John Ruskin (1857): 'The Elements of Drawing'

"I do not think it advisable to engage a child in any but the most voluntary practice of art."

Ruskin's preface to this self-study guide to drawing, exhorts parents and readers on a general approach to art which is as different from a modern Learn to Paint book as Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes is different from a Lonely Planet Guide.  The modern art book lists essential primary colours of the medium and recommends basic appropriate paper types. Compare to Ruskin in his preface: "If a child has many toys he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure is perfected and his attention concentrated." He is as insistent on the background preconditions to approaching the practice of art and Wordsworth is that we approach the Lakes along a certain valley at a certain time of the day. No-one but a fool would stand at Innominate Tarn at any time of the day but late afternoon!

David A. Cross (2007): "Cumbrian Brothers" Fell Foot Press

This is the latest slender edition from Fell Foot Press, and the most recent publication from independent art historian David Cross. Like his previous work, A Striking Likeness, which considers George Romney's 18th Century portraiture, the subject of this book is a Cumbrian Artist.  In Cumbrian Brothers, Cross introduces us to the illustrated letters of lakeland artist Percy Kelly to the poet, Norman Nicholson. The introduction is all we need to set the scene for the pictures and letters, beautifully reproduced, which comprise the bulk of this text.

Neither the writer nor the painter would otherwise have been on the tip of my tongue without this book, which provides a sufficiently concise but compelling introduction to encourage me to undertake a little more reading in the area. I'll probably spend a little time in later posts to discuss what I'm learning here about poets and artists in general, and these two specimens in particular.

To my shame, some of the more outrageously self indulgent uttering of the poet in his letters are not beyond the kind of thing I find myself saying (hopefully only in the hearing of the cats, who are above such pettiness.) This was a useful heads-up to the possible nature of my own wanderings in art and literature.  A warning to us all, but also an encouragement to find our own meanings in the medium of expression which we choose for ourselves and take for our own. I shall take this as the starting point for further reading around the subject of art and writing in general.  Next on the list, and not too far down the pile on the study floor, might be another mildly obscure book from the British Museum Press: Kim Sloan's: A Noble Art: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600 - 1800.

T.C. Lethbridge (1980): "The Essential T.C. Lethbridge". T. Graves & J. Hoult (eds.)

I came to this volume via one of its editors, Tom Graves, who wrote a short book, Pendulum Dowsing (1989) which references the work of Lethbridge.  Lethbridge was a Cambridge University archaeologist who worked for many years within the accepted tradition of his discipline. Gradually, from his archaeological work on "the confused and difficult subject of the ancient Gods in Britain", to a personal investigation which takes a turn from the conventional as Lethbridge takes up pendulum dowsing.

This produced the same feeling of genuine scholarship applied to a less conventional area of study as reading, say T. J. Hudson's (1893) Psychic Phenomenon, which I picked up randomly for its attractive binding out of a cardboard box many years ago for £1- in a student union book sale. I remember enjoying Hudson at the time, and then recommending it and lending it to another student who disappeared from the scene never to be seen again.  These were the times before Amazon or AbeBooks.co.uk, so it was not until much later that Psychic Phenomenon could be tracked down again, it not being terribly or outrageously well read these days.  I always remember the books I lend, and to whom, and if I have received them back again.  Likewise I know which on my shelves aren't mine, but borrowed and a sense of obligation to return them lingers almost palpably about the shelf on which they sit.  Hudson went into that category of Lost Books, a file in my mind which is not so full now as it used to be, of those lent volumes which are irredeemably lent to the irredeemable.  From a more recent re-read of his Victorian works, I came to Graves, then Lethbridge and other minor madnesses such as Rupert Sheldrake and The Sense of Being Stared At (2003) or 1782 French grimoire, Le Petit Albert - this latter which it would be wrong to commend in any way at all.

Lethbridge reminds us of the interconnectedness of things:

I have enjoyed one great advantage over many of my contemporaries. It has never been necessary for me to stick closely to one line of study, and thus work it to death.  There has always been time enough to gain at least a passing acquaintance with subjects other than archaeology... Although this may well have led to my becoming a "jack of all trades and master of none", it has nevertheless provided me with a great store of experience, with some of which I at times bore my friends.

(p. xviii)

This broad-based interest in inter-connectedness of areas of intellectual endeavour very much represents what this Blog is trying to achieve with regard to winding the personal serendipitous highways and by-ways of books, old and new. The conceptual leads taking us from one book to another, and helping to explain the unconventional homes of certain books next to others on the shelves of the home library.  

