"Stop [pause] messin' about!"

When Harold Pinter wrote sketches for Kenneth Williams

Programmes for Pieces of Eight (1959) and One Over the Eight (1961)

A couple of theatre programmes this week. Both quite rare survivors. It's the name of one of the writers in the first one that caught my eye...

In May 1958, Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party opened in London. Eight performances later, it closed, after a critical and commercial battering. (True, influential Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson gave it a rave, but it had already come off by the time that review was published.) Pinter would eventually break through in 1960 with The Caretaker, but in 1959, when his Birthday Party producer Michael Codron put on a West End revue starring Kenneth Williams, the 29 year old writer was probably happy to be asked to contribute a few sketches.

The lead writer for Pieces of Eight was a wunderkind who was then still a student at Cambridge: a pre-Beyond the Fringe Peter Cook. His sketch 'Not an Asp' is probably the best-remembered bit of the show, and was still being performed by Kenneth Williams, and indeed Cook himself, decades later.

Pinter had four sketches in the show: 'Special Offer', 'Getting Acquainted', 'Request Stop' and 'The Last to Go'. Of these, 'The Last to Go' was the only one to make it onto the Original Cast Recording album, which is still available. It's a typically, um, Pinteresque piece of desultory conversation between an old newspaper seller (Williams) and a bartender, which manages, by not really being about anything, to be about pretty much everything. There's a later performance, without Williams (but possibly featuring Pinter?) which you can hear in full here. 

Though the other three sketches were published in the collection A Slight Ache and Other Plays, it appears Pinter chose not to preserve 'Getting Acquainted', and I've seen the piece described as 'possibly lost'. However, given that the revue's full script would have been submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office to gain a licence for performance (as all theatrical productions had to do back then), there must be a file copy somewhere, probably in the British Library. 'Umbrellas', a forgotten Pinter sketch for a later revue, turned up there last year, and caused quite a fuss.

Pieces of Eight was a big hit, and ran for over 400 performances. One Over the Eight followed in 1961, again written largely by Peter Cook (who was by then the toast of London), but without any input from Pinter (who was by then the toast of London too, albeit with a somewhat different crowd toasting him).

Here's Kenneth Williams, pictured in his dressing room before going on to perform in Pieces of Eight. I wonder if he ever got a visit from Harold. 

Goldfinger, Great Pan paperback edition (and a Moonraker melange)

A 'bread and butter' book this week: nothing to set the world on fire, not especially rare, but a nice copy of a collectable book, and an excuse to link to this (the best ever deployment of the line "Good evening Mr Bond").

I'm not a James Bond collector, luckily, as it can be an expensive business. Dustjacketed firsts are a mainstay of UK Bookfairs, and copies of the early ones in really good nick go for silly money. Add a Fleming signature and we're into the stratosphere. Bond never seems to go out of fashion, but after that Olympic cameo, and with the 50th anniversary of the first film adaptation, Dr. No, and a new movie, Skyfall, both coming up this year, I imagine the book collecting side is in pretty rude health.

I suppose there must be people out there who have gone beyond the hardback firsts and now want to collect all editions of every Bond novel (an endless task, surely), but one of the first stages on that journey must be to assemble a shelf of paperback first editions. It's by no means easy (true first printings of the paperback of On Her Majesty's Secret Service are ridiculously rare), but if you're not fussy about getting a 1st/1st – the copy I'm selling this week is a 1st/5th, for example – then you can find copies without having to break into Fort Knox (see what I did there?).

Then again, this book might find a buyer who is not a Bond collector. This chap collects Pan paperbacks. His wonderful website is both a testament to a rather scary obsession, and a very useful research tool. He's only got three Pans left to go before he has a full set. I rather hope he never makes it. (What will he feel like if he did?)

For Bond collectors though, here's the paperback motherlode: Piz Gloria (named after the location used for Blofeld's mountain base in O.H.M.S.S.) has nearly 500 different covers to pore over.

