10 Beautiful Books From Our Shelves

10 Beautiful Books From Our Shelves

By Lauren Hepburn

Some books should be judged by their covers. This is true in the case of many titles on our bookshelves, ten of which we list here. Though beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, unique details such as hand-painted illustrations, dazzling gold-leaf decorations and ornate designs and patterns; intricate craftsmanship demonstrated through embellished lettering, gilt edges and marbled endpapers; and the use of the highest quality materials, from soft Morocco leather to handmade paper, universally contribute to the aesthetics of the most beautiful book covers.

Read on to discover more about the most beautiful bindings Peter Harrington has in its collection, as chosen by our discerning experts. These books are not just for reading, they are works of art.

The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory; illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley

Top of the list is this rare set of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthurian epic The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur. These painted covers are especially scene-stealing, handmade in 1893 by famed binder Cedric Chivers using his signature “vellucent” technique (a process Chivers would patent in 1898). Each volume features a figure panel of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Malory’s work, designs which  took him 18 months to produce when he was just 20 years old; both vignettes are sweetly framed by soft floral borders. Chivers’ binding style is produced by hand-painting the backing sheet of the binding, which is subsequently covered in vellum that has been shaved to transparency then tooled in gilt.

Catherine de Medicis, Henri Bouchot

This opulent first edition of Bouchot’s historical biography of Catherine de Medici is a fine example of the 1,000 copies initially printed on handmade paper by Blanchet Frères et Kléber, bound in timeless burgundy morocco by Lucien Durvand, with gilt edges, marbled endpapers and a tricolour silk page-marker. The book was printed and engraved by Jean Boussod for art dealer Goupil & Cie in 1899, and showcases an elaborate interweaving pattern, deeply satisfying in its symmetry. The dazzling cover incorporates ornamental strapwork, fleur-de-lys, a central roundel with Catherine and Henri II’s conjoined ciphers inside a wreath of twined olive branches, as well as a banderole bearing Catherine’s motto “Bringing light and peace of mind” in Greek.

Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser

Francis Sangorski and George Sutcliffe were pioneers of jewelled leather bookbinding, their most famous of which, the “Great Omar” (1910), was lost with the Titanic. Their first jewelled binding covered an edition of Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion (held by the British Library) and many of its design elements are found on this manuscript of the same poem. On a backdrop of brown morocco, the front cover is set with garnets and turquoise, while Tudor-style roses on the centre of each side are composed of white, red and green onlays, within elaborate borders of scrolling vines. White cinquefoils decorate the spine alongside gilt lettering. Put simply, this exquisite binding is as precious as the stones adorning it.

 

A book of common prayer

Another example of preeminent bookbinder Cedric Chivers’ “vellucent” style, this elegant prayer book was likely so finely bound for presentation and includes an ink inscription indicating that it was indeed a very special gift. Bound in midnight-blue leather, its gold floral tooling is strikingly art deco before Art Deco, resonating with motifs one might find in the work of Scottish architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who was prolific in Scotland at the time. The showstopper here, however, is the prayer book’s front board, featuring two hand-painted angels flanking a mother-of-pearl cross, radiantly resembling stained glass. A truly heavenly item.

Ulysses, James Joyce

Expertly crafted in 1960 by Bennett Book Studio in New York, this first first edition, first impression of James Joyce’s Ulysses is bound in russet half-morocco leather with geometrically patterned paper covers in deep-sea green and cream, finished with a Jackson Pollock-worthy smattering of pink and blue; the compartmented spine also displays futuristic geometric designs alongside titles, all in gold leaf. An unusual and exciting design appropriate for a triumph of modernist literature.

Le Livre D’Amour, Blanche Butterworth Haggin

Bound by one of the best-known and most influential fin de siècle French binders, Léon Gruel’s atelier, this romantic cover perfectly complements its contents. A book of French love poetry including works by Charles Baudelaire, Christine de Pizan and Victor Hugo, it was compiled by San Francisco socialite Blanche Butterworth Haggin who dedicated the work to “A mon mari” – her husband. Bound in contemporary morocco in a shade of tan, it features intricate depictions of roses and tulips in pink, white, and blue, forest-green leaves, delicate posy bows in burgundy, and is completed with board edges also tooled with delicate blooms. Floral patterned endpapers and a silk book marker provide a finishing flourish.

