Unseen For a Century? Views of Fairlie, Ayrshire

This rather lovely book is a recent arrival at Withnail Books, and is evidently a rare survivor. I can trace no other copies available anywhere (it's another ABEwhack (tm)). I can't even find any reference to its existence. The title page has a few clues:

Charlie McNair, according to this page, ran the local Post Office and shop (which also served as the savings bank, telegraph station and chemists). He sold postcards of the area, which sometimes appear on eBay described as 'Fairlie, McNair series', and, it would appear, published this book of similar local views. It's beautifully produced, about 5 in x 7in, with a gilt stamped debossed design to the cover, which won't have come cheap. It was probably only ever available in McNair's emporium, as the posh alternative to a postcard for the well-heeled tourist.

There's no date in the book, but the title page reveals it was 'Photographed and Printed by G. W. Wilson & Co, Ltd, Aberdeen.' Wilson was a pioneering Victorian photographer, who popularised stereo views (early 3D prints), and worked for the Queen and Prince Albert, but his company had been wound up by 1908, so we know this book has to be earlier than that. Looking at the clothes in this close up of the image above, I'd guess 1890s to early 1900s was about right.

(An aside: I've just had it pointed out to me by a regular customer that G. W. Wilson & Co in Aberdeen was once the employer of writer, photographer and entertainingly bonkers cult figure Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo. In fact, such a dedicated employee was he that he continued to work for them even after he'd lost his job there. They had trouble getting rid of him...)

Fairlie is a little town in North Ayrshire, on the eastern shore of the Firth of Clyde looking out to Arran. Wikipedia perhaps unfairly dismisses it as 'little more than a commuter town' these days, with Hunterston B nuclear power station, a deep sea shipping terminal and a NATO base all on the coastline nearby. Charlie's little book is a souvenir of a different time, when the pier was still up and running, and the internal combustion engine was still pretty new-fangled, let alone nuclear...

So here, for what is very possibly the first time in over a century, is the complete Views of Fairlie...

(2019 update: Every few months since this blog was posted back in 2013 I get an email asking if this book is still for sale. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it sold almost immediately, and went to the USA, as I recall.)

(That's Charlie McNair's shop, above.)

A Baron Corvo Centenary Oddity: Ottoline Morrell's copy of Hadrian the Seventh

This week, October 25th to be precise, marks the centenary of the death of Frederick Rolfe. Better known by his self-invented title Baron Corvo, Rolfe is best described as the literary cult figure's cult figure. He was a writer of fiction, but also a photographer, artist and one of the great letter writers, especially to people he had fallen out with (which was, eventually, most people he met). W. H. Auden described him as "one of the great masters of vituperation." His Wikipedia entry will give you a quick overview, and if you want to know more, A. J. A. Symons' groundbreaking biography The Quest for Corvo is still in print. To commemorate the centenary, Withnail Books has listed several items of Corvine interest on eBay, including this interesting association copy, linking Rolfe's most famous work to the Bloomsbury Group.

It's a 1929 first printing of the Phoenix Library edition of Hadrian the Seventh, not an especially rare book in itself, but what makes it unique are the inscription and annotations.

Wikipedia will furnish you with detailed summaries of the lives of Morrell and Stephens if you're not familiar with them, but in brief:

Lady Ottoline Morrell was a friend, confidante and/or lover of many of the early 20th century's brightest literary lights, inlcuding Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon and of course the 'Bloomsberries', inlcuding Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey.

James Stephens was an Irish novelist and poet of smaller stature (both figuratively and literally: he was only 4 foot 10) who became part of Morrell's salon, much to the consternation of her other guests, due to his tendency to talk at people until they were bored stiff. Lytton Strachey dismissed him as 'a little gnome-like Irishman', and Ottoline's biographer Miranda Seymour notes that: 'It was not unusual for a visitor to find, say, Yeats, de la Mare and Eliot sitting in polite silence while Stephens told tales of leprechauns and, far too often, of his poverty-stricken childhood. (He was particularly fond of telling his audience that he had often had to fight with swans for a piece of bread...)'. One can only wonder what a meeting between Stephens and Rolfe could have been like... but I think both of them (and Ottoline) would be on my Fantasy Dinner Party list, for sure.

Despite his expertise at killing social occasions stone dead, Ottoline was very supportive of Stephens, and at some point (after 1929) he, presumably impressed with the novel, gave her this copy of Hadrian the Seventh as a gift. He inscribed it, in pen, 'With love to Ottoline Morrell / James Stephens'. Morrell, for her part, did not sign her own name in the book, but did, as was her wont, mark up in pencil passages or lines which appealed to her (only a few of which are pictured below). On the rear free endpaper, she even included page references to remind her of particular lines. Page 105's 'Acting as though the ideal were real, He made it real' being a favourite, it appears.

A small book with a lot of history. Here's a photo of them (with the translator S. S. Koteliansky on the left), from 1935.