The London Library Magazine Issue 30 Winter 2015

MAGAZINE WINTER 2015 ISSUE 30

HIDDEN CORNERS

Peter Stothard selects his personal highlights from the Library’s ornithology collection

THE DIARIST’S ART

The intimate records left by artists of their daily lives are analysed by Philip Hook

CITIES BUILT ON BOOKS Alberto Manguel reflects on the essential role of stories at the beginning of our societies and at their end

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 30

11

CONTENTS

Ian Kelly tells of his serendipitous find in the Literature shelves of works by an eighteenth-century transvestite comedian, who ended up as the subject of his play, currently playing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket

5 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 6 CONTRIBUTORS Samuel Foote (1720–77).

8 BEHIND THE BOOK

14

When artists record their thoughts and observations in a journal, the result is a valuable written record of the workings of the visual imagination, as Philip Hook has found in his wide reading of the genre

The eLibrary offered Flora Fraser a new and exciting way of researching her book on George and Martha Washington

11 MY DISCOVERY

Eugène Delacroix, Femmes à la Fontaine (detail), 1854. © Sotheby’s.

14 THE DIARIST’S ART

18

There is more to the Library’s ornithology collection than the volumes featuring bold and glossy plates by J.J. Audubon, Edward Lear and Peter Scott, with a large number of more modest titles among the 900 or so books on the subject. Peter Stothard presents the results of his survey of the Birds section.

Ian Kelly on the Library book he chanced upon which led him to write a biography then a play about Samuel Foote

From Delacroix to Warhol, Philip Hook picks the best artists’ diaries

18 HIDDEN CORNERS Peter Stothard explores the ornithology titles to be found in Science & Miscellaneous

22 CITIES BUILT ON BOOKS Edward Lear, pale-headed parrakeet, Platycercus palliceps, from Edward Lear’s Parrots (1949). Courtesy Duckworth Publications.

Alberto Manguel considers the way we use stories to create an identity for ourselves and our surroundings

27 MEMBERS’ NEWS

22

When Pedro de Mendoza launched his expedition to the New World in 1535, he took with him a collection of books that shaped his conception of the city he founded, Buenos Aires. Alberto Manguel reflects on the way explorers, refugees and settlers see the world around them in narrative terms.

Illustration from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (1642).

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

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4 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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On the cover

‘Winter Time’, illustration by J.G. Keulemans, from Alfred Edmund Brehm’s Bird-Life, Being a History of the Bird, its Structure, and Habits, Together with Sketches of Fifty Different Species, translated from the German by H.M. Labouchere and W. Jesse (2nd edition, 1874).

FROM THE LIBRARIAN Since reading Alberto Manguel’s fascinating piece in this issue, I have been contemplating the many ways in which cities may be built on books. The most literal way I have seen involved walls patched up with old books in place of bricks at a public library in Russia which had run out of funds for maintenance, but how much more subtle is the influence he alludes to, the influence of what we read on what we do and on how we interpret what we see.

Such influence is perhaps in evidence elsewhere in this issue too. In exploring the Library’s ornithology collections, Peter Stothard begins to wonder whether it is bird or human behaviour that is more thoroughly revealed by the many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications to be found there.

Then there is the way in which what we read shapes what we write, and this is ably demonstrated for us by Flora Fraser whose Behind the Book piece introduces us to the influences behind her new biography of George and Martha Washington. In similar vein we have the first of a new, regular feature called My Discovery, in which contributors write about something they have come across in the Library collections that has either just been a great read or has led on to a project for a book, film or play. Ian Kelly starts us off with his discovery of Samuel Foote and how that led to his play Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which recently transferred to the West End, with another Library member – Simon Russell Beale – in the lead role.

Moving from writers reading to artists writing, Philip Hook opens up for us the sometimes shocking world of artists’ diaries. Often entertaining, often endearing, many of these diaries also prove artists to be no less tortured by their art than writers.

As this is the final issue of the Magazine in 2015, in Members’ News we look forward to 2016 when we will be celebrating the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Library. At the time of writing we are hard at work on detailed plans for a five-day celebration from 4 to 8 May 2016, with events to interest every member and also to introduce many potential new members to the Library. Be sure to keep some space free in your diary to come along and bring your friends.

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 13 November 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 Tina Hall Picture research Charlotte Burgess

Editorial Committee David Breuer Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

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Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Flora Fraser

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1981

Flora Fraser is the author of Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton (1986), The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline (1996), Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III (2004) and Venus of Empire: The Life of Pauline Bonaparte (2009). She is Chair of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, established in 2003, and lives in London.

Philip Hook

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1993

Philip Hook is a director and senior paintings specialist at Sotheby’s. He has worked in the art world for 40 years and has also been a director of Christie’s and an international art dealer. He is the author of five novels and two works of art history, The Ultimate Trophy (2009) and Breakfast at Sotheby’s (2013). He serves as a Trustee of The London Library.

Ian Kelly

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2004

‘A visual diary of the Age of Enlightenment at its most glamorous and exotic’ Financial Times

Ian Kelly is a writer and actor. His play Mr Foote’s Other Leg, written at The London Library, has just opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. His books include biographies of Casanova, Samuel Foote, Beau Brummell and Antonin Carême, as well as a life of Vivienne Westwood, co-written with Dame Vivienne. As an actor his work includes Harry Potter, Howard’s End and Downton Abbey, and The Pitmen Painters at the National Theatre in London and on Broadway.

Alberto Manguel

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1996

Alberto Manguel is a Canadian writer born in Buenos Aires in 1948. He has published fiction and non-fiction, including All Men Are Liars (2010) and The Library at Night (2006). He was named Commander of the Order of Arts & Letters in France, and is doctor honoris causa of the universities of Ottawa and York in Canada, Liège in Belgium, and Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge, UK. His latest book, Curiosity, was published in March.

Peter Stothard

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2002

Until 31 January 2016 The Sackler Wing royalacademy.org.uk Friends of the RA go free Jean-Etienne Liotard, Woman on a Sofa Reading (detail), 1748-52.

Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo Gabinetto Fotografico dell’Ex Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the National Galleries of Scotland

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Additionally supported by

Peter Stothard is Editor of the TLS, a classicist and the author of three books of diaries: Thirty Days (2003), On the Spartacus Road (2010) and Alexandria (2013). In 2012 he was chairman of the judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. From 1992 to 2002 he was Editor of the Times. He is currently completing a memoir about enthusiasts for stoicism in the age of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

BEHIND THE

BOOK

‘

The Library’s wide-ranging resources – from early 19th-century biographies published in the States to digital archives using the eLibrary – were essential research tools for Flora Fraser’s new biography

Flora Fraser’s George and Martha Washington: A Revolutionary Marriage (2015).

’

My first port of call when beginning a new book has always been The London Library. When I embarked on George and Martha Washington: A Revolutionary Marriage, published this September, I did not expect to find the rich transatlantic pickings that I discovered in St James’s Square. I was also in almost daily communion for five years with the eLibrary, which hosts the papers of America’s first president.

 The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel et al. (Virginia 2008– ongoing). eLibrary.

This remarkable historical project features all Washington’s known correspondence, private and public. In diary entries recording accounts of Martha’s travels to headquarters every winter of the war, in questions of etiquette raised in the first days of presidency during the war, George and Martha Washington’s lives are laid bare.

This digital archival research was a new and exciting trick for an old dog to learn, and I revelled in the experience.  George Washington: A Biography by Douglas Southall Freeman et al.

(7 vols., New York 1948–57). Biog.

Washington.

Freeman, a scholarly newspaperman, died before he could complete the final volume of this enjoyable multi-volume biography, based on the Washington papers in the Library of Congress. He writes compellingly about Washington’s reserved character and large-scale ambitions. Also charted is Washington’s growing urge to expand out West while embellishing Mount Vernon, his Virginian home. Freeman made me keen to include this expansionism in my book, and provided details of great interest.  Washington and his aides-de-camp by Emily Stone Whiteley (New York 1936).

