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must go to the Society rooms in person to collect it. Why does this con- cern the book collector ? Because one of our subscribers read our Polar Special from start to finish while in the town, laughed ‘hideously’ at our penguin joke and asked if we could give the polar bear a mention since it is as wonderful a creature as the penguin. We are very happy to do this, not only because it confirms the truth of our strapline: ‘The Book Collector Covers the Globe.’ until 9 november 2018 the Book Club of California has an exhibition devoted to all who ‘go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters.’ It’s called Nautical Fiction: Covers, Colors, and Contents ’ and is curated by David Pettus. The sea is crucial both to the United States and the United Kingdom. William Bradford writes of the Pilgrims’ first landfall at Cape Cod: ‘they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and fu- rious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.’ It’s good that the BCCA show gave precedence to the fictional aspects of the sea for these are, for the most part, relatively benign. In the real world there’s no such thing as a kindly sea as is illustrated by item 60 in John Drury’s catalogue 190: The bye-laws and regulations of the Marine Society . The Marine Society, the world’s oldest public maritime charity, was founded in 1756 at the instigation of the traveller (and ‘inventor’ of the umbrella) Jonas Hanway with the purpose of getting men and boys to join the Royal Navy without having to rely on the brutal methods of the press-gang. Little could have been worse than to have been nabbed by a press-gang and torn from all that was familiar to live out a life of ‘rum, sodomy and the lash,’ in Churchill’s echoing phrase. Impressment ceased with the defeat of Napoleon. in our issue for Winter 2017 the leader, written by James Fergusson, was ‘The Wigtown Diarist’. It concerned the latest exponent of book- shop rudeness, Shaun Bythell, who had just published The Diary of a Bookseller (Profile Books, £ 14.99). Shaun (if I may) owns and runs one of the largest secondhand bookshops in Britain. Being his own em- ployer puts him beyond any necessity to bow and scrape if he doesn’t feel like it. This summer (2018) he was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. According to The Times newspaper, he’s become a heroic figure for having picked up his father’s shotgun and
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