Front Free Endpaper

Enquire Within 1930s style 1

2012-02-01T23:45:00.000Z

The Enquire Within on Anything series has been going since the year dot: the FAQ book before there was the Internet. These sumptous pieces of educational graphics are from a two-volume 1930s set. There may be more of these in the coming days - there's just something about the look of these things that I love...

1960s Austria

2012-01-31T07:30:00.000Z

Two favourite things of mine are combined in these fantastic images: retro graphics and a nerdy interest in maps of all kinds but particularly in graphically representative ones. 1960s Austria, from a guide book. I thought the colours and the almost surreal graphics were just charming.

Physique

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000Z

Beefcake isn't usually my thing, just a bit too, well beefy for me. These kinds of oiled-up, slightly cheesy stud shots were the stock-in-trade of organisations like the Athletic Models Guild (AMG) and countless 'physique' magazines and were, throughout the 40s and 50s, about the only acceptable form of homoerotic image out there. This chap just has that little extra something and despite my aversion to such photographs normally, in this case I found my mouse finger exercising the 'right click manoeuvre'. I'm sorry, I don't know where I nabbed the picture from.

UPDATE: A good friend of Front Free Endpaper has mailed to point out that in the original version of this post I had inadvertently typed 'Amateur' for 'Athletic' in the name of the AMG. This was just the result of brain freeze but it was an error not without irony since it was actually the case that many of the Models were in fact not amateurs at all but professional hustlers. One of the best glimpses into their world I have come across comes from Justin Spring's The Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade. Sam Steward, aka Phil Sparrow and the author Phil Andros, was a long term client of these hustler/models and the biography, brilliant on so many levels, also opens up this hidden world in a very insightful way.

The Rocky Mountains in 1917

2012-01-30T23:49:00.001Z

I have a weakness for 'books of views'. They come in all shapes and sizes and from almost every era since the invention of photography, in fact, since the invention of drawing really. Anyway, this one is particularly nice. The photos are all mechanically printed - I've no idea if the process has a name - in colour. This is fairly large (oblong 4to) book of 24 views "made exclusively for the Van Noy Inter-State Company, Denver, Colorado. For sale only en route on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad" and it was published in 1917. I find the whole thing very evocative.

A new trick of mine is to go looking on Google Earth for the places that cross my desk in vintage photos. It's a dangerous business as the potential for wasting entire afternoons on Google Earth has always been high but it's great fun when you finally find the same spot today and can switch to streetview to make comparisons.

Vintage Swimwear in Devon

2012-01-29T17:12:00.002Z

These came from a photo album I bought some time ago. I didn't buy the album particularly for these but it was a nice bonus. This hunky-monkey was bounding around Devon in the early 1920s.

Blindstamped Binding

2012-01-28T07:00:00.000Z

I have shamelessly stolen this picture from an ebay listing and I'm hoping the seller won't mind so long as you all go and click on the link. What a brilliant use of blindstamping in a commercial binding. This is Austen Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (John Murray: London, 1853) and on the spine is an Assyrian Cherubim, the originals of which you can see in the British Museum largely because of the expeditions like this one that were sponsored by them, the wings of the Cherubim stretch gloriously onto both boards of the binding.

Henry Scott Tuke: Rare Books

2012-01-27T19:22:00.001Z

Prices for Henry Scott Tuke's paintings have gone through the roof in the last decade or so with celebrity collector's such as Elton John adding a certain something to the mix. The two publications pictured above are both about Tuke and both are very desirable and scarce. Henry Scott Tuke: A Memoir (Martin Secker: London, 1933) by Maria Sainsbury, Tuke's sister was the first biographical work about the painter and remains an important source. It is also vanishingly scarce with, particularly in anything approaching good condition. The economics are simply that in 1933 there were far fewer people who wanted to read the life of Tuke than there are now, consequently the book wouldn't have been printed in large numbers at the time and there are now more people who want it than there are copies available. Hence, a copy in very good condition is likely to start at £250. The photos below are all from this book.

The other publication in the photo above is even rarer but has no pictures at all, in fact it is about 70 pages of close black type on A4 pages. In the mid-1960s an independent scholar named Brian Price tracked down as many of the people who had known Tuke and were still alive as he could find. He interviewed them on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder and then transcribed the interviews and called the result Tuke Reminiscences. The epic nature of this quest is only underlined when you consider that in order to produce it in a comfortable form he then typed into the IBM mainframe computer that he used at his day job, using a word-processing program that he had to write himself expressly for the purpose. A single copy was printed and the pages then copied electrostatically and ring bound between blank white cards. The authors of Henry Scott Tuke: 1858-1929, Under Canvas, (Sarema Press, 1989) David Wainwright and Catherine Dinn credit this document as being one of their most important sources in compiling what has been recognised as Tuke's definitive biography. I can't find a copy of this for sale online and the last one I saw was some years ago. I have forgotten what it might have been priced at then, but it wasn't cheap.

The Soul of Wood: Bruno Walpoth

2012-01-26T16:50:00.002Z

Bruno Walpoth is an Italian sculptor whose wood carving has had me transfixed for months. These are just a few examples of his meditative human forms which, to my mind at least, have something of Renaissance and Medieval religious sculpture about them, not in the way that work would have looked when new but how it sometimes looks now with the paint gone and gesso and clawing chisel marks exposed. There is more of his work to be seen at his website and, in particular, the Hermaphrodite sculpture is worth looking at. In an article in Sculpture Review, Walpoth is quoted as saying that he wants the viewers of his sculpture to be convinced these objects have souls, something in which he completely succeeds as far as I'm concerned.

In Print

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000Z

It's always nice to see oneself in print and I received yesterday my copy of Gay News from the Netherlands which contains an article I wrote on the Uranians and as a review of Michael Matthew Kaylor's Lad's Love published by the excellent Valancourt Books, four double page spreads rather handsomely illustrated I thought! I don't think anything I've written has ever been translated before either which is a rather nice feeling too.

Vintage Swimwear on a Pole

2012-01-24T21:11:00.001Z

The vintage swimwear post a couple of days ago produced quite a flurry of interest in my email inbox which is lovely so I was delighted when my latest acquisition arrived today in the post. What a handsome chap! No piles jokes please...

Letterheads

2012-01-23T23:46:00.000Z

Phew! That was close. Since Christmas Day I have been trying to keep up the discipline of one blog post a day and I seem to have got this one in with about half an hour to go. It's been a peculiar weekend. As well as publishing the last in the Raven series, with all the wrapping and packing and posting that follows on from that, I also visited the brilliant Pallant Gallery in Chichester. The main purpose of this was visit an exhibit of work that was finishing the same day and which included a great number of the Bloomsbury group painters. Strangely, there was one painting in particular which was almost a perfect fit for this blog: a Keith Vaughan painting of two nude male forms that was given to E. M. Forster by Christopher Isherwood - if it were a book it would be an amazing association copy. Anyway, as it turned out, that exhibition was unexpectedly outshone by the amazing and huge exhibition of work by Edward Burra currently also at the Pallant. Work that neither R nor I particularly expected to like we were completely taken aback by. The exhibition includes every aspect of his output from his Harlem and Paris street life scenes, through the surrealist, Lovecraft-inspired 1930s to his Sussex landscapes and theatre designs - a real surprise and I know that some of you are near enough to Chichester to visit - GO! All of this and then being incapacitated by an excruciating toothache for twenty-four hours has made this a most unusual weekend.

So, above and below, what do we have? I have been looking through a large Victorian collection of crests from letterheads. I blogged the monogram pages a little while ago. These though are just a small selection of the ones which took my eye among hundreds of heraldic devices these jumped out for being a little unusual. A game of croquet and a game of something like lawn tennis, the crest of a butcher perhaps? and then how could I resist a tiny crest with the Latin motto made famous by The Dead Poets' Society, Carpe Diem.

Vintage Swimwear just because...

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000Z

We haven't had a good dose of vintage swimwear pictures on this blog for quite a while now, which is really because I haven't been buying them with quite the same regularity as previously. However, this is a small selection, a propos of nothing in particular, not from my own collection but culled from the Interweb, mainly from Ebay. Some are quite recent, some were originally cut from the low-hanging branches of the Internet tree a long time ago but have been sitting pretty on my hard drive for a while.

Raven 15: The Splendid Olympian

2012-01-21T14:00:00.000Z

It has been six years since the first of Robert Scoble's Raven series about Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo was published. That first Raven was a real-life detective story based in Venice, tracking down the identity of the mysterious 'Cockerton', a companion of Rolfe's in Venice. It is particularly satisfying then, that this last in the series returns to Venice and to The Venice Letters and unravels the life of another of the group of young men who floated around the eccentric Englishman at the turn of the last century.

I will paste the full blurb for this title at the bottom of this post but it is worth pausing just a moment to express just what an acheivement this represents by Robert Scoble. The last six years have been full of constant research: inimitable in tracking down every scrap of information, unswerving in follwing every lead to its final end, and unerring in pressing always for the fullest accuracy of fact and presentation. Scoble must have sent literally thousands of emails, and has had researchers working on his behalf all round the world in libraries and university collections.

In terms of adding to the canon of information about Rolfe's life and work, this body of work puts Scoble up there with some of the great Corvine scholars and at Callum James Books we are proud to have been able to support such a stellar effort.

Raven Fifteen: The Splendid Olympian

by Robert Scoble

In a letter from Venice to Charles Masson Fox, written in late 1909, Frederick Rolfe describes a casual conversation in the street with a seventeen-year-old youth on the staff of the Bucintoro Club. Rolfe has seen him working at the rowing club, but does not yet know his name, so refers to him in the letter as ‘the Corfiote Greek Jew.’ The young man pops up only a few more times in the correspondence, so previous scholars have taken no note of him. True to form, however, Rolfe has left us several clues which, when pieced together, identify his importunate young interlocutor as none other than Giorgio Cesana, who remains to this day Italy’s youngest-ever Olympic gold medallist.
Born into a Levantine Sephardi Jewish family which had emigrated from Corfu around the time the island had been transferred from Britain to Greece, the boy had grown up in Venice's Ghetto district and at the age of thirteen been chosen to cox the Bucintoro's crews at the Olympic Games. Winner of three gold medals, Giorgio soon found that his celebrity was destined to fade, and although the Bucintoro initially gave him a job in some menial capacity, history gradually lost sight of him.
In this final essay in the Raven Series, Robert Scoble brings Giorgio Cesana back from obscurity. He describes a young man with an exuberant and playful personality, whose antics as Rolfe's assistant gondolier endeared him to one of the most original writers to have graced the canals of Venice, and ensured him a tiny but immortal place in the literary history of that enchanting city.
Of a full edition of 70, the first 12 copies of The Splendid Olympian constitute the special state, case bound in dark blue paper-covered boards with gilt titles, and signed by the author. Numbers 13-70 form the ordinary state of the edition, and are sewn into dark blue card covers with a paper label and acetate wrappers.

Latin! or Tobacco and Boys

2012-01-21T07:30:00.000Z

The Edinburgh Fringe in 1980 saw the first performance of a play with the pithy and descriptive title of Latin! or Tobacco and Boys. It perhaps won't be a galloping surprise to anyone who doesn't already know that this romp through the sex-drenched atmosphere of an English public school was penned by Mr Stephen Fry. It has been produced a few times since and the text appears in Fry's Paperweight. However, I was particularly taken by the poster for the original Edinburgh production which is reproduced in The Fry Chronicles and which has a caption explaining it was the "most stolen' poster of the Fringe that year. I would love to add one of those to my collection one day!

