[He will] pursue a volume in an active or seductive way; he will use intrigue and stealth; he will hazard his fortune and he will journey around the world, or even marry for the gain of a coveted book.
The psychiatrist Dr Norman S. Weiner on the bibliophile1
For him that stealeth, or borroweth, and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.
Curse on book thieves from the library of the Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona
The heavy leather binding is embossed carefully, if not quite symmetrically. An ornate lozenge with a swirling pattern forms the centrepiece, surrounded by rectangular borders. On the right-hand side, brass hinges that were once nailed to the lid have left their traces. In the top centre an inscription: PAROCHIE KERK VAN LOENEN; and at the bottom: 1807. One has to open it with care; the binding is broken, too heavy for the old paper and hemp that used to hold it together. The spine of the book flaps open and reveals its anatomy, arteries of string and membranes of leather and of paper. A dry smell rises from it, a tantalizing intimation of the secrets this book holds. There is an inscription in the inside of the lid: L. K., which probably stands for ‘Loenen Kerk’, the church to which the bible used to belong. The frontispiece opposite shows a portal in the austere way of the Dutch Baroque. The panel reads:
BIBLIA
DAT IS
De gantsche H. Schrifture
Vervattende alle de Canonycke
Boecken des Ouden en des Nieuwen
TESTAMENTS
The bible was printed in Amsterdam, in 1761, by Losel, Onder de Linden. My mother gave it to us as a wedding gift. It is a relic of my great-grandfather’s collection, which overshadowed my childhood with its mystery and wonder. Its connection with our family does not span centuries of pious Calvinist Dutchmen, and the inscriptions are witness to a somewhat confused history: Dutch and German, and now English, and who knows what else.
My great-grandfather bought this bible, along with many others. Bibles, and with them a stubborn and eclectic desire for the Truth, were his great passion. He possessed and read them in many languages and old editions, some with precious bindings and others in more unassuming garb. I have another one of these, a well-thumbed pocket bible replete with his personal annotations and with newspaper clippings: ‘The Advice of a Psychiatrist’ lies on top, a collection of useful platitudes or words of wisdom; ‘Search for peace first and foremost’ is underlined. ‘God’s word in 1392 languages’ is the next clipping, then a little drawing in ballpoint on a newspaper margin, two people in a doorway, with an illegible caption. They are followed by many others: ‘Old Hebrew text found’, ‘New editions’, ‘Historical psalms’, ‘A key to understanding the Bible’, etc. Then there are the scribblings in the margins, underlinings in coloured pencil and notes in ballpoint. Some passages are highlighted in red or blue; words and sentences in the heavy, ceremonial Dutch, which always seems at once frightening and ridiculous to me. This is one of the red passages, all of which seem to deal with human relationships: ‘En Hij zeide: Neem nu uwen zoon, uwen eenige, dien gij liefhebt, Izak, en ga heen naar het land Moria, en offer hem aldaar tot een brandoffer, op eenen van de bergen, dien Ik u zeggen zal’. (‘And He said: take thy son, thy only one, whom thou lovest, Isaac, and go to the land Moria, and make a burned offering of him there, on one of the mountains, which I shall show thee.’) It sounds more distant and yet more immediate in an older version, in massive, Gothic letters and with tiny cross-references in the margins:
Ende Hy seyde; Neemt nu uwen sone
uwen eenigen
dien gy lief hebt
Isaac
ende gaet henen na het lant Morija;
ende offert hem aldaer tot een brand-offer
op een van de bergen
dien ik u seggen zal.
