MAGAZINE Summer 2015 ISSUE 28
ÂŁ3.50
uncertain territories
Roger Kneebone considers The London Library as a place where the worlds of trauma surgery, puppetry and jazz intersect
restif de la bretonne
Matthew Beaumont on the night-time encounters of the bohemian writer in eighteenth-century Paris
hidden corners
The Library’s collection on the Low Countries is wide-ranging and includes some important early titles, as Hugh Dunthorne has discovered
Le Carré (John) A Murder of Quality, 1962, first edition. Sold for £3,720
Fleming (Ian) Casino Royale, 1953, first edition. Sold for £24,180
Tolkien (J.R.R.) The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again, 1937, first edition. Sold for £18,600
WELCOMING CONSIGNMENTS FOR OUR AUCTION CALENDAR
Modern Literature London: Bloomsbury House, 24 Maddox Street, Mayfair W1S 1PP Please contact us for a free auction valuation. Contact: info@dnfa.com | +44 20 3291 2835
Part of The Stanley Gibbons Group plc
w w w . d r e w e a t t s . c o m | w w w. s t a n l e y g i b b o n s . c o m | www.bloomsburyauctions.com
LoNDoN sUMMER saLEs 2015 Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts London 7 July 2pm BST English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations London 14 July 10.30am BST
FRaNçoIs LE Roy Dialogue de consolation entre l’âme et raison, in French with a few passages in Latin [France (Paris), c.1520] £20,000–30,000 Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 5330 mara.hofmann@sothebys.com 34–35 New Bond street, London W1a 2aa. Register now at sothebys.com
The London Library Magazine / issue 28
14
C ontents
The surgeon Roger Kneebone sees his work as a practice that depends on craft and performance as well as science. Here he explores parallels with other craftsmen and performers, beginning his examination by browsing the shelves of The London Library and using its singular classification system to find books that spark ideas and shape his thoughts.
7 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 8 Contributors 10 BEHIND THE BOOK Surgery with simulated patient.
18 The Library’s holdings on the history and culture of the Low Countries include some rare early titles, such as Edward Grimston’s A generall historie of the Netherlands (1608), as well as an important selection of the books and pamphlets that describe Belgium’s suffering ‘under the German yoke’ published during the First World War, as Hugh Dunthorne explains
The Library’s English Drama and Shakespeare shelfmarks offered Don Macpherson rich pickings for his film script on the forger William Ireland
13 bibliotherapy Owen Sheers finds reading Dannie Abse’s collected poems a life-affirming experience
14 uncertain territories Roger Kneebone’s research as a surgeon and academic into apparently unconnected professions to his, and the ‘reciprocal illuminations’ that can result Engraving of Frans Hogenberg’s The Sack of Naerden by Spanish forces, 1572, from volume 1 of Pieter Bor’s Nederlantsche oorloghen (1621–30).
22
18 hidden corners Hugh Dunthorne on the extensive range of titles on the Netherlands to be found in H. Belgium and H. Holland
22 restif de la bretonne The French writer and his multivolume record of night wanderings are explored by Matthew Beaumont
Restif de la Bretonne, known as the ‘Rousseau of the gutters’, was a dedicated enemy of de Sade, although he himself was an erotomaniac. He was also an obsessive patroller of the nighttime streets, and detailed the fascinating and gruesome sights he witnessed in his work Les Nuits de Paris (1788). Matthew Beaumont offers a profile of the noctambulist.
26 POETRY 27 MEMBERS’ NEWS
Illustration by Jean-Michel Moreau, from Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris (1788).
p
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5
Two monarchs who divided a nation
KING JOHN richard II 1 – 27 june
#KingJohn #RichardII
11 july – 18 october
Valuations of libraries, manuscripts, archives and photographs for probate, insurance and sale.
Bernard Quaritch Ltd 40 South Audley Street London, W1K 2PR www.quaritch.com 020 7297 4888
Rare books, manuscripts, and photographs. Auction commissions, and valuations.
6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
p
f rom the L I B R A R I A N As I write, the May excitement of a General Election and the Chelsea Flower Show is behind us, so summer is undoubtedly near and with it our summer issue of the London Library Magazine. One of the hardest things to sum up in a few words is the impact that the Library has on the world. The ways in which members use and benefit from the Library are so varied that it is difficult to encompass them in a single sentence. Perhaps that is why librarians here are rarely surprised by anything we are asked for help with. Roger Kneebone comments on this in his fascinating article on the parallels between the work of a surgeon and that of a craftsman or performer. He finds the Library’s idiosyncratic classification scheme a joy for his particular research purposes and, in Members’ News, Dunia García-Ontiveros explains some of the challenges of maintaining it.
On the cover
Eduardo Paolozzi, Wittgenstein in New York from ‘As is When’ (detail), 1965, screenprint on paper, Pallant House Gallery (Wilson Gift through The Art Fund). © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, and reproduced with their kind permission.
In Hidden Corners, Hugh Dunthorne explores our collection of books relating to the history of the Netherlands, illuminating what has been, for me at least, a hitherto darkened corner of European history. Darkness of a different kind forms the topic of Matthew Beaumont’s piece on the eccentric noctambulist Restif de la Bretonne and his extensive record of nights spent pacing the streets of Paris and the incidents he encountered there. Elsewhere, Don Macpherson introduces us to sources on the theatre world of eighteenth-century London which helped him prepare his film script on the Shakespeare forger William Ireland. Owen Sheers offers us perhaps the ultimate bibliotherapy – a guide to living a more fully attuned life – which he finds in Dannie Abse’s poetry collection, Ask the Moon. He has certainly convinced me and I shall be off to acquire my own copy directly so as not to deprive members of the Library’s copy! Also in Members’ News this time, the outcome of our search for a new Chairman to take over after the AGM on Tuesday, 3 November 2015. Do make that a date for your diary so that you can join us in thanking Bill Emmott for his service and welcoming Sir Howard Davies.
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 June 2015 © 2015 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
Editorial Committee David Breuer Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner
Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Irene Michaelides 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library 020 7766 4704
Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7
CONTRIBUTORS
Magna Carta through the ages
Matthew Beaumont joined the library in 1980
Matthew Beaumont is the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015). His other books include The Spectre of Utopia (2012); The Task of the Critic (2009), co-written with Terry Eagleton; Restless Cities (2010); and G.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity (2014). He is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at UCL.
Hugh Dunthorne joined the library in 1965
Free exhibition
Society of Antiquaries of London 26 May – 31 July 2015 (Mon - Fri) Museum Late: 19 June (Fri) www.sal.org.uk Supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, The Headley Trust, Heritage Lottery Fund, Magna Carta 800th Anniversary & the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts.
Until his retirement in 2009, Hugh Dunthorne taught in the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University. His most recent book is Britain and the Dutch Revolt 1560–1700 (2013). He is currently working on a study of war artists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.
Roger Kneebone
joined the library in 2011
Professor Roger Kneebone is a clinician and educationalist who jointly directs the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science (ICCESS). He wishes to acknowledge the support of the Wellcome Trust, Joshua Byrne, Brothers of the Art Workers' Guild, Professor Gunther Kress and his colleagues at ICCESS.
Don Macpherson
joined the library in 2000
Don Macpherson read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and was a screenwriter on films such as Alien 3, The Big Man and Entrapment, and on projects with Pedro Almodóvar, Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese. His recent film and TV credits include The Gunman for Sean Penn and Fleming with Dominic Cooper.
Joseph Prestwich Joseph Prestwich has recently completed four years of study of German with English Literature at King’s College London. In 2013, he won the undergraduate prize in the Ernst Jünger Translation Competition. He has had poetry published online and in Black & Blue magazine. From September, he will be working at the Courtauld Institute of Art’s Book Library.
Owen Sheers
joined the library in 2011
Owen Sheers is a novelist, poet and playwright. His awards for poetry and drama include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Welsh Book of the Year and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression award. His verse drama Pink Mist will be produced by Bristol Old Vic in July. His latest novel is I Saw A Man (Faber). He is Professor in Creativity at Swansea University.
Catherine Walters Catherine Walters is studying English Literature at King's College London. She is a devotee of phonological frivolity, and her published poetry largely comprises Wenglish nonsense verse poised on Hudibrastic rhymes with 'sheep'. In the future, Catherine would like to pursue an MA in Early Modern Studies and enter academia. 8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
BECOME A FRIEND And relAx in the boudoir with MAdAMe de PoMPAdour. Become a Friend of the Wallace Collection for only £45 and you can enjoy a range of exclusive benefits all year . Buy your Friends’ membership before 25th June and receive free admission to 3,000 years of art history at London’s Masterpiece Art Fair * *Ticket value is £50 and admits two guests. Valid for one visit any day between 25 June and 1 July 2015
To find out more visit wallacecollection.org/friends phone 020 7563 9558 or pick up an application form today in the Wallace Collection Shop or at the front desk
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9
Behind the
Book
‘
The London Library supplied Don Macpherson with rich source material on the theatre world of late eighteenth-century London for his current scriptwriting project
’
Playbill for the opening – and only – performance of Vortigern at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1796.
I used the Library to research a famous scandal concerning the forger William Ireland for a film script, The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare, currently in pre-production for Ecosse Films. Ireland wrote and mounted a ‘found’ Shakespeare play, Vortigern, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1796. It was produced by Sheridan but exposed as a fake by Edmond Malone. The Library helped me explore the social underworld of eighteenth-century Covent Garden.
Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge 2012). L. Eng. Lit., Shakespeare; Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography by Peter Martin (Cambridge 1995). Biog. Malone. It was William Ireland’s fate to arrive just after the death of poet Thomas Chatterton in 1770 but 200 years before Roland Barthes’ essay, ‘Death of the Author’ , in which the idea of authorial originality was laid to rest. Would we now call Ireland an inspired romantic forger like Chatterton, or merely an early post-modernist? Malone uncovered Ireland’s forgery which James Boswell had earlier unwisely authenticated. The controversy shrouded the single performance of Vortigern, which ended in uproar and exposure. Ireland later confessed and became a penitent novelist, ending his days in poverty. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan by Tiffany Stern (Oxford 2000). L. Eng. Drama, Hist. of. How did eighteenth-century actors rehearse in an age when there were no directors? What versions of plays did they use? What tricks did actors use to wrongfoot rivals? This splendidly original book revolutionised drama scholarship and dishes excellent gossip on the fraught and
10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
comical relationship between producers and actors, who often used first nights as extended rehearsals. The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805 by George Taylor (Cambridge 2000). L. Eng. Drama, Hist. of; In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars 1793–1815 by Jenny Uglow (London 2014). H. England, Social &c. Ireland lived in dangerous times and was denounced as unpatriotic for ‘slandering’ Shakespeare. Taylor details the seismic impact of revolution on the theatre, while Uglow illuminates the paranoid fears of invasion and French spies. Ireland’s play was caught up in the culture wars, patriotic fervour and secret courts of its time. Shakespeare’s Lives by Samuel Schoenbaum (Oxford 1970); Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James S. Shapiro (London 2010). Both L. Eng. Lit., Shakespeare. These American scholars chart the complex tale of Shakespeare’s own status as an author, from anonymous scribe in his early career to revered national genius by the 1790s. Ireland was one of many forgers, trimmers, editors and unreliable authors who tampered with Shakespeare’s works in the intervening period. His play was culled from Holinshed and presented as the missing link between King Lear and Cymbeline. It was all too
believable for those searching for the Holy Grail of a ‘lost play’ by the Bard. Authentic Memoirs of the Green-Room: Involving Sketches, Biographical, Critical, & Characteristic, of the Performers of the Theatres Royal, Drury-Lane, CoventGarden, and the Haymarket by John Roach, Vol.1, Memoirs for 1801, 1803 and 1804 (London 1801–15). L. Eng. Drama, Hist. of. This obscure volume of witty memoirs, full of priceless anecdotes, was found by chance using the Library’s search engine. John Kemble, Sarah Siddons and littleknown actors such as ‘Diggy’ Dignum spring to life through character sketches and descriptions of the curious trivia of the day. The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age (London 2013); City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (London 2006), both by Vic Gatrell. T. London. Ireland learned his talent for forgery as a lawyer’s clerk, and managed to fake handwritten Tudor documents with some skill. His bid for literary fame was less successful, but the thriving bohemian culture from which he emerged is captured here by Gatrell, with his impishly satirical world-view portrayed in all its boisterous and irreverent glory.
THE HOURS OF HENRY VIII — The Morgan Library & Museum, New York — Jean Poyer’s career as a painter was short, from 1483 to 1503, but he was famous for being a master colourist and a genius at composition and perspective. Both Poyer and Bourdichon, painter of the Great Hours of Anne of Brittany, were amongst the finest illuminators in the early sixteenth century and helped keep the art of illumination at its peak of excellence.
uuu PLEASE SEND ME INFORMATION ON:
Tel. +44 (0)20 7193 4986 moleiro.com/online
o o o o o o o o
The Hours of Henry VIII Hours of Henry IV of France Livre de Chasse, by Gaston Phoebus The Hours of Charles of Angoulême The Isabella Breviary Cardeña Beatus Ladhdhat al-nisâ (The pleasures of women) The Book of Felicity
o o o o o o o o
Bible Moralisée of Naples The Great Canterbury Psalter Splendor Solis Tacuinum Sanitatis Tractatus de Herbis Vallard Atlas Universal Atlas of Fernão Vaz Dourado General Catalogue
LLM VI.15
lim ite d e d itio n
"
The Hours of Henry VIII, Jean Poyer’s masterpiece, receives its name from King Henry VIII of England, second monarch of the House of Tudor. This codex, endowed with an unparalleled dramatic force fitting for the most passionate and fascinating monarch in English history, is known to have belonged to a series of later English kings. For example, there is proof that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it still belonged to the library of George III.
NAME .............................................................. FAMILY NAME ......................................................
Travesera de Gracia, 17 -21 08021 Barcelona - Spain Tel. (+44) 020 7193 4986 Tel. (+34) 932 402 091 www.moleiro.com www.moleiro.com/online facebook.com/moleiro youtube.com/moleiroeditor
ADDRESS ......................................................................................................................................... CITY .................................................................... POSTCODE ........................................................... COUNTRY ........................................................................................................................................ E-MAIL.............................................................. TEL........................................................................ In accordance with the Personal Data Protection legislation of Spain, you are hereby notified that the information submitted to us will be stored in a database owned by M. Moleiro Editor, S.A.. Such information will be used only for processing your request and informing you of any activities and offers by the Moleiro Group that may be of interest to you. You may amend, cancel and consult your data at any time by writing to: M. Moleiro Editor, S.A., Travesera de Gracia, 17-21, 08021 Barcelona, Spain.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMBERS CLUB The Royal Over-Seas League is a unique, not-for-profit, private membership organisation that encourages international friendship and understanding through arts, social, music and humanitarian programmes. With membership benefits including accommodation and dining at clubhouses in London and Edinburgh, and reciprocal arrangements with over 80 clubs around the world, we offer our members a home away from home.
HOW TO JOIN Call +44 (0)20 7408 0214 (ext. 214 & 216) and quote ‘The London Library Magazine’ for special joining discounts, visit www.rosl.org.uk or email info@rosl.org.uk
ROSL_AD_LONDON_112.5x83mm.indd 1
12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
09/05/2014 11:58
BIBLIOTHERAPY
dannie abse’s
ask the moon
new and collected poems 1948–2014
‘
This volume of poems written by Dannie Abse spans almost 70 years and offers Owen Sheers a guide for life itself Ever since my teens I’ve turned to poetry whenever I’ve felt as if I’m losing sight of the meat of life; when the mechanics of living or the weight of the inconsequential seem to have drowned out the music of being alive. As I’ve got older, and our digital world has become increasingly polyphonic, the use of poems as refuge and reflection has garnered an even deeper vitality for me. To experience something crafted, whole and exclusive within our ever-fracturing and multiple days is to slow the pulse of thought for a moment; to step out of the stream of cacophony and listen, instead, to a single thoughtful and feeling voice in your ear. For this reason, much of what I have to say about Dannie Abse’s collected poems, Ask the Moon (2014), might equally apply to the work of other poets (assuming, as Keith Douglas once wrote, that there is no such thing as bad poetry, just ‘poetry’ and ‘not poetry’). But Abse’s poems are, I believe, particularly well suited as a prescription for those in need of a guiding light as to how we might live a more fully attuned life. This is partly because of the extraordinary breadth and depth of Abse’s own life, which informs nearly all of the poems in Ask the Moon. Abse started writing early, in 1948, and sustained a remarkable consistency of poetic enquiry until his death last September at the age of 91. As such, his collected poems span almost seventy years and embrace all seven ages of man. Here is Abse as war-time medical student, entering the dissection room with its ‘twenty/ amazing sculptures waiting to be vandalized’; Abse the young courting lover marrying his ‘white girl/ beautiful in a barley field’; the husband lying with his wife ‘on our shadows naked,/ more than together’; the father telling his
As I’ve got older, the use of poems as refuge and reflection has garnered an even deeper vitality for me
’
Dannie Abse’s Ask the Moon: New and Collected Poems 1948–2014 (2014).
