Nuns, Nudes and Nomads

At my old storage unit, I used to be able to gauge what time of the year it was by the volume of mud, flies and excrement. I became resigned to the mud,  gradually accepting that washing my car was a completely futile task. But I never got used to the flies.

For some reason, my car was a fly-magnet and on some days I counted over 50, before giving up in despair. Whenever I opened the car door, several flies would sneak inside and hide, waiting until I'd reached a critical speed on the journey home. I nearly crashed on several occasions, trying to steer with one hand and swat with the other.

My new premises appear to be fly and mud-free. Also, I can now watch the seasons change. This is how the view has altered during the last few weeks:

I'm looking forward to having my lunch breaks by the lake.

During today's trip to work, I found a collection of the Photography Year Book from the late 1950s and early 60s.

As a schoolboy I used to avidly pour through copies of these at the local library (mainly because they contained photographs of naked ladies), but hadn't looked at one for years. I'd forgotten how each collection had the same recurring subjects.

Here are a few of those themes:


1. The Still Life:

I didn't like them when I was 13. I'm not that keen now, although I've learned that if I'm with people in a gallery, I must say something positive about the "form" and "composition" rather than risk exposing myself as a complete philistine. "I like the interplay between the horizontal and verticle leaves..."


2. The Very Wrinkled Old Person:

There was a time when no widow in an Italian hill town could safely go to confession without being assailed by a photographer, who would then bundle her into a pensione and take a series of unflattering portraits. As much as I like the lined face and knowing eyes, it has become something of a cliché.


3. The Naked Lady Landscape Shot:

Yes, it's a nude woman. But she's imitating a natural feature on a beach or in a national park and she's not wearing saucy underwear, so this is a serious photograph. Isn't it?


4. The Special Effects Study:

They say "I achieved this effect by using a 200mm lense at f/5 and a halogen flash at a shutter speed of 1/4..." and all I can think is, was it worth it? Trees at night-time.


5. Some People in a Third World Country:
 

These pictures were a doddle, once you'd convinced the subjects that the camera wasn't stealing their souls.

The people would either be naked or wearing outlandish clothing, so a successful photograph was almost guaranteed. These days, you'll have to ask the subjects to removed their Nike t-shirts for a few minutes.


6. A Picture of an Animal:

You may say that it's just a picture of a sparrow in the grass, but apparently it's good enough to be published.

Perhaps sparrows are hard to photograph.


8. A Photograph of Anything, As Long As It Features a Nun:

Beyond the usual themes of nuns, nudity, abstract compositions and old people I found a few pictures that I really liked. Here is a small selection:

Nurses praying? I'm very relieved that none of my nurses had to turn to prayer when I was in hospital a couple of months ago.

I enjoyed looking at the work of so many gifted photographers, but what struck me most was how commonplace the exotic images of Chinese peasants, African tribeswomen and Arab nomads appeared, while the once mundane pictures of British miners and city gents in bowler hats seemed extraordinary. How times have changed.

Now and Then

This afternoon, while filling in a form, my wife asked me what my occupation was. I thought of all of the different options before reluctantly answering "Bookseller. But I'm not really a bookseller, am I?"

Even after 25 years, I still resist being defined by my occupation. It would be different if I was a composer, writer or artist - I could say any of those with pride. But bookselling is something you do when you don't know what you want to do.

In the past, the job had its compensations. I got to read new novels months before they were published. I met novelists, actors, artists, gangsters and models, enjoying the demimonde of London without having to buy a single drink. I also worked with some lovely people.

However, today my working life is mainly one of drudgery. I buy books in bulk, knowing that most of them are worthless, hoping that the few that are of value will keep the wolves from the door for another month or two. So far I've kept going, but the sales have been rather patchy recently.

My book sales used to be fairly predictable. I knew that I would sell x number of books per thousand on sale, and that 60% of the orders would be from within the UK.

However, that's all changed. For some reason, the ratio of domestic to foreign orders has reversed and on some days, I sell more books to Amazon Germany than its UK branch. I thought I was doing something wrong, but when I spoke to a friend who sells ties on eBay, she said that she'd had an awful summer.

It looks as if people in Britain have stopped buying things they don't need. I'm in trouble.

As a result, I've neglected blogging and days out, so that I can knuckle down and increase my sales inventory to compensate for the downturn in sales. I've been taking so many boxes of books to and from home, that several neighbours have assumed that we're moving. It's been hard work, but I have come across some interesting books.

