There’s reason to celebrate – the Fox Inn in Stourton has cancelled a Woodland Hunt’s end of season supper. The owners wouldn’t comment but it is not the first pub to disassociate itself from such organised crime groups.
The Anchor in Exebridge no longer hosts the Quantock Staghounds, the Raven Inn in Powys decided not to host the South Shropshire’s Boxing Day meet, the First and Last Inn in Cornwall likewise a lunch after the Western Hunt was famously filmed killing pet cat Mimi.
Perhaps the most significant refusal to host hunts at all was by the owners of the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor, where meets had taken place for hundreds of years.
In Animal Trust I wrote: “It’s surprising that in the twenty-first century so many pubs, apart from bearing names like The Tally-ho, The Pheasant, The Fox and Hounds, continue to adorn their walls with prints of hunting scenes.” And in Animal Wild: “I often feel bombarded with news, images and videos of fox persecution. I don’t need to go online though, it’s the motif of many pubs not just in their wallpaper and cheap repro framed prints, but in their names. Why should people have to endure this whilst they are trying to eat, drink and socialise? Renaming and redecoration would be a very welcome change. That might seem too much to ask for such a dyed in the wool tradition, but racist pub names have pretty much been done away with, so I don’t see why those which celebrate the cruelty of hunting animals with dogs and other blood sports should not do the same.”
There is nothing like repeating oneself to make a point I seem to have been thinking, but I do think this is an issue which an organisation like PETA could effectively take on, and indeed I have suggested it to them.
The Jamaica Inn was further immortalised in Daphne Du Maurier’s novel of 1936 and subsequently the Alfred Hitchcock film in 1939. We don’t have a copy of the first edition of the novel in stock at the moment, but there are two outstanding copies on the market in their dust-wrappers, one a presentation copy, one signed, by the author, at around £18,600 and £10,750 respectively.
We do however have a lovely copy of another tale of smuggling, piracy and derring-do, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Chatto & Windus, 1929. A signed copy (not one of ours) with the dust-wrapper and the rare wraparound band is available for £600. It was first published in its entirety in America in the same year under the title An Innocent Voyage, so this is the First English Edition. Prior to both, was an abridged version published in the periodical Life and Letters, edited by Desmond MacCarthy, also 1929, of which we have a copy in stock as well.
The 1965 film of the book featured not only a young Martin Amis, whose father Kingsley’s working library we sold to the Huntington Library in San Marino, and who later wrote of the book that it was “thrillingly good”, but also the writer and actor Brian Phelan, the sale of whose archive we handled and are still involved with. By a very strange coincidence, I visited Brian just a few days before writing and researching this.
Continuing the Jamaican theme, Ian Fleming enthusiasts and collectors are familiar with the story that James Bond’s name was taken from the author of Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936 by The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Signed first editions of that book have become so sought after that two copies now on the market are priced at around £10,000 and £13,000. Fleming was a keen bird-watcher and he named his Jamaican estate Goldeneye, although this apparently had nothing to do with the species of duck of that name. What I did not know but learnt from lunch with our lovely business insurance broker, Joe, was that his father, Richard Thompson, also spent a great deal of time in Jamaica and was likewise an ornithologist. So the story goes, it was Richard’s copy from which Fleming derived his Eureka! moment. We did but no longer have a copy of Mary Wickham Bond’s book, How 007 got his name, Collins, 1966, which included a plate showing the only occasion when her husband and Fleming met. The dust-wrapper is by Richard Chopping who designed most of those for the Bond series.
My father, Anthony Rota, also handled the sale, to Eton College, of a manuscript notebook of Fleming’s, of which he wrote in his own autobiographical work, Books in the Blood, Private Libraries Association and Oak Knoll Press, 2002, that Fleming had jotted on one page “Scrambled eggs and coffee, the only two things that never let you down.”
I sold a fine copy of the first edition of the first Bond book, Casino Royale, in its dust-wrapper, in 2006, for over £10,000, which was then a record-breaking price. A copy as good as that now would fetch six or seven times that, there’s a signed copy on the market for £80,000 and another, unsigned, for an eye-watering almost £117,000. I question some of the claims made for that copy in the description. As my father used to say, it’s not even a rare book, as evidenced by the number of copies on sale today.
