SHARP 15.1.P65
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SHARP News Item Type Newsletter (Paginated) Authors SHARP, (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing) Citation SHARP News 2006, 15(1):1-16 SHARP News Publisher Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing Journal SHARP News Download date 29/09/2021 04:33:03 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/106243 SHARP NEWS Volume 15, Number 1 Winter 2006 lishing in wartime. Jane Potter, from Oxford MODERN BOOK HISTORY Brookes, distilled an impressively lucid and HIGHAM ARCHIVE well-organised paper out of a mountain of Parallel sessions are par for the course at information on the surprisingly diverse re- Literary agencies are an often over- book history conferences these days, and the sponses of the major British publishers to looked resource for bibliographical re- Modern Book History Conference hosted the propaganda expectations of the Welling- search. It is strange that this should be so as by Oxford University on 26 November 2005 ton House Bureau during WW1, and Helen the historic place that agents have had in the was no exception, with three concurrent Smith, from York, teased out a fascinating manuscript-to-publication process is itself streams of papers. One shared the wish Asa and thought-provoking comparison between relatively well-known. Recently, Peter Briggs expressed in the third plenary of the the classic reprints series produced for the McDonald illuminated the part that Arthur day, to be in two or three places at once. American armed forces in WW2 and the Conan Doyle’s agent, A.P. Watt, played in Considering the diversity of interests repre- Gulf War. placing Conan Doyle’s early Sherlock sented, however, the organisers managed to The second session offered a three-paper Holmes stories in The Strand. Similarly, Mary group the papers intelligently. feast for Joyceans, a panel on reading com- Ann Gillies has contextualized Watt, along The program began in suitably self-scru- munities, and one on texts and history, fea- with his contemporaries in late-nineteenth tinising fashion with Helen Small’s elegant turing Mark Nixon on John Morley’s biogra- century British literary agency, J.B. Pinker meditation on the paradox posed by book phy of Gladstone, Jonathan Rose on and Curtis Brown, in terms of the estab- history’s exemplary contemporaneity and Winston’s Churchill’s serial commercial fail- lishment of the contemporary (and eventu- interdisciplinarity, on the one hand, and on ures as an author in the US, and the reading ally, of the twentieth century) literary mar- the other hand its slightly mid-Victorian autobiography of Miki Kiyoshi, a Japanese ketplace. devotion to the accumulation of individual intellectual of the interwar and war years. The David Higham Literary Agency, for- instances. Peter D. McDonald, in a second The third and final session focussed on merly Pearne, Pollinger, and Higham Ltd., keynote presentation, took up Small’s hints publishing and the literary marketplace, with has been the agency of record for some of at an exemplary status for book history papers on the Dutch, Flemish, British and the twentieth century’s most prominent Brit- among the humanities disciplines, partly ac- Estonian booktrades, a panel on current and ish poets, novelists, and essayists, among knowledging, with Jonathan Rose, its poten- future publishing, and two excellent and them Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, Edith tial role as Fortinbras to the royal house of closely argued papers, one by Chris Hilliard Sitwell, and Allanah Harper. The Harry Ran- Theory, but warning against naïve hopes of (U of Sydney) on the Tillotson Syndicate, a som Center at the University of Texas at a return – by this or any other route – to the distribution agent for magazine fiction Austin holds an extensive collection of the innocent simplicity of a pre-theoretical throughout the Empire, and another by Dal- Higham Agency’s archives dating back to Elsinore. The question of ‘the literary’ in las Liddle (Augsburg College, USA) on shift- the early 1930s, and the records of corre- ing representations of journalism in mid-Vic- particular, as canvassed by the likes of ... / 2 Eagleton, Bourdieu, Blanchot and Derrida, torian literature. can hardly be wished away, and book histo- The conference as a whole was remark- able for its tight (but generous) organisation, ry’s inbuilt awareness of material and insti- CONTENTS tutional determinations does allow the so- the strength of the plenaries and of all the phistication of some of those insights to be panels I was able to attend, the international retained and even built upon. Asa Briggs, in diversity of the delegates, the vigour of the MODERN BOOK HISTORY 1 the last of the plenary talks, invoked pre- discussion, and the reliability of the heating. HIGHAM ARCHIVE 1 cisely those determinations