9
The Also-rans and the Books-that-never-were

The missing masterpiece

‘To introduce the microscopic world we would take you, perhaps surprisingly, to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Peer over the edge. Below there appears a different world: minute creatures moving this way and that, some singly, others in two’s or three’s together, whilst somewhat larger, oblong forms glide among them.

‘Imagine for a moment that we have come, as intelligent beings, from another planet and this is our first close-up view of the earth’s surface. And further let us suppose we are of enormous size (for size is only relative) and that this great girder contraption on the top of which we are now poised is our landing apparatus; if the little creatures we first observed were then no larger in relation to our bodies than are the tiny inhabitants of the microscopic world we are about to explore, what would we think of them and their way of life? What indeed are we, in real life, to think of those fantastic little animals the microscope will reveal to us?’

Sir Alister Hardy. The opening words from Into the Microscopic World, being the first chapter of ‘Ponds, Pools and Puddles’ (1975)

‘Ponds, Pools and Puddles’, subtitled ‘A natural history of the microscopic world’, was to have been the New Naturalist pond life book, covering all the variform small beasts of freshwater from amoebas to water fleas. Alister Hardy had intended to write it shortly after completing his Open Sea volumes. He had, in fact, been hoping to write such a book since the 1930s, and had a full set of photographic illustrations ready for it, taken through the microscope by his friend Donald Hutchinson. Julian Huxley, an old friend and Hardy’s former tutor (though only nine years older than he), had proposed the title, ‘Ponds, Puddles and Protozoa’. Hardy thought that name ‘a bit cheap’ preferring his own ‘Little Waters’, as the counterpart of Great Waters, the book about his Discovery voyages in the 1920s (the book takes its title from Isaiah: ‘those that do business in great waters see the wonders of the Lord’). Little Waters had become ‘Ponds, Pools and Puddles’ by the 1970s, though I suspect that the eventual book would have had a more straightforward title like ‘Ponds and Pond Life’.

The trouble was that The Open Sea books had consumed Hardy’s spare time for years. There was now a backlog of books that Hardy wanted to write. Great Waters, the book of the oceans, headed the queue, and after that he hoped to have more time, with retirement approaching, to spend on puddles. At this point we should remind ourselves of the many-sided phenomenon that was Sir Alister Hardy. The word that sticks in one’s mind from the excellent biographical essay accompanying his private papers is ‘protean’. He was, in terms of our perception, but not his own, a shape-shifter. His Oxford students remember Hardy the brilliant marine biologist who was at heart a wide-ranging Victorian naturalist with an intensely developed natural curiosity. Others knew Hardy the enthusiast. A man of demonic energy, both physical and intellectual, he was an inventor, a watercolourist of considerable talent and an addict of flying machines of all kinds, especially hot-air balloons. Throughout his life he travelled mainly by boat, balloon or bicycle (or, right at the end, by bus). There seems to have been an air of wholesome innocence about this long-limbed, bespectacled, slightly simian figure. One biographer found in his personality ‘a tantalising mixture of complexity and simplicity’ though he was entirely straightforward in his approach to all that he did. The one point on which everybody who knew him agree is that Hardy was a lovable man, gentle and courteous, and in the widest sense of the phrase, good humoured.

Sketch by Sir Alister Hardy to illustrate the movement of Paramecium. (Private collection)

There was another Hardy yet, which dominated his published work in the last two decades of his life. Hardy was a nature mystic. Not in any airy-fairy sense but as a student of ‘natural theology’, which he considered to be a science. As a child he had sometimes felt the presence of an unseen companion ‘partly outside myself and curiously partly within myself’, especially during his solitary rambles in search of beetles and butterflies (I suspect that this sense of ‘otherness’ on lone nature rambles is not unusual. I sometimes had it. Did you?). During the First World War, Hardy became convinced of the reality of telepathy. These experiences stayed with him and gave him the idea of shared unconscious experience as an underlying force in animal behaviour. He developed these ideas in the Gifford Lectures in the mid-1960s, which attempt to link natural theology to the process of evolution. Side by side with the lectures, Hardy founded, and then went on to direct, the Religious Experience Unit (now the Alister Hardy Research Centre) dedicated to studying ‘encounters with the divine’ using scientific methods – which Philip Toynbee memorably compared with trying to catch an angel with a butterfly net. Its work need not distract us further. It is mentioned here only to emphasise that for Sir Alister Hardy retirement was an unusually busy and fulfilling time. Little Waters, the puddles book, was one among many projects, some of which were jumping the queue.

