TLS Review: The Country House Library (Mark Purcell)

BI BLI OGRAPHY Study called utopia The changing fortunes of the private library O ne can almost picture an interior decorator placing Mark Purcell’s The Country House Library, with its handsome cover photo of Chatsworth, just beside an Aspinal day diary, set perfectly askew, on a study table in Knightsbridge. Its title is unassuming, but it constitutes, in fact, a significant contribution to the scholarly discipline of book history. Purcell’s introduction both surveys the state of that discipline and serves as a cri de coeur for the return of general erudition to academia. Formerly Libraries Curator at the National Trust and now Cambridge University Library’s Deputy Director of Research Collections, Purcell worries about “literary scholars of all kinds knowing more and more about less and less”. The historian of the nineteenth-century library must read Chaucer and John Aubrey. The medievalist cannot neglect Andrew Marvell or John Evelyn. Most scholars, as Purcell pointedly shows, will require much broader knowledge if they want to write the narrative history of private country house collections and libraries. He describes the problematic terminology of literacy and libraries in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when a litteratus (a man who could read Latin) was often confused with a clericus or clerk, while illiteratus as a term for the layperson was not always applied with accuracy either. A library could be a few books, a small room, or very much later, a great Palladian hall. Purcell takes care to mention that the gentry of the English country houses did often J ust what is it that editors do? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer.” This collection of essays by distinguished figures in American publishing aims to provide that answer. Edited by Peter Ginna, a former publisher at Bloomsbury US and a lecturer on New York University’s publishing programme, it is detailed and comprehensive in scope. There are essays by editors of almost all rank and genre: assistants, publishers and freelancers, from large conglomerates, independent presses and self-publishing services, who edit children’s books, biographies, genre fiction and reference works. The essays are generally informative rather than personal, and the book explicitly aims to keep in check any romantic notions of an editor’s life, emphasizing that editors take meetings, publicize books and check contracts at least as often as they make marks on manuscripts or host boozy lunches. That is true, though less interesting to read about. There are succinct and eloquent descriptions of the craft: “The editor, then, is a connector – a conduit from writer to reader – but also a translator, improving the communication from each to the other”. There are also moments when it reads like a general business manual: “you are steward of your employer’s most valuable resource: your time” or “In cases of disagreement, knowing when to appeal to higher authorities, and doing so transparently, will help keep the team moving forward effectively and with trust intact”. Certain ideas (that acquiring a book is a financial investment; that there are different levels of editing) ALEXANDRA MARRACCINI Mark Purcell THE COUNTRY HOUSE LIBRARY 352pp. Yale University Press. £45 (US $55). 978 0 300 22740 6 read their own books, dispelling the myth of “books by the yard”. Relatively few country libraries survive in their original setting, and in his efforts to describe them accurately Purcell makes resourceful use of what others might construe as insignificant details. In estimating the size of Richard De Bury’s pre-Reformation library and of others in the period, he counts cartloads in transit and estimates books per cart, as well as considering the likely contents of surviving wooden chests. He also describes and photographs a neo-Gothic library ladder at Nostell Priory, in which Chippendale installed horsehair cushioning on each step, presumably so that one could sit as one browsed on high. From the Dissolution, the Long Parliament, and the Restoration, Purcell combs through bills of attainder, inheritance battles and seized assets. He traces the evolution of libraries from studies and “closets” to larger and more public spaces, including those of gentry collectors and antiquarians, proceeding through the neoclassical and the “Gothick” and into modernity. Charming anecdotes enliven this work A detail from “Petworth: the White Library” by J. M. W. Turner, 1827 for the general reader. Purcell notes, for example, that for Sir Edward Dering of Kent, who called his study-library “Utopia”, the private space of knowledge was also a space where he could welcome his wife without the notice of servants. One of the most notable early glazed-front freestanding bookcases, we are told, was made for Samuel Pepys, but it wasn’t until 1720 that Hot damn Trying to discover what an editor’s job entails KATE MURRAY-BROWNE Peter Ginna, editor WHAT EDITORS DO The art, craft, and business of book editing 320pp. University of Chicago Press. £19 (US $25). 