Lord George Gordon Noel Byron: The Love Affairs of Lord Byron, by Francis Gribble

“Whether a book is called ‘The Love Affairs of Lord Byron’ or ‘The Life of Lord Byron’ can make very little difference to the contents of its pages. Byron’s love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost the only ones” – Francis Gribble’s statement in his preface to this collection is difficult to deny, thus Byron’s heroic portrait on this front cover seems perfectly apt for a collection of his amorous adventures. Framed by a Cosway-style binding by Bayntun Riviere, the oval miniature of Byron’s noble profile sits behind glass, his surrounds complete with red moiré silk endpapers, gilt edges and two scarlet silk bookmarks.

Cosway bindings are called after the famous Regency miniaturist Richard Cosway (though having no connection with him). Cosway binding was a style originally executed by Rivière & Son in the early years of the twentieth century for the London booksellers Henry Sotheran’s, Imitations are designated “Cosway-style” bindings.

Chansonnier dédié aux Demoiselles, Blanche Marguerite

An enchanting example of French glass binding, this songbook typifies the fragile binding technique. Father and son Pierre-Étienne and Louis Janets were well-known engravers and publishers of ephemera in luxury bindings, but of the Blanche Marguerite verse collection specifically, we can trace just one other copy at the Juliette K. and Leonard S. Rakow Library in New York, part of the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass. Encased in gilt metal with three-dimensional leaf and polka-dot details, thin glass panes cover grey and white marbled paper boards; a hand-coloured engraved illustration beneath the front panel depicts a cherubic winged woman delightedly posing in front of a looking glass, her attendant smiling behind her.

The Times Atlas of the World, Stuart Brockman (binder)

An excellent binding belonging to the renowned Wardington collection of atlases, this modern cover was crafted in 1993 by the celebrated Stuart Brockman of Oxfordshire’s Brockman Binders. Classic red morocco is boldly inlaid with black and green, tooled in gilt, and neatly finished with small gilt crests in the design’s corners and on spine ends. Stuart Brockman has received numerous accolades for his work, is a Fellow of Designer Bookbinders and has work held in the British Library as well as among private collections.

 

 

Sammy Jay

Sammy Jay

Interview by Lauren Hepburn.

How did you come to the rare book trade, and how have your responsibilities evolved in that time?   

My “origin story” is a bit crazy. About a decade ago, after tumbling out of my English Literature degree without much direction, I found a book on the bookshelves in my grandfather’s house that changed my life. 

I was looking through his library after he died, getting a sense of what he cared about (there was a lot of Romantic poetry, a connection I didn’t know we had – he was an economist), and on the top shelf, untouched and unnoticed for decades, was a first edition of Frankenstein, inscribed by Mary Shelley to Byron. Needless to say, this was a very significant and valuable book. My grandmother decided that it should continue its story, and be sold.  

That was how I encountered the rare book trade: the discovery opened the door to a whole world which I barely knew existed, peopled with dealers, collectors, and curators whose enthusiasm for all the things I cared about was what sustained them. So I jumped in with both feet and, after they handled the sale of Byron’s copy of Frankenstein in the spring of 2012, started working at Peter Harrington. 

Since then, I’ve worked at most aspects of the trade: packing and polishing in the post room, cataloguing mountains of books, holding the front line with the sales team during our Dover Street shop’s Christmas rush, tending the stand at book fairs in London and abroad and, in more recent years, moving into the buying side of things.  

Tell us about your current role at Peter Harrington.  

I look after the Modern Literature at Peter Harrington – though “modern” is a loose term, and my enthusiasm for Poetry in particular often has me reaching further into the past. Really, my passion is for literature in general, any feat of human imagination in word form. Essentially, if it didn’t happen, I’m interested.  

What this entails is a lot of buying – my main activity is scouring the globe in search of great books to fill our shelves, mostly through the internet these days, but we look forward to the return of book fairs and road trips. We have two shops to fill, and many ravenous customers, so I’m busy. But I absolutely love it. Making house calls is something I particularly cherish – seeing books in their “natural habitat” and helping people uncover the rarities is a delight, not least because you get to meet such lovely and interesting people. I work with our team of cataloguers to process what comes in. They’re always surprising me with their own discoveries and interpretations. 

Relationships with customers is also a big part of what I do; finding the right home for any given book is really rewarding. After almost a decade, many customers are by now old friends – I enjoy keeping them up to date about anything that might come in “with their name on it”, as it were, and it’s a pleasure to have some involvement in how their collections grow and develop – witnessing the unfolding of whatever story they’re trying to tell. 

 

You have responsibilities both buying and sell books, as well as curating catalogues – how do these roles intersect?  

