Gregory. Having just moved into his new home, Yeats evokes the presence of a succession of friends who due to the ‘discourtesy of death’ (a classic Yeatsian phrase) cannot be there for the housewarming. The poem celebrates the values of friendship, companionship and home, idealising the young Major Gregory as a modern Renaissance man, ‘as twere all life’s epitome’ . Although his life was cut short, he lived not like those who burn damp faggots (bundles of twigs), but rather consuming ‘the entire combustible world’ in a flare of excitement and activity. Like all Yeats’s best poems, this one is slightly mad, somewhat difficult to understand, and profoundly life-affirming.
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A SECOND
FLOWERING The novel Elizabeth and her German Garden was a publishing phenomenon for its author, Elizabeth von Arnim, in 1898. Isobel Maddison celebrates this sharp social satire with its vivid descriptions of the natural world.
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hen Julian Fellowes included a reference to Elizabeth von Arnim’s book Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898) in an episode of the ITV television drama Downton Abbey in 2011, questions were raised in the press. Who was this writer, evidently so popular at the beginning of the twentieth century? What was the significance of the book’s inclusion as a potential love token from Matthew Crawley’s butler, Joseph Molesley, to head housemaid, Anna Smith? We might add a few more questions to this list. Was the novel really the ‘potboiler’ suggested by Sarah O’Brien, Lady Grantham’s maid? And if so, did the choice of book suggest an unsuspected, and risqué, aspect to the personality of the previously timorous Molesley? Was the progress of Downton Abbey mapped somehow on to the narrative of von Arnim’s first book? The scope for speculation was wide and, for those of us who have long had a literary passion for von Arnim’s comedic writing (I have located various editions of her novels on the London Library shelves), there was delight that her fiction was again impinging on the popular imagination. It was rather disappointing, therefore, when Fellowes explained in the Independent in November 2011, that the fleeting inclusion of von Arnim’s novel in Downton was not to establish a literary resonance with his own country-
Elizabeth von Arnim in 1924.
house drama, but because he knew of the book’s huge popularity at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than a potboiler, Elizabeth and her German Garden is a light-hearted and stylish social satire written by the antipodean, Mary Annette Beauchamp (1866–1941), under the nom-du-plume ‘Elizabeth’ . The elder cousin of Katherine Mansfield, von Arnim had become a German countess in 1891 when she married Count Henning von Arnim-
Schlagenthin. Later, she became a society wit and a member of the British literary intelligentsia (to use the term loosely). Her friends included Augustine Birrell, George Bernard Shaw, Ethel Smyth, Vernon Lee and Max Beerbohm. She was the sometime lover of H.G. Wells (as were many literary women) and, after Henning died, she became the wife of Francis, Earl Russell, the elder brother of the philosopher, Bertrand. By the time of von Arnim’s death in 1941, she had written more than 22 books, 2 of which have subsequently been adapted for film: Mr Skeffington (1940), starring Bette Davis, in 1944, and The Enchanted April (1922), starring Joan Plowright and Miranda Richardson, in 1992. Von Arnim had no intimation of her impending literary fame when she sent the manuscript of Elizabeth and her German Garden from Nassenheide, Pomerania, to Macmillan publishers in March 1898. In fact, she feared the book might be worthless and was adamant that, if it were published, the author must remain anonymous, especially since her husband, Henning (who appears in the book as the ‘Man of Wrath’), would have found it intolerable for it to be known that his wife was writing commercial fiction. This was not because the financial benefits were unwelcome – especially since Henning’s agricultural experiments on the Nassenheide estate were costly – but because public acknowledgement of
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From left Elizabeth von Arnim’s house in Nassenheide; Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, Elizabeth von Arnim’s husband. Images above and on previous page from Leslie de Charms’ biography Elizabeth of the German Garden (1958). Reproduced by kind permission of Ms Ann E. Hardham and Random House.
his wife’s success was inconceivable for a man of his class at such a time. So, having rejected several pseudonyms, von Arnim’s first book appeared under the simple title Elizabeth and her German Garden, and it was phenomenally successful. Eleven editions were printed before the end of 1898; it earned over £10,000 in its first year of publication and had been reprinted twenty-one times by May 1899. The book prompted fan mail and started a trend for writing on similar themes, described in 1900 by Mrs Stephen Batson, in the Nineteenth Century, as the ‘Vogue of the Garden Book’ . Our Lady of the Beeches, published in 1907 by Baroness von Hutten, was one of these; another was Anna Lea Merritt’s An Artist’s Garden (1908). Von Arnim’s female narrator in her book may have declared, in an uncomfortable pun, that ‘a garden is by no means … a fruitful topic’ for conversation, but the reading public clearly thought otherwise. And while several critics applauded, Rebecca West, Vice-President of the London Library from 1967 to 1983, retrospectively regarded von Arnim’s first novel with ‘alarm’ , a judgement probably complicated by the fact that West and von Arnim were simultaneous rivals for the affections of H.G. Wells in the early 1900s. West argued, in the New Statesman in 1921, that von Arnim’s novel had ‘set … tiresome women … smirking coyly about their gardens as if they were having a remarkably satisfying affair with their delphiniums’ .
Von Arnim’s book opens with the narrator’s statement, ‘I love my garden’ , and is a first-person, free-associative tale written as a daily journal in an amusing and nonchalant style. The novel relies on the vivid pictorial descriptions of the glorious, and largely uninhabited, Prussian countryside for its effects, and its central focus is the romantic engagement of the narrator, Elizabeth – an avid reader of Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth – with a garden set amid perfumed pine forests, where sleigh rides to the frozen Baltic provide opportunities for adventure. The newly created (trial and error) garden is a source of intense pleasure, so much so that Elizabeth dates the beginning of her ‘real life’ to the point when she arrives in this, her personal Pomeranian ‘kingdom’ .
