1
A New Natural History
The first New Naturalist book I can remember was a battered copy of Butterflies in the school library when I was about 14. I remember being struck by the dust jacket, torn and grubby as it was, which was not like that of any other natural history book I had ever seen. The contents were even more curious: a magnificent set of colour plates, and a readable text which explained the significance of all those varieties and ‘aberrations’ in Nature’s grand scheme. But mixed in with the interesting stuff were incomprehensible chapters about breeding, involving words like homozygote, allelomorph and polymorphism. I gave those chapters a miss.
A year or two later, I acquired an ex-library copy of Summe’rhayes’ Wild Orchids of Britain, which seemed to me wholly excellent. When I saved up enough money to buy a single-lens reflex camera, it was Robert Atkinson’s pictures of orchids that I wanted to emulate. Better still was J.E. Lousley’s Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone, back in print again after a long absence. Following Lousley’s lead, I took my camera to the White Cliffs of Dover, Painswick Beacon, Avon Gorge and Berry Head, and for a year or two became rather hooked on wild flower hunting. I realise now that I should have been drinking beer and chasing girls, but I don’t blame Summerhayes and Lousley for that. Their books seemed to me to be inspirational in a way that others were not. They were about the things I liked: the English countryside and its seasons; the ‘localities’ hidden away behind the fields and lanes; and nature’s quirky and sometimes comic ways: the sex-starved wasps which, for lack of a mate, make do with an orchid flower, the yellow centre of a white rock-rose which spreads out like a fan when touched, and the mysterious Epipogium which may flower only once in a lifetime.
The list on the back of the books showed them to be part of an already lengthy and expanding series. By the time I graduated (in botany: thank you, Lousley and Summerhayes) I owned about a third of them. A few I could never get into, but most of them were such a refreshing change from university textbooks and identification guides that I wondered why on earth there were not more like them.
A quarter of a century later, I still wonder that, but I can appreciate why there is only one New Naturalist library. No ordinary mortal sets out on such a venture, nor would he do so in normal times. The New Naturalist library exists because one man wanted to produce a series of books so different to what had gone before that it would set a new standard of natural history publishing. It developed in the way it did for two main reasons. The first was ‘the coming of age’ of the relatively new science of ecology, which not only united the hitherto disparate strands of field study but promoted new ways of observing and understanding nature. Ecology was the science of relationships, between living things and their different environments – food, hiding places, burrows and nests, air, water and rock. It was field study transformed into a respectable (because quantifiable) science. The second reason was the new developments in photography, pioneered by Kodak in America, that enabled skilled naturalists for the first time to record wild nature in colour. That in itself was a major development which changed the habits of naturalists and publishers alike. The butterfly, bird or flower need no longer be depicted pinned, stuffed or pressed but as it occurs in life, and in its natural habitat.
The circumstances might have been propitious, but without the right kind of experts, willing to organise and write for the series or take the photographs, it would not have lasted five years, let alone (the so far) fifty. Here lay the greatest good fortune of all. In 1945, there was a considerable number of full-time and amateur naturalists who were not only expert on a particular subject but could think in the round and put their thoughts down on paper in a way that any reasonably well-educated person could understand. Some of these people had already written successful books, or were known to the public through wireless broadcasts and newspaper nature diaries. One, in particular – Julian Huxley – was not only a gifted scientific populariser, but a man of influence. It was the commercial resources of a publisher, W.A.R. Collins, allied to the intellectual resources of Huxley, that provided the key to the success of the series. Collins could print the books, Huxley could find the authors. And at this time, authors of the highest calibre were willing and able to write the sort of books that both of them wanted.
But was there a market for such books? The New Naturalist library charted unknown publishing waters. Other publishers seemed convinced that it would be a flop, and Collins must have been only too aware of the commercial risk he was taking, especially since the investment in the series, in terms of photography and editorial time, had been enormous. In the event, the subscription sales of the first books more than fulfilled his expectations. There must have been something special about the readers of 1945. They had not been starved of books during the war. But there had been very little colour printing (with the significant exception of the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, published by Collins), and, of course, for most people the opportunities for walking in the country and looking at birds and wild flowers had been very limited. The New Naturalist books must have made a colourful impact in the bookshops of postwar Britain. There was a great deal of popular interest in nature, and, unlike today, no colour television to cater for it. Instead people read books. Their attention spans seem to have been longer, and there was a great deal of interest in adult education, including special grants to turn ex-servicemen into schoolmasters. Popular science was at its peak (who could not have been stirred by the advancing machines of war, culminating in the atomic bomb?). So was a desire for a more peaceful future, in which there would be green spaces around towns and national parks in the hills. These must have been factors that contributed to the success of the series. It was no coincidence that the New Naturalist library and the institutionalisation of field study and nature conservation after the war ran on parallel tracks. Both were responses to a similar and widely felt need. The series was a triumph of good timing. And since these books were marketed as a collectable series, the success of the first half dozen titles ensured a similar success for the second.