Every year the process of buying culminates in a printed catalogue or two from the literature side. I set the theme for these and curate the selection, which I find personally extremely involving, and which sometimes presents an opportunity to reflect on current events. For example, last year’s Fantasy & Science Fiction catalogue came out during the dystopian nightmare of the first lockdown, and stories like E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops took on a renewed relevance. It’s very energising to me, the way in which all these treasures of the past can still speak to us today. It’s like T. S. Eliot said: “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”. 

So I suppose when I’m out buying I’m often, consciously or subconsciously, thinking about the next catalogue, as well as looking out for specific rarities which customers have asked us to hunt down. There’s an imaginary wall of “Wanted” posters in my head – and when you encounter one at a book fair it’s a question of shoot on sight! 

 

Tell us about one of your weirdest and most wonderful experiences working with Peter Harrington.   

I had a wonderfully bizarre half hour when a man walked in and sat down asking me whether we had any books “about either Richard II, or Abraham Lincoln”. “Two very specific and not obviously related people”, I replied, “What connects your interest?” At which he grinned widely and revealed to me that he was in fact the reincarnated person of them both. 

I think of this whenever people ask me “why do people collect books?” There are so many varied reasons! Plus, if anyone asks who the biggest celebrity we’ve ever had in the shop, I know my answer – Abraham Lincoln. 

The travel side of my work can also take me to unexpected places – there was a brief trip to Hawaii where we bought a huge collection of Hawaiiana, and we were woken each morning by a dawn chorus that sounded extra-terrestrial to ears used only to the cooing of London pigeons.  

 

What do you think the role of book dealers is in preserving items of historical significance? 

It’s a good question – sometimes we do get people seeing the things we have and saying, “but that should be in a museum!” I would challenge the assumption that items being in private hands is in some way inimical to their preservation or even, necessarily, their accessibility. Byron’s Frankenstein, for example, was purchased by a British private collector, but they have several times allowed it to be included in public exhibitions around the world. 

Dealers working with collectors play their part in recognising (and thereby raising) the value of books and manuscripts, which has the knock-on effect of making their owners more careful with them. The number of books which we spend significant money preserving with judicious repair work, or for which customers order fire-proof solander boxes from our Chelsea Bindery, is worth remembering, too. 

It’s a sad thought but if these sorts of books weren’t worth money, many would end up in the skip. As it is, however, people who discover interesting items at home bring them to us, and we set to work finding appreciative new custodians for them. I hope that arrangement is good for everybody, including the books.

We do have great relationships with various libraries and museums too, and when we find something that really should be in a particular institutional collection, we do what we can to facilitate that.

 

You recently helped curate an exhibition to accompany a Fendi fashion show – can you tell us how this came about and what your contribution was? 

Yes, it was very exciting – and unexpected! The connection to Fendi came through their Artistic Director of Couture and Womenswear, Kim Jones, who is himself a great collector of books. During the pandemic we enjoyed chatting about books together, and one of his great passions is Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. When it came to his debut couture collection last January, he themed it around Orlando and the great love story between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and he asked me to help curate an exhibition of books and manuscripts from his personal collection in a side-room at the show. It was a thrill to see rare books thrust into this kind of limelight – the video for the show stars Demi Moore gingerly leafing through the first edition of Orlando which Woolf inscribed to Sackville-West. It was also very gratifying to see how collecting can be a creative process: old creations giving inspiration to new.

What projects are you currently working on?   

We’re right now putting out our latest catalogue on the broad theme of “Poetry”. It’s a question of coming full circle for me, as that was the subject of my very first catalogue for Peter Harrington, five years ago. There’s some incredible things in there – our first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which I dearly love) has promotional broadsides stuck in by the poet himself, and holding it gives me full-blown ASMR. It was one of the very first copies ever to cross the Atlantic for a British readership, being a promotional copy sent to the editor of the Edinburgh Review.

 

If you could have any book in Peter Harrington’s collection for yourself, what would it be? 

There are long-since-sold books which I sometimes remember with a pang – we had a copy of the Rubaiyat which Dylan Thomas owned as a drunken teenager, or Aubrey Beardsley’s own copy of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, owned before he started work on his illustrated edition, with a drawing of Merlin in the front. Those sorts of things set my imagination on fire.

But right now, the book that blows my mind is actually the 1488 first edition in Greek of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, printed at the height of the Florentine Renaissance, before the French war and Savonarola turned things sour for anyone fond of poetry or pagans. For me, it marks an exciting moment in history when two unrelated forces met: the technology of printing (introduced in Europe only three decades earlier) travelling south into Italy from Germany and encountering waves of Greek scholars moving west after the sack of Constantinople, bringing with them their language, their learning, and their manuscripts.

