AMANDA HALL RARE BOOKS Easton Farmhouse Berwick St. John Shaftesbury Wiltshire SP7 0HS England Tel: + 44 (0) 1747 898330 [email protected] www.amandahall.co.uk Front cover illustration shows Christopher Thacker on the Chinese bridge at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire. Back cover illustration is explained on the inside back cover. With many thanks to Venetia Lang and Sara Trevisan for their help in compiling this catalogue. All books are sent on approval and may be returned for any reason within ten days of receipt. Any items returned must be insured for the invoiced value. All books remain the property of the seller until payment has been received in full. EC customers who are registered for VAT should quote their VAT number when ordering. VAT number GB 685 384 980 BOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CHRISTOPHER JOHN CHARLES THACKER (1931-2018) ‘Christopher was the most generous of lecturers. His inimitable style, presenting fine scholarship with the lightest touch of puckish humour, captivated his audiences’ (Rosemary Nicholson). ‘He was a most inspiring man, and no-one interested in the field of garden history will ever forget his pioneering work’ (Anna Pavord). Contents Introduction Section I Books 1534 - 1894 1 - 164 Section II Mainly Twentieth Century Books: 1. Art, Architecture and Design 165 - 177 2. William Beckford 178 - 190 3. Biography and Memoirs 191 - 202 4. Sir Frank Brangwyn 203 - 211 5. Lady Brassey 212 - 225 6. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 226 - 231 7. Laurence and Gerald Durrell 232 - 241 8. Embroidery 242 - 252 9. Garden History and Botanical Books 253 - 275 10. Humour 276 - 284 11. Richard Jefferies 285 - 297 12. Literature 298 - 326 13. Rose Macaulay 327 - 340 14. The Sitwells 341 - 373 15. Freya Stark 374 - 389 16. Travel Books and the Levant 390 - 414 17. Vampires and the Gothic 415 - 425 18. Voltaire and the Enlightenment 426 - 446 19. Percy Francis Westerman 447 - 454 20. Miscellaneous 455 - 464 Section III Books by Christopher Thacker 465 - 483 Introduction Christopher Thacker was a distinguished garden historian, lecturer in French literature, eminent Voltaire scholar and a leading pioneer in garden history as an academic discipline. He was also a voracious book collector whose shelves teemed with the connected threads of a long and varied life. His widow, Thomasina Beck, told me of the excitement with which he would receive booksellers’ catalogues and pore over them in search of some obscure author. His search was academic rather than aesthetic and he would forgive a copy a little grubbiness or some restoration if it furthered his intellectual quest. Very much a scholar’s collection, Christopher’s extensive knowledge informs the presence of each book so that an apparent mystery – why this book? – is always solved on closer inspection. The random inclusion of a book of poems is revealed as a study in landscape, or a perennial calendar turns out to have a wealth of beautifully observed information on garden flowers. So that browsing through this collection, one is graced with moments of surprise as connections open into fields of interest, as a carefully landscaped parterre reveals a sudden vista with distant grottoes, all carefully framed and mutually dependant. Educated at Portsmouth Grammar School and Brasenose College Oxford, where he read Modern Languages and spent his spare time acting or flying with the University Air Squadron, on one occasion Christopher famously looped the loop over Brasenose in a Chipmunk. After Oxford, he married Jean Stewart and they moved to Cyprus where Christopher succeeded Laurence Durrell as PA to a Greek millionaire. It was here that he published his first serious work, a well-researched booklet on the long history of winemaking in Cyprus. In 1958 he embarked on his academic career, taking a Diploma in Education at Oxford before going to Indiana University to take a PhD on ‘Attitudes of European Travellers to the Levant (1696- 1811)’. After this he spent three years teaching French Literature at Trinity College Dublin before becoming senior lecturer in French at Reading University, where he was to spend the next 15 years. During this time he published his Voltaire, 1971, an acclaimed critical edition of Candide, 1968 and, what many regard as his most original and important book, The Wildness Pleases: on the Origins of Romanticism, 1983. He would later publish his own translation of Candide in a splendid folio edition produced by the Libanus Press with illustrations by Angela Barrett. It was from Christopher’s studies of the French eighteenth century that his understanding of the great cultural significance of gardens was to grow. In particular, it was Christopher’s immersion in Candide, and the link between fantasy and topography that formed his fascination with the location of Candide’s redemptive garden, that in turn sparked the passion for garden history that was