Latest news with #bibliophile
The Guardian
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
To buy or not to buy? $2m Shakespeare folio headlines literary treasures on sale at Melbourne's rare book fair
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bibliophile in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a 1894 deluxe edition of Pride and Prejudice. The first fully illustrated edition, adorned with Hugh Thomson's pen and ink drawings and printed on fine China paper, is expected to sell for A$15,000 (£7,300) at Melbourne's rare book fair this week. The edition reflects the late 19th-century renaissance of Jane Austen's reputation after her books spent decades out of print. Bound by the famed Riviere bindery, it exemplifies the collision of literary legacy and exquisite craftsmanship, according to its dealer, Pom Harrington. 'Austen had been neglected for nearly 50 years,' he says. 'Then this comes out, illustrated by one of the best of the time, Hugh Thomson [also renowned for his illustrations of Dickens novels]. It was clearly done as a luxury item.' Fewer than a dozen survive in good condition. Yet the true star of this year's fair is a rarity of a different order: a Shakespeare third folio, printed in 1664. Once owned by the astronomer and MP Charles Shuckburgh, the volume is bound in 18th-century leather and carries a $2m price tag. It is among a handful that escaped destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666, which ravaged the St Paul's district where most of the city's publishing houses were clustered. The folio was the first to include Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and its scarcity is legend. The Shakespeare folio headlines a compelling constellation of literary relics on offer at the annual rare book fair at the University of Melbourne, and this year dealers from around the world will congregate in Australia for the first time for the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) symposium. The symposium, held at the Wheeler Centre, will explore contemporary challenges in the global trade of rare books and cultural property. Experts gather to discuss provenance, border restrictions and dramatic cases of literary theft, including the heist near Heathrow airport in 2017 in which £2m worth of rare books were stolen in a Mission: Impossible style operation. They were later recovered buried beneath a farmhouse in Romania. Beyond Shakespeare and Austen, the fair's exhibits span cultures, genres and centuries. One exceptionally intriguing item is an 1850 handkerchief covered in thousands of miniature Chinese characters. It is an exquisite hand-inked cheat sheet that would have been smuggled into the Imperial Chinese examination, the highly competitive written test young scholars were required to pass to enter the Qing dynasty bureaucracy. Described by Harrington as 'entirely handwritten with just mind-blowing craftsmanship', it is priced at $17,500. Another intriguing artefact is a copy of what is believed to be the first English-language sex manual. Dated 1695, Aristotle's Masterpiece (not written by Aristotle) appears to be a curious 17th-century hybrid of The Joy of Sex and What to Expect When You're Expecting. This copy includes copious candid notes written in the margins by the book's husband and wife owners, Winifred and Francis. The couple appeared to be preoccupied with the words 'copulation' and 'seed' and seemed to be worried sick about giving birth to a baby with a 'monstrous' deformity; Winifred would later die in childbirth. With only one other annotated copy known to exist, it is going in Melbourne for $35,000. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning David Samwell's A Narrative of the Death of Captain Cook, printed in 1786, carries an asking price 10 times as high. The eyewitness account – Samwell served as Cook's surgeon on his third and final voyage of exploration – apportions blame to members of Cook's crew for failing to prevent his death during a confrontation with Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay in 1779. Samwell's scathing assessment of the way some of his crew treated their island hosts leading up to Cook's death never made it into the official narrative received in England. Only five copies, including this one, have made it to auction in the past five decades and it is expected to attract significant interest among global collectors of Cook memorabilia as well as museums and libraries, at the princely price tag of $350,000. The bookbinders Sangorski & Sutcliffe have gone down in history as the company that lost what was believed to be the most lavishly bejewelled book in modern history. More than 1,000 rubies, topazes and emeralds decorating a volume of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám went down with the Titanic in 1912. More than two decades later, the bookbinders recreated the extravagant folly – only to see it incinerated by German bombers during the London blitz. But for lovers of book bling, a more modestly bedazzled Sangorski manuscript of Rudyard Kipling's If – one of Britain's most beloved poems – will be selling for $150,000. A classic that only narrowly escaped its own incineration is a signed first edition of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in its original plain cream dust jacket, self-published by the author. It is number 336 of just 1,000 Lawrences printed in Florence and distributed to private collectors. Dawn Albinger, a Melbourne book dealer, describes the copy as a beautiful first edition of one of the 20th century's most important books exploring desire and sexual awakening. 