I don’t know where I’d put it, though – the two huge folio volumes bound in bright red leather would look rather out of place in my flat. Still, I wouldn’t say no!

Sammy’s Picks

LE GUIN, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. £1250.

WHITMAN, Walt. Leaves of Grass. £295000. 

This rare English issue of the first edition of Leaves of Grass was one of the first copies ever to cross the Atlantic for a British readership, being a promotional copy sent to the editor of the Edinburgh Review – the literary scene of the Old Country was hardly ready for Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”. What really moves me (aside from the poem) are the broadsides stuck in by the poet himself, touting his own brilliance.

THOMAS, Dylan. Selections from his Writings Read by the Poet – Volume I. £2750.

This record has Dylan Thomas mischievously inscribing “my name rhymes with villain!” for a fan in New York, while he was on his alcoholic downward spiral. Recordings like this that capture of the voice of the poet are so valuable for posterity, and I could listen to him reading, or rather incantating, “Fern Hill” anytime.

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. Adonais. £1500.

This is edition of Shelley’s eulogy for Keats, which was really a pre-emptive eulogy for himself, is in a lovely little Arts & Crafts binding. Also: “Life, like a dome of many coloured glass, / stains the white radiance of eternity” – I’m still unpacking that

SAPPHO; WHARTON, Henry Thornton (trans.) Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings. £675.

This scarce edition marked an important moment in making Sappho – the idea of her as well as the few gleaming fragments that remain of her poetry – accessible to the general English reader. Wharton prints the original Greek alongside his own literal translation, and selects from several prior poetic interpretations. If you care about poetry of any kind, having a sense of Sappho is essential – she was the original poet.

OLIVER, Mary. Twelve Moons. £750.

Mary Oliver has been a constant companion over the past few years, and I have been enjoying watching her growing in popularity, particularly in the rare book market! This is early collection is scarce and has some great poems – try “The Night Traveller”.

KEROUAC, Jack. On the Road. £3250.

On the Road is a book I love. I took my own cross-country American road trip at the age of 22, in pursuit of the myth Kerouac conjured up in these pages – seeing this volume on the shelf always brings back memories.

FROST, Robert. Mountain Interval. £3750.

This copy has a really meaningful inscription. Mountain Interval has Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” in it, a meditation on the fork-in-the-road decision taken by his friend the poet Edward Thomas, who chose to go to the front (where he was soon killed), versus Frost’s own decision to return to America from England at the outset of the war, and take up a teaching position at Amherst College. This copy was inscribed by Frost to one of his Amherst students, who then chose to sign up and go to fight in Europe, and so many Americans did. I wonder what Frost thought – did his student read “The Road Not Taken” correctly?

COHEN, Ira (ed.) Gnaoua. £2250.

This scarce little one-shot Beat magazine from Tangiers was one of several hipness-heightening nick-nacks artfully strewn around for the cover photograph of Bob Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home. You can see it on the mantelpiece!

Censure vs. CensorshipBanned books and the legacy of Lolita

Censure vs. Censorship
Banned books and the legacy of Lolita

By Lauren Hepburn

When Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known and most scandalous novel, Lolita, was published in the USA in 1958, it topped bestsellers lists. Selling 100,000 copies in its first three weeks, it was on its third printing within just a few days, and shot the author to fame in the country. Until then, Nabokov, an émigré in the US, had struggled to find an American publisher bold enough to back his book and had – like James Joyce before him, for the similarly controversial Ulysses – looked to Paris for a supporter. In Nabokov’s case, this was Olympia Press, a publisher which, at the time, had a reputation comparable to that of Mills & Boon. Olympia printed 5,000 copies in 1955, all of which sold. Customs officials in the United Kingdom were soon instructed to seize copies of the book at the border, and a year later it was also banned in France.  

As the remarkable correspondence accompanying this copy of the first edition reveals, Olympia Press defiantly continued printing and selling the book illicitly following the bans, increasing its price by one third, from 900 to 1,200 francs per copy. Its widespread censorship had failed to suppress public appetite for the story of Nabokov’s eloquent, witty protagonist Humbert Humbert, who details in this fictional memoir his paedophilic obsession and relationship with 12-year-old “nymphet”, Dolores (whom he nicknames Lolita).   

