JOSEPH CONNOLLY
on how buying a bookshop fuelled his passion for modern first editions
Precisely 45 years ago, I bought The Flask Bookshop in Hampstead from a kindly white-haired old couple who had run the place since before the War. Actually, they weren’t quite the couple that everyone assumed them to be: the one who wore the trousers was Peggy, the shrewd and knowledgeable sister to Jasper, her very sweet and homosexual brother who could (and did) quote quite endlessly and seamlessly from any of the poets from Shakespeare to Ezra Pound (particularly relishing Keats and Byron). By this time (1975) I was very keen on modern English literature and attracted by the idea of first editions, the chief reason I acquired the bookshop being to fund my own collection (that was the idea, at least, but for rather too long I ended up funding little more than the rent and rates).
‘Modern first editions’ is rather a broad term which at the time was largely interpreted as 20th century – though in the eyes of the elite of the generally rather patrician antiquarian booksellers (with the sole and notable exception of Bertram Rota) some authors were more equal than others. Those deemed collectable were wholly established, highly literary and more or less all pre-war: hence, no novelists since Greene and Waugh, no poets after Auden and Eliot. Now I liked all of these, and did my best to gather what my very slim budget would allow, but I was also taken with many of the more recent writers – Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and William Golding, among many more. These authors were acknowledged, but not seriously collected, which I thought strange – and nor really were poets and playwrights such as Ted Hughes, Heaney, Plath, Larkin, Pinter, Osborne and Stoppard. Odd, no? But the writers the establishment were wholly dismissive of were any that were regarded as ‘commercial’ – ie, the most loved and popular authors of the time: Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and quite a few others.
The plus side of all this was that impoverished collectors such as myself could wander into any secondhand bookshop (oh Lord – there were thousands of the glorious things) and take their pick. Seldom was any differentiation made between first editions and subsequent impressions – nor even whether the book retained its dust-wrapper … so I scooped them up. I was eager to explore the bibliographies of all these neglected authors, but none existed. Values too were notional – and so, with the zeal and confidence of a young enthusiast, I wrote a book called Collecting Modern First Editions – very attractively produced in 1977 by Studio Vista with lovely colour plates, all the books photographed from my own collection (for where else could one go?). So here for the first time were not just the 20th-century giants – Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Eliot, Greene, Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, Woolf and very many more – but also the more fun side of things: Wodehouse mainly, along with such as Christie, Fleming, Ayckbourn, and personal favourites such as Geoffrey
Willans and Ronald Searle (who are great, as any fule kno). I particularly stressed the importance and beauty of the dust-wrapper, which was often seen as an optional extra, and rather vulgar in the bookcase: so many were ritually thrown away.
My book was something of a pioneering work, and it did seem to strike a chord, running to many subsequent editions over the years. I had a stab at valuing every single book – often guesswork, as of course for the more recent works there were no precedents. Apart from the well-established greats, prices ranged from £3 up to a dizzying £25 or so – although these prices soon were to rise quite sharply (partly, I suppose, because of this brand new reference work).
There was a weekly cheaply produced trade paper called The Clique – exclusively for bona fide antiquarian and secondhand booksellers – where you could advertise for books wanted and for sale at a penny a line. Before the cat was out of the bag, I said I was willing to buy all the modern authors I have mentioned, if in fine condition, and listed dozens of them each week. I was inundated: word got round in the trade that there was this loony in Hampstead (where else?) who was actually paying good money for all these piles of 1950s and 1960s books that they had been unable to shift. I remember I bought a mint first edition of Lord of the Flies for the dealer’s asking price of £8, along with loads of Wodehouse. With the exceptions of the tricky first three in the series, you could buy all the James Bond books for two or three pounds each. I think there was a point when I was the only Bond collector in the country – strange to think of it now.
I suppose it was just one of those happy instances of being in the right place at the right time, and being possessed of oddball inclinations. People told me constantly (professionals, mainly) that here was a bubble that would surely burst… but 40 years on, this particular bubble does seem to be remarkably resilient. And in reply to the endlessly asked question: yes, I did actually read all my first editions … just rather carefully.
‘Impoverished collectors such as myself could wander into any secondhand bookshop and take their pick’