son ‘Too soon maturity will civilize your night’; the doctor witnessing a ‘red-blue tinged with hirsute mauve/ in the plumskin face of a suicide’; the grief-struck widower telling his dead wife ‘without
you dark is darker still and infinite’; and lastly, and perhaps most surprisingly, the thankful, wry explorer of his own final years. ‘In this exile people call old age,’ he writes in ‘Valediction’ , ‘I live between nostalgia and rage./ This is the land of fools and fear. / Thanks be. I’m lucky to be here. ’ Such a full span of acutely observed and rendered life experience is rarely found in a body of poetic work, but it is the nature of the intelligence and voice brought to bear upon these experiences that makes Abse’s poems such powerfully quiet reminders of what it is that matters. The humanistic generosity of his attention is often a call to appreciation, but it is always accompanied by a sharp-edged inquisitiveness, a bright-eyed needling of us and our world. Just as a moment in life is illuminated, so too the light the poem casts will reveal the shadows it throws. ‘Look, love and laugh, ’ his poems seem to say to us, ‘but don’t settle either, don’t stop enquiring of the dark from which we shine’ . Above all I think it is the inclusivity of Abse’s poems, not so much in terms of their accessibility as in their range, that has seen me repeatedly returning to them when in need of tonal guidance in my living. Poems such as the chilling ‘In the Theatre’ , in which a patient speaks, then dies, during brain surgery, are firmly rooted in the physical, but never at the expense of the spiritual. Similarly, conversational rhythms never preclude a musicality, nor the anecdotal the profound. Most importantly, perhaps, wit and wisdom are often found lying side by side in Abse’s poems, weaving through Ask the Moon a particularly life-affirming ludic thread and a reminder to us that it is in play – as a child plays, as a poet plays – that we question, love and learn to live. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13
UNCERTAIN TERRITORIES Roger Kneebone describes his discoveries about the surprising parallels between his work as a surgeon and that of the craftsman and performer, and sees The London Library as a metaphor for exploring connecting worlds
It all started with a chance meeting. I came across Joshua through a mutual friend, without any premonition of how our worlds would overlap. Joshua is a bespoke tailor who creates men’s suits and jackets. They are works of extraordinary craftsmanship and beauty. Each piece is unique, and every time he makes one he starts from scratch. No blocks, no factory-made patterns – just careful observation, a set of measurements and a lifetime’s skill in cutting and making. A bespoke suit only makes sense on the person it is made for. On anyone else, it is all wrong. On the hanger, it is lifeless and inert. But on the man it is made for, one of Joshua’s suits does something magical: it reflects and shapes that man’s personality while bringing the fabric to life. I’m a surgeon; at least I have been. I changed tack 30 years ago, and my career has taken several directions since. For many years I was a GP, then an academic at Imperial College in London. I’m still there, and now my field is engagement – exploring how people with different views of the world can exchange perspectives, and how this can result in ‘reciprocal illumination’ . As a result I’m fascinated by expertise outside my own field. The first thing that struck me about Joshua was his skill with a needle and thread. I’m not bad with a needle and thread either; or so I thought. As a trauma surgeon in Africa I spent years sewing arteries, veins, intestines and skin. But 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
when I asked Joshua to let me have a go at putting a sleeve on a jacket, I floundered around without a clue. Away from my familiar surroundings – bright lights, gown and gloves, a scrub nurse handing me things, an assistant ensuring a clear view – I felt completely useless. I realised that skills which I had taken for granted had been painfully laborious to acquire and only work in their own context. Once my bruised ego had recovered a bit, Joshua and I started to compare notes about other aspects of our work. It turned out that his approach to his customers was very similar to my approach to my patients. We both saw every encounter as a unique meeting-place between the knowledge and skills we had acquired through years of training and the needs of the individual in front of us. For both of us, our work was based on a relationship of integrity and trust between professional and customer or patient, requiring us to apply our expertise to an individual, not a type. To Joshua and to me, that is the essence of bespoke. That initial meeting marked the beginning of a conversation which has been going on for six years and shows no sign of petering out. Talking to Joshua made a penny drop in my head. I stopped thinking of surgery as a science and started seeing it as a craft. This is an unorthodox view. When I started my surgical training I thought I was a scientist. Most of my friends thought they were too. Six years at medical school
had done nothing to dispel that view. From my first days in the dissecting room and the physiology laboratory, it was all about memorising facts, about acquiring scientific knowledge. It wasn’t until much later that I came to see what I did as a practice – one that depends on scientific knowledge, certainly, but where science alone cannot provide the answers. As a clinician I brought to my work a knowledge of facts and science, of anatomy, pathology and the rest. I brought my experience of treating other patients, and what I had learned through doing this. But in every instance I had to apply that knowledge newly, to the person in front of me. At the same time, each patient presented only those aspects of their life that seemed relevant to the issue at hand. For both of us this involved selection, abstraction, ‘re-presentation’ between one world and another. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that this was not a scientific process of the kind I had learned during my training. I wasn’t conducting experiments under controlled conditions or seeking to eliminate confounding variables. I wasn’t trying to minimise subjectivity or bracket myself out of the picture. Instead I was trying to integrate and to synthesise, to draw on the most appropriate resources to address each person’s problem. And that’s what Joshua does when he creates a suit. Once I started thinking of myself as a
From top Surgeon Omar Faiz with simulated patient; Joshua Byrne, tailor, in his studio.
‘
As a surgeon I spent years sewing arteries, veins, intestines. But when I asked Joshua to let me have a go at
’
putting a sleeve on a jacket, I floundered
around without a clue.
craftsman rather than a scientist, all that factual knowledge started to look different; still indispensable, of course, but somehow less prominent. I came to realise that what I do as a doctor doesn’t just use craft – it is craft. The consultation, the operation, responding to anxieties without letting my own anxiety show – all instances of bespoke. So I started to wonder what I could learn from other craftsmen. Whenever I could, I visited experts in their workshops
and their studios. I became a member of the Art Workers’ Guild and found a world I never knew existed. Frame-gilders, woodengravers, lute-makers, hatters, sculptors, illustrators, architectural stone-carvers, cabinet-makers, textile artists – the list seemed endless. All masters through years of practice, and all completely different from surgeons – or so I thought. Once I started to watch and read about their work, I discovered common threads. All of them were perfectionists, all were
familiar with the tedium of prolonged apprenticeship, all had experienced the flashes of inspiration that make the job worthwhile. Most are delightful, many are eccentric, some irascible and a few unspeakable. Just like surgeons. Another penny dropped when I realised that as well as being a craft, surgery is also a performance. It’s no accident that we talk of surgeons performing operations in a theatre. I began to ask myself what surgeons might learn from other performers – from THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15
actors, say, or dancers, puppeteers, musicians, magicians, sportsmen. Very soon I realised how much I had to learn here, too. But immediately I hit a problem. I needed a means of showing craftsmen and performers what happens in surgery, so that they could experience the world I was talking about. But it’s impossible to invite sightseers into the operating theatre. Or is it? At one level, of course, surgery is quite rightly out of bounds. Which of us would want someone coming in off the street and watching our operation? Quite apart from issues of infection and sterility, surgery is very private. But simulated surgery is another matter. Simulation is now a mainstay of medical teaching, and medical schools across the world use models and computers to teach undergraduate students and specialists-in-training how to perform skilled tasks. Surgeons too use simulation – often building accurate (and fabulously expensive) replicas of real operating theatres, complete with overhead lamps, instruments and anaesthetic machines. Yet these facilities are usually restricted to insiders, to specialist clinicians.
In my research group at Imperial I’ve been taking a different tack. I have developed the idea of using simulation to reach outwards, to open up the world of surgery to patients and the public instead of keeping them out. My colleagues and I have developed Distributed Simulation (including a full-sized pop-up inflatable operating theatre, where clinicians invite the public to take part in operations) and Sequential Simulation (where the action moves from the roadside to an ambulance, then into an operating theatre, a recovery ward and finally a GP surgery). Lightweight theatrical props provide a surprisingly vivid sense of realism, and silicon prosthetic organs look like the real thing. The illusion becomes stronger still when ‘performed’ by real clinical teams. I invited craftsmen and performers to join these ‘operations’ as part of the team, then tell me about any similarities and differences they noticed between their world and mine. Of course they all picked up on different aspects. Craftsmen were fascinated by the technical side of the process. Stone- and wood-carvers responded to the sculptural aspects of
three-dimensional organs. Jewellers noticed the tiny delicate instruments of vascular surgery. Lace-makers were struck by the way surgeons used threads, and how simple their knots were in comparison with the complexities of lace. Performers, on the other hand, responded more to the teamwork they saw. Choreographers and dancers were captivated by the movement of people around one another, and the ballet of hands around an open wound. Puppeteers picked up on the wordless teamwork and how surgeons read one another’s bodies while they operated. Musicians pointed out similarities between planned surgery and scored composition, contrasted with the connections between emergency surgery and improvised jazz. A Formula One team was aghast at the apparent chaos of the emergency room and saw parallels with the split-second co-ordination of the pit, contrasted with the meticulous precision of the engineering bay. Once I became aware of these parallels, I began to see them everywhere. That posed the difficult challenge of choosing which to explore. I became dazzled by
From left Rachael Matthews, textile artist, at the Art Workers’ Guild; Vicki Ambery-Smith, jeweller; puppetry, surgery and sculpture, with Rachel Warr, puppeteer (far left), Roger Kneebone (centre) and Paul Jakeman, stone-carver (right). 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
uncertain territories possibilities. How could I investigate them systematically without becoming swamped, and how could I keep hold of that sense of the unexpected, the unpredictable, the sudden shaft of insight from a serendipitous connection? How could I find the things I didn’t know I didn’t know? Books were the obvious answer, but most libraries I knew of could only help if you knew what you were looking for. And I didn’t. When I discovered The London Library I realised I had landed in the perfect place. It was different from any library I had ever come across, and joining it was a revelation. In biomedical science, one is usually exploring a narrow aspect of a highly technical field. It is essential to remain aware of the latest research by other groups. The emphasis is on what is going on now. Opportunities for looking completely outside one’s field are limited. Computers are ideal for this kind of research: they can explore connections, follow links, carry out comprehensive searches. But my focus is different. I’m interested in the spaces between domains – those crossing points that are shaped by their relationships to neighbours. These are zones of negative
space, of curved and temporary outlines that take shape and then dislimn. The London Library is a mysterious warehouse for books, and you never know what you’ll find. It offers an unparalleled opportunity to browse; to set out on journeys without knowing where they will lead; to follow hunches; and to tap into the librarians’ expertise. They don’t seem to find it odd that a reader might want to explore Lightning Conductors one day, Syphilis the next, and then go on to South Asian Dance. And because the Library’s classification – especially in Science & Miscellaneous – is so idiosyncratic, it doesn’t conform to the systems that populate my own mind. So going in search of a book becomes a journey of discovery in itself. The Library’s classification system exerts its own power, transcending the books it contains and opening a little wicket gate into a world that is becoming increasingly rare – a place where wandering, browsing and exploring are seen as completely normal; a world where, in the words of the sociologist and musician Richard Sennett writing in The Hedgehog Review about the Renaissance workshop, there is no ‘iron rule
of utility that establishes a fixed goal […] in advance’ , no insistence that something must be demonstrably useful in order to justify its place on a shelf. Of course the collection is not comprehensive. Often there are books or papers that are not there, and I have to go to other libraries. Yet that too is part of its charm – when browsing through a section, my search is framed by what is there, rather than what might be or what is not. And that provides a starting point, a structure to push against, and a means of imposing order on a complexity that could be overwhelming. To me the Library’s books are like cells in a body, constantly being renewed, changed and added to. Yet in spite of this perpetual change, the Library moulds itself in response to the outside world, subtly changing without abandoning its individuality. It is like human ageing. I started with a chance encounter between a surgeon and a tailor. My wanderings brought me to The London Library in search of books. And in the Library I have found a perfect metaphor for exploration.