Sir Julian Huxley, of all people, would have known what a masterpiece Little Waters was going to be, the perfect combination of subject and author (for I maintain that only a ‘Victorian’ naturalist can convey the joys of pond dipping). The small world of pond water lay at the root of Hardy’s later exploration of the seas and the air; it was his first love (as it was for so many of us) and he would bring sixty years of accumulated wisdom and experience to the book. In that certainty, the file on Little Waters makes poignant reading. Hardy had suggested the theme as early as 1953, but first he had to finish The Open Sea. In 1961, came some ‘very good news’. Hardy would be starting on the pond book as soon as he had finished Great Waters. But it was not to be, for Hardy plunged instead into his Gifford Lectures and the books based on them, The Living Stream and The Divine Flame, before getting on with directing the Religious Experience Unit. In 1974, his son Michael joined him in a concerted new stab at the book which now bore the title of Ponds, Pools and Puddles. The Ellises designed a handsome dust jacket for it, and Hardy produced some lovely watercolour sketches (see Plate 14) which suggest that he intended to illustrate the book himself in a similar way to The Open Sea. Then he changed his mind and decided to write the book on his own. And all the time, the reader of the file is thinking, for heaven’s sake get on with it, man, with the realisation that Hardy had by now celebrated his 80th birthday. Even he would have to slow down soon. First though, he intended to write his autobiography and a book about ballooning. Oh why didn’t the Collins team come up to Oxford en masse, and get down on their knees? It was not to be, after all. Sir Alister Hardy died in May 1985 at the age of 89. Of Ponds, Pools and Puddles there is only an introduction, a chapter, the sketch of the dust jacket, and a handful of coloured drawings. They are enough to suggest that the book was conceived along the lines of The Open Sea: The World of Plankton, and with the same lightness of touch and Hardean cordiality. There is not, alas, the space to reproduce the fragment here, but perhaps the list of contents below and the watercolour drawings reproduced here will suggest the magnitude of the loss to the series. This, I am fairly sure, is the Missing Masterpiece.

The contents page of ‘Ponds, Pools and Puddles’ by Sir Alister Hardy MA, DSc, FRS

Editors’ Preface Author’s Preface Chapters

1. Into The Microscopic World

2. The Microscope – and How to Use It

3. Amoeba and its Relatives

4. Sun-animalcules

5. The Flagellates – Plant or Animal, and Mixtures of the Two

6. The Bacterial Background

7. Multum In Parvo: The Ciliate Protozoa

8. Desmids and Diatoms

9. The Filamentous Forests

10. Freshwater Sponges

11. Polyps and Polyzoa

12. Wheel Animals and Bristle-backs

13. Flatworms, Round Worms and Worms of Many Kinds

14. ‘Water Bears’ and Water Mites

15. Water Fleas and Other Small Crustaceans

16. Pond Ecology: Different Waters – Different Beasts

17. Seasonal Succession – Bacteria and Decay

18. Desiccation and Dispersal

Molluscs, marshes and other gaps

In discussing the New Naturalist monographs and the work of the editorial board, I mentioned in passing several titles that never completed their transformation from contract to book – Fishes, The Fox, Marsh and Freshwater Birds and several others. These in fact were the tip of a phantom iceberg – perhaps surprisingly, there were almost as many unpublished as published titles, though happily most of the really important ones did get written in the end. Some of the unpublished ones were never much more than a gleam in the eye of one of the editors, or a suggestion that was left on the table. For others, authors were found and books commissioned. Some were never completed and not a few were probably never started. A minority, though, did pass the finishing line but were judged unsuitable for the series – too long, perhaps, or too superficial, or too difficult, or too dull, but at any rate unsuitable.

For one important gap in the series, the story is rather different. This is the book on Molluscs, one of the original titles listed in 1943. Evidently Molluscs was to have been a joint work, with one author tackling land snails and the other freshwater and marine molluscs. When, by 1950, the book showed no sign of progress, the editors despaired of the original authors and sent them an ultimatum. At this point Julian Huxley contacted C.M. Yonge, the world expert on bivalve molluscs, who had recently delivered one of the best books in the series, The Sea Shore. Yonge was now collaborating with John Barrett on the Collins Pocket Guide to the Seashore, but he agreed with some enthusiasm to take on the mollusc book as his next task, describing it as ‘a labour of love’. A year later though, he had had second thoughts about writing a book on the whole of the Mollusca, preferring to confine himself to those he knew best, the marine ones. At this point, then, the New Naturalist Mollusc book became a two-parter, divided between land and sea. But, like his friend Alister Hardy (who had heard about the book and wrote to say ‘what fun to hear that you are doing a New Naturalist on Molluscs’), Maurice Yonge was an exceptionally busy man, up to his ears in university administration, public service and world travel. What time he had left for the New Naturalists he devoted to his first love, Oysters. Then, for another decade, he was more interested in studying living molluscs than writing yet another popular book about them. Another factor might have been lack of incentive. The terms offered by Collins by the mid-1950s were nothing like as good as in the palmy postwar years, while the colour allowance had shrunk to almost nothing. ‘I’d prefer this time to write the book first and consider publication afterwards,’ wrote Yonge in 1955, having read the revised terms. Fifteen years on, when he had at last found the time to make a serious start on the book, he received a note from Collins informing him that the ‘rise in all costs forces us into quite Aberdonian attitudes…We are thus going to be in some trouble if the line drawings cost more than £150…I’m only too aware of that this kind of fee often represents risibly little return for the work that goes into complex drawings.’ This was no way to encourage the author of two best-selling books for Collins, and having received several more penny-pinching notes of this sort, Yonge wrote sharply to Billy (now Sir William) Collins: ‘I am dealing with Warnes whose attitude is the precise opposite to yours…And they haven’t made anything like as much money out of me as you have. I must ask them how they do it.’ The upshot was that Yonge removed his book from the New Naturalist list since he now believed that he could obtain better terms and more colour outside the series than in it. Living Marine Molluscs by C.M. Yonge and T.E. Thompson was eventually published by Collins in 1976. With a touch more tact and beneficence on the part of the publishers, it could have been a very worthwhile addition to the New Naturalist library. As it was, Collins had succeeded in antagonising not only a major author but also Sir Julian Huxley, who was furious at the loss to the series of this title. Perhaps there was something unlucky about molluscs. The contracted-for volume on Land and Freshwater Molluscs never materialised at all, and had to be abandoned in 1968.