'It was of course a banned book for many years, so many were seized and destroyed,' she says. 'It's a miracle this one survived.' The grand folios and glittering first editions will draw their share of headlines, but for those with a taste for the prosaic, Tim White, owner of Melbourne' s Books for Cooks, has what he reckons are two must-haves for any foodie's library. An 1861 first edition of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, a hefty Victorian tome that was a domestic bible for generations, is on sale for $2,000. It's not the priciest item, but its cultural legacy looms large, packed with recipes, etiquette and advice for the 'mistress of the house'. More of a curiosity is a 1940s hand-mimeographed booklet of jungle cookery compiled by American missionaries working in Peru. For anyone needing advice on how to prepare monkey stew or capybara casserole, Jungle Cooking by Mary Baker is the kind of oddity that leaves a lasting impression – a bewildering snapshot of cultural improvisation. 'Most exhibitors will have at least one thing that's truly rare or strange,' White says. 'They may not always be expensive, but they'll be beautiful, eclectic, or tell stories you didn't know you needed to hear.' The Melbourne Rare Book Fair is open from Thursday to Saturday this week at the University of Melbourne's Wilson Hall
Times
24-07-2025
- Times
Samuel Pepys was a sexual predator — the case for the prosecution
One day in February 1668 the naval official Samuel Pepys bought a book. Given his bibliophile tendencies, this was a regular occurrence, but The School of Venus was no ordinary volume. Pepys had dithered over the purchase for weeks, eventually deciding that he really should read this 'most bawdy, lewd book' just once, for information. Later that day, after an enjoyable evening in his private chamber, he burnt it, 'that it might not be among my books to my shame'. Fortunately for us, Pepys's embarrassment did not stop him from recording this and many other pleasurable episodes in another, equally racy book: his diary, which he kept throughout the 1660s and in which he confessed to many incidents that blushing Victorian editors deemed unfit for publication. Not until the 1970s did the most explicit extracts make it into print, albeit with Pepys's polyglot (the complicated multilingual shorthand in which he recorded his most private thoughts) untranslated. Consequently, although some scholars have highlighted his uncomfortably sleazy behaviour, Pepys is seen widely as a ladies' man; highly sexed but harmless. In The Confessions of Samuel Pepys, the historian Guy de la Bédoyère (who has also edited several volumes of Pepys's correspondence) sets out to correct this misapprehension. By compiling, translating and commenting on the sections of the diary that focus on Pepys's personal life, he presents a powerful case for the prosecution. Some of the most damning evidence relates to Pepys's treatment of his wife, Elisabeth — who was, he claimed, a foolish, argumentative woman, prone to tuneless singing and with embarrassingly poor taste in art. Even if that was true, she had a lot to put up with. Pepys could be loving and generous, but he was also prone to beating his dependants and so jealous that, when he found Elisabeth talking to her dancing master, he crept upstairs 'to see whether any of the beds were out of order'. Of course, the serial philanderer in the Pepys household was not Elisabeth but Samuel, whose many extramarital activities ranged from brief encounters with the prostitutes of the Fleet Alley to lengthy affairs. One of his longest relationships was with the linendraper Betty Martin, which continued after she married. This arrangement suited them both since he could have sex without fear of becoming a father, and her husband got a hand up the career ladder. But all too often, Pepys took advantage of women and girls who could not object, with those employed in his household especially vulnerable to his wandering hands. So were desperate women such as Mrs Robins, who sought his assistance when her husband was press-ganged into the navy. He agreed to help, but only after 'I made her put her hand upon my thing'. Such coercive behaviour was, it seems, typical of Pepys, who often 'did what I would' when meeting resistance. His persistence sometimes drove women to desperate measures: one maid, repeatedly groped during a sermon, eventually threatened to prick him with a pin if he touched her again. • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next More often, it was Pepys who used violence to get what he wanted. The unfortunate Elizabeth Bagwell met Pepys when she and her husband sought his patronage; shortly afterwards, he sexually assaulted her at a dinner party. Then he turned up at her home, where 'though with a great deal of difficulty, nevertheless in the end I had my will of her'. The following day he complained of a hand injury 'received last night in struggling with the woman I mentioned yesterday'. Other editors have left the details of this encounter conveniently vague, but Bédoyère's translation is clear: Mrs Bagwell resisted Pepys, and he raped her. Possibly he felt that her flirtatious manner justified his actions; a few years later, when his