Biog. Washington.

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Mrs James Gustavus Whiteley published this late in life. A Baltimore Democrat and wife of a literary man, she is one of a number of American women who made a colourful and imaginative contribution to Washingtonian studies in the 1930s. I referred often to this little book. It sparked my interest in Alexander Hamilton, who quarrelled with Washington, and John Laurens, tragically later killed in a skirmish.

I always resumed work refreshed. Whiteley had a knack for describing the atmosphere that prevailed at headquarters when George and Martha dined with the ‘family’, as the aides were collectively known.  Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures by Robin Jaffee Frank (New Haven 2000). A. Portraits.

The author of this book was kind enough to show me the miniatures by Robert Field of the Washingtons, now at Yale University Art Gallery, that Martha commissioned after George’s death in 1799. Her excellent book features these and other images that brought consolation to spouses, parents and children at a time when smallpox, yellow fever and typhus were common killers.  The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution: Or, Illustrations by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence by Benson J. Lossing (New York 1868 edition). H. United States, 4to.

In the early 1850s, Lossing undertook a journey of over 8,000 miles in order to report on sites associated with the Revolution, and described the whole in glorious detail. By the time this 1868 edition came out, the Civil War had effaced, in some states, much of what he had so recently seen. This book was a wonderful resource for me, going some way to set the scene before I ventured out to visit headquarters like Valley Forge where George and Martha had endured hardship together. The engravings of everything under the sun – pulpits, portraits, battlegrounds – charmed me when digital research tired my eyes.  Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, by his Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis; A Memoir of the Author, by his Daughter, ed.

Benson J. Lossing (New York 1860). Biog.

Washington.

A diverting read. George and Martha ‘adopted’ two of her grandchildren, after their father’s early death. ‘Wash’ Custis revered the President, but was more than a little imaginative in his Recollections.

His account of the meeting between his grandmother and Washington – a man soon to become her second husband – is a chivalric romance in itself, all pacing steeds and love-struck swain. Wash Custis’s daughter married Robert E. Lee, the famous Civil War Confederate general.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9

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MY DISCOVERY

An unexpected find in the Library shelves by Ian Kelly was a crucial link in the chain of events that led to his West End play about the most celebrated entertainer in Georgian London

MEMOIRS OF SAMUEL FOOTE

BY WILLIAM COOK (1805) Mr Foote’s Other Leg, a play based on the Samuel Foote biography of the same name, opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket last month after a sell-out run in Hampstead. Starring Simon Russell Beale, it brings Foote and his works back into the West End after two hundred and fifty years of neglect. But the trail that brings Foote back to his own theatre began in part in the book stacks of The London Library.

This is a local tale. I first came across Samuel Foote (1720–77) because Casanova (1725–98), the infamous Venetian gadabout, refers to bumping into Foote a couple of streets away from The London Library, on the Haymarket.

I wrote a biography of Casanova some years ago. Much of it was researched in The London Library, but I also travelled to the archives in St Petersburg, Venice and Prague, where Casanova has thoughtfully distributed his record. Casanova scribbled a note about meeting Foote outside the Little Theatre on the Haymarket, immediately adjacent to the current Nash building, in the margin of something in the Prague archives. It was one of his many celebrity ink-sketches that never made it into his posthumously published memoirs, but once you’ve come across a reference to a one-legged Georgian transvestite comic, you tend not to forget. So seeing the name Samuel Foote, skulking on a low shelf on the third floor in the Literature section of the Library, stopped me in my tracks. I glanced at a few titles – mainly Foote’s collected plays – and at first thought no more of it.

I am an actor as well as a historian, and just as I was finishing the work on Casanova in 2008 I was also appearing in The Pitmen Painters at the National

Theatre. The playwright Lee Hall and I were discussing possible future projects and he asked if I had ever considered writing about Foote. This took me back to the bookstacks, and the happy discovery that The London Library has kept not only various editions of Foote’s plays and afterpieces as well as memoirs by his colleagues, but also his long-forgotten bon mots, collected in Memoirs of Samuel Foote by William Cook (3 vols., 1805). It’s the sort of thing one could only discover when browsing at the Library, a consequence of keeping on the shelves authors who have long fallen into desuetude. Foote was the writer of hit comedies featuring a one-legged actor to star himself and consequently must own some authorship of his own obscurity.

The amputation had been the result of an ill-advised bet which led to him being thrown from the Duke of York’s horse.

So he might well have been forgotten anyway, but his name was effectively buried after a scandalous trial that ended his career. The story, however, is even more intriguing than that. Though the bon mots were of use and interest in writing the biography of Foote, I’d have to say the book didn’t really come into its own until I was commissioned by the producer Sir Michael Codron to write a stage adaptation. Some of the most successful lines in the play, in comedic terms, are not mine. They are Foote’s. But very often they are not from his plays at all: they are from the collected bon mots.

Performers are usually forgotten, and comics are forgotten faster than most. Wit dates, and Foote’s wit, which relied on his skills as an impressionist and topical satirist, dated even faster. However, the

Johann Zoffany, Samuel Foote (detail), 1769. Private collection.

idea of the forgotten comic as emblematic of the evanescence of things was something I knew I wanted to address in a play which is in part about theatre ghosts and lost voices. The bon mots were vital in rediscovering Foote’s voice, and his best lines. For instance, it would seem that the well-known riposte from the period, ‘Well that rather depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress, ’ in response to the remark ‘From what I know of you I don’t know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox’ (usually attributed to Lord Chesterfield or to John Wilkes) was in fact coined first, in English at least, by Foote. He may in turn have been quoting Mirabeau quoting an older French comedy – but the record is there on the Library shelves that Foote said it too. Arcane, perhaps. Unimportant, maybe. But it is also the sort of book-stack archaeology that makes The London Library my favourite place in the West End that isn’t a theatre … and a detail that Casanova, the librarian and theatre-lover, would surely have relished too.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

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THE DIARIST’S ART Philip Hook is struck by the variety of fascinating journals by artists over the centuries, which reveal a private side of the individuals who were writing for themselves rather than the public I have always been interested by painters who can write. Some artists of course remain resolutely mute, unable or unwilling to express themselves verbally.

That doesn’t make them less good painters.

One doesn’t demand of writers that they should paint in order to give the fullest account of themselves; if one did, only a relatively small number would qualify to be taken seriously: August Strindberg, Victor Hugo, Edward Lear and John Ruskin; perhaps also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Morris. But because I enjoy diaries I am particularly drawn to painters who keep them. In research

for my recent book Breakfast at Sotheby’s (2013) I began scouring the shelves of The London Library for examples. I found a surprising number of artists who kept records of their day-to-day lives, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, from Albrecht Dürer to Keith Haring.

What makes artists diverting diarists is that the solitude demanded by painting can breed a certain eccentricity. Artists’ diaries are valuable first-hand despatches from the bohemian front line, intimate records of the anarchic, obsessive, destructive and sometimes downright comic ways in which creative people

Eugène Delacroix, Femmes à la Fontaine, 1854. © Sotheby’s.

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

live. As early as 1555 Jacopo Pontormo is interspersing an account of his painting of the frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence with neurotic notes about his own diet and digestion. Three hundred years later Gustave Courbet confides that whenever he finishes a painting for exhibition it brings on his haemorrhoids.

The essential quality of a diary is its immediacy, what Virginia Woolf calls ‘the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along … the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of

Paul Klee, Freundlicher ort, 1919. © Sotheby’s.

the dustheap’ . Where does one find the most such diamonds in artists’ diaries?

Having read my way through around 50 journals from the Library’s shelves, I have homed in on five that I think are the best.