Jean Cocteau Drawings

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000Z

On Valentine's Day in Paris the Pierre and Franca Belfond Collection of artwork by writers is being auctioned. As things to collect go, I think this is a minor piece of genius. Obviously, there are some writers for whom art is a second home and other for whom, their drawings offer only psychological or potentially literary insight. Jean Cocteau, obviously, is one of the former and the collection contains a number of works by him, including many which might seem atypical to those familiar with his published works: one album of drawings in particular is almost reminiscent of Ronald Searle's cartoons...

Above, is a self portrait, and below an example of what Cocteau drew best, attractive naked young men.

Baedeker Catalogue and Chile

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000Z

Collecting Baedeker guides is an area which I thought had gone off the boil a little of late but if this new-ish catalogue by Shapero Rare Books is anything to go by then perhaps it's not so depressed as one might imagine at the top end of the market. Among the things we learn from this catalogue is that very early Baedeker Guides from the 1840s and early 50s had very attractive yellow boards. Also that there are a few guides for which a top London dealer can get away with asking upwards of 3,000 GBP. The catalogue is fascinating to me as someone who has always enjoyed the heft and heave of a good guide book whilst not knowing a great deal about them. It should be fascinating to anyone who likes to hunt down bargains in local bookstores as it's an excellent resource for learning which guides are scarce and valuable.

The most interesting guide book to cross my desk in recent months doesn't appear in the Shapero catalogue. Titled, Baedeker de Chile, and published in 1930 it was, in fact, nothing at all to do with the Baedeker publishing company but rather was published by the tourism ministry of Chile, perhaps under the misguided impression that Baedeker was a generic term for a guide book: something like the way Hoover or Biro were trademarks which became nouns. I sold it a little while ago now and it turned out to be worth at least as much as some of the volumes in the Shapero catalogue.

Thanks for Robert for the heads-up on the catalogue.

Guy Laramee Book Sculpture

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000Z

The art of book sculpting has become a little 'old' in the last couple of years, it was difficult to see how anyone was going to take it further than the somewhat 'crafty', if very skilled, cut-out silhouettes and quirky visual literary references... and then along came Guy Laramee. Astonishingly original and, for the first time in my experience of book sculpture, an artist has created something which is beautiful, something which goes a long way beyond simply clever. These are amazing pieces with real meditative power. Thanks to Mark for the heads-up.

Manicules for Sale

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000Z

Elin was noodling around on the web - her phrase - and came across these. Obviously, upon seeing manicules for sale she knew exactly where to go and emailed me imdediately. For myself, I can't yet come up with a use for them - although hanging them from next year's Christmas tree was suggested. But, as Front Free Endpaper has something of a love affair going on with the pointing finger and, as Etsy is, of late, fast becoming my favourite website of the moment I couldn't resist sharing. It would be nice to think that there were sold because of this post - so if you do think of a use for them and decide to splash out, please let us know.

All hail! Elin!

Beautiful Art Deco Sketchbook

2012-01-16T07:30:00.000Z

Little sketch books and autograph books from the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century are very common. Sometimes they have interesting things in them, just occasionally there are two or three good pages in each one. Which is why I was so excited by this little find. A small sketchbook bound in grey moleskin with silver flecks and with protective steel (or possibly silver) corner pieces and inside? page after page of really great, brightly coloured, art deco style artworks. Many of them are accompanied by little slips of paper tipped into the page with a nonsense poem typewritten on it. This is just a small selection from the thirty images in the book. It's clear that the project was to create a hand illustrated book of nonsense verse and that it was never quite completed... nonetheless, its a real cut above the norm for this kind of thing...

Wind-bittered Lyme Regis

2012-01-15T13:03:00.002Z

It's rare that R and I get a whole day off together and this week has seen two such days. Yesterday's day trip was to a wind-bittered Lyme Regis with plenty of rummaging in book and antique shops and plenty of breaks for hot chocolate and cake...

Reg S Gray: Illustrator

2012-01-15T07:30:00.001Z

As promised yesterday, another post about mid-twentieth century childrens' book illustration, this time the book is Lizard Island Adventure by John Mercer (Oliver & Boyd Ltd, London: 1965). This is another book we found on Friday on our little jaunt along the coast. I can't tell you much about the illustrator, Reg S Gray, except that he appears to have illustrated a few books for this publisher during the 1960s and then in the 1970s moved on to illustrate books with titles like Spy Stories for Boys and Sports Stories for Boys published by Hamlyn.

Barry Wilkinson: Illustrator

2012-01-14T07:30:00.000Z

This is the brilliant dust jacket and some interior illustrations (below) of Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (Max Reinhardt, London: 1966). This mid-twentieth illustration in childrens' books has to be some of the most under-appreciated British art. These are by Barry Wilkinson who, as well as being a film buff extraordinaire and jazz afficianado, trained as a stained glass artist after WW2 later becoming the Head of Wimbledon College of Art, from the 1960s onwards he worked freelance as an illustrator and animator. He worked on some of the Paddington Bear books for Collins, for Puffin, illustrated for the Radio Times and for the BBC's Jackanory series. He died in 2007.

There is just something about this kind of illustration that appeals to me very strongly. It is just so vibrant, so inky and scratchy, sometimes reminiscent of rough printing, sometimes just a dynamic whirl. I'm surprised that this style hasn't yet been given a name and isn't collected as a 'movement'.

This particular book was one of a few that I picked up today as R and I took a bus ride along the Sussex coast through Emsworth to Chichester (the car was in the garage for the day) so you can expect to see more tomorrow.

Vintage Summer...

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000Z

I don't know if this is actually a vintage swimwear shot but, in these days of getting up in the dark and drudging along under leaden skies and grey rain... isn't it nice to be reminded that not too far away, there will be days of sunshine, warm, languorous, luxurious sunshine and warmth...

The Yellow Book according to John Lane

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000Z

If only there had been thirteen days of Christmas, this post would have been just perfect. I currenty have a set of The Yellow Book in stock and as a result was doing a little digging when I came upon this article in the Pall Mall Gazette, just before the publication of the first volume of the now in/famous periodical. I know that people always assume that the title, and therefore the binding, was derived from the yellow bound books of the French decadence, but I have always wondered how much evidence there actually is for that. Sadly, this interview with John Lane comes tantalisingly close to answering the question but just veers away at the last minute and doesn't quite address in a definitive way, why The Yellow Book was yellow. Still, its fascinating to read Lane's thoughts about the publication before it all began even if it is, fairly transparently, a puff piece...

"The Yellow Book"
An Interview With its Publisher

Mr. John Lane, little dreaming of the dangers of the vicinity, was quietly walking down the Charing Cross-road, when a Pall Mall Gazette interviewer suddenly darted from his place of concealment, and held a note-book and pencil to the head of the publisher before he had time to realize that he had approached the confines of newspaperland. For Mr. Lane at once carrited one's mind to the "Yellow Book" which is to be issued on the 16th inst., and quartlerly thenceforth on the 16th of every third month.
"Tell me all about this Yellow Book Mr. Lane." - "Let us go round to the Hogarth Club, then."
Five minutes later the club had been reached, and the chat was in progress.
"An illustrated quarterly , with fiction for its backbone, is somewhat out of the ordinary path of your firm, I believe. How was this new departure initiated?" - "The idea was born in this very club, in that very chair you occupy. I was here one day. Mr. Harland and Mr. Aubrey Beardsley came in and suggested to me the scheme of a light and advanced quarterly. I liked the idea at once, and we discussed it so practically that we had fixed upon a name - the present name - before we separated. Within a few days the scheme had taken definite form, and we had decided upon the main lines upon which it was to be run. We had preffered the quarterly to the monthly, because while there are plenty of light monthlies, there is nothing among the quarterlies similar to the book we desire to produce."
"And those main lines upon which you decided were?" - "To have a magazine, which chall be beautiful as a piece of bookmaking, modern and distinguished in its letterpress and its pictures, and popular in the best sense of the word. We long to get as far as possible away from the bad old traditions of periodical literature. We shall have no serials, and every picture is to be independent of the text, unless the text also be provided by the artist."
"To parody Lord Arthur Pomeroy's 'why fairies?' may I ask why the Yellow Book?" - "Well, we were aware that the official books of France and China, the equivalent of out blue books, are yellow books, but our title has no association with that. We originally intended to bind the quarterly in yellow paper wrappers, like the French novels, and hence the title. But as our scheme developed we found the volume becoming so bulky that, of course, no paper could hold it together. So we are going to have a yellow cloth binding, and Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, the art editor has designed the cover. It is a different design, I should tell you, to that on the cover of the prospectus we are issuing. But I will give you a copy for reproduction in the Pall Mall Budget. The first number will be in pott quarto, which is the size of the paper on which the old plays and the old divinity books of the seventeenth century were printed."
"Mr. Harland will be the literary editor, I understand?" - "Yes, and he will gather round him as many of the younger generation of authors as may be. Not exclusively though, of course. For instance, Mr. Henry James has a story in the first number."
"What else about your first number?" - "'John Oliver Hobbes' and Mr. George Moore have collaborated on a comedy scene. George Ederton has written a story quite out of the 'keynotes' vein."
"By-the-bye, Mr. Lane, what is the attitude of the quarterly going to be towards Mrs. Grundy?" - "It is carefully stated in the prospectus, that we shall seek always to preserve a delicate, decorous, and reticent mien an conduct. That reminds me, although perhaps the connection is not very clear on reflection, that Mr. Beardsley will have in this first number a portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in her character of the Second Mrs. Tanqueray. This is his first attempt at portraiture. Altogether, there will be fifteen separate illustrations, and twenty-one stories, essays and poems."

"There will be no limited edition about this quarterly?" - "It will be as unlimited as ever we can make it, you may take my word for it. We mean it to be a book that every booklover will love at sight, and a book that will make book-lovers of many who are now indifferent to books. You will appreciate the sincerity of our intentions of making it beautiful to the eye when I tell you that we shall eschew all advertisements other than publishers' lists. Altogether we hope to present the world with that which is getting rarer and rarer, something unique"

...if only they had known...

Barnett Freedman, A Proper Look

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000Z

On The 9th Day of Christmas I mentioned my small collection of books in jackets by Barnett Freedman. I think I rather short-changed the poor chap by the two quick photos I was able to take at the time so here are some much larger and more considered scans for you.

I have been trying to analyse what it is that draws me to these jackets. Among other things it has to be the colour palette, also the texture of the black from the lithographic crayon. I think too, I enjoy the way that many of his designs are composites of a number of different elements from the book being illustrated, layered over and next to one another to create a whole new image.

These books (all but one published by Faber and Faber) are from the 1930s and 40s and when you see one on the shelf in a bookshop, it just leaps out from the crowd. I said how this was a collection which started accidentally but I suspect it will be quite deliberately fostered from now on.

Derek Jacobi as Rolfe in Hadrian VII

2012-01-10T07:00:00.000Z

The best known of Frederick Rolfe's novels today, and still in print, is Hadrian the Seventh. It is a wonderful piece of wish-fulfilment fantasy full of rococo flourishes and obscure neologisms in which a penniless Catholic writer is plucked from obscurity in his London garret and through a series of unlikely chances is made Pope. The novel continues from that point to give an account of what the main character, Rolfe's alter ego George Arthur Rose, does with his new found position and authority. It's an amusing romp and is, in places, politically very prescient. Remarkably, even in a novel so clearly based on an author's fantasy, a large amount of information about Rolfe's actual life can be gleaned from the novel and nearly every character is a carefully chosen pseudonym for one of Rolfe's friends or enemies.

In 1968 the book was produced as a play in a very clever adaptation by Peter Luke in which the main character's name is Fr. William Rolfe. The lead was taken originally by Alec McCowen and, at the Mermaid Theatre in London, is was a surprise runaway success. The play hasn't been produced all that often since but as a little bit of Corvine ephemera, the programmes and other materials from its occasional productions make a nice addition to any Rolfe collection. Hence, I was delighted the other day to come across this programme for a 1995 production at the Chichester Festival Theatre with Derek Jacobi in the lead role.

