Do You Know Your Norseman C-64 From Your Traveller UC-43? A Vintage Aircraft Recognition Handbook

A couple of fascinating old aeronautical items arrived this week, both from circa 1948. First up is a copy of an Aircraft Recognition Handbook: American Continent. It was issued by the British War Office in a binder with string ties, so extra pages (and aircraft) could be added. There's also a sheet at the front where any amendments, made by hand, were logged.

Then there's volume one of the official (and Restricted!) Royal Airforce Pilots' Flying Manual, another chunky binder chock full of step-by-step instructions, including the important advice to actually look for your ripcord rather than just feel for it! There's also a rather beautiful colour foldout sheet showing the right way, and several wrong ways, to approach a runway at night.

It's not that often that you see a book that can just sit there and radiate history, but these both do just that.

War, Wine and Women: The Most Famous World War One Memoir You've Never Heard Of

With World War One centenaries now set to come thick and fast over the next few years, now is as good a time as any to have a look at a long-out-of-print book which few have heard of, even though in its day it was a widely read bestseller, right up there with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and All Quiet on the Western Front.

War, Wine and Women, a war memoir by Wilfred Saint-Mandé, was published in June 1931. The example Withnail Books has in stock is very much a reading copy...

... and is a third impression, from the the same month as the first:

Sales of the book were evidently brisk. Much of its popularity can probably be put down to the 'wine' and 'women' parts. Wilfred is very much a man about town, and his adventures before being sent to the Front (and indeed after) involve many and varied encounters with many and varied women, recounted in a way that was extremely racy for 1931. The young widow Daphne, for example, in addition to "slender ankles and shapely calves", had "firm little breasts which stood out challengingly". Steady on! She later gives him a pair of her silk knickers for luck.

Once in the trenches, Daphne's delights are a distant memory. Here's an excerpt, which even in 2014 can't help but impress with its blunt, unflinching detail:

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With startling suddenness the guns started firing, and from the German lines coloured S.O.S lights soared skyward. His artillery was at that time far superior to ours, and in less time than it takes to tell, hell broke loose in all its fury. Our front line, communications, and supports, were literally plastered with shells of all calibres. The Véry lights and bursting shells were like a Crystal Palace firework display, only a thousand times more impressive, awful and terrifying. The big shells sounded like express trains roaring overhead, and the deafening nerve-shattering crash, as they exploded deep in the ground, sending up showers of earth and stones and often mangled men, is beyond my powers to describe. I do not believe the horror of it can ever be communicated to those who have never experienced it. The earth shook and heaved, acrid fumes filled the air, and massive jagged splinters of steel came hurtling down, dealing out death and mutilation. It was as if on some overhead platform ten thousand carters were tipping loads of pointed steel bricks that burst in the air or on the ground, all with a fiendish ear-splitting devastating roar that shook the nerves of the stoutest.

Part of our parapet was blown in, and a dug-out demolished by a direct hit, which destroyed the occupants and buried them at the same time. I was covered with earth and flying debris, but clambered clear. As I got up again a sod as big as a pillow struck me in the chest and sent me sprawling in the mud, where I lay dazed and cowed. Before I could get up a shrapnel shell burst about ten yards above my head and a man at my side crumpled up and lay in a pool of blood. I tried to help him but quickly saw that he was beyond help, with a gaping wound in the head and a score in the body. I wondered how much longer my reason could stand it, and had a mad desire to run until I got out of the shambles. I felt that my face was wet, and, drawing my hand across it, discovered it was bloody. Then I saw I was sprinkled with the blood of the corpse near my feet.