Roger Deakin (2007): "Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees"

Having recently been given and immediately devoured whole a copy of his 1999 book, Waterlog, I have just obtained Deakin's 2007 sequel like volume, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, which I intend full to savour.   A third book, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, came out in 2008 and similarly to Wildwood, it too was published posthumously after his sad death in 2006. 

This highlights a theme I have always been interested in: books which will not not be written. What would Alain-Fournier have produced to follow Le Grande Meaulnes had he not died on the Western Front, or Saki whose Reginald stories of high Edwardian satire evolved (The Square Egg and other Tales, etc.) in the light of the author's period in the trenches (where he died, his last words being quoted somewhere as: "Put that bloody cigarette out!")?  Would Hillary have written something to compare with his only book, The Last Enemy, and could Saint-Exupery (Le Petit Prince) have gone back to writing had he not disappeared over the Med? Wildwood may turn out to fit into a "died too young" theme, which in turn may overlap for obvious reasons with a category of military autobiographical accounts, of which I am also rather fond (e.g. Sydney Jary's essential reading: 18 Platoon or anything by Milligoon).

Foucault, M. (1961): Madness and Civilization

Someone was staring to read Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a l'age classique, so I am quite happy to start a thread on what the current Routeledge version claims to be "the most influential, and controversial text in this field during the last forty years."  Having read and re-read the first three chapters several times without ever having got any further, this is a good opportunity to start over from my almost blunted purpose.

A Wikipedia summary to get you going. How does the impression on your mind of the summarised version differ from the experience of a reading of the original text, and do we in fact benefit from the time spent in reading this, as opposed to just Googling the summary and going for a run instead?

"Crime and Custom in Savage Society" By Bronislaw Malinowski (1926)

 Any takers for this classic text? Available free online HERE for those who don't already have it on their shelves. Shame on you.  I'm working from the 1966 8th edition which has been withdrawn from UCS Sociology Dept at some point in the distant past and retailed to me through abebooks.co.uk, of which you are no doubt already aware.  Seventeen chapters in two parts beginning with "The Automatic Submission to Custom and the Real Problem", and ending with "The Factors of Social Cohesion in a Primitive Tribe." Remembering that this was first published in 1922 and take into account that one of the reasons for starting with the older books before the more recent descendants, so to speak, it gives us a chance to look at the ideas in their embryonic but fully contextualised form rather than the gloss or digest of what Malinowski is said to have said passed down as footnotes of footnotes.  Part of the point in starting here is to get an idea of the original text, and from it to form a set of potential trajectories. Where could these ideas have led to when they were written in 1922? Not only where did they they lead, but what could they have led to.  Reading references to older texts in more recent books, particularly in some recent scholarship, it is possible for the reader, and likewise the reader of history texts, to get the idea that the development of thought from then to now was a linear and predictable process.  Clearly this view should at the very least be questioned. So I would propose that it is preferable to read and react to the original text, bearing in mind when and for whom it was written, what it was trying to convey to which audience. We should choose rather to re-read the original in preference to a quick Google search for Wiki-commentaries in order that we might begin to build a substantial base of knowledge on which those later refinements and commentaries can more fairly sit. Presuming, that is that we are reading for pleasure and expanded self-knowledge, rather than hoping to pass exams in the immediate future or knock out a quick cut'n'paste essay.  

Walter Lippmann (1922) "Public Opinion"

 "Written by one of the most influential men of his times and one of the greatest journalists in history" it says on the blub.  I'm a fan, but have to say that I haven't re-read it for some years. Just getting into it again now and I thought this would be a good chance to see if the blog format works in any way.  Just skimming the text over in a few minutes, I saw that some of the things Lippmann says are the ultimate source of some of the things I seem to find myself spouting about regarding the actions of the press.  How current is he? What is he actually saying? Is it still relevant?

What has Lippmann to say in 1922 which I can still use to help me understand what I read and hear in the press at the moment?  Is presumably my starting point.

Something in the Woods - Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley

As one Luddite to another, I have no idea how to adopt all the features of this online book reading scheme into my otherwise non-web-based daily habits. nonetheless, I'll share authoring of these pages will all and sundry who are interested, and who knows, we may be among the first to actually use the internet for something other than cutting and pasting other peoples' crap into essays or watching images which would not be available in anything published by OUP.

Banbury Book Club Blog

Presuming that you aren't a bored housewife of Banbury wishing to gossip about what you saw the neighbours doing through your net curtains with their hosepipe, or wishing to rant on about bonfires and how little Jimmy gets asthma if anyone so much as burns a hedge clipping, then this may be for you.  James, Hannah, Rosie and Robin - suggest titles, add comments or questions, cut and paste text, bibliographies...whatever.