I’ve realised I can set my watch by the Great Spotted Woodpecker. She arrives each morning between 10.20 and 10.25 and feeds for about five minutes. Mostly, the smaller birds hang back but not one brave Great Tit who joined the GSW at the feeder this morning. The photo shows her with her tail curved under the feeder as mentioned in a previous post. The garden birds generally seem to be becoming ever less nervous of me.
Eating dogs
I have never felt comfortable criticising the consumption of dogs for food. It really is only a cultural difference (I think the distinction is that in the west we tend not to eat other carnivores). We keep dogs as pets and therefore are repelled and appalled by their being maltreated and eaten, but pigs, for example, are at least as intelligent if not more so. Animals have emotions, can suffer and feel pain, no matter what the species (above a certain level in the tree of life as far as we know so far). The jury is very much out as to whether trees may be sentient. We have finally accepted that lobsters, for example, are. The dogs in Korea live horrible lives but then so do the vast majority of our farm animals. Any step towards ending or at least minimising our exploitation of animals is to be welcomed, such as this news from Korea.
Fate of half million dogs unclear as dog meat ban nears – The Korea Times
The question arises as to what happens to the nigh on half a million dogs already kept in cages on farms. Clearly rescues do not have the capacity to take them all. I think it’s spurious not to move forward on this basis, just as is the case made by the hunting industry that their hounds would have to be killed in the wake of a ban on trail hunting. That is manifestly untrue in any case, but even if it were not, great sadness though mass slaughter would be, if that is the awful cost then so be it, I am very reluctant to say. We seem to have few qualms about the mass killings of animals, during outbreaks of disease. In the case of foot and mouth disease, of cows and their calves, sheep and their lambs, six million of them – and it was entirely unnecessary. In the case of BSE, it would have been good if we hadn’t being turning herbivores into cannibals in the first place. When prices for pig meat plummeted, at least 30,000 (DEFRA does not actually keep such data) were killed in 2022 for economic reasons and labour supply issues.
One of the worst anti-vegetarian arguments I have heard is, “What would we do with all the sheep?” Sheep farming is not profitable and heavily subsidised. I love sheep, but we don’t need to keep producing them. Populations would eventually dwindle, we could maintain rare breeds and perhaps just learn to share the planet with our fellow creatures.
Books, manuscripts and digitisation
The image at the head of this post shows one page an autograph fragment of significance. When we were handling the sale of Hilary Mantel’s archive, in tranches, to the Huntington Library in California, it came to light. Hilary had purchased it in Paris in 1993 when she was preoccupied with the French Revolution. It is by a key figure in it, Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794) and dates from 1793. Essentially, he argues for moderation and a free press at a time when it was very dangerous to do so. He was arrested and executed in 1794.
There is a long-lived e-newsletter for booksellers, Shepherd’s Confidential. It tends to include news of upcoming auctions, auction results, new catalogues and stories and links regarding record prices and so on. The editor introduces the latest issue with a piece welcoming the digitisation of the contents of libraries, in particular the Gilson Library in Saffron Walden which received £139,000 for the purpose from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. I have no idea why the process is so expensive. I am not of course against digitisation (I love the pdfs of the great natural history colour plate books from the nineteenth century which I use to illustrate some of my posts) which makes material accessible to so many, wherever in the world they may be, but I am equivocal about the level of priority it is given nowadays and I feel that the editor might have sounded a warning note. It should not be at the expense of acquisition of original materials. If there is no money for that, important archives may be lost forever. I wrote the article below around a decade ago. I don’t think I ever published it anywhere (probably for fear of alienating most of my customers), but I stand by it.
I am fortunate enough to have visited the houses of Bob Marley, Charles Darwin and Gandhi (the one in Mumbai). There is no substitute for the frisson, the sense that the spirts of these heroes of mine were somehow still there. No photographs or virtual tour can replace that and much the same can be said of manuscripts. The French bookseller’s catalogue entry below shows a price of 26,000 FF. Hilary was donating it in one of many acts of generosity towards the Huntington. As ever, giving things to libraries was much harder and more complicated than selling them. Either way, we needed an export licence and I see that we valued it over a decade later at £15,000. Why did Hilary bother with the purchase? Could she not have made do with photographs of it? Of course not. It spoke to her in ways that a reproduction never could.