There were a few more cases where a disaffected author withdrew his book from the series, but not very many. More frequent was the ‘Unsuitable Book’, such as the ‘art of animal illustration’, the zoological counterpart of Wilfred Blunt’s well-known book. Here the technical difficulties were great: animal art is a more diffuse subject than its vegetable counterpart. And, while either Wilfred Blunt or William Stearn could have written the plant book on their own, there were no equivalent candidates for the animal book (there might well have been for a book about bird art, including James Fisher himself, but the editors wanted something more broad-ranging). In 1947, the task was taken on by Dr ED. Klingender, and a manuscript was duly delivered five years later under the title ‘Animals in Art and General Thought’. James Fisher found it ‘remarkable, very detailed’, but also ‘very esoteric, very Teutonic and without humour’. It was also 180,000 words long, more than twice the length contracted for. While they did not turn it down flat, the Board asked Klingender to have another bash, suggesting tactfully that he threw the ‘General Thought’ stuff overboard while jollying-up the ‘Art’. The second draft was certainly shorter, but it took the story only as far as the Middle Ages! Huxley was in favour of publishing it, though Fisher thought the general reader would find it tough going. Billy Collins was even less enthusiastic, and his opinion was the one that counted most. Animals in Art and General Thought was eventually taken to another publisher who specialised in difficult art books.

Despite the Klingender experience, the editors retained the title on their list and continued to seek a suitable author. Robert Gillmor was contacted at one point, but he did not have time for it. Clifford Ellis, too, showed some interest but after reflection decided that the subject called for a larger format and that his interpretation of it would lean towards art history rather than nature. A pity: an Art of Animal Illustration by either artist would have been worth reading.

Among the more prominent missing books were a whole mini-series on bird habitats, of which only two, Sea-Birds and (much later) Woodland Birds were ever published. In the chapter on photographs, I suggested that one reason for this was the non-availability of colour photographs of sufficiently high quality. For ‘Shore Birds’, the contracted author, Eric Ennion, proposed to get around that problem by illustrating the book himself. That brought him into conflict with Eric Hosking, who felt strongly that the camera, not the brush, was the handmaid of the New Naturalist library, and he didn’t like Ennion’s paintings anyway. At any rate, neither ‘Shore Birds’, ‘Freshwater Birds’ nor ‘Moorland Birds’ were ever finished; quite possibly the ornithologists of the day were more at home with birds than with their habitats. The New Naturalist bird books of the 1970s and 80s are more traditional in their treatment, confining themselves to related groups of birds – waders, finches, thrushes, and so on. But that was not how the fathers of the series had intended to tackle the subject.

Another pile of ‘Books-That-Never-Were’ might come under the broad heading of ‘Loose Ideas’. There were usually a lot of these floating about the board room, many of them emanating from the direction of James Fisher. There was a select number of senior naturalists whom the editors might have allowed to write more or less any title they liked for the series, among them Arthur Tansley, Vero Wynne-Edwards, Peter Scott, Harry Godwin and Julian Huxley himself. These were the big fish that were never landed. Other ideas swam in and out of vogue. Perhaps influenced by the popular books he had written for Basil Rathbone, James Fisher suggested broadening the series to include a Junior New Naturalist, a New Naturalist Companion and The New Naturalist on Holiday. Huxley counterpointed in a different key, suggesting the Natural History of Myths and Errors, A Medical Natural History (‘including herbs and simples’) and The Natural History of Diseases (W. Collins: ‘That is a rotten title.’ Huxley: ‘What about “Life and Death in Britain”?’ Collins: ‘Excellent!’). In terms of sheer zaniness, Fisher’s idea for a set of short ‘mini-monographs’ takes some beating. For what he had in mind were not the well-known animals and birds of the failing Monograph series, but a more esoteric group altogether: ‘The Mammoth, The British Hippopotamus, The Giant Deer and all Five British Rhinos’. This series of extinct Pleistocene wildlife would, he thought, be suited to 10s. pocket editions with a print-run of 3,000 to 4,000 copies. To which Michael Walter of Collins was heard to mumble, ‘Don’t bank on it.’