As a diarist, Eugène Delacroix is definitely one of the stars. His vivid and intelligent journals are among the great personal testimonies of art history.

In his youth he takes the romantic’s feverish pleasure in chasing girls and in painting them: ‘I again had my key in the keyhole of my sweet Emilia,’ he writes of his model in January 1824. ‘It in no way dampened my enthusiasm’ (from Painter of Passion: The Journals of Eugene Delacroix, translated by Lucy Norton, 1995). He visits London a year later and his Parisian sensibility is horrified:

‘What shocked me most is the absence of anything we should call architecture. ’ The impact that North Africa has on a European is perceptively described in the account of his first journey there.

‘There is beauty in everything they do, ’ he writes of the Arabs in 1832. ‘But we, with our corsets, narrow shoes and tubular clothing, are lamentable objects. We have gained science at the cost of grace. ’ In his later years he grows more reclusive but loses none of his skill in using words to express visual experience. He is also a laconic observer of society. Towards the end he deplores the speed of travel newly introduced by railways as symptomatic of ‘the thirst for riches which brings so little happiness [and] will turn us into a world of stockbrokers’ .

Artists’ diaries are valuable first-hand despatches from the bohemian front line

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

Keith Vaughan, Pupitre, 1945. © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.

As Delacroix was recording his thoughts and actions in the first half of the nineteenth century, on the other side of the Channel Benjamin Robert Haydon was also keeping a diary. Haydon was a very average History Painter but a marvellous writer. An important quality in a diarist is a willingness to consider, even at times embrace, your own inadequacy and ridiculousness. Haydon is the victim of a debilitating folie de grandeur in his estimation of his own painting, but as a diarist he expresses an endearing awareness of his own personal fallibility.

The tension between the two lies at the heart of his appeal. He charts his own ups and downs: on a bad day ‘The melancholy demon has grappled my heart, & crushed 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

its beatings, its turbulent beatings, in his black, bony, clammy, clenching fingers’ .

But on a good day he declares: ‘when I paint I feel as if Nectar was floating in the Interstices of the brain’ (from Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1808–1846, edited by John Joliffe, published in 1990). On the day his beloved daughter dies he finds himself remembering there is no ketchup in the house and stops to buy a bottle. ‘Such is human sympathy!’ he laments. ‘I wept bitterly at her Death, & did not feel less hungry of my dinner!’ Battered by life, Haydon finally commits suicide. His last diary entry is almost impossible to read with a dry eye.

As you would expect of a man

who memorably described his own idiosyncratic art as ‘taking a line for a walk’ , Paul Klee’s diaries – published in The Diaries of Paul Klee (1898–1918), edited by Felix Klee (1965) – provide insights into an extraordinary visual imagination. His journal runs only as far as 1918, but it is evident early on that he has a poetic eye. ‘Oh, the overflowing jumble, the displacements, the bloody sun, the deep sea filled with tilted sailboats, ’ he rhapsodises while on a trip to Italy in 1902. ‘Theme upon theme, till you could lose yourself in it. To be human, to be ancient, naive and nothing, and yet happy. ’ There are moments of comedy, too. The account of a bungled visit to a brothel in his youth is self-mockingly honest. And he

THE DIARIST’S ART

On 5 July 1983 Andy Warhol writes: “There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already”

Andy Warhol in London in 1984. Photo by AGIP/ RDA/Getty Images.

is an eyewitness to the First World War, in which he served on the German side. He describes the military band accompanying his fellow soldiers retreating exhausted from the front line: ‘Nothing heroic, just like beasts of burden, like slaves. Against a background of circus music.’

If a writer’s intimate journal is a book about how hard it is to write a book, then an artist’s is a book about how hard it is to paint a picture. Keith Vaughan was a talented but painfully introverted British painter of the post-war years. His diary, published in his Journals, 1939–1977 (1989), is a graphic account of his dayto-day uncertainties. He fears that artists ‘are destroyed in their creating’ . Or is he a fraud? He decides that ‘there is no choice now but to go on until I’m found out’ .

He has occasional rays of hope. ‘Today I’ve felt that wonderful elation of being involved. Of struggling with a problem I understand and which I know is soluble.

It is not necessary to succeed in solving it to enjoy the struggle. ’ There is an essential humanity, humour and intelligence about him that makes you read on. ‘Feel like this notebook, ’ he records: ‘Narrow, feint and ruled. ’ Despite the dispiriting gloom in which he enshrouds himself, you like

the man. That’s why the final entry – describing his suicide, by an overdose of pills, and what it feels like as he sinks away – is so shocking and so moving.

On 5 July 1983 Andy Warhol writes: ‘There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already’ (from The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, published in 1989). Warhol’s diaries are despatches from the war zone of fame, where he spent considerably more than 15 minutes. He dictated them every morning to his long-suffering secretary, and they record everything: his glittering social life, his studio practice, his anxieties and his expenditure. Warhol emerges as an oddly innocent, insecure yet sympathetic human being. ‘It was a beautiful day. Walked on the street and a little kid, she was six or seven, with another kid, yelled, “Look at the guy with the wig,” and I was really embarrassed, I blew my cool and it ruined my afternoon.

So I was depressed. ’ These diaries are frank, honest and extremely diverting to read. Now and then you wonder if they aren’t even better than his paintings.

A diary often represents the therapeutic externalisation of painful

internal motions of the soul. Writing it down makes the pain better, more comprehensible, more copable with.

And for some it is a means of imposing discipline on life: Ford Madox Brown meticulously records the number of hours he has put in at work in the studio each day. One suspects he exaggerates slightly, but it helps him feel better. And one dull Sunday in Geneva, on 7 September 1856, John Ruskin calculates ‘the number of days which under perfect term of human life’ he might have left to him to live: 11,795, he concludes, and solemnly reduces that figure by one on each successive diary entry. He keeps it up for nearly two years.

On The London Library shelves there’s a wonderful range of writing by artistdiarists to be enjoyed, offering insights into the gestation and creation of some important works of art. The attractive feature common to many of them is their sincerity and spontaneity. The authors write for their own purposes, not for their public, who are the audience for their art, not their journals. There are certainly diarists who have kept their journals selfconsciously, with an eye to publication.

Refreshingly few of them are painters.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

HIDDEN CORNERS

ORNITHOLOGY COLLECTION Peter Stothard discovers the large number of early books on birds on the Library shelves whose purpose is more complex than a mere observation of the behaviour of the species Between Biology and Blindness sit the Birds. The Library’s ornithology collection is a flock of about nine hundred, its home on more than 30 shelves in Science & Miscellaneous, Back Stacks Level Four.

Less conspicuous in this section than you might expect are the bold, bright and glossy books from the catalogue, the ones with plates by John James Audubon, Edward Lear, C.F. Tunnicliffe and Peter Scott. Perhaps they are out on loan for the summer. What is easily seen is a host of LBJs, those Little Brown Jobs, as some

Illustration of an Arctic tern, Sterna arctica, by John James Audubon, 1833, from his The Birds of America (1827–38), 1944 edition.

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of us term birds that look like sparrows but may not be, Little Brown, Blue and Buff jobs as they appear in Science & Miscellaneous next to the histories of institutes for the hard of sight. These duller-coloured volumes, like those similarly clad birds, are more fascinating than their grander relatives, a small book of wrens typically teaching us more than do gold-leafed folios of parrots.

The Library does boast some Audubon in the Birds section. There is Audubon’s Elephant (2003) by Duff HartDavis, recording the desperate saga of the American ornithologist’s struggle to publish The Birds of America (1827–38).

Safe in the Safe there is also Audubon’s own, less snappily titled Ornithological biography, or, An account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America: accompanied by descriptions of the objects represented in the work entitled, The birds of America, and interspersed with delineations of American scenery and manners (1831–9).