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The garden is a source of intense pleasure, so that Elizabeth dates the beginning of her “real life” to the point when she arrives in this, her Pomeranian “kingdom”
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The beauty of this isolated place is heightened for Elizabeth by her previously interminable experiences in a flat in ‘town’ (for which we read Berlin), where persistent ill health meant doctors became ‘bad habits’ that the family found it increasingly difficult to shake off. In addition, the ‘horrors’ of city life were exacerbated by the necessity of carrying out social duties ‘wreathed in the orthodox smiles’ of a supportive wife. Consequently, the German garden becomes a refuge from wider social intrusion while simultaneously providing the opportunity to think and write in relative isolation. Throughout the book, Elizabeth is portrayed as a nostalgic romantic, defining herself in artistic and languorous opposition to the brisk German women who are her nearest neighbours. Capable of spending days, and even an entire ‘solitary summer’ , in contemplation, Elizabeth repeatedly takes up ‘a volume of poetry’ , wanders ‘out to where the king cups grow’ and forgets the ‘existence of everything’ but the natural world and her journal. Not for Elizabeth the energetic, organised life of the perplexing German hausfrau, who (as the local ‘pattern’ of the perfect German country lady) is a recognised, hands-on authority on the ‘mysteries of sausage-making, the care of calves and the slaughtering of swine’ . There are nevertheless occasional frustrations to be overcome, however creative and languid the narrator. For one thing, Elizabeth’s aristocratic status and THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15
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gender mean she is never allowed to dig the garden, even if she spends her ‘pin money’ on ‘artificial manure’, a pastime eccentric enough to bewilder the servants. Gardeners, therefore, become essential to Elizabeth’s happiness, though most eventually fall from favour. Marked by their inexperience, some make elementary errors when stubbornly refusing to take orders from a woman. One goes ‘mad’ and is sent to an asylum, although the inclusion of his insanity is a literary device on the part of von Arnim, since all the doctors ‘had against him’, her narrator explains, was that ‘he would write books’. Whatever the idiosyncrasies of her fictional gardeners, von Arnim’s Elizabeth remains undeterred in transforming the neglected German garden, even if this is achieved vicariously. Gathering a cosmopolitan collection of gardening books, she searches endlessly through a whole series of manuals whilst looking for a sympathetic gardener who can recreate the informal English design (typified by Gertrude Jekyll, Norah Lindsay and William Robinson) that she desires. Most of the botanical knowledge in the book springs from von Arnim’s own experience; as Katherine Mansfield pointed out, her ‘Cousin Elizabeth’ had a genuine ‘love of flowers’ and this was her ‘great charm’. But von Arnim’s book is not simple autobiography. In fact, to those who would dismiss Elizabeth and her German Garden on this basis, we have the evidence of E.M. Forster who, in 1904, preceded Hugh Walpole as tutor to von Arnim’s children. In Forster’s impressions of Nassenheide, published in 1959 in the Listener, he remarks: ‘The German Garden itself … did not make much impression.’ In truth, he couldn’t find it. The house, he notes, ‘appeared to be surrounded by paddocks and shrubberies’, while in the summer, ‘some flowers – mainly pansies, tulips, roses [appeared] … and there were endless lupins … the Count was drilling for agricultural purposes’. But, Forster adds, ‘there was nothing of a show’. Essentially, von Arnim’s depiction of the lush garden is, at best, highly fabricated, and this book is more akin to convincing fiction than to autobiography. Even so, Gertrude Jekyll was so persuaded by von Arnim’s horticultural representation that, in her book Children and Gardens (1908),
she mentioned von Arnim. Including a photograph of a woman in front of a thatched cottage, Jekyll added a caption that read: ‘The pretty lady in this picture is a German Princess. She has brought out her work to the old play-house.’ This ‘pretty lady’ was Elizabeth von Arnim, and Ellen Willmott, an influential member of the Royal Horticultural Society and the recipient of the first Victoria Medal of Honour, had travelled to Pomerania to meet Elizabeth and take her photograph. As we can see, von Arnim’s first book had far more influence than its author ever expected, and this was because the book was both deceptive and timely. Elizabeth and her German Garden includes, for example, a subtle portrait of AngloGerman tensions as they arose in the wake of German unification in 1871 when the arms race began. The book explores this context through the minutiae of everyday experience and small-scale personal encounters, while succeeding as a witty, irreverent work that carries its message in an accessible and unthreatening manner. Elizabeth and her German Garden is also alert to the preoccupations of an emerging group of professional women gardeners at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its publication coincided, for instance, with the foundation of the first agricultural school for women in Reading in 1898, and also with the first issue of the English Women’s Agricultural Times. Moreover, the book typifies a world of privilege and aesthetic aspiration, and reflects ideas that were represented at the time in newly emerging magazines, including Country Life, which first appeared in 1897 under the guidance of Edward Hudson. Not that von Arnim’s book simply replicates and augments these aesthetic preoccupations in a jolly countryhouse novel that happens to be set in rural Prussia. Rather, Elizabeth and her German Garden deliberately challenges a series of political and gendered assumptions that qualify the notion of an idealised late Victorian world and the position of an upper-class woman within it. In this sense, at least, von Arnim’s novel is an interesting counterpoint to Downton Abbey. The book set the tone for von Arnim’s later work and, as her fiction became ever more accomplished, even Rebecca West was able to be positive about it. In 1921, for example, she argued that von
Arnim’s novel, Vera, was ‘distinctly a triumph’ , and ‘one of the most successful attempts at the macabre in English’ . Barbara Pym explained, in 1978, that she had particularly ‘enjoyed the works’ of von Arnim while reading English as an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1930s. Her novels, including Elizabeth and her German Garden, had been ‘a revelation in their wit and delicate irony’ , Pym declared in the 2011 Virago edition of her book Civil to Strangers and Other Writings (1987), suggesting that Elizabeth’s novels were ‘models’ for her own richly comic fiction. In the 1980s Virago began reprinting several of von Arnim’s novels as ‘modern classics’ . In 2011 The Enchanted April appeared as a Virago limited edition with a cover featuring Angie Lewin’s textile design for Liberty. The London Library holds early copies of von Arnim’s work, too, including her novels that have yet to be republished. For those who love humour and gardens, Elizabeth and her German Garden and its sequel, The Solitary Summer (1899), are essential reading. Hugh Walpole rightly pointed out, in his obituary of von Arnim in the Daily Sketch in 1941, that ‘English Literature is not so crammed with wits that it can spare Elizabeth’ . Now, at last, we’re recognising that such a wit can no longer remain lost.
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Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922), 2011 Virago edition with a cover featuring Angie Lewin’s Winter Stem textile design for Liberty.
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THE INTIMATE WELDING OF HISTORY With the centenary this April of the sinking of RMS Titanic, the list of publications marking the disaster grows even longer. The Times’ Literary Editor Erica Wagner describes her personal favourites, both old and new, from the wealth of titles.
T
he Fairview Lawn Cemetery lies towards the north of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia; it’s about an hour’s walk from the city’s pretty harbourside, where you can enjoy excellent coffee, memorable blueberry muffins and whale-watching tours. In the cemetery you will find a few rows of plain grey stones: 121 markers, none of them splendid or grand, to note where the bodies of 121 victims of the sinking of RMS Titanic – on 14–15 April 1912 – lie. The graves were paid for by the White Star Line; a few other souls are interred in neighbouring Catholic and Jewish cemeteries, but non-denominational Fairview holds more victims of that bitter night than any other burial ground in the world.
I was there in the early autumn. It was a dozen years ago now, but my memory of the place is clear: I can feel the soft, sea-scented breeze that threaded its way through the whole city; I recall the pale grey lid of the sky as I planted my feet on the well-kept grass and stood, all alone, looking down the row of stones. I’d come, well, because I could. James Cameron’s film, Titanic (1997), had come out the year before – released, of course, by 20th Century Fox, another company owned, like The Times, by Rupert Murdoch. Now the video would be released; the newspaper had the funds to produce a supplement and – word having got out that the Literary Editor was interested in the subject – I was put in charge. I decided to use some of the money to send myself to Nova Scotia.
