The Collected Poems Arrive
On the eve of publication of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, we are to be interviewed by Kate Molleson on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Front Row’, via Zoom, later today. The programme begins at 7.15 pm London time (2.15 pm U.S. Eastern Time), and we’re told that our segment is to come just after 7.30, but this is subject to change in a live broadcast. The programme will also be available to hear following the broadcast through the Radio 4 website.
The first formal review of the Poems (of which we’re aware) has appeared in the online journal The Conversation: ‘First Publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Collected Poems Offers New Insights into the Lord of the Rings Author’s Personality’, by Tom Emanuel. The review notes that our book brings together ‘all of [Tolkien’s] poetry’, which Tom has pointed out on the Tolkien Society’s Facebook page is an incorrect statement put in by his editors.
Another review appears in this week’s Times Literary Supplement (13 September), ‘Full of Sound and Faërie’, written by Tolkien scholar John Garth with intelligence and clever turns of phrase.
The Collected Poems was mentioned, though not reviewed, among notable new books on the September Book Reviews page of the Fine Books & Collections blog.
Advance notice: Sometime next month, the moderators of the Tolkien Collectors Guide will interview us for their YouTube channel. And late in October we will have an AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) session on the Reddit platform tolkienfans. More formal announcements will be forthcoming.
Finally, we will be posting this evening – the morning of U.K. publication day, the 12th – a first Addenda and Corrigenda page for the work, noting a few errors we failed to see before our book went to press, as well as inevitable additions. For now, readers will have to only imagine the prodigious addenda and corrigenda yet to be made for our other writings, in particular The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, in light of the new information found in the Collected Poems and the many newly published poems which will need entries.
[Edited 11 September to add John Garth’s review]
‘Beyond Bilbo’
An article about the forthcoming Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien was posted online today, in advance of print publication in the Observer tomorrow, Sunday 25 August. The Arts journalist Dalya Alberge interviewed us by phone and saw a PDF of our book. The Collected Poems is still on schedule to be published on 12 September in the U.K. and 17 September in the U.S.
At least two physical copies of the Poems – three volumes boxed, one as issued by HarperCollins and the other with the American imprint, William Morrow – have somehow escaped into the wild, despite technically being available only for pre-order. We ourselves have not yet had copies to hand, and not long ago our editors told us that they themselves had not yet had sample copies from the printer (Rotolito in Italy). One of the early owners of a set posted photos of it on Reddit, which generated a few dozen comments; these images were also picked up by the Tolkien Collector’s Guide.
There have been several requests online, and directly to us, for a table of contents of the Poems, possibly even sample pages. We’ve asked our editors about the feasibility of this, and were about to repeat what we wrote earlier: that apart from those published in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, from which we took selections, almost any Tolkien poem one can name is in the Collected Poems. But as we see that photos of our table of contents have been posted on Reddit by the aforementioned early owner, we have ourselves made a PDF of those pages to which we link on our website.
Following questions on Reddit, we can confirm that there are indeed poems in Quenya, Sindarin, Gothic, and Old English in the collection. But we did not include Tolkien’s translation of the Old English Exodus, because although the Exodus is poetry in the original, Tolkien’s Modern English rendering is in prose.
We were pleased to dedicate the Collected Poems to the memory of Christopher Tolkien, who brought us onto the project and with whom we had a long correspondence until his death in 2020. The Poems will be published in the 100th year since Christopher’s birth, and we have agreed to take part in the Tolkien Society’s Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference, to be held online 23 and 24 November 2024. Further details are yet to be announced.
We will post a few addenda and corrigenda to the Collected Poems on our website once the book is published.
Tolkien Addenda & Corrigenda Updates
After too long a hiatus, we have updated many of our web pages on hammondandscull.com, providing further additions and corrections to our books. When we last posted addenda and corrigenda, in late December 2020, we had only begun to add information from Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018) by Catherine McIlwaine; now that we have completed our work on Tolkien’s Collected Poems, we have been able to absorb Maker more fully, and to deal as well with much of the small mountain of new Tolkien scholarship and new online resources that have appeared in recent years, and with addenda and corrigenda suggested by readers. The most substantial updates are, not surprisingly, those for The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion and The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. Today’s addenda and corrigenda, which in Word run to nearly a hundred pages, do not quite bring everything up to date, but they do much to close the gap – that is, until the Collected Poems appears this September, with dozens of previously unpublished works and much new information, and sets us right back again!