Titles by Lear include Edward Lear’s Parrots, published in 1949 with a commentary by Brian Reade, in which some of the chattering subjects are illustrated and recorded for the first time by the shy painter and master of the nonsense rhyme. Tunnicliffe is represented not by his Brooke Bond tea cards which introduced so many (including me) to the love of birds in the 1950s, but by the lovely A Sketchbook of Birds, published in 1979, the year of the artist’s death. Also in the collection are Peter Scott’s once almost as familiar

studies of geese in Wild Chorus (1939).

But the pride of the Library is its mass of commoner stories (all too common in the field of ornithology) of human curiosity, vanity and greed. The shabby treatment of one bird-book-maker by another is demonstrated by Lear’s publisher, the once renowned John Gould, a giraffe-stuffing taxidermist, innovative businessman, luxury gold-leaf spreader and prolific borrower of other men’s material for personal gain. Lear’s plates were almost always credited to Gould who, although occasionally confessing his crimes and misdemeanours, seems for the most part to have got away with them.

Bestsellers abound. A few hummingbirds may have been made brighter by gilded feathers, but the most important bird books in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were products for the mass market. This is not because they added much to Biology (and only occasionally to Art) but because birds have always said something to us about ourselves. Scientists study bird behaviour.

Bird books describe human behaviour.

In the Biology section there is hard science, hard knowledge about the natural world. Among the bird books there are fewer biological facts, and most of the information is about us, romantic, soft and frail. The Birds of the Green Belt (1936) by the Welsh authority on rabbits and puffins, Robert Lockley, is a typical example. Its purpose is to describe a place where we go to watch birds. It is not primarily about the birds themselves. It is about observation and the hunt, not about the observed or

Henry Stevenson was one of the earliest writers of bird books to recognise the danger that birdlovers posed to the objects of their love

Illustration by Edward Lear of a hyacinthine macaw, Macrocercus hyacinthinus, from his book Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots (1832). By permission of the Linnean Society of London.

the hunted. To see the first Little Owl in Loughton is an achievement for us if not for the owl. We regard so many birds as rarities now, not because the birds have disappeared but because we do not care to look and do not know what they are.

Among popular bird books by the historian of Roman religion, William Warde Fowler, are A Year With the Birds (1886), originally published anonymously as ‘by an Oxford tutor’ , and Tales of the Birds (1888). He counts among his Oxford birds a stormy petrel who lives only ‘in Mr Darbey the bird-stuffer’s window’ .

Bird-stuffer? So much better a term than taxidermist. It took a classicist to seize the English and avoid the Greek. Fowler was a very individualist observer. Even in

his later years, when he walked little and heard less, he could still find fascination under any hedgerow. Deaf to the song of the tree-creeper, he stood resolutely by his view of its rarity, despite Julian Huxley’s assertion that its song was audible in Oxford every fine April day. Determined bird men do not have to travel afar, and many are slow to change their minds.

Rows of the Library’s bird books carry the name of a place. But The Birds of Nottinghamshire (1975), edited by Austen Dobbs, The Birds of Cheshire (1962) by Charlie John Sherratt, A History of the Birds of Essex (1929) by William E. Glegg and A History of the Birds of Hertfordshire (1959) by Bryan L. Sage are about how we once defined the counties where we lived,

not how we have ever defined the birds themselves. A Nottinghamshire thrush is no different from a Nantwich thrush. A Rutland thrush evokes perfectly the loss of Rutland.

The Birds of Norfolk (3 vols., 1866–90) by the stationer and newspaper publisher Henry Stevenson is confined today to the Safe, and is a particularly fine example of the unadorned county guide, illustrated only by a bittern, a coot and an extinct great bustard. Stevenson was one of the earliest writers of bird books to recognise the danger that bird-lovers posed to the objects of their love – and spent his final years campaigning to protect the avocet and reduce London’s culinary demand for the eggs of lapwing, redshank and bearded tit.

Scan the shelves and you will notice that most of the bird books are about using birds for human purposes. This Bondage (1929) by Bernard Acworth is ostensibly about bird migration, which he argued was a random phenomenon driven by the winds. Flying feats by gulls were an optical illusion, he maintained.

Cuckoos, to which Acworth later gave a separate treatment in 1944, were parasitic hybrids born by miscegenation with honest nest-builders. The author’s real purpose was to defend Christianity against immoral Darwinism, and to use bird study to mock the utility of flight and attack military reliance on the newfangled aeroplane. Acworth, a submariner THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

‘Mallards and the Mourne Mountains’ by Peter Scott, from his book Wild Chorus (1939), 1942 edition. © Dafila Scott.

by training, was a supporter of more money for those fighting underwater.

A volume by Colonel Willoughby Verner is titled, with rare honesty, My Life Among the Wild Birds in Spain (1909). The most important word in the title is the first.

There are 90 pages and 32 illustrations before the reader reaches a picture of any bird, a white stork. Necessities for birdwatching described in My Life include compasses (ideally the Service variety, of which Verner was the inventor), U-shaped springs to stop field glasses falling from a man’s saddle and, absolutely essential, a pair of alpargatas, boots with rope soles. Verner’s kit collection is illustrated profusely. After that the Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, his yacht Miramar and the Spanish Queen Victoria-Eugénie take due precedence over any friend that is 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

feathered, although by page 185 we do begin to learn a certain amount about the snake eagle (‘a lazy bird’) and the black vulture (‘a difficult stalk’).

Edward Armstrong’s The Way Birds Live (1943) was written in Cambridge and published with irreproachable conformity to Authorised War Economy Standards.

Advice on domestic propriety is neatly wrapped in the language of ornithological observation. In Chapter One: Finding a Partner, the author describes the heron’s mating technique: he ‘points his beak to the sky with his head thrown back and calls hoo, then lowers his head towards his legs, making a snapping sound …

He goes on doing this until at last a female becomes interested; then things warm up and after some preliminaries housekeeping begins’ . The writer

compares this behaviour with that of eligible bachelors, who instead of going to dances to meet nice girls might rent an empty house, stand at the open window and take off their hats to them. Chapter Nine is titled ‘Toilet and Tidiness’ , Chapter Thirteen ‘What’s for Dinner?’ He also poses the critical question, of constant fascination to bird-watchers with eyes on themselves: ‘Do Birds ever pair for life?’

Armstrong’s answer is commendably more accurate than that of many books in the shelves seeking winged support for their author’s values. While crows, swans and geese are deemed comfortingly faithful (decisive DNA evidence to the contrary was unavailable in 1943), male bitterns and corn-buntings may have several wives and in some species (unspecified to hide their blushes)

HIDDEN CORNERS

‘the females have several husbands’ .

Anyone seeking more of this might try The Romance of Bird Life (1921) by John Lea, which is subtitled ‘Being an account of the education, courtship, sport and play, journeys, fishing, fighting, piracy, domestic and social habits, instinct, strange friendships and other interesting aspects of the life of birds’ .

The recognised father of British ornithology is William Turner, who in 1544 published A short and succinct history of the principal birds noticed by Pliny and Aristotle, originally written in Latin but published in an excellent English edition in 1903, with an introduction and notes

by A.H. Evans. Classicists are commonly fond of birds. The Oxford don Warde Fowler was in a long tradition of writers whose work spanned the humanities and science shelves, an essential requirement in Renaissance days when Aristotle’s writings about migration patterns, or the Elder Pliny’s about the cuckoo, were deemed superior to any observations by lesser men. Both ancients discussed the proper number of eagle, hawk and vulture species that should be identified under the overall classification of Acciptres.

Ten for Aristotle, sixteen for Pliny, who thought the sighting of certain birds of prey particularly lucky for humans seeking happiness through marriage or money.

Turner was unusual for his time in being knowledgeable about his great predecessors but not in their thrall.