to dominate the rest of Christopher’s life, an exemplar of Candide’s final injunction: ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’. Christopher now joined the Garden History Society (later The Gardens Trust) and in 1972 became the founding editor of its journal, Garden History. It was here that he met Thomasina Beck, the embroidery and gardens expert who later became his second wife, when he published her article ‘Gardens in Elizabethan Embroidery’. He was one of the founding Trustees of the Museum of Garden History (now the Garden Museum next to Lambeth Palace) and worked tirelessly with its founder Rosemary Nicholson prior to its opening in 1986 and for many years afterwards. Christopher was also employed by English Heritage as the first inspector for the comprehensive Register of Parks and Gardens of Historic Interest. His classic work, The History of Gardens, 1979, was hailed by Nigel Nicholson as by ‘our leading expert on the subject’ and ‘impossible to excel’ (Daily Telegraph, 1979). Other works of particular note by Christopher include his Masters of the Grotto, Joseph and Josiah Lane, 1976 and Building Towers, Forming Gardens: landscaping by Hamilton, Hoare and Beckford, 2002. When I first went to Christopher and Thomasina’s house to look at the books, it was a breath-catching moment. Books everywhere, of course, but most memorable was the large, light drawing room, with its ordered but teeming shelves, beautiful paintings and the piano which Christopher rushed off to play, delighted at the invitation. Beyond the piano, the vista, towards the lovingly tended garden. And Christopher, all friendliness, mirth and remembered delight, as we stood surrounded by his books, talking about Voltaire. Tim Jeal, Christopher’s brother-in-law, wrote of the warmth of Christopher’s personality, even after the onset of vascular dementia that had put an end to his academic career. ‘Many people have remarked upon Christopher’s ‘sweetness’ and really there is no other word for the way in which his habitual manner combined modesty, courtesy, kindness and concern for whoever he was speaking to. His smile was delightful and never forced … Perhaps the most memorable manifestation of his desire to help and please was his eagerness to amuse people with one of the personal anecdotes he still remembered. Christopher was extremely sociable and loved going out and talking to people, including complete strangers, and making them laugh. Though sweet and lovable, he could also be wickedly and naughtily funny, an echo perhaps of his childhood delight in jokes and pranks’. As a boy, Christopher had immersed himself in his father’s collection of Punch. He used to delight in his father’s accounts of practical jokes he had been involved in during the war, writing later that these seemed to him ‘the breath of life, joyous reversals of the accepted order of things, a setting upside down of properness’. It was while Christopher was at Oxford that Stephen Potter’s Lifemanship books were first published, to his great delight: ‘Potter explored, analysed, codified, and with brilliant success, a spacious region of laughter’. To Christopher, laughter was to be taken seriously. Using a favourite phrase, borrowed from Homer, he wrote: ‘it is this asbestos gelos [literally, fire-proof laughter] which raises us above the brute beast, for we laugh, not only at the oddities of others, but at ourselves. We are liberated when we see how silly or pretentious we are, for laughing at ourselves gives us a chance – a gift of the gods – to do better, to be less silly, another time’. Section I Books 1534 - 1894 1. ADDISON, Joseph (1672-1719). Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c. In the Years 1701, 1702, 1703. By Joseph Addison, Esq. London, J. and R. Tonson, 1761. 12mo, pp. 303, [9], with occasional illustrations in the text, in contemporary plain calf, single gilt fillet to covers, plain spine with raised bands, ruled in gilt, red morocco label lettered in gilt, with the later pictorial bookplate of A.J. Sambrook and his inscription dated 1954. £120 An attractive copy of Addison’s popular account of his grand tour across Italy and into Switzerland, written while crossing the Alps in 1701 and first published in 1705. Numerous editions of this classic travel account were published throughout the eighteenth century. ‘After travelling south to Marseilles Addison took ship for Italy on 12 December 1700, but was driven back by a storm. In the end he reached Genoa by land, and then proceeded through Pavia to Milan and then Venice, after which he followed the accustomed route south, choosing to go via San Marino and Loreto as he journeyed briefly to Rome and then on to Naples. He climbed Vesuvius, sailed round Capri, and sailed back up the coast to Rome. Here he passed a more extended sojourn, visiting churches, annotating architecture and antiquities, and undertaking trips out to literary shrines such as Tivoli and Frascati.