long-term mistress Doll Lane was violently assaulted, he argued that she had no right to complain, given her willingness to have sex with him. Even more objectionable was his response to a gang rape witnessed from his carriage: 'God forgive me, what thoughts and wishes I had of being in their place.' Despite finding such behaviour repugnant, Bédoyère is reluctant to call Pepys a sex pest — although his own theory that the diarist was a sex addict seems equally unsatisfactory. So should we simply accept that Pepys was a man of his time who cannot be judged by modern standards? Certainly many of his friends — including his work crony Peter Llewellyn, who gleefully shared a story about a mutual acquaintance posing as a physician in order to fondle a woman's genitals — could be equally boorish. And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Pepys did know better. For one thing, he expected high moral standards from other people: this was a man who disapproved of (among other things) lecherous courtiers, his brother's interest in a pretty new maid, and women who cheated on their husbands. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Throughout the diary, he repeatedly declared himself 'ashamed' of his conduct, vowed to reform his ways, and was plagued by fears of discovery. When Elizabeth found him fondling their maidservant Deb Willett and threw the girl out of their house, it was not his wife's upset but her threats to 'publish my shame' that truly alarmed him. For a brief period, Pepys was chastened, too afraid of Elizabeth's anger even to 'look about me to see the fine faces'. But he was soon back to his old ways, seeking out new women and plotting to take Deb's virginity despite her obvious reluctance to touch him, his predatory behaviour continuing right up to the diary's final entry — and doubtless beyond. Bédoyère's focus on Pepys's unsavoury behaviour ultimately does the diarist no favours; his sexual exploits are much easier to stomach in wider-ranging editions, where they form just part of the rich tapestry of his undeniably interesting life. Nevertheless, this portrait of a deeply flawed man enhances our understanding of one of England's great diarists — even as it forces us to confront the fact that even interesting and extremely likeable people can behave very unpleasantly behind closed Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations by Guy de la Bédoyère (Abacus £25 pp400). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Arab News
15-06-2025
- General
- Arab News
Jadal Library: A cultural oasis in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province
DHAHRAN: In the quiet village of Umm Al-Hamam, located in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, a lifelong passion for books has been transformed into a cultural haven. Ali Al-Herz, a bibliophile and literary archivist, has turned his home into Jadal Library, a treasure trove of over 37,000 books, more than 100,000 newspapers and magazines, and antiques, some dating back more than a century. Yet Jadal is not just a library; it is much more than that. It is a museum to explore, a philosophical space to reflect, and a stand against forgetting important cultural stories. Al-Herz told Arab News: 'Since I was born I have been surrounded by my mother's books. I grew up immersed in this passion to the point where it completely took hold of me; I became a bookworm.' The spark that ignited it all was when Al-Herz encountered the epic 'Sirat Antar' at age 13. 'From that epic and through it, I began to look into other worlds,' he said. This curiosity and fascination ultimately led Al-Herz to create one of Saudi Arabia's most unique initiatives. The name 'Jadal' means 'debate' or 'discussion' in Arabic, reflecting the library's curious spirit. For Al-Herz, the goal is not just to preserve texts but also to preserve the idea of questioning and exploring ideas. Al-Herz said: 'I chose this name for the library because it is deeply rooted in ancient Greek philosophical history and in our own Arab-Islamic cultural tradition, particularly in our religious heritage.' The philosophical atmosphere fills three main halls — named after Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — which welcome visitors into a curated world of reading and reflection. Rare manuscripts, ancient texts, newspapers, and antiques have been carefully archived. Each piece is a whisper from the past speaking into the future. Al-Herz explained: 'Even my recent focus on buying books has mostly shifted toward rare editions and old prints, to create a harmony between heritage and modernity.' But Jadal is not stuck in nostalgia, as every two weeks Al-Herz holds a literary gathering. The event brings back a tradition that was once important in the intellectual life of Arabs. It is an environment where writers, scholars, and thinkers gather over Arabic coffee to exchange ideas in a vibrant atmosphere. And in a time when people seek instant information online, Al-Herz still uses traditional methods. 'There is an ongoing struggle between two generations,' he observed. 'Victory will ultimately go to this latter generation once my generation becomes extinct. Paper libraries will then be transformed into museums.' Perhaps he is right; but for now, in the heart of Qatif's countryside, Jadal Library lives on, and it is a place where ink, memory, debate, and heritage continue to shape the cultural soul of the Kingdom.