According to Evans, he had a direct knowledge of buzzards, cuckoos and tree-creepers. He was also a well-travelled bird-man, a wise recourse for a learned protestant friend of the immolated bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. He was as potent a Christian proselytiser as Acworth would later be, but perhaps better able to separate birds from God. The German, C.L. Brehm (1787–1864), was another churchman ornithologist, collector and dissector of disputed species. He published hundreds of scientific treatises on subjects from swans to shrikes. He was influential on his colleagues but was massively eclipsed in popular appeal by his son A.E. Brehm, whose Bird-Life, Being a History of the Bird, its Structure, and Habits, Together with Sketches of Fifty Different Species is

‘A Clear Drop’ by Ida Verner, from Colonel Willoughby Verner’s My Life Among the Wild Birds in Spain (1909).

Cover of Edward Armstrong’s The Way Birds Live (1943), 1944 Library edition.

kept in the Safe (1874 edition). The second edition of the younger Brehm’s 10-volume Life of Animals published in 1876–9, became one of the first international bestsellers of its kind, its illustrations attracting the praise of Charles Darwin.

The Library has a handsome fivevolume set of one of the great works of nineteenth-century ornithology, William MacGillivray’s A History of British Birds (1837–52). While biologists in distant labs were obsessing about classification systems and common theories (was the goat-footed ostrich really, or nearly, a mammal?) MacGillivray, the Scottish loner, was cataloguing what he saw.

He painted too and might, with better luck, have published as successfully as Audubon, with whom he collaborated in Scotland. If MacGillivray had stuck to recording the oats and barley seeds in the crops of rock doves he describes in volume one, even his skimpily illustrated text might have done better in the bookshops. But by entering gingerly into the Franco-Swedish-German issues of whether a bird species might be defined by its gut construction he attracted the jealousy of his self-styled intellectual superiors. His History received what reviewers today term ‘a good kicking’ .

Library members may often stop

between Biology and Blindness for their own book-writing purposes. What kind of buzzard, hawk or falcon would the hero of a new novel be likely to have seen on the Thames at Southend in the declining years of Queen Victoria? Birds of Essex (1890) by M. Christy will do nicely for that. Avoid the honey buzzard, which is ‘now rare’ . Or do we need a little tern to mark the first whiff of Hitler? Try Sea Terns or Sea Swallows (1934) by George Marples. If that is out with another reader, there is The Home-Life of the Terns or Sea Swallows (1912) by William Bickerton; tern behaviour does not change too much from one dishonest decade to the next.

What breed of vulture might have hovered when Tutankhamun was interred or while Cleopatra was offering her body to the asp? I once asked that question in the Birds section myself, conducting some fact-checking for a memoir I had written in Alexandria. This research was only a partial success. I easily found Steven Goodman and Peter Meininger’s The Birds of Egypt (1989), a palpably respectable academic tome. It told of bird pictures painted as far back as 4,500 BC. But long-legged buzzards and vultures? ‘Nothing is more tantalising,’ runs the learned text, ‘than the lack of precision with which the Ancient Egyptians depicted the Acciptres’ .

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

CITIES BUILT ON BOOKS For centuries, people have carried founding libraries with them to establish an identity for themselves in the places in which they live, as Alberto Manguel explains

Above and below Illustrations from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (1642).

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In my Buenos Aires High School, alongside thorough readings of Don Quixote and other Spanish classics, we studied the bloody adventures that some call the Conquest and others the Invasion of the Americas. We learned that the literate and illiterate soldiers who sailed for the New World carried with them not only their mythologies and faith – mermaids and amazons, giants and unicorns, and the redeeming god who is nailed to a cross and the tale of the virgin mother – but also the printed books in which these stories were recorded or retold. It was moving to read in Christopher Columbus’s account of his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 that, upon reaching the coast of what is now Venezuela, the admiral saw three manatees swimming close to his ship, and wrote that he observed ‘three mermaids emerge quite visibly from the sea, but’ , he added with commendable honesty, ‘they are not as beautiful as they are made out to be’ .

Antonio Pigafetta, who travelled with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage around the world in 1519–22, described the inhabitants of the southernmost part of the continent as big-footed or ‘patagones’ because he thought he recognised in the tall natives dressed in boots and capes of fur, the Nephilim, the offspring of the gods and of the daughters of men mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Francisco de Orellana gave the river and the jungle of the land he explored the name of Amazon because, in the women warriors he and his men encountered, Orellana recognised the

Named Protector of the Indians, Zumárraga burned thousands of native manuscripts that he deemed contrary to the true faith legendary tribe described by Herodotus.

All these men were readers, and their books told them what they were going to see long before they saw it.

A number of these readers brought with them not only the recollection of their readings but the physical books themselves, and when these did not suffice, they began making new ones to furnish their libraries in the New World.

Juan de Zumárraga, an elderly priest, was proposed by the Spanish Emperor Charles I as the bishop of Mexico City. Named Protector of the Indians, Zumárraga proceeded to burn thousands of native manuscripts and artefacts that he deemed contrary to the true faith. At the same time, he encouraged the Emperor to allow him to set up a printing press to provide the new converts with catechisms and manuals for confessors written in the native tongues. In a literary twist that Henry James might have enjoyed, the man responsible for the destruction of many of the earliest documents of the Olmec, Aztec and Mayan civilisations, was responsible as well for establishing, in 1539, the first printing press in all of the Americas. The earliest productions of the press included not only a book by Zumárraga himself, a Brief Doctrine of the Christian Faith, but also a Latin edition of the dialectics of Aristotle and a handbook of Mexican (i.e. native) grammar by the priest Alonso de Molina. Books are often wiser and more generous than their makers.

The imaginary reality of books contaminates every aspect of our lives.

Nineteenth-century engraving based on a sixteenth-century portrait of Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga. Image courtesy of latinamericanstudies.org/juan-zumarraga.htm.

We act and feel under the shadow of literary actions and feelings, and even the indifferent states of nature are perceived by us through literary descriptions, something John Ruskin famously called ‘the pathetic fallacy’ . This contamination, this style of thought, for want of a better term, allows us to believe that the world around us is a narrative world, and that landscapes and events are part of a story that we are compelled to follow at the same time that we create it. This imaginative credulity leads us to unearth Troy as Schliemann did through his readings of Homer, and also to hunt the unicorn, of whom a Chinese bestiary tells us we know nothing because its shyness prevents it from appearing before human eyes.

Among the stories that the Spanish explorers brought to the New World were many that dealt with fabulous kingdoms such as the ones featured in the novels of chivalry, kingdoms in which Don Quixote

was an ardent believer. If cities of gold and mountains of precious stones populated the geography of those brave, imaginary epics, their emulators believed that richer golden cities and higher precious mountains would certainly exist in the strange and wonderful lands that they thought were the Indies.

In 1516, the explorer Juan Díaz de Solís sailed into the River Plate, landed a handful of men on the muddy western bank, and was promptly killed and eaten by the Charrúa natives. Some of the survivors continued the voyage and sailed along the coast of Brazil to a place they called Santa Catarina, where a tribe of Tupiguaraníes told them about a mysterious White King, Lord of the Silver Mountain. According to their account, somewhere inland, deep in the jungle, there rose a mountain made entirely of pure silver. The king of that realm was known to be a generous and peace-loving THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

monarch who would gladly give travellers part of his treasure to take away as a sign of good will. One of the survivors, Alejo García, decided to mount an expedition to search for the fabulous kingdom.

García managed to cross the vast green continent and reach the heights of Peru.

He was killed by native arrows on his return journey, but his men brought back with them to Santa Catarina a few chunks of silver ore, presumably from the area of Potosí in Bolivia, that were offered as proof of the truth of the story. From then onwards, the Conquest of the New World was fired by the belief that a magical realm of marvellous riches lay far in the interior of the continent, ready for the picking.

