Books Do Furnish A Mind, Part III
by Ibn Warraq (June 2014)
[2], while the Foyle brothers opened their first bookshop here, in 1904, before moving on to its present, more famous, location at 107, Charing Cross Road; John Watkins opened his esoteric bookshop in 1901 which flourishes to this day, and where I was to buy Ali Dashti’s truly iconoclastic work, Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, and J.M. 
Robertson’s A Short History of Freethought. Ancient and Modern, in two volumes, published by Watts & Co (London, 1906), for £9.00 and £20.00, respectively, in the 1980s), two shops in particular attracted me, one specializing in travel literature and the other in Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton held a singular attraction for me as his works touched on my life in many ways; he wrote four works on the area of India where my ancestors came from, the Sind (my mother tongue is a Sindhi dialect, Kacchi or Kutchi), viz., Scinde or the Unhappy Valley (1851), Sindh and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852), and Sind Revisited (1877). Furthermore, Burton, though a non-Muslim, had accomplished a pilgrimage to Mecca, and had written a fascinating account of it in Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah, 3 vols, 1855-56. Writing about Islam in general was to become an important, and, in some ways, a rather depressing part of my life. Thus Burton’s account, apart from its intrinsic worth, was of profound interest to me. Alas, these works, though available in London bookshops, were collectors’ items and thus way beyond my schoolboy means. One of the salesmen of the two bookshops treated me with a rudeness I have never forgotten- he looked me up and down with contempt and told me this shop was not for me. I did eventually buy Burton’s Sindh and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus, an unattractively bound volume reprinted in Karachi in 1973, for a reasonable £5.25. Many years later when I was married and working as a primary school teacher I bought, in about 1980, Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights in seventeen volumes from a second-hand bookshop in Crouch End, for £65.00. I was to quote Burton’s daring excursus on homosexuality, known as the Terminal Essay, and his remarks on women and sexuality in the Islamic world, in my first book, published in 1995, Why I am Not a Muslim.
I usually ended up, crestfallen, at Collet’s Penguin bookshop on Charing Cross Road, buying an affordable paperback, collecting the Penguin Catalogue, and then retreating to an Indian restaurant, the Murshidabad Grill, in Irving Street. I do not think either the bookshop or the restaurant exist any more.
My healthy intellectual curiosity, at the age of fifteen, did not stop at works of fiction only, but led in all sorts of direction, as I haphazardly explored various fields of intellectual and scientific inquiry. One early interest in one such field was the History of Art and Architecture. Here Pelican Books, an imprint of Penguin, proved indispensable: my early purchases included Eric Newton’s European Painting and Sculpture, which in 1950 cost just one shilling and sixpence. Newton’s confession that he did not love Rembrandt was quite a shock to a novice like me, leaving me totally bewildered, but eventually his guilty secret proved to be a liberation since it made me realise that there would always be works of art acknowledged to be “great,” “important,” or even “works of genius” which would leave one cold. Here is Newton’s mea culpa: “The giant of Dutch painting is, of course, Rembrandt. And here the art historian has to gird himself to a special task. Not that there is any difficulty in assessing Rembrandt’s stature both as an artist and as a painter. By every known test he is the giant not only of Dutch painting but of European painting. But at this point, in my readers’ interests, I must make a confession that I have never been able to love him. Love is an irrational thing, but for the critic it is an essential thing.” He laments his own limitations in not being able to appreciate Rembrandt’s qualities. But for him, Rembrandt lacks “colour orchestration” and “gaiety”: “To feel a little unhappy in the presence of a work of genius which has neither quality is my personal misfortune….[H]ow I wish he could give me pleasure! ….Rembrandt can do anything except rejoice. There is no nonsense about him; he cannot smile. In that respect alone he is a smaller man than Shakespeare.”[3]
[4] Petersburg</em>; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.” [5]
Lest there is some misunderstanding, I personally do love Rembrandt’s work.
[6] claimed that the representation of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface in such a way that one received a strong impression of physical tangibility is ‘life-enhancing’. It is not clear why.”
At the time, I uncritically lapped up anything Bernard Berenson wrote, I particularly treasured his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance which I consulted in our school library. I sought out his works in the shops in the Charing Cross road, especially in Zwemmer’s Art Bookshop at 78 Charing Cross Road, just before Cambridge Circus. Zwemmer’s was more than a bookshop:
Noted British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark reflects upon on the artistic climate after the war and the void filled by Zwemmer:
[7]
[9]
This was entirely my own experience: to gaze at, and be dazzled by, the displays in the window, and then enter timidly, to spends hours browsing, and finally to leave with a sigh and without a purchase. Gorgeous art books published by Phaidon and Thames and Hudson were obviously out of my reach: I did buy three paperbacks in Zwemmer’s over the years: one was Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1936), also Anthony Blunt’s Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 , an Oxford University Paperback 1962, which contains the following words of thanks, in the Preface, “to Mr Guy Burgess the stimulus of constant discussion and suggestions on all the more basic points at issue.” And finally, a paperback edition of Elisabeth Holt’s A Documentary History of Art, Volume 2: Michelangelo and the Mannerists, The Baroque and the Eighteenth Century, first published in 1950s and 1960s.