Some might have wondered why The Cairngorms by Nethersole-Thompson and Adam Watson, published by Collins in 1974, was not included in the series, since everything about it smacked of the New Naturalist apart from the title page and dust jacket. The decision was evidently the authors’. They envisaged the book as ‘a popular skiers and camper’s guide to The Cairngorms’, though, in the event, it was mainly about wildlife. Thompson had also fallen out with the Collins editor and had complained about the lack of promotion of The Greenshank in Scotland. Another regional book that might have seemed suitable for the series was that on Upper Teesdale, edited by Roy Clapham and published by Collins in 1978. Possibly its multiple-authorship militated against it, or perhaps it was judged too specialised. We should note that, by the 1970s, the New Naturalist was not the popular banner it had once been. Some authors may, like Maurice Yonge, have decided that their book would receive better treatment outside the series. Many had experienced irritating delays and misunderstandings with the publisher and, the world of natural history being a relatively small one, these stories probably spread as Chinese whispers. That may be one factor in the exceptionally large number of unfinished titles commissioned in the 1970s. Dust jackets had been designed for ‘Bogs and Fens’, ‘Waysides’ and ‘Seaweeds’, but as the years slipped by it became increasingly clear that there would never be books to wrap them round (see Plate 12). This frustrating non-appearance of titles has continued to the present day, playing havoc with the editors’ plans and denying us what in some cases sound like mouthwatering titles (see Chapter 10).

I have included this brief review of the might-have-beens and never-weres of the series as a reminder of the uncertainties faced by any series which depends on busy people writing in their limited spare time – and in the hope that the subject is of interest. The significance of the New Naturalist series lies, of course, in what did appear, not in what did not. Book publishing is like the parable of the sower, with some contracts landing on the stony ground of writer’s block and others among the thorns of unsuitability. What was unexpected was that so many New Naturalist manuscripts were of surpassing literary quality and would inspire a whole generation of even newer naturalists. And some of the scattered seed may yet bloom into roses.

Let us now move on to the New Naturalist ‘Also-rans’: the paperbacks, the journal and the fellow-travellers of the series and the recent hardback reprints in new jackets. None of these are collected to anything like the extent of the main series, but they have their place in the developing story and help to chart the changing expectations of the sellers and buyers of books.

The New Naturalist Journal

‘One thing in the world is invincible – an idea whose time has come.’ Max Nicholson famously applied these words to conservation, but James Fisher seems to have been imbued with the same confidence when he launched the New Naturalist Journal in 1948. By then, the sales of New Naturalist titles had reached 170,000 (an average of around 20,000 per title). Nature conservation and National Parks were in the news and there seemed to be every good prospect for an illustrated magazine written in the same spirit as the parent books. At any rate James Fisher, always the most optimistic and imaginative of the editors, came to an agreement with Wolfgang Foges whereby he would edit a journal on British natural history designed and produced by Adprint. The journal would be printed by Collins, with the same profusion of colour and monochrome pictures as the contemporary New Naturalist books, though more fully integrated with the text in the fashion of magazines. Fisher enlisted an impressive group of New Naturalist authors and other leading scientists to contribute articles, among them Arthur Tansley, W.H. Pearsall, E.B. Ford, Harry Godwin, Stephen Potter, Frank Fraser Darling, Peter Scott, Ronald Lockley and Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald. Rather than launch the journal on an uncertain magazine market, Adprint decided to bind the first four issues together and sell them in book form at a guinea each. The book duly went on sale at the end of 1948. It was in quarto size and casebound in good quality beige cloth, with a rather dull monochrome dust jacket bearing the ‘NN’ monograph in giant green letters, and the full title: THE NEW NATURALIST A Journal of British Natural History. After an enthusiastic introduction by Fisher, the quarterly parts of the journal were each devoted to a particular theme: Woodlands, The Western Isles of Scotland, Migration and The Local Naturalist. The black and white photographs were first-rate, the articles well written and the overall production attractive. And yet, after this volume, only two more parts, (on ‘Birth, Death and the Seasons’ and ‘East Anglia’) appeared before the journal ceased publication for good.

Why did it fail? There is no clue in the sixth and final number of summer 1949 that the run would not continue. Unfortunately no contemporary documentation survives. It may be that Adprint or Collins failed to find enough retail outlets for the journal, and that the subscription rate was not high enough for the enterprise to be commercially viable. Or, perhaps, it fell victim to the worsening relations between Collins and Adprint over payments to photographers. Another possibility is that James Fisher’s media commitments left him with insufficient time to attend to the journal; he often tended to bite off more than even he could chew. It is likely that the journal was printed in fairly large numbers, for the bound volume is still commonly found in second-hand bookshops. Numbers 5 and 6, published separately in the spring and summer of 1949 are much scarcer, especially No. 5.