This dustjacket is somewhere between the salacious covers of 1950s Pan paperbacks and the Fleming/Deighton adaptations of the early 60s. The Lady Chatterly trial is over and suddenly, everyone appears to be sex mad.

      "I just need to measure the light by pressing this against your chest"

This is from a 1960s book on taking portraits. The 'glamour' element is creeping in, but there are also some interesting pictures that don't feature tasteful nudity:

This is a great photograph, with echoes of Yousuf Karsh. Sadly the book is worthless, so I ripped out the plates before I threw it away.

I've no idea what this man is doing. He seems very respectable, but perhaps he is distilling the LSD that will destroy the social fabric of Great Britain, paving the way for sitar music and kaftans. I've no idea.

This is Jack de Manio - a name that will probably mean nothing to most people, unless you're British and were born before the 1960s.

The name sounds vaguely like a New York boxer or gangster, but he was every inch the English gentleman:

De Manio was one of the original presenters of Radio Four's Today and when his laid-back, clubable persona didn't fit with the more earnest, news-oriented direction the programme took in 1970, he resigned. He was almost sacked in 1956 for carelessly announcing a programme called Land of the Niger as Land of the Nigger.

De Manio's autobiography, Life Begins Too Early, is a very entertaining account of his bizarre childhood, when he had to compete with a monkey for his mother's affections. There are also some amusing accounts of his wartime experiences, during which he was both awarded the Military Cross and dismissed after a Court Martial. It's only a penny on Amazon, so you have nothing to lose.

I barely remember the 1960s, but these creatures made a very strong impression on me:

 

I still remember the terror I felt when I saw a Dalek in Arding and Hobbs - a department store at Clapham Junction. It moved, waving its sink plunger menacingly. I had no idea that a small child had climbed inside and put a shilling in the slot for a one-minute ride.

Finally, if you were born in Britain during the 1960s, you may remember this:

This is from a BBC schools educational series called Look and Read. The programmes lasted for about 15 minutes and were divided up into three segments. The first and last segments contained a filmed drama series, but the middle contained a tedious section that introduced children to words like tug, wharf and mob.

The fourth chapter, called 'The Big Job', asks children to "Draw a crate and write on it a mark which makes another mark when it is upside down."

I never liked 'Len and the River Mob'.The social realism always depressed me. 'The Boy From Space' was more my cup of tea, and it was in colour.

I shall keep the momentum going on the book-logging front, so I hope that I'll have some more interesting titles for a future post. In the meantime, here is a wonderful author photo from an earlier period:

Six of the Worst

I've no idea how many secondhand books I've sorted through during the last three years, but even a conservative estimate puts the total at over 100,000. During that time, I've come to several conclusions:

• Most bestselling authors are destined to go out of print. When was the last time you saw a novel by Naomi Jacob, Howard Spring, Frances Parkinson Keyes or Frank Yerby in a bookshop?

• Publishers between 1964 and 1979 were obsessed with sex

• Almost every book published by Rupert Hart-Davies is worthless
  

• A tatty, obscure 1970s horror title will usually be worth far more than a beautiful old Penguin paperback

• The period from 1954 to 1974 was a golden age for book design, but it also saw some incredibly awful, garish covers, like these reprints of popular classics:
  

Jane Austen is synonymous with refinment and understatement, unlike this hideous jacket design. I particularly hate the almost fluorescent font for the title.

Slightly less offensive, but once again with rubbish fonts and a girl who looks like Nellie Olsen, for those who remember 'The Little House on the Prairie'.

Cor! A saucy French novel. I'll 'ave some of that! But where's the sex? I'll flick through to the end of the chapter...no, nothing there...maybe the next chapter...no, still nothing.

Maupassant and Zola may have been 'racy' in the 1890s, but I suspect that many 1960 book buyers felt that the cover design promised more than it delivered.

But the deception wasn't limited to adults. I wonder how many children struggled to read the copy of 'Gulliver's Travels' that Auntie Doris had given them for Christmas?

"Heathcliffe, it's me, Cathy, I've come home". Perhaps I'm being geeky about fonts, but this one is only acceptable in the credit sequence of a David O. Selznick Hollywood film. Like the Gulliver, this is also a children's edition cover. Lucky kids.

Finally, here is the 31st book in the famous 'Bancroft Classics' series:

No, I haven't heard of them either, but the cover design is in a class of its own, with Jane Eyre depicted as a 10-year-old with encephalitis. The eyes follow you around the room.