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During this period I once saw, in a Charing Cross second hand bookshop, volume one only of a three volume set of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, going cheaply, for obvious reasons. I was convinced that I had seen the other two volumes in a second hand bookshop in Edinburgh. I took a chance, and when back in Edinburgh hurried to the shop I had in mind, and lo and behold, I found the other two volumes in the same edition, also going at a very reasonable price.
[10]</a> ; and Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Phaidon Press, 1965, with the dedication, “6th March, 1969, Edinburgh. To ***** EEYEEEHOOOOOO !!! etc. a token of gratitude, ***.”[11] I have all these volumes – apart from T.S.Eliot’s Selected Poems – in my library to this day. In 1970, they were all that remained of four years of book buying.
****
I got tired of lying around with a hassle[12] of amiable, kind, but inarticulate, unintellectual and aimless hippies in Notting Hill, and took a degree in education from the University of London, Education Institute, and became a qualified teacher. I taught for five years in London primary schools. But while teaching during the day, I enrolled in the night classes at Birkbeck College, University of London, and studied Philosophy (essentially Western philosophy: Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Frege, Russell, Popper, and Wittgenstein). Birkbeck College was specifically founded for working men and women who could not attend classes during the working day. These were some of my happiest years. For four years, five days a week, after a day’s teaching, I took the tube nearest to my school, South Kensington, and went on the Piccadilly Line to,…yes, Leicester Square, and the second hand bookshops. But this time I had money. My crawl up Charing Cross Road ended very conveniently at the Birkbeck College, Philosophy Department,14 Gower Street, just in time for my first philosophy classes of the evening.
Every week-day, for nearly four years, I visited the secondhand bookshop Joseph Poole and Co. Ltd. at 86 Charing Cross Road. It was next to an address that became much more famous, 84 Charing Cross Road, thanks to Helene Hanff’s book. But as far as I can remember, by the time I frequented 86 Charing Cross Road (1974-1978), the shop at 84 was no longer in operation. Joseph Poole and Co was run by a group of young booksellers whose daily turnover was enormous, with wonderful bargains every day so that almost all my books in my newly growing library came from them.
Talking of 84 Charing Cross Road, here it would be appropriate to talk of “drif’s guide To the Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. The Only Guide That’s Been There” by “drif field” [sic]. It is an eccentric guide, for which the term “irreverent” is totally inadequate, far more accurate would be “scurrilous” and “scabrous”. It is also hilarious. It does indeed go through every single second hand bookshop in Britain with pithy and rude descriptions of the shops and the shop owners. I am not sure when I first came across it, probably sometime in the 1980s during one of my visits to London (for by 1982 I was living permanently in a village near Toulouse, France). Each edition, execrably produced (tiny format, and tiny typed fonts so one needs, literally, a magnifying glass to read it), is different, with different anecdotes, introductions, and descriptions. The copy I acquired online recently is dated 1991, and all my quotes come from this edition. An earlier edition which I no longer have had this anecdote: Drif was coming out of a secondhand bookshop when a fellow dealer accosted him, and told him that he was looking for a particular title for which he was prepared to pay a good price. As the dealer was talking, Drif noticed that that very title was in the window of the shop he had just come out of. Needless to say, Drif did not apprise the dealer of his discovery.
Drif laments the passing of an era: “The old style bookshop, the one before the advent of television, used to rely on knowledgable collectors, people who had some grounding in the subject they collected. People who had some understanding of the history of English literature and European culture, but there are no such people any more. They also relied on what was known as the carriage trade, who did not so much buy books, as buy decorations for their homes, but most of these people are long dead and their offspring now try to emulate what they fondly believe is working class culture.”
I only once strayed from the Charing Cross Road or Dillon’s Bookshop on Gower Street, when I accompanied my wife to an auction at Sotheby’s. She wanted to buy some second hand furniture for our apartment. While wandering around I found a cheap clothes cupboard that was filled with books, among which I picked out some tomes in the prestigious series Sacred Books of the East. I immediately decided to put in a bid. The bidding began at a very low sum, but someone started bidding against me. I still managed to acquire the entire lot for £10.00. Most of the fifty or sixty books in the lot were worthless, rather tatty copies of romantic fiction from Boots Booklovers’ Library, a booklending service established in 1898, within the Boots Chemist’s chain of shops, a service which had ceased to operate by 1966. I think I gave them to some charity shops. But I kept what turned out to be the personal copies of books on Jainism and Hinduism of the British Jain scholar, Herbert Warren. For years, until, in fact, I began writing this essay a few weeks ago, I was under the impression that Warren was the scholar also of Buddhism mentioned by T.S. Eliot in the end notes to The Waste Land. Much to my disappointment, Eliot was referring to another scholar altogether, namely, Henry Clarke Warren, and his work, “Buddhism in Translation.”