What did I gain? A sense, as I laid my palm against one stone and then another, of getting just that much closer to the history of this ship whose story, now a century old, only seems to grow in power. Some of the stones – laid in a curved line, like the hull of a ship – are carved simply with the words ‘Died April 15, 1912’ and a number; over 40 of the bodies in the graves are unidentified. And I understood – much better than I had before – the peculiarly personal resonance of the sinking of the Titanic. If I had embarked from Southampton, where on the ship would I have been on that night? How would I have acted? What would have become of my loved ones? Never mind that we know, as its passengers did not, that the First World War was coming; the true draw of this story, to my mind, is that THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17
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Graves of Titanic victims, Fairview Lawn Cemetery, Halifax. Photograph by John Campbell, 2011.
we may measure ourselves against it, and speculate, from the safety of the shore, what our fates would have been. The mini-publishing boom brought on by the disaster’s centenary would seem to bear this out – and certainly bears out the notion that interest in every aspect of the ship shows no signs of diminishing. (Let’s not forget that beyond the literary world, Cameron’s film is being re-released in 3-D; in Belfast – where the ship was built – a whole new museum devoted to her will open.) But what do the books available really have to offer the Titanophile? It depends – as ever – on what you’re looking for. Those of us interested in the history of the ship fall into two categories: to put it most plainly, one might call them the more and the less obsessive. I’d say I fall into the latter: but then I would say that, wouldn’t I? In the former category are the folk who note (for instance) that in the Cameron film the pipe frames supporting the third-class berths have set-screw speed rail fittings: such fittings were not developed until 1946, I am informed. I’m not bothered about that kind of thing: I like the broader picture. It’s the arc of the story, the pattern, the mix of characters, that keeps me hooked. I suppose that’s why, in truth, it’s still hard to beat Walter Lord’s 1955 bestseller – the book that got the ball rolling – A Night to Remember. Penguin publish a handsome re-issue in April. The book simply doesn’t put a foot wrong – its pace, its brevity, its great heart: none of it can be faulted. Even its chapter titles, each a spoken quotation (‘Another Belfast Trip’; ‘There is Your Beautiful Nightdress Gone’), remain perfectly gripping. If you’ve never read anything about the Titanic, there is still no better place to start.
One of the best new books on the subject is Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew by Richard Davenport-Hines (January 2012). A scrupulous and imaginative social historian, the match of author and subject is at first glance a fine one, and the book bears this out. He doesn’t simply look at the lives of the millionaires (Astor, Guggenheim) who went down in the ship: he looks at what it meant to be a millionaire in gilded-age America; at how their families had risen from poverty in a new world. He brings to life the noise of a Belfast shipyard, and the silence of a freezing sea. Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town by John Welshman (March 2012), takes its title from Lord’s description of the sinking, but homes in on twelve of the inhabitants of the ‘town’ . These include a woman travelling from Assyria with her two children and a young Finnish woman travelling to Pennsylvania with her husband, all of them in third class; a 15-year-old South African girl; an American governess; an English teacher travelling second class. Welshman wishes
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If I had embarked from Southampton, where on the ship would I have been on that night? How would I have acted?
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to shift the focus away from the stories of male passengers and first-class passengers and to avoid the better-known stories (you’ll find nothing in this book about Captain Edward Smith or the ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown). Welshman’s book reminds its readers that the ship was – like any other of its time – populated by men and women whose lives were wrenched away from the ordinary by mere force of circumstance. Two new books focus on survivors’
stories. Andrew Wilson’s Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of those who Survived (2011) dramatises the aftermath of the disaster for some of the just over 700 people – 700 out of more than 2,200 – who made it to dry land. ‘Lady Duff Gordon looked down at her lavender silk kimono in distaste. The evidence of her seasickness was all too obvious, the delicate fabric splattered with patches of vomit. ’ If something more restrained suits you better, you might enjoy dipping into Titanic Voices (February 2012), edited by Hannah Holman. This thick volume collects together – unabridged – all the major first-hand accounts of the sinking of the ship; quite a few have been out of print since the early years of the twentieth century. Here is the voice of John Hart, a third-class steward, responsible for leading two groups of third-class passengers up on deck; his testimony, however, seems to suggest that his instructions may have been otherwise: British Board of Trade Inquiry: You went round among [the passengers] and tried to assure them that the vessel was not hurt? Hart: In the first place. BBTI: Why did you do that? Hart: Because it was my instruction to do so. BBTI: Why? Hart: To keep them quiet. It is quite obvious. After all these years, this still has the power to raise the hairs on the back of a reader’s neck. Words of men such as Hart are why the story of the Titanic will be told and retold. Perhaps the Titanic’s most famous – or infamous – survivor was J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of J.P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company. The company had purchased the White Star Line and, thereby, the Titanic. Ismay escaped in Collapsible Lifeboat C, and refused to look back at the ship as she sank. (‘You did not care to see her go down?’ he was asked by the Board of Inquiry. ‘No. I am glad I did not, ’ he replied.) He resigned his chairmanship just over a year later; the tragedy, and his failure to go down with the ship as Captain Edward Smith had, haunted the rest of his life. Frances Wilson, in How to Survive The Titanic, or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (2011), sets the story of the man who became a scapegoat for public and press in context.
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THE INTIMATE WELDING of history It’s almost hard to recall, now, that before 1985, no one knew – really knew – what happened to the ship after she sank. Seventy-three years after steel and iceberg met (in an ‘intimate welding of history’ , as described by Thomas Hardy in his poem about the disaster, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ of 1912), Dr Robert Ballard, Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, located the wreck on the ocean floor, more than 12,000 feet below the surface of the sea. Ballard’s book, The Discovery of the Titanic (1987), is still worth reading if you can get hold of a copy. Ever since, the fate of the wreck – how and if it should be preserved, whether or not its artefacts should be sold or put on display, whether it’s right for tourists (albeit a few very wealthy ones) to visit it – has been a subject of intense debate. Yet there have not been, since Ballard’s discovery, any really significant revelations about the ship, and the fact that so many books can be released in time for the anniversary without any of them really offering anything ‘new’ , is testament to the endurance of this tale. And so the reader moves into more
Lifeboat with surviving passengers from the Titanic being hauled up on to the Carpathia, from Titanic in Photographs, by Daniel Klistorner et al. (2011). Courtesy the History Press.
Queenstown Southampton Cherbourg
Route of the Titanic Halifax
New York Location of the wreck of the Titanic
NTIC LA AN T A CE O
Map showing the route of RMS Titanic after its departure from Southampton on 10 April 1912.
specialised territory. The Bodleian Library will be publishing Titanic Calling: Wireless Communications During the Great Disaster, edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth (April 2012) – the result of the Marconi Collection being bequeathed to the University of Oxford in 2004. Narrow though its focus would seem to be, it gives a fascinating glimpse of a vanished world – a world where instant communication couldn’t be taken for granted. ‘CQD require assistance position 41.46 N 50.14 W struck iceberg Titanic. ’ Jack Phillips, senior wireless operator on the ship, would perish at his post; Harold Bride, his junior, would survive. This is a beautifully produced volume. The History Press, unsurprisingly, is making a vigorous contribution to Titanic text, producing seven new books as well as re-releasing a not-insignificant backlist. I was fascinated by Titanic in Photographs by Daniel Klistorner and Steve Hall, with Bruce Beveridge, Scott Andrews and Art Braunschweiger (2011). I’d certainly never seen an image of one of the Titanic’s great anchors leaving the proving house of Noah Hingley & Sons in the Midlands, later to be transported to Harland & Wolff – the shipyard that built the vessel – in Belfast. Nor photographs of her Belfast launch – 31 May 1911 – when her four funnels had yet to be fitted. From her impressive beginning to her awful end (here are the Titanic’s lifeboats with surviving passengers being hauled up on to the deck of the Carpathia), this is an elegant pictorial record. Those who wish to question the aura of hubris that haunts the ship could try The Unsinkable Titanic: The Triumph Behind a Disaster by Allen Gibson (February 2012), which seeks to remind the reader what a triumph she would have been if she hadn’t sunk; or for those of a
musical bent there is A Hymn for Eternity: The Story of Wallace Hartley, Titanic Bandmaster by Yvonne Carroll (2011). Backlist books include editions of the memoirs of survivors Colonel Archibald Gracie (2008) and Violet Jessop (2007); and Titanic and the Californian by Thomas B. Williams (2007) – the Californian was the ship that saw the Titanic’s lights and distress rockets from a distance of ten miles, but failed to come to the rescue because her wireless set was switched off. Sometimes, the fascination with the Titanic’s story even seems to erase the fact of the ship’s fate. Prior to my visit to Halifax, I also held a dinner party at the behest of The Times; its recipes were taken from Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner by Rick Archbold and Dana McAuley (1997). ‘A charming gift book which will help re-create what it was like to dine on the most famous of all ships, ’ runs the Amazon blurb … well, there’s charming and there’s charming, and I can attest to the fact that while a pleasant evening was had by all, and the old-fashioned food was decent, it was a pretty queer business to stand at my stove and consider the fate of those who had once eaten similar meals. In the same vein, Titanic: A Passenger’s Guide (2011) by John Blake is a small hardback that offers not only background on the ship but also ‘Information for Passengers’ – a guide to the arrangement of the decks, disposition of rooms (‘&c’) and a description of the service of plate: ‘On the waiting tables are electrically heated Rechaud stands of the Goldsmith Company’s special type. ’ And now they lie, those Rechaud stands, 2,000 fathoms beneath the sea. So much was lost the night the Titanic sank; some would say a whole world, never mind a town.