.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17
HIDDEN CORNERS
embattled belgium
from THE revolT of the netherlandS to the first world war Hugh Dunthorne samples a small selection of the Library’s extensive collection of books on the history of the Netherlands The invasion of neutral Belgium by German forces on 4 August 1914, and the subsequent military occupation of the country, was the immediate cause of Britain’s entry into the First World War. It had the effect of making Belgium’s fate a matter of immediate concern to British people in a way that is now difficult to appreciate. The reasons for this public concern were partly strategic and diplomatic, to do with the conduct of the war and the international treaty-making that preceded it. Under the Treaty of London of 1839, Britain (with other European powers) was a guarantor of the independence and neutrality of the young Belgian state, and thus had an obligation to come to its aid if that independence was violated. But there were other reasons for Britain’s concern over the plight of its southern neighbour. One of these was social, as more than a quarter of a million Belgians fleeing the German advance found refuge in Britain – the largest influx of its kind in our history. There were literary reasons for Britain’s sympathy with Belgium, too, as from 1915 onwards scores of books and pamphlets – many of them now to be found on the History and French Literature shelves of The London Library, as well as in its Pamphlet Collection – told the story of Belgium’s suffering ‘under the German yoke’ , and appealed to allies and neutral powers for help. The authors of these wartime
18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
publications – drawn almost exclusively from Belgium’s French-speaking minority – became familiar names in Britain. They included national figures such as CardinalArchbishop Désiré Mercier of Mechlin, a distinguished philosopher and teacher. After the Belgian government’s retreat into exile at Le Havre, he remained in Belgium where he assumed an entirely new role as the effective leader of his country’s civilian population and its international
spokesman. His pastoral letter of December 1914, Patriotism and Endurance – published first as a pamphlet in 1915 and later in a collection of the Archbishop’s wartime writings, The Voice of Belgium (1917) – was outspoken in denying the legitimacy of the occupying regime and in condemning the brutality that had accompanied the movement of German forces westwards. Between August and October 1914 some 5,500 unarmed men, women and children
‘
From 1915 onwards scores of books and pamphlets told the story of Belgium’s
’
suffering and appealed to allies and neutral powers for help
Opposite Pierre Paulus, Flight, 1914, depicting Belgian civilians fleeing from German forces. A postcard reproduction of this picture was sold in Britain to raise money for the Belgian Soldiers’ Clothes Charity. © DACS 2015. Above, from top Frank Brangwyn, Antwerp. The Last Boat, c.1915–16, a poster commissioned by the Belgian Red Cross Fund to support Belgian refugees in Britain, © David Brangwyn; front page of La Libre Belgique, June 1915, showing the Prussian Governor-General of Belgium, Baron von Bissing.
had been killed, in reprisal for supposedly hindering the German advance, and around 20,000 buildings had been burned down, among them much of the historic centre of Louvain, including the university library and all its contents. If Archbishop Mercier did much to win support in Britain for Belgium’s cause, so also did the writings of officers in the Belgian armed forces. Commandant Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery’s Belgium in War Time, translated by Bernard Miall (1917), is a fine example of the genre. Broad in scope, dealing with social as well as military aspects of the conflict, it is engagingly written, clear in structure and well documented, including in its documentation many of the author’s own photographs. It also paid tribute to ‘our brave king’ Albert, who led the Belgian army in the defence of Antwerp and subsequently on the River Yser line in the far north-west of the country. The heroic standing of the young king, ‘the soul of our resistance, ’ was almost as high in Britain as in Belgium itself. By the time de Gerlache’s book appeared, leading Belgian academics were adding their voices to the literary war effort. One of them, the scientist Jean Massart, charted the rapid expansion of underground printing in Belgium from 1915 onwards, a development unmatched elsewhere in occupied Europe. Massart’s La presse clandestine dans la Belgique occupée (1917) was an anthology of newspaper articles as
well as a narrative, and offered interesting sidelights on methods of distribution. The cover of the French edition (sadly absent from the shortened English translation of 1918, also in the Library) reproduced the famous front page from La Libre Belgique, the best known of the secret newspapers, from June 1915, showing the Prussian Governor-General of Belgium, Baron von Bissing, apparently consulting the same newspaper. According to the picture’s caption, ‘our dear governor’ was ‘sick of the lies printed by the official press’ and was relying instead on a paper that told him the truth about the war. As it was intended to do, this lampoon infuriated the German authorities, who increased to 75,000 francs (£3,000) the reward offered for information about the paper’s editors. But the secret was kept – not least by Massart himself – and La Libre Belgique continued its subversive role. Finally, and just as influential in Britain, there were the impassioned writings and speeches of leading Belgian poets and playwrights such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Émile Verhaeren and Émile Cammaerts. Shortly before publishing his Belgian Poems: chants patriotiques in a bilingual edition in 1915, with English translations by Tita Brand-Cammaerts, Cammaerts had begun to collaborate with Edward Elgar, who set three of his patriotic songs to music. The earliest of these collaborations, ‘Carillon’ , evoked the ruined bell-towers of three of Belgium’s ‘martyr cities’ , Aarschot, Dinant and Termonde. The piece was an immediate success, received with ‘patriotic fervour’ at its first performance in London in December 1914, and in the spring of 1915 it was taken on a concert tour of eight British cities to raise funds for Belgian charities. At the same time, Cammaerts’ fellowpoet Verhaeren was addressing enthusiastic audiences across England and Wales, urging ever closer ties of friendship between Britain and Belgium. When soon afterwards Verhaeren’s last collection of poetry appeared under the title Les ailes rouges de la guerre (The red wings of war) (1916), that work too became famous. One poem in particular, ‘La patrie aux soldats morts’ , still retains for francophones the poignancy that Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ has in the English-speaking world. The destruction of Belgian towns and villages during the summer and autumn of 1914 was not unprecedented. For centuries in this embattled part of the Low Countries – THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19
‘
Some of the earliest contemporary histories of the Revolt were written by
’
Netherlanders living in exile, and were fiercely patriotic in tone
‘the cockpit of Europe’ , as it has been called – war had destroyed lives and buildings as, in many parts of the world, it still does. This dark subject, the endlessly destructive relationship between war and urban life, was chosen in 2014 by the M-Museum Leuven and the Catholic University of Leuven (to give the city its modern spelling) as their joint offering to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War. An exhibition was mounted and a book published to accompany it: edited by Jo Tollebeek and Eline van Assche, Ravaged: Art and Culture in Time of Conflict (2014) has recently been added to the Art shelves of the Library. As we would expect, one of the contributors to this volume, Mark Derez, retells the story of the ‘burning of Leuven’ in August 1914. But the book as a whole looks much further afield, pursuing its recurring theme across continents and from the ancient world to the wars of today. The sense of history repeating itself, which anyone reading this book must feel, was also experienced by those who witnessed the havoc of 1914 at first hand. There were, after all, historians among Belgium’s wartime authors, so it is not surprising that some of their accounts should have echoed earlier episodes in the country’s war-torn history. The ‘German fury in Belgium’ , as one journalist termed it, recalled the ‘Spanish fury’ more than three centuries before, when in 1576 unpaid 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
soldiers of Philip II of Spain had sacked the great Flemish city of Antwerp. Like the German invasion of 1914, the earlier occupation of the Netherlands by the Spanish Army of Flanders had provoked a European conflict – the war, or series of wars, now usually called the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568–1648). It had caused thousands from Flanders to flee the bloodshed, many seeking refuge in southern England. As in 1914 to 1918, the Revolt produced a substantial war literature of pamphlets and contemporary histories. Published in the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth,
these works are now rare, so the Library is fortunate in possessing among its antiquarian collections more than a dozen of them, all now kept in the Safe. Some of the earliest contemporary histories of the Revolt were written by Netherlanders living in exile, such as Historia Belgica by the London-based merchant Emanuel van Meteren. (The Library does not possess this work in its original Latin edition, published in 1598, but does have two early translations: an English one by Edward Grimeston, printed in 1608, and a French edition of 1618.) Like the wartime literature of 1914 to 1918, these early accounts were
hidden corners fiercely patriotic in tone. Starting work on his Nederlantsche oorloghen (Netherlands wars) during the 1590s – a copy of which is also owned by the Library – the Utrecht notary Pieter Bor aimed to show that the Revolt of the Netherlands had been caused by the oppressive and unconstitutional rule of the Spanish Governor-General, Alva. The Netherlanders, in other words, had taken up arms in a just war of self-defence. Scattered throughout the book, the vivid engravings of Frans Hogenberg reinforced the point, contrasting the orderly conduct of forces loyal to the Prince of Orange with the ruthlessness of Spanish soldiers as they razed towns and murdered their inhabitants. Later narratives, by Hugo Grotius and Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, adopted a more dispassionate approach, influenced by the famously impartial History of his Own Time by the great French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou. A fine poet and playwright before he turned in later life to history, Hooft wrote his Nederlandsche historiën (Netherlands histories), first published in 1642, in a concise and powerful prose style that brought out the drama of the Revolt and the fortitude of the Prince of Orange; the Library has the third edition of 1677. At the same time Hooft was even-handed in his judgements, pointing out that both sides had been guilty of atrocities and that the Spanish rulers of the Low Countries were capable of acting with magnanimity as well as brute force. A similar objectivity can be found in accounts of the conflict written from the Spanish or Catholic point of view, by authors such as the Jesuit Famiano Strada and the papal nuncio Guido Bentivoglio. As a diplomat, Bentivoglio understood the international dimensions of the Revolt of the Netherlands better than anyone. In his Della Guerra di Fiandra (The War of Flanders), published in 1637, he explained that the sheer ‘bulk’ and geographical spread of the Spanish empire had involved the King of Spain in commitments that went far beyond his limited military and financial resources. As a result he was forced repeatedly to divert men and money away from the Low Countries, leaving the Army of Flanders ‘in a forlorn condition’ and unable to suppress the rebellion there. The Library has a 1637 edition of Bentivoglio’s book, and a 1678 translation by Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth. In their original languages as well as in
Opposite Edward Grimeston’s A generall historie of the Netherlands (1608), a translation of Emanuel van Meteren’s Historia Belgica, but published under Grimeston’s own name. Left Engraving of Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, from the Library’s 1677 copy of his Nederlandsche historiën (Netherlands histories), first published in 1642.