On the other hand when my wife asked the author Richard Harris whose books are always very deeply researched whether he missed going to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and feeling, touching, smelling the original material, he replied that he didn’t miss it all. Now he could do it all from his desk without the bother. We were both a bit shocked.
Setting self-interest aside, which it would be ludicrous to deny has some part to play in what follows, I am writing to express my grave concerns about the state of the market in archives, both here in the UK and across the world. There are only a few booksellers in this country who have the time, energy and expertise to handle literary and other archives and given the amount of work involved (cataloguing for sale alone can take weeks or months), the inevitably protracted nature of negotiations, the sometimes meagre rewards and, to be frank, the occasional fickleness of vendors, it can feel as though it were almost a pro bono undertaking. We have been doing it for ninety years.
In recent experience, libraries offered an archive have taken over a year even to have had the necessary meetings to start asking their first questions, let alone set about raising funds where there is a will to do so. We remain constrained only ever to offer to one institution at a time. Vendors, whilst generally honourable and necessarily patient in their dealings, can take advantage of a free valuation and cataloguing, then simply take the papers back and sell them themselves – it seems there is little we can do to protect ourselves from this, even where there is a letter of contract. And they can become awfully suspicious when we are reluctant to reveal from day one to whom we might offer their papers – in fact there are many valid reasons for this, not only self-protection, but also for example insistence by potential purchasing institutions that everything is handled with the utmost discretion, perhaps because the last thing they need is a host of enquiries from eager researchers before they have even unpacked the boxes of treasure they have received, let alone the essential processes of conservation and their own cataloguing. Again all of this has been known to take not weeks or months, but years.
No two libraries’ acquisition policies are the same and priorities naturally change over time. But to generalise, where once archival integrity was a lower priority than straightforward acquisition, it became the case that having all of an archive in one place was the keynote. Why would Library A buy additional material from Author A when the rest of his papers were at Library B? One could then be reasonably confident that Library B would step up to the plate, provided of course that fair prices were asked and there was no exploitation of a captive audience, as it were.
The pendulum has swung back – where archives are located matters less and less. We used to argue that British authors’ archives going to America was not the end of the world in the age of the jet plane, a shrinking planet and generous grants to serious researchers. There has been one outcry after another over this – but at the time the American universities were best placed and funded to properly store, conserve and make available what they purchased. Institutions in the UK simply were not. That, thankfully, has changed to some degree. We have always tried to place a UK archive in a UK institution in the first instance; the export licence system works extremely efficiently and well these days, safeguards are in place to the right extent, and UK institutions are better funded than they were. And yet the tax breaks so readily available in America for those who fund their universities’ purchasing are only recently (and reluctantly) made available here and to a level which is simply not appealing enough. There’s a whole other corollary to this: there’s a danger of giving private individuals too much control over the acquisition policies of what are essentially public institutions, but that is another debate.
Furthermore, gifting to institutional libraries, as some seem to expect or demand, is in reality more often than not most unwelcome in the end. I am fortunate enough to have visited and spent time with the holdings of a good number of the greatest libraries in the world. On many occasions I have asked what the intriguing but clearly unloved, uncatalogued and unattended dusty cupboard in the dusty corner might hold. “Oh, that’s just the stuff we’ve been given”. Some of the most difficult negotiations with which I have been involved, with exceptionally august institutions, have been between an author and a library where (and I have a particular example in mind) he has tried to give the second part of his archive to the purchaser of the first. As soon as we were called in to put a value on the second part and applied some gentle, tactful pressure, things started moving after more than a year of inaction (and distress for the would-be donor).
The real point and what all of the above is leading up to is this: the d-word. Digitisation. It’s a wonderful thing, no doubt about it. It’s not just about accessibility, not just about it mattering less and less where archives are physically – take a look at what Reading University has done with its Beckett holdings. It is astounding and extraordinarily educative (which is after all the point). It actually in its way tells you and illuminates almost as much, although I am slightly reluctant to admit it, as the manuscripts and typescripts themselves.
