Book Notes, January–June 2022

Wayne writes: With so many books to report more than two years after my last post about reading, it seems best to deal with no more than six months at a time, here the period from January to June 2022:

On Carol. Katherine Small Gallery, 2020. ‘An introduction to Carol J. Blinn delivered by Michael Russem at the December 2014 meeting of The Society of Printers’. A slight but attractive pamphlet highlighting Easthampton, Massachusetts printer Carol Blinn’s (Warwick Press) jobbing work – business cards, invitations, etc. – which I’ve long admired alongside her decorative paste papers. I used to collect Carol’s book publications and ephemera.

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe by Kathy Peiss. Oxford University Press, 2020. Peiss tells a story, sometimes at exhausting length, first of efforts, before the United States was formally at war, by American libraries to obtain materials from overseas when their usual sources were cut off or hampered, and by American intelligence to gather foreign publications with information useful in the coming conflict. Later these initiatives grew into programs such as the T-forces, which swept into Europe behind advancing Allied armies to sweep up not only documents to aid intelligence and support the prosecution of war criminals, but even entire libraries, seen by some as spoils of war. Peiss does not omit discussion of the morality of such activities, or of fraught efforts to restore materials to the owners (if they survived) from whom they were stolen. There were many competing interests among libraries and agencies, fraudulent claims, thefts, and subterfuge, amidst widespread destruction. A related book on my shelves which I have not yet got to is The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell (2015).

National Treasures: Saving the Nation’s Art in World War II by Caroline Shenton. John Murray, 2021. The nation in question is Britain, and Shenton includes libraries with the wartime efforts to move art collections out of harm’s way. Museum and library authorities had the foresight to plan for evacuations before conflict with Hitler began, though not everyone carried through with the same efficiency, there was competition for suitable space, and some officials dragged their feet or withheld the necessary funds. It is a happier story than Peiss’s in Information Hunters, but Shenton allows personal biases to colour her account. ‘Elegant, patrician’ Kenneth Clark of the National Gallery, for example, is a particular target; the important forensic scientist Ian Rawlins is described as ‘immensely tall – well over six foot four – bespectacled, with pale skin, a greasy auburn comb-over, and unfeasibly long fingers’; Martin Davies, Assistant Keeper of the National Gallery under Clark, nicknamed ‘Dry Martini’, is said to have ‘cut a fastidious, shy, unworldly figure as he walked through the West End, carrying at all times a string bag full of library books and oranges’. Such people were ‘unlikely wartime heroes’ in saving Britain’s national treasures, because of their knowledge and talents; but were they unlikely? or, in fact, the most likely? If not these experts, dedicated and on the spot, who else would have done the job? Or is Shenton making a distinction between those who fought in battle (‘wartime’) and those who did not? In any case, it does these accomplished men and women no honour to depict them as somehow bizarre in their tastes, mannerisms, or appearance. (A shorter, mainly photographic account specifically of saving the National Gallery’s collections is The National Gallery in Wartime by Suzanne Bosman, 2008.)

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with My Nine Year-Old Self by Katherine Langrish. Darton, Longman & Todd, 2021. Fantasy author Langrish reminisces about her first readings of C.S. Lewis’s seven ‘Narnia’ novels. Now an adult, she sees different things in the stories than she did as a child, including biblical passages and other literature which may have inspired Lewis’s writing, and she has different attitudes to the books while remembering how she felt once upon a time. She notes, for example, something that had never occurred to me, that it was in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not in The Last Battle, that Lewis first dismisses Susan, described as ‘the pretty one of the family’, ‘no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age)’ (‘a euphemism for sexual precocity’). I don’t entirely share Langrish’s opinions about favourite characters or passages, but am glad that she too admires Pauline Baynes’s illustrations.

Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts by Wolf Burchard. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. Written to accompany an exhibition at the Met in New York (which we saw) and later at the Wallace Collection, London and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in California. Burchard recounts Walt Disney’s personal interest in European art, especially (though not wholly) French decorative art – porcelain, furniture, clocks, tapestries – and the Rococo in particular, and how this influenced his animated films, notably Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast, as well as the architecture of his theme parks. Burchard, a curator in the Met’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, is more at home discussing the art that did (or may have done) the inspiring, and does so sometimes at a greater length than the purpose requires, but in terms of illustration the book is well balanced between French art and Disney art.

Holbein: Capturing Character, edited by Anne T. Woollett, with contributions by Austėja Mackelaitė, John T. McQuillen, et al. J. Paul Getty Museum, 2021. A catalogue to accompany an exhibition at the Getty and at the Morgan Library and Museum (we saw the latter). The contributors take it in turns to discuss the ‘pictorial eloquence’ of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543), his connections with Erasmus, his portraits, his relationship with humanism and the book, his lettering art, and specifically his painting An Allegory of Passion.

