Tag Archive: 0art

Of the Werther-related items in Anglo-German Cultural Relations, item 37 stands out as particularly striking and visual: a group of three etchings with stipple by Bartolozzi after Bunbury and Ramberg, each illustrating a scene from the novel. Goethe’s influential novel first appeared in English, via a French translation, in 1779, and soon grabbed the attention […]

This week we received the printed copies of a catalogue that has been in the works for some time, and have finally mailed them out. Published to mark my tenth anniversary as an independent bookseller, it has been years in the making.  Many people know me for selling Russian material, but in fact my interest […]

A bookseller’s year is marked by the book fairs.  Summer is a quiet time, but in autumn everything starts up again.  There was York, then the ILAB Congress in Budapest, and now there’s Grasmere (a first for the ABA), Seattle, Frankfurt, INK in London (another new fair), Boston, and Chelsea.  Obviously, I can’t attend all these, so […]

Théodore Géricault’s vast masterpiece Le Radeau de la Méduse (now at the Louvre) is, of course, based on fact.  But how did he find out about what happened on that ill-fated voyage?  Answer: he read a book.  The book he read, written by two of the shipwreck’s survivors, Jean-Baptiste Savigny (the ship’s surgeon) and Alexandre Corréard […]

Here’s an odd one for you: snapshot commentary on dystopian Seventies Britain, in words and images, from an anonymous poet in Bristol.  The inspiration is not just contemporary, either; he includes an eighteenth-century tomb inscription he came across in Bath Abbey. I bought the book because of the materials used in its production.  Sandpaper was […]

This original watercolour illustration appears in a typescript copy of Pellobelle Tinkea gentilhomme de fortune, a powerful anti-assimilationist novel, set in West Africa, Europe and America 1915–19, which focuses on, among other things, the status of ‘author’ among African writers of the time, a status which was denied them.  The authors are given as Hippolyte and Prosper […]