Perhaps in 2013, the hundredth anniversary of Rolfe's death, someone might find the inspiration to put it on again. What I wouldn't give to see Ben Kingsley or David Suchet as Rolfe

A Letter from Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo to the Morning Post

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000Z

This is a new discovery: a previously unknown letter by Frederick Rolfe to the Morning Post of 15th October 1887 published here for the first time since then.

THE PILGRIMAGE TO WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Sir-, I should be glad if you would allow me, through the medium of your paper, to thank the Dean of Westminster for the courtesy the Catholics of England have received at his hands to-day. Last year our pilgrimage to the shrine of St Edward the Confessor was disturbed by several unseemly incidents. To-day every facility was given us to pursue our devotions in comfort, and I noticed that the rule which last year forbade us to touch the shrine with our rosaries was removed to-day. The civility of the officials was also deserving of the highest praise. -I am, sir, yours, &c., FREDERICK ROLFE

208, Belsize-road, St. John's-wood, Oct. 13.

This will be of particular interest to Corvine scholars for a number of reasons. Partly because this year and a bit of Rolfe's life is not well documented. The address is new, (and if I read Google Street View correctly, now nothing more than a shudderingly awful 1960s municipal development) from a time when Benkovitz (one of Rolfe's biographers) despairs of getting all the details of a succession of boarding houses. But more important perhaps is that this letter adds just a little more context to Rolfe's conversion. He is, at this point, a new convert to Catholicism and has left a post at Grantham Grammar School partly because of this and has taken the tutorship of two boys in a catholic household in London. Clearly Rolfe is trying to 'fit in' to his new religious home. Even making the pilgrimage in the first place could be seen as part of that attempt, but also his writing about it in such a public forum is a very public way of asserting his Catholicism.

Postcard

2012-01-08T07:00:00.000Z

I bought this postcard on the Internet recently. It is blank on the back, has no context, has nothing at all to explain or elucidate but that doesn't matter: this is one of those occasions when the image is enough on its own, intriguing, dandyish, aloof....

Rolfe's Tarcissus and Thomas Reardon

2012-01-07T07:00:00.001Z

I did think that I had already brought this little discovery to the blog but a search of my own archive suggests that maybe I haven't. One of the first publications I ever put out was a new edition of Rolfe's first published work, Tarcissus. The Boy Martyr of Rome. Rolfe paid for and arranged for the original publication himself whilst he was a school master in Saffron Walden. At the front of the poem was a list of some 22 sets of initials representing 22 boys, mainly pupils of Rolfe. Cecil Woolf in his edition of Rolfe's Collected Poems, identified a number of them and, almost in the way some people do soduko, I have been digging away at the others now for some years. This work has included at one point reading the entire census return for Saffron Walden for boys of the right age and checking all their initials against the list.

One of the ascpects of the list which has always remained a little mysterious, until now, was the death of the only fully named dedicatee Thomas Reardon (RIP). Cecil Woolf identifies him as a pupil of Rolfe's at Saffron Walden Grammar School, and there is a memorial card in the Rolfe collection in the Bodleian which makes it clear that Thomas died by drowning in the Thames in 1878. Only recently have I discovered the full tragic extent of Reardon's death and perhaps, in doing so, providing a greater context for Rolfe being moved to poetry. Reardon, in fact, was a victim of one of London's worst marine disasters, an accident on the Thames which shocked the country and filled the papers for weeks. There was a collision between the “Bywell Castle” and the “Princess Alice” on The Thames about 7pm on the 3 September 1878. The latter sunk with the loss of over 600 lives (The Times, Sat Sept. 14 1878 p.11) The Times reports a few days later that Thomas (16) was identified by his father but at that point his younger brother John (14) was still missing. There were so many bodies that a warehouse in the Woolwich Arsenal was put aside to house them and to allow for identification. It was a horrible incident and much more than the solitary drowning by misadventure that I had previously assumed befell the young Master Reardons. There is a lot of reportage of the event from the papers of the time but I have recently come across the above image of the disaster, sketched by an eye witness, that I think gives some measure of the scale of the tragedy.

[I have a number of Rolfe bits and pieces to blog in the next few days so do keep a weather eye in this direction if you are of a Corvine bent!]

Men of the Stacks

2012-01-06T07:30:00.000Z

This is Gabriel. He's a librarian. He's Mr December in a brilliant new calendar called The Men of the Stacks 2012. Male librarian's in varying states of undress in an attempt to break the stereotype wide open.

If you needed another reason to buy a copy, all proceeds are going to the It Get's Better Project...

Thank to Thev for, ahem... turning me on to this one...

Twelve Penguin Logo Designs

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000Z

Well, this has been fun... a nice way for me to get into the discipline of blogging every day to start the year as we mean to go on (kind of...). However, the whole one - twelve thing was becoming just a little bit oppresive for a while there so I shan't be sorry to go back to the less numerically dependent style of blogging from tomorrow. And for the twelfth day? Well, Penguin never fails us. Here is a set of twelve Penguin/Pelican/Puffin logo designs taken from The Penguin Story (1956).

Eleven Book Catalogue Covers

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000Z

One of the highlights of 2011 for Callum James Books has been issuing our first catalogues in the form of 5 (so far) Short Lists in pdf format sent to an ever-growing list of subscribers (to be on the list simply send us an email). But one of the things you realise as you begin to put together book catalogues is the importance of the images, and, in particular, the images you choose for the front cover. Jacqueline Wesley, bookseller, flourit. c.1980-90s, was particularly good at this - back in the days of printed paper catalogues... Wesley specialised in books on the occult, mysteries, gothic literature, unorthodox sexuality, decadence, drug use, mysticism and the like. She would have liked this blog I think! These are the first eleven of her catalogues. Each has an illustration taken from a book on sale in the catalogue. I have annotated each scan with the artist, author, book and price. Click, as ever, to enlarge.

Unknown Artist. An etching of Francis Thompson, £15

Aubrey Beardsley from The Art of Aubrey Beardsley (Boni & Liverright, NY, 1918), £12

"Decadence" by Beresford Egan from Beresford Egan: An Introduction to His Work (1966), £10

Illustration by A. S. Boyd from A Lowden Sabbath Morn (1898), £12

"The Head of Bran" by Wendy Wood from The Mysteries of Britain by Lewis Spence (n.d.), £25

Illustration by Mera Sett from The Misfortunes of Elphin Rhododaphne by Thomas Love Peacock (1897), £16

Illustration by Jean de Bosschere from the Fortune Press edition of The Satyricon of Petronius ([1933]), the plates were condemned at the Fortune Press obscenity trial in 1934 and so this was a rare copy, £80

Illustration by Robert Anning Bell for Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1902), £40

Aubrey Beardsley from Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and his Work by Haldane Macfall (1928), £75

Illustration by Anthony Little from The Wandering Jew and Other Stories by Apollinaire (1967), £25

Illustration by Cecily Peele for her own Encyclopedia of British Bogies (n.d.), £10

Ten Top Blog Posts Here

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000Z

According to Google's stats the top ten posts of all time on this blog (in terms of page views) are as follows. The leading contender is the first time this photo above was blogged which currently has over 12,700 page views since it was put up in 2009.

1. Vintage Posing Pouch (2009)

2. Miscellaneous Artworks (2008)

3. Strike a Pose: Nudism in the 1930s (2010)

4. Equus: It's That Horse Thing Again (2008)

5. Vintage Swimwear (2009)

6. A Stationary Post (2009)

7. Vintage Winter Sports (2009)

8. Vintage Swim Again: Part 2 (2009)

9. Male Nudes 1906-7 (2010)

10. Vintage Swim (2008)

Nine Dustjackets by Barnett Freedman

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000Z

This is an example of how an accidental collection can start... A couple of books by Walter de la Mare and then you notice another book on a bookshop shelf which looks similar and realise it has been illustrated by the same artist and so you decide to buy it, and then, suddenly you are collecting Barnett Freedman dustjackets! There is plenty to read about and see of Barnett Freedman on the internet, despite a fairly inadequate Wiki entry...

Eight Modern Postcards

2012-01-01T07:00:00.000Z

I stopped updating my Postcard Palace blog a long time ago but that didn't stop me squirrelling away modern postcards that took my eye and so, here are eight which I don't think have appeared on the former blog. Some I have had for a long time, others more recent...

...and a happy new year to one and all....

Seven Puffin Picture Books

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000Z

There's nothing guaranteed to make this vintage heart of mine sing more than a bit of Penguin/Pelican/Puffin design and the Puffin Picture Books of the 1950s onwards are just dripping with period juiciness: these are seven of them currently in my stock...

Six Great Blogs to Explore

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000Z

Six blogs which I don't think have been mentioned here before but which feature on my favourites list and may of of interest to readers... perhaps you know some of these, perhaps not, all of them are, IMHO, worth both watching and exploring...

Ephemera
An amazing blog where, almost daily, the owner manages to find incredible pieces of ephemera for sale on Ebay and posts a picture, link and the first part of the seller's description. Always the most interesting things... great for learning about things you didn't know were sought after...

Book Dedications
This is a new one to me but I'm slowly working my way through the back-entries: "does exactly what it says on the tin"

M. S. Corley
This is a slight cheat because this blog has been mentioned just the once, and quite recently, as it is by the designer of the Harry Potter/Penguin book covers I mentioned a couple of days ago but, an extremely talented artist and designer with plenty to show off...

Illustrated in Colour Throughout
This is a 'finished' blog. A student working for a masters degree in design and illustration used the blog to catalogue and showcase the illustrated books they found during the course of their course! So no new stuff but plenty to surf through.

Academic Nudes of the 19th Century
The most artfully astute of you may have noticed that the illustration I plucked off this blog is, in fact, from the 17th century, but that only goes to indicate the catholic, generous nature of this blog in which a very cultured blogger explores the male and female nude from the 17th century onwards really, with a bent towards art with a sense of draughtsmanship about it. A great deal of this blog is illustrated from the blogger's own collection which I always think is a bit nicer than a blog made up entirely of reposts from elsewhere on the Internet. You'll find it behind a mature content wall but I haven't found anything on here that would make my mother blush.

East Village Boys
An art, culture and lifestyle blog that's modern, urban and very sexy. This one does have a good amount of full frontal nudity, but no pornography, so probably best not clicked at work.

Five Small but Perfectly Formed Publishers

2011-12-29T08:30:00.000Z

Five publishers whose catalogues would be well worth perusing by anyone who has the same kinds of interests as this blog:

Elysium Press

Among their titles are the huge and superb An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward by Justin Spring which was published as a companion to The Secret Historian also by Justin Spring. The Secret Historian is a biography of Sam Steward aka Phil Andros (pornographer), Samuel M Steward (Professor of English) and Phil Sparrow (tattoo artist). Both books are completely un-put-down-able. Other recent titles from Elysium include The Photographs of Frederick Rolfe by Don Rosenthal and others by Stephen Tennant, Denton Welch, Baron Fersen and so on...

Ex Occidente Press

"Ex Occidente Press is an independent publishing house from that doubtful place that was once called "la Porte de l'Orient" by travellers, seers and esoterists, generals and freemasons, poets and spies, prostitutes and rakes, salon artists and theologians, but which is known nowadays under the name of Bucharest. " So says their website and who am I to argue. A simply unmissable website for anyone interested in the literature of the bizarre, the weird and the ghostly. If anyone were to ask me what they should collect as an investment that is being published now I would say buy each of these titles as they are published. Also, this publisher has a knack for creating books in such a way that you hold them in your hand and immediately sense the quality; this is a publisher producing some of the best quality books currently available from anyone, anywhere...

