Apart from the Text

Hugh Pagan, 01 May 2000 - [ E-mail a Friend ]

As befits a book written by a President of Honour of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, this is a serious and well considered study of the printed book as it has developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with chapters devoted to printing, paper, design, bindings, book jackets, book illustrations, "three-decker" novels, part issues and "yellow backs".

Although all these topics are familiar ones, it is not easy to think of another recent book in which all are discussed and all are given their appropriate importance, for books about books written by academics or those involved in book production tend to focus on the authors' particular area of knowledge, to the detriment of a wider view. Antiquarian booksellers, by contrast, have necessarily to bear in mind almost every physical aspect of the printed volumes that fill their shelves, and Anthony Rota, for over thirty years the head of Bertram Rota, the firm of British antiquarian booksellers with the greatest specialist expertise in English and American literature of the present century, is well qualified to write with authority on his chosen theme.

Rota's prose is almost Olympian in its concentration on matters which he feels that his readers really ought to know about, and it is only occasionally that the reader is allowed to sense his own personal opinions and preferences : but his lucid discussion of the merits of, and pitfalls in, the collecting of books in their original dust-jackets (pp 135-141) is clearly informed by long practical experience. It should be recorded, incidentally, for the benefit of those who may have observed the absence of any mention of "livres d'artistes" in the summary just given of the volume's contents, that Rota explicitly states in his introduction that he has limited himself almost exclusively to books produced in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America.