These two bibles in my study establish my fraudulent family history. One might think my great-grandfather a terrible bible-basher, a Calvinist bigot with a head full of Old Testament verses and bowdlerized science. He was, in fact, a Calvinist, but in no way a bigot. He was too many things to be that: translator, tea taster, stockbroker, biscuit manufacturer, bad flautist, clandestine antiques dealer and spurious feeder of swans, member of the Dutch resistance, Russian scholar and great collector. One thing that Willem Eldert Blom was not, however, was my real great-grandfather. I have adopted him in the same way that my mother did before me when she moved into his house as a girl of eight just after the war, the daughter by a previous marriage of his son’s new wife, a German girl in Holland, a little enemy. While the local children and her teachers, some of whom had been tortured by the Gestapo, took their revenge against the Third Reich out on an eight-year-old with bullying, dog shit and segregation, Willem read her stories, translated prima vista from Greek, Latin, French and English, in his book-lined front room. When he died, aged ninety-four, a few books of his library found their way into our house. Everything wonderful seemed to stem from him, be connected with him and with that country in which I spent my school holidays, that wonderfully unGerman country of contented people who lived by canals and beaches swept by savage winter storms, of large, curtainless windows and long bicycle rides hard on the heels of my much faster cousins, of windmill biscuits and cheese and different smells all conspiratorially connected to that language which I learned almost as fast as my mother had done, and with the same intent: not to be noticed, not to be different, to belong. He was my great-grandfather all right, if perhaps not by the reckoning of those who think along blood lines so much more pettily than he did. A child who had not met his father, far less his grandfather or great-grandfather, I fervently made him my own, and with him the family legends that surrounded him. He was that mythical patriarch, Abraham, or Moses maybe, and his was the Promised Land.
So much is bound up with objects and their history, so many feelings, hopes and delusions we need to preserve in order to preserve ourselves. Books have the most powerful and subtle connotations, for they are never only objects, they have a voice with which they speak across time and across lives, a voice contingent only in part on their material nature and expressed forcefully in their text. They are at once relics of a different era and personalities forever in the prime of their life, talking as objects and as books, from their own time and from that of the reader’s. In the case of our family bible there is half a century between the printing and the binding it is housed in; they already talk different languages. The text is both 250 years old, and millennia. It speaks to a secular mind as powerfully as it does to a religious one, but in radically altered ways.
Book collecting has many faces. It is perhaps the richest, most ambiguous form of collecting. There are those who treat books simply as objects and who open them only to check place and date of printing, the edition, the quality of the paper and the typeface of the print. They may collect first editions, or all titles published by a particular publisher or written by a certain author, or books printed in Würzburg or Oxford in the sixteenth century, or books bound by a particular Paris workshop, or bound in morocco leather, or books with Expressionist bindings, or blue books, small books, tall books, or rare uncut copies. ‘Most of these will never be opened,’ comments an employee at Henry Sotheran, the famous London antiquarian bookseller, pointing to the glow of leather bindings and gold lettering on the surrounding walls. ‘They are collected, not read.’ In the eighteenth century, many book collectors bought two copies of each book; one for the collection, one to be read.
Nowhere has collecting more different faces than among those who invest their capital, temporal and financial, in books. Consider Willem Blom’s search for Truth in uncounted bibles; the elegant historico-philosophical hand library of the dethroned Crown Prince Ernst Moritz von Sachsen-Altenburg. Wolf Stein attempted to regain his lost childhood through books that had long since taken over his house and his life. Another Jewish refugee I encountered, the former Berlin bookseller Ernst Laske in Tel Aviv, kept pre-Hitlerian Germany alive in his flat: the brash, modern Levantine state outside his doors, inside all deutsches Bildungsbülrg-ertum. A woman friend in Vienna owned many thousand novels and never married - her emotional life played itself out vicariously through the characters of the books she read and reread. Show me your library and I’ll tell you who you are.
The lives of bibliomaniacs are rarely ever quaint and can be, in extremis, utterly alarming - none perhaps more so than that of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), whose stated ambition was ‘to have one copy of every book in the world’. His is a story of obsession that ended in complete and devastating failure and earned its protagonist nothing more than a handful of monographs and bemused footnotes instead of the grand library that was intended to be his monument in perpetuity.