First edition, this copy accompanied by a revealing trove of correspondence relating to the censorship of Lolita, as well as works of Jean Genet, and other Olympia Press books, between American screenwriter Theodore Reeves (1910-1973), and Olympia Press’s Ian Shine. Highly revealing of the mechanics of literary censorship from the point of view of an American customer. 1955. £12,500. If you are interested in this item please do not hesitate to contact us.

Early reception of the novel demonstrates how polarising it was. While its sales success proved its popularity, a New York Times review described it as “repulsive . . . highbrow pornography” (qtd. by Cooper, The New Yorker). At the same time as London’s Sunday Times judged it one of the best books of 1955, a reviewer at the Sunday Express considered it “the filthiest book ever read” (qtd. by Boyd, 1991). Although Nabokov had been rejected by multiple American publishers, the man who finally took on Lolita, Walter Minton of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, actively pursued it:

Minton got hold of an excerpt of the novel, via the unlikely agency of an exotic dancer named Rosemary Ridgewell, in whose living room he once fell asleep after a night on the town. “I woke in the middle of the night and there was this story on the table. I started reading. By morning, I knew I had to publish it.” (Cooper, The New Yorker.) 

Perhaps surprisingly, Lolita was never banned in the United States (though it was in Canada). This may have been the legacy of Hon. John M. Woolsey, whose decision in the case The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses”, in 1933, deemed Joyce’s epic nonobscene. Woolsey’s decision is described as “monumental” by Nabokov in Lolita’s foreword.  

As the discipline of psychology and our understanding of sexual abuse and its lasting damage have advanced, Lolita is more categorically recognised as a story of paedophilia and child abuse told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Dictionary definitions of ‘Lolita’ testify to the historically unsympathetic attitude towards Nabokov’s 12-year-old character: 

‘a precociously seductive girl.’ (merriam-webster.com) 

‘a young girl who has a very sexual appearance or behaves in a very sexual way.’ (dictionary.cambridge.org) 

True to its nature of contrasts and controversy, Lolita is also considered a masterpiece and is taught on curriculums, referenced in diverse artistic works and has been adapted for screen and stage; it is widely regarded as a triumph of late modernist literature.  

Theatrical release poster for the 1962 film Lolita, the first cinematic adaptation.

Though an early admirer of Lolita, literary critic Lionel Trilling nonetheless described the knife-edge any reader of the tale balances upon: 

we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting. (Trilling, qtd. by de la Durantaye, 2005.) 

Humbert Humbert’s irony, sarcasm and intelligence are appealing; we find ourselves somehow complicit in his actions. There are arguments for the literary and even moral value in this. Andrew Koppelman, in a 2005 essay for the Columbia Law Review questioning the legality of literary censorship, quotes American literary critic Wayne C. Booth: 

Booth concedes that even the most malign material, such as the pornographic novels of the sociopath Marquis de Sade, can offer “the by-no-means contemptible gift of providing fodder for ethical discourse, including my own” (Koppelman, 2005). 

Koppelman himself argues that attractive portrayals of perverse characters “are risky, but morally valuable, precisely because they help to dispel the notion that evil is wholly other” (ibid.).  

Telegram Announcing prohibition of the novel ‘Lolita’ in New Zealand, 1959.

In Dirt for Art’s Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson traces the history of books that were once vilified and banned but are now considered canonical literature. Naturally, Lolita features. Ladenson describes the modern shift away from book banning as somewhat objective:

Two ideas which had already been circulating for sometime in the form of avant-garde heresy, gradually became accepted clichés, and then grounds for legal defence. The first is most conveniently encapsulated in the formula ‘art for art’s sake’ the notion that a work of art functions on its own terms, exists in a realm independent of conventional morality, and should therefore be exempt from the strictures of moral judgement. The second is that of ‘realism’. The idea that the function of the work of art may legitimately include and perhaps should even obligatorily take on, the representation of all aspects of life, including the more unpleasant and sordid. Both these ideas now seem obvious, but they were unmentionable for a very long time. (Ladenson, 2007, qtd. by A. G. Noorani, 2007.) 

No matter one’s subjective opinion of Lolita, censorship is inherently at odds with the democratic necessity of freedom of expression. Political commentator A. G. Noorani has framed this more categorically: “Book banning is a civilised form of the vice of book-burning which is a sure symptom of fascim” (ibid.). Whether or not one agrees, Lolita will continue to be published, read, studied, championed and indeed deeply criticised for a long time to come. 

Why do we use Catalogues in the Rare Book World?

Why do we use Catalogues in the Rare Book World?