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Masters of
Aberration and DERANGEMENT Maggs Brothers’ Carl Williams describes the collection of counterculture literature and ephemera he has built up at the long-established bookshop
F
Poster designed by Jamie Reid and John Varnom to advertise the Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, 1977, for Virgin Records Ltd.
rom the outside, Maggs looks like a monolith, an established institution with rules, an ideology and a tradition. It seems to be structured like a pyramid, with a leader at the top sending directives downwards. In reality, it is constantly subject to outside challenges in the form of the wishes and desires of its customers, and it performs in a highly unstructured and serendipitous way. Maggs Bros. is a series of specialised departments responding to external demands and to the interests and personalities of the specialists who run them. The company has been around for a long time (it was founded in 1853), so it is defined by what is publicly known about it or by what is within living memory or just beyond living memory. It is subject to the inaccuracies of oral traditions. Departments, staff, enthusiasms and specialisms have come and gone, and like the waves on a beach have swept away the evidence of what came before. Traces of other Maggs Bros. remain, of course, in the form of travel books, religious manuscripts and bibles in the great and the good public and private libraries and collections of the world. Maggs’s huge repository of 1,457-plus
sales catalogues, bound and shelved in the basement of the Berkeley Square shop, are a rich source of another, subterranean bookshop. Otherwise, the sales catalogues largely exist as undiscussed titles on the internet or as provenance notes in library catalogues. One sales catalogue in particular from 1937, issued by our Paris shop, sticks out in my mind, the 242 item Special Paris Catalogue, No.4, ‘Editions Originales et Autographes de Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud’ . The frontispiece has a photograph from around 1863 of Baudelaire by Etienne Carjat, and below this the famous photograph of Paul Verlaine drinking absinthe, taken by Paul Marsan Dornac in 1892. I buy and sell some of the most deviant and carnivalesque material from the twentieth century and other periods, but it still surprises me that Maggs, a holder of the Royal Warrant, dealt in these three masters of aberration and derangement so very early on. It makes my stock of Sex Pistols posters seem very tame indeed. The heavily annotated ‘marked copy’ of this catalogue is somewhere in the great Ludlow Santo Domingo Library (LSD Library) in Geneva. The collection,
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William Burroughs lived on Duke Street … and the Scotch of St James club, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience played in 1966, was at No.13
officially launched in 2005, was named after a Wheaten terrier called Louis Santo Domingo, belonging to the late Julio Mario Santo Domingo. It was formed from the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library and Julio’s own outstanding collections. LSD is of course the accepted abbreviation for, in the German, Lyserg-Säure-Diethylamid 25, the most potent hallucinogen in a series synthesised for the first time in 1938 by Albert Hofmann in a Swiss laboratory. Julio was a wealthy Colombian collector who decided to retire from finance and collect books largely on drugs, but also on erotica and rock music. The realisation came to him one day that he was interested in ‘inner travel’ , as he felt that the sights and sensations experienced in the mind were ‘real’ , that they existed independently in their own right, and were not just mental phantasms but were ‘places’ . Julio had been coming in for many years but he walked into the shop on, I think, 30 October 2002, and Ed Maggs (the great helmsman at Maggs) introduced me to him. On that day, I sold him a manuscript and drawings by the artist José Luis Cuevas, created in 1957 whilst experiencing the almost immediate and overwhelming effects (‘imaginación exagerada’) of a subcutaneous injection of LSD in the neck. We got on like a bong on fire after this initial purchase, and I went to work for him on secondment from Maggs for around three years. I do not need to explain how this arrangement sets Maggs apart from other established dealers, but I will. It shows a willingness to foster a trade for the coming demographic, for new shopping rituals and customers that goes beyond dealing in the ‘high points’ of Western books and literature. This, I think, is reflected most especially in my
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colleague Titus Boeder’s understanding of Japanese avant-garde photography. The London Library helped me catalogue and build part of the LSD collection because, quite simply, it arranges books in recognisable categories. We all know what ‘Drugs’ means, and so there is a section with a few hundred very good commentaries and histories. I love the internet, yet I doubt that I would ever have found The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs (2001), Richard Davenport-Hines’s seminal and important work on the subject, there. It would have been lost among the many other books on the subject. This book became my bible for a while, and sent me off in all sorts of directions that could be explored with ease, because Davenport-Hines is also a member and so his ‘path’ of books became mine. Beryl Bainbridge once described the London Library as a ‘Proper library full of proper books’ , but for me at least it has been a ‘Proper library full of improper books’ , and in that sense it has been invaluable. Even better, the Library backs on to Mason’s Yard, a place resonant with countercultural associations. William Burroughs lived on nearby Duke Street with his young men, the so-called ‘[Picca] Dilly Boys’ , and Robert Fraser’s Gallery was at No.69. My mate Barry Miles ran Indica bookshop, with John Dunbar in charge of its gallery, in Mason’s Yard itself, and the Scotch of St James club, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience played their first gig in 1966, was at No.13. Somehow, it feels right to depart from Berkeley Square, cut through the Smithsons’ Economist building, go through the arch and cross the Yard by White Cube, press the buzzer, watch the door open and step into the London Library.
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From top William Burroughs, Paris, October 1959. Photograph by Brion Gysin, courtesy of Barry Miles; Carl Williams’ office at Maggs Bros., 2011. Photograph by Jess Gough; Richard Davenport-Hines’s The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001). THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21
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HIDDEN CORNERS
Forbidden
PLeasures Giles Milton explores the Safe Collections, which include not only rare volumes, but a category of ‘forbidden’ books, from the days when the Librarian also played the role of censor
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n Umberto Eco’s modern classic, The Name of the Rose (1983), the narrative revolves around a monastic library that is structured as a labyrinth. On the shelves of this library are scores of forbidden works kept hidden from prying eyes. Among them is Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics, the only surviving copy from classical antiquity. The London Library cannot boast such a rarity, but it will come as a surprise to many members that it does have its very own section of ‘forbidden’ works. If you find a book once catalogued under the shelfmark ‘Librarian’s Room’ (or even ‘Librarian’s Room Drawer’), prepare yourself for a hot flush. These include the books that an early Librarian once considered so (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) naughty that there was only one place for them: his personal drawer. The Librarian’s Room books are still kept under lock and key: these days, they form a part of the Safe Collections. They are a quaint survival from the days when the Librarian – always male – had a role in deciding what we should, and should not, be allowed to browse. (All of these books could be borrowed, but they were first wrapped in brown paper before being handed over to members.) The Librarian exercised the censor’s role until quite recently. The Transvestite Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy (1862)
was locked away as late as 1973, while Louis Henriques’s Love in Action (1959) was removed from circulation ten years earlier. An unexpected (and delightful) forbidden treasure is Emmanuelle l’antivierge, the 1959 French original of Emmanuelle the AntiVirgin, by Emmanuelle Arsan, whose pen name was Marayat Rollet-Andriane. I vividly remember the film version (1974): it was required late-night viewing for all teenage boys in the late 1970s. Aubrey Beardsley’s erotica was confined to the Librarian’s drawer in 1899, while the illustrated Beauty’s Day: les quatre heures de la toilette des dames by the Abbé de Favre, was placed under lock and key in 1890, the year it was published and acquired. Some of the titles in this little collection are self-explanatory. The Practice of Sex (1939) doesn’t beat around the bush, although I must confess to doing a double-take when I saw the author’s name: A. Willy. Other volumes cry out for further exploration. My eye was drawn to Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in All Countries (1869). In all countries! It’s good to know it’s not just the British who like to whip each other. The book’s author was an Anglican vicar,
Aubrey Beardsley’s Lysistrata (detail),from Beardsley’s illustrated edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1896).