If you're feeling corrupted by this horrible display, then I'd recommend visiting this wonderful collection of Penguin and Pelican covers. Here are two of my favourites:

Will book jackets go the way of album covers as the market share of ebooks continues to rise? I hope not.

Why I Wish I'd Been Born in 1946

When was the best time to be born?

There are many periods that I'd like to visit if I could: Britain during the late Victorian age, America in the 50s, or Andalucia before the reconquista are three that instantly spring to mind. But would I want to swap them for my comfortable world of antibiotics, hot water and edible food? I don't think so.

Sometimes I find myself yearning for a world where no-one has ever heard of Alesha Dixon or Facebook, but if I start to get dewy-eyed about the past, I remind myself that history is always written by the winners and survivors. The stories of the millions of individuals who lived Hobbes's "poor, nasty, brutish and short lives" will never be heard.

After a great deal of thought, I've chosen 1946 as the best time to be born. If I'd been born ten years earlier, I would have experienced warfare, rationing and Shirley Temple films. But in the late 1940s, I'd be entering a world in which improved healthcare and educational opportunities were transforming the lives of millions.

Also, I could enjoy growing up in the world of Ealing comedies, Uncle Mac and steam engines.

It's a world that is celebrated in a Ladybird book I found recently, which has the slightly creepy title 'In the Train with Uncle Mac':

This is a Britain that now only exists in model railway displays and episodes of Chigley. It is a world of timeless villages and market towns, where technology has unobtrusively augmented peoples lives rather than changed them beyound all recognition.

Old maids still cycle to communion, village greens echo to the sound of willow on leather and car ownership is limited to the great and the good.

"Hullo! Here are our friends Bob and Betty just off on a long journey to the seaside. Dog Trigger is with them, so they are happy".

Whatever happened to 'hullo'? Nobody uses it any more, although Lionel Richie's notorious song sounds more like hullo than hello to me. Even hallo is disappearing.

I don't know how old Bob and Betty are, but I don't think I'd send them halfway across the country, unaccompanied, on a journey that includes changing in London.

It's time to leave and this smartly-dressed guard is a stark contrast to the scruffy, slouching men in donkey jackets who shuffled around the station platforms of my youth, blowing their whistles half-heartedly and shrugging their shoulders when I told them that the Nestle machine had swallowed two 5p coins.

"It is thrilling to stand on a railway footbridge and watch the trains rush by"

In those days, even a small, provincial station would have a full complement of staff, including porters, guards, clerks and signalmen:

I have vague memories of waving to men in signal boxes when I was very young. They always waved back. Then the signal boxes became automated. I wonder what happened to the signalmen?

"Bob and Betty are by themselves, but the guard will keep an eye on them". Oh, well that's all right then.

"So at last our express train has reached London where all is bustle and hurry".

It's time to change trains and the station porter is giving Bob and Betty directions to the Underground. But hasn't anyone noticed that creepy stranger standing right behind them?

Oh dear - it's that man again. Bob and Betty are so excited by the underground train that they haven't noticed that they're being followed.

"The train is rather noisy, and it sways and rattles as it rushes along".

The stranger sits next to Bob and Betty, pretending to read a newspaper.

Betty has now noticed the strange man following them and a woman on the down escalator looks concerned. But as they reach the top of the escalator, the man is stopped by a policeman, who seems to know him. Perhaps the man is a detective.

"There is a kitchen on the train and a real chef to cook the meals. Betty and Bob are smiling at the thought of a jolly good meal"

Bob and Betty are about to enjoy a bowl of thin, tasteless oxtail soup and a shepherd's pie of indeterminate origin, washed down with two glasses of weak squash.

"Betty and Bob had a glimpse of the driver. But an equally important person is the fireman, or stoker. He MUST keep up steam for the engine to pull the train. He shoots more and more coal into the great furnace and the wheels go faster and faster. Well done, fireman!"

Sadly, the recently-qualified fireman is unaware that the line is due to be electrified in a couple of years..

"Bob and Betty know that the long run is nearly done"

"Thank you for a safe and lovely journey!"

"Glad you enjoyed it!" grins the driver, while the fireman waves a grimy hand. The engine, too, looks dirty but somehow very proud".

So there you have it: incontrovertible documentary evidence that if I'd been born in 1946, this was the world I would have grown up in. A society in which youth crime meant St Trinians and young men who wanted 'respect' wore tweed.