All of our addenda and corrigenda pages are indexed here.
· The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014)
· Arthur Ransome: A Bibliography
· J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017) shared elements
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017) shared elements by date
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017) bibliography
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (2017)
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (2017) by date
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide (2017)
· The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide (2017) by date
· Index to The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981, 2023)
· The Lord of the Rings (2004–5)
· The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2014)
· The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2014) by date
· The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2014) bibliography
Collected Poems Bindings & Boxes
Our editor has sent us the latest mock-ups of the U.K. (HarperCollins) and U.S. (William Morrow) editions of Tolkien’s Collected Poems, differing only in the imprint. Click on each picture to enlarge. After a similar image was posted on another site, we read a comment which suggested that the creamy paper shown within the ‘notch’ of the box might be an inserted booklet; this is in fact simply the front board of the third volume. Each of the three volumes features on its cover a fanciful ‘tree’ drawn by Tolkien, one of which may be seen on the side of the box.
Tolkien’s Collected Poems Update
Our thanks to all who have written to us with congratulations and set a new record for views of this blog. News of the Collected Poems has caused not a little excitement. It has also led to not a few questions, chief among which has been: What will the book include? Will it have the complete Lay of the Fall of Gondolin? Will it have Tolkien’s verse translation of Beowulf? Will it have his rumoured bestiary poems about the Fox and the Unicorn? And especially (if very curiously), will it have The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf, which so far has been published only in German translation?
We regret that we can say only so much about the contents at this time, beyond what we already have – it’s up to our publisher, and to the Tolkien Estate, to decide how much publicity to release, what, and when. But we can say that almost any poem a potential reader can name is likely to be present in the book, except for most of those in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as we earlier made clear. The Bookseller magazine unfortunately took liberties with HarperCollins’ press release, declaring the Collected Poems to be ‘the first time all the author’s poems will appear in one volume’: it won’t be quite complete, nor will it will be only one volume.
There will be an American edition, from William Morrow, which should be identical to the copies issued by HarperCollins U.K. except for the imprint. This has been announced for 17 September, five days later than the U.K. release on 12 September, with the list price $125. We’ve seen some complaints that the U.K. list price of £90 is steep, but that is for three thick volumes (and a box), after all, and before any bookseller’s discount. Another forthcoming book related to Tolkien we’ve seen advertised is priced at only a little less than the Collected Poems at list, yet has only about a quarter of the length; for that, one might legitimately grouse.
Speaking of length, we finished our work on the book only today and sent it off to HarperCollins to go to press. There was just a little kerfuffle at the eleventh hour, when we learned of strict limits on volume length due to the way the book is to be printed, but we were able to meet these without much trouble. We’ve neatly ended up with three volumes of 540 pages each, or 1620 pages in all. Volume 1 will have 92 pages of preliminaries – an introduction and a brief chronology of Tolkien’s poetry – followed by the first 448 pages of the poems proper. Volume 2 then will have the first 12 pages of the preliminaries repeated (so that the complete table of contents is in each volume), followed by another 528 pages of poems, and volume 3 will have the same preliminaries again, the final 434 pages of poems and appendices, and a glossary, bibliography, and index to the three volumes which are continuously paginated.
In the past week or so we’ve read through the text again and made the odd tweak. One could tweak endlessly, but the time has come to hand it over, take a rest (sort of: there are shrubs to prune), and move on to other Tolkien matters, not least the addenda and corrigenda to our other books we’ve been gathering for two or three years and will be reporting here.
Tolkien’s Collected Poems
HarperCollins having announced today that The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien will be published this September, we’re able to speak publicly about our next book for the first time since an edition of Tolkien’s verse was suggested to us in HarperCollins’ offices in April 2016. The Tolkien Estate were eager to bring more of Tolkien’s unpublished poems into print, and Christopher Tolkien hoped that his father’s talent for poetry could become more widely known. We were sympathetic to both aims, and no strangers to Tolkien’s poems through our earlier work.