I love that Fleming was also author of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang series and that the screenplay for the film was written by Roald Dahl. A fine set of those three books might set you back £2,000.
This has just arrived – I could not resist acquiring a copy any longer.
This is a late edition, the sixth in fact. Details of the first are above, the second was published in 1947, the first Macmillan edition, followed by four revised Collins editions from 1960 (the author, in his preface, describes the first, second and third editions as separate books), so a bookseller can legitimately call the latter two “first editions thus”. This then is the fourth Collins edition, 1979. Originally called Field Guide of the Birds … it was Collins who changed the title to, simply, Birds of the West Indies, a guide to the species of birds that inhabit the Greater Antilles, Lesser Antilles & Bahama Islands. It has map end-papers, black-and-white illustrations and charming colour plates, a list of vagrants and an index. Each bird description includes a list of local names given to them.
Bond, James Bond (couldn’t resist) amusingly notes in the preface that “it is wise to bear in mind that a West Indian when asked the name of the bird he does not know is apt to conjure up one that he thinks is suitable”. I can confirm from recent experience that this can still be the case. He also describes the ‘native’ inhabitants of all the islands as “extremely pleasant and hospitable” and advises that “one should accept and reciprocate the many courtesies that are offered to strangers”.
Haile Selassie at the Royal Academy of Arts
To give more (but not all) of his full name and titles, Ras Tafari Makonnen, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, invariably in the reggae world followed by a triumphant/defiant/celebratory cry “Jah! Rastafari!”, can now be seen in the courtyard of the venerable institution on Piccadilly in London. He is at the centre of an astonishing sculpture, The First Supper, by Tavares Strachan both in homage and answer to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
The sculpture is made of bronze, painted in matte black and gold.
Other figures represented are the artist himself, and black pioneers and activists in many fields of endeavour: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisholm, Marcus Garvey, Zumbi dos Palamares, Mary Seacole, Matthew Henson, Marsha P. Johnson, King Tubby, Derek Walcott, and Robert Henry Lawrence, the first African-American astronaut.
The exhibition and accompanying book, Entangled Pasts 1768 – Now, Art Colonialism and Change, Royal Academy of Arts, 2024, is intended to “reflect on [the Academy’s] role in helping to establish a canon of Western art history within the contexts of British colonialism, empire and enslavement” (from the introduction to the book by Dorothy Price and Sarah Lea).
I am reliably informed that the rest of the exhibition is just as spectacular, mind-blowing, thought-provoking and deeply moving.
I am always interested in protest and activism and am reminded of how proud my father was when he brought about the sale of the archive of C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian writer and activist, and like Marcus Garvey, pan-Africanist, to the University of the West Indies in 1997. In those days records of such sales were kept on “Visicards” and this is the relevant one:
Only the notes in pencil and red ink are in my father’s hand. He was very much of the generation of having a secretary to carry out the physical acts of writing and typing. The University seems to have decided to go ahead within a couple of months which seems remarkably speedy – these things tend to take a very great deal longer. I am sure that the named executor would have been Benedict (M., not N.) Birnberg, the great radical lawyer and human rights campaigner.
I am especially interested in the power of protest songs and a few favourites came to mind when I was thinking about it the other day. Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, High Wire from the Rolling Stones 1991 live Flashpoint album, a rare foray into the political arena for them, protesting the Persian Gulf War, and War Pigs by Black Sabbath. The only trouble with War Pigs is, for me, the opening lines: “Generals gathered in their masses, Just like witches at black masses.” It bugs me every time. Surely with a little more effort another rhyme could have been found for “masses” other than “masses” or failing that, completely rewrite the lines. It doesn’t bug me nearly as much as the grammar of Live and Let Die by Wings though – I am not much of a McCartney fan anyway but this I cannot listen to. “In this ever-changing world in which we live in…” Give me strength.
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