Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Book rummage – 9: Jane Eyre
The last of the original series, co-written with Jamie Sellers back in Brighton in 2001 or thereabouts. Anyone interested in me continuing this with purchases made on the cheap in Brisbane?
JANE EYRE
by Charlotte Bronte
(Penguin, pub 1847, this edition 1959)
Now this is a novel. Make no mistake. None of your namby-pamby Nick Hornbys or Irvine Welshes, none of your real life survival tales or “I spent three hours as Madonna’s valet” or crap Channel 4 tie-ins. You knew where you were with Jane Eyre. Right from its formidable dedication – “to W M Thackeray esq, this work is respectfully inscribed by the author” – to its imposing reproduction of the Bronte Sisters on the back sleeve, everything about this book screams “NOVEL!” On page 19 of our edition, someone’s been underlining all the adjectives, and you know precisely how they feel. In the 19th Century, you had to pay attention when faced with the printed word. This was the era of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and yes, the aforementioned Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair remains to this day the most dreaded book on an English Lit course, even more so than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and that really is saying something, take it from one who suffered. This is a novel. Bronte never uses one word where three hundred will do, and even if this book never did reach the dizzy heights that her sister Emily achieved posthumously, what with Ms Bush and her frizzy hair, this is most assuredly and unashamedly a NOVEL. Or have we said that already. Don’t for God sake’s attempt to read it.
Cost: 49p
Bargain value: 3 (it’s very common currency)
Cover: 6 (the classic Penguin orange and white)
Author’s authenticity count: 10 (she the woman!)
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Book rummage - 8: Oil Painting Step By Step
Here's a book you don't encounter every day. Six quid on eBay right now.
OIL PAINTING STEP BY STEP
by Arnold Fletcher
(Faber, pub 1965, this edition 1970)
The blurb on the jacket tells us that this is a 26-lesson course for newcomers to oil painting, especially the housebound. Nice slim-line hardback edition, with some useful colour charts in. One priceless example is a plate of a 24-colour circle that is essential for the colour-blind painter to ensure he doesn’t paint purple London buses because it marks all the colours with letters like points on the compass. For example YYO is yellow-yellow-orange, and then there’s OOY, which is orange-orange-yellow. BPP is blue-purple-purple. You can guess the rest. Elsewhere, we’re informed that poster colours can be purchased in “small jars for 1 s each”, and “the medium is the solvent that thins out the paint and makes it easy to apply”. This no-nonsense approach to one of art’s most notoriously difficult mediums is applied throughout the 26 lessons, with large, easy to understand lettering, and sturdy yet informative diagrams explaining the techniques behind perspective, colouring, etc. On one page, two blobs of black inexplicably converge and end up splattered across the bottom frame, like a grisly outtake from an early edition of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. “Before you begin to paint,” advises the slightly hectoring author, “let us have a few words about your balance.” And it doesn’t stop there! “How do you make things important?” Mr Fletcher asks. “By getting closer to them, by making them bigger. After all, a bull seven fields away is only an animal, but a bull seven yards away is a thing to be reckoned with.” He’s not wrong, you know. We’d recommend this book to anyone: particularly aspiring oil painters.
Cost: £1.99
Bargain value: 7 (great condition, and a good and useful book)
Cover: 7 (hardback with nice neo-modernist dust jacket)
Author’s authenticity count: 7 (he’s clear and concise)
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Book Rummage - 7: New Cinema In Britain
Time we turned our attention to the 'arts' section of charity stores. Don't start getting too hot under the collar, though...
NEW CINEMA IN BRITAIN
by Roger Manvell
(Studio Vista/Dutton, pub 1969)
This is a good book to leave lying around. Lots of photos from films that are never on TV, like The Penthouse and Decline And Fall of A Bird Watcher, not to mention Mia Farrow in Secret Ceremony. A photograph from the middle film features a woman having a bath on top of a giant plaster hand, the champagne on ice: should be in the MOMI, really, under movements in cinema. The book cover is a rather crude cut out of David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave frolicking in The Touchables. Frolicking is, of course, something people didn’t do until the 1960s, because it was outlawed. The design of this book is very aesthetically pleasing: a similar sort of glossy photographic paper as John Berger’s classic deconstruction of art criticism Ways Of Seeing, and not much text either. Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? asks one film title (directed by the suave gent Anthony Newley who was married to co-star Joan Collins at the time), so maybe this is a book of criticism as well. The text is brief and to the point, and very much of its time: discursive without being entertaining. Actually New Cinema is so 60s, it scares us, but even so, the beautifully reproduced B&W photos from films like Ken Loach’s bleak Poor Cow, the hideous overblown early rock opera Privilege starring Paul Jones, and Albert Finney’s masterly Saturday Night Sunday Morning – plus a host of others – makes us want to book a series of 60s films at our nearest art house cinema now. That would be the Duke Of Yorks, then. So be it.
Cost: 49p
Bargain value: 9 (for the photos alone)
Cover: 7 (nice picture of Larry Olivier in The Entertainer on the back)
Author’s authenticity count: 6 (he was also responsible for New Cinema In Europe and New Cinema In USA)
Monday, June 29, 2009
Book Rummage - 6: Thelwell's Brat Race
I've known women who consider being caught reading The Daily Mail automatic grounds for divorce. And rightly so. And yet, from the very heart of middle England, comes the following inspired cartoonist...