Herbert Warren was a convert to Jainism, and known for several works on this religion originating from the Gujarat. My haul consisted of two volumes in the Sacred Books of the East series edited by Max Müller: the Jaina Sutras, translated by Hermann Jacobi, Part I published in 1884, and Part II, in 1895; thus they were both first editions. There was also “A Sketch of the Vedanta Philosophy” by M.S. Tripathi, published in Bombay in 1901. One volume from the Oriental Translation Fund, New Series, The Antagada-Dasao and Anuttrovavaiya-Dasao, translated by L.D. Bennett, published in London in 1907. There were several short works on Jainism by J.L. Jaini, and Virchand R. Gandhi [1864- 1901] a well-known scholar from the Gujarat who represented Jainism at the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago. Finally there were three personal black leather-covered notebooks of Herbert Warren himself. They contain, in beautiful, regular handwriting, notes on lectures given by V.R. Gandhi, in Spring 1901. These notes were the basis of his book, Jainism in Western Garb, as a Solution to Life’s Problems, published by K.D. Prasad in Arrah, India, in 1912.[14]
I have not managed to find out much about Herbert Warren on the Internet but have pieced together from what I kept from the Sotheby lot the following: Warren [1866-1954] was the Honorary Secretary of Jaina Literature Society. It was in 1909, that J. L. Jaini created the Jain Literature Society in London together with F. W. Thomas, professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, and Herbert Warren, and in 1913 the Mahavira Brotherhood or Universal Fraternity with Herbert Warren, and others.
I think his married daughter, called Ivy Arthur, a violinist in a London orchestra, inherited some of his works. Warren lived first at 84, Shelgate Road, London, S.W., then 15 Eccles Road, Lavender Hill, London, SW, but finally seems to have moved in with his daughter at 18, Wandsworth Bridge Road, Fulham, S.W.6. Among the books, there was a part of a letter to Warren from the bank manager of Barclays Bank Ltd., stating that Warren had £25. 8. 1. [twenty five pounds, eight shillings and one pence] in his current account and £50 in his deposit account. There is one more piece of evidence, a 1917 edition of a book of poems by Laurence Hope, Indian Love, in which someone whose signature I can not read has inscribed, “To Ivy, with fond and happiest memories.” She probably died in her seventies, and the contents of her house in Fulham were auctioned in circa 1978.
I recorded my daily purchases in a notebook that I still possess. By 2nd August, 1979, my library held 1519 books, of which 605 were on philosophy.
*****
[3] Eric Newton. European Painting and Sculture, Pelican Book: Harmondsworth, 1950 [Ist. Edn.,1941]pp.133-136
[4] It is more commonly spelt, Bely
[5] Vladimir Nabokov. Strong Opinions, Vintage Books: New York, 1990, p.57.
[6] Bernard Berenson was born Bernhard Valvrojenski in Lithuania.
[7] Jane Carlin, “Anton Zwemmer:London’s Bookseller and Publisher for the Arts”, in Book Club of Washington Journal, Fall 2012 Vol. 12, No. 2, pp.38-39, which quotes Kenneth Clark.
[8] I once possessed a Henry Moore sculpture for forty eight hours. But I digress….
[9] Jane Carlin, “Anton Zwemmer:London’s Bookseller and Publisher for the Arts”, in Book Club of Washington Journal, Fall 2012 Vol. 12, No. 2, p.40 where Henry Moore is quoted.
[10] The asterisks represent my and my friend’s name.
[11] “EEYEEEHOOOOOO !!!”is a private joke between me and my friend specific to a particular time and place which would make no sense now to an outsider.
[12] My coinage: a collective noun for 1960s hippies.
[13] Oxford English Dictionary: “Rubbish, junk, worthless goods”.
[14] Entire text available at: https://archive.org/details/jainisminwestern00warriala
[15] Bob Dylan came to live in Crouch End at about the same time.
[16] A.J.Ayer, ed. Logical Positivism, Introduction, New York: Free Press Paperback, 1959, pp.6-7. All my information on the Vienna Circle comes from Ayer’s introduction. __________________________________ . To comment on this essay, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish scholarly and interesting essays such as this, please click here. If you have enjoyed this article by Ibn Warraq and would like to read more, please click here.