SPAIN AND PORTUGAL: FROM THE LIBRARY OF IAN ROBERTSON BERNARD QUARITCH LTD BERNARD QUARITCH LTD 36 BEDFORD ROW,LONDON, WC1R 4JH tel.: +44 (0)20 7297 4888 fax: +44 (0)20 7297 4866 email: [email protected] / [email protected] web: www.quaritch.com Bankers: Barclays Bank PLC 1 Churchill Place London E14 5HP Sort code: 20-65-90 Account number: 10511722 Swift code: BUKBGB22 Sterling account: IBAN: GB71 BUKB 2065 9010 5117 22 Euro account: IBAN: GB03 BUKB 2065 9045 4470 11 U.S. Dollar account: IBAN: GB19 BUKB 2065 9063 9924 44 VAT number: GB 322 4543 31 Front cover image from no. 169 - Vivian Inside covers from no. 119 - López Title-page vignette from no. 14 - Batty Recent lists: 2021/8 The Classical Tradition 2021/7 Eccentrics, Cranks, Ousiders, Obsessives 2021/6 Women 2021/5 Art & Architecture 2021/4 Hippology - The Billmyer-Conant Collection II 2021/3 The Library of Sir Geoffrey Bindman part III, 1800 to 1950 2021/2 California Virtual Book Fair 2021 Recent catalogues: 1443 English Books & Manuscripts 1442 The English & Anglo-French Novel 1740-1840 1441 The Billmyer–Conant Collection — Hippology 1440 English Books & Manuscripts © Bernard Quaritch 2021 CATALOGUE 1444 SPAIN AND PORTUGAL: FROM THE LIBRARY OF IAN ROBERTSON BERNARD QUARITCH LTD MMXXI In memory of Ian Robertson (1928–2020) who sadly died as this catalogue was nearing completion SPAIN AND PORTUGAL: FROM THE LIBRARY OF IAN ROBERTSON At first sight this catalogue, of a large part of a collection mostly of travel andmilitary books concerning Spain and Portugal, may reflect diverse interests, and perhaps it should be explained in outline how and why they were accumulated and their apparent disunity. At an early age I was referred to as a ‘book-worm’, and in due course I found myself employed for a pittance by that irascible publisher Victor Gollancz. While I might haunt the numerous second-hand and antiquarian bookshops that flourished in post-war London, I could ill afford to buy many books or prints, as Music and the Fine Artswere also among my enthusiasms. Memorable were the concerts in London conducted by Richard Strauss in 1947 which I attended; while I was overwhelmed by exhibitions from the great collections at Munich and Vienna, and another devoted to Claude and Poussin. In the late 1950s I married a Basque and first visited the Basque provinces of northern Spain. Not long after, when scouring the shelves of Harry Pratley’s shop in Tunbridge Wells, I chanced on The Subaltern (1825), Gleig’s narrative of his experiences in those provinces towards the end of the Peninsular War. This was enough to get me hooked on the subject, and I started to collect contemporary descriptions of both that conflict and the later Carlist War, about which there was nothing in print. In my search, I had the temerity to enter the portals of Maggs, and to introduce myself to Edward Dring at Quaritch: morning coffee in the bowels of Berkeley Square with John, and pow-wows in Grafton Street with Toby Rodgers, later a close friend, became frequent. Several fruitful visits were also made to John Gili at Oxford. Before long, I acquired a first edition of Richard Ford’s Hand-book for travellers in Spain, and in due course, before they became increasingly hard to find, a number of choice volumes of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel. Due to my slender means, I was obliged to be very selective. I was able to persuade a publisher to commission a military history of the Peninsular War, and found myself editing, when not re-writing, the author’s convoluted text and re- drawing his maps and plans, at the same time learning a great deal about that wide subject. In those far-off days, months would pass as draft chapters, their corrections, and then proofs of Jac Weller’s Wellington in the Peninsula would shuttle backwards and forwards by ‘snail mail’ before its publication in 1962. At my suggestion, the same publisher had already issued several volumes of Corvo’s Letters, edited by my old friend Cecil Woolf. Later, on hearing by chance that Jon Wynne-Tyson at his Centaur Press in Sussex was intending to reprint Richard Ford’s Hand-book of 1845, I committed myself to seeing that masterpiece through the press, which amounted to 1500 pages in three volumes when reset. This was published in 1966. With the help of Brinsley Ford, the author’s great- grandson, I contributed a preface. All this occupied many months of my ‘free time’; but again, it was an instructive and satisfying undertaking. In 1970 the Centaur Press produced a facsimile reprint, also with my introduction, of Joseph Baretti’s Journey from London to Genoa through Spain (1770), which may well have prompted the translation into Spanish which was published by Reino de Redonda several years