the book collector
and once again I had great fun illustrating it with all kinds of pictures from personal sources. Early on I learnt that to the Murrays publishing was a way of life and that work and play merged into each other. While I was at boarding school my father used to write me letters with the latest news of what was going on at 50 Albemarle Street, the home and later the publishing o Y ces of the Murrays since 1812. My father would describe how he went exploring parish churches with John Piper and John Betjeman in preparation for their county guides and how he would visit Dame Felicitas, Abbess of the enclosed order of Benedictine nuns at Stanbrook Abbey, to discuss with her through a grille her book In a Great Tradition . I also remember his description of the excitement when Paddy Leigh Fermor tracked down Byron’s slippers in Missolonghi and sent back a tracing of them to my father to check them against Byron’s boots in our collection. Then there was the evening spent in the drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street with Harold Nicolson and Peter Quennell reading through original Byron letters brought up from the archive, trying to discover what Byron was up to on a certain date in May 1815 that was a vital piece of information required by Harold Nicolson for a book he was writing. When my father read out a certain letter Harold Nicolson jumped to his feet exclaiming ‘so that’s where he was on that eve- ning!’ This gave me an idea of what the Murray style of publishing was like. My parents were close friends with their authors and there was clearly an overlap with the family as can be seen by the choice of their children’s godparents. Sir Francis Younghusband, who led Lord Curzon’s notorious invasion of Tibet in 1904, was my elder sister’s godfather, Freya Stark, the Arabian traveller, was my godmother, Osbert Lancaster, the cartoonist, writer and theatre designer, was my younger sister’s godfather and John Piper was my brother’s godfather. I found early on that the Murrays were often much more than publishers in their duties to their authors. John Murray II collected from the London docks the body of Byron’s illegitimate daughter Allegra, who had died in a convent in Italy, and arranged for her to be buried beside the porch of Harrow Church. John Murray III
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