Another burst in the air sent pieces of casing and shrapnel bullets whizzing down, and I felt a sudden hot stinging pain at the side of my head. Blood flowed freely but it was superficial and nothing but a fairly deep cut. For an instant I was tempted to jab it with my bayonet and go down the line. Then I realized that more shells were falling behind our trench than in it, so decided to stay where I was. A high-velocity shell shrieked and burst in the next bay. Crawling round the traverse I saw Corporal Stamford lying broken up and yet still moaning. He had a terrible wound in the belly and the genital organs were reduced to a pulp. The left side of his face had been severed as if by a gigantic razor. His hands were bloody stumps.  I then observed that there had been another man in the bay with Stamford, but his remains could have been gathered up with a trowel. Parts of him were sticking in the sides of the trench, a leg lay in one corner, part of a mutilated trunk in another, while the head was embedded in the parados. With a shock that almost made me faint I realized the remains were those of Greenling, who had been the sentry in that bay. An artillery officer, who had been directing the fire of his battery, was lying on his face with a piece of shell a foot long and as thick as a cricket stump sticking out of the middle of his back. He was dead, so I did not bother to pull it out. 

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Strong stuff. Back in 1931, the reviewer for The Spectator noted that the book:
 
"puts on record how another individual endured the War, and with more candour than most, the joy he had in it. The charnel house is no longer part of our lives, the skeleton does not face us at every turn, but for a while, here and in this book, it is brought very close."

Being sure to mention the "photographic realism of the love episodes", the Spectator also opines:

"If you want the picture of a hero, Mr. Saint Mande's book will give it you, twopence coloured. War, Wine and Women is a very long book, and much of its length is irrelevant detail such as no practised writer would have permitted himself. But many passages are written with a verve that few practised writers could imitate. As a record of personal experience, the book's authenticity is open to doubt." 

The reviewer was wise to cover his arse. For now we come to the reason why War, Wine and Women is all but forgotten today. It is, in the word(s) of Arnold D. Harvey in Muse of Fire, his overview of literature, art and war: "tosh".

Wilfred Saint-Mandé never existed. The author was in fact one John Henry Parkyn Lamont, an Englishman who when he wrote the book was a lecturer in French at the University of Pretoria. Lamont had served in the war, but later admitted that the book was little more than a novel with the war as its background.

If the book is remembered at all these days, it's for the large kerfuffle it caused when it originally appeared in South Africa. In one brief episode, Lamont has one of his characters, a cad named Danesford, drunkenly describe his experiences in the country. He's not very complimentary: "the back-veld Boer bathes only for baptism, marriage and burial. He has no notions about sanitation and often uses his bedroom as a latrine."

This did not go down at all well, especially when it got out that 'Wilfred' was in fact living in South Africa. Once his identity was uncovered, Lamont was kidnapped by some furious students. As Frederick Hale's fascinating paper on the case details:

"Near the edge of the veld, the four young men ordered him to walk into an open garage, where they removed his clothing and placed a bathing costume on his otherwise almost naked body. They then coated much of his skin with grease, ripped open a pillow, and spread on him the feathers which it had contained. The muggers completed their attack by placing around Lamont's neck a placard identifying him in both Afrikaans and English as the author of War, Wine and Women, depositing him on Church Square in central Pretoria, and informing him that he could retrieve his clothing at Turkstra's Tea Room."

Lamont was ultimately hounded out of the country, much to the approval of the local press, as this contemporary cartoon from Die Burger shows:

Not the background I was expecting to find (after some pretty deep googling) when I thought I'd leaf through a book on the Great War.

Still, the book certainly has its merits, and doesn't deserve to completely fall between the cracks of history. I'll leave the last word to Arnold D. Harvey, as I think he hits the nail on the head:

"War, Wine and Women must be regarded as a successfully calculated piece of book-making — one that brought its own poetic retribution in the failure of Lamont's later books to meet his expectations — and as such presumably related more to the author's assessment of what readers expected than to personal agonies that needed to be exorcized. And yet the author was in the war, and though not killed, or like his protagonist, mutilated, the war presumably made as a big a hole in his life as it did in the lives of other participants. War, Wine and Women may be tosh, but it is still an ex-soldier's attempt to salvage some sort of literary statement from what he had lived through."