Our immediate task was to review scans of poems and suggest to Christopher the best way to present them. It took months to organize and read these, more than a thousand pages of varying difficulty, from almost illegible draft manuscripts in soft pencil to professional typescripts. And at the same time, we were obliged to work on a new edition of our J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, which had been commissioned at that same April 2016 meeting; this occupied us until June the following year.
In the beginning, Christopher had no thought of publishing his father’s entire vast, complex poetic opus. Instead, he focused on what he called the ‘early poems’, which we interpreted as those composed mostly before the 1930s. Many of those were, indeed, not yet published, some not even recorded in our Chronology. But we saw that there were also unpublished poems of note from later decades, as well as some which had been published but were now hard to find, and we knew that not a little of Tolkien’s earlier poetry had evolved into later verse, for example in his 1962 Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Surely, no one can appreciate Tolkien as a poet fully without considering all of these works together.
Discussions with Christopher about the book occurred at intervals; he himself was busy, preparing The Fall of Gondolin. At length, we proposed that it would be a lost opportunity not to collect as many of his father’s poems as possible, regardless of their date of composition, language, or circumstance, and to model such a collection after Christopher’s History of Middle-earth, combining original texts with editorial notes and commentary. For Tolkien’s longer poems already published as separate books, such as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur, or in composite works such as The Lays of Beleriand, we suggested that brief, representative extracts be included, in order to show in full Tolkien’s development as a poet and verse forms he did not use elsewhere; and in the same way, we would draw also from his translations of Old and Middle English poems, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In March 2019, in what would be the final message he sent to us, Christopher approved our concept and trial entries.
After Christopher’s death in January 2020, we needed to make our proposal to the Tolkien Estate trustees (Christopher had retired as a trustee in 2017, but remained his father’s literary executor), and to HarperCollins. This was complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic, but in the end all was agreed, and we were formally commissioned as editors. We completed a draft text in June 2023 (while also preparing the index to the new edition of Tolkien’s Letters). Since then, we have been revising, with advice from Chris Smith at HarperCollins, and have also incorporated poetry by Tolkien found at the eleventh hour in the archive of the C.S. Lewis scholar Walter Hooper.
A number of factors, namely economies of production, ruled out a Complete Poems by Tolkien. Nevertheless, the Collected Poems will include most of the verses Tolkien is known to have written, and for most of these, multiple versions which show their evolution. There are at least 240 discrete poems, depending on how one distinguishes titles and versions, presented in 195 entries and five appendices. When possible, we have used manuscripts and typescripts in the Bodleian Library, at Marquette University, and at the University of Leeds. We have chosen not to include all of the one hundred or so poems contained in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but have made a representative selection – surely, no one who reads the Collected Poems will not already have at least one copy of Tolkien’s two most popular works. His longer poems, as we have said, will be presented as excerpts. The book will also include a long introduction to Tolkien as a poet, a brief chronology of his poetry, and a glossary of archaic, unusual, or unfamiliar words he used in his verse.
HarperCollins have announced the Collected Poems as a three-volume boxed set. The Amazon UK description gives its extent as 1,368 pages, which is close to the number in our typescript; in fact, the printed text will run to more than 1,500 pages. There are currently no plans for a de luxe edition, but we’re aiming for an elegant trade release. We have not yet heard about a U.S. edition.
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.
Hail and Farewell
Wayne writes: The ‘hail’ of our title is our way of saying ‘hello’ again to our readers, after more than two years of silence on this site, and especially to those who have recently subscribed to our blog despite more than two years of silence. The ‘farewell’, in turn, is my bidding good-bye to the job I held as a college rare books librarian for more than forty-five years, which I mentioned was in the cards in our post of 26 December 2021.
I retired in February 2022, more than a year earlier than I had intended. I had planned to stay until summer 2023, to mark my 70th birthday and ‘my’ library’s centenary, which seemed appropriate and long enough (my predecessor held on until age 77). I had not grown tired of the library’s superb collections, and since 2015 I was at last the director, after thirty-nine years as junior. I knew the best antiquarian dealers, and enjoyed collecting many excellent books, manuscripts, and other materials. I found it rewarding to help generations of students with their courses, and I hope I inspired them to learn from the rarities I put into their hands.