THELWELL’S BRAT RACE
by Norman Thelwell
(Eyre Methuen, pub 1977)
One of the great unsung pleasures of middle England: alongside Giles’ Christmas cartoon collections, Richard Scarry, The Good Life and causing premature water shortages by leaving your bloody garden sprinkler on all summer. Thelwell’s mischievous children are like a cutesy cross between Ronald Searle’s nightmarish St Trinian’s girls, Dennis the Menace and well, Thelwell’s children really. He defines his own genre. In every panel – there’s only one or two to a page, allowing maximum space for enjoyment and reading ease – the children (babies, really) are causing their long-suffering parents conniptions by, for example, putting a hosepipe on an innocent dad’s barbecue, tearing pillows apart in a fight with the family dog, and tearing up the garden with a toy pick-up truck. Might not sound so funny here, but that’s why these are bloody cartoons, right? Thelwell’s cartoons hold wider implications for society: warning people off from having children lest they unwarily trigger an amoral, apocalyptic future where everyone under the age of five is an anarchist, causing only misery and suffering to their elder kin and any passing small furry animal. One presumes Thelwell must have been a dad, in order to paint such a vivid picture. One can only sympathise.
Cost: £2
Bargain value: 7 (hardback edition)
Cover: 8 (front and back full colour illustration)
Author’s authenticity count: 7 (smokes a pipe)
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Book rummage - 5: Pygmalian
Next up in the series that absolutely no one is reading, a bona fide classic.
PYGMALION
by Bernard Shaw
(Penguin, 1st produced 1914, 1954 reprint of film version)
First point, with Pygmalian and My Fair Lady, we have a rare example of the musical remake being equally as fine as the (excellent) original (see also The Philadelphia Story and High Society)... and you can forget any nonsense about how Julie Andrews would have made a better Eliza than our Audrey. Second point, the ending of the original is different to the ending of the remake – old bearded Bernie’s original has an Intro and an Outro, the latter a very serious piece of writing indeed, in line with the Socialist ideals he intended to put into this play, quoting both Nietzsche and HG Wells, and informing us in no uncertain terms that Eliza would have ended up marrying Freddy, supported by money from the beneficent Colonel, not the odious misogynist Henry Higgins as was implied by the film. This is actually the crux of Shaw’s play, and it would have pained him considerably to see his message so messed with by Hollywood. Treatises aside, there are some extremely engaging sketches of the characters drawn by one Feliks Topolski – haunted, blurry, the very essence of London life circa 1914 – and the actual banter is first rate. Still, what else would one expect from the author of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide To Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism? An eminently readable play that is still a delight from beginning to end.
Cost: 10p
Bargain value: 10 (it’s got illustrations even!)
Cover: 4 (classic Penguin, but no picture)
Author’s authenticity count: 10 (19th Century Socialist, prime mover of Fabian Society, vegetarian, published essays on Ibsen and Wagner)
Book rummage - 4: The Wonderful World Of Peanuts
Just because you (still) always see these around, doesn't make them any the less genius.
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PEANUTS
by Charles Schulz
(Coronet, 1st pub 1952-4, 1971 reprint)
Peanuts means different things to different people. One of us used to think he was missing out on something because the strips weren’t always funny, but always stuck with it because he loved Snoopy. He was also convinced even back then that most of the characters were gay, and Pig Pen reminded him of a kid in his class. When his year had its school Jubilee pageant and they had to come up with something to celebrate the Queen’s 25-year reign, he came up with a Peanuts play and played Charlie Brown. It wasn’t very British, but what the hell. He got to duck a baseball bat in the school hall. To another of us, peanuts are a very tasty snack. She liked watching it on TV, as a cartoon with all those weird off-camera mumbled adult voices, and had a tweeting Woodstock toy on a spring that bounced up and down. She also owned a Snoopy toy, but he was just a stuffed dog really. To the third, Peanuts is simply one of the finest newspaper cartoon strips ever – on a par with Calvin And Hobbes, Little Nemo and Krazy Kat – certainly up to the end of the Sixties. If allowed, he would burble on for hours about Peanuts, about how, within its deceptively simple, childlike parade of characters and interactions, you can see reflected the early alienation and neuroses of America’s babyboomer generation, and how it offers insights into the human psyche no other medium has ever achieved, but fortunately we’re not going to allow him the space. Before Peanuts, no one went to the psychiatrist. All right then, it just makes him laugh. This particular book is a very fine example of Schulz’s craft, being from the early years when the characters were still fresh and naïve (even Lucy) and the sight of Snoopy fighting the Red Baron on top of his doghouse and the kite-eating tree were but distant gleams in Schulz’s imagination. There are more visual gags here than later readers might be used to – Snoopy balancing two pitchers of water on his ears, Snoopy licking a baby Linus – and the humour is much more upfront, untouched mainly by the cares of the world. Thoroughly recommended.
Cost: 75p
Bargain value: 8 (early run of top notch cartoon strip, increasingly scarce)
Cover: 9 (classic Schulz)
Author’s authenticity count: 10 (he the man!)
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