Paradise Printed & Bound: Book Arts in Northampton & Beyond, edited by Barbara B. Blumenthal. The 350th Anniversary Committee, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2004. Includes essays on the book arts in and near Northampton, on the Hampshire Bookshop in Northampton, and on Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. I ran across this work by accident and bought it out of nostalgia. I know, or knew, many of the printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and librarians operating out of the Northampton area, or connected with them: Carol Blinn (mentioned above), artist Barry Moser, binder Arno Werner, publisher David Godine, bookseller Gordon Cronin (from whom I bought excellent illustrated and typographic items at prices that still make me smile), master printer Harold McGrath. I met Baskin once, when he visited Williamstown, and having seen a museum catalogue I designed complimented me on my letterspacing.

The Orchard, no. 10 (Autumn 2021). The annual journal of The C.F.A. Voysey Society, which celebrates the achievements of Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941), one of the most distinguished Arts and Crafts architects and designers, ranked with William Morris for his wallpapers and textiles. As always, The Orchard has much of interest, perhaps especially in this issue Tony Peart’s ‘Modern Symbolism: The Graphic Design of C.F.A. Voysey’. (Since writing this note, two more numbers of The Orchard have appeared. I’ve been reading about Voysey’s work since I found Wendy Hitchmough’s 1997 Phaidon monograph.)

A Breath of Fresh Air: Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden & Douglas Percy Bliss by Gordon Cooke. The Fine Art Society, 2007. English artists Ravilious, Bawden, and Bliss met at the Royal College of Art in 1922 and became lifelong friends. Their paintings, wood-engravings, and other designs are, to me, among the most pleasing of the art produced in the twenties and through the war years into the fifties. I have many of the books to which they contributed, or books about them, which I must describe sometime as one of ‘Our Collections’. Cooke’s text told me nothing I didn’t already know, and has a few editing issues, but the book – a catalogue of a December 2007 exhibition at the Society’s New Bond Street, London gallery – includes several pictures I hadn’t seen before, and is beautifully designed. I learned of this only when a copy was offered in the invaluable online shop of the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.

Barron & Larcher, Textile Designers by Michal Silver, Sarah Burns, et al. ACC Art Books, 2018. Phyllis Barron (1890–1964) and Dorothy Larcher (1884–1952) made a success in hand block-printing textiles in modern designs from the early years of the twentieth century until the nineteen-forties, when wartime shortages of materials forced a halt to production. This book documents their work well, with good illustrations. Barron and Larcher’s designs weren’t known to me before I came across this volume (also in the Pallant House shop, then on sale); some of them can be seen on the website of Christopher Farr.

Shell Art & Advertising by Scott Anthony, Oliver Green, and Margaret Timmers, with contributions by Nicky Balfour Penney. Lund Humphries, 2021. The Shell oil company has had a long history of progressive and inventive advertising, which at one time employed many of the artists I’ve admired and collected, such as Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Paul Nash, and Barnett Freedman. Shell Art & Advertising is a comprehensive and well-illustrated account of this work.

The World of Stonehenge by Duncan Garrow and Neil Wilkin. British Museum, 2022. A lavish and very informative volume to accompany the British Museum exhibition. It focuses on the larger archaeological and social context of Stonehenge, and discusses Stonehenge as one of many ceremonial monuments and gravesites in Britain and Ireland and on the continent.

Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature. Edited by Annemarie Bilclough. V&A Publishing, 2021. Covid prevented us from seeing this exhibition of Beatrix Potter’s drawings of plants and animals in London in 2022, and we’re not able to see it in New York this year either, but the accompanying book is well written and has many pictures. If we want more on the subject, we also have several earlier books, such as A Victorian Naturalist: Beatrix Potter’s Drawings from the Armitt Collection (1992) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2007).

Edward Bawden: English as She Is Drawn by Peyton Skipwith. Fine Art Society, 1989. Catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of one of my favourite artists, held in London in September 1989.

Voyaging Out: British Women Artists from Suffrage to the Sixties by Carolyn Trant. Thames & Hudson, 2019. A good book on this subject (another Pallant House sale item), which I wanted to explore in order to have a wider context for studying Pauline Baynes’s work, not that she’s represented here. The title echoes that of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.

Cutting It in Oxford: Kindersley Inscriptions in the City and County by Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley and David Meara. Photography by Stuart Vallis. Cardozo Kindersley, 2017. This is the last of the series of fascinating little books documenting inscriptions cut by David Kindersley (1915–1995) and his successors in the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in Cambridge, England. I had the earlier volumes already; this one was impossible to get through the usual sellers, but I was able to order it direct from the Workshop. I was privileged to meet David Kindersley in my first year as a librarian (1976–7), when he spoke in Williamstown; three of his beautiful slate tablets are in the library I worked for.

Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive. Bodleian Library Publishing / The Griffith Institute, 2022. Christina and I would have liked to see this exhibition too, but again Covid prevented us. The catalogue of the display in Oxford is attractive but limited in scope to archaeologist Howard Carter’s archive at Oxford’s Griffith Institute.

The Art of Alice & Martin Provensen. Chronicle Chroma, 2021. Text by Karen Provensen Mitchell, Leonard S. Marcus, et al. I’m glad to have an account of the Provensens, whose art for children’s books always impressed me – we have several of their books, some were mine as a child – especially one with so many images. It’s a very awkward volume, however, small, oblong, and heavy, its text and captions tiny and grey on the page, its pictures crowded together. It would have been much improved as an upright folio, evoking, say, the 1953 Giant Golden Books New Testament the Provensens illustrated.

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch. Orion, 2022. Another title in the Rivers of London fantasy/mystery series. Aaronovitch is always entertaining, though I admit that as these novels or novellas come out at such wide intervals, I’m not always able to keep the continuity of characters and incidents in mind.

The Imagination Chamber: Cosmic Rays from Lyra’s Universe by Philip Pullman. David Fickling Books/Scholastic, 2022. Pullman has issued several little volumes set in the His Dark Materials universe; if they were edible, each would be hardly a mouthful. This is printed on rectos only, some pages with only a few sentences, so a very quick read. I hear that Sir Philip is nearly finished writing the third and last volume of his second trilogy, The Book of Dust; when that finally appears, I’ll have to go back and read the first two in succession before reading the third, because (as with Aaronovitch’s series above) there has been so much time between the instalments. This also happened with the first trilogy: I had to re-read The Golden Compass (Northern Lights) when The Subtle Knife finally appeared, and both of those before reading The Amber Spyglass some time later.

Decimus Burton: Gentleman Architect by Paul A. Rabbitts. Lund Humphries, 2021. Burton (1800–1881) was a leading architect of his day, and I’ve seen some of his buildings in person, e.g. the Athenaeum Club in London and the Temperate House at Kew Gardens. This book unfortunately doesn’t do him enough justice. The author quotes too much relative to his own writing (which admittedly is rather dull), the format of the volume is too small for the illustrations, and it needs maps and more plans.

The Real J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Created Middle-earth by Jesse Xander. White Owl, 2021. This is mainly a reworking of Humphrey Carpenter’s biography and Colin Duriez’s Tolkien: The Making of a Legend. And oh my, it gets so much wrong: ‘Middle-Earth’ spelled thus, The Lord of the Rings described as a trilogy (it’s not), Vincent Trough rather than Trought, Simon Tolkien as Priscilla’s son rather than her nephew (Christopher’s eldest son), Stanley Unwin asking Tolkien to illustrate The Hobbit when Tolkien in fact put his pictures forward off his own bat, etc., etc., nothing a simple fact check wouldn’t have caught. The dust-jacket is nice, though.

Fuseli: Drama and Theatre. Edited by Eva Reifert, et al. Prestel, 2018. A somewhat repetitive account of the Swiss painter, a contemporary of Blake, who lived much of his life in Britain and produced intriguing, sometimes grotesque art based on Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Norse mythology, etc. But the volume is in a dramatic tall (but not oversized) format, with bold typography and excellent reproductions.

The Great Troll War by Jasper Fforde. Hodder & Stoughton, 2021. The fourth and final book in Fforde’s Last Dragonslayer series. It has some clever moments, such as when an unnamed fantasy author is brought in to divine the villain’s plot, and it’s clearly Fforde himself. But the series was sufficient with just the first three titles, and even then is among the weakest of Fforde’s several series: prefer the Thursday Next titles.

John Edgar Platt: Master of the Colour Woodcut by Hilary Chapman. St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery / Samsom & Company, 2018. Sansom (1886–1967) was a painterly artist influenced by Japanese colour woodcuts. This is a short book and catalogue about his work, another title found at Pallant House.

In Praise of Aldus Manutius: A Quincentenary Exhibition by H. George Fletcher. Pierpont Morgan Library and University Research Library, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, 1995. I worked with books printed by Aldus and his successors for many years; we had a copy of this catalogue, and belatedly I decided to add one to my professional library. Aldus (Aldo Manuzio) was the quintessential printer of the Italian Renaissance, from which came some of the most beautiful printing types as well as the pocket-sized book.