
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Book-Building after a Blitz
Author: Macaulay, Rose [Emilie Rose] (1881-1958)
Date of first publication: 6 June 1942
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: The Saturday Review of Literature, 6 June 1942
   [Vol. XXV, No. 23]
Date first posted: 20 July 2014
Date last updated: 20 July 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1190

This ebook was produced by Dr Mark Bear Akrigg






Book-Building after a Blitz

ROSE MACAULAY




It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents
in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called _blitz_,
though why we should use the German for lightning for attack
by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism,
like calling the Furies Eumenides. Anyhow, whatever the thing
was called, it destroyed my flat, leaving not a wrack behind,
or, rather, nothing but wracks. Of furniture, books, and
pictures nothing stayed but a drift of loose, scorched pages
fallen through three floors to street-level, and there lying
sodden in a mass of wreckage smelling of mortality, to trouble
me with hints of what had been. Here was a charred, curled
page from one of the twelve volumes of the Oxford Dictionary,
telling of hot-beds, hotch-pots, hot cockles, hotes, and
hotels; there, among a pile of damp ashes and smashed boards,
were a few pages from Pepys, perhaps relating of another
London fire, a few from Horace Walpole, urbane among
earthquakes, revolutions, and wars, knowing that all things
pass. But no book remains; my library, with so many other
libraries, is gone.

When the first stunned sickness begins to lift a little, one
perceives that something must be done about lost books.
One makes lists; a prey to frenetic bibliomania, I made lists
for weeks; when out, I climbed my ruins, seeking in vain;
when in, I made lists. A list of the books I had had; that is
the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it. A list of
those one cannot hope (for one reason or another) to have
again. A list of those that one hopes to replace one day,
but not yet. Another of those to replace at once, directly
one has shelves again -- the indispensables. Another of
the good riddances.

I had not a grand library, full of costly firsts. Plenty of
firsts, but usually poor firsts, like my "Athenae Oxonienses,"
of which the later editions were much better, or Fuller's
"History of Cambridge," or Thomas Heyrick's "Miscellany
Poems," which no one had bothered to reprint often (I seldom
found anyone to like this Heyrick much except myself and his
patrons, who prefaced his book with their flattering views in
verse), or torn copies, such as Hooker's "Ecclesiastical
Polity," and Raleigh's "History of the World," or books so
popular that the first edition was enormous, like Fuller's
"Holy and Profane State," or books that no one would
dream of ever reprinting at all, like the essays of my
great-great-great-grandfather on "Revealed Religion," or my
great-grandfather's notes on the antiquities of his parish
(as I have said, I had a lot like that, and they went).
And, naturally, plenty of the first editions of my
contemporaries, but they scarcely count as firsts. I had a
few real firsts. I had "Tom Jones" and Bentley on "Phalaris,"
which was terribly dull, and Baker's "Chronicle," and
Holland's Pliny's "Natural History," and Purchas his
"Pilgrimage" (1613), and Johnson's Dictionary, apparently
stolen by my great-uncle from the library of St. John's
College, Cambridge, and a few obsolete poets and essayists
of small merit, and "Leaves of Grass"; but no collector
would have thought anything of my library. I have never
had any particular feeling about firsts, and would as soon
read a book in any vaguely contemporary edition published,
say, in the first fifty years.

To return to my lists. First I thought I had better do the
ones I saw little prospect of getting again, then I could
forget them. Some I knew to be out of print and unprocurable
even by their authors; of these were Dr. Gosse's "Gathered
Together," Logan Pearsall Smith's "Cornichiana," and "How
Little Logan Came to Jesus"; these three little books seem
irrecoverably gone, with a lovely edition of Gerard Hopkins's
"Mermaids." So do the "Purefoy Letters," whose publishers
exasperatingly remaindered it to some wholesaler who got his
stock burnt. And a quantity of old numbers of the _Modern
Language Review_. And Purchas his "Pilgrimage." Not his
"Pilgrimes," of which I had the Maclehose edition in 20
volumes, and which could be got again when I could afford
them. They went on the next list, of books now barred from
me by price, but which might be replaced if ever they should
turn up cheap somewhere, or if ever some money should turn up.
This list was long; it was headed by the Oxford Dictionary.
I grew up with this dictionary, I grew with its growth, for
my parents had subscribed to it from the first; my copy was
full of my father's annotations and additions and my own
later ones. I had not yet led a life without it, but such lives
can be led and are; in any case it was not a book to be bought
by the totally bombed and totally uncompensated. (But, through
the munificent generosity of a friend, I now have it.) Also
on the list of farewells-thou-art-too-dear-for-my-possessing
were the Paget Toynbee, Horace Walpole, Wheatley's Pepys,
Birkbeck Hill's Johnson (Boswell, Piozzi, Letters and
Miscellanies), Dr. Keynes's Sir Thomas Browne, Topsell's
"Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents," Holland's Pliny, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jowett's Plato, the Blackwell
"Poly-Olbion," several Nonesuch Press books, and plenty more.