later. In 1972, at my suggestion, Wynne-Tyson published a facsimile edition likewise of Beckford’s Recollections of an excursion to the monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha, introduced by Boyd Alexander. My humble position ‘in publishing’ – a precarious profession at the best of times – improved, but gradually, allowing my infant library to grow with the help and encouragement of a number of London booksellers: the names of Alan Thomas, Bill Fletcher in Cecil Court, gentlemanly Stanley Crowe in his cluttered basement near the British Museum, come to mind. After a decade with publishers – already entering a period of change with which I had increasingly little sympathy – I ‘changed horses in mid- stream’to book-selling, with Bertram Rota at Bodley House engaging me to promote what he referred to as ‘tomorrow’s First Edition’. It was a happy association until his sudden demise: less so with his dapper son, and we parted company, with Ted Dring inviting me to revive Q’s quiescent ‘new book’ business. Regrettably, the task did not prove sufficiently rewarding despite my efforts. Meanwhile, on the last of several short holidays in Spain, curiosity caused us to make a detour to visit a house advertised in The Times as for sale in an as yet unspoilt ‘medieval’ village, Pedraza de la Sierra, near Segovia. We fell instantly for this ‘ivory tower’ and in due course were able to buy it; but how could I possibly earn a living there? Aware that the ‘Blue Guide’ to Spain, on which we had long relied, was getting increasingly outdated, I had earlier complained, gently, to Ernest Benn Ltd, its publisher. On our return to London, I pressed the point. It was a long shot, but well-aimed; and the outcome of several conversations with the series editor, Stuart Rossiter, was a commission to compile an entirely re-written edition. Going freelance was a risk I was prepared to take, although it may have had the appearance of ‘dropping out’. Due notice was given to Q’s, and early in 1971 we installed ourselves on the high-lying meseta of Old Castile with all our belongings, my precious books, and my first type-writer. It was to be our home for almost two decades. Many strenuous excursions were made over the next three years in exploring those many nooks and crannies not yet seen, revisiting others, followed by a deal of laborious two-finger typing, very often well into the night. The first edition ofmy Spain was not published until 1975, but meanwhile, fortuitously, I had been commissioned by Editora Nacional in Madrid to write about the adventures in Spain of earlier travellers. This study, admirably translated by Paco Mayans and entitled Los curiosos impertinentes (coincidentally reflecting the title ofa novela by Cervantes), was published in the new year of 1977 (revised edition 1988). This was to precipitate a rash of articles and essays in Spain, while the first Spanish translations of several narratives described in the volume appeared in its wake during the next few years, notable among them being those of Baretti, Jardine, and Jacob. Well content with the sale of Spain, Timothy Benn proposed that I revise their Blue Guide to Paris likewise, and in due course, until 1997, I was to find myself gainfully occupied not only entirely re-writing several editions of those to Ireland and Switzerland, compiling Cyprus, Portugal, and Austria from scratch, but also writing one to the whole of France. Meanwhile, in 1990, we had migrated from Old Castile to Arles in Provence, a more convenient base from which revisions of my extended ‘empire’ might be covered adequately. By then, the flourishing series had been sold by Benn to A. & C. BlackLtd. Unfortunately, their conception of what constituted a comprehensive guide for the cultivated traveller proved to be very different from mine in many respects. Eventually, after enduring a deal of gratuitous interference and duplicity, I chose to disengage myself entirely from them. My titles were allowed to slide out of print and, before very long, the respected Blue Guides themselves passed into other hands, later the fate of their publisher. In 1974, at my suggestion, Enrique de Mesa’s translation of Richard Ford’s Gatherings from Spain, entitled Cosas de España, had been reprinted by Turner in Madrid, while my edition of Gatherings, and my biography, Richard Ford: Hispanophile, connoisseur and critic, were published in 2000 and 2004 respectively, the latter by the late Michael Russell. By 2008 Turner had issued Jesús Pardo’s translation of the whole of Ford’s Hand-book in seven card-back volumes, while generously illustrated catalogues to separate exhibitions devoted to Ford’s drawings and watercolours of Spain were published in Seville (2007) and Madrid (2014).