During the pandemic shutdown, however, when I worked from home or in a nearly deserted library, I had time to reflect, and not only on how precious time with a loved one can be, and how suddenly it might be taken away. The college had become, I felt, uncomfortably bureaucratic (if, maybe, no more so than has happened at other schools), with meetings, reports, and strategic plans overwhelming actual education and scholarship. In particular, two administrative restructurings I thought very ill-advised had reduced my library from the discrete, visibly special entity intended by its founder to merely part of a department within the general library; and in the process, my authority as director was hobbled if not eliminated. I felt out of sympathy with (much younger) management and colleagues as to what a special library should acquire, how it should be organized, how its budget should be spent, and they in turn seemed to be out of sympathy with me. Also, I realized that most of the faculty and staff I had enjoyed working with over the years had themselves either retired or passed away. All things considered, I decided it would be best that I leave too, just before I turned 69 rather than wait until 70.
Another reason I felt I should retire earlier than planned – and why our blog has been quiet for so long – is that Christina and I have been working on a new book. I had not been able to give it many hours while holding down a nine-to-five job, and as we were facing a deadline (in the event, extended) it was clear that something would have to give. Look for more news about this next week.
Book Notes, June–December 2021
Wayne writes: In no particular order, here are books I read during the past few months. It’s an embarrassingly small number, which I put down to: our having subscribed to the New Yorker, which has distracted from books (but is such a civilized magazine); my having taken up crossword puzzles; and my being occupied with things to do as I approach retirement from my library job after more than forty-five years.
The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783 by Joseph J. Ellis. Liveright, 2021. I’ve enjoyed Ellis’s books on the Revolutionary period (e.g. The Quartet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers). He has an easy style, and I’ve always learned something new from him, which I’ve been able to use in lecturing at Williams College about American documents. That said, The Cause is a short book for a big subject, and feels miscellaneous in its coverage, skipping over some events I would have liked to see treated more fully. Well, I’m sure it’s the book Ellis wanted it to write, and we should judge it as such. But it could have used better copy-editing: it has a few typos and one real bloomer, where Ellis credits the phrase ‘the shot heard round the world’ to Longfellow rather than Emerson, and it frequently has ‘comprise’ when ‘compose’ would be correct.
Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood. Like Joseph Ellis, Gordon Wood is one of the leading scholars of the early American republic. His manner of writing is more staid, and his style can be repetitive, but this book too opened my eyes to a great deal of history I had never learned, such as that some who supported the proposed federal constitution did so because Rhode Island (especially) had harmed upper-class financial interests by flooding the country with paper money not backed by specie. Whenever I read books like Power and Liberty I think back to high school, where everything was compressed, leaving no time for interesting stories or sidelights, and to college, where the first course in American history was hijacked by the professor’s personal interests: ‘You heard all about the Pilgrims in high school, we’re going to spend the semester talking about slavery!’ Then the instructor in American History 102 assumed that we had, in fact, heard about the Pilgrims, and everything else up to the Civil War, in 101; but we hadn’t, so were at a disadvantage.
Kay Nielsen: An Enchanted Vision: The Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection by Meghan Melvin, with an essay by Alison Luxner. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2021. We saw a lovely exhibition of Danish artist Nielsen’s (1886–1957) works from the Daniels’ collection at the MFA two years ago. This book, less a catalogue of the exhibition than a related monograph, has finally appeared. It’s an attractive volume, well illustrated and with an intelligent text. Nielsen’s art is endlessly fascinating, akin to work by Aubrey Beardsley and Jessie M. King and clearly influenced by Japanese prints, but uniquely his own, very unlike illustrations by contemporaries and rivals such as Rackham and Dulac. Unlike so many other art books Christina and I are reading these days, the designer of Kay Nielsen has paid attention to type size versus length of line, so that the text blocks aren’t a challenge for the eyes.
John Hassall: The Life and Art of the Poster King by Lucinda Gosling. Unicorn, 2021. Hassall (1868–1948) is best known today for his 1908 travel poster Skegness Is SO Bracing and its successors, showing a jolly fisherman prancing on a Lincolnshire beach, but this was only the smallest part of an enormous output. Hassall worked hard, and he worked fast. Gosling says perhaps more than she needs to about the artist, his life, and his methods – one can’t complain that she left something out – but it’s an interesting account of a commercial artist in Britain of the period, and not incidentally of the business of art at that time. One could wish, however, for a larger format: so many of the illustrations are tiny, and their captions (in narrow sans-serif) tinier still.
