Volumes that I prize...

I'm loving reading new things and  also revisiting some old favourites for the PhD work.  I was reading  J.C. Trewin's book again a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to look at the date inside the front cover.  I used to have the habit of putting the date and my name on the flyleaf whenever I bought a book, although I stopped doing it a while ago. This particular book is dated October 1994 and I can pinpoint the exact time and place where I bought it. 

There used to be an excellent (if rather expensive) second hand and antiquarian bookshop in Stratford, a couple of doors down from New Place, called David Vaughan Books.  We were in Stratford to see A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Adrian Noble - a starry cast including Alex Jennings, Stella Gonet, Barry (now better known as Finbar) Lynch, Toby Stephens, Emma Fielding, Desmond Barrett and Philip Voss.  It was a magical production.  The trip was also memorable as the first time I visited the Shakespeare Centre reading rooms and spent a day looking for information about Henry Ainley.  The book was purchased with birthday money and, at that time, it was the most I'd ever spent on a book - £18.  

Another book I'm going back to this week is the one that started off this madness in the first place.  The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre by Ruth Ellis was bought in a second hand book shop in Harrogate in July of 1986, shortly before my first visit to Stratford.  It was here I first read about the Bensons.  

That first book led to years of hunting through second hand bookshops for hidden treasure, wherever we went, and then, much later, using ebay and Abe books trying to track down specific and sometime elusive titles. The magic of second hand books, bookshops and websites is in the serendipity of it, finding hidden and often unprepossessing gems in the most unlikely of places.  (I once bought a book by H.B. Irving that had definitely been gnawed by something rotent-y! There are clear teeth marks on the cover...) 

In Stratford, two weeks ago, I read a fabulous Post Graduate diploma dissertation by Mary Rose Allen, in which she had compared one of the prompt books to the Memorial Theatre edition of Hamlet and made some really interesting points about the performance texts the Bensons used. She included some information about the Memorial Editions - the fact that they were edited by Charles Flower, published by Jarrold and sold in the 'Reading Room' of the theatre (now the room off the Swan bar). I suddenly realised that the accounts entry - 'Dream books' - for one of the visits to Sunderland would have been for sales of the single play edition. 

I hadn't really thought about Flower's texts being a basis for Benson productions.  However, for some plays, added to the repertory after being 'The Birthday Play' in Stratford, it was the most likely blueprint for the cuts and rearrangements which were made.

On the journey home, pondering over this, I remembered that I'd seen several volumes on ebay, ages ago, part of a collected edition.  A quick hunt through the listings and I found they were still there - five volumes out of the eight which formed the 'Collected Edition', half-bound in leather, at (incredibly) £6.99 each.  I  ordered three of them, which covered many of the plays I'm most interested in, although I felt bad about leaving the other two behind and almost immediately wished I'd bought all five.  By the next morning, I was on the verge of adding the other two to the order, when I had a message from the seller who said he was having difficulty locating them in his recently-renovated house.

My heart sank - I've had a couple of disappointments with ebay purchases which have started out with such a message, only for it to transpire that the article in question has already been sold or has been 'lost in the post'... However, after a day or two a further message arrived, headed 'Success!'  (The seller had, apparently, asked his wife to search for them and she'd found them within an hour... I have no comment to make on this!!!)  and the seller very kindly offered to send the remaining two volumes free of charge to make up for the delay. 

So I now have all five, in really excellent condition: they look virtually unread. They are going to be useful in the next couple of years, but they are fascinating in their own right, to see what was considered appropriate or inappropriate on stage in 1898.  

And, of course, I now have a new second hand book quest - to try and find a copy of volumes 3, 7 and 8 from somewhere...!