So the New Naturalist journal became another of the might-have-beens of the series. There would be nothing to compare with it for many years to come, not at any rate until the appearance of Animals Magazine in the 1960s, and not until the launch of British Wildlife in 1989 has any journal bridged the divide between scientist and field naturalist half so effectively. Many readers will, I’m sure, already own a copy of at least the first four bound issues of the journal. But because of its special interest in terms of contemporary natural history and its close links with the New Naturalist library, I summarise the contents below.

THE NEW NATURALIST A Journal of British Natural History

Bound volume 1948; 216 pp; 12 colour photographs and 175 illustrations in black and white. Designed and produced by Adprint and published by Collins. 21s.

[Number One] SPRING: Woodlands

The New Naturalist. Editorial

British Forests in Prehistoric Times. H. Godwin FRS

British Woodlands. A.G. Tansley FRS

The British Elms. R. Melville

Grey Squirrels in Britain. Monica Shorten

Woodland Butterflies. E.B. Ford FRS

Woodland Tits. Philip E. Brown

Woodland Bird Communities. M.R. Colquhoun

Books and the Amateur Naturalist. Stephen Potter

[Number Two] SUMMER: The Western Isles of Scotland Editorial

The “Outer” Hebrides. Arthur Geddes

The Climate of the Hebrides. Gordon Manley

The Passing of the Ice Age. J.W. Heslop Harrison FRS

St Kilda. James Fisher

Leach’s Petrel. Robert Atkinson

The Natural History of Ailsa Craig. H.G. Vevers

The Atlantic Seal [pictorial]

Science or Skins? F. Fraser Darling

[Number Three] AUTUMN: Migration

Some Problems of Animal Migration. C.B. Williams

Notes on British Immigrant Butterflies. C.B. Williams

Bird Navigation. G.V.T. Matthews

The Migration of Wild Geese. Peter Scott

The Problem of the Corn-crake. K.B. Ashton

Bird Migration Studies in Britain. R.M. Lockley

The Value of Bird-Ringing in the Study of Migration. A. Landsborough-Thompson

The Last Hundred Bird Books. James Fisher

[Number Four] WINTER: The Local Naturalist

On Being a Local Naturalist. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald

A Directory of Natural History Societies. J.S. Gilmour

The Natural History Societies of the British Isles. H.K. Airy Shaw

School Natural History Societies. David Stainer

Local Journals. W.H. Pearsall

Naturalists on the Air. L.C. Lloyd

Printed in spring and summer 1949, on sale separately at six shillings each.

[Number Five] Birth, Death and the Seasons

The Biology of the Seasons. C.B. Williams

The Breeding Seasons of Animals. A.J. Marshall

Reproduction and Behaviour of the British Amphibia and Reptiles. Malcolm Smith

The Spread of Plants in Britain. Sir Edward Salisbury FRS

Flowering. P.J. Syrett

The Meaning of Bird Song. E.M. Nicholson

The Death of Birds. James Fisher

Insect Hibernation. R.B. Freeman

The Hibernation of Mammals. L. Harrison Matthews

Seasons in the Sea and on the Shore. C.M. Yonge FRS

[Number Six] East Anglia

Flatford Mill. E.A.R. Ennion

The Coast of East Anglia. J.A. Steers

The Draining of the Fenland. H.C. Darby

Aquatic Life in the Norfolk Broads. Robert Gurney

The Shrinking of the Broads. J.N. Jennings and J.M. Lambert

The Broads as a Relict Marsh. E.A. Ellis

The Ecology of Breckland. A.S. Watt FRS

Rushes in East Anglia. Paul Richards

A Naturalist Sportsman in Norfolk. Anthony Buxton

An Ornithological Examination Paper. David Lack

The Fontana paperbacks

Between 1960 and 1975, some 18 New Naturalist titles were printed in paperback by Collins under their Fontana imprint. These books gave a much-needed boost to the series and enabled the author to revise the text more substantially than would otherwise have been possible, so that the Fontana text could then be used as the basis for a new hardback edition. The Fontana titles, in the distinctive green livery used from the mid-Sixties onwards, were essentially a response to the demand for lighter reading from university biology courses, especially, after 1971, by the Open University. They were, in the publisher’s slightly patronising words, ‘designed mainly for students and the more enterprising sections of the reading public’. Of course, the New Naturalist library had never been designed as textbooks, but for an altogether more popular market. As T.T. Macan remarked of Life in Lakes and Rivers, ‘it has caught on at universities in a way I did not foresee.’ He had the impression that the university biology was served by so many stolid treatises that teachers were only too glad to recommend something a bit more enjoyable, especially when it was concerned with ecology.