Old Stile Press

Of course, this list wouldn't be complete without mention of Nicolas and Frances, tucked away in a pastoral idyll at the bottom of the Wye Valley producing stunningly beautiful books combining word and image in an instantly recognisable way. The press has a fair number of titles which fall into the homoerotic bracket and that was how I first encountered them but they have much, much more to offer besides. The blog is currently headed by some breath-taking photographs of the environs of the press and the website is dripping with gorgeous books to buy.

Tartarus Press
Known for their beautiful cream-colour dust-jackets, the Tartarus Press is another which specialises in the strange and mysterious. Robert Aickman, Ambrose Bierce, Walter de la Mare, Beresford Egan are just the beginning of the catalogue. Also, among a great and glorious list of titles is the Wormwood Journal edited by Mark Valentine. Well worth an extended browse...

Valancourt Press

An independent publisher which describes itself as 'small' but has an extremely healthy output of scholarly editions of neglected classics in the field of Gothic, Victorian, Mystery, Gay interest, Edwardian, 1890s stuff... They even have a couple of Rolfe titles and have recently published a two volume edition of Forrest Reid's Tom Barber Trilogy: the first volume containing the trilogy, the second containing a study of Forrest Reid and explanatory notes by Michael Matthew Kaylor. James Jenkins, who runs the show at Valancourt started things up in 2005 and their list is quite an achievement for such a space of time.

Four 1930s Shell Oil Posters

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000Z

Surprising at it might at first seem, Shell was one of the twentieth century's most important patrons of the arts. The company had a huge collection of original artwork as well as commissioning some of the greatest artists of the time to design their posters and other commercial images. These four 1930s posters are all from a recent sale. From top to bottom they are by Duncan Grant, Edna Clarke Hall, Rex Whistler and Algernon Newton. All had estimates in the low hundreds but all failed to sell save for the Whistler which sold under-estimate for £160. If this kind of 1930s commercial art floats your boat then you might like to explore the Shell Collection at The National Motor Museum in Beaulieu

Three Sets of Harry Potter Designs

2011-12-27T08:45:00.000Z

So today we have a set of three different designs for the Harry Potter books. There are a number of places where you can see the various covers that have graced these incredible books over the years in various editions, countries, languages and versions. in particular, the Harry Potter Wiki has a fairly comprehensive summary page. It's fair to say that, unlike the novels themselves, design-wise, on the whole the Harry Potter series has NOT been a great. Bloomsbury themselves quickly realised that these were books that appealed both to adults and children and, in an effort to make them less embarrassing to read on the train to work, they began issuing each book with its own 'adult' cover. This was the first attempt at this and the most promising, but it faltered and stopped at book 4. There is a complete set of adult covers now available but they are just a bit shiny to be of much graphic interest to me.

Much more interesting in many ways were the Swedish book covers, much more Manga then any other country's editions and slightly edgier to boot, these are by a Chilean-born Swedish illustrator called Alvaro Tapia:

But, by far the most interesting designs for the Harry Potter series have never been published. M. S. Corley, an incredibly talented and interesting designer and illustrator posted a series of concept designs for the Potter series to his blog in 2009: Harry Potter meets vintage Penguin - genius!

Two Amazing Bodies

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000Z

We have been watching the stunning Eike von Stuckenbrok on Front Free Endpaper for a while now so imagine my delight when this elfin piece of human plastic turned up on, of all things, The Royal Variety Performance, this year. He's found a new friend, Remi Martin (not the drink but an extremely talanted 26 year old 'equilibrist') to perform with and, whilst this isn't video of their Royal Variety performance, it is the same routine. Breathtaking...

One Christmas Video

2011-12-25T09:51:00.000Z

A very happy Christmas to all my readers, friends, family and colleagues. For the next 12 days Front Free Endpaper will be devoted to a numerically expanding imbroglio of interesting items: a galloping gallimaufry of graduated goodness... and we start today with this classic piece of internet Christmas joy.

If you don't know them aleady then you really do need to go and have a listen to Straight No Chaser at their website, an all male a cappella group from the US who shot to Internet fame for, among other things, this wonderful arrangement of The Twelve Days of Christmas. They are in the UK this year and part of R's Christmas present is a couple of tickets to see them in February... so what better way to start our own twelve days....

Today's Delivery of Vintage Swimwear

2011-12-09T11:50:00.001Z

Your weekly dose of vintage swimwear... This rather charming postcard fell through the letter box this morning (well, I say morning, this is the Royal Mail we're talking about so it was almost midday)...

Speed in 1950

2011-12-07T23:41:00.001Z

I did warn you that we were in for a bit of a vintage graphics binge: which is really because I know what I've been acquiring recently, including these great images by Kenneth M Sibley from c.1950 that were published in The Wonder Book of Speed, a book free entirely from all modern considerations of things such as the avoidance of hubris, environmental concern, and any limitations on the notion of 'progress' at all.

Vintage Swimwear Madness

2011-12-05T22:56:00.001Z

I don't own this photo, nor did I bid on it. It seems at the moment that the whole vintage swimwear thing is really going some on Ebay. If you have the right photo, like this one, with plenty of bulge and a few good looking young guys, you can really be in the money. The original of this one just sold for 150 GBP!! And this is not the first vintage swimwear photo that I've seen go for silly money in recent months... I do hope this blog hasn't had anything to do with the rise in popularity...!

Retro Glasgow Theatres

2011-12-04T01:41:00.001Z

It's been a peculiar day today. The boiler has broken and a very nice man from British Gas came and assessed the situation but can't actually effect a repair until Tuesday so until then it's gonna be chilly...! Wrapped up in my study though, it seems the chill might be good for my productivity as I managed to reduce the 130 emails sitting in my inbox to just 30...

We're going to be having a bit of a binge on vintage graphics I rather fancy for the next little while. These theatre programmes from the late 1950s are just up my street. And, from the back (below) of one of them it appears that Messrs Howard & Wyndham had a stable of theatres in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle, each with their own fab linocut (I think) illustrated covers on the programmes. A little digging on Ebay shows me that they printed them in a variety of purple, red and turquoise... how fab would a collection look all framed up together...

A Portrait in a Snapshot

2011-12-03T11:07:00.001Z

Although this is clearly just a snapshot, I love the way that it's almost like a renaissance portrait in the arrangement of small details which are suggestive of the bigger life of this young man beyond the instant of the photograph. The boots and turned up jeans suggest a kind of 1950s 'rocker' look, the dog is a slightly softer element, the first word of the title of the magazine is visible when you enlarge the picture and is "Hunting...", I have no idea what the little piggy's head on the sofa is about but the detail I love most, balanced on the back of the sofa, every rocker's must-have accessory: his comb!

A Book Collector and His Cat

2011-12-02T18:58:00.001Z

A must-see video in which writer, editor and collector Mark Valentine discusses his collection. According to the Youtube write up:

"Mark Valentine discusses the following writers: Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, Lord Dunsany, M.P. Shiel, William Gerhardie, R. Austin Freeman, William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Hubert Crackanthorpe, H.A. Manhood, Claude Houghton, E.E. Dorling, David Lindsay, Ronald Fraser, Park Barnitz, Norman Boothroyd, Francis Brett Young, Sarban, W.F. Morris, Denton Welch, Oliver Onions, Eric Lyall, Peter Vansittart, J.C. Snaith, Mary Butts, Frank Baker and Phyllis Paul. He ends with a discussion of the classic "British Rainfall, 1910".

Mark Valentine is an English author, biographer, editor and book collector.

His short stories have been published by a number of small presses and in anthologies since the 1980s, and the exploits of his series character, "The Connoisseur", an occult detective, were published as The Collected Connoisseur in 2010. As a biographer, Valentine has published a life of Arthur Machen, and a study of Sarban. He has also written numerous articles for the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, and introductions for various books, including editions of work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Saki, J. Meade Falkner and others.

Valentine also edits Wormwood, a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature, and has also edited anthologies.

The cat that appears in the video is called Percy :-)

As I was watching it, I was struck by how little you actually see of other people's collections. It's a quite unusual thing to be given such access to someone's ongoing collection, perhaps a testament to the usually solitary nature of the activity. In this video, you never quite know what Mark is going to pull off the shelf next and this gives it an almost compelling quality.

Timelapse Cities

2011-12-02T10:24:00.001Z

This is a little off-topic for me, but I'm very into timelapse films at the moment, and it's nice to share... This one is absolutely beautiful, took a year to film in cities in Canada and the US. Some of the images are just stunning. Its called "The City Limits" and its by a chap called Dominic Boudreault.

Turn the volume up and turn on the HD and sit back and enjoy...

Callum James Books Short List #5

2011-12-01T17:23:00.001Z

We have just released Short List Catalogue No. 5, a list of 27 items this time, of books and ephemera. If you know and like this blog then you will probably find something of interest in our catalogue. Our aim is to present an eclectic mix of items with a range of prices.

We run an email mailing list which contains the text version of the catalogue and a link to a fully illustrated version online. If you would like to receive these mailings then please do drop us a line using the email link to the top right of this page.

Vintage Venice and Serendipity

2011-12-01T00:52:00.001Z

This was going to be an ordinary post about the handful of vintage Venetian postcards that I picked up at the local postcard and ephemera fair I mentioned a few days ago. I was going to simply muse about how one could almost imagine Tadzio skipping along the Lido in the top image and to comment on how I have tried, in my recent gathering of Venice postcards to stick to buying only images of places off the beaten track or which have something to distinguish them from the millions of postcard images created of this most photographed of all cities.

It seems that philosophy has served me well because in the process of scanning these for the blog, I was idly reading the back of the card of the Rio delle Maravegie above and my heart skipped a beat as the rather spidery handwriting on the back began to resolve: in a completely random way, in a church hall near Portsmouth, I had managed to pick up a postcard sent from Venice to Oxford by the Rev'd Canon Lonsdale Ragg. For those who aren't already gasping in amazement, that's okay, we can't all be Corvine obsessives, the good Canon and Mrs Ragg were an independently wealthy couple who lived in Venice and who gave lodgings to Frederick Rolfe. It was whilst he was staying in their palazzo that Rolfe wrote the bulk of The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It was the same book which resulted in Rolfe having to forgo their hospitality: Mrs Ragg begged Rolfe to show her the manuscript that he'd been working on so assiduously, and Rolfe eventually, but ill-advisedly gave in. The book paints a viciously Corvine picture of the English community in Venice at the time and Mrs Ragg couldn't countenance more of it being written under her roof and so matters came to a head.

The card is just a note really from Canon Ragg to a Professor at Oxford with whom he was going to stay and annoyingly the stamp has been removed which has, in turn, removed the postmark and therefore the date. There is, however, every possibility that this card could have been written in Venice when Rolfe was staying with them. A delightful and serendipitous find!

Man With Sword

2011-11-29T23:58:00.001Z

Well, this sexy swordsman arrived in the mail this morning but I feel I have to dedicate this post to the man who has led the way on the blogging of men with swords... Mr John Coulthart...

Monograms and Dead Hobbies

2011-11-27T00:00:00.001Z

Well, this is a hobby which must be well and truly dead by now surely. These are two pages from an album containing a huge collection of crests and monograms that I bought recently. The idea was that, by hook or by crook, you obtained letters from various institutions and personages and since they all had embossed crests or monograms on their stationary, you snipped it off and stuck it in an album. Almost impossible now of course. There are still people who collect collections(!) of this stuff and my album, I'm sure will find a home, particularly as the crests are nicely categorised into 'schools and colleges', 'army and navy', 'barons', 'earls', 'the royal family' and so on... but I think, personally, its the monograms that are the most attractive and interesting, not least because they too represent a more or less dead art. I know there are calligraphers out there who would be delighted to be asked to design monograms but I can't imagine its a craft to keep you in bread and marmalade these days...