the Revd William Cooper. The fact that he was a respectable man of the cloth did not prevent his work being locked into the Librarian’s drawer. How often, one wonders, did the Librarian furtively open his drawer for a quick peek at the forbidden fruits therein?
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Did he secretly thumb The Ten Pleasures of Marriage by A. Marsh (1682)? Did he finger his way through the Registrum librorum eroticorum by Rolf S. Reade (1936)? Did he quietly close the door as he delved into Frank Caprio’s Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism (1954)? What makes the Librarian’s Room shelfmark so fascinating is the idiosyncratic nature of the stuff. I couldn’t help wondering why Julian Marshall’s The Annals of Tennis (1878) was included in this roster of rude books. I pulled it down from the forbidden shelf – to which I’d been granted special access – half-expecting the title to be a masquerade for something more lewd. But no. It was a rather dull book about tennis. One can only assume that this was the favourite sport of the Librarian of the time and therefore ended up in his drawer. This eclectic shelfmark provides a fascinating peephole on the changing standards of prudery, but includes just a small number of the books not found on The London Library’s miles of open shelves. The Safe Collections of books kept securely locked away are shaped less by prudery than by prudence: these volumes are deemed so rare and valuable that many of them can only be viewed under supervision. As every member knows, Thomas Carlyle founded the Library with the intention that all of the books could be borrowed. But as an increasing number of historically important volumes were bequeathed to the collection, it was decided that some of these should be kept under lock and key. Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio is one such example. The idea that a member could borrow it – and take it home on the Tube – was deemed unwise. So who decides which books are to be put in the Safe Collections? ‘Any book published before 1700 is automatically placed in the safe, ’ says Dunia GarcíaOntiveros, Head of Bibliographic Services, who is busily cataloguing these 40,000 or
Left to right The Beautiful Madam Lapuchin, illustration from the Revd William Cooper’s Flagellation and the Flagellants (1869); frontispiece from Abbé de Favre’s Beauty’s Day (1890).
so volumes. ‘Other books are housed there only if they are fragile, very rare or have a special provenance. ’ The Safe Collections have grown so large that they have to be kept in many different rooms spread across the nine floors of the London Library. The majority are in the Anstruther Wing, at the very rear of the building. It has its own temperaturecontrolled environment. Some of the books in the Anstruther Wing are extremely rare. The enormous first edition 1611 folio of the King James Bible – 10kg of literary genius – is one of these rarities. Even more precious is King Henry VIII’s 1521 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, a book with a colourful history. The King wrote it as a riposte to Martin Luther’s 1520 De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium and his earlier Ninety-Five Theses (1517). The London Library has both of these Luther tracts in the safe. Henry VIII’s response to Luther is possibly the Library’s greatest treasure. A vigorous defence of the Catholic faith, it was dedicated to Pope Leo X and printed
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These books could be borrowed, but they were wrapped in brown paper before being handed to members
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with a beautiful and highly political titlepage vignette. The Pope was so impressed that he rewarded the King with the title Defender of the Faith. It is the binding that makes the book so special. The original leather is impressed with an exquisite Tudor rose and pomegranate, the latter being the emblem of Catherine of Aragon. It was bought by the Library, together with the rest of the 12,000-volume Allan Library, in the 1920s. In a different safe, three floors above, is Luther’s 1522 Contra Henricum regem angliae. This is where the argument between the two men got personal, with Luther accusing the English King of having ‘a slavish and impudent and strumpetlike insolence and silliness’ . The volume is illustrated with a magnificent engraved portrait of the author by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Another of the Luther volumes has been bound, at some point in its history, in a beautiful but discarded medieval manuscript. The earliest safe books are predominantly religious tracts and bibles, many of them arcane and very rare. The 1584 Biblia það Er Øll Heilóg Ritning vtlógð a Norrænu is, as any Icelandic speaker will tell you, the first Icelandic Bible. There’s also a beautiful 1565 edition of the books of Samuel and Kings in Hungarian and an impressive 1581 Slavonic Bible, complete with a handwritten note as to how it made its way into the collection. Surprisingly, the Library’s oldest book THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23
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Illustration by Lewis Carroll of his poem 'You are old, Father William', recited by Alice, from the 1886 facsimile edition of the 1864 manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
– and only remaining incunabulum (the majority were sold at a time of financial crisis in the 1960s) – is not a Bible at all, but a collection of poetry by the Florentine poet Girolamo Benivieni. It is quite possible that there are other pre-1501 books waiting to be discovered. Only a fraction of the Safe books have been electronically catalogued. The rest are still to be found in the old printed catalogue, whose Victorian cataloguers were remarkably cavalier when making their entries; they often listed the volumes as ‘n.d.’ (no date). ‘We don’t know what discoveries we’re going to find in the future,’ says Dunia. ‘That’s what makes the task ahead so exciting. We might yet find some more fifteenth-century books.’ It is a humbling experience to walk along the stacks in the Safe and see the first editions of so many literary and historical giants. Tobias Smollett, Benedictus de Spinoza, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift all sit shoulder to shoulder under ‘S’. Elsewhere, in a random wander, I found first editions of John Keats, Carl Linnaeus and the rare 1886 facsimile edition of the 1864 manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated not by John Tenniel but by Lewis Carroll himself. There is also a small collection of original manuscripts, many of which have yet to be properly studied. The commonplace books of James Mill, John Stuart’s father, written between 1806 and the mid-1820s, surely contain much of interest to any would-be biographer. Also in the manuscript collection is the commonplace book of Robert Harrison, Librarian from 1857 to 1893. This contains a vivid account of the only member to have committed suicide on the Library premises. His name was Bryan Hunt, son of Thornton
Hunt, first editor of the Daily Telegraph. According to Harrison, Hunt arrived at the Library in May 1875, and made his way up to the Magazine Room. This was at the very rear of the building, where few members ever went. He pulled out a loaded pistol and held it to his head. Seconds later, members heard a muffled shot. But Hunt was not dead. A few minutes later came a second shot, at which point Robert Harrison was called to the scene. ‘I found brains and blood oozing from his forehead,’ he recorded in his commonplace book. ‘There was no hope of saving his life.’ Harrison ran back to the Librarian’s Room, bumping into Thomas Carlyle on the way. He told him that a member had committed suicide. Carlyle, who clearly disliked the Hunt family, showed ‘no symptom of emotion’. Indeed, he was heard to utter: ‘Another of Thornton Hunt’s bastards gone.’ The importance to members of so many of these ‘Safe’ volumes – both printed and unprinted – is not so much their great value but the fact that they can be consulted by each and every one of us. I’ve made use of many of these books in the course of my research. When investigating the white slave trade, I discovered that the Library had a copy of Pierre Dan’s 1637 Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires. This is a remarkable book that sheds much light on the slave auctions of Morocco, Algiers and Tunis. Dan was a French Redemptionist priest who negotiated ransoms on behalf of the European slaves held captive across Barbary. ‘It was a piteous sight to see them exposed for sale in Algiers, ’ he writes of an Irish family auctioned in the slave market, ‘parting the wife from the husband and
the husband from the child’. The London Library’s edition comes with a splendid 1704 bookplate denoting that it came from the library of Philip Sidney, Earl of Leicester. Also housed in the Safe Collections is the eclectic collection of pamphlets, randomly bound into hardcover volumes. The Pamphlet Collection is a unique resource, containing essays, ephemera and polemical tracts. Many of these are not available anywhere else: you certainly won’t find all of them in the British Library. This area also holds the unique Claude Montefiore pamphlets (the earliest dates from 1797 and the latest was printed in 1938, the year of Montefiore’s death), a huge collection of essays on subjects that interested the great religious scholar. ‘He collected writings on anything and everything,’ says Dunia. ‘It’s like gazing into his mind.’ So how do you get to consult the books, pamphlets and manuscripts that are housed in the Safe Collections? You need to order them from the main issue desk, filling out a form and quite possibly reading the volume under the watchful gaze of a librarian. This enables the Library to keep tabs on the rarest volumes; it also allows them to keep an eye (snigger, snigger) on who’s reading what. ‘Now, sir, which particular book were you wanting to see?’ ‘Er … it’s called Love’s Picture Book. And it’s in the Librarian’s drawer.’
