the book collector
love that man.’ Sheira said, ‘Huh, Eric Korn, he makes me homesick.’ Victoria was unable to imagine two more disparate people than Sheira and Eric and said doubtfully, ‘Eric Korn makes you homesick?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Sheira, ‘he reminds me of my dogs and I miss them.’ in our last issue we wondered out loud if anyone collected su V ragette material. Thanks to the good o Y ces of the New Statesman we now have an answer. In their Summer Special they ran a piece entitled “Objects of desire: writers on their prized collections”. In it, mirabile dictu, the British author, journalist and broadcaster, Hunter Davies, told the tale of his su V ragette collection. Maybe we should try and get an article from him, this being the era of feminism and our issue in Spring 2019 having women and books as its theme. Others had di V erent stories. Lucy Hughes Hallett, prize-winning biographer of D’Annunzio, told of the drawers full of women’s gloves, each of which had belonged to a conquest of his. For David Baddiel it was Billy Bunter comics, for Erica Wagner, the American who used to be the literary editor of The Times , coronation mugs of Edward VIII since they demonstrated the superiority of a republican system of government. (Is she now de-accessioning?) For some their collections were identity projects, as their owners readily confessed. The greatest number of our subscribers are, by a long chalk, individ- uals. Some will be active collectors, others will be interested bystanders. Over the years we have printed a huge number of words on collections being formed and collections being sold, on their importance or other- wise and so on. Except in Sheila Markham’s marvellous interviews, we have seldom sought to trace that wandering path by which collectors reach their destinations. The subject seemed to arouse pleasantly nos- talgic memories for the New Statesman ’s writers. Might it do the same for the book collector ’s readers? If any of our subscribers felt like writing a couple of hundred words or so on how they got to where they are, editor@thebookcollector.co.uk would be glad to hear from them. the arctic circle is 66.5 degrees north of the Equator. Continue north and you’ll eventually reach Hammerfest, which bills itself as the ‘northernmost town in the world’. Its population is 8,000 souls. It’s been a trading port since medieval times. It has a one-room museum. And it’s been, since 1963, the home of The Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society. Anyone wishing to sport their splendid-looking lapel pin
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