Lehnert & Landrock Joy

2011-11-26T15:16:00.001Z

I know, I know, it's a trifle unusual to see images of pretty young women on this blog! However, regular readers might remember that R and I are collectors of postcards and other images by the German duo Lehnert & Landrock, a couple of enterprising guys who packed up their cameras at the turn of the nineteenth century and headed of the the Middle East and North Africa to start taking photos of the people and the places. We were at a local postcard and ephemera fair today and usually, we don't expect great things from local fairs in terms of Lehnert & Landrock because it tends to be the same dealers that one see every time and we have pretty much cleared them out of these cards. But something changed today and we struck a particularly rich seam, pulling over 30 cards out of the boxes in the course of about an hour, of which these are some of the most colourful...

Today's Vintage Swimwear

2011-11-25T12:56:00.001Z

It's always a good morning when three handsome guys like these turn up on the doorstep!

Unusual Beardsley

2011-11-20T19:42:00.001Z

If, like me, you've been wondering what to do with that spare 10-15,000 GBP that's been burning a hole in your pocket recently then you might consider popping into Christie's London on December 15th. It's there that you'll find this charcoal drawing by Aubrey Beardsley of... Aubrey Beardsley. Unfortunately, the online catalogue gives no details of provenance, one can only assume that somewhere like Christies will have done their research and that their experts will be convinced that it is what they say it is...

Quite an unusual image of AB nonetheless. Clearly he is younger (in a life where he was only ever young) than in most photographic representations we have. He looks to be little more than a boy here, and I suppose that might explain also the style. He seems, even so, to have depicted himself as having somewhat finer features than we are used to from photos of him even just a little later in his short life.

Robinson-esque

2011-11-20T19:07:00.001Z

It's been another Sunday afternoon in front of my computer, cataloguing, catching up on emails and so on. Also, I've been leafing through some Edwardian copies of The London Magazine, which is a new one to me. Every month they had a fairy story for children which was, very often, illustrated by Charles Robinson. Usually these were small black line drawings and signed. Then, suddenly, in the one month where the illustrator isn't identified, this full-page riot of black and white is unleashed. Could be Charles Robinson, but isn't signed not attributed.

2011-11-17T23:52:00.001Z

From a box of old photographs, most likely taken in Sierra Leone in the 1920s I thought this photo was quite remarkable for the silent narratives that could be woven into it. Plus, what's not to like about a family so inordinately proud of their palm nuts that they want to show them to the camera!

The Macabre Imagination

2011-11-15T23:51:00.001Z

Sometimes when I'm at an auction I will come across the relics of someone's career as an art student or amateur artist and if their work takes my fancy I've been known to have a bid in order to sell off the better pieces individually. I like the way that this gives artwork which may well have been lying in an attic for sixty years, never looked at since art school in the 1940s, a new life. I don't make any great claims for the quality of this kind of material but I do find it interesting. So, it's become something of a recurring theme that, within the otherwise completely conventional work of a young woman in the 40s or 50s I am usually assured of finding at least one item where the slightly darker side of their imagination has been let loose. This latest lot has been something of a goldmine in that respect. Among what must be some 200 pieces ranging from pencil sketches to finished paintings, including the usual botanical watercolours, pencil life studies of big bottomed women, exercises in illustration and lettering and so on... are these four: a demon in a Victorian dress, a seedy looking gentleman with a third eye, a sickly-looking woman in yellow and a quick sketch of bodies hanging from a gallows. All most peculiar and perhaps just a little bit telling of the suppressed strains of wartime.

The Ones That Got Away

2011-11-14T01:08:00.001Z

I would hate y'all to think that I have been lax in my duty whilst away...! The book above, I found in a small but perfectly formed bookshop amongst the tiny cobbled streets of Robin Hood's Bay: a 1950s London guide which I bought, obviously, for the graphic cover and pretty much no other reason. But the ones that got away this week... well, below is a photo taken through a shop window - a CLOSED shop's window - actually an antique shop rather than a bookshop but that small display in the window caught my attention immediately, £3.50 each!! and a large selection inside!! twice I went back to see if the shop was open but to no avail. I shall have to leave here the tantalising thought that there must be profit to be had in this shop and leave it to someone who actually lives close enough to find the shop open...

Gothic Gorgeousness

2011-11-14T01:00:00.001Z

When in Whitby, of course, you have to have a little bit of Gothic atmosphere but this afternoon, wandering around Whitby Abbey in the fog we could have been in the very depths of Bram Stoker's novel. Of course, there will be more of Dracula and Stoker once I get back home and am able to share in a slightly more detailed way but can you almost imagine, looking at the pictures above (click for enlargement as always) the dark shape of a black dog-like creature that leaped from the bow of the ship that Stoker wrecked against Whitby's piers, a ship which, on later inspection, appears to be completely crewless...

Ravines and Film Sets

2011-11-12T23:49:00.001Z

Today has been a day of unexpectedly intense exercise. What began as a walk in the North Yorkshire Moors, to track down another waterfall (Mallyan Spout), which we did and very pretty it was too, turned into something more than a walk... hours of trekking through woodland, much of it alongside the North York Moors Railway, stopping every now and again as one of the huge steam engines thundered past, and then finding ourselves on a sheep path rather than an officially sanctioned footpath, which was pretty enough so long as it stayed next to the small beck we had been following, but which then turned almost vertically up a steep ravine and the next half-hour it was hands and feet and knees and mud and slipping... the kind of thing that nearly kills you at the time but afterwards feels like an achievement.

... and the reward was arriving in Goathland station which is brilliant for a Harry Potter fan like me as it turns out I was walking on one of the sets of the films. This station, which has been frozen in time since the 1860s was used as the set of Hogsmeade Station in a number of the films. The photo at the bottom shows the bridge on which I was standing to take the picture below. Kewl eh? :-)

The Walk to Falling Foss

2011-11-11T12:29:00.001Z

The November fogs cleared just a little yesterday to reveal a beautifully autumnal Yorkshire and we took on a short walk along the valley of the Little Beck river, a tributary of the Esk, to find the Falling Foss waterfall. However, when M and I go away we seem to have developed a tradition for finding odd and/or ruined buildings in isolated places, and half-way up the valley on the way to the waterfall we came to this fantastic folly, carved from a single boulder and with the initials GC 1790 above the door: "The Hermitage" is carved on the side of the single-room rock. There's nothing much on the Internet to tells us any more but it does seem that we missed a bit of a trick and that on top of hermitage are two wishing chairs, also carved from the rock, one to sit in and make the wish, the second to sit in so that the wish comes true...

Fred Holland Day and Maynard White

2011-11-11T11:38:00.001Z

I was searching for something else in the amazing archive which is the Library of Congress Image Library when I came across these two photos. The Library has quite a collection of work by and about the photographer Fred Holland Day and that's him, the older one, in the top photo. The young man he is gazing at is Maynard White, the son of the artist Clarence White. Day used all of White's sons as his models from time to time but Maynard was clearly his favourite and they became life-long friends. These photos were taken at the summer chalet in Maine where Day and the White family, and hordes of others it seems, went to retreat into a more relaxed and 'artistic' lifestyle. The Library of Congress has a number of photos of Maynard by Day which haven't been digitised, and it is possible to identify Maynard White as the model in a number of Day's more famous smokey black and white nude images but these I really liked for their evocative nature: very Brideshead, very Maurice...

Robin Hood's Bay

2011-11-10T01:58:00.001Z

We are staying about a 20 minute walk up the hill from the famous Robin Hood's Bay on the East coast of Yorkshire, in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. The weather thus far has been grey and overcast and a little blustery - exactly the kind of bleakness we come away in search of. This was the view yesterday, south along RHB. Pretty much the whole of Whitby and the village of Robin Hood's Bay is closed for the winter but we're enjoying the quiet desolation. The weather seems set to get a little better in the next couple of days and, indeed, there was enough blue sky by the end of this afternoon, to make a sailor a pair of trousers.

Vintage Driving

2011-11-10T01:49:00.000Z

As I'm off on my travels at the moment I thought these great graphics from the 1920/30s might be appropriate. These are two pamphlets, shown front and back, extolling the virtues of membership of the AA (Automobile Association) and RAC (Royal Automobile Club)

Whitby

2011-11-08T09:07:00.002Z

Arrived yesterday in a bleak-looking Whitby on the East coast of Yorkshire, pressed low under a thick layer of white-grey cloud and buffeted by a cool wind off the North Sea. Suffering from sleep deprivation, having had only three and half hours sleep the night before and then driven for six hours to get here, leaving at 6.30 in the morning, we spent a bleary-eyed hour or so wandering around the town, getting our bearings. We were surprised, as we strolled out onto Whitby's famous piers, to be suddenly surrounded by a mob of enormous seagulls mobbing, in broad daylight, a large owl. The chase wheeled over the piers and then went upwards, up and up over the headland until it was impossible to distinguish which of the tumbling black dots in the sky was the owl and which its vicious pursuers. A strange omen perhaps for the beginning of our stay here. The town is also still full of goths from the WGW (Whitby Gothic Weekend) which was this one just passed. Presumably the reason that most of the goths left behind look fairly middle-aged is because they are the ones whose alternative lifestyle leaves them enough leisure and spare cash to stay past the end of the weekend. There are some great costumes on display!

Actually, my best friend and I are staying for this week not in Whitby, but in the nearby village of Fylingthorpe, just a short walk from Robin Hood's Bay. One of our occasional trips away together to retreat, recuperate, rest and revive...

Coronation Map

2011-11-08T08:33:00.005Z

There's nothing I love more than a good vintage map and out of a box of old Ward Lock Guides and Baedekers the other day fell a handful of old tram, bus and underground maps from London Transport in the 1930s. Some of these have a little value behind them but the one I liked best, just for the sheer exuberance of its design, isn't worth a great deal but it does looks fab. This is the map put out by London Transport so show its arrangements for Coronation Day in 1937.

Say Cheese

2011-11-05T23:38:00.004Z

When the auctioneer announced an 'album of cheese labels', could I really have been expected not to put my hand in the air. So I am now the proud owner of an old school exercise book displaying someone's neatly numbered collection of over 200 cheese labels, each one tipped in with those little gummed tabs that stamp collectors used to use. I like to think my love of vintage graphics knows no bounds and I hope this little purchase has gone someway to confirming that!

It was only after a little while looking through the album that, tucked into an envelope on the inside of the cover I found the little slip below... a shameless piece of marketing... but one that any 'collector' will recognise immediately, and then resign themselves to being taken in by... Fromologist! Honestly!

Vintage Photos

2011-11-05T01:50:00.001Z

It's been a busy week here at Callum James Heights and I should have some interesting bits and pieces to blog about in the next little while but, for now, as its late and I should be in bed, just a couple of vintage photos that arrived recently...

The Bookplate Society: Gleeson White and the Ex Libris Bookplate

2011-11-03T13:55:00.003Z

The Bookplate Society has just published an edition of its Journal dedicated to the work of Gleeson White on the Ex Libris bookplate. A significant chunk of the 72 page, perfect-bound publication is devoted to reprinting the special Winter-Number of The Studio 1989-9, written by Gleeson White on British bookplate designers. This reprint includes all the original illustrations but there is also supplementary material on Gleeson White's life and career, a section of bookplates by artists mentioned but not illustrated in the original Winter-Number, and a section illustrating bookplates by and for Gleeson White himself.

This publication was originally slated for the March 2009 edition of the Journal but due to unforeseen circumstances, publication was delayed until now.

We're delighted to say that we at Callum James Books can offer copies of this publication for 14.00GBP plus postage (UK - 1.50GBP; EU - 3.20GBP; Rest of the World - 5.40GBP). Payment can be made through Paypal (you do not have to be a member of Paypal to make Credit/Debit card payments) or by sterling cheque or money order: please email for details.