By way of illustration, here are the covers, in no particular order, for Moonraker alone (or Too Hot to Handle, as it was first called in the USA... )

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.

Point Blank (aka The Hunter) by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake), 2001 UK Alison & Busby pb edition

Signed by both Westlake and director John Boorman

After the digression about a dustjacket in my last post (and there's more to come on that, as I've discovered something very interesting about the artist...), it's back to the business of this blog: selling books. Here's a very rare chance to get a copy of the novel which was adapted into the film Point Blank, signed by both its author Donald E. Westlake, and the film's director John Boorman.

I won't go into the history of the novel, or indeed the film, here, as other places online have that covered. Fans of Westlake should already be acquainted with the excellent website The Violent World of Parker and the blog Existential Ennui (the latter run by a friend of mine, the estimable Nick Jones).

On offer here is a copy of the 2001 UK paperback edition from Allison & Busby, featuring a still of Lee Marvin from the movie on the cover. Aside from a small indentation mark to the front cover, the book is in near fine, unread condition.

I bought the book, and got it signed, at the opening gala of Crime Scene 2005, a screening of the film at the NFT South Bank in London on 30 June 2005, attended by both Westlake and Boorman. A copy of the event's programme notes (1 A4 sheet, folded) will be included with the book.

The book is flatsigned (in red ink, to go with the cover design) on the title page by Donald E. Westlake (using his real name, rather than his pen name Richard Stark) and John Boorman. There is no other copy of Point Blank (or indeed anything else) signed by both these gentlemen currently available on the Internet that I can find, so don't miss out... Click on 'My current eBay listings' on the top right of this blog.

I can't remember a huge amount of detail from the event, other than that Westlake, three years before his death, looked and sounded very tired (mind you, he probably had jetlag, poor bloke). John Boorman spoke warmly of working with Lee Marvin, who was willing to give him, a first time feature director, pretty much carte blanche.

This isn't part of my sale, but I notice that a fellow eBayer is currently selling some wonderful contact sheets of photos from the making of the film. One of them is here.

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.

Not for sale promotional books for Hotels No.2:

Say Hello to Sally For Me

After last time's Icons At The Pump Room, as promised here's another not for sale promotional book produced for an hotel: Say Hello To Sally For Me, by Lynda Berry. It's a beautifully produced little volume, with a full cloth binding, debossed front board, and ribbon marker. It's got no ISBN, and was never offered for sale in shops. It's a very rare book. As I write, there are no copies of it on ABE at all, and none on eBay (other than this one). So what's it about? Who's Sally?

As a child, Sally Bulloch appeared in the film Pure Hell At St Trinians (she set fire to the school). That was pretty much it for her acting career, though you've probably heard of her brother Jeremy, who starred with Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday, and later played the iconic Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett... Later in the 1960s Sally was nanny to Peter Cook's children, and regularly sat around the Cook dinner table with the likes of Peter Ustinov, John Lennon and Alan Bennett. After a few years living in Malta she returned to London and worked in the hospitality business, spending most of her life at The Athenaeum in Mayfair, eventually rising to General Manger. She was evidently a force of nature, and was a friend and confidante of the great and good who stayed at the hotel, which became known as the 'Tinseltown on the Thames'. Nothing was too much trouble; her motto was 'the answer is always yes'. Mr Spielberg wants an edit suite installed in his, er, suite? No problem. Mr and Mrs Thatcher are having work done on their house, and want to come and stay for three months? Fine, we'll employ a personal butler for them. Stacy Keach has been arrested for possession of cocaine? Oh dear. Would you like us to retain the services of a solicitor for him? Nelson Mandela once found her so enchanting that he left an entire motorcade idling in the street so he could spend a bit more time with her. Take That announced their split from the Penthouse Suite of the hotel. Sally spent the day trying to talk them out of it.