Lauren Hepburn talks to Adam Douglas, Head Cataloguer at Peter Harrington about the importance of the book catalogue within the rare books trade.

 

Tell us more about what you do as Head Cataloguer at Peter Harrington.

I’m in charge of overall standards, making sure that we all write our book descriptions to an agreed set pattern. I don’t want to cramp anyone’s individual style, but customers like to know where to look for the information they need. If one cataloguer mentions the binding in the very first line of the description and another cataloguer leaves it until the last paragraph, it can be confusing.

I trained most of our existing cataloguers, and I wrote the house style manual, which guides our cataloguers on matters great and small, like whether “dust jacket” has a hyphen or not. (It doesn’t.) I also teach cataloguing skills at the annual York Antiquarian Book Seminars.

 

What is the importance of printed catalogues within the trade?

Traditionally, print catalogues were the main method of distance-selling rare books. A sole dealer might have been able to get by with single offers by letter or telephone, but a book catalogue is more efficient and showed that they were a proper going concern.

Saving books up for a catalogue is a seasonal ritual for most booksellers. Issuing them helps remind customers that the bookseller is still plugging away, even if they don’t want anything from the current offering.

The most prestigious dealers issued lavish catalogues that have become reference works in their own right – grand dealers like Bernard Quaritch, Maggs Bros., Martin Breslauer, H. P. Kraus. All good dealers have shelves of old dealers’ catalogues which help them in their research. It’s my aspiration to keep producing book catalogues for Peter Harrington that live up to those high standards.

 

What are the main functions and benefits of using print catalogues?

Printed catalogues give the potential buyer time to contemplate the item on offer, read through sometimes lengthy descriptions at their leisure, and consider buying a book, without the time pressure auctioneers rely on to get people to make up their minds. They also get the opportunity to browse through other items they may not otherwise have considered. The internet is brilliant for finding books, but it tends to narrow down the search to only one or two items. A print catalogue is more like browsing the shelves of a well-managed bookshop.

As booksellers who issue catalogues, we have a golden opportunity to show the same kind of taste and judgement that goes into buying our stock. It’s hard to imagine that a bookseller who issues an ugly, badly produced catalogue cares much about the aesthetic appeal of the books they offer for sale.

A book catalogue collection from Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Have book catalogues evolved over time?

In the past, every dealer worth his or her salt issued a book catalogue, from the flimsiest photocopied list to a massive hardbound book. From the 1980s desktop publishing and cheap colour photography greatly improved the general appearance of booksellers’ catalogues. Nowadays, the influence of digital platforms is beginning to show in the formats of print catalogues. Many innovative dealers are beginning to chafe against the old restrictions and dare to try different layouts and presentations. But rare bookselling and collecting is by definition a refuge for traditionalists – old habits die hard.

 

What goes into the creation of a Peter Harrington catalogue?

We start with the choice of books, whether it’s going to be a specialist selection or one of our seasonal miscellanies. If it’s a selection, one of our book specialists will be closely involved, choosing the books and arranging their order, as well as writing an introduction. All the books will have been photographed beforehand, but sometimes we might ask Ruth, our photographer, to take additional shots that will suit a particular spread we have in mind.

We then gather the books together and the editorial team reads through the descriptions once more, checking for consistency, accurate condition reports, and any little errors that may have crept in. We also use this time to freshen supporting notes that may have been too frequently used in the past, sometimes rewriting them altogether to suit a new context.

In a collaborative process with our print designer, we then create layouts of the text and images, usually aiming to produce a 100-page catalogue. At that point there is often more photography required; an index is a useful addition, if necessary; then proofreading, more proofreading, another round of proofreading. And then, off to the printers, who usually take two weeks to print, bind, and post them out (which gives us time to spot the errors we’ve missed!)

 

How do the print and digital spheres interact and collaborate at Peter Harrington?

That’s a fascinating question, and the answer is that they’re still in flux. For several years now we’ve been able to send our catalogues in PDF format, which means that the customer can print the pages themselves, much as they would see them in the physical catalogue, although not so well reproduced. New digital publishing formats mean that we can design much more interesting multimedia digital publications, but there is still some resistance to novelty. Collectors are like cats – they don’t appreciate change.

There is no doubt that digital publication requires a briefer presentation. It’s tough to read long descriptions on a screen. In the digital age catalogue descriptions need to be shorter, snappier, pithier. That’s the challenge – to tighten up our descriptions without sacrificing accuracy and vital information.