Whenever I have mentioned Gleeson White here before it has become a commonplace to rue the lack of attention he has received for his contribution to the art and design world so it's great to see this begin to be addressed by a publication such as this.

Corvo at Bonhams

2011-11-02T01:35:00.003Z

I'm very grateful to all those who have pointed out the two lots in Bonhams 22nd November sale which related to Corvo and I thought, what better place to pass on the information but here. The auction is from the stock of Michael Silverman, one of the most respected dealers in autograph material and manuscripts, who died in May. These two lots are both of exceptional interest, although the second, with its provenance being traced through A J A Symons and Maundy Gregory, two of the greatest of all early Corvines, is probably the more desirable of the two. The Holywell letter has an academic interest as there is a period of a month or two before the moment when Rolfe rocked up in the Workhouse, when it is not clear what was going on in his life, and this letter adds just a little bit to our appreciation of his biography at that point.

The first lot is catalogued as:

Lot No: 150
ROLFE (FREDERICK WILLIAM) 'Baron Corvo'
Autograph letter signed ("Frederick William Rolfe"), to the Rev W.E. Scott-Hall, pleading desperately for his help, written on small irregular sheets of paper ("...You must excuse the scraps of paper on which I write. I have no other. Nor a stamp. I am completely stranded for the time..."), with autograph envelope (unstamped but postmarked) addressed to "The Rev W.E. Scott-Hall/ Staverton Fields/ Oxford", 3 pages, spindle-hole through letter and envelope where originally filed, a few very slight fox-marks but overall in fine and fresh condition, oblong (irregular) 8vo, Hotel Victoria, Holywell, 31 December 1898

Footnote:'ALONE, NAKED, AND WITHOUT A FRIEND': a last desperate plea from Frederick Rolfe, 'Baron Corvo', before entering the workhouse. Corvo had arrived at Holywell, near Chester, in 1895. Here he had painted a series of sacred banners for the local church, under the aegis of Fr Charles Beauclerk, a Jesuit priest who was trying to turn St Holywell into the 'Welsh Lourdes'. However in November 1898 a series of articles appeared in the Aberdeen Evening Gazette vilifying him and his murky past, which were reprinted in the Catholic Times and distributed throughout the country. For this, Corvo held Fr Charles responsible. On 9 January 1899 a destitute Corvo entered the Holywell Workhouse: 'He was broken in spirit and numbed in mind and body. The workhouse was the acme of his pain' (Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo, 1977, p. 103).

Just before entering, he wrote this letter, by way of final appeal; although Corvo's invitation to join his feud at the end of the letter may not have appealed greatly to Scott-Hall (indeed most offers of help ended in the hand being bitten, as Fr Charles could have testified): "I am paralysed for the moment and my perceptions have been dulled by this long-enduring agony... I would gladly come to you if you will not be ashamed of my horrible appearance. I am clean, although in rags. I have not the smallest idea of your position or of the kind of establishment you keep. It maybe that you would not care to take the trouble; but I remember well what kind of man you used to be; and that is why, in my dire necessity I have asked you to be a friend to me now. The best thing I can do is to put myself in your hands... Something must be done, immediately: for, at any moment I may be without a roof to cover me. The most direct way would be for you to bring me to Oxford for a few days... Yes. I have always heard that England is a free country, and I never would have believed that a Jesuit could succeed in taking away an Englishman's liberty. Yet that is precisely what my persecutor is doing. Actually he menaces my life as well as my liberty. When he cursed me, he swore to ruin me, to make me suffer, to prevent me from ever earning a living, and to have me hounded out of the town. And he is doing that exactly. What can I do, alone, naked, and without a friend, against that? Yet, at the present moment I can expose and crush him, (I speak seriously,) if only I can have your help... I am in your hands".

Estimate: £1,000 - 1,500, € 1,200 - 1,700

The Second Lot:

Lot No: 151•
ROLFE (FREDERICK WILLIAM) 'Baron Corvo'
Autograph manuscript of part of his Venetian tale "Cascading into the Canal/ by / Frederick of Venice'', comprising four leaves (of eight), including the first and last, the first bearing the title "Cascading into the Canal/ by/ Frederick of Venice" with in the top left-hand corner his return address "From Mr Rolfe/ Palazzo Mocenigo Corner/ Campo San Polo, Venezia", dated in another hand in pencil, 1 October 1909; bound with a preliminary leaf inscribed by A.J.A. Symons: "Baron Corvo/ Original Manuscript of/ Cascading into the Canal" and by him in pencil: "Sheets 1, 3, 6 & 8 only", 4 leaves of ruled paper written on one side only, mounted on stubs and sewn into linen-backed decorative paper wrappers (probably by the Curwen Press, c.1930), with preliminary leaf of ruled paper inscribed by Symons, bookplate of J. Maundy-Gregory, folio, Venice, 1 October 1909

Footnote:'MY SPARE SANDALS (POMPEIAN PATTERN, VERMILLION)': part of a Venetian tale by Baron Corvo, bound and annotated by A.J.A. Symons, author of The Quest for Corvo, for Lloyd George's notorious honours broker, Maundy Gregory (for whose own part in the tale of how Symons uncovered the facts of Corvo's life and his improbable passion for collection Corvine rarities, see Chapter XX, 'The End of the Quest' of The Quest). The story was published as 'On Cascading into the Canal' in Blackwood's Magazine for July 1913; and in this form was reprinted in Three Tales of Venice (1950) by the Corvine Press, a copy of which is included in the lot (Woolf A11; no. 78 of 140 copies).

The manuscript paints a mockingly bizarre self-portrait of its author and his life in Venice, recounting not only his own accidents ("....I was splendidly retrieved from the flood, & set on foot in my own boat, still immutably solemn, though weeping water in streams from every fold of my habiliments. I slowly wiped my eyeglass on the cushions & stuck it in its place...") but those that happened to others, such as an English artist friend whom he was serving as gondolier: "with puffed cheeks, shut eyes, & a meek splosh, my master cascaded into the canal... A barcheta, rowed by friars minor from San Francesco in Deserto, went by with solemn & most unfranciscan disgust. Blessed Father Francis would have joined in our merriment: they did not even proffer Extreme Unction. Insued a most astounding toilette. I hanged my paron's wet garments on my lofty forcola to drain; & lent him my spare sweater (fearfully & wonderfully decolletè it was), & my spare sandals (Pompeian pattern, vermillion), & my white linen hat in place of which I wound a white silk neck-square round my head, making myself look like an erudite but honest Jesuit posing as one of Brangwyn's brigands, so my master declared... And, in this garb, he demanded his tea – a hilarious meal consisting of cucumber & egg sandwiches, with a red wine & cigarettes; &, afterward, we turned & went back with the tide, passing through the small canals which extend inward from Rio dei Mendicante was a voyage richly pimpled all over with chuckles on the part of both of us. I know that we presented an exposition as startling as a carnival: but the dear Venetians understand that the English (though quite admirable) are stark mad, & the spectacle of one in two coats, a low-necked sweater, vermillion sandals, & a white hat, & of another coifed like a pirate & doing gondogliere, simply struck them speechless. No one even spat over a bridge on us. No one even tittered when we reached the palace, & my paron had to skip pink-leggily over a barge of ice-blocks which was moored to his own watergate". See illustration on preceding page.

Estimate: £2,000 - 3,000, € 2,300 - 3,500

Such interesting Corvine autograph items don't often come up for sale and it will be interesting to see how they go on this occasion.

A Few New Vintage Photos

2011-10-25T20:14:00.002+01:00

This little cutie fell through the letterbox yesterday- which was a pleasant way to start the day although it does betide some kind of problem in the Atlantic post route as this is the second item recently to have taken more than three weeks to cross the pond!

Then R and I were at Newbury Racecourse for an antiques fair and in one dealer's bargain box I found these two. I've mentioned before how I don't mind, in fact quite like, a bit of damage and wear on an antique photo as it gives some character to the image and a sense of history to the object - and these two have that in spades...

Pressed Weeds

2011-10-22T00:26:00.002+01:00

In an otherwise unassuming mid-Victorian sketchbook, catalogued in a recent auction as 'pressed flowers' I found these (and many more) specimens of what are, of course, pressed seaweeds. I think they are utterly charming and mounted (matted) and simply framed I think some interior scheme would be very graced by these.

The Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert II

2011-10-21T22:21:00.002+01:00

A remarkable set of photographs of the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert II which have come into my possession recently. The yacht was in service from 1855 to 1904 when she was scrapped. If Google imagesearch is to be believed then there are very few photographs of this ship extant. As a paddle-steamer she is quite recognisable and distinct from RY V&A I and II. Two of these photos, which I imagine date to about 1890 have the backstamp of the known Portsmouth photographer Symons and it's particularly nice that in one of the photos of the ship herself she is seen steaming out of Portsmouth Harbour with recognisable landmark buildings in the background. The top photograph is labelled as the Deck House in the Queen's Apartment, the bottom photograph is a 'corridor and staircase in the Queen's apartment', the other interior photo is the dining room. Unfortunately, there is nothing to tell me about the Captain and his dog although it is clearly from the same group of photos.

The Advice of the Boys' Own Paper

2011-10-20T20:58:00.002+01:00

The BOP was one of the great institutions of Victorian and Edwardian England. It may be surprising to learn that it had an 'agony' column, of sorts. They called it simply 'Correspondence' and it had the same kind of broad reach as say, 'Notes and Queries' dealing with any question that a boy might be concerned enough to write in about but the boys' letters were never published, just the responses and, whilst sometimes it's easy enough to intuit the question from the answer, sometimes that just adds to the humour. Here are a few which appealed to me, all taken from two issues of The Boys' Own Paper from 1893:

SLEEPY HEAD (c. Brown) - 1. You must take all the exercise you can in the open air and an occasional opening pill or two at night. Your blood is not all right. 2. "Indoor Games" can be obtained by order through any bookseller.

CYCLING (Persistent)- Begin with short and train up to long. Do not spurt much as that really does injure or stretch the heart.

ENTERING NAVY (R. W. P.) No, you must have two eyes, or you will not be accepted.

FLATULENCE (J. M. B.) Perhaps charcoal as sold in chemists' shops would afford relief. You give us so little to go by. Pepsine, too, would do good if the digestion is slow.

CANARY DEFORMED (W. Weaver) No, we don't think that anything can be done

"IN IGNORANCE" (Richards) Read your Bible, and you will see where the sin comes in. What you refer to will not stop all at once. What you have to do now is to lead a sinless life, govern your thoughts, and obey the laws of health.

WILD-CATS' SKINS (Arthur) Dress them neatly and let them form the centre parts of two mats or anti-macassars, to place over sofa or on back of chair. The may itself might be light blue with a bordering of flowers.

Vintage workman

2011-10-15T20:09:00.000+01:00

I just thought this was a really good photograph: good composition, good contrast, good lighting and, of course, a very sexy back... anyone need their pipes boxing in...?

Photos in Books

2011-10-15T10:42:00.000+01:00

It isn't unusual to find books which have photographs as illustrations. I've seen a number of mid-Victorian topographical works which are illustrated with either tipped in or pasted in photos. This one, I found irresistible. As you can see it is the catalogue of one man's collection, a man who is interesting enough to have had his biography written: The Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp. The blurb to the biography reads: "Richard Sibthorp, youngest son of a celebrated Lincolnshire family, became through his forceful preaching and acknowledged piety, one of the leading Anglican Evangelicals of the 1820s. During the next decade his Old Testament studies turned him into a High Churchman who transformed his chapel on the Isle of Wight into a pioneering centre of ritualism. In 1841, at great personal cost, he converted to Rome. More astonishing was his announcement, in October 1843, that he was returning to the Establishment."

