A rather niche quiz question
May. 14th, 2025 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustGeoffrey Trease's Enjoying Books is one of a series - 'Excursions' Series for Young People - encouraging children and young people into activities like going to the cinema, or the theatre, or looking at paintings or "Going into the Country" (I wonder what that one suggested?); some of them were reissued as Puffin books, but not, oddly, the one about reading. It was published, as I was myself, in 1951: it isn't afraid of making assumptions about what will interest boys, and what girls, but isn't heavy-handed about it. It isn't particularly didactic: the aim is to help the reader find books they will enjoy, and then to get more enjoyment from them. It's like having a conversation about books, with lots of examples, and reading out favourite bits, and it's very wide ranging. Trease makes suggestions about novels and short stories and plays and history and travel and diaries and ... he even acknowledges that comics exist, though he hopes you will grow out of them. Much of the pleasure comes from discovering some shared favourites. The chapter on poetry opens with the final stanza of Fleckers To a poet a thousand years hence, before moving on to Auden's Night Mail - I was about to say that this was a more obvious choice, and so it is now, though Auden is also one of the 'modern' poets who need defending against the charge of being 'awkward' (T.S. Eliot, he points out, is also Old Possum). He contrasts two passages of Peter Fleming, an author who always makes me want to demand that anyone nearby 'just listen to this': there's a dramatic description of a fire, and then a laugh-out-loud description of some over-the-top statuary. There's an extract from Richard of Bordeaux, which I certainly wasn't expecting. In fact, the only author whose absence really struck me was Trease himself.
Which brings me to the final chapter, which points out that reading books is not the only way of enjoying them, and considers the book as object, and the part played by the publisher in its production. Hence this passage on the joy of the colophon:
The Atlantic bird is the easy one: there's only one publisher it can be. I recognised the windmill as Heinemann, too. I could picture, but not place, both the urn of flowers and the fountain, but I had to leaf through a number of books before I tracked them down to Jonathan Cape and Collins. Who, though, is represented by the sea-bird? It could, of course, be any one of the Penguin / Allen Lane imprints, and the more I think of it, the more I incline to this conclusion, because surely even by 1950, Puffin books were, as Francis Spufford puts it " the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative". That just leaves the open book. Again, I can picture it, but not place it, and I'll need to use the steps to reach my copies. But this history mentions nothing of the kind, and without using the word 'colophon' describes the adoption of the dolphin and anchor -
- which brings me back to Geoffrey Trease, whose challenge continues:
but modestly does not say that he had recently published a novel in which two intrepid young people seek out a lost manuscript for Aldus to publish.
Which brings me to the final chapter, which points out that reading books is not the only way of enjoying them, and considers the book as object, and the part played by the publisher in its production. Hence this passage on the joy of the colophon:
Book-lovers could have quite a competition, collecting and identifying colophons, and asking each other what publishers were represented by an Antarctic bird, a windmill, an urn of flowers, a fountain, a sea-bird and an open book bearing a Latin phrase.
The Atlantic bird is the easy one: there's only one publisher it can be. I recognised the windmill as Heinemann, too. I could picture, but not place, both the urn of flowers and the fountain, but I had to leaf through a number of books before I tracked them down to Jonathan Cape and Collins. Who, though, is represented by the sea-bird? It could, of course, be any one of the Penguin / Allen Lane imprints, and the more I think of it, the more I incline to this conclusion, because surely even by 1950, Puffin books were, as Francis Spufford puts it " the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative". That just leaves the open book. Again, I can picture it, but not place it, and I'll need to use the steps to reach my copies. But this history mentions nothing of the kind, and without using the word 'colophon' describes the adoption of the dolphin and anchor -
- which brings me back to Geoffrey Trease, whose challenge continues:
This kind of trade-mark is almost as old as printing itself. Aldus Manutius of Venice used a dolphin entwined with an anchor. It was he...
but modestly does not say that he had recently published a novel in which two intrepid young people seek out a lost manuscript for Aldus to publish.