Our website offers the same full-length descriptions as our print catalogues, but we present the elements of our descriptions in a slightly different order. It’s a new mise-en-page, a new visual grammar, and we’re still learning how to do it best. The advantage the website has over a printed catalogue is that we can attach as many photographs as necessary to each description and also add 360° videos which allow the customer a much more detailed look at bindings, and give a more accurate picture of the book as a physical object .

 

What do you think the future of catalogues will be?

Given the fact that the rare books trade is centred on love for and appreciation of the printed book, I think that the printed book catalogue and its digitally formatted first cousin will show a remarkable resilience. If you love old books, you probably love reading booksellers’ catalogues, even if they are occasionally a little fusty and filled with obscure jargon.

The more innovative rare booksellers who produce catalogues are showing ways to create more attractive publications – less stuffy but without sacrificing honest, accurate descriptions.

Suzanna Beaupré

Suzanna Beaupré

Interview by Lauren Hepburn

How did you come to be a cataloguer at Peter Harrington?

Slightly by chance! I wasn’t aware of the rare book world until I started job hunting upon completing my history degree. I had specialised in my final year in material and visual culture and was looking for a role that would let me continue research from that angle, and there was Peter Harrington offering the perfect mix!

What brings you the most excitement about working with a rare book dealer? 

I think, for me, it’s the very physical connection to the past that you experience when you discover an inscription or note laid into a book. I’m a big proponent of writing in your new books (although maybe not in the ones you buy from us…) so that historians have a future record to work from. I get huge excitement from seeing inscriptions such as the one in our copy of The Accomplish’d Housewife (1745), owned by one Mary Bacon, who wrote inside, “Mary Bacon – her book. 1775 Steal not this book for fear of shame for here you find the owner’s name Mary Bacon Her Book”. It’s likely this copy belonged to the Mary Bacon (1743–1818) who is the subject of Ruth Facer’s 2010 micro-history Mary Bacon’s World: A Farmer’s Wife in Eighteenth-century Hampshire (2010), and I was pleased, during lockdown, to see the inscription used for a Society for Renaissance Studies online event on early modern conceptions of book provenance. It’s always fun when a book you have started to research is picked up as part of a wider discussion. 

The Accomplish’d Housewife; or, the gentlewoman’s companion. 1745.

A similar example of this tangible connection with the past was in one of my favourite recent items, the Rebecah Childe manuscript ‘receipt’ book. I studied food history, which has led to me becoming involved in some of our cookery material here, and the immediacy of seeing authentic signs of use such as a cookery stain on a recipe is always a rush. 

Another simple joy that comes from working in this industry is the range of time periods we work across; the surreal nature of looking at your desk and seeing a 1595 Daemonolatreiae, a pulp edition of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, and a book of Maya Angelou’s poetry published in 1971, as if, in some way, time has been collapsed in the shop.

How do you feel that the industry contributes to the preservation of culture and history? 

I used to feel like we were the shady underside to the more upstanding library and curatorship industry, but increasingly I see the potential for us to work in partnership with these institutions to source items for public benefit. We have the time and resources to uncover unique and important items where institutions are often a bit more squeezed. 

An example of how my job now colours everything I do (beyond not being able to listen to my favourite history podcasts without madly searching for first editions of the books mentioned) was my visit to the excellent Thomas Becket exhibition, currently showing at the British museum. I loved it but I couldn’t help thinking a copy of the first edition, first impression, of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral would have sat well in it (750 copies were published in May 1935 and were sold at its production in Canterbury Cathedral). It might also have been fun to have included another item we have; actor Michael Miller’s working copy of the final script for the 1964 film Becket possibly with a clip of the film running alongside. Although, I may well only be suggesting that as it’s such a treat to see Peter O’Toole’s depiction of Henry II!

When certain things come up, such as the Honresfield Library sale, I can come over all Indiana Jones – “it belongs in a museum!” – so finding a perfect institutional home for an item can be rewarding. Institutional ownership doesn’t always guarantee that the item will be more accessible, however, and depends hugely on the resources a given institution has at their disposal. The painstaking research undertaken by cataloguers in the rare book trade is not always preserved, and items are sometimes not easily available to view, either in person or through an approachable digital database.

We are always keen to increase access to the items we hold here – and whenever we receive enquiries from researchers interested in learning more about a certain book or piece of ephemera we are always happy to help by providing photographs, or arranging in-person viewings.

You often focus on women’s work and helped curate Peter Harrington’s first catalogue dedicated to female authors and artists. How do you go about purchasing and spotlighting female authors and artists? 