García died in 1525. Ten years later an aristocratic knight, Pedro de Mendoza, who had served as chamberlain to Emperor Charles I and fought in Italy against the French, became convinced that he was the man to find the White King and dispossess him of his riches.

Mendoza launched an expedition of 13 ships and two thousand men, partly funded by himself, and partly by the Emperor, who stipulated that Mendoza set up three Spanish fortified towns on the conquered land and, within two years, transport a thousand Spanish colonists to inhabit them. However, after crossing the Atlantic, Mendoza’s fleet was scattered by a terrible storm off the coast of Brazil.

Natural catastrophes are often mirrored

Deutsche Pfadfinder des 16. Jahrhunderts in Afrika, Asien und Südamerika by Ulrich Schmidl et al. (1911).

24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

by human ones. Shortly after the storm, Mendoza’s lieutenant was mysteriously murdered. These were not the ideal conditions to start a colony or undertake a treasure hunt.

On 2 February 1536, on the banks of the same wide and muddy river where the natives had feasted on Solís, Mendoza founded a city he called Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre after the patroness of Sardinia, a name that successive centuries would trim down to Buenos Aires. Mendoza suffered from syphilis and his intermittently confused state of mind was not conducive to an effective government. Five years later, due to Mendoza’s failings and to the belligerence of the natives, the city was abandoned. It was to be founded again some 42 years later by Juan de Garay. In 1537, a sick and wretched man, Mendoza attempted to return to Spain but died on the homeward journey.

Among the crew of Mendoza’s expedition was Ulrich Schmidl, the 25-year-old son of a wealthy German merchant. Schmidl was witness to the degradation and collapse of the new city, and to the struggles of the colonisers to survive under the constant attacks of the natives. After the city was abandoned, he travelled up to what is today Paraguay and was present at the founding of another city, Asunción, and then travelled further to Bolivia. Receiving news that his elder brother had died and that he had inherited the family fortune, Schmidl asked for a discharge and returned to Europe in 1552. There he wrote an account of his experiences, based on a journal that he had kept throughout his adventures. The book was published in Frankfurt in 1557 under the lengthy title of True History of a Remarkable Voyage Undertaken by Ulrich Schmidl of Straubigen in America or the New World, from 1534 to 1554, Where Can Be Found All of His Misfortunes of Nineteen Years As Well As a Description of the Lands and Noteworthy People He Saw There, Written

by Himself. Several translations quickly followed, in Latin, French and Spanish, as well as a new edition in German, Deutsche Pfadfinder des 16. Jahrhunderts in Afrika, Asien und Südamerika (1911), which is embellished with graphic illustrations.

Schmidl’s account, the first of what can be called the history of Argentina,

chronicles in lurid detail the atrocious conditions of the lives of Mendoza’s men. Under siege by the natives, the colonists were so afflicted by famine that they resorted to cannibalism: as soon as one of them was hanged for treason or for a petty crime, the others hacked the body to pieces and ate it. Schmidl sheds a different light on the European conception of the cannibal savages by documenting the fact that Europeans too were capable of such acts. Michel de Montaigne, in a famous essay written at about the same time as Schmidl’s chronicle, using cannibalism as his point of departure, attempted to subvert the notion of European superiority.

Montaigne had met one of these ‘cannibals’ brought to France from the Americas by a French expedition, and had in his employ a servant who had spent many years living among them. These cannibals, Montaigne wrote, were not the savages we imagine, but people who lived harmoniously, respected the nature that surrounded them, and possessed all manner of technical and artistic skills.

They held solid religious beliefs and lived under a perfectly efficient form of government, unlike Montaigne’s fellow Frenchmen. These so-called savages, Montaigne pointed out, had no slaves, no rich and no poor, and spoke a language in which the words for treason and lying, envy and avarice, were absent.

If the stories of Greece and Rome, and the literature of chivalry, had fed the explorers’ imagination before coming to the New World as a foreword to what they would see, Schmidl and Montaigne’s accounts coloured the vision of the Americas in the decades that followed, as an afterword to the immense saga.

Mendoza had brought with him a small collection of books that in a secret way define perhaps the city that he had imagined. Possibly all cities are founded with a library in mind. The books Mendoza brought with him were ‘seven volumes of a medium size [he writes] bound in black leather’ , whose titles unfortunately have not come down to us. He also brought with him a book by Desiderius Erasmus, ‘also medium-sized and bound in the same black leather’ , a collection of Petrarch’s poems, a ‘little book with golden covers that says inside “Virgil” ’ and a volume by de Bridia bound

CITIES BUILT ON BOOKS

Those who are driven from their homes by war, famine and sickness try to carry with them the words of their poets, on paper or in their heart Illustration by Theodore de Bry, from Luis Guilherme Assis Kalil’s ‘The Cannibal Spaniards: Analysis of the Engravings of the seventh volume of Theodore de Bry’s “Grands Voyages”’, Revista Tempo, vol.16, no.31 (2011).

in vellum. It seems that C. de Bridia (we only know the initial of his first name) was a Franciscan monk who accompanied the mission of the Italian John of Plano Carpini to Mongolia in 1247, and wrote a detailed history of the Mongol people entitled Tartar Relation, a manuscript now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

This modest list is wonderfully revealing. The books that Mendoza brought with him to found Buenos Aires tell us of an eclectic, generous conception (probably unconscious, certainly not explicit) of what this new city should be. In this founding library we find: a philosopher of a faith that was not Mendoza’s own (Erasmus), poets in tongues other than Spanish (Petrarch and Virgil, though Mendoza’s education would have included Latin), a fellow explorer from another age and another culture: the far north of Tartary as opposed to the far south of the New World. All this is to say that, for Pedro de Mendoza, contemporary of Alonso Quijano, the world of the intellect was all one or, in other words, that any singular undertaking formed part of a universal whole. Symbolically, if not deliberately, the impulse to bring with him these books lent the identity of the city yet-to-be imaginative power and a sort of immortality.

A sort of immortality: this is perhaps what drives us, in the societies of the

book, to be literary nomads. Our constant migrations are pinpointed by readings.

As exiles, as explorers, as refugees, as settlers, we carry books in our chattel. Our ancestors brought with them cattle, tents, grains, weapons but also their libraries.

We travel with our paperbacks or kindles.

The custom is very ancient.

The people of Mesopotamia carried their trays of clay tablets to the site of new foundations to transmit the knowledge of their laws and magic rites. The Egyptian kings set up libraries in the farthest cities of their realm and above the entrances had inscribed the words ‘Clinic of the Soul’ , which the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus read on their majestic ruins centuries afterwards. In the fifth century BCE, the young Alcibiades, visiting a distant village during one of his tours of the Greek colonies, slapped the face of a teacher whose school library did not hold a single volume of Homer. A hundred years later, Alexander the Great, perhaps in order not to forget that the vanquished also have a voice, always carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad. In the tenth century, Abdul Kassam Ishmael, Grand Vizier of Persia, to feel at home wherever he went, would transport his library of 117,000 titles on the backs of 400 camels trained to march in alphabetical order.

Books help to found cities; they also

help us to bring our cities to mind when we are forced to leave them. Those who are driven from their homes by war, famine, sickness and other catastrophes, try to carry with them the words of their poets, on paper or in their heart. In the Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, tents have been set up as makeshift book rooms. In Sweden, Palestinian exiles come together in the Stockholm Public Library to recite poetry. Mexicans who have escaped the violence in their country by illegally crossing into the States have recreated in the suburbs of Los Angeles or Detroit their ‘salas de lectura’ , improvised book clubs established throughout Mexico by ordinary readers.

Stories are at the beginning of our societies, and also at their end, and they provide us with an identity for the place we live in and for ourselves as individuals.

