Archive

I blogged last year about the idea of books being ‘fashionably orange’. Here’s another example: This is a copy of the first edition of Die natürliche Tochter, the last of Goethe’s three verse dramas in the classical style, which had received its premiere, in Weimar, in April 1803. This copy is in the original orange […]

Last week, I delighted to read the following five-star review of the new album of my choral music from Choir & Organ magazine: The musical world of Simon Beattie is, in the main, lush, chromatic and lyrical. An antiquarian bookseller by profession, he has clearly taken great care with his choice of texts, translating some […]

There is something about orange publishers’ bindings that has always appealed, for some reason. It’s not a common colour and perhaps that’s why they always leap out at me. I blogged about this example, from 1851, back in 2012: But when did such orange covers start? The question occurred to me recently when I was […]

I’m delighted to announce the release of an album of my choral music recorded by the critically acclaimed London Choral Sinfonia under Michael Waldron: https://orchid-music.lnk.to/theworldtome In the sleeve notes, he writes: ‘I first came across Simon’s music several years ago. I was initially grabbed by a setting of Advent Calendar – a setting of a […]

Rilke wrote Das Marien-Leben at the castle at Duino, on the Italian Adriatic coast, in late 1911 and early 1912, just before he began work on what was to become the monumental Duineser Elegien.  In the preface to his translation in 1951, Stephen Spender notes that ‘Rilke wrote of the Marien-Leben as being “a little […]

Published in Boston in 1855, this is a sumptuous gift-book edition of Byron’s works, in the preparation of which ‘the publishers have spared no expense or delay in making it entirely complete.  In its progress through the press, it has undergone the careful supervision of a distinguished literary gentleman; and its proprietors feel that they […]