Saki Dust Jackets Redux

As final preparations are made for the 'formal' opening of The Little Shop (tm) on the 21st (do come along if you're in the area), here's a quick update entry on something from the previous incarnation of this blog. Any longtime readers will know that I get all of a flutter when it comes to rare Saki dust jackets. New readers can bring themselves up to speed with the entries here, here, here and here, but hold onto your hats, it's pretty exciting stuff. Pure bibliographical Viagra, as someone once almost said.

A while back I was contacted by a reader who ended up buying the copy of When William Came mentioned in that last entry, but also had, from another source, scans of a better copy of the dust jacket — which he kindly shared with me. See, I'm not the only one out there who's interested in this stuff.

So here, for the first time on t'internet, feast your eyes on the full DJ of Saki's great pre-WW1 satire...

Saki Sighting: Another rare dust jacket surfaces online

As any readers of this blog will know, few things tend to make me more giddy than an old Saki dust jacket that I've not seen before.

As a collector of all things H. H. Munro (and if you're not familiar with this writer best known for his Oscar Wilde/P. G. Wodehouse meets The Mighty Boosh short stories, just take 10 minutes to read 'Sredni Vashtar' or  'Tobermory'), I have previously become inordinately excited by the discovery of dust jackets — and rather wonderful pictorial dust jackets by noted artists at that — for Beasts and Super-Beasts and The Unbearable Bassington.

Now a copy of his second novel, the Germans-Invade-England satire (or rather call-to-arms, since it was published in 1913) When William Came, has turned up on ABE, complete with DJ. It's a fourth edition, which at first I dismissed as the first printing of the book in the smaller format, collected edition of Saki's work, all of which have quite scarce, but fairly boring text-only jackets, but now I've seen the photo with the listing, I realise it's a later printing, in blue cloth rather than the original red, of the larger format first edition. The design isn't as eye-catching as the ones previously featured here, but it's nonetheless another exceptionally rare survivor.

My heraldry isn't up to much, but I think that's a nicely apt mash-up of the United Kingdom and German coats of arms.

It's a shame about the extensive chipping and loss to the jacket, and at the £65 it's listed for, it's a little bit rich for me, though it's quite possibly the first and last example of it I'll ever see... decisions, decisions.

Having said that, probably the single most valuable book I own is a first edition of the same novel, signed by the author to the woman he was supposedly going to marry, but that's another story...

A Saki Letter, and an early Lady of Comics

A fly-by post today (apologies for the recent lack, but Things Are Afoot), just to link to an entry on Jot 101, a time-hoovering blog by the Big Cheese of the shop Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road. The blog posts interesting snippets from letters, diaries and general ephemera found lurking in books. This entry is about a letter by Hector Hugh Munro, sold back in 2005...

Saki letter to Annie E. Lane ( wife of his  publisher John Lane.) Not dated (July 31st.) About 1906. Sold on a Charing Cross Road catalogue 2005.

On the headed paper of the now vanished Cocoa Tree Club of St James Street in London S.W. Signed 'H.H. Munro.' Munro (ie the genius of the modern English short story 'Saki') thanks Mrs Lane for a book of her writings she had produced in 1905 about women's roles, high society, champagne etc., called 'The Champagne Standard' --'I have been enjoying its contents, which are new to me with the exception of one article which I had read somewhere. Being much out of England I have missed much of current literature...' He adds 'I hope to be able to break in upon your Devonshire fastness when I am down that way...' adding regards to her husband and sometime publisher John Lane (of The Bodley Head.) 2 sides of notepaper about 90 words.

It doesn't say what it sold for, but letters by Saki rarely show up, so I reckon several hundred pounds at least.

As for the book, copies of the rather interesting sounding (it apparently contains a chapter called 'A Plea for Female Architects') The Champagne Standard are readily available on ABE, with even a signed copy lurking in Canada for under $70. Alas, it's not the copy which led to this thank you letter from Saki. It's dedicated to Carolyn Wells, which I'm pretty certain after minimal googling is this Carolyn Wells, a prolific American author and poet who, like Annie E. Lane, was married to a publisher, in her case Hadwin Houghton, of Houghton-Mifflin.