English translation, these works circulated quite widely in Britain. It is interesting to discover that the Library’s copy of Carlos Coloma’s well-informed Las guerras des los Estados Baxos (The wars of the States of the Low Countries), published in 1625, was once owned by William and John Paston, seventeenth-century descendants of the well-known Norfolk family. What is more, these contemporary histories of the Revolt of the Netherlands influenced the writing of history in this country. Having read Bentivoglio’s history in Italian, Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, took this ‘excellent’ and instructive work as a model for his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1807, H. England). The early publications about the Revolt influenced political thought and action, too. The best-known and most often quoted of the contemporary histories, Grimeston’s translation of van Meteren’s Historia Belgica, which was issued under Grimeston’s own name as A generall historie of the Netherlands (1608), provided English readers not only with a detailed account of the Revolt but also, thanks to the documents and tracts incorporated into the narrative, with arguments and precedents justifying resistance to tyranny. They were arguments soon put to use in Britain’s own political struggles – in the civil wars of the 1640s and again during the Revolution of 1688–9. By 1700 the Netherlands had come to be seen
as ‘the mother nation of liberty’ , in the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s phrase. To Americans during the War of Independence they were ‘our great example’ . As the story of the Revolt was retold and popularised in the nineteenth century, it took its place as one of the key chapters in the history of modern liberty. No wonder, then, that this struggle was still in the minds of the people of Flanders and the other provinces of Belgium as they fought once more to defend their liberty in the European War of 1914 to 1918. The books discussed in this article are of course only a fraction of the Library’s extensive holdings on the history and culture of the Netherlands. Anyone in search of a broader view of these collections should browse the History shelves H. Belgium and H. Holland, as well as the equivalent sections in Topography, T. Belgium and T. Holland. They should consult not only contemporary histories of the Low Countries – often vivid narratives written by those who witnessed or lived through the events they were recounting – but also the arguably more impartial accounts written by later historians, including historians of the present day. It is worth noting that far more historical works on the Netherlands are now published in English than was the case a generation ago. All these writings have a story to tell about the experience of the Low Countries in peace as well as war, and across many centuries.
.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21
Restif de la Bretonne The Night Side of the Enlightenment CitY The encounters of the noctambulist French writer were recorded in meticulous detail in his multi-volume work, Les Nuits de Paris, as Matthew Beaumont reveals In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Paris and London, a peculiar social archetype appeared for the first time on the streets at night: the noctambulist. Before then, only prostitutes and vagrants had, reluctantly, made the nocturnal city their home. But from the late seventeenth century, after the introduction of public street lighting in Europe’s capitals, eccentric exiles from the middle classes, almost all of whom were male, began to haunt the streets at night. Bohemians like the Irish poet, playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith, who had led a vagabond existence as a youth, glimpsed in the night-time city the sordid underside of civilisation. More rakish types, such as James Boswell, grasped the nocturnal streets as an opportunity to sample sensual pleasures that were impossible to enjoy with impunity during the day. Perhaps the most eccentric of all the eighteenth-century noctambulists was the French writer Nicolas-Edme Rétif (1734–1806), known as Rétif, or Restif, de la Bretonne. He published a record of his restless perambulations after dark, entitled Les Nuits de Paris, ou Le Spectateur-Nocturne, in 1788. There is a fine copy in The London Library. This multi-volume compendium consists of numerous anecdotal accounts of Restif’s adventures in Paris since the 1760s, the 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
decade in which he first explored his complicated, if not pathological, impulses towards the women and pubescent girls to be found in the streets of the city at night. As Les Nuits de Paris reveals, Restif is the most exhaustive and imaginative guide we have to the emergent ecology of the metropolis at night in the eighteenth
century, the epoch in which, throughout Europe’s urban centres, ‘nightlife’ became a distinctive cultural phenomenon. The son of a Burgundian peasant, Restif was born in Sacy but migrated first to Auxerre, where he was apprenticed to a printer, then to Paris. In the French metropolis, as a penurious young man, he became a professional printer and, from his mid-thirties, a prolific author, publishing more than 200 books in his lifetime. On occasion, according to legend, Restif composed volumes directly on to the press instead of drafting them first in manuscript. It was in Paris that he developed his reputation both as an erotomaniac and a graphomaniac. As well as an obsessive writer who suffered from chronic logorrhoea, he was a famous foot fetishist whose name eventually provided the pathological term for this predilection – retifism. His innumerable volumes of autobiographical prose centred on the need, first, to gratify his immediate sexual desires; and, second, to create the kind of political and social conditions in which everybody might express passions that, under the prevailing dispensation, and in polite culture, were regarded as obscene. Restif is best situated, then, in relation to the utopian socialist Charles Fourier on the one side and the Marquis de Sade on the other (fittingly, he is said to have
‘
Restif is the most exhaustive and imaginative guide we have to the metropolis at night in the eighteenth century
’
coined, in different contexts, the words ‘communism’ and ‘pornography’). Restif and Sade were in fact deadly rivals, and were violently dismissive of one another’s work. Restif, who published his pornographic Anti-Justine, ou Les Delices de l’Amour (1793) in response to Sade’s novel Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu (1791), urged that the latter’s publications should be suppressed and even that the author should be executed. Sade mocked the fact that, as a professional typesetter, Restif had a printing press at his bedside, and jeered that ‘a single press would groan under the burden of his dreadful output which is characterised by a low and prolix style, [and] disgusting adventures which have been derived from the behaviour of the worst kind of company’ . Others referred to Restif as ‘le Rousseau des ruisseaux’ , the Rousseau of the gutters. ‘A man in his forties who could no longer attract young ladies,’ as the historian Mark Poster writes in his book The Utopian Thought of Restif de la Bretonne (1971), ‘Restif took to the streets to meet them, to speak to them, and to be with them’ . He liked above all to identify abused or threatened women, performing the role of their heroic protector. For instance, he frequently intervened in incidents on the streets by claiming to be related to the women involved, in order to prevent them from being criminalised. As Poster puts it, ‘Restif saw it all and saved the girl just in time. Thus the libertine and the moralist were satisfied night after night. ’ In Les Nuits de Paris, Restif characterised himself as the ‘Night
Watcher’ . He took as his emblem the owl, a bird that he regarded as omniscient, but which is proverbially thought to be ominous. After a night of noctambulations, Restif often repaired to the house of his patroness, a mysterious Marquise who lived in the Marais and apparently
Opposite Title page from Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris (1788). This page, from top Engraving of Restif de La Bretonne, 1785; JeanPierre Houël’s La Prise de la Bastille, 1789.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23
provided philanthropic assistance to some of the people he had encountered in the streets. She was evidently an admirer of his books, since at one point in Les Nuits de Paris he records with pleasure her praise for two of them, Le Paysan perverti; ou, Les Dangers de la ville (1774) and La Paysanne pervertie (1785). In Les Nuits de Paris she serves as his silent, invisible interlocutor, to whom he rehearses his recent experiences and narrates his picaresque adventures. Restif provides a sketch of his relationship with the Marquise in an account in Les Nuits de Paris of the conversation he has with a tall, beautiful woman and a gentleman on the Pont Henri IV one night at 3.30am. Restif introduces himself to them as Monsieur Nicolas and, when the man appears surprised to be addressed by anyone at this time of the night, he admits that he often accosts people like this, ‘for I am always abroad at this time, and I have occasionally had the pleasure of being helpful ’ . ‘I spend my time discovering what is happening, ’ he explains, ‘then I go and call on a certain person who lives in the Marais, and wrongs are righted’ . Les Nuits de Paris is packed with sensational and often salacious detail about the Parisian streets after dark. Every night, this ‘vast and shapeless city, full of marvels, virtues, vices and follies’ , as the French diplomat Charles de Peyssonnel writes in his series of satirical essays Les Numéros (1782), offers Restif different excitements. Venturing into the city at all times of the night, and throughout the year, except when he is suffering from illness, he perambulates streets that are sometimes ‘quiet and empty, because the useless members of society had not yet risen’ , and at other times teem with a febrile, volatile life. On the eleventh night that he recounts, for example, he hears ‘piercing cries coming from the passage of a house whose open door I happened to be passing’ and, according to his testament at least, saves a woman from a man who is trying to kill her. The next night, he goes out wandering at about 11.30pm, having finished working on his current book and, at once benign and faintly lupine, eavesdrops on two people sitting on a bench. More than once, he contrives encounters with women in high heels 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Right Illustration of Restif by Jean-Michel Moreau, from the first edition of Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris (1788). Opposite Plaque at Restif de la Bretonne’s house, 16 rue de la Bûcherie, 5th arrondissement, Paris.