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Pierre Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires (1637).
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The LiT LiTerary ConferenC ConferenCe
June 8–9 2012 | free Word Centre, London
An up-to-the-minute conference to make sense of the many possibilities open to writers today, with practical sessions, workshops, case studies, working examples, debates, networking, and a writing competition.
How to make and sell ebooks self-publishing v. traditional models Emerging international markets Examples of new literary forms social media, and other promotional tools “PEn FACTOR” – an FULL PROGRAMME open panel critique And BOOkinGs of fictional projects www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk submitted by delegates. Join leading authors and industry figures: HARi kUnZRU, kATE MOssE, niCOLA MORGAn, siMOn TREWin, MARiA REJT, LindA GRAnT, dAVid GOdWin, ROBERT kROEsE, plus many more! Recommended by
In assocIatIon WItH
BERRYS’ WINE CLUB CLUB CLASS DRINKING Every other month Berrys’ Wine Club delivers a case of the finest drinking wines direct to the door of its members. Often UK exclusives, the wines are chosen by Berrys’ Masters of Wine, so you can be confident that the wines in your case are focused on quality, variety and distinction. With great savings, exclusives, free delivery and tasting notes the Club is designed with your utter enjoyment in mind. So this year resolve to relax, unwind and enhance those little moments in life with Berrys’ Wine Club. First case half-price; join online today at bbr.com/wineclub quoting ‘LL’ in the special instruction box or call 0800 280 2440.
D.R. HARRIS D.R. Harris, Royal Warrant holder to HRH The Prince of Wales and purveyor of fine soaps, fragrances, shaving creams and other luxury grooming products, are pleased to welcome you into the store, or to visit us online, to enjoy an exclusive 10% discount (quote ‘London Library’ along with your membership number). From soaps to shaving creams, body lotions to skincare, as well as our newly launched Naturals collection, sample something special with D.R. Harris. 29 St James’s Street, SW1. 020 7930 3915. drharris.co.uk
EMMETT SHIRTS Emmett Shirts are delighted to offer a 10% discount until 25 June 2012 to London Library members on their first purchase from our range of ready-to-wear shirts. If you appreciate superior quality and are looking for a degree of exclusivity, then visit our shops at Jermyn Street, King’s Road and Eldon Street, where there are over 400 designs each season to choose from. Please show your London Library membership card to obtain your discount. 112a Jermyn Street, SW1. 020 7925 1299. emmettshirts.com
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FLORIS Established in 1730 and still run by the original family from 89 Jermyn Street, Floris create exquisite English perfumes to stand the test of time. To celebrate the launch of their redesign Floris are delighted to offer London Library members a 15% discount and a complimentary Rosa Centifolia Hand Treatment Cream worth £10 when they spend £75 or more in the Floris shop. Offer closes 25 June 2012. 89 Jermyn Street, SW1. 020 7930 2885. florislondon.com
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MEMBERS’ News WANTED: TRUSTEE VOLUNTEERS, AND HELP WITH TRUSTEE RECRUITMENT
ARE you a Potential trustee?
COULD YOU HELP US WITH TRUSTEE RECRUITMENT?
Could you • Think strategically about the long-term interests of the Library? • Listen to others’ views and contribute your own to help reach decisions collectively? • Collaborate effectively with the Library’s professional staff? • Promote the Library and speak up for it at critical moments?
• Do you have experience of recruiting trustees or senior staff in the charity or voluntary sector, or advising on these or related aspects of charity governance? • Could you spare a couple of days during the spring and early summer to lend your expertise to the Library? If you can answer ‘Yes’ to both these questions, you may be able to help the Library recruit new trustees to fill the posts that will fall vacant this autumn. Since 2008 the Library’s Nominations Committee has included a non-Trustee member of the Library with relevant specialist skills. The present holder of this post is now stepping down after four years of valuable service, and the committee is looking to fill this vacancy before shortlisting and interviewing candidates for election to trusteeship at the 2012 AGM. If you are interested in this role, an application form is available to download from the Vacancies page (in the About Us section) on the Library’s website. In case of difficulties it may be obtained on request from Sarah Farthing on 020 7766 4712, or email librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk
If so, why not offer your time, energy and expertise to the Library as a Trustee? The trustees are responsible for the longterm well-being and effectiveness of the Library and, besides thinking about services and facilities, must ensure that the Library safeguards its assets, meets its financial obligations, and functions within the legal requirements of a registered charity. Applications for Trustee positions falling vacant in autumn 2012 are now open, and this year the Library is keen to hear from members with the following specialist skills and experience: • Knowledge and experience of law, particularly in relation to employment and charity administration • Experience of working on building construction or development projects in teams and to deadlines, for example as a project manager, architect, engineer, planner or similar role. Knowledge of listed buildings issues would be useful. The Library also welcomes applications from established writers who are ready and willing to engage in the governance of the organisation while also helping to raise its profile in literary circles through their presence on its Trustee board. Past experience suggests that applications from women tend not to be received in numbers proportionate to their representation among the Library’s membership. Such applications are therefore particularly welcome. A brief guide explaining the responsibilities and commitments involved, with full details of how to apply, is available to download from the Vacancies page (in the About Us section) on the Library’s website. Please contact Sarah Farthing on 020 7766 4712, or email librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk, if you require any further information. FOR CONSIDERATION THIS YEAR, PLEASE SUBMIT APPLICATIONS NO LATER THAN 27 APRIL 2012
Please complete and return the application form by 10 April 2012
Nicholas Underhill, current London Library Trustee, explains why he applied for the role and what being a Trustee involves I have loved The London Library since I was a child. I used to come with my father and was thrilled by the experience of peering through the floor grill of the stacks at five floors of books – also, though less pleasurably, by the then continual static electricity shocks. I joined as soon as I could afford it and have been a regular user for over 30 years. I am a lawyer – formerly a barrister, now a judge – and not a researcher or a professional writer. I use the Library as an inveterate general reader with a succession of interests that can’t be satisfied anywhere else. I decided to apply to become a Trustee because I wanted to give something back to an institution that I had got so much from – also, less altruistically, because I am professionally inquisitive and wanted to learn all about how it works.