Unfortunately, this copy isn't in very good condition but you have to ask yourself just how many copies could have been 'published', and I think this is the crux of my fascination with this book, just how much work it must have taken to put together. There must be well over 100 photos which not only had to be taken but developed and then stuck onto the pages of the book, probably before binding. Readers may remember that R is a bit of a pot freak, in the purely ceramic sense, and add that to the mix and I could hardly leave this one on the shelf now could I?

Delighting in Dunstan

2011-10-14T21:26:00.005+01:00

Back in 2007 R came home from a day out with a present for me. It was a book of what appeared to be war poems from WW2 with a distinctly homoerotic bent. At the time I was so taken with the poems that I put three of them on the blog: "This Tall Horseman, My Young Man of Mars", "The Lay of the Battle of Tombland", and "Field Music II" All of the poems were so vital and vigorous and had a tense, sometimes violent and often sexy energy to them. There was, at the time, precious little else to go on and almost nothing to be found about this poet. A little while later I came across a second volume of poems, with some crossover of contents with the first. And then finally, some long time later I came across an online article "What Became of Dunstan Thompson" by Edward Field. At last, a little more information and I can happily recommend the article to anyone who enjoys this blog, as something I think you'll find worth reading in its entirety, however, we should probably say something here about this mysterious man.

He was a man of contradictions when his life is viewed across time. It appeared to the reading public that after the 1940s with his couple of 'slim volumes' and a couple of travel books, that he disappeared. In truth, there was nothing very mysterious about it. He didn't stop writing poetry, he simply found it almost impossible to get another collection published. There was a personal turning point. During the war as a GI stationed in the UK doing office work, he met Philip Trower and they became lovers but at some point further down the line both men had a conversion to Catholicism (or 'transformation' as Trower calls it in Thompson's case since he had been brought up in a fiercely Catholic home). From that point on the two men lived as platonic friends, together, in the Norfolk village of Cley-on-the-Sea, until Thompson's death in 1975. Trower was Thompson's literary executor and in the last few years, as Thompson has become more and more noticed again, he has been approached on numerous occasions (when he could be found in his remote Norfolk home) about reprinting those early volumes of poetry but he always maintained that Thompson himself had instructed him, shortly before his death, never to allow the reprinting of those early books. Modern sensibilities being what they are, it is difficult to grasp what has happened here. We are used to the notion of the 'ex-gay' and all its attendant problems and politics but this is not that, so much as the more old-fashioned notion of a commitment to celibacy.

Clearly this blooming of devout Catholic life is something of a contradiction and critics have found it problematic. With it, in his writing, came a broadening of subject matter, a move away from the overtly homoerotic tone of some of his earlier work and a somewhat more mature style. It may be a combination of these things, along with changing fashions in poetry which stopped him having another collection published in his lifetime. However, there is a slow resurgence in interest and I was amazed and delighted to find the book at the top of the post which was published last year by the Pleiades Press in their 'Unsung Masters Series'. It consists of essays on Thompson's life and work, interviews with and reminiscences by those who knew him, including Trower and a portfolio of poems which includes a few selected from the two early volumes. I am almost finished with the book now and it reveals an extremely complex and interesting character who genuinely is an 'unsung master' in anyone's book. He should have been up there with Auden and Spender as one of the best poets of his generation but somehow managed to fall through the cracks of history. The two eminent quotes at the beginning of Field's essay (which is reprinted in the Pleiades book) sum-up for me the difficulty and the enjoyment of getting to grips with Thompson: "The gayest poet of WW2" and "The best catholic poet of the latter half of the 20th century"

The new book also includes, in its small selection of his poems, a representative sample from the later work. Philip Trower published a collection after Thompson's death and, as a beautiful example, I've chosen this one. It is not the substantial nor the most representative but as the UK has been in the grip of a wonderful Indian Summer it feels particularly evocative.

Passage

The thistles, rooted out, throng in again;
The single regal rose is mobbed by weeds;
The plums, the pears, the ripening apples, rain
In the sun; and past summer plants new seeds.

The chaffinch looks around the world, and takes
His time with August: even wasps relax -
Late afternoon, their metric buzzing breaks
Off, as though they were bees and the light wax.

Here, or there, these common yearly things
Repeat, repeat, and gardens do not range:
Yet thistles, roses, fruit trees, birds, and stings
Come to an end, and the church bells sound a change.

These many soft declensions of the day,
So hard to take to heart, bear life away.

So, read the Edward Field article, read the poems, if at all possible, buy the Pleiades Press book and make a discovery.

--------------------------------

This bibliography makes no claims but I think covers most of the obvious bases.

The Song of Time. An English Poem Adapted from the French of Marguerite de Navarre. Cosmos Press: Cambridge (MA), 1941. Printed in an edition of 50 copies with the original French poem facing Thompson's Translation.

Poems. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1943.

The Third Murderer. Poems Privately printed: London, 1944. A 7pp booklet printed in an edition of 60 copies.

Poems. Secker & Warburg: London, 1946. With a slighty different selection of poems.

Lament for the Sleepwalker. Dodd Mead & Co.: New York, 1947. A second collection of poetry.

The Phoenix in the Desert. A Book of Travels. John Lehmann: London, [1951]. A book of travel writing about the Middle East with the journey itself commissioned and paid for by the publisher.

The Dove With the Bough of Olive. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1954. Another volume of travel writing. UK first edition by Cassell: London, 1955.

Poems 1950-1974. Paradigm Press: Bungay, 1984. The posthumously published collected and edited by Trower, mostly unpublished material. Sometimes referred to as The Red Book.

I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who knows of other material which could be added to this bibliography and I will try to update it from time to time. Thompson edited and contributed to a number of poetry magazines both before and after the war and so at some point I may add a 'non-book' section to this list.

Dressing Up

2011-10-14T10:57:00.000+01:00

It's not unusual to find Victorian little boys in dresses, it was just what children wore and then, at some nebulously illdefined stage little boys became 'boys' and girls remained children and so the boys move out of the dresses into short trousers. And that was the way it was for much fo the nineteenth century. It's a little more unusual to find a boy of this lad's (on the right) age, or perhaps he just looks a little older than he actually is.

J & J Jeffery Inkiness

2011-10-13T10:30:00.002+01:00

It's been a while since I featured any of the wonderful paper made by J & J Jeffery in Edinburgh but as a sweetener for a large order I placed recently for an upcoming project they sent this sheet. This is about A3 in size and so the pattern is really wallpaper sized (I realise I should have photographed it with some kind of context). The Jefferys cut their own lino blocks and print them and this sheet is just delicious in the blank inkiness and vintage/contemporary design printed on brown parcel paper which is somehow just right.

I have also noticed that so far on this blog whenever they've been mentioned, I've been misspelling their name... ooops... sorry...

And while we're on the subject of printing, these little wooden blocks are rather fun. They were in a crate from an auction that was bought for its other contents. I'm not even sure that these are really for printing with ink, I think more likely they are for impressing designs in butter or biscuits, certainly there was other kitchenalia in the lot. Anyway, clearly I couldn't NOT have a little experiment. I think the results are rather charming.

Ghosts And Ghostly Libraries at Senate House

2011-10-12T23:32:00.002+01:00

Senate House is the HQ of the University of London. It is an astonishing building whose main claim to fame is its many appearances in television and film whenever a piece of fascist-looking architecture is required, most notably as The Ministry of Truth in "1984". My best friend is one of the denizens of Senate House and he was delighted to discover that the building holds the Harry Price Library, that is, the collection made by one of the most famous psychical researchers / ghost-hunters of the 20th Century. The library is now not easy to access in its entirety for reasons which aren't exactly clear to me but 20 years ago it was an open access resource and there is a great reminiscence of the library at Tom Ruffles's blog. To continue the theme, Senate House must be one of the only buildings in the country which has a blog dedicated to its ghosts, one which encourages up-to-date contributions. The same people also have The Magical Library blog up, an 'artistic response' to the Harry Price Library, but it has been 'coming soon' since April...

Best Ever 'Gay Interest' Photo...

2011-10-12T20:08:00.004+01:00

...is how the seller of this photograph on Ebay is billing it. (Click to enlarge). Perhaps the slight hyperbole can be forgiven since the photo is frankly, quite astonishing. I don't normally post nudity on Front Free Endpaper but I don't see how anyone could be particularly upset by this given the oddity of it. Having recently discussed on the blog what constitutes a 'gay' photo its hard to know how this wouldn't qualify: just what are the two men lying on top of each other actually doing...? The shaved heads suggest soldiers, perhaps Eastern European or German, in the first quarter of the 20th century. Groups of naked or near naked soldiers in photos are not uncommon, neither are photos of groups doing acrobatics but combine the two and add in the complete nudity and the very peculiar poses and we have quite the unique item.

The seller has very kindly allowed me to post it here but if you would like to see the photo in situ on Ebay, click here...

O Wonderful Town

2011-10-12T15:30:00.000+01:00

A strange trip to London this week. Some wheeling and dealing in the back-streets of Piccadilly, where the high-end art galleries are. Supper with my best friend and then a gentle stroll over the Thames and back to Waterloo for my train. I've said before that London is my favourite city in all the world and with views like this as the evening darkens.... well...

Young Man Abed?

2011-10-12T01:17:00.004+01:00

This is a recent arrival. I had thought that perhaps when I saw this image 'in person' as opposed to on the screen that I would be able to resolve some of the strangeness of it. But no. I'm still very happy with it and one of the things the scan doesn't show is that fact that this is a good sized (10"x8") photo. A young man certainly... but why the over-excited expression? is he abed? what's he reaching for? The picture makes me smile!

Callum James Books: Short List #4

2011-10-09T18:21:00.005+01:00

Later on this evening I shall be releasing Callum James Books' Short List No. 4. These short catalogues have proved very popular and if you are familiar with the kinds of things that get put up on this blog and that we publish from http://www.callumjamesbooks.com, then you should have a good idea of the kind of things we are selling from these lists. The idea is to have a wide selection with something to suit every pocket, usually between 15 and 25 items. Often these are items new in stock that haven't been put up for sale elsewhere on the Internet as yet. Mostly there are books but ephemera, photos and artwork get an occasional look in too. This list will include items by or relating to Aubrey Beardsley, John Gambril Nicholson, Hajo Ortil and Ralph Chubb among others.

If you are not on the mailing list for this catalogue then please just email us at the link to the top right of this page and we'll happily add you on. The catalogue comes in the form of a text only email which also contains a link to the fully illustrated pdf version.

Funny Ol' Swimwear

2011-10-09T18:18:00.002+01:00

Just to prove a point that doesn't really need proving: sometimes vintage swimwear photos aren't super-sexy, they are, in fact, just a little silly...

Identifying People in Old Photos

2011-10-07T00:35:00.002+01:00

In an age before television, it wasn't uncommon for the high and mighty of the land to have their portrait taken by a photographer and for that image to be sold throughout the country at stationers and booksellers. So they occasionally turn up in family albums. Many are easy enough to spot: Dickens was a favourite, the Queen of course and members of her family, the occasional Bishop or preacher if the family was particularly devout, like these two above of Mr and Mrs Gladstone that came from a large Victorian family photo album I bought recently.

But then there are others who one suspects are 'personalities' but who can be a little more difficult to pin down. So, a plea for help I suppose: the two photos below are both by Bassano, a very well known photographer of celebrity at the end of the nineteenth century, based in London, and from the Bond Street address on the back of these cabinet cards we know they are post 1876. The National Portrait Gallery has nearly 41000 photographs by the Bassano company and trawling through them for a match isn't really praticable. Of course, Bassano photographed the humble as well as the famous and the name alone is not enough to suspect that these two are personages. However, both these cabinet cards also have a retailers sticker on them as well and the retailer was local to the family from whose album these come. This is enough for me to believe that these are photos of famous people but I don't know who... any thoughts my faithful friends and readers...?