The illegitimate son of a wealthy cloth dealer, Sir Thomas had the means to devote himself exclusively to his passion for everything that was printed or written by hand. Corresponding with book dealers in London and beyond, he amassed books and manuscripts in his country estate of Thirlestaine House, Cheltenham. He was eager to share his delight in his possessions with other devotees, and to show off his treasures to them. Not all visitors, though, appreciated his way of life, which had moulded itself, and par force that of his family, entirely around his passion. Sir Frederick Madden was dismayed and slightly hysterical about the state of his host’s residence:
I never saw such a state of things! Every room filled with heaps of papers, MSS., books, charters, packages, & other things, lying in heaps under your feet; piled up on tables, beds, chairs, ladders, &c, &c. and in every room, piles of huge boxes, to the ceiling, containing the more valuable volumes! It was quite sickening! I asked him why he did not clear away the piles of papers &c. from the floor, so as to allow a path to be kept, but he only laughed and said I was not used to it as he was! His own bedroom is much more filled up with books & boxes than when I last saw it, and how it is possible for any lady to sleep or dress herself in such a room, I am at a loss to imagine! In a small room adjoining this are kept all the Meermann MSS. In boxes piled one above the other. These boxes, however, throughout the house, are so constructed, that the lids fall down in front, and the MSS. stand in a row, as if on shelves.2
Sir Thomas seemed oblivious to these complaints, and to his visitor’s melancholy state of mind. He ploughed on amiably enough, but without taking any notice of Madden’s discomfort, expressed again in a diary entry: ‘17th Rain again all day. The windows of the house are never opened, and the close confined air & smell of papers & MSS. is almost unbearable. It is a complete literary charnel-house.’3 The host was by no means indifferent to visitors as such. Many scholars came to visit him and were surprised by his kindness and solicitude. Even the meals took on a decidedly bookish quality. A visitor from France relates:
At the end of a day, when we felt that we should have been making our apologies, we were invited by the baronet to an entertainment which he described as ‘a dessert of manuscripts’. At the hour when an English table is spread with wine, fruit and rare dishes, we found displayed before out eyes a choice treat of the most precious manuscripts of Middlehill, and we were able, at will, to pass them from one to the other until all hours of the night.4
It was no accident of design that Thirlestaine House was a repository of books first and a human habitation second; it had, in fact, been chosen for the books. When his previous residence proved too small to accommodate his treasures, Phillipps had had to face up to the terrible realization that he would have to move his entire library to another place. The circumstances of his family’s existence had become quite insupportable, as even he had to admit when he was forced to write to an acquaintance, a Mr Curzon:
I do not see why you cannot come to Middle Hill with Mrs Curson [sic] except that there is hardly room for you!!! You who have travelled and lodged in Greek monasteries might know how to put up with the inconveniences of Middle Hill but I should fear Mrs Curzon would feel wretched among them. We have no room to dine in except the Housekeeper’s Room … Our Drawing Room & Sitting Room is Lady Phillipps’s Boudoir!! If Mrs Curzon could put up with all this we should be most happy to see her with you.5
A small tenant farmer was entrusted with organizing and conducting the move. For eight months, from July 1863 to March 1864, a total of 230 horses transported 103 wagon loads of books between the two houses, only for Sir Thomas to write to a friend: ‘I have filled four Rooms here & have about 200 Boxes more, ready to come, besides 50 or 60 cases of books & 3 large Book Cases.’6 At his new residence, a large building with a wide central gallery and two spacious wings, Sir Thomas took to travelling the interior of the 349-foot-long gallery on horseback while supervising the unpacking of his books and the hanging of his pictures. As if this were not enough, a constant stream of new acquisitions kept complicating matters during the move, among them 48 bound volumes of French State Papers, more than 220 bound volumes of Italian letters, 45 folio volumes of Milanese genealogies from the archives of a patrician family, and a collection of the manuscripts of an eighteenth-century Arabic scholar.
Phillipps’s self-professed motive for this maniacal devotion to the written word was to salvage what otherwise would be irrevocably lost: ‘In amassing my collection, I commenced with purchasing everything that lay within my reach, to which I was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts.’7 How many books and manuscripts he ultimately possessed has never been established. His own catalogue, which was printed privately in 1827, contained 23,837 entries. According to Phillipps’s own estimate twenty-three years later, he possessed some 20,000 manuscripts and 30,000 books. At his usual accession rate of 40 books per week – he was thought to spend some £4,000 annually on the collection – the total holdings would have grown to about 77,000 items in total, many of them very rare.