The relationship between the cities we create on earth and the cities we create in the mind compete for our attention, and it is most often the imagined ones that have the upper hand. Jorge Luis Borges, in a poem entitled ‘Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires’ , summed up this relationship between the fictional and the material city in two magical lines: ‘I can’t imagine a time when she started to be./ She seems as eternal as the air and the sea. ’

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

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MEMBERS’ NEWS ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS IN 2016 3 May 2016 marks a special milestone in The London Library’s history. That day the Library will be starting its 175th year of operation, and celebrations are in order. As the planning gathers pace, Philip Spedding, the Library’s Director of Development, offers a glimpse of what is to come.

The Library’s centenary in May 1941 was barely marked, apart from an article by E.M. Forster in the New Statesman and Nation.

It was, in fairness, hardly the time for celebration. London was still suffering the devastating effects of the Blitz: two weeks before the anniversary date a bomb destroyed Christie’s in nearby King Street, and five days after this the Library lost 100 panes of glass due to enemy action, an episode described by Helen O’Neill in Issue 29.

Sir Charles Hagberg Wright – the Librarian for 47 years – had died the previous year. A party was not on the agenda.

The 150th anniversary, in 1991, was an altogether livelier occasion. As the Library’s then Chairman, Lewis Golden, wrote in his foreword to Founders and Followers: Literary Lectures Given on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Founding of The London Library, published to commemorate the milestone, the Library was planning two important projects for its 150th year. First it would begin construction on what we now know as the Mason’s Yard extension. Second it would obtain its first computer, ‘which will contain the whole of the catalogue eventually and will also record all book movements’. The extension is now an established part of the Central Stack, and with a whole new generation of digital technology at members’ fingertips with the Catalyst catalogue, it is hard to imagine the Library without any computers just 25 years ago. Both these projects were funded through an appeal launched during the 150th anniversary celebrations. As part of both that appeal and the celebration, the Library worked with the Royal Mint to strike a commemorative medallion for sale to members and a glorious party was held in St James’s Square.

The main focus, however, was the publication of John Wells’s anecdotal history of the Library, Rude Words: A Discursive History of The London Library, and a series of lectures on individuals who had strong connections with the Library. Noel Annan talked about Thomas Carlyle and other speakers included A.S. Byatt (on George Eliot and G.H. Lewes), John Julius Norwich (Rudyard Kipling) and A.N. Wilson (Rose Macaulay). All the lectures can be read in Founders and Followers.

The Library’s 175th anniversary falls on 3 May 2016. It is probably fair to say that 175 years does not mark one of the great anniversaries – the spectacular firework display can safely be put on hold for another 25 years – but this is an interesting moment in the Library’s history, when it seeks to build its profile and start the final stage of its capital programme. It also occurs at a moment of singular change in the development of books, in reading and writing, not least because of digital innovation. Given

all this, the anniversary provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on the relationship between the Library and literature today and the way they have supported and influenced each other.

Some of our plans are simple. We will pick a special colour for the Reynolds Stone label to mark those books that enter the Library in its 175th year. We are combing the Library’s archives for interesting pictures of its past which we will twin with more modern images. We are preparing a project for which we will collect people’s memories of the Library (we know one individual who still recalls, as a child, being brought to the Library by Virginia Woolf) and the books and other features that members have found in the Library which have inspired, amused, astonished or baffled them. These schemes are all devised to celebrate the wonderfully quirky and timeless qualities of the Library and its lasting impact on the lives of members and staff.

Working with a publisher we are also exploring whether, hidden away on our shelves or in our vaults, are small books out of copyright that we could republish to delight those who don’t know the Library and help promote more broadly both the institution and the astonishing breadth of its collections.

Of course any celebration needs a centrepiece. We are planning a series of public talks and conversations for early May that will help illustrate the challenges of inspiration, discovery and creativity in both writing and reading. A large marquee in St James’s Square has been mentioned … As all these plans come together, members will be the first to hear of them, but for now keep your diary free in early May.

London Library book label designed by the engraver and letter cutter Reynolds Stone in 1951.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

SPOTLIGHT ON ADAM DICKINS, BUILDING & FACILITIES MANAGER The Library’s premises are loved by its members and lauded by the architectural profession. But there’s a great deal more to them than meets the eye. In this article Paul Hamlyn, the Library’s Bursar, talks to Adam Dickins, Building & Facilities Manager, about the challenges of running a building with a character of its own.

Adam Dickins at the Antarctic, 2012.

Paul Hamlyn As someone who sees changing a fuse as the height of DIY ambition, I find the idea of looking after the Library building and facilities pretty daunting, but you’ve tackled it with impressive commitment in the time you’ve been here, just over two years now. Tell us a bit about how you first got into the facilities management game.

Adam Dickins I started out in product design, doing an industrial placement as part of my degree and working for an aerospace company near Derby. Unfortunately the company had suffered a major fire which took out their UK head office and main manufacturing site, and I was given the opportunity to help get things up and running again. This led on to further projects and an increasing level of responsibility within the company.

PH Your FM career began in earnest at the British Antarctic Survey. Did you get to travel to the polar regions?

AD I was Facilities Manager at the Cambridge site, where scientists study materials brought back from the Antarctic; as well as ice cores, this includes a variety of marine life such as sunfish, starfish and sea anemones. But towards the end of my time there I did have a brief stint at the Antarctic island bases. My specific focus was to ensure that critical project materials got ashore at 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Bird Island, which required close liaison between the ship’s crew and the base staff and commander. Before heading out I also had a week to learn how to operate a 7.5-tonne digger. The whole trip took a little over five weeks, although I only spent seven days in total on the island bases, making it one of the longest commutes I’ve ever done. But it was worth the weeks spent on a ship pitching and rolling while crossing Drake’s Passage.

PH I’m sure it was. What were your main concerns when you were in Cambridge and not driving a digger?

AD Not surprisingly, cooling was the biggest issue. We knew how much effort and expense had gone into retrieving and transporting the samples from the Antarctic, and it would have been disastrous to lose them as a result of failure in the refrigeration systems.

PH Things are a bit more nuanced at the Library, aren’t they?

AD Temperature control isn’t quite such a critical issue, although that doesn’t mean it’s not important. It can be a bit of a balancing act, because conditions that suit people don’t always suit books.

When the Development Project is complete we will have centralised control of the temperature throughout the building, but in the meantime we’ve had to explore less sophisticated interim solutions in the parts of the building that haven’t yet been refurbished, particularly the 1890s and 1920s book stacks. This has involved a lot of tracing of pipework to identify the relevant manual-control valves, although there are some areas where the valves and bypasses simply aren’t in place.

PH You’ve also introduced LED lighting into some areas. Has this made a difference?

AD In the long run LED lighting offers benefits in terms of energy efficiency and maintenance, so although the initial cost is higher it pays for itself quite quickly. It eliminates the need for additional UV filters to protect the books, and generates significantly less heat than other forms of lighting. That’s why we recently installed LED in the St James’s book stacks (Literature block) and in the Art Room, even though it hadn’t been specified during Phase 2 of the Development Project back in 2008–2010. Since then technology has moved on rapidly, and we will be specifying LED for the rest of the Development Project.

PH As you say, temperature control is important but not absolutely critical. What about fire and flood?

AD We’ve made a lot of improvements in both areas. A wireless system for the fire alarm was installed in 2009 in the main building to replace an older wired system that was failing. The rationale for a wireless system was that it wouldn’t then be necessary to

MEMBERS’ NEWS rip out fixed wiring when the rest of the building came to be refurbished. It’s fair to say that although the wireless system was a workable solution to what was quite an urgent problem, the structure and contents of the building can cause problems in some areas. Through systematic surveys we’ve been able to identify the areas where the wireless signal strength was less than it should have been and install the necessary kit to boost it. We’ve also upgraded the Public Address/ Voice Alarm system recently, making it more robust and consistent throughout the building (and eliminating an annoying buzzing noise which had developed in some areas), and we’ve done it in such a way as to minimise any waste and disruption when we come to the final stage of the Development Project.