Vintage Gay Photos...

2011-10-05T10:54:00.003+01:00

If you search Ebay's photograph section for "gay" or "affectionate" or "shirtless" you will be presented with a host of vintage photos which could be said to appeal to a gay viewer. Most of my vintage swimwear collection has come from Ebay in this way. But nearly every photograph listed as something like: "affectionate men hugging gay interest" is actually a photo of father and son, perhaps brothers, army comrades or simply mates hugging in less uptight times. There is quite a market in such images and if it floats your boat then great...

Much, much rarer indeed are those photos that could genuinely have something to do with a homoerotic situation. Clearly, such photos were rarely taken, the danger was too great, but every now and again one surfaces like this one, sold by the lovely people at the Ampersand Gallery in Portland, and just suggestive enough to make one think there may be more to it than mates sharing a bed, maybe not of course, we'll never know, but the gaydar does ping. Which is possibly why it sold for nearly 200 GBP with this inscription on the back...

Condition is everything...

2011-10-04T23:26:00.002+01:00

My apologies that I haven't been about as much as I would like on the blog for the last week or so. Part of the reason for that has been the amount of work involved in purchasing a large collection of books recently. Above is just a couple of shelves of the more general books from the collection (most of the others are art, photography or transport related) but what is astonishing about all of them is the condition. It's hard to convey in pictures even how these books, printed and published in the 1970s, 60s, 50s, and some in the 1940s are as crisp as the day they were bought. It still gives me chills to pick some of them up. Not a single one of the books on those two shelves is a reprint. How often does a secondhand bookdealer get to use phrases such as "fine in every respect" or "as new" about books of this age? I have decided to make the most of it! the reason they are in such amazing condition is simple: the entire collection has had to be liberated from the paper bags in which it was bought. Every book was found tucked in its original paper or plastic bag from Hammicks, W H Smith or Foyles...

The Churchill books below... also first editions...!

Titanic Brochure

2011-09-25T10:48:00.002+01:00

I once had my own degree of success with Titanic memorabilia when I came across a large photo of her in a local auction which had been taken while she paused on that fateful maiden voyage in Ireland. However, nothing on the scale of this little beauty which sold the other day on Ebay. For the time being you can view the listing here. This was a Souvenir Number of Shipbuilder Magazine, a fairly impressive production and was published in 1911. To say it is now a very sought-after book is probably underselling it somewhat - Ebay auction end price: 3,550USD / 2,299 GBP! after 44 bids by 6 different bidders. Interestingly the winning bid was by an Ebay newbie with no Ebay feedback, which might worry the Vendor for a little while but needn't do as this often happens with standout items - a serious collector who wouldn't normally have anything to do with Ebay is told about the item and registers specifically to bid on the one thing.

Monochrome Boy

2011-09-24T01:39:00.002+01:00

I've mentioned R and I recently had a day out in Brighton, digging around in the Lanes for treasure and this was among the stuff we brought home with us. I was delighted to find this really very sweet monochrome watercolour of a young boy. There are actually two of them and they are so fine that we first thought they must be prints but there are a host of small differences between the two representations and the other one is monogramed MB

In Camera...

2011-09-23T14:50:00.000+01:00

A while ago I posted about how damage to vintage photos wasn't necessarily the end of the world to a collector of old vernacular photos... the same could be said about poor photographic focus. I have been saying how life is currently a little hectic and, adding to that is that is the fact that R has recently been confirmed redundant at work. This means that come the middle of November, if he hasn't found something new, things could get a little hairy... but the flip side is that he got to keep the two weeks of annual leave he had booked off and so we went yesterday to Brighton for a day out and, this is a long-winded way of saying, it was there that I found this magnificent specimen for 50 pence at the bottom of a box. we are, of course, used to the 'mirror shot' genre of photo in this facebook age but this must have been something a little more avant garde when this was taken, no wonder his focus was a little off... which I think just makes the image rather more compelling...

Raven 14: The Artist and the Scholar

2011-09-23T00:41:00.004+01:00

As I mentioned in the previous post, the penultimate Raven has flown the nest. This one is a particularly fascinating insight into the life of one of Rolfe's most singular friends/combatants, Professor Dawkins. It also includes the text of the infamous letter 30 (ominously but not particularly appropriately lettered XXX in roman numerals!) that was omitted from Cecil Woolf's edition of Rolfe's letters to Dawkins that he published in 1962. The blurb below will fill you in on all the details...

If you have ordered on of these Ravens then it should either be with you by now or (in the case of overseas order) be on its way. There are just a couple of orders still to be sent out so please don't panic yet if you haven't had yours, it is coming...

Callum James Books runs two mailing lists. The first carries the announcements of new publications (including the Ravens) and the second contains the occasional Short List Catalogue of rare and interesting books and ephemera that we issue from time to time. Both the titles we publish, and the books and other items that we sell, often but not always have a flavour of gay history and literature about them. If you would like to be included on either or both of the lists, please drop me a line at callum@callumjamesbooks.com.

Raven Fourteen: The Artist and the Scholar
by Robert Scoble

It was Frederick Rolfe's good fortune to find himself invited to accompany the archaeologist Richard MacGillivray Dawkins in the summer of 1908 on a trip to Venice. Dawkins was intelligent, good-natured and equanimous, and it would have been a great advantage to Rolfe had he cultivated this new friendship in the conventional way. True to form, however, Rolfe squandered the opportunity, quarrelling with Dawkins and subjecting him over the next few years to a barrage of insulting letters.

With the publication in 1934 of A J A Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, the more disreputable aspects of Rolfe’s life became public knowledge, and Dawkins came under pressure to explain his friendship with Rolfe and his bankrolling of their trip to Venice. This he did by emphasising Rolfe’s charming and unusual personality, hinting that he had had to terminate the friendship when he realised Rolfe’s propensity for unseemly behaviour.

Subsequent commentators, including Rolfe’s several biographers, have reinforced this narrative. Rolfe has been portrayed as grasping and ungrateful, with Dawkins as his kindly and long-suffering victim. This telling of only half the story, with its homosexual subtext downplayed, does a disservice to Rolfe.

In this penultimate addition to the Raven Series, Robert Scoble describes the trajectory of the short-lived friendship between Rolfe and Dawkins, a friendship unable to survive the incompatibility of their temperaments.

The Raven Series has been planned as a set of fifteen scholarly essays which will add substantially to our knowledge of the life and work of Frederick Rolfe. Each essay is being published in a strictly limited edition, and there is little doubt that complete sets of the fifteen monographs will be sought after by collectors in the years to come.

Of a full edition of 70, the first 12 copies of The Artist and the Scholar constitute the special state, case bound in bright green paper-covered boards with gilt titles, and signed by the author. Numbers 13-70 form the ordinary state of the edition, and are sewn into bright green card covers with a paper label and acetate wrappers.

Busy Times...

2011-09-22T23:41:00.003+01:00

It's been an unusually busy time for the last couple of weeks. Among other things, I have just published the penultimate in the Raven series of monographs about Frederick Rolfe by Robert Scoble (more of which shortly). I have also been buying a huge collection of books from the house of a gentleman bachelor who died recently aged 100. The sad and strange things that one comes across in the process of clearing books from houses will surprise no seasoned bookdealer but this one was particularly peculiar. The books were stacked horizontally from the floor to a height of about 6' all around the back bedroom: the absence of shelves is not entirely unusual in such circumstances but the fact that every book was still in the paper of plastic bag in which it had been bought was a new twist. I could run a seminar on the evolving design history of W H Smith for the last 60 years with the materials from that room. The piles of books were covered in many years of dust and dirt but, of course, inside the paper bags... new books. I have never in my life seen books from the 1950s in such pristine condition: they look as though they have been lifted carefully from the bookshop shelf just yesterday. How often does a bookdealer get to use the words 'as new' to describe a late 1950s first edition? but it is true of many of these. It's a huge collection with some literature but mainly focused on trains, trams, ballet, the stage, art and photography. I think the last trip to the house should be tomorrow.

On top of all this I was also helping my very good friends A&R move from their house in Portsmouth to a boat! on the Isle of Wight. The entire contents of a house had to be manhandled up a gang-plank some two feet wide at a 45 degree angle over a two metre drop into the icy water of the Medina river on a day when the wind-power research centre across the water seemed the most appropriately sited building in the country. Believe me, a double mattress with a person at each end acts a lot like a sail in a force 6! How someone didn't end up in the water with a sideboard on top of them I'll never know... but in the end, of course, it went well and as straightforwardly (if not entirely painlessly) as could be expected.

A few weeks ago I was selling a collection of old maritime postcards and among them was the picture above of the paddle steamer Ryde proudly going about her business on the Solent. One of the stranger moments of the moving day was the moment I realised that this piece of metal below, which was my friends' new neighbour, is all that remains of her...

Septembeard and Crazy Victorian Beards

2011-09-16T20:18:00.003+01:00

I hadn't heard of the Septembeard charity until it was too late to join in this year (grow a beard through the month of September and get sponsored to raise money for Prostate cancer charities) but, next year, with inspiration from these guys who fell from the pages of a Victorian album yesterday, it should be a snip...

Beauty

2011-09-14T00:54:00.002+01:00

The vintage swim collection has a good number of handsome young men in it but this guy takes some beating for sheer captivating, striking good looks. I have no idea who he is, where this was and only the vaguest sense that this photo dates from some time in the 1920s or 30s... but here he is, in 2011 and an image made on one sunny day perhaps nearly one hundred years ago is now being beamed around the world through satelites orbiting the earth in space... it's a funny ol' world...

Phillumeny

2011-09-11T11:42:00.003+01:00

The title of this post is not a word I knew before today but, Alistair, who runs one of my favourite blogs: We Made This, is off on a charity cycle ride from Lands End to John O Groats and so they are having a series of guest posts over there on all aspects of design and the whole series has been great. The one on matchbox labels however, Phillumeny I now know, by David Pearson, was particularly brilliant and if you have any form of the collecting virus you should not go near it.... The montage above is from a flickr set by Jane McDevitt which Pearson points us to and which I have spent the last hour or so clicking through... sigh...

Sam Steward Video

2011-09-02T13:19:00.003+01:00

I've posted now and again about the remarkable character Samuel Steward aka Phil Sparrow aka Phil Andros and as a follow on to the publication of a biography of his extraordinary life The Secret Historian by Justin Spring and an Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward also by Spring, there is now an exhibition about his life and work at the Museum of Sex in New York. The video above is one of the best introductions to Steward's life that I've seen yet and is well worth putting aside the entire ten minutes to watch...

Vintage Swim B.S.C.S.C.

2011-09-02T12:32:00.002+01:00

Three absolutely stonking vintage swim photos - or in this case Water Polo photos - just added to my collection. If you were wondering, BSCSC stands for Bishop's Stortford College Swimming Club. Particularly nice is the fact that many of the lads here are identified on the back of the photos.

Just a quick word about the watermarking. I would like to not put my web address on these photos but all too often I find them being used elsewhere on the Internet with no attribution or link. The worst offender in this regard is back and yesterday I discovered nearly all the images this blog has ever had by, about or of Ralph Chubb cobbled together into a new post on his blog. Let me be clear: if you have a blog or tumblr or flikr account and would like to use anything from this blog I do not mind at all, I'd be delighted, chuffed to mintballs... all I ask is the courtesy of a simple link back here, an acknowledgement. I understand that the internet is a bit of a free for all and I understand that occasionally we all find things we want to repost but can't remember where they came from, I'm very laid back about this kind of thing on the whole but until one blogger in particular who does it time and time again starts showing the courtesy of an simple acknowledgement I'm sorry but I will have to add the occasional watermark to the images posted here. Rant over...