and delivers a long lecture to them on the glories of their footwear. They must have been bemused, if not alarmed, by this behaviour. What else does Restif find in the marvellous, vicious streets of the city at night? He encounters poor families secretly moving house in order to escape the rent that is due to their landlords. He sees men at the Champs Elysées smuggling forbidden books into the city from Versailles. He visits cafés and overhears heated discussions about the American Revolution. One night he hears a noise up a side street and discovers ‘a little creature who looked like a monkey’ hanging from the bars of a window. He is convinced it is a marmoset but, as he is about to move on, it falls at his feet and he sees that it is a ‘a tiny mulatto, who had fallen in love with the chambermaid of
one of the lady residents’ . Restif is on his way back home on the nineteenth night after several diverting incidents and, ‘deep in thought, as was my habit’ , sees what looks like a dog lying on the ground. It turns out to be a drunken ‘old rag-picking woman’ , who makes ‘a deep and mournful cry’ . He approaches her animal form in fear, his hair standing on end. The woman’s head is pillowed on a sack of dead cats and dogs that she has killed so as to sell their flesh or fur. He tries to rouse her and move her on, but she stirs and stabs at him with a stick once she realises he won’t buy one of the animals. These gruesome sights are in the end less disturbing than those that point not to the corrupt or desperate practices conducted in the metropolis at night, but to the mental collapse experienced
‘
restif de la bretonne
More than once, Restif contrives encounters with women in high
’
heels and delivers a
long lecture to them
on the glories of their footwear
by some of its inhabitants. On the 240th night, at the top of the Rue des Orties, on the outskirts of Paris near the Bois de Boulogne, he sees ‘something dragging itself slowly along’: ‘I was disturbed by this, fearing that it might be a man who had been mortally wounded, and approached the figure cautiously. It proved to be a man crawling along on all fours and sighing. ’ The next day he learns that on the morning of their wedding this man found his fiancée dead in bed. Since then, in order to be closer to the ground under which she is buried, ‘he has never stood up again, and never goes out except in the middle of the night to go to the Rue des Orties to see the house in which she lived’ . This bereaved and tortured lover, reduced to a state of chronic and degrading agoraphobia, appears to have escaped from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. If Restif is the hero of the short stories he reconstructs, women tend to function either as objects of pity, or erotic possibility, or both. On one occasion, ‘having taken a wide detour in order to profit by my Night, ’ he happens to look up from the street and see ‘something white at a high window’ . He shouts out but, to his horror, a woman is suddenly pushed out of the window, falls to the ground below and is killed. Moments later, he sees a pimp he recognises slip out of a side door in the building. He tracks him through the streets and eventually alerts a sentry at the watchpost at Les Halles. The officer, however, is suspicious of Restif and
impedes the mysterious noctambulist’s passage, so the pimp is allowed to escape. Other anecdotes turn on sexual dramas that seem to take place spontaneously in the theatre of the streets. One night he comes across a crowd of people surrounding a charming young girl. He asks the girl why everyone is staring at her, ‘when suddenly the young thing, without a word, lifted her skirts, and revealed her breeches’ . He realises that the girl is in fact a boy, ‘amusing himself in a thoroughly unsuitable way’ . So far, so farcical. As Restif is remonstrating with the boy, a carriage pulls up so that its occupant can ascertain the cause of the commotion. Shockingly, when the latter discovers that the child is a transvestite, two servants leap out and bundle the boy into the carriage. He has been kidnapped. ‘I will draw a veil over the results of this appalling incident, ’ Restif concludes, ‘except to say that the boy is now an effeminate, and occupies a place at the * * * *-* * * *. ’ On the nocturnal streets, comedy turns to tragedy in an instant. Les Nuits de Paris comes to an end when the Marquise unexpectedly dies – to the inconsolable grief of le spectateur-nocturne. She has functioned as Restif’s maternal superego, offering a counterbalance to the unconscious forces of the nocturnal city in which he becomes embroiled or entangled. Her philanthropic activities have domesticated Paris at night and made it appear morally accountable. In her
absence, it is as if ‘the unofficial capital of the European Enlightenment’ , as the historian Colin Jones calls it in Paris: Biography of a City (2004), and ‘the movement of ideas stressing the rational improvement of humanity’ , is given up to chaos and darkness. One name for this chaos and darkness, in the late eighteenth century, was the French Revolution. In 1789 Restif supplemented Les Nuits de Paris with an additional volume that recorded his nocturnal experiences at the time of the liberation of the Bastille. He was ambivalent about the Revolution: he condemned aristocrats as ‘madmen, bored with their own happiness’ , who had immiserated the people; but was nonetheless fearful of the people. Restif’s descriptions of the fourth night after the beginning of the Revolution are almost allegorical of this position. On the afternoon of the fourth night, walking ‘like a drunk’ , he ventured into the city and discovered that the Bastille had been taken. To his horror, he then stumbled across ‘a headless body lying in the mud, surrounded by five or six loiterers’ , a corpse that turned out to be that of the Governor of the Bastille. Reaching the Bastille itself, he observed that ‘a destructive madness seemed to be running through the city’ . This scene is the symbolic climax of his multivolume testament to the irrationalism of the French metropolis, in which Restif details the dark underside of the Enlightenment with the methodical care and ambition of an encyclopaedist.
.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25
POETRY Cosmo Davenport-Hines, who was the youngest life member of The London Library, died on 9 June 2008, aged 21. The Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize was set up at King’s College London in his memory. This year’s co-winners are Joseph Prestwich and Catherine Walters. Fremd
Love at Third Pint
(From Goethe’s Römische Elegien II, V ) Before, I began to doubt those close-knit circles, pointless and apolitical paraphrasing, repetitive rhetoric: but now I am secure in this other place das fremde Land, followed down by bootleg Dylan through Garstang, Preston, Birmingham-outskirts, those for-some-reason friends turning to illusions as the accent got softer, the air got muggier. You did not know me but recognised yourself in me, surely, as I did you. I told of my foundry grandfather who melted metal forty-five years and sits now in the house my mother left; my grandma, who two years straight sat estranged, who thought a fall in the kitchen was a trip to Blackpool beach, but who smiled, at the end, o how she smiled. I told all. You told some, and your southern senses, so foreign to me, so well-versed in Greek mythology, forced a better wit from my barbarian mouth. Nights we spent, I, tapping out verses on your back, stoking the flame from morning ash, you, teaching love and, you, I’m sure, learning our senses could be the same. But – when I return, what do they ask of me? In their company lies some regret that something known was lost, that I, I, das fremde Ich, am somehow translated. They recognise these hands, these clothes, but still I stand at stranger’s distance from them. What did I lose? Tell, that I may reach back and find that other self that dwelled here so contentedly, and let him fear the native’s return for as long as natives can. Am I that much changed? I must return, love. Love, reassure me, please. Call me back. Teach me that I may still learn how to love, still be myself, and not fear it. Joseph Prestwich
26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Apparently freedom looks like the bearded man in the dressy dingy room made of jumbled furniture and too many clocks and mumbled introductions. ‘You’re prettier than your picture’ he smiles as I secretly scramble for my phone and substitute the one from Rome to Sorrento and my desperate bikini shot. The liturgy hasn’t changed – the dirge of drinks and my gospel truth about juniper juice and where it comes from followed by the oh-so Soho barmaid with too many earrings and too many memories of bearded, besweatered predecessors. Seminal question: ‘Double?’ With a wrinkled mouth that silently spells ‘I reckon he’s into Star Wars’ . She pours. A long pause. He paws at his manbag and pays. The lighting is low enough to trick attraction but a fraction too high not to cover one eye to pretend that he’s a different beard: one that knows more about Dryden than droids but does a perfect Princess Leia on a junk-fuelled Sunday afternoon when we’re gleefully glued together like jam. One that knows all that I am (including that I hate clichés but that I use them anyway); one that talks to my eyes about my breasts not to my breasts about my eyes. One with whom I’ve sat here, not here sipping a single, not single. Catherine Walters
MEMBERS’ News
catalyst
‘
Members may recall that in previous editions of the London Library Magazine we have highlighted the introduction of the discovery software Primo to the catalogue. We spent the dark winter months working on the interface, ensuring that it was as user-friendly as possible. In this task we were aided by a number of members who volunteered to try out the prototype, and we are very grateful for the time they took and the valuable feedback they provided. On 26 January we went live with the new catalogue, now called Catalyst. For the first time members can simultaneously search both our printed titles and electronic holdings, and be taken straight to relevant articles with no need for a separate search. No longer do you need to know how to search individual databases and eJournals: Catalyst can do it for you, and even suggest further topics should you wish. The reception has been positive, and where we can we have made changes based on the feedback we have received. Since we introduced Catalyst, over 130 members have attended our introductory and drop-in sessions at the Library. These are designed to introduce members to the key features of Catalyst and demonstrate its vast potential to aid research. We have used it to hunt out lists of nineteenth-century Italian fiction, search for history books when only the publisher was known, and uncover articles on a host of subjects.