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Whatever the position may have been in the past, trustees are not appointed on the basis of whom they know – I knew none of the other trustees when I was appointed – but for particular skills and experience that may be of value, and in order to represent the broad range of members. The interview process was straightforward and unintimidating. In my case I imagine it was thought that a Trustee with employment law expertise might be useful, and I have indeed since served on the Remuneration and Appraisal Committee. Since my appointment I can’t say I’ve found out everything about every aspect of the Library – that would be a lifetime’s study. But I am certainly a lot less ignorant than I was, and the work is every bit as interesting as I hoped. Although the management is firmly and rightly in the hands of the Librarian and her staff, the trustees have to decide questions of policy and strategy over the whole range of the Library’s affairs, including financial management, the development of the building, the needs of the membership and the balance of the collection – and, inevitably, fundraising. My fellow-trustees are as diverse as the membership of the Library itself, and meetings are friendly and stimulating. The basic commitment of a Trustee is not onerous. There are six board meetings a year, and the papers are clear and well focused. But trustees are expected as far as they can to attend the various talks, parties and the like by which the Library promotes itself to members, donors and others – hardly a hardship. And some colleagues with an expertise that is particularly in demand are happy to put in a huge amount of work. I observed with awe the involvement of the members of the Building Committee in both the planning and the implementation of the most recent phase of the Development Programme. If you love the Library and think you have something to offer, do apply. You have nothing to lose but your right to make indignant complaints in the Suggestions Book about the incompetence of the trustees.
LIBRARY SUBSCRIPTIONS A potential Tax REDUCTION Library members may be interested to know that their subscription could be tax-deductible under certain circumstances. Members who are freelance writers or journalists may be able to argue that their membership of the Library is wholly and exclusively connected to their writing activities. If it were, the subscription fee would be deductible from any taxable income and royalties they receive for their work. Members who are employees may be able to deduct the subscription fee from their taxable salary. They must be able to show that their membership of the Library is of ‘direct benefit to … the performance of the duties of the employment’. They must also pay for the subscription themselves (although if their employers do pay for it, it may not be a taxable benefit in kind for the same reasons). The Library is currently on the list of organisations maintained by HM Revenue & Customs to which this tax relief applies. We are unable to advise on individual cases, but further information can be obtained from the HMRC website at hmrc.gov.uk/incometax/allowance-relief.htm
ANNUAL LECTURE 2012 This year’s London Library Annual Lecture will again be delivered as part of the Hay Festival, taking place in Hay-onWye from 31 May to 10 June 2012. We are delighted to confirm that the 2012 Lecture will be given by renowned biographer and London Library member Claire Tomalin, who will speak about another Library member, Charles Dickens, in this, his bicentennial year. Claire’s Charles Dickens: A Life was published in 2011 to universal acclaim. More details on the Annual Lecture will be forthcoming on the Library’s website, in its e-newsletter and on noticeboards throughout the Library. For those members who are unable to attend, an edited version of the Lecture will be published in the Magazine later this year.
THE FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE NEW YORK LAUNCH Encouraged by the success of the Library’s patrons’ group, the Founders’ Circle, in its first year, December 2011 saw the Development Office launching an international chapter for London Library friends and supporters in New York. The US Founders’ Circle was inaugurated at an evening drinks reception on 12 December, in the beautiful surroundings of the New York Yacht Club, with speeches by Library member Andrew Roberts and Director of Development Lottie Cole. Our thanks go to Mrs Jayne Wrightsman and the Duke of Devonshire for their invaluable help in bringing this event to fruition. We now have a growing number of US Founders whom we are delighted to welcome to the London Library fold. As with the UK Founders’ Circle there are three levels of annual membership: Dickens, Thackeray and Martineau, at $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 respectively. Membership benefits include invitations to all our exclusive Founders’ Circle events in both New York and London. Our next New York event will be a lecture given by Richard Davenport-Hines, author of Titanic Lives (2012), on the Titanic disaster, given in the week of its 100th anniversary. If you are interested in joining either the US Founders’ Circle or the UK Founders’ Circle, please contact Lottie Cole on 020 7766 4716 or visit the ‘Support Us’ pages of our website
LIBRARY MEMBERS’ E-NEWSLETTER SIGN UP NOW We are delighted to have launched a quarterly members’ e-newsletter, full of Library and literary news, event updates and exclusive special offers for members. If you have not already subscribed, please email news@londonlibrary.co.uk with your name, membership number and ‘SUBSCRIBE – MEMBER’ in the subject line.
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MEMBERS’ NEWS
Spouse membership a reminder: now half price!
THE LONDON LIBRARY LIFE IN LITERATURE AWARD
If you would like to share your passion for The London Library with your partner, there is now a very good incentive to do so with the introduction of a 50% reduction on the annual membership fee for spouses or partners living at the same address as a current annual or life member. For just £225 a year (£18.75 a month), your partner can now enjoy all that membership of the Library offers, giving you the opportunity to enjoy using the Library together, whether spending time relaxing in the Reading Room with a magazine or browsing the shelves and discovering the best of the Library’s collections. So if you are looking for a birthday or anniversary gift with a difference, or simply wish to treat your partner to something very special, Spouse Membership is now the perfect way to share your love of books with your nearest and dearest. Membership can be purchased online at londonlibrary.co.uk/ join or in person from the Membership Office.
The Library has teamed up with respected and beloved Mayfair institution, the Heywood Hill bookshop, to revive a unique literary award. The Heywood Hill Prize for a writer, editor, reviewer, collector or publisher who has made a lifelong contribution to the enjoyment of books was last awarded in 2004. In its new incarnation as The London Library Life in Literature Award, sponsored by Heywood Hill, it will continue to recognise those whose impact on literary life has been exceptional. The new Award was celebrated at a party at the Library on 1 December 2011, hosted by the Duke of Devonshire and Sir Tom Stoppard. Sir Tom announced that two renowned literary figures, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor and Josephine Hart, would be recognised jointly and posthumously by the 2011 Award, in honour of their extraordinary achievements and dedication to writing. The winner of the 2012 award will be announced at the Library’s Annual Literary Dinner in early May 2012.
LIBRARY OPENING HOURS The Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics The Library will be observing this year’s additional Bank Holiday in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which falls immediately after the Spring Bank Holiday. The Library will therefore be closed from Saturday, 2 June–Tuesday, 5 June inclusive. Owing to predicted travel difficulties related to the Olympics, which are likely to impact staff who travel longer distances to work, the Library will also close at 5.30pm daily throughout the Olympic period and will not open on Saturdays for the dates 27 July–12 August inclusive. We regret any inconvenience caused to members during this time. We hope to make the Library available for venue hire in the evenings and on Saturdays throughout the Olympics, gaining crucial extra income which in turn helps us to keep membership costs as low as possible.