It might have been a stuffy, stifling world, but that wouldn't have affected me because by the time I'd reached 18, everyone would have been listening to the Rolling Stones and sleeping with each other.

Obviously I'm being silly, but there is a kernel of truth. My wife's parents were part of the theatrical world of the 1960s and whenever I hear anecdotes about them or their friends, it sounds as if they lived in an enchanted age. It's not that stories themselves that impress me, but the incidental details: being able to move around London easily by car, turning up at the BBC to see if they have a job and actually getting one (which changes from teaboy to assistant producer within months), buying a four-storey house in Islington for a few thousand and the way a casual flirtation would end up in bed.

It was an enchanted time, for some at least, because it felt as if they lived in a world of possibilities where people were no longer tied to jobs or relationships for life. This experimentation was all done against the backdrop of their secure, Uncle Mac childhoods, blissfully unaware of the consequences of their actions on the next generation.

If I'd been born in 1946, I would also be retiring at a time when health care, benefits and private pensions were still sustainable.

I could spend my dotage enjoying fond memories of exciting holidays with Betty and Trigger, travelling across Britain by train, being offered sweets by kindly strangers.

NB - People born in 1946 include Stephen Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Alan Rickman, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, David Lynch, John Waters, Brian Cox, Charles Dance, Diane Keaton, Danny Glover, Cher, Charlotte Rampling, Dolly Parton, Liza Minelli, Freddie Mercury, Joanna Lumley, Felicity Kendal, George W Bush, Steve Biko and Philip Pullman.

Health and Efficiency*

"Tradition is a barrier to progress. The massive complexity of a town embraces techniques and ideas which extend over hundreds of years and whose rate of change is necessarily slow. We are all locked in this matrix of living and have to accept the conditions of life and work that others have created."

These opening lines begin Anthony Tucker's 1967 book "Climate For Living", which I came across last week. At first glance, the book looks like a rather dull survey of postwar town planning.

However, it soon becomes clear that this 64-page paperback is an uncompromising Modernist manifesto, giving a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of those architects and town planners who believed that social engineering was part of their remit.

Tucker's use of images is highly selective, contrasting the filth and squalor of traditional urban environments, with the bright, clean, "healthy" environment of the new townscapes:

There is also an alarming overuse of the word "efficiency", which always sets my alarm bells ringing. Efficient for whom?

Here are some of the illustrations, with the author's original captions:

"Modern flats can blend with industry"

"Artist's impression of street scene in new town"

"Windowless instrument factory in Felixstowe"

"A central computer could serve the new town"

"Microwave cookers provide quick meals"

"Austrian glasshouse tower for continuous production of lettuce"

What a depressing world to live in: windowless workplaces, concrete landscapes and microwave meals accompanied by tasteless, mass-produced lettuce. It's hard to believe that anyone could have been naive enough to think that this was really progress, but at the time I suppose many people shared the conviction that modern, urban planning would liberate the masses from the squalor and discomfort of the past.

In fairness to the author, he does later acknowledge that:

"Tradition may always be a barrier to progress, but it may also contain elements of great importance obscured by a clutter of obvious obsolescence. The problem lies in teasing these factors out so that they can be properly assessed, and then using new techniques in such a way that they are taken into account.

The upsurge of architectural and engineering optimism of thirty years ago died in its own cold wilderness of concrete because its eyes were on structural possibility, not human requirements.

Planners and engineers are now concerned first and foremost with the creation of environments that are sympathetic to human needs..."

Ironically, it is the original Modernist buildings, built between the wars, that have proved to be more enduring than the townscapes heralded by Anthony Tucker. What does that tell us? Perhaps simply that good design is what really counts, not a utilitarian social agenda, however well-intentioned.

Today, the urban landscapes celebrated in "Climate For Living" feature prominently in books and websites like "Crap Towns" and Between Channels and are almost universally derided. We know just how quickly the "cities in the sky" became sink estates, with broken lifts, graffiti and urine-soaked stairwells. It's amazing to think that half a century ago, this all looked like a good idea.

As for being "locked in a matrix of living...that others have created", I'm more than happy to live in a slightly chaotic hotch-potch of medieval, Tudor, Georgian and Victorian buildings, rather than some drab, functionalist vision of efficient living.


That's probably very inefficient of me.

*Apologies to anyone who hoped that this post was about naturism.