A Feast of Philip José Farmer

A shelfload of vintage paperbacks by Philip José Farmer came in this week, with a selection of titles from most areas of his work: the 'mainstream' sci-fi fantasy of the Riverworld series, the early literary mash-ups of his 'Wold Newton' books – combining historical and fictional characters into a massive conspiracy melange long before the likes of Alan Moore and Kim Newman did it (though to be fair they did tip their hats to Farmer) – to novels which can only really be described as full-on extreme weirdo erotica. Strangely enough, it's some of those latter ones which have already sold...

One of the 'classic' characters Farmer played with in fiction is Doc Savage. His novel Escape From Loki, a paperback original from 1991 (now out of print and increasingly scarce) is billed on the front cover as 'the first all-new Doc Savage adventure since 1949!' Not quite true, as from 1969 onwards Farmer wrote several books featuring the thinly disguised 'Doc Caliban'. Given that these novels, beginning with A Feast Unknown, feature industrial sized doses of X-rated goings-on, it's amazing that Farmer was later invited to write an 'approved' version of the character by Doc Savage's rights holders. (He also wrote the 'biography' Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.) Caliban's half-brother 'Lord Grandrith' is another thinly disguised pulp character, and it's even more amazing, considering the tight hold that the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate keeps over their creation, that Farmer also wrote a licensed Tarzan novel.

Here's a selection of the covers. Included below is art by some real greats, including Boris Vallejo, Howard Chaykin and one painted by Jim Burns, who was obviously a *really* big fan of the young Sigourney Weaver...

An Original Page of Dave Gibbons Doctor Who Art (From A Story With a Rather Famous Fan...)

In issue 57 of Doctor Who Monthly, a letter appeared from a reader who wanted to praise the comic strip from a couple of issues back: 

‘I simply must comment on The End of The Line. I’ve always concentrated more on the articles than the comic strip, but this was outstanding. The ending was surprising, if not shocking and very moving indeed, and gave us a very different perspective on the travels of the Doctor.'

The name of the letter writer? A certain Russell Davies, from West Glamorgan.

So, listed the same weekend as the San Diego Comic Con, and Doctor Who Comics Day, Withnail Books is eBaying a chance to own an original page from the story which so impressed the man who later - with an added T. to his name - brought the Doctor so triumphantly back to TV. (Watching the cannibals in his episode 'Utopia', it's easy to see some direct influences from this strip, too...)

Any reader of DWM back in 1981 would have been pulled up short by this story (summarised here), and this page, with its big splash panel, is the one the really packs the main punch of the narrative: there's nowhere to escape to! Indeed, long before the 'dark' stories of the post 2005 TV series, here's a tale, brilliantly written by Steve Parkhouse, where the Doctor comprehensively loses, and fails to save anyone.

The art is inks over pencils, with Letraset for the Doctor's coat, and the odd bit of Tippex here and there, as part of the art. It's on thin artboard, approx 19 x 13in. An added bonus of course with Dave Gibbons' art is that he was his own letterer, so there are no faded sticky speech balloons on the art here: all the lettering is inked directly onto the board. A few years ago I had the chance to show Dave (a lovely gent) the page. He remembered it fondly, and added "You know how I got that textured effect on the railway bridge? Dabbed it with an old tea towel!" So there you go.

As you can see from the photos, the detail on this page is really phenomenal, and there's more than a hint of the Watchmen cityscapes to come...

I've set the Buy It Now price at what I think is reasonable for this key bit of British comics and Doctor Who history (it's certainly more affordable than the £10,000+ any page of Watchmen is going to set you back...).

UPDATE: Before I had a chance to post this blog, it sold. It will be off to its new home in Australia next week...

How To Open A Secondhand Bookshop By Mistake: ONE YEAR ON

So, the Little Shop 'officially' opened a year ago tomorrow. Last July I blogged about how it all came to be. One year on, Withnail Books is ticking away quite nicely, 'washing its face' as they say. It's true that selling secondhand books is a lifestyle choice rather than an empire-building exercise, but when that lifestyle means you live in the Lake District and surround yourself with old books all day, then it's a choice I'm very happy to have made. The shop already has its regulars, and now the summer season has started in earnest, I've started noticing holidaymakers coming back in again after finding us last year. A lot of this has to do with Other Adam's hard work developing The Brunswick Yard, where the Little Shop is, into the kind of place which causes visitors to tell him, quite unbidden, on a daily basis, how amazing it is.