We are continually on the lookout for authors whose importance has been hidden by the misogynistic mists of time and are currently gathering items for a second catalogue of women’s works to follow our 2019 Works by Exceptional Women catalogue (cat. 151). There has definitely been a shift in the rare book trade to recognise the blindingly obvious importance of collecting female authors and, consequently, a lot of exciting material is emerging.

Two of my favourite items included in Works by Exceptional Women were a collection of fashion magazines that belonged to a successful female entrepreneur, and Mary Hays’s obituary of Mary Wollstonecraft in The Annual Necrology for 1797–8

I was also very excited recently to get hold of the first English edition of Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night (1954), the original version of which was first published in German in 1938. I came across the Pushkin Press 2019 reissue of Jane Degras’ translation and fell in love, so I immediately started the hunt for a first edition. It’s a remarkable work which has never been out of print in Germany, detailing Ritter’s 1934 stay on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen.

RITTER, Christiane. A Woman in the Polar Night. Translated by Jane Degras. 1954.

You also specialise in more niche themes – what led you to specialise in them? 

Nosiness, largely! Spotting interesting books on my colleagues’ desks and asking questions or seeing if I could get involved with them. One example of this involved a sample catalogue of albumen photos of late Victorian London, which I was excitingly able to date after spotting a promotional poster in the background of one images for the German Exhibition of 1891, and an advertisement for the first performance of Charles Reade’s comedy Nance Oldfield, in which Ellen Terry took the leading role (a role which she reprised for Cicely Hamilton’s 1909 suffrage fundraiser A Pageant of Great Women). This, I think, sparked my interest in the books we get which demonstrate the entanglement of Victorian cultural life and politics – the connections and overlap between the fight for suffrage, worker’s rights, socialism, vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionists, later Esperanto proponents, and, throughout much of it, a great deal of spiritualism and theosophy. Having also previously studied early modern witchcraft through the lens of visual culture, the adoption of the occult by these various left-wing movements is fascinating. From Matter to Spirit (1863) by Elizabeth Sophie de Morgan offers a good example of these conjoining forces. 

A slightly later witchcraft-related story I particularly love involves one of my favourite novels, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Upon reading it, Virginia Woolf asked Warner how she knew so much about the lives of witches, to which she simply replied, “because I am one.

A related area which I love to catalogue is private press books. I am a devotee of the Cuala Press books, one half of the Cuala Industries, a co-operative business run by Lily and Elizabeth Yeats following a split from the equally attractive Dun Emer Press. Cuala Industries was founded with the aim of reviving the craft of book printing in Ireland and “to give work to Irish girls”. They combined Irish Nationalist, feminist, socialist, and artistic interests into one press. Their output’s distinctive and simple style is beautiful. Women played a key role as binders and illuminators in the private press movement. Florence Kingsford Cockerell and Anastasia Power at the Essex House press produced some stunning pieces, and there was an upsurge in amateur calligraphy and bindings, often embroidered, during this time. I love getting examples of these into the shop; seeing the time and care put into the craft of the printed book.

Peter Harrington is best-known for its rare book collections, but in fact offers precious material in diverse mediums. Can you describe some of the items you’ve worked with other than written texts? 

Absolutely – despite being a book shop you never know what you will end up with on your desk. One recent item that springs to mind is the Bea Nettles Mountain Dream Tarot set – the first known photographic tarot deck. Ours is signed by the artist.

Some other, older items I have worked with include photographs taken by Californian historian Frances Rand Smith in 1918 of architect Henry A. Minton’s model of the Mission Santa Cruz and a collection of woodcut proofs for Wuthering Heights, each signed by the artist.

NETTLES, Bea.
Mountain Dream Tarot. 1975.

What has been one of your most standout experiences working with Peter Harrington? 

There have been many moments where I have stepped back and thought, “wow, what I’m holding is incredible”. Condolence letters sent to Vanessa Bell after Virginia Woolf’s death have this effect; a beautiful unrestored copy of the first edition, first issue, of Dracula had a similar impact on me, as always do any books inscribed by Queen Victoria. Finally, I had this same sense of awe about a beautiful set of The Lord of the Rings in our recent fantasy catalogues In Other Worlds: Fantasy, Science Fiction and Beyond, which I had a ball cataloguing for. 

As a single experience, cataloguing a collection of material relating to Hawaii has been my biggest and most rewarding challenge. It was a fascinating deep dive, taking me from the earliest printed works on the islands, through the colonial struggle for possession of the land, and up to, following the inclusion of the islands as a U.S. state in 1959, technicolour American tourist guides from the 1960s.