legacy gifts The London Library has never received any regular public funding, so philanthropic support from generous individuals has been invaluable for the organisation throughout its history. Among the first donors was Prince Albert, who gave the Library 24 volumes and a donation of £50 (the equivalent of about £65,000 today).* The nature of this princely gift highlights one the Library’s ongoing philanthropy challenges: books or money? It is undoubtedly true that the Library’s greatness has been consistently enhanced by the astonishing books that we have been given. From rare volumes we could never afford to the perfect fillers for nagging gaps in the collection, book donations have made a vital difference to the Library’s ability to deliver the breadth of collection that our members seek. Donated books, however, can come with some challenges, as Gill Turner outlines in her article on page 29. The best rule of thumb, if you want to leave books to the Library, is to contact us first so that we can discuss the practical implications of your very kind offer. Self-evidently a bequest of money or other assets alongside or instead of books, comes with far fewer problems and in truth the Library has, at times, been saved by such bequests. Perhaps the most famous came from Major Prevost in 1929. For much of the 1920s the Library had been struggling with the question of how to expand to meet the ever growing need for more book shelves. A space had been identified in Mason’s Yard but
Just used the new Catalyst search system this evening, and am astonished by how comprehensive and useful it is. I’m doing Ph.D. research on a Russian sculpture, spending my days in libraries in the UK (and actually today the BNF in Paris) and I have never used a search engine that is so effective.
’
Of particular interest has been the eShelf, where item records can be stored and searches can be saved and set to run automatically, alerting you of new results by email. Virtual Browse is another popular new tool, allowing you to wander the shelves of the Library and see the catalogued material from wherever you are in the world, bringing an element of serendipity to the catalogue as never before. Introductory sessions will be running regularly at the Library. If you are interested in attending one please contact Reception (tel. 020 7766 4700 or email reception@londonlibrary.co.uk). Alternatively, do please ask next time you are at the Library and we will be glad to give you a demonstration. the Library did not have the means to act on this important opportunity. In his timely will, Major Prevost left the Library his country house and some £16,000 in cash (the equivalent of about £6m today).* The house was sold and, with the entire bequest, the Library was finally able to create the 1930s extension, adding bookstacks that have been such a vital part of the building ever since. More recent benefactors, as can been seen from our Legacy board outside the Art Room, include John French Slater, Betty Kathleen D’Alton, Robert Brendan McDowell, Anne Marjorie Crosthwait and Mabel Dorothy De’Ath. We will tell their stories and describe the huge impact they have had on the Library in later issues. Last year saw the launch of a special Chapter for those who have kindly offered to make a bequest to the Library in their will. It is named the Prevost Chapter after the Major and meets once a year to explore a particular aspect of the Library’s work. This year’s meeting will be held in June, and will explore the wonderful work of our Collection Care team. The Library welcomes bequests of any size and is happy to discuss how a bequest can be structured to help achieve a permanent solution to some of the many challenges, great and small, which the Library faces. If you would like to know more about bequests, please contact Philip Spedding, Director of Development (tel. 020 7766 4716 or email philip.spedding@londonlibrary.co.uk). * figures calculated using measuringworth.com.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27
maintaining a unique shelf order Head of Bibliographic Services Dunia García-Ontiveros on the importance of preserving the Library’s unique classification system alongside managing the collection’s growth Last December, at a member’s suggestion, we made a small change became a collection in their own right and were moved into the Art to our classification scheme. We merged T. Newfoundland and T. Room (although, tellingly, books on cinema and photography stayed Labrador to form T. Newfoundland & Labrador and, although we in Science). To give an example of this system, Hagberg Wright had no H. Labrador (the books on the history of Labrador were in created a shelfmark for cheese within Science & Miscellaneous fact shelved in T. Labrador), we changed H. Newfoundland to H. because we had a sufficient number of books on that topic in the Newfoundland & Labrador, which required us to extract the relevant 1890s to warrant it. Had we also had a substantial number of books books from T. Labrador and place them in History instead. on sausages back then we would probably have S. Sausages today We decided to go ahead with this change for two reasons. First, as well as S. Cheese. What makes the scheme even more unusual the change made perfect sense. The island of Newfoundland and is that he did not organise the shelfmarks hierarchically (grouping mainland Labrador have been part of the same Canadian province narrower shelfmarks such as S. Birds and S. Camels under the broader since it joined the confederation in 1949. Although the province was shelfmark S. Zoology, for instance) but rather alphabetically, creating originally named Newfoundland its name was officially changed to the incongruous juxtapositions Library members know so well. Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001 and this was reflected in our This organic approach to classification explains why we had books, many of which covered both territories. The other reason separate shelfmarks for Newfoundland and Labrador, and why in we made this very sensible change now and not later was that the History we didn’t have a shelfmark for Labrador at all. The earliest number of books affected, both in Topography and History, was books, acquired before or during Hagberg Wright’s time, focus on one relatively small and so would not require too much work. or other territory while those on the history of Labrador would have The amount of work involved is often a key factor when been later acquisitions, added to the collection after Hagberg Wright’s considering a classification amendment because there are various tasks death when there was understandable reluctance to make alterations associated with any change that can be very labour-intensive. Even to his classification. Afterwards, changes or additions to the scheme when the change is straightforward, for example, changing Corea to were only made when it became imperative to make room for a Korea (and Corean to Korean) in History, Literature, Philology, Religion completely new topic: S. Cybernetics &c. (later renamed S. Computers and Topography, it still involves physically rewriting shelfmarks inside &c.) was eventually created for books on computer science, for each volume, moving large numbers of books to create the necessary example, and has since grown to encompass the internet (including gap on the shelves to relocate a renamed shelfmark, amending websites such as Google and Wikipedia), online social networks the signage on both shelves and stackboards and updating all our and networking websites, email and the digital age in general. classification lists. Sometimes a change can be much more complex. S.R. Ranganathan’s fifth law of library science states that When we created H. Islamic World we assessed each of the 700 or so a library is a growing organism. The same can be said of a works we had in R. Mohammed &c. to decide whether they should classification, but managing the growth of a unique scheme is stay in Religion or move to History. This was often difficult as so a great challenge. There is no external editorial body to oversee many works covered the theological as well its development, which means we have to as the historical, political and social aspects make every decision about amendments of Islam. ourselves. While this gives us great freedom Our unique classification was created to make any changes we think necessary by Sir Charles Hagberg Wright (Librarian, to accommodate publications that reflect 1893–1940) in the 1890s, and is very an ever-changing world, it also places on much a reflection of its time but also of the us the enormous responsibility of doing so collections the Library held then. Hagberg while respecting and preserving its character. Wright’s approach to building a classification We are keenly aware of the strengths and was unorthodox to say the least. While weaknesses of our unique classification most other schemes have a broad coverage and this year we will assess our shelfmarks and systematic arrangement, our Librarian in Topography and History and try to find created a classification tailor-made for The sensitive and practical ways of addressing London Library. He arranged the books into certain gaps and inconsistencies without broad collections for different branches of compromising the integrity of Hagberg the humanities, and subdivided these only Wright’s scheme. Any changes we decide to by the shelfmarks needed for our holdings make will be carefully co-ordinated with the at the time. Works on subjects outside the book moves required by the next phase of humanities he grouped into a collection known our Development Project. Until then we are as Science & Art, which was renamed Science likely to carry out only the most urgent or & Miscellaneous when in 1935 the art books straightforward amendments. Classification list from Science & Miscellaneous. 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
MEMBERS’ NEWS
BUYING BOOKS; OR, ‘THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD?’ Spotlight on Gill Turner, Head of Acquisitions I joined the Library in July 1995 after 10 years in bookselling, and became Head of Acquisitions in 2004. I have a team of three staff in Acquisitions and there are also three cataloguers who buy books in Italian, German and Russian, while I look after the French and Spanish as well as the English titles. My work involves selecting books to continue building the Library’s collection and managing the various processes involved in acquiring them. At times the selection can seem daunting. We have tight budgets to control across the various materials we buy (books, periodicals, online resources), and each year we have to stretch them a little further to accommodate jumps in price that outstrip the Library’s budget increases. But we care passionately about what we do and hope we are measuring up to our illustrious predecessors. We try to buy ahead of publication or from reviews, and I spend many hours on the train marking up publisher’s catalogues in preparation for ordering. There is a lot of additional checking against our holdings before the final decision is made, but we still manage to order between 5,000 and 6,000 titles a year, including both new publications and out-of-print ones. We think constantly about the collections and how we are adding to them, discussing some purchases with colleagues and researching many more to be certain each title fits the collection remit. Members’ individual requests for titles is an area that has grown exponentially over the past few years, and it now takes a much larger proportion of the budget than previously. The Librarian reviews every such request or suggestion, and while she hopes to say yes to the majority, this is not always possible and we try to explain every declined request to the member concerned. Subscriptions are maintained to some 650 periodicals and, like the individual book orders, take a lot of tracking and chasing to make sure we don’t miss out on individual issues. One of the hardest jobs we face is making decisions about which periodicals to persist with as the costs continue to rise. At best our subscription budget can rise by 2% or 3% a year, whereas a recent study of the economics of scholarly journal publishing revealed an average price increase of 13% a year between 1970 and 1997 and there has certainly been no sign of improvement since then. (Many members are also surprised to learn that a modest journal that can be acquired by an individual for, say, £50 a year, costs £450 or more a year for an institutional subscription.) Online resources have become a key part of our collection in recent years, with eJournals that supplement print periodicals as well as databases and reference works. With the advent of Catalyst these are now more visible than before. Online resources too can bring their own particular headaches, and with subscription increases at around 5% per annum we have to think very hard indeed when proposing to add a new title