I'm still a baby bookdealer of course, learning the trade. I must say that any and all of the other dealers I've met, either when they have dropped by the shop, or at the book fairs I've pitched out at, have been unfailingly friendly and happy to chat about the business. That makes sense though, as selling books is as much about who you know as what you know: you might not have a customer for a certain book, but with any luck you'll know a dealer who does...

Withnail Books has a few little specialist areas (a certain film of course, graphic novels, a bit of T. E. Lawrence and some Lakeland books) but it's mainly about being able to wander in and find something 'interesting', usually for under a tenner. That's the answer I always give to the question "What sort of books do you buy?" "Interesting ones." It's not a particularly useful answer, but it's the most honest one I can give.

One skill that I have honed quite a bit in the last year (and it's just as well) is being able to tell whether a book is one that will likely:

i) sell very quickly
ii) have to wait a while for the right person to come along, but will go eventually
iii) haunt the shelves forever and day.

There are some books that I just know when I put them out will not last the week, and they never do. Which books? Well, interesting ones...

Anyway, a hearty thank you to everyone who has visited the shop, or simply followed it via this blog, or on Facebook or Twitter. Chin chin!

Finally, I will leave you with the inaugural winner of the (drum roll...)

Withnail Books Bonkers But 100% True Customer Quote of the Year Award:

"I need a book with photographs of meat!"

(He went away happy.)

A first birthday present from friend of the shop Martyn Watson: T. E. Meerkat of Arabia.
So very, very wrong, it's right.
(As another friend pointed out, at least an Arabian meerkat is more believable than a Russian one!)

"What F***er said that?"

Watercolour by Craig Thomson

Before Uncle Monty: A Glimpse At The History of Sleddale Hall

Seeing as last week's blog about the Picnic Cinema screening of Withnail & I at Uncle Monty's cottage proved rather popular, here are a few more photos which might be of interest.

Back in 2009, when the "horrible little shack" went under the hammer, the Telegraph talked to a former resident, and ran a few of her snaps of Sleddale Hall, aka Crow Crag, back in the 1950s...

Sitting on the step of the door used in the film. Ferrets almost certainly in that shed at the back.

Yes, he is the farmer.

Sleddale Hall, taken from the rear.

The article in the Telegraph ran as follows:

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More than two decades before it featured in the film Withnail & I, Sleddale Hall was home to the Harrison family. "My father farmed the valley but when the damn was built to make the reservoir we moved away," says Margaret Kuchczynski (Harrison). That was in 1965 - no one has lived there since.

Sleddale Hall was Margaret's parents first home. There was no electricity, and they got about by horse and cart. "We had two horses, both called Piggy," says Margaret. Groceries were delivered as far as Thorney Bank (Margaret's aunt and uncle's farm), over a mile away. "We collected them by pony and cart or Uncle Henry brought them up by tractor and trailer," says Margaret.

Their mother cooked on a big range, but also used a calor gas cooker and did the washing in a Calor gas fired tub with mechanised paddles to wash the clothes. "I can remember being taken to bed by oil lamp and my parents using candles too," says Margaret.

Over the past few years Margaret and her sister Heather have taken their own children back to Sleddale Hall, to see where their mothers were born. "It should be a family home again," says Margaret. "It would be such a shame if it was turned into a museum, after all it was a farm from 1722 until 1965 (over 240 years), and a film set for only one summer in the 1980s. We wish we could afford to buy it."

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The Harrison family, I'm guessing, were the ones who used to keep ferrets in the barn (see last week's blog). No doubt Margaret is happy to know that it is a home once again, albeit one that has several hundred rather drunk guests hanging around outside in the yard for one weekend a year...

For more information on the history of the house, plus lots of photos of the interior (taken back when it was in its semi-derelict state) this site is well worth a visit.