Wells wrote over 170 books, including a bunch of mystery novels starring the 'transcendent detective' Fleming Stone. She also wrote for newspapers, and deserves her place in history alone for being what must be one of the very earliest female 'comic strip' writers. Back in the heyday of Little Nemo in Slumberland, she was writing several strips, including an equally bonkers, though now little remembered strip called Adventures of Lovely Lilly, which as far as I can tell, featured the cherubic Lilly facing down and then beating up a different large animal each week. Here, thanks to Allan Holtz, are two of her adventures, from the New York Herald in June 1907. The rather wonderful art is by G. F. (George Frederick) Kaber.

You wait decades for a rare Saki dust jacket to come along...

The Unbearable Bassington — art by Harry Rountree

There was much excitement on this blog a few weeks ago when I discovered a previously unrecorded dust jacket for a book by one of my favourite authors, H. H. Munro, better known as Saki. As this post lamented, I missed out on buying it, though the seller did send me some photos. The (wonderful) design turned out to be by the noted woodcut artist John Hall Thorpe. 

I'd surmised that this evidently extremely rare jacket must have been included with a later printing of the short story collection in question, Beasts and Super-Beasts, so I decided I'd have a quick look on ABE to see if there might be any of his other books where the reprints had dust jackets too... and yes folks, I found one. In 1924, the final Saki collection, The Square Egg, was published. The first edition came with a plain, text only wrapper (which I have), but I now know that a couple of reprints that came out at the same time — or at least, in the same year — were given pictorial jackets: the Hall Thorpe Beasts and Super-Beasts, and the thing of beauty pictured above, The Unbearable Bassington, featuring an illustration by Harry Rountree.

He certainly looks pretty unbearable, doesn't he?

(Please excuse the reflection on the photos, but the jacket came nicely presented in a mylar protector which would be tricky to take it out of!)

Saki's short stories are rightly more celebrated than his two novels (Bassington and the Germans-invade-England satire, written on the eve of WW1, When William Came), but people are still discovering and enjoying The Unbearable Bassington, and it's hardly been out of print, even as a separate edition, since it was first published in 1912.

The jacket artist Harry Rountree has quite a pedigree it turns out. A New Zealander who came to the UK as a young man (just like Hall Thorpe, except he was Australian), Rountree had a long and distinguished career as an illustrator, as this heartfelt tribute by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. reveals. The Bassington jacket was probably just 'another job' for him, but produced to his usual very high standards nevertheless. I love it.  

So when did Rountree paint this piece? Was the illustrated dust jacket only included with the 1924 reprint of Bassington, to give it another 'push', and a little bit more visibility on the shelves? The copy above (and yes, dear reader, I managed to buy this one!) is a 1924 reprint. The novel had already been reprinted in 1912 (3 times) and 1913 (twice). I think it had this dust jacket design from the outset, and I'll tell you why. Look at Harry's signature above. It's hard to see in the photo, but after the last E is a full stop, and then, after that, there's a 12: for the year, surely. So one can assume that somewhere, someone might still have a first/first in dust jacket. I've certainly never heard of one, let alone seen one...

The artist William Stout is a Rountree fan, and appears to have written a book about him, though I can't find any copies for sale; perhaps he's still working on it. I wonder if he's aware of the Bassington jacket?

Also in 1912, Rountree painted the illustrations for the first printing of Conan Doyle's The Lost World, when it was serialised in The Strand. Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. is lucky enough to own the original of one of them, and here it is, complete with a '12' after his signature.

A previously unknown piece by John Hall Thorpe?

The Saki dust jacket artist revealed!

After my previous post about this wonderful, and ridiculously rare dust jacket for a book by one of my favourite authors, I thought I'd try and find out a bit about the artist, who's clearly credited in the bottom left hand corner: 'Hall Thorpe'.