978 0 226 29997 6 recur throughout. The book is about the US industry, but it appears that American editors largely do the same as British ones, only in a more sanitized and businesslike manner. Ginna writes that “editors may go to great lengths in wooing authors . . . . For one celebrity author I pursued at Crown, we not only mocked up a dust jacket for her memoir but created a full-color cardboard display . . . to show how we intended to merchandise it in the chain stores”. Apocryphal tales of British editors wooing authors include running to the literary agent’s to deliver a pitch for a book about marathons and baking a cake in the shape of a vagina for the author of a book about feminism. In What Editors Do, acquiring books is mostly presented as a sober, rational process (“acquisitions can be assessed along three axes: author, subject, and execution”, “an editor should be able to show plausible signs that those writers who do not make money are on a path to doing so with future books”), whereas, in the UK at least, the business side of publishing is often more nuanced and messy. Ginna concedes that the industry is “unusually challenging as a business”; Erika Goldman’s description of it as “hugely labor-intensive and inefficient” is less euphemistic. Goldman is publisher at Bellevue Literary Press, “a nonprofit, mission-driven publisher” and her essay is refreshing: she is sceptical of “big books”, believes that there is a “frequent disparity between a book’s intrinsic quality and its sales”, and is frank about the less tangible nature of the business (“I couldn’t have known that the book would win a Pulitzer Prize. Nor could I have predicted how it would sell . . . . What I did know was how I felt about it”). She and Jeff Shotts (an editor at Graywolf, another independent press) inject an invigorating literary passion into the collection. It would have been good to see more of this provocation, since the collection cleaves to a more conventional line, and its internal contradictions are largely left unexamined. Where personal experience seeps in, it is funny and instructive: George Witte of Picador USA recounts the time an author began to cry TLS DECEMBER 22 2017 37 they became common. These and other library innovations proliferated largely as a result of the rise of the Grand Tour, the explosion of printing on many “ordinary” topics, and the increasing popularity of purpose-built libraries in country estates. It is in this latter portion of the book that the collaborative publishing effort between the National Trust and Yale University Press truly shines. Thanks to Yale’s ownership of the Lewis Walpole Library and related materials, Purcell is able to present pictures of books and libraries from Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as abroad. By the time readers get to the account of nineteenth-century “bibliomania”, they may be struggling with all the symptoms described by Thomas Frognall Dibdin in a pamphlet (1809) of the same name. Yet Purcell does not shy away from criticism of the National Trust or its collections, despite his affiliations. He repeatedly notes the neglect of libraries in the Trust’s holdings until fairly recently, and the pressing lack of information about what they hold. He recognizes the need for the digital to save the most rooted and provincial of physical collections, mentioning online records as the future of directing such new work. It is a source of melancholy to him that increased running costs at country estates have forced the sale of books. This has eliminated the opportunity to examine them in situ and in unified collections. Mark Purcell is right to note that dispersal can interfere with our sense of books being in their proper contextual place. Perhaps he should consider it balm to his displeasure that these kinds of sales have also made passionate historians of English books around the world, where the remnants of country house libraries can also serve as ambassadors for their cause. when he suggested cuts to the manuscript – “Really cry. I mean, weep and wail – as if he had lost a loved one”. Witte persuades him to go through with the edit on the grounds that it will make the book a bestseller but: “Nota bene: It didn’t best-sell. More tears. If you become an editor, never make that promise”. Matt Weiland of W. W. Norton punctures any fantasies of cerebral author–editor dialogue by giving a flavour of his marks on manuscripts (“HUH?”, “HOT DAMN”, “LOST ME HERE”), making the point that being “rude and coldhearted [and] . . . as ignorant as possible” is an important part of the editor’s job: to help a writer see where his connection with the reader is failing. Chris Jackson, publisher and editor-in-chief of Oneworld, makes an eloquent and necessary call for diversity in the industry, underpinned by his account of entering publishing as an eighteen-year-old African American. Copyediting is often seen as the driest area of publishing, but Carol Fisher Saller, the author of the thoughtful and lively book The Subversive Copy Editor, makes the case for it as a more creative process: “in copy-editing, the right answer is often a surprising ‘That depends’”. What Editors Do is aimed at people interested in or embarking on a career in publishing; writers who want to understand how publishing works; and “book lovers curious about how the books they loved (or hated) came into being”. For the first two categories, it certainly provides all the detail you could need. The last is perhaps more of a leap – even the most determined book-lover might regret asking the question.