in a wise and en- For most of these, the organiser, Kate THE SHARP EDGE 3 gaging evocation of a long and brilliant ca- Longworth of Magdalen College Oxford, THE BOOK COLLECTOR 4 reer, one crowning achievement of which will was responsible, and she has much to be PRIZES 5 be his monumental history of the House of proud of. It’s to be hoped that a publication BOOK REVIEWS 6 Longman, soon to appear. will result. BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR 12 The first of the parallel sessions offered EXHIBITION REVIEWS 12 one group of three papers on texts and im- Patrick Buckridge CALLS FOR PAPERS 13 ages, a second on particular authors and pub- Griffith University, Australia FORTHCOMING EVENTS 14 lishers, and a third (which I attended) on pub- BIBLIOGRAPHY 15 2 W INTER 2006 SHARP NEWS VOL. 15, NO. 1 ... / 1 spondence between the agency and its useful the still unexplored areas of the SHARP NEWS storied clients, as well as reader reports on a Higham archive might be. variety of lesser-known creators, are an in- Although only some of Dylan Thomas’s EDITOR valuable resource for literary history, cultural letters to the Higham Agency appear to be Sydney Shep, Wai-te-ata Press studies, and history-of-the-book scholarship. in the archive, it does contain many letters Victoria University of Wellington Although the archive is not completely cata- from Higham himself to Thomas, chiefly PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand logued, individual author correspondences over Thomas’s missing of deadlines, and Fax: +64-4-463-5446 are easily located, and the archive’s contents over Higham’s efforts to keep prospective E-mail: [email protected] have already proven to be essential sources publishers happy with no product to show for several scholarly works. them. More intriguing, though, is the agen- EDITORIAL ASSISTANT - 15.1 We can divine remarkable insights about cy’s small role in keeping Thomas out of Renée Maunder the creative process from material that we military service during the war years. Tho- Summer Publication Assistant might, at first, consider tangential to it. Cer- mas’s wish to avoid conscription is some- Wai-te-ata Press tainly, a great deal of what literary agents thing which several Thomas biographers, do might seem to have more to do with the Paul Ferris and Andrew Lycett among them, REVIEW EDITORS business-end of the writer’s existence than have made clear. Ferris points out that Ian Gadd, Book Reviews with the creative. However, a perusal of Higham had apparently advised Thomas to Bath Spa University College, UK some of Graham Greene’s letters to, and re- go for his military physical, one which he E-mail: [email protected] sponses from, the Higham Agency during subsequently failed (a failure which ulti- the early 1940s is remarkably illuminating, mately excluded him from service). Higham Gail Shivel, Book Reviews both from the standpoint of scholarship on wrote to Thomas, on 1 February 1940 (in a University of Miami, FL, USA Greene and for our understanding of the letter which Ferris does not make use of), in E-mail: [email protected] historical context of publishing during the reference to Thomas’s attempts to land a ci- war years. Norman Sherry, in his three vol- vilian job with the British government prior Lisa Pon, Exhibition Reviews ume biography of Greene, made extensive to his physical: “I am so sorry but there is Southern Methodist University use of the correspondence between Greene not truth in that story you have heard about Dallas, TX USA and Lawrence Pollinger from the Higham the Ministry of Labour form which you E-mail: [email protected] archive. At one point in early 1943, Greene completed, and which we turned into them. wrote to Pollinger from Freetown, West I more than sympathise with your wish not Tina Ray Murray, E-Resources Reviews Africa, where he was stationed as an intelli- to be conscripted in a few months time. Per- University of Edinburgh, SCOTLAND gence officer for MI6. Amidst his instruc- haps the war will be over by then. Let’s hope E-mail: [email protected] tions to the agency concerning paperback and pray so.” These and other pieces of cor- BIBLIOGRAPHER reprints of his earlier novels, he lashed out respondence in the Higham archive show just Robert N. Matuozzi at the complacency of his fellow British how intimate Thomas’s relationship was with Washington State University Libraries colonials: “One feels out of it in this colony his agent at a critical point in his life, and, as Pullman, WA 99164-5610 USA of escapists with their huge drinking parties with the already noted correspondence of E-mail: [email protected] and their complete unconsciousness of what Greene’s, they underscore the potential that war is like. I had hoped at one time that we the agency’s archives may still hold for schol- SUBSCRIPTIONS might have been bombed, but that hope has arly projects.