Questland by Carrie Vaughn. Mariner Books, 2021. A bit of fluff, really, but amusing. I’m a selective fan of Vaughn’s novels (Bannerless, for example), and Questland seemed up my street. The hero is a literature professor with expertise in fantasy, hired to help a mercenary strike team penetrate the defences of a high-tech island being developed as an amusement destination with animatronic dragons, unicorns, and other elements of myth and magic. It’s sort of Jurassic Park crossed with Ready Player One. RPG and Tolkien references abound.
Hiroshige: Prints and Drawings by Matthi Forrer, with essays by Suzuki Jūzō and Henry D. Smith II. Prestel, 1997. An account of the work of Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), one of the leading creators of woodblock prints. The book has many well-printed illustrations, which however represent only a fraction of Hiroshige’s pictures. In addition to their intrinsic beaity, the reproductions given here are interesting for similarities to be found between some of Hiroshige’s prints and elements in Tolkien’s art, especially for The Hobbit. We know that Tolkien was attracted to Japanese prints, and some of his illustrations have a stylistic sympathy with Hiroshige’s work, more so than, say, that of Hokusai.
Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People by Rick Gekoski. Constable, 2021. Book dealer and literary treasure-hunter Gekoski supplies thirteen essays on writers, literary research, and the adventures and perils of the book trade. He drops a lot of names, from D.H. Lawrence to J.K. Rowling, among them two or three I know, or knew, personally from my years as a librarian. I found myself nodding frequently in agreement at his afterword: ‘I regret the gradual decline of connoisseurship, a term more often associated with the art market, but which can be pertinent to sophisticated book collecting.’ My first boss at Williams said that it was his goal in the Chapin Library to teach the students to be connoisseurs of books, and he did succeed with a few; but this wasn’t, and isn’t, the goal of the faculty, and it’s their work we’re meant to support. ‘For many of us [booksellers, bookselling] is a vocation, rather than a job, which can be practised to the very edges of senility, and sometimes beyond. You can still hunt treasure even when you don’t remember where it is. But if we carry on, it is not always a comfortable process . . . it is too easy, and in a way too agreeable, to compare the past favourably with the present.’ I’ve bought and worked with books and manuscripts, professionally, about as long as Gekoski has sold them, and although it has been a job, it has also been part of my life – what I think Gekoski is getting at – not something I leave at the office at five o’clock. And although much of the present is preferable to the past (I do not miss typing catalog cards), many good things of the past were better (more civilized, more elegant) than what pertains now.
Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, 800–1500 by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Joshua O’Driscoll. Morgan Library & Museum/D. Giles, 2021. Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, on now until 23 January 2022; Christina and I saw it last month. The book is informative but hard on the eyes, with lines of type spread out both horizontally and vertically. Its colour reproduction is good, but some of its pictures are much smaller than the original book or page.
The Left-handed Twin by Thomas Perry. Mysterious Press, 2021. The ninth of Perry’s Jane Whitefield novels, featuring a Native American woman who helps people in fear of their lives disappear into a new identity. These books (since Vanishing Act, 1996) have been entertaining, sometimes gripping, but in the new story the author seems to have been concerned only to write a potboiler to attract fans of the series (clearly, it did the trick). The situations are familiar, and so is much of the dialogue. As in every book, Jane is teaching a frightened client to live a secret life, and as in Poison Flower (2012), criminals are trying to capture Jane in order to locate the people she has helped over the years. What we haven’t seen before is an ending this contrived and unsatisfying. With The Left-handed Twin (the title refers to Hanegoategeh, the Destroyer, a Native American devil figure), Perry has taken this series perhaps as far as it should go.