It was his great ambition to leave his collection to the nation, as Sir Hans Sloane had done before him, and be assured of immortality for himself and for it. His own insistence on total control of the collection and the failure of his correspondent Benjamin Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to make a reasonable offer on behalf of the government meant that when Phillipps died in 1872 nothing was settled and the collection, still not fully catalogued, only partly unpacked and in a state of total disarray, was committed to auction, or rather auctions, for as I write the sales from the Phillipps Collection are still ongoing at Sotheby’s, 168 years after Sir Thomas’s death. He himself had been acutely aware of the importance of financial value regarding items that were, in fact, priceless:
As I advanced, the ardour of the pursuit increased until at last I became a perfect vello-maniac, and I gave any price that was asked. Nor do I regret it, for my object was not only to secure good manuscripts for myself but also to raise the public estimation of them, so that their value might be more generally known, and consequently more manuscripts preserved. For nothing tends to the preservation of anything so much as making it bear a high price.8
In 1946, both Harvard University and the British Library failed to raise the £110,000 asked for the Bibliotheca Phillippica, the latter for a second time. Considering that several sales of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and rare old editions later the American Lew David Feldman offered $10 million, sight unseen, for the as yet uncatalogued remainder, this failure weighs all the more heavily.
The Bibliotheca Phillippica is no longer extant, and in a way it never really existed. The sheer accumulation of books does not constitute a library. It is also their organization, the ordering mind inhabiting and ruling them. Many of Phillipps’s books and manuscripts never left the crates they were delivered in and most of the others were stacked and almost impossible to access. What remains of this great collection is catalogues, hearsay, footnotes and auction prices.
The passion for books can turn those possessed by it into criminals. Nicholas Basbanes relates the case of Stephen Blumberg, who stole some 24,000 rare books from public libraries and stored them in his house in Ottumwa, Iowa. Altogether 268 libraries lost books to him. He had no interest in selling his treasures, he explained when he was caught and tried, he just felt that he had to have them.9 At his trial, Blumberg’s plea for what Basbanes calls his ‘criminal bibliomania’ was insanity.
One of the few documented murders connected with collecting, later to inspire one of the first works of Gustave Flaubert, is recorded in Spain, in the 1830s. The villain of the story is one Don Vincente, a librarian in a monastery near Tarragona, which was robbed of much of its gold and precious books by a gang of daring thieves. Soon after Don Vincente left the order and reappeared as a rare-book dealer in Barcelona, who became known for his unwillingness to sell anything of value and for the fact that he bought far more than he allowed to leave his shop. In 1836, a great treasure came up for auction, the Furs e Ordinations de Valencia (Edicts and Ordinances for Valencia), believed to be the only surviving copy of a book printed by Lambert Palmart, Spain’s first printer, in 1482. To his uncontainable fury Don Vincente found himself outbid by a syndicate of rival dealers led by one Augustino Patxot. Three days later Patxot’s shop was burned down and he was found inside, murdered. A whole wave of murders swept Barcelona and surroundings, the victims all men of learning, scholars and book lovers. Don Vincente soon became prime suspect in this case and, when his apartment was searched, the Furs e Ordinations de Valencia was found on the top shelf of his library. Other books that had belonged to recent murder victims were also discovered. When asked whether he felt remorse for what he had done, Don Vincente simply replied, ‘Every man must die sooner or later, but good books must be conserved.’ His defence lawyer faced an uphill battle, but he had a secret weapon with which he hoped to get his client off. When the prosecutor pointed out that the copy of the Furs e Ordinations must be the one stolen from the murder victim as it was unique the lawyer leaped to his feet and showed the court proof that a second copy survived in Paris, and that it was therefore possible for yet another one to exist. Don Vincente, far from being grateful for this lifeline thrown to him by his attorney, was devastated and lost control of himself altogether. ‘My copy is not unique!’ he was heard shouting in rage and disbelief, a sentence he was heard to repeat over and over until the day of his execution.