The first Fontana title, published in 1960, was, naturally enough, the best seller of the parent series, Britain’s Structure and Scenery, which already had a proven market in school geography classes. At that time the Fontana list was short and dominated by rather esoteric titles on history, religion and art. The Fontana ‘library’, as it was then known, was named after the beautiful eighteenth-century lettering used by Collins from 1936 onwards. That name had, in turn, inspired Eric Gill’s elegant fountain emblem, used to decorate the title page of each book published by Collins. The colophon used on the Fontana paperbacks is a stylised version of Gill’s fountain. Britain’s Structure and Scenery was followed in 1961 by The World of the Soil and later by other New Naturalist titles, listed below. Presumably their sales were less than spectacular for no more than five titles appeared in Fontana until 1968. It was then that the paperbacks began to take off, helped by the redesigned and much more eye-catching photographic covers, and by the growing demand for such books from ecology courses. The most successful books were those that catered best for this market: Mountains and Moorlands (1968), The Highlands and Islands (1969), Pesticides and Pollution (1970), Life in Lakes and Rivers (1972) and three reprinted paperback titles, Britain’s Structure and Scenery, The World of the Soil and The Sea Shore. Each sold over 40,000 copies during the next few years. The best seller was The Highlands and Islands at around 80,000 copies. The paperback was published in the same year as Fraser Darling’s Reith Lectures, which must have done no harm to its sales.

Table 9. New Naturalist titles in the Fontana library and year of first printing

Britain’s Structure and Scenery. 1960

The World of the Soil. 1961

Climate and the British Scene. 1962

The Sea Shore. 1963

The Open Sea: The World of Plankton. 1963

Mountains and Moorlands. 1968

The Highlands and Islands. 1969

The Snowdonia National Park. 1969

Pesticides and Pollution. 1970

The Trout. 1971

The Natural History of Man in Britain. 1971

Life in Lakes and Rivers. 1972

Wild Flowers. 1972

Insect Natural History. 1973

Dartmoor. 1973

The Peak District. 1973

Butterflies. 1975

Other New Naturalist titles in paperback

Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos. Pelican 1957

The Badger. Pelican 1958

All these books were illustrated by black-and-white plates only. This was the reason why certain popular titles like The Art of Botanical Illustration and Wild Orchids of Britain, judged to be too reliant on their colour plates, were not printed in paperback. In this, the publishers were probably right, for when Butterflies was belatedly reprinted as a Fontana paperback without the colour plates it did not sell. Other books were too long for paperback treatment, or too outdated. Several titles, including Life in Lakes and Rivers and The Sea Shore, were prescribed by the Open University as set books (the former helped by the advocacy of Margaret Brown, the co-author of The Trout), which guaranteed their success. That the sales were overwhelmingly university-oriented is suggested by the relative failure of the National Park books – Dartmoor, Snowdonia, The Peak District – on which Billy Collins had set such hopes. These probably missed the tourist market they were intended for in being too ‘scientific’ and not nearly colourful enough. Indeed, these paperbacks do somehow seem a more difficult read than their parent hardbacks: we miss the colour plates, and the smaller print size does not help either. One curiosity of the Fontana ‘library’ is the inclusion of David Lack’s Life of the Robin in New Naturalist livery, as though it had been a New Naturalist title (which, of course, it was not). Another was the failure to reprint The Herring Gull’s World, which, one might have thought, was an obvious choice.

Cover of the Fontana paperback reprint of Butterflies.

The heyday of the Fontana titles evidently lasted no more than a few years either side of 1970. The last new paperback, Butterflies, was published in 1975. In answer to an enquiry a year or two later, Kenneth Mellanby was told that Fontana were no longer interested in printing New Naturalist titles. Mellanby was understandably puzzled by this, knowing that his Pesticides and Pollution had sold 45,760 copies in paperback, which most publishers would regard as rather successful. But the sales of these books were declining as other more up to date and better presented books appeared on the market. Most of the Fontana paperbacks were out of print by the early 1980s, and the remaining stock was remaindered in 1985. Curiously enough, they seem to have had no effect whatever on the sales of the New Naturalist hardbacks which evidently cater for a quite separate market of naturalists and bibliophiles.

The Country Naturalist and the Countryside Series

The Country Naturalist series originated in an idea of James Fisher to ‘show off’ the colour plates taken for the New Naturalist library in a series of cheap paperback titles on various wildlife subjects. The pictures would be accompanied by a 10,000 word text written by the author of the parent New Naturalist title and introduced by James Fisher as editor of the series. The wording of Fisher’s standard text, placed opposite the title page as in the New Naturalist books, suggests that he intended the Country Naturalists to be a kind of launch pad for the senior series:

‘OUR BRITISH ISLANDS, with their wonderfully varied geology and climate, present to the bird’s eye an intricate patchwork of woods, fields, moors, mountains, towns and rivers, with a margin of sea coast of great length and complexity. Each of these types of country supports its own peculiar communities of plants and animals.