What sort of person was W.A.R., usually called ‘Billy’, Collins? Physically, he was a tall, athletic man, with a quizzical expression, the combination of a gimlet gaze and attractively feathered eyebrows. His manner was gruff and direct, and he could seem impatient. He had three qualities that made him a great publisher: he was an enthusiast; he had an attention for detail that was almost obsessive; and he drove both himself and his colleagues hard. Even his weekends were, we are told, ‘vigorously occupied in farming, hunting, gardening, and above all reading manuscripts’. He was the old-fashioned sort of publisher who actually read books.
W.A.R. Collins (1900-1976), photographed in 1966 by Eric Hosking.
He was Billy Collins the Fifth. Collins the First was a Glasgow schoolmaster who had set up as a printer of religious and educational books in 1819. When his great-great-grandson took over the reins of the family firm in the late 1930s, Collins & Co was still more of a manufacturer than a publisher, printing stationery, diaries and bibles. Its reputation as a publisher of natural history books and novels was largely the work of our Billy Collins. He had entered the family firm in the mid-1920s, and his interests had always been less in the printing side of things than in the more glamorous world of London publishing. He was a good businessman, and knew his way around the international book world. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that ‘he knew what the leading booksellers throughout the world had ordered, when they should reorder, when they were overstocked’. He and his wife visited the United States regularly, and on one such trip returned with the manuscript of James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. He built up a loyal and devoted staff, including Ronald Politzer, the greatest book promoter of his day, and F.T. Smith, the inventor of the Collins Crime Club, and who was, for many years, his right-hand man on the New Naturalist series. It was also our Billy Collins who introduced the clear and beautiful ‘Fontana’ typeface used in Collins publications from the mid-1930s onwards, and based on eighteenth century lettering. Despite conscription and bombs, Collins had a good war, recruiting works from a number of significant novelists and historians to his list, including Arthur Bryant’s patriotic English Saga.
In 1944, the Collins London offices were blitzed, and the firm moved to new premises at 13-14 St James’s Place, its home up to the 1980s. It was here, in the two Georgian houses, one of brick, the other painted cream, that the New Naturalist Board used to meet around the big polished boardroom table. It was a fitting office for what was still a close-knit family firm: a graceful winding staircase and panelled rooms in which publisher and author could talk books over a glass of madeira. The noise and bustle of the printing factory lay far away in Glasgow, where 2,500 people were employed – ‘compositors, machinemen, electro- and stereo-typers, lithographers, binders, marblers, cutters, sewers, pagers, bundlers, chemists and engineers’ – over some 13 acres of floor space. It was here that the New Naturalist pages were printed – an edition of 15,000 copies could, on these machines, be printed in as little as an hour – and also their colour plates, rolling round the flashing cylinders ‘like a whirling rainbow’.
For most of the war, Billy Collins was thinking about the peace. A countryman and amateur naturalist himself, he wanted more than anything else to develop the firm into a major natural history publisher. The House of Collins (1952) relates how ‘for a long time he had pondered a new series of illustrated nature books, which would be not merely a popular addition to the literature of natural history, but a series of definitive texts judged by the strictest scientific standards’. This, the New Naturalist library, was intended to be the Collins flagship. Compared with the New Naturalists, all the other well-known natural history books published later by Collins – the Pocket guides, the Field Guides, the New Generation Guides – were secondary in prestige. Billy Collins is said to have regarded the New Naturalist library as his most significant achievement, and when one looks at what else he achieved, that is no small tribute.
The immediate steps taken by Billy Collins to prepare and launch the New Naturalist series are the subject of the next two chapters. What he himself wanted from it was what he called ‘a new survey of Britain’s natural history…popular in price, presentation and appeal, that would make available to the general public all the wealth of new scientific knowledge that had been acquired during the present century’. He reckoned it to be ‘one of the biggest ventures on which any publishing house has ever embarked’, and that was at a time when the library was conceived of as a programme of ‘only’ 50 titles, produced over six years or so. Today it is said to be the most significant natural history library ever published. It was, above all else, a product of its time, though, like all the best stories, it has grown in the telling. It captures a moment when the great field traditions of British natural history merged with the cutting edge of science and the founding of institutions that remain with us to this day. It was a fleeting moment, and it did not last. But the spirit of the New Naturalist lives on in the new titles being added to the library, and even newer naturalists still refresh their minds by reading the timeless classics of Pearsall, Ford and Yonge. This book is about that spirit, and about the people who embodied it best.
Table 1. The New Naturalist Library 1945-1995
The New Naturalists library up to No. 58. (Photo: Paul Sterry/Nature Photographers)