*     *     *     *     *

Then there the books to look out for in second-hand bookshops,
in case they turned up cheap enough. (For the encouragement
of others in like case, I should add that many of them have.)
Among these were the Cambridge "English Literature" (in 15
volumes, not in one), Sylvester's "Du Bartas," Burnet's
"Theory of the Earth," Bishop Wilkins's "Mathematical Magick,"
John Swan's "Speculum Mundi," Professor Livingston Lowe's
"Road to Xanadu," Tyndale's and Coverdale's Bible translations,
a lot of diaries (Evelyn, Anthony Wood, Hearne, Fanny Burney,
etc.), a lot of letters (Verney, Conway, Pope, Gibbon, Mme.
de Svigny, Byron, Jane Carlyle), Gunning's "Cambridge
Memories," Aubrey's "Miscellanies," and "Antiquities," "Elegant
Extracts," Hone's "Every Day Books," Ovid's "Metamorphosis"
translated by several gentlemen _c._ 1700, the "Phoenix Nest,"
Camden's "Reviews," and so on. (I have not listed books by
my friends, as it did not prove necessary; tell your friends
you have been bombed and you tap in them a most admirable
generosity, both about books they have written and books
they possess, or even buy; this is the brighter side of getting
bombed.)

Then there was the list of indispensables, to be replaced at
once, either new or second-hand -- Shakespeare, about twenty
other poets, Herodotus, Jane Austen, Aubrey's "Brief Lives,"
some edition or other of Browne, Pepys, Horace Walpole,
Boswell, "The Spectator," and "Guardian," Isaac D'Israeli's
"Curiosities of Literature" and "Calamities and Quarrels of
Authors" (out of print and proved hard to find), the Authorized
Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Arber's
"English Garner," de Fontanelle's "Plurality of Worlds"
(preferably John Glanvill's translation), Burton's "Anatomy,"
Hakluyt's Voyages, Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Johnson's
"Lives of the Poets" (all these last five are in Everyman;
why is not Walton's "Lives"?), Norman Ault's "17th Century
Lyrics," and "Unfamiliar Lyrics," a Shakespeare concordance.
Smith's "Greek and Roman Antiquities," the Greek Anthology,
some foreign dictionaries, "South Wind." Then, to look out
for at leisure, a great number of travel and exploration
books of all periods, a number of modern French books (not
just now replaceable), some contemporary books by writers
I know too slightly to raise the subject with, or don't know
at all, or else they are poor, or dead, or their publishers
are bombed. And Quarles's "Emblems," Clarendon's "Life,"
most of the Restoration plays, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Defoe,
all kinds of Coleridgeiana, Milton's prose (or about half of it),
"Piers Plowman" (but not the Everyman edition, which is a very
strange one), and a number of history-books, and biographies
of all dates. And a lot of island literature -- Beebe, and
"Robinson Crusoe," "Coral Island," "Swiss Family Robinson,"
"Masterman Ready," "Suzanne et la Pacifique," and so on.

Among the irrecoverables were my own MS notes on places,
books, and the character and behavior of animals in literature.
This last was a large file, the result of about ten years of
spasmodic research, that would in about another ten years
have become a book. The sources of my notes and extracts
are now largely inaccessible, and even if they are ever again
within reach, I shall not have the heart to begin all that
again; it was the book I really wanted to write, but it is
gone, with all the other notes and MSS I had. And with all
my maps and guide-books. I had a good collection of these
-- all the Michelin sections of France, much of Italy, Spain,
and the Americas and West Indies, and many large-scale maps
of foreign towns, and 6-in. ordnance maps of a lot of England,
but you can't get these now, it would help the Germans for
you to have them. And Baedekers one can't get much, or only
antiques, and anyhow travel is over, like one's books and
the rest of civilization.

One keeps on remembering some odd little book that one had;
one can't list them all, and it is best to forget them now
that they are ashes.






[End of _Book-Building after a Blitz_, by Rose Macaulay]