‘The object of this series of illustrated popular nature books is to give the reader a first introduction to these members of Britain’s principal living communities.

‘Each volume in the series is written by a contributor who is not only an expert in the science of its subject, but can analyse and illuminate it for the ordinary reader.’

The books were published between 1952 and 1954. Each contained a mixture of 32 colour and monochrome plates including a cover photograph, most of them taken from New Naturalist titles such as Butterflies, Birds and Men and Flowers of the Coast. The series even had its own little colophon, a sitting red squirrel similar to the individual symbols designed for the senior series by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. But only five Country Naturalist titles were ever printed, although the advertisement on the back of each title announced that ‘many more [are] on their way’. The five were:

Birds of the Field by James Fisher (1952).

Butterflies of the Wood by S. and E.M. Beaufoy (1953).

Birds of Town and Village by R.S.R. Fitter (1953).

Flowers of the Seaside by Ian Hepburn (1954).

Beasts of the Field by L. Harrison Matthews (1954).

Flowers of the Wood by F. M. Day (1953)

Butterflies of the Field by S. and E.M. Beaufoy and Birds of the Seaside by James Fisher were advertised, but apparently never printed. Each book sold for 2s.6d. or 3s.6d. with a print-run of about 25,000. The cover design contained a colour photograph with ‘The Country Naturalist’ running down one side with the title of the book at the bottom. Only the first two titles were numbered.

The short life of this series implies either commercial failure or internal dissension. The latter is more likely, since the other New Naturalist Board Members are on record as being less than enthusiastic. Evidently Fisher had pushed ahead with the series in his separate capacity as natural history advisor to Collins. According to the minutes for 20 November 1951, the Board was worried about the potential effect on the sales of the New Naturalist books. Dudley Stamp in particular felt that it ‘parasitised’ the parent books, and wanted an assurance that they would not appear until at least three years after the relevant New Naturalist volume had been published. After a private meeting with Fisher and Collins, he agreed to a compromise in which the gap was reduced to ‘at least a year’. Perhaps to mollify Stamp, the possibility of expanding the series to include geology and climate was raised, and he was invited to contribute a title based on Structure and Scenery.

Another problem had arisen over the failure of Collins and Fisher to consult E.B. Ford about the butterfly titles. Since the selling point of these books was the colour plates, Sam Beaufoy had been asked to supply a text to accompany his pictures, and was well able to do so (Eric Hosking had been so impressed with his pictures that he arranged for Collins to publish another collection of them in a book called Butterfly Lives, published in 1947). Fisher belatedly wrote a diplomatic letter to Ford, and the Board agreed that ‘the position should in future be clarified with the author of the closest New Naturalist book’. Hosking reminded Collins that he would need to pay a reproduction fee to the photographers, and suggested that if the colour plates were all to be filched from the New Naturalist books, then it might be preferable for the sake of originality to furnish the Country Naturalists with a new set of black and whites.

All in all, it would not be surprising if Collins (and Fisher) had had second thoughts about The Country Naturalist series. Though some titles remained in print until the 1960s, no more of them were printed. Quite possibly the rising cost of colour printing in the 1950s was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The Countryside Series, published by Collins between 1974 and 1979, might be deemed the cheap ‘n’ cheerful second cousins of the New Naturalists. The family feel was reinforced by the Ellis-designed dust jackets and the fact that three New Naturalist authors, C.T. Prime, William Condry and Christopher Perrins, wrote books for the new series. The Countryside Series was designed principally for the younger naturalist, but the books shared much the same holistic, ecological pitch as the senior series. They were to have been titled ‘The Young Naturalist’, but that name was dropped after the sales people explained that ‘the young don’t like to be called young, and the old won’t buy books written specifically for the “young”’.

Christopher Perrins, author of British Tits, 1993. (Photo: Christopher Perrins)

The first title, Life on the Sea Shore by John Barrett, was published in 1974, and it was followed by six more titles covering habitats, geology and species biology. Each consisted of around 160 pages, and was reasonably well-illustrated and produced. The series was not, however, the runaway success that Collins had hoped for. Perhaps it fell between two stools, too advanced for the intended market but too elementary for the older student (who already had the New Naturalist library to turn to). The sales people found a scapegoat in the Ellis jackets which, they decided, were too ‘upmarket’, and so replaced them in 1976 with boring laminated photographic jackets. It made no difference. The series was discontinued in 1979.

For New Naturalist addicts, the interest in this series may lie principally in the Ellis dust jackets. The couple evidently produced six designs in 1973, of which, as far as I know, only three were printed. Two more, ‘Ecology’ and ‘Grasslands’ were for books that never materialised. The Countryside Series is not, so far as I know, widely collected, but it may very well become so one day (I have in mind the habits of Observer’s Book collectors, which have broadened out into related books and publishing ephemera of all kinds). In that expectation, I list the seven published titles below:

1. Life on the Sea Shore by John H. Barrett (1974). Ellis jacket.
2. Birds by Christopher Perrins (1974). Ellis jacket.
3. Woodlands by William Condry (1974). Ellis jacket.
4. Plant Life by C.T. Prime.
5. Insect Life by Michael Tweedie (1977).
6. Rocks by David Dineley (1977). Ellis jacket designed; was it ever printed?
7. Fossils by David Dineley (1979).