PH That’s good to know. But, except in wartime, I imagine it is water rather than fire that has caused the most damage to the Library. The basement flood in 2011 was the most serious recent example. Are we better prepared now?

AD Definitely. We now have a detection system in key risk areas that sends a wireless alarm signal in response to water ingress, and we have solenoid valves that will shut down automatically if there’s a surge in the incoming supply. We don’t want to be plagued by false alarms and it’s taken us a while to get the

calibration right, but now we’ve sorted out the teething troubles we have significantly better protection.

PH The job’s not all about doomsday scenarios, is it? What about the day-to-day stuff?

AD It’s very much a team effort. Things have changed a lot since the days when the Library’s Support Team were known as porters. Of course they do still move large numbers of books around the building, but they do a lot more besides. As well as opening up and shutting down the building each day, they deal with contractors, distribute the mail, carry out minor maintenance tasks, monitor building-management systems and generally keep the regular processes moving so that I can devote time to more complex and strategic issues. They also provide an out-of-hours response to various alarm systems.

PH All in all, the job has a lot of variety to it. I suppose that’s what keeps you interested.

AD That’s right. In a complex building like the Library, with staff and members circulating through it, you haven’t got complete freedom of action as a Facilities Manager. The challenge is to find the optimal solution for each issue even if the ideal solution is not practical. FM is a largely unseen role but without it the Library would not be able to function.

CHRISTMAS CARD 2015 Taking as its inspiration The London Library’s very own owl who sits in watch on the fourth floor looking out over St James’s Square, this year’s card has been designed by Kate Forrester, a well-established illustrator, designer and hand-lettering artist who has designed book covers for Faber & Faber, Barnes & Noble and Penguin Books among others, as well as many other creative and commercial projects.

• The cards are sold in packs of 8 cards with envelopes.

• The message inside reads: ‘With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year’.

• All proceeds from the sale of the card raise vital funds for the Library.

• You can purchase them by post, online or in person.

• The postal and online price is £5.00 per pack (including postage and packaging).

By post Please complete the form below and send it to The London Library.

Online londonlibrary.co.uk/shop.

In person from the Library’s reception for £4.50 per pack.

ORDER FORM YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE)

PLEASE SEND ME: pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack: TOTAL: £ _______ Please make your cheque payable to ‘The London Library’ Please return this form to: The London Library, Christmas Card Orders, 14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG

ADDRESS

POSTCODE

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

MEMBER EVENTS All member events are free, but places are limited so must be reserved in advance at londonlibrary.co.uk/memberevents the most of your membership.

Invitations will be sent to new members nearer the time.

Thomas Carlyle’s sofa and Christmas decorations at The London Library.

MEMBERS’ CHRISTMAS DRINKS Thursday, 26 November 2015 6.45pm – 9pm Reading Room Kick-start the festive season and enjoy a glass of wine in the Reading Room with your fellow Library members.

Please note the Library will be closed to members before the event between 5.30pm and 6.45pm.

SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE AS POLITICAL DYNAMITE Pauline Kiernan Tuesday, 2 February 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room At a time when any talk of the Succession was made treasonable by Elizabeth I, Shakespeare dared to put a barely disguised challenge to his Queen on a public stage.

Shakespeare scholar Pauline Kiernan discusses the popular belief that Shakespeare was a ‘Tudor propagandist’, which, she argues, is a myth that needs to be blasted off the 30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

stage. Pauline Kiernan is a literary critic, playwright and short-story writer.

Christine L. Corton’s London Fog: The Biography (2015).

GAMES NIGHT Tuesday, 16 February 2016 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room Indulge in some friendly rivalry with fellow Library members at our regular members’ Games Night. Choose between chess and Scrabble, or bring along a game you wish to share, at this informal and fun social evening.

urban life, creating worlds of anonymity for London’s inhabitants. Fog was also a gift to writers, appearing famously in the works of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot and many others. In this talk, writer Christine L. Corton, whose book London Fog is published by Harvard University Press this month, tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and their lasting effect on our culture and imagination.

LONDON FOG: THE BIOGRAPHY Christine L. Corton Tuesday, 23 February 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room In popular imagination, London is a city of fog. The classic ‘pea-soupers’ of the early nineteenth century remained a constant feature of London life until clean-air legislation brought about their demise in the 1960s.

The phenomenon changed

NEW MEMBERS’ DRINKS RECEPTION Thursday, 10 March 2016 6.30pm – 8.30pm Reading Room Any member who has recently joined or rejoined the Library is warmly invited to this special drinks reception to welcome you to The London Library. This is an opportunity to meet other members socially, view special displays and receive expert advice from staff on how to make

THE RIVER GANGES RUNNING RED: SACRIFICE AND SANITATION IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA Cleo Roberts Tuesday, 22 March 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room What happens when you start a trading empire on the banks of one of the world’s most holy rivers, whose sacred water is an integral part of a region’s daily routine, linked with ritual purity, eternal health and well-being? And how do you appropriate this to meet imperial and commercial ambition?

Working with rare pamphlets from The London Library’s collection alongside unpublished images and Indian government papers, member Cleo Roberts takes a look at the East India Company’s continued attempts during the nineteenth century to change the local communities’ relationship with the Ganges.

Cleo Roberts is a Ph.D. researcher whose work is part of the UK India Education and Research Initiative’s showcase project, Envisioning the Indian City.

MACBETH AND THE NORTH BERWICK WITCH TRIALS Jon Kaneko-James Tuesday, 12 April 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Shakespeare’s Macbeth follows its protagonist’s

MEMBERS’ NEWS

MEMBERS’ AWARDS & PRIZES Congratulations to the following London Library members who have recently won or been nominated for literary awards and prizes. If you have been shortlisted for or received an award, please email to let us know (prizewinners@londonlibrary.co.uk).

Catherine Aird, winner of the 2015 Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for an outstanding lifetime contribution to the genre.

Helena Attlee, The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit, winner of the Guild of Food Writers’ 2015 Food Book of the Year Award.

Bill Bryson, winner of the 2015 Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.

Wood engraving of the North Berwick Witch Trials, 1591. By permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

fall from trusted retainer to insane and degraded usurper, and celebrates the role of James VI’s adopted ancestor Banquo and the inevitable victory of rightful kingship. However, there is another story within the well-known plot. During the scene when the witches first appear there is a reference to a fraught and bloody phase of James’s kingship, the North Berwick Witch Trials of 1591. This talk by writer and Shakespeare’s Globe guide Jon Kaneko-James examines the allusion to the trials, the influence on Shakespeare of the sensational pamphlet News From Scotland and the resonance between the character of Macbeth and

James’s real-life attempted usurper, Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell.

PH.D. MEMBERS’ GROUP First Wednesday of every month, 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room A meeting is held in the Members’ Room at the Library on the first Wednesday of every month, for any members currently studying for a Ph.D. These informal gatherings provide an opportunity to share information on a variety of subjects including research and funding opportunities, as well as networking.

Contact Library member Cleo Roberts (cleoetic@gmail.com) for more details.

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 would like to contribute to the members’ events programme, or have any ideas for a future event, please email us (marketing@londonlibrary.co.uk).

Horatio Clare, Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men, winner of the 2015 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Richard Vinen, National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945–1963, winner of a Wolfson History Prize in 2015 and the Society for Army Historical Research 2015 Templer Medal.

TREAT SOMEONE TO A MILLION BOOKS THIS CHRISTMAS

GIFT MEMBERSHIP OF THE LONDON LIBRARY The perfect present to treasure all year round

Membership Gift Vouchers are also available (£50 & £100) www.londonlibrary.co.uk/join

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

THE LIBRARY OF THE LATE HUGH SELBOURNE, M.D., PART TWO Wednesday 17 February 2016 Knightsbridge, London

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