Welcome to BOOKS MATTER!

To the right you can click on the latest episode in my series on How To Write A Damn Good Novel, in which most of the thoughts, you’ll be relieved to hear, come from other writers – modern crime writers such as Ian Rankin, Peter Lovesey, Mike Jecks and others; earlier ones like Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith; plus some thoughts thrown in from John Steinbeck, Anthony Trollope and others.

This week, how did John Steinbeck like to start his day?

Also to the right you’ll see links to several other strands:

About Me - which, if nothing else, is refreshingly short

An eBook Diary - trials & tribulations for beginners in the field

Some attractive Ephemera of the Book Trade

Have You Met? (some odd characters)

a few Jottings from previous blogs

a large selection of Victorian Writers & Poets

and some comments on the writers’ life, collated as  We Writers

This remains a blog for writers and readers, people who love books. (Though if you do want to know a little more about me, check my website at http://russelljamesbooks.wordpress.com/ ).

Whatever else you do, please check back in to BOOKS  MATTER from time to time.  You never know what you’ll find.

Russell James  

That’s The Way To Do It!

Back in the 19th century we knew only too well that . . . Books Matter.

(And the Victorians loved puns!)

I’ve been looking back at a time when books were good to handle and bookselling more than a trade – the days when booksellers talked to their customers, and publishers sought to build a relationship through insert cards and booklists, and send-for catalogues. (Do you remember the Penguin Club?)

Here’s an example of a publisher’s marketing from nearly a century ago:

The Everyman’s Library

This long-running series was a mainstay of the 20th century and was indeed relaunched towards the end of it.

Throughout its long life it maintained a catalogue of severely selected literature, braced with a healthy whiff of minor classicism.

Authors listed on the reverse of this bookmark (‘Modern Books in Everyman’s Library’) comprise Arnold Bennett, G K Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Florence Converse, Sir A Eddington, John Galsworthy, Charles Gore, Henry James, D H Lawrence, Pierre Loti, George Meredith, Hugh Walpole and H G Wells, along with the Golden Book of Modern English Poetry.

That was to get you started.

The encyclopaedia was some decades old by the time this flier was introduced.

The price had risen from 5/6 to 14/- per volume and the text had increased from 7 to 9 million words.

Recommendations from the famous had been replaced by recommendations from not only the BBC but sundry newspapers – though none, may it be noted, from the national dailies other than the Scotsman.

‘You cannot afford to be without a real Encyclopaedia,’ ran the copy, ‘and you can afford Everyman’s.’

So there.

But then, as if these weren’t sufficient encouragement . . .

This next little slip was placed inside many a book (well, certainly many a book published by Dent) to advertise what was then an ambitious and fairly successful series.

The ‘Opinions’ cited overleaf comprised plugs from no less than J B Priestley (‘a most extraordinary production’), Sir Austen Chamberlain (‘the pages open freely and the print is clear’), Sir Josiah Stamp (‘an invaluable work’), Sir Arthur Keith (‘a veritable triumph’) and Viscountess Snowden (‘a never-failing
source of information and delight’).

Somehow, I feel Maurice Saatchi might have improved these testimonials just a tad.

And couldn’t these ads have been a little more attractive?  Well, see below . . .

Pretty, Pretty

This lovely little corner-of-the-page bookmark dates from the end of the Victorian era. (The food, rather than the infant, was ‘not farinaceous’; syntax could be imprecise, even then.)

Support Your Local Library

Issued in 1940 and lasting who knows how long into the straightened times of the Second World War, this three-fold bookmark given away to borrowers from Cheltenham Public Library was a neat money-raising device.  Printed both sides, it incorporated advertisements from 16 local businesses and, on the obverse, a space for the reader to jot down a list of Books Wanted, a seven-inch ruler, and an exhortation: ‘DO NOT Turn Down The Leaves Of Your Book.  Use This Bookmark.’

We assume that the firm W S Trenhaile, if it survived the war, did so by concentrating on only one of its two unrelated forms of business.

Publishing – “A Gentlemanly Profession”

Readers who returned this postcard to Collins (then at 48 Pall Mall, London SW1) were assured they would receive both catalogues and the newssheet News of Books.

Another Vintage Publisher’s Ad:

Publishers still occasionally try to have readers contact them directly, but the practice was once far more routine. Jonathan Cape here offer any interested reader the chance to subscribe, for free, to a 4-monthly catalogue. All that was required of the reader was a 2d stamp on the postcard.

Before Your Time

Here’s an example from William Heinemann, the card dating from – I suggested the Thirties, but that expert on such matters, Ralph Spurrier, said No, the card must date before 1920, as it purports to come from William Heinemann himself – and he died in 1920.  So . . . from the second decade of the last century:

The only stipulation from Heinemann on the reverse of this beautifully formal postcard is that the reader indicates whether their interest is ‘Art, Education, Works of Fiction, History, Medicine, Memoirs, Poetry, Science, etc.’