Mere seconds on Google reveal that it has to be John Hall Thorpe (1874-1947), who, it turns out, was an Australian-born artist who moved to England and made his name with a hugely popular series of colourful woodblock prints. Though he also produced landscapes and city scenes, his trademark was  flowers. Here's his single most famous print, 'The Country Bunch', made up from 15 blocks which apparently took Hall Thorpe a full year to prepare:

This print, and many others like it were hung above countless fireplaces in the 1920s and 30s, and Hall Thorpe still has a considerable following today, as this 2008 exhibition catalogue shows. He was really hitting his stride in the period just after the First World War, exactly the time he would have designed the jacket for Beasts and Super-Beasts, which includes some flowers along with the society gent and the wolf, just for good measure.

The very informative blog The Linosaurus, which contains several posts about the artist (who bizarrely does not have a Wikipedia entry yet), mentions a children's painting book with art by Hall Thorpe, but I've yet to discover any other book or dust jacket work by him: which makes his Saki design doubly rare! (And gives me another reason to be annoyed I missed my chance to buy it...)

John Hall Thorpe ended up living in Bexhill, on the South coast of England, where he died of pneumonia in 1947 (a committed Christian Scientist, he refused medical help when he got ill). If you're local to the area, you might want to visit an exhibition of his prints being mounted by Pimpernel Prints at The Seaside Gallery in Bexhill from the 10th to the 22nd of September 2012. I might pop along meself.

Is this one of the rarest dust jackets in the world?
Saki, Beasts and Super-Beasts, in DJ

I've been on holiday, hence the lack of posts recently, but before resuming normal service, here's a post about a book that is NOT for sale. I can't sell it, because I don't own it, but believe you me, if I did own it, I'd never sell it. I missed out on buying this particular copy by a matter of hours, and it's entirely possible I'll never see its like again.

Suffice to say that I'm a very big fan (and collector) of the work of Hector Hugh Munro, the author better known as Saki. If you're unfamiliar with him, his Wikipedia entry will bring you properly up to speed, but the brief version is that he wrote brilliant, funny and shocking short stories, often about genteel Edwardian society colliding with the unexpected and the supernatural, which are at their best as good as anything Oscar Wilde and PG Wodehouse ever wrote, and have influenced everyone from Noel Coward and The Goons to The Mighty Boosh. He's never gone out of print, and his collected works fit handily into one volume. (There's also a rather nice little book of uncollected pieces too.) He's out of copyright, so if you want to sample his work online, try this, or this, or this. He's well worth discovering.

Anyway, I collect Saki. Alas, when it comes to him, I'm the kind of collector who has long since passed the stage of simply getting first editions of a writer's books. I have entered the dangerous twilight world of acquiring 'interesting' editions, association copies, and - the really lethal area - first edition copies that are 'better' than the ones I already have. So, I have an alert set up on ABEbooks for any new Saki firsts that are listed. One morning a little while back I opened my emails to find an alert for a Bodley Head first edition of Saki's short story collection Beasts and Super-Beasts. An American dealer had listed it for a reasonable price, but what's this? Complete with pictorial dust jacket?

In nearly 20 years of collecting, I had never even heard of this edition of the book having a dust jacket, let alone seen a copy with one for sale. This dust jacket is, yes folks, 'unknown to bibliographers'.

I clicked through to buy it, pronto, but of course it had already gone. I evidently wasn't the only person who knew quite how rare this was. There was no visual with the listing, but I really wanted to see this jacket. I emailed the dealer, who was kind enough to send me some photos. So here, for what I think must be the first time on the Internet (and with the permission of the lucky purchaser), is the dust jacket for the Bodley Head edition of Saki's Beasts and Super-Beasts.

A cheeky looking society gent with a monocle, apparently in conversation with a wolf. Perfect.

Beasts and Super-Beasts was first published in 1914, by The Bodley Head, but this copy (or at least, this dust jacket) must be from a later printing, as the back includes an advertisement for the 1919 posthumous Saki collection, The Toys of Peace. Perhaps the first printing in 1914 did not have a dustjacket (there was a war on, or about to start) and a jacket was added to a later, post war impression, when The Toys of Peace came out, a book which had its own pictorial jacket (also vanishingly rare, but I did know of its existence, and there are a couple of copies on ABE, for a hefty price):

So there you go. For someone like me, that counts as exciting stuff.