Here's how her friend and regular guest Richard Dreyfuss describes her in the book:

"Sally was a dame and to an American that means Cole Porter. It means chairs are up on the table because the waiters want to go home. It means there are four guys, two of them from the band and she's still there with them, drinking whisky, smoking cigarettes and having a fabulous time. Two of the guys at the table are probably billionaires and two of them are poorer than church mice, one of them is black and she's probably going to go home with two of them. And that's Sally! She's a dame. She was my dame."

This hugely entertaining book is full of quotes and anecdotes like this. Here's another couple of my favourites:

Tova Borgnine (wife of actor Ernest):

"Some friends had a reception for Bill Clinton and I asked if I could invite Sally. I remember standing with her at the door and when Clinton came in she said, "I've been an admirer for years, how lovely to meet you, I want to read your palm..." and he said, "Do you read palms?" and so they went off to another room, but that was Sally.

When they came back he wanted more... I mean she'd nailed him... she never repeated what went on in that room or their conversation. And I didn't ask, she was always the soul of discretion, always. She would have made a great spy."

Facing up to Russell Crowe:

'When Sally asked the chambermaids how they were getting on with Mr Crowe, they said he was charming, but making up his room was nearly impossible, as it was so untidy.

That evening Sally positioned herself in her usual seat at the bar, with an excellent view of the lobby and waited for him to come in. She called him over and in total English nanny mode said, "Now Mr. Crowe..." and then suggested he was making life difficult for her staff.

Admonished, he immediately went up to tidy his room and needless to say they then spent the rest of the evening together in the bar.'

Here she is, on a magazine cover reproduced in the book:

She was obviously quite a character, but sadly Sally died, aged only 59, in 2008. This book, written by her friend and 'accomplice' Lynda Barry as a tribute to her, was published in 2010, and as far as I can tell copies were left, like a Gideon's Bible, in the rooms at the Athenaeum for guests to find. There were probably only a few hundred printed. It's a fun book, about a fun person, and deserves to be more widely known, say I.

Not for sale promotional books for Hotels No.1:

Icons at the Pump Room

I have two books that I intend to sell which can be described as 'not for sale promotional books produced for hotels', so hey presto, my first series of linked posts! Try not to get too excited.

I've actually got various books which were created as promotional items, and never intended for sale. They don't have prices on the back, or ISBNs, and some of them are printed to a very high standard: one title I have, an illustrated history of a tea company which was originally given away to shareholders, has a quarter cloth binding, and even a full cloth slipcase.

This week's book is not quite as posh as that; it's a paperback, but printed on nice thick matte paper, and it's full of nothing but black and white photos of, yes, Icons.

For decades, the Pump Room at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago was the restaurant/bar where all the celebrities would go when they were in town. This collection of press and publicity photos of the great and the good, all pictured in the Pump Room or elesewhere in the hotel, was printed last year, and sent to the press to mark the reopening of the fabled venue at what is now The Public Hotel (which looks rather lovely, but rather expensive). 

I've no idea how many copies were printed, but I'd be surprised if it was more than a few hundred. Only a handful have made their way into the secondary market in the US (where the asking price is $30-$45), and currently none (other than this one) are on sale in the UK. I found this copy in a second hand book shop in Brixton. Perhaps it was sent to a journalist at a UK-based travel magazine or supplement. Who knows, but like the vast majority of such promotional efforts, it was evidently discarded pretty quickly by its recipient, who probably gets piles of PR tat every week.

This book ain't tat though; it's great. It's about 150 pages of full bleed photos, all of them unfamiliar, and some of them absolute corkers. How about this one of a very young and utterly luminous Sigourney Weaver...

Then there's a spread featuring two of the cooler human beings ever to have walked the Earth:

This is a good one of some of the Brat Pack in their pomp:

Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis back when they were King and Queen of Hollywood:

... and Dustin Hoffman, mucking about in a hotel porter's hat:

In fact, thanks to this this site, here are thumbnails of a bunch of the photos in the book. How many Icons can you identify?

Stay tuned for the second and last entry in this captivating 'not for sale promotional books produced for hotels' series, a title which manages to shed light on both Russell Crowe's daily habits and Boba Fett's family...