Get Your Hands on Poetry!

Following the well-attended pop-up exhibition in October, as part of the wider UCL Festival of the Arts, on Saturday there is a chance to see some different items from UCL’s collection of little magazines and alternative press publications. Slade Librarian Liz Lawes and Department of Information Studies PhD student Sara Wingate Gray have curated a selection of the concrete poetry, and Sara has also designed some bookmarks and an accompanying website, with support from a professional graphic designer.

From the event web-page:

Did you know that UCL Library holds over 12,000 small press poetry items?

As part of UCL Special Collections, the Poetry Store is a collection especially rich in visual, sound and concrete poetry: these forms of poetry are visually striking and innovative, questioning established forms and attitudes, all of which featured prominently in small press activity from the mid 60s onwards in Europe and America.

Come along to our hands-on exhibition to explore in more detail a specially-curated selection of these rare items, and learn more about their history from Liz Lawes (UCL Library Services), Anne Welsh and Sara Wingate Gray (UCL Department of Information Studies), who will help you explore these items on the day.

The Itinerant Poetry Library will also be opening for part of the afternoon and there is a wide range of other activities, all free, and almost all on a drop-in basis.

The Old English Gardening Books

I’ve been working on Walter de la Mare’s essay collection Pleasures and Speculations (Faber, 1940) and comparing the subjects within it to the books he annotated in his working library. I’m largely focusing on his poetry collections at the moment, for a paper I am giving at the Writers and their Libraries conference in March, but I’ve been dipping into his natural history and gardening books too.  For de la Mare, flowers and poetry were linked:

No collection of English verse on the theme of poetry of flowers could fail to include many flowers of poetry. The very phrase recalls the Garland of Melager – prototype of all anthologies – of precisely two thousand years ago. Mealeager’s title, however, was metaphorical; he had art and not nature in view; the loveliest poems of his age. (Walter de la Mare, ‘Flowers and Poetry’. In Pleasures and Speculations (Faber, 1940), p. 200.

Plants and flowers feature frequently in de la Mare’s own verse, as for example in ‘The Sunken Garden’ (The Sunken Garden and Other Poems, Beaumont Press, 1917), which begins with a litany of herbs:

Speak not — whisper not;
Here bloweth thyme and bergamot;
Softly on the evening hour,
Secret herbs their spices shower,
Dark-spiked rosemary and myrrh,
Lean-stalked, purple lavender;
Hides within her bosom, too,
All her sorrows, bitter rue.

It was interesting, but not surprising to find him annotating one of the plant lists in Eleanour Sinclair Rohde’s Old English Gardening Books (Martin Hopkinson, 1924; [WdlM] 321): on p. 98 in a list ‘From A Most Briefe and pleasaunt treatise teachynge  howe to dress, sowe and set a Garden. By Thomas Hyll. (1563)‘ he has placed ticks against “Lettis. | Endive. | Bleet.”; crosses against “Violet. | Roses. | Carnation.| Petilius. [also marked "(?)"] | Orache. [also annotated "(Mountain Spinach)" | Navew. [also annotated "(Bargeman's Spinach)"]“; and dashes against “Mallowes. | … Alisander. [also annotated "('Black Pot-Herb')" | ... Rue. | Tyme. | Organny. [also annotated "(Marjoram) | (Pulling grass | or Penny Royal)". "Sperage." is annotated "(Asparagus)" and "Savery." is translated to "(Mint)".

The dates of publication of 'The Sunken Garden" and Sinclair Rohde's book highlight that annotations are sometimes used by authors to mark pages that chime with things they have already written - in this case we can see they reflect an ongoing preoccupation of de la Mare and one of the 'pleasures' he covers in Pleasures and Speculations. 

The book also features seasonal and butterfly poems that de la Mare has marked and listed, including one long passage from Spenser. Which seems like a very good reason to revisit The Faerie Queene (my own old battered university paperback and [WdlM] 382) over Christmas.

—

Image: Walter de la Mare  (Creative Commons, limited non-commercial use)

by Lady Ottoline Morrell

vintage snapshot print, 1936
2 5/8 in. x 3 in. (68 mm x 75 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax144075

Book Art Bookshop

The first in an occasional series on book-buying (although I’ll retrospectively tag previous book-buying posts in case you want to click through to them).

On Friday I finally made it along to the Book Art Bookshop, near Old Street tube station, for an event featuring Tom Phillips, the genius behind The Humument. For those not familiar with the history of this altered text, there’s a brief summary on its website, as well as the introduction to the new fifth edition (Thames & Hudson, 2012).

I’ve been meaning to get along to the shop for some time now, but its advertised small size combined with my own self-awareness of my complete absence of a sense of direction, even in parts of London I know well (and Old Street was my local station when I worked at Moorfields, remember), had deterred me from doing so. I’d wanted to go to Nancy Campbell’s event there, but work commitments had prevented me from doing so, and I’m really grateful to Nancy for advertising the Tom Phillips event on her facebook, otherwise, in this busy term, it might have escaped my notice.

What a FABULOUS shop. It is everything a bookshop should be: beautiful, quirky and stuffed to the rafters with a selection of stock that is clearly individually-selected by its owner: the ‘eclecticism’ apparent at first glance was soon revealed to be an external expression of Tanya Peixoto‘s personality, as the stock of every truly specialist shop should be.

In an artistic mix of open and glass-fronted bookcases and laid out on tables nestle a wide range of wares – everything from signed first editions and mass-produced art books to experimental pieces and zines (cave, Wiggly Mittens – only go there with a firm budget imposed on yourself as I did for danger to bank balance lurks within). There’s also a goodly range of “pocket money items” – badges, magnets, stickers etc. – and a range of bags from plain paper, through hand-decorated to printed canvas totes.

The window display is the exhibition space, with, until 31 December, Tom Phillips’ work in residence, and new exhibitions and opportunities to meet artists posted on the shop’s events page. There’s also a facebook page, as well as Tanya’s twitterfeed, and I can’t finish without mentioning the wonderful blog, which first drew my attention to the shop’s existence and which, like the shop, is full of beautiful glimpses of beautiful books and book arts.

If you like small press poetry, zines and / or artist’s books – or, to be honest, if you just like beautiful books in general, and if you have anything from £1 upwards to spend on your collection or gifts for friends, the Book Art Bookshop is the ideal place to shop. The photo at the top of this blog post shows my haul on Friday – a copy of The Humument which Tom Phillips graciously signed “to the UCL bibliography students” (as although it’s my own copy I bought it specifically for teaching); two copies of a Les Coleman print which I can’t describe much here as one is intended as a Christmas gift for a friend; and Stephen Emmerson’s Pharmacopoetics (pill poems to be swallowed with a glass of water), which really is worth a blog post of its own, and which will also be used in teaching (although it is my private copy).

Regular readers know that I rarely take part in #FF (twitter’s ‘Follow Friday’ meme), but I simply had to indulge this week:

A belated #FF for @bookartbookshop @tomphillipsart and @nancycampbelle for a lovely early eve with beautiful books twitter.com/AnneWelsh/stat…

— Anne Welsh (@AnneWelsh) November 30, 2012