When the great thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides searched for a title for his magnum opus he found perhaps the archetypal name for all of literature: More Nebuchim (A Guide for the Perplexed). Like a child that needs to hear the same story over and over again to grasp the shape of things, the structure with which to see the world, all reading and every story reassures that there is form, that events have a beginning and an end, that catharsis follows catastrophe, that good wins over evil, that the bedlam of our daily lives can be cast into a mould of meaning, of recognizable convention: I met so-and-so yesterday, and I said, and he said, and I said …
We need to rehearse this in the face of a chaotic world, again and again, for reading and storytelling are consolations for the perplexed. Collecting is an aspect of this process. The collector, like the reader, seeks to convince himself that there is structure, that things can be ordered and understood, even if they seem to obey alien rules, or no rules at all. The library, a space where books are ordered and classified and not just jumbled in heaps of unconnected titles, becomes a story in its own right; within it, at least, things have their place in the scheme of things, on their shelf.
For the German philosopher and bibliophile Walter Benjamin, this principle was all important.10 Benjamin was perhaps the most poetic and exact chronicler of and observing participant in the passionate relations between people and things that consitute collecting. In his essay ‘Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus’ (‘Unpacking my Library’), he describes the sensual power and the philosophical complexities of his collection to which he devoted much of his life.
I am unpacking my library. Yes. It is not yet in its shelves, the faint boredom of order is not yet manifest. I am not yet able to take parade by walking past them in front of a friendly audience. They don’t have to fear all this. Please follow me into the disorder of opened boxes, in the air filled with wood dust and on to the floor covered with torn packing paper, among the piles of volumes which have seen the light of day after three years of captivity.11
Invited to follow the collector into the chaos of the world before the third day of Creation, the reader is soon treated to the spectacle of Benjamin’s spirit hovering over the waters and surveying the curious passion that led to this wonderful moment of confusion and delight: ‘Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.’12 Order, the writer concludes, is nothing but ‘a state of suspense above the abyss’.13
The dialectic of the relic and the taxidermic specimen, awakened to a new life only through suffering death in the world of its origin, holds for a library as well:
It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to include individual pieces in his circle of power in which it petrifies as the last shudder, the shudder of being acquired, is still running over it. Everything that was ever remembered, thought, and conscious, becomes the foundation, frame, plinth, and lock of his possession. The period, landscape, craft, and owners from which it originated – in the eye of the collector they all fuse into a magical encyclopaedia which has at its core the fate of every one of his objects.14
Death and transfiguration in the collection (‘for the true collector the acquisition of an old book is also its rebirth’15) work a curious alchemy, as it is not only the collection that lives for the collector, but also he himself who lives through and in it. Subject and object merge in an image of harmlessness exemplified by the nineteenth-century domestic idylls of that most sentimental of all painters of interiors, Carl Spitzweg:
Happiness of the collector, of the private individual! Behind nobody has less been suspected and nobody has been more snug than he, who was able to continue his disreputable life behind the Spitzweg mask. For his mind is inhabited by ghosts… which ensure that he has the most intimate relation to his possessions possible: not that his possessions would live in him, it is he who lives through and within them.16
With seismographic accuracy Benjamin traces the components of a collector’s mind. In the figure of the great collector the urge to conserve fuses with exhibitionism and vanity and with the fixation on one goal to the exclusion of all distracting influences.17 Looking at lithographs by Daumier that depict art lovers and collectors, Benjamin notes their similarity to ‘those gold diggers, necromancers and misers which can be found on the paintings of old masters’.18 Like the alchemists of old, who wanted to create gold through understanding the divine harmonies resonating underneath the bewildering multiplicity of the physical world, the collector ‘has taken up arms against dispersal. The great collector is touched to the core by the confusion and the dispersal in which the things are found in this world’.19
There is in these words the echo of a poet writing 700 years earlier: Petrarch (1304–74), an inveterate bibliophile and hunter for manuscripts in danger of the destruction of oblivion. Conversing with one of his heroes from antiquity, Cicero, Petrarch poured out his grief to the great orator:
You have heard what I think of your life and your genius. Are you hoping to hear of your books also; what fate has befallen them, how they are esteemed by the masses and among scholars? They still are in existence, glorious volumes, but we of today are too feeble a folk to read them, or even to be acquainted with their mere titles. Your fame extends far and wide; your name is mighty, and fills the ears of men; and yet those who really know you are very few, be it because the times are unfavourable, or because men’s minds are slow and dull, or, as I am the more inclined to believe, because the love of money forces our thoughts in other directions. Consequently right in our own day, unless I am much mistaken, some of your books have disappeared, I fear beyond recovery. It is a great grief to me, a great disgrace to this generation, a great wrong done to posterity. The shame of failing to cultivate our own talents, thereby depriving the future of the fruits that they might have yielded, is not enough for us; we must waste and spoil, through our cruel and insufferable neglect, the fruits of your labours too, and of those of your fellows as well, for the fate that I lament in the case of your own books has befallen the works of many another illustrious man.20
In some mysterious way we know that the Tower of Babel must have been a library. Its base was a common language just as its ruination was the loss of mutual understanding between its builders, God’s punishment for their presumption, the true beginning of division in the world. Breughel’s huge snail’s house of a tower growing out of the rock must have been filled, we imagine, with an indeterminable number of tablets in indecipherable cuneiform – each a fragment of hidden knowledge of the true order of the world, ruined by those who did not understand its nature.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his customary way of taking the plausible to fantastical extremes, constructed his own Library of Babel, an inescapable universe in which the books, all uniform and housed in hexagonal room after hexagonal room, contain every possible combination of letters, forming every work of nonsense and of sense that can and might be written: ‘This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.’21 Vast armies of scholars scour this labyrinth of meaninglessness in the pursuit of some scraps of meaning, something to hold on to in the chaos of randomness and chance. Their quest, he writes, is essentially quixotic and will drive them mad if it does not kill them, but the rewards, hypothetical as they are, are enormous, for among the garbled pages of nonsense and endless repetition of the same twenty-five symbols is all possible knowledge: ‘the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel … the true story of your death …’22
This elegant parable of learning and collecting allows all of us to feel that we inhabit some small corner of that eternal library and that it is yet possible to find order in chaos, to find the book that encapsulates all others. The Mannerist scholar-magi of Rudolf II’s day surrounded themselves with diversity in order to be granted the vision to see the one Platonic idea underlying all of it, the ultimate truth and the alphabet of creation. Like their collections, every attempt to organize the world (or some small fragment of it) is a testament of defiant optimism, of the hope that order has not yet surrendered to chaos, justice to injustice, meaning to chance, entirely. Every library becomes a compendium, a book of spells to ward off the evil eye.
The subtle dialectic of order suspended over a sea of chaos that Benjamin diagnosed in every collection seems especially true of libraries. The different sizes, colours, textures and typefaces of spines and covers populating shelves and tables always introduce an intimation of disorder and disintegration into the most ordered shelf (those ordering books according to colour and size transfer this anarchy to their content). The mind controlling this near-chaos, aided, perhaps, by a catalogue, is the master of the universe. It is also that most dangerous thing, a contented hermit. Surrounded by imaginary realms and people, by periods and riches that open themselves only to the reader’s eye, the book lover craves no company and no approbation from outside. Nothing is needed for his happiness but solitude in which to immerse and forget himself, to emerge into other worlds and new self-possession.
Sometimes the worlds in which the reader emerges can be unexpected. One of the most remarkable book collections to be assembled exists, appropriately enough, on paper only. It was brought together in 2000 by Russell Ash and Brian Lake, two London book dealers. Their small publication Bizarre Books is the result of decades of loving devotion. Among the many (and invariably genuine) literary gems detailed in their catalogue are indispensable titles such as: William Harper’s An Historical Curiosity, by a Birmingham Resident. One Hundred and Forty-one Ways of Spelling Birmingham; the Handbook for the Limbless, published by the Disabled Society in 1922; Erections on Allotments, published by the Allotment Society; and many other valuable publications, proof, if proof were needed, that while everything can be collected every last question will, given enough time, have a book devoted to itself. Borges would approve. Among the other titles in this catalogue are: Warfare in the Enemy’s Rear; Truncheons: Their Romance and Reality; Who’s Who in Barbed Wire; The History of the Concrete Roof Tile; The Romance of Concrete; Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun; How to Avoid Huge Ships; The Darjeeling Disaster – Its Bright Side; Railway Literature 1556–1830; Swine Judging for Beginners; The Earthworms of Ontario; Cameos of Vegetarian Literature; A Holiday with a Hegelian; and The Joy of Cataloguing.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