Nature’s Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World. Princeton University Prss, 2021. I need to preface this note with mention of The Anatomy of Colour: The Story of Heritage Paints and Pigments by Patrick Baty (Thames & Hudson, 2017; the U.S. edition, from the same publisher, is The Anatomy of Color – presumably someone felt that Americans would not buy the book with the -our spelling, but I did). I see that I bought The Anatomy of Colour in 2017, but didn’t read it until earlier this year or late last year, and seem to have overlooked it when writing previous Book Notes. Its history of paints is fascinating, and it has a strong bibliographical component, describing house-painting and colour manuals through the years, and it’s beautifully designed. Then, not too many months ago, I ran across an algorithm-generated recommendation for Nature’s Palette, which has a similar design aesthetic, and again the participation (but not sole authorship) of Patrick Baty, historic paint consultant. The later book, also a visual delight and bibliographically informative, takes as its point of departure the importance and influence of German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, devised in 1774 and subsequently expanded and refined by others.
All of the Marvels by Douglas Wolk. Profile Books, 2021. Wolk, a critic of music and comics, read 27,000-plus superhero books published by Marvel Comics in order to write about them as a vast, interconnected epic, and about their creators (especially Lee, Kirby, and Ditko) and their influence on popular culture. I don’t entirely buy the interconnected-epic argument, given the many restarts and reinventions since the Marvel stories began in the 1960s, but as an old (literally) comics hand, I found it interesting to read of Wolk’s journey and to look back on my own on-and-off experiences with Marvel. I was a Batman and Superman fan from the late fifties, following their titles as well as delighting in the occasional DC surprise, such as the Doom Patrol in My Greatest Adventure and the Metal Men in Showcase. Then, aged eleven, I ran across Fantastic Four no. 20, November 1963, ‘The Mysterious Molecule Man!’ and was hit hard by Jack Kirby’s art (much more so than by Stan Lee’s script). I didn’t know who these characters were, but suddenly Superman and Batman were prosaic in comparison. I started an X-Men run with no. 7 (‘The Return of the Blob!’), and Spider-Man with no. 9 (‘The Man Called Electro!’, wowed by Steve Ditko’s drawing) * – it was an exciting time. I gave up comics in high school, as my interests turned elsewhere (especially to Tolkien), but was drawn back in the early eighties when I read that Jean Grey of X-Men had died; at that time a comic hero’s death was not yet common, except in an ‘imaginary story’, and I was intrigued. Comics dealers having become a thing, I was able to find back issues, and became hooked by the Claremont and Byrne/Austin X-Men, Byrne’s ‘back to basics’ revamp of the Fantastic Four, and so much else (such as the Levitz/Giffen Legion of Super-heroes and the Wolfman/Pérez New Teen Titans, returning also to DC’s line).
Two days ago, the New York Times ran an article by Julie Lasky, ‘How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?’ Lasky quotes Reid Byers, author of the recent book The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom (Oak Knoll Press), who has coined the term book-wrapt ‘to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library’. Byers suggests 500 volumes as a minimum number for ‘any self-respecting home library’, though he allows that a smaller quantity is possible, in a smaller space. One of the accompanying photos shows a ‘book wall’ which is more whatnots than books, so really a cheat to think of it as a ‘library’. There are more than a thousand comments attached to the article as of this writing, predictably a blend of ‘never enough books’ and ‘get a Kindle’. (Yes. No.)
Tolkien Notes 20
This will be a shorter ‘Notes’ than usual, indeed very brief, as we’re pressed for time, with various appointments, landscape work on our property to do or be scheduled (we’ll have another post about our garden soon), car repairs, and so forth. But nothing Covid-related: we’re fully vaccinated, and life where we are, at least, has returned to mostly-maskless. Of course it’s less good in many other places, which is worrying. And there are still many restrictions on travelling.
In Tolkien news, addenda and corrigenda for our books (mainly addenda) are accumulating, and we’ll have another group of these posted to our website before long. We’re catching up with several books about Tolkien from the past few years, including Holly Ordway’s work on Tolkien’s reading, which have provided new information or different perspectives. There are also a number of Tolkien-related textual questions we’ve received, which we assure the writers we’ll answer, or try to.
Speaking of catching up, a long Zoom interview we gave on 25 February to four Portuguese-speaking Tolkien enthusiasts – but speaking in English to us – has just been posted to YouTube. For this, our thanks to Cesar, Inês, Ronald, and Sérgio. (It was a pleasant surprise to learn that Christina already knew Ronald Kyrmse, from correspondence back in the 1980s in regard to the linguistic journal Quettar.) The interview is one of many videos (most of them in Portuguese) on the YouTube channel ‘Tolkien Talk’, including some devoted to our books.