But I worry. I think most of us who deal in this kind of material do so with some sort of ideological mindset that we are “doing the right thing”, finding good homes for important archives (and who are we or anybody to say what is and isn’t important, what may or may not be important in the future? I have been genuinely horrified to have offers turned down on the basis that whilst a specific institution has the bulk of, say, a poet’s manuscripts and typescripts, they cannot justify spending a few hundred pounds on some additional papers because students are not spending much time on it at the moment). We also hope to make some sort of a living out of it.
With digitisation come real dangers I think. There always seems now to be plenty of money available to fund that, and why not? It also seems, however, to be at the expense of acquisition. I have Ivy League (and many other) universities telling me that they have, literally, no money, whatsoever, for acquisitions. Can it be the case that authors who often have precious little income otherwise, can no longer hope to be remunerated in this way? There is little or no sense of eagerness to add to a library’s holdings. They are just too busy … digitising. As I say, I am all for it in principle, but is seeing a Charlotte Brontë manuscript on a screen really the same as holding it in your hand, as I have been privileged to do? Is there really any substitute for the original with all the extra sensory input it provides?
And what happens when it is all done? When everything has been scanned and stored on disk, when you can find out how many megabytes a great manuscript occupies, but not what it feels like, not how it feels actually to see and touch that piece of paper once held by Darwin or Gandhi?
I worry. If an Ivy League university tells me that “we’re moving away from the whole archive thing”, if prices become so depressed that the game simply isn’t worth the candle, if there’s not a bit of healthy competition between institutions to seek out new collecting areas, to add to and augment what they already have, I worry that really significant chunks of history are going to disappear, be disposed of, unloved and unvalued, completely lost and gone forever.
In order to digitise you have to have something (some thing) to digitise.
So, to summarise this presumptuous call to librarians everywhere, I would argue: carry on with what you are doing, digitise to your heart’s content, but not at the expense of acquisition. Surely there’s a kind of madness in that?
On Cruelty to Brutes
A bookseller I met only recently as a result of our Mervyn Peake catalogue, Michael Kemp, is a Peake specialist and completist collector. He has cleverly adapted to the fundamental changes the book trade has seen and regularly issues catalogues of ephemera. As he pointed out, it’s about the one thing left in our niche world where you can’t google the price. They make fascinating reading. I am very tempted by, in fact I covet (but at £300 cannot afford within the self-enforced strictures of my animal rights collection) a rare slip-song, an eight-line poem ‘On Cruelty to Brutes’ by G. Norton, c.1790, on a single sheet of paper. It may well be the only surviving copy. Norton was a bookseller, printer and the owner of a circulating library. It’s a powerful poem which bears reading several times to fully grasp.
A Man of kindness to his Beast is kind,
But brutal actions shew a brutal mind:
Remember, He who made thee, made the brute;
Who gave thee speech and reason formed him mute;
He can’t complain; but God’s all-seeing eye
Beholds thy Cruelty — He hears his cry.
He was design’d thy servant not thy drudge;
And know, — that his Creator is thy Judge!
There are aspects of it which do not sit ideally with modern sensibilities but it’s a pretty early date for such sentiments. The earliest book in my collection is John Hildrop’s Free Thoughts upon the Brute-Creation, published in 1742 and after that Humphry Primatt’s A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, R. Hett, 1776, in which (I write in my footnote) the author argues in the context of natural religion that justice is an invariable, applicable to humans and animals, that domestic animals have the right to food, rest and tender usage, that “No creature is so insignificant, but whilst it has life, it has a right to happiness”. His opinion of the duty of man to wild animals is admirably concisely summed up: “Let them alone”.
For context the RSPCA was only founded in 1824 and the RSPB in 1890.
Coincidentally if not on the exact same day that I received Michael’s catalogue, I learnt from a crossword clue and answer that the singular of “ephemera” is “ephemeron”. I am not sure how I didn’t know that given my life as a bookseller. It derives from the Greek and was first used in the late 1500s. It means short-lived, or lasting only a day. Specifically it then referred to insects with short life spans (making Laurence Whistler’s reference to his brother’s wasting his time on mayflies (dust-jackets) all the more appropriate).
A Simple Life
Finally, a nice quote from J.R.R. Tolkien in my inbox:
“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”
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