to the suite. Our policy is to provide access to materials not generally available or affordable to individual subscribers, sticking to titles where the digital format adds value to the content by improving information Gill Turner. retrieval (for example, through full-text indexing or enabling searching across a range of materials) and has a reliable preservation and support infrastructure. Even so, there is much more we would like to add if we had the funds. In addition to the selection of new books we also have a huge number of books offered as donations (nearly 2,000 in 2014 alone, of which 875 were accepted), all of which are assessed by me for inclusion in the collections. It gets harder every year as more members are ‘downsizing’ and hoping the Library would like some of their books. We do take in as many as we reasonably can, balancing subject matter, binding, space concerns, condition and in some cases the location of the collection being offered. However, paperbacks cost between £12 and £25 to bind for our open shelves, so we either have to decline them or enquire delicately about funds for the costs, otherwise the value of the donation to the Library is somewhat watered down. These days our Conservator also casts her eye over every donation coming across the threshold to ensure we are not getting more than we expected: mildew and book-eating insects have been known to make an appearance on offered works so we have to be extremely careful not to introduce them. Most of the donated books come across the desk in the Issue Hall and we have a short form that needs to be filled in by staff so that by the time the books reach me I know what is being offered, by whom and what I might do with them if the material is not suitable for the collections. These forms are essential admin but they do meet some resistance at times, so I would ask donors to be aware that without them I am working in the dark! The other area related to donations is bequests or intentions to bequeath. There has been a steady increase in this form of helping the Library and we welcome notifications of such intentions. I am very happy to explain the Library’s particular needs in this area as we cannot take in full collections nor usually visit an estate, so forward planning is very much appreciated. I have only had space here to reveal the tip of the iceberg of acquisitions work. A couple of years ago one of our new trustees came round on a visit and, on hearing what my job was, exclaimed in the doorway: ‘Oh, so this is the Best Job in the World Room!’ I think she might have something there … THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29
p
Literary prizes
diary date
Congratulations to the following London Library members who have been nominated for literary awards and prizes. Due to space constraints, a selected list of members’ awards, prizes and nominations are included here. The Library’s new website, which will be launched later in the summer, will include a full list of members’ awards. If you have been shortlisted for or received an award or prize, please do let us know. Email member_services@londonlibrary.co.uk. Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors, winner of PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2014. Edmund de Waal, winner of a 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Adam Foulds, In the Wolf’s Mouth, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2015. Sally Gardner, Tinder, shortlisted for the 2015 Carnegie Medal. Mercy Kahan, Lunch, winner of a BBC Audio Drama Award 2015 for Best Scripted Comedy Drama. David Kynaston, Modernity Britain, Book One: Opening the Box, 1957–1959, shortlisted for the Orwell Book Prize 2015. Patrick Ness, More Than This, shortlisted for the 2015 Carnegie Medal. Sigrid Rausing, Everything is Wonderful, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2015. Marina Warner, winner of The Holberg Prize 2015 for outstanding contribution to research in the arts and humanities. Sarah Waters, The Paying Guest, shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015.
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
GRADUATION GIFT
INSPIRE A LOVE OF LEARNING IN A YOUNG PERSON Gift membership of The London Library makes a wonderful graduation present for young people who no longer have access to a college library or electronic resources such as JSTOR. Annual Young Person’s Gift Membership is £243 (for the under 25s) London Library Membership Gift Vouchers can also be purchased (£50 & £100 vouchers) www/londonlibrary.co.uk/join 30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Tuesday, 3 November 2015, 6pm – 8pm The London Library’s 174th AGM will be held on 3 November 2015 in the Reading Room. This will be an opportunity for members to meet Sir Howard Davies, the incoming Chairman of Trustees, and offer thanks to the outgoing Chairman, Bill Emmott, who steps down after almost seven years in the post. All members are warmly invited to attend. Please join other members, staff and trustees in the Issue Hall for drinks, which will be served from 5.30pm.
Member Events Summer MEMBERS’ Drinks party Thursday, 2 July 2015 Reading Room 6.30pm – 8.30pm Free, but tickets must be obtained in advance as numbers are limited. Hosted in the Reading Room, this is an opportunity to socialise with other members over a glass of wine. Obtain your free ticket on Eventbrite (londonlibrarysummerdrinks. eventbrite.co.uk). How to … Get Published Drop-in advice session with Emma Herdman from Curtis Brown literary agency Monday, 13 July 2015 5.30pm – 7pm Free, no need to book in advance. Are you a young writer, perhaps working on your first book and wishing to find out more about how to get published? Member Emma Herdman, from Curtis Brown literary agency, will be running an informal drop-in session and will be on hand to answer questions about how to get published. From practical issues including how to choose an agent and putting together a proposal,
to broader questions such as how the publishing industry works, this will be a great opportunity to have practical and hands-on advice. Just come along to the Members’ Room any time between 5.30pm and 7pm. Do you have a subject you are passionate about that would make an interesting talk or event for other members? Do you have professional experience in an area that you would be happy to share in a ‘How to ...’ session? Or perhaps you work somewhere interesting and would be able to offer a tour to members? If you are interested in contributing to the members’ events programme, or have ideas for a future event, please email us (marketing@londonlibrary. co.uk). Ph.D. Members’ Group For any members currently studying for a Ph.D., there is a meeting held in the Members’ Room at the Library on the first Wednesday of every month. The informal meetings provide an opportunity to share information on a variety of subjects including research and funding opportunities as well as informal networking. Email Library member Cleo Roberts for more details (cleoetic@gmail.com).
MEMBERS’ NEWS AV AI LA BL EA UG US T
New Chairman of Trustees The Trustees are delighted to announce that on 20 May they appointed Sir Howard Davies as their new Chairman, to succeed Bill Emmott whose term ends at the AGM in November. Howard first joined the Library in 1981, and his wife Prue Keely and son are also members. Chairman of the Man Booker Prize jury in 2007, a frequent book reviewer and author, and a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris, in his less literary moments he has also been Director-General of the CBI, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, Director of the LSE and much else, and will become Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland in September. Howard’s charity-trustee experience includes Tate (2002–10) and the Royal National Theatre (2011–15).
Clive James
Latest Readings
Clive James takes readers on a journey through his final reading list with characteristic humour and erudition. ‘As a reader and writer confronting death, Clive James has all the creative energy and charm of a man discovering life. These thoughtful essays are immensely appealing, their tone is beautifully judged. Cleverly, he re-reads in order to measure the past. With this and his recent poetry, he could outlive us all.’ – Ian McEwan tel: 020 7079 4900
YaleBooks
Hardback £12.99
Sir Howard Davies.
www.yalebooks.co.uk
What beneficiaries say*
London Library quarter page 6-15.indd 1
Communicating by email In addition to the magazine, the Library informs members about news and events by email, and the Library’s quarterly eNewsletter is the best way to find out about new member events as they are announced. If you are not currently receiving the Library’s emails but would like to do so, please let the Membership team know at membership@londonlibrary.co.uk and we will update your record with your current email address. If you have provided a current email address and still aren’t receiving the newsletter, please check your spam folder to make sure our emails aren’t lurking there unread. You can opt out of receiving the newsletters from the Library at any time and we never share your details with third parties.
Website The London Library’s website (londonlibrary.co.uk) will have a new look this summer. An improved design and better navigation will make it easier for members and non-members alike to find the information they are looking for. We will announce the date of the new website’s launch in the Members’ e-newsletter and on Twitter and Facebook in due course.
02/06/2015 15:31
The Royal Literary Fund ‘A mi e quiet racle. ‘One of thr civility.’ ’ u o f o s r pilla ‘An increasingly noble, and increasingly necessary, endeavour.’
-raft ‘A lifeiters.’ to wr
‘A ray of light shinin through a dark clou g d.’
*quotes from RLF beneficiaries during 2013-14
The Royal Literary Fund has been supporting published writers during hard times for over 200 years. If you need help e-mail eileen.gunn@rlf.org.uk or go to www.rlf.org.uk All enquiries are treated with sympathy and in the strictest confidence. Registered Charity No 219952
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31
FINE BOOKS & MANUSCRIPTS
Wednesday 11 November 2015 Knightsbridge, London Entries now invited Closing date for entries Friday 18 September 2015 ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7393 3810 books@bonhams.com
BOYLE (ROBERT) THE SCEPTICAL CHYMIST, FIRST EDITION, 1661. Sold in March for £362,500, three times the previous world record for a book by Boyle.
bonhams.com/books
Prices shown include buyer’s premium. Details can be found at bonhams.com
