the book collector
Stoops to Conquer”, which is still performed to packed houses in the West End every two or three years. Dr Johnson: ‘There was nothing he touched he did not adorn’. Indeed, but the trouble was that he was Irish and the Irishness of his manners and conversation lay poorly with English society. An appeal is being put together to restore his tomb. More news will follow. anything to do with the suppression of texts has to be of the keenest interest to collectors. In this connection mention must be made of the death, at the age of ninety-one, of John Calder, co-founder of the publishing firm Calder and Boyars that lasted for the twelve years between 1963 and 1975. Those were no ordinary years. They were the years of an awakening that empowered all that’s followed, trampling without mercy on the politics and mores of the past. On Calder’s list were three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and nineteen winners of the Literature Prize. Beckett was his (naturally) and so was Hubert Selby Jr. In 1964 Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was published by the Grove Press, the same firm that had got Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the American law courts. In 1966 Calder took on Last Exit for the British and Commonwealth market. Despite having lost the Lady Chatterley case (see p. 677), the government decided to double down and to prosecute Calder under the obscenity laws. It won. To challenge a government, any government, in the courts at that period was no trivial undertaking for a small publisher. But Calder did, and won the case on appeal, a decision that spelled the end of literary censorship in Britain. As The Times remarked, A is for Audacity, B is for Bravo, C is for Calder. His autobiography, Pursuit: the Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder was published in 2001. Two other deaths must be reported: M.J. Long (1939–2018) and Inge Feltrinelli (1930–2018). Mary Jane Long, known throughout her professional career as ‘M.J.’, came from Summit, New Jersey. Trained as an architect, she found her way in due course to London. In 1974 she and her husband, Colin St John Wilson, were asked to assess the feasibility of the Euston Road site for the new British Library. The building of it took more than thirty years. By the time it was complete the two babies she’d had had left home. ‘That the British Library works so well owes everything to M.J. Long’ said The Guardian newspaper. It was she who had charge of the operational aspects of the library: storage, procurement and reading, a process of immense complexity. If books still take only twenty minutes to reach the reading room from
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