The Bloomsbury hardbacks

By 1988, the whole of the New Naturalist library was out of print apart from the most recently published titles. For the first time since 1945 one could visit a reputable bookshop and find not a single New Naturalist title, apart from may be a paperback Heathlands or New Forest on which the New Naturalist banner was hidden away inside. A few titles, like Mammals in the British Isles and The Natural History of Shetland were still listed by specialist outlets, but many people not unnaturally assumed that the series was coming to an end. It was to bring some of the classic titles back into print that, in September 1988, Crispin Fisher raised the rather desperate expedient of allowing a remainder company to reprint some of them. The books would be produced in hardback, but with a new jacket design and with the original colour plates in monochrome. When the New Naturalist editors reasonably asked why Collins could not do this themselves, Crispin explained that they could no longer publish such books in-house at a commercially advantageous price. Collins was now geared up to much higher print-runs, and ‘structural changes’ within the firm had in any case made it impossible. The recent attempt to reprint the series in paperback (see page 227) had not encouraged further in-house experiments. The remainder company, on the other hand, had much smaller profit margins, and would be able to retail the books at around £10 to £15.

The remainder company was Bloomsbury Publishing, an operation of Godfrey Cave Associates Ltd, in which Crispin’s brother Edmund was at that time involved. The two thrashed out an agreement that Bloomsbury would print ‘a maximum of 10,000’ cased copies of each of 24 chosen titles, and, if all went well, would reprint a further 24 titles at a later stage. The Collins part of the bargain was to commission and pay for a distinctive new set of jackets and produce a camera-ready ‘lay-down’ for printing, which in some cases meant providing file copies of the actual books to copy from. Since the Bloomsbury hardbacks are reprinted in facsimile, they were not technically new editions but simply reprints of the most recent edition. In choosing the titles for reprinting, Crispin Fisher decided to exclude those recently reprinted in paperback by Collins. The rights of some others had since resumed, while others were badly out of date or were deemed unlikely to sell (the latter consideration ruled out The Monographs en bloc). In the end, the 24 titles still reprinted in 1989 and 1990 in batches of six by Bloomsbury Books, were as follows:

Jacket designed by Philip Snow for the Bloomsbury reprint of London’s Natural History.

Wild Flowers	Woodland Birds
Mountains and Moorlands	Life in Lakes and Rivers
A Natural History of Man in Britain	London’s Natural History
British Mammals	Birds and Men
The Lake District	An Angler’s Entomology
British Birds of Prey	Insect Natural History
Sea-Birds	The Sea Shore
Fossils	The Peak District
The Highlands and Islands	Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone
Mushrooms and Toadstools	Inheritance and Natural History
Reptiles and Amphibians	The Natural History of Wales
British Plant Life	Butterflies

In his standard letter to the authors, asking their permission and offering terms, Crispin explained that reprinting these titles would give the series ‘what amounts to a second life. They were seminal contributions to British natural history when they were originally published, and that is how they are still seen, as landmarks in contemporary study.’ The new jackets were designed by Philip Snow, and produced in four colours on laminated paper. When the first batch arrived, Crispin enthused over them: ‘I can’t tell you how excited I am by the first six artworks. I can hardly wait to see them round books.’ They were, indeed, nicely executed, in delicate pastel colours reminiscent of magazine illustrations. Gone were the familiar bold, smudgy Ellis jackets, and in their place was an ‘ecological’ scene of habitats and representative wildlife. All were in much the same style, and, perhaps, the main criticism to be made of them is that they are superficially all rather similar. Nor did they conform well on the bookshelf with the Ellis jackets.

What can be said for the Bloomsbury reprints is that they kept a number of classic titles before the public. In commercial terms they seem to have been a bad misjudgment by both parties. With their poorly printed halftone plates, these books were but a pale imitation of the real thing, and it soon became clear that many New Naturalist fans would be content with nothing less than the original format. They did not sell well and at the time of writing can be picked up in remainder or second-hand shops for a few pounds each – certainly a bargain. After so poor a showing, Bloomsbury Books had no interest in reprinting more titles. Collins came to regret the transaction. The availability of New Naturalist titles in hardback at around £5 each obviously made it so much less likely that the public would be prepared to spend £20 or £30 for a reprint by Collins. Nor did their poor reproduction quality do anything for Collins’ reputation. On the other hand, the Bloomsbury reprints made no difference whatever to the second-hand prices of New Naturalists. Most people who collect this series want the originals in Ellis jackets and with their full complement of colour plates; and the Bloomsbury books were no more part of this market than were the Fontana paperbacks.