Carlyle memberships ENSURING THE LIBRARY IS OPEN TO ALL This issue of the Magazine includes a leaflet on Carlyle Memberships, which allow keen writers, readers and researchers to join the Library at a reduced rate in keeping with their limited financial resources. The London Library Trust provides Carlyle Memberships to as many worthy applicants as it can, but with your help still more subsidies could be offered to those for whom the full fee is a barrier to membership. If you would like to help someone else discover the joys and benefits of the London Library, please see the leaflet enclosed, or contact Lottie Cole in the Development Office (lottie.cole@londonlibrary.co.uk, tel. 020 7766 4716).
Above, from top The Duke of Devonshire and Library President Sir Tom Stoppard in the stacks before announcing The London Library Life in Literature Award, sponsored by Heywood Hill. Photo Marcus Dawes / Country Life Picture Library; Dominic West, Natascha McElhone and Bill Nighy at the launch party for The London Library Life in Literature Award. Photo Marcus Dawes / Country Life Picture Library. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29
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RECENT LITERARY AWARDS Congratulations to the Library members who were nominated for or have won literary and other awards recently Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, shortlisted for the 2011 Marsh Biography Prize. Alex Bellos, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, shortlisted for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms, longlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Any Human Heart, narrated by Mike Grady, shortlisted for the audible.co.uk Audiobook of the year, Galaxy National Book Awards 2011. Michael Burleigh, writer and historian, won the 2011 Nonino International Prize, Master of our Time Award, for his life’s work. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer, shortlisted for the 2011 H.W. Fisher Best First Biography Prize.
Anne Chisholm, Frances Partridge, shortlisted for the 2011 Marsh Biography Prize. Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze, won the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature. Daisy Goodwin, My Last Duchess, shortlisted for the Specsavers Popular Fiction Book of the Year, Galaxy National Book Awards 2011. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio, a Life Sacred and Profane, shortlisted for the 2011 Marsh Biography Prize. Jonathon Green, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, won the 2012 Dartmouth Medal, as judged by the American Library Association, for the ‘outstanding reference work’ of 2011. Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen, shortlisted for the W.H. Smith Paperback of the Year, Galaxy National Book Awards 2011. Selina Hastings won the Biographers’ Club 2011 Lifetime Services to Biography Prize. Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril, nominated for the 2011 Financial Times/
Goldman Sachs Best Business Book award. Lisa Hilton, The House with the Blue Shutters, shortlisted for the South Asia and Europe Best First Book, 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Andrew Martin, The Somme Stations, seventh in the series of Jim Stringer novels, won the 2011 Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. Alexander Masters, The Genius in my Basement, shortlisted for the Telegraph Biography/ Autobiography of the Year, Galaxy National Book Awards 2011. Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls, won the National Book Tokens Children’s Book of the Year, Galaxy National Book Awards 2011; also shortlisted for the Galaxy Book of the Year 2011. Edna O’Brien, Saints and Sinners, won the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Robert Pattinson won the 2011 Richard Attenborough Film Award, in the category Film Star of the Year for The Twilight Saga:
Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011). Judy Rudoe and Charlotte Gere, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World, won the 2011 William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History. Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, shortlisted for the 2011 Marsh Biography Prize. Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life, won the Telegraph Biography/ Autobiography of the Year, Galaxy National Book Awards 2011. Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes, won the Adult Category of the 2011 Independent Booksellers’ Book Prize, run by the Booksellers Association. Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, shortlisted for the 2011 Wellcome Trust Book Prize.
We would welcome any information from members who have won or been nominated for prizes, to be included in future issues. Please send details to: development@londonlibrary.co.uk
ONLY LONDON APPEARANCE
THOMAS FRIEDMAN A MANIFESTO FOR RESCUING AMERICA 13th June 2012
Tickets available online at
www.intelligencesquared.com
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EATING OUT
DINING OUT NEAR THE LONDON LIBRARY
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This is an advertisement feature. To advertise please call Janet Durbin
7 12
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on 01625 583180.
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1 AL DUCA Serving modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses heavily on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world. Simple fresh ingredients are skilfully combined in a wide range of traditional dishes offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following Pulze’s ethos of reasonably priced good Italian food. Now serving breakfast. 4–5 Duke of York Street, SW1, 020 7839 3090. alduca-restaurant.co.uk
4 DELHI BRASSERIE For over 20 years, the Delhi Brasserie has served outstanding traditional Indian cuisine to the discerning diner. Situated in the heart of Soho on Frith Street and next to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, we provide a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere. Pre- and post-theatre menus are available. 15% discount for students with ID. Special offer available for group bookings. 44 Frith Street, W1, 020 7437 8261. delhibrasserie.com
7 FRANCO’S Franco’s has been serving the community of St James’s for over 60 years. Open all day, the personality of the restaurant evolves from a quietly and gently efficient breakfast venue to a sharp and charged lunch atmosphere, to elegance and romance in the evening. The lunch and dinner menus highlight carefully prepared traditional and more modern Italian dishes. Our service is always relaxed, friendly and personal. 61 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7499 2211. francoslondon.com
10 HIX AT THE ALBEMARLE This fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients. Mark Hix and Marcus Verberne offer a full à-la-carte menu alongside a special set-lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. Brown’s is also home to the award-winning English Tea Room and the chic Donovan Bar. Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle St, W1, 020 7518 4004. thealbemarlerestaurant.com
2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT Located in central Mayfair (near New Bond Street), Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar, among its other dishes, serves Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. Open for lunch Mon–Fri; dinner Mon–Sat. 18–18a Bruton Place, W1, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk
5 FORTNUM & MASON A day at The London Library feeds the mind and spirit. Fortnum & Mason feeds the body and soul. With four fabulous restaurants, and just a hop, skip and a jump from St James’s Square, Fortnum’s is the perfect place to satisfy the hunger pangs brought on by rigorous research, from breakfast until supper. To book your table, please call 0845 602 5694. 181 Piccadilly, W1, fortnumandmason.com
8 GETTI Jermyn Street A modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience. A splendid destination for London locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy. Private dining available. 16/17 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7734 7334. getti.com
11 RESTAURANT AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY Located beneath the historic galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts, the restaurant blends exquisite food with breathtaking interior design by Tom Dixon to create a spectacular addition to the Mayfair dining scene. From full breakfasts to afternoon teas, to mouthwatering all-day menu. Modern British cooking made with fresh British produce. Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1. 020 7300 5608. reservations@ra-ra.co.uk
3 CUT AT 45 PARK LANE World-renowned chef Wolfgang Puck has made his restaurant debut in Europe opening CUT at 45 Park Lane, a modern American steak restaurant featuring great food in a contemporary and dynamic environment. Located in Dorchester Collection’s new Mayfair hotel, CUT at 45 Park Lane mirrors the award-winning original CUT in Beverly Hills, offering outstanding steaks, a superb wine list and impeccable service. 45 Park Lane, W1, 020 7493 4554. 45parklane.com/CUTat45ParkLane
6 THE FOX CLUB Situated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park. Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and, for those in the know, a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious. The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3– 5pm. 46 Clarges St, W1, 020 7495 3656. foxclublondon.com
9 THE GRILL AT THE DORCHESTER Brian Hughson, Head Chef at the Grill, is passionate about using quality produce sourced from the British Isles. In addition to the British and classic grill dishes offered at the Grill, Brian has reinstated classics from the original Grill menu such as Dish of the Day, and the traditional roast-beef carving trolley introduced at the Grill when it first opened in 1931. The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com
12 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri. To make a reservation, please quote the London Library Magazine. 55 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk
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