The Library of Alan Clodd

CATALOGUE REVIEW

by James Fergusson

When the poet and novelist Iain Sinclair was asked in an interview by Kevin Jackson whether his decade as a bookdealer was years completely wasted, he replied no - it was 'a second education'. 'I learnt incalculable amounts from those secret scholars, the dealers and collectors - Martin Stone, Driffield, John Clute, John Eggeling, Donald Weeks, Gerry Goldstein, George Locke, Alan Clodd.'

The secret scholar Alan Clodd died on Christmas Eve 2002 (and Donald Weeks's death was announced just last week). I miss his soft voice, that learned murmur. His successor at Enitharmon Press, Stephen Stuart-Smith, writing Clodd's obituary for The Independent, emphasised Clodd's debt to his paternal grandfather, Edward Clodd (1840-1930), the very Victorian banker-cum-writer who befriended Meredith, Gissing, Hardy and others - demonstrating, in the words of his faintly pedestrian DNB biographer, E.S.P. Haynes, 'a wonderful genius for friendship'. The 'astonishing collection' of books and manuscripts amassed by Clodd senior, recorded Stuart-Smith, made 'a lasting impression' on his grandson 'and helped to define the course of his life'. He eventually became a full-time publisher and bookseller, so indulging his principal pastime - book collecting. His personal collection, said Stuart-Smith, was 'breathtaking'.

That collection, or part of it, is now slipping on to the market, through the good offices of Maggs Bros (50 Berkeley Square, London W1J 5BA: 020 7493 7160). 'There were 20,000 books in Clodd's relatively modest North London house,' reports their latest catalogue, 1352, 'and the dispersal of this library will take some years.' Individual author collections, 'where [they] achieve or come close to definitive status, . . . are to be offered en bloc. His James Joyce collection has already been sold thus, as has A.E. Housman. Catalogues of his very extensive T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Siegfried Sassoon collections will be available shortly, and will be followed by, among others, Christopher Isherwood and Edwin and Willa Muir.'

Edward Clodd was very English. He was born in Margate, the son of a Trinity House pilot, and settled in Aldeburgh. Alan Clodd's maternal grandparents however, the Alexanders, were Irish. They kept a shop in Blackrock, Dublin, and it was in Dublin that Harold Alexander ('Alan') was born in 1918. How appropriate, therefore, that Maggs should open their series of catalogues, 'The Alan Clodd Library', with the title 'Dolmen, Heaney, Yeats & Others'. This Irish fascicle, which would meet, I think, even Clodd's high technical expectations, runs to 653 items, divided thus: 65 Dolmen Press, 204 Seamus Heaney, 43 Jack Butler Yeats and 166 William Butler Yeats. And, even in this comparatively narrow range, it demonstrates the particular characteristics that made Alan Clodd a star collector: old-fashioned intelligence; dogged perseverance; unstoppable thoroughness; and relentless opportunism.

Here are Richard Murphy's first book, The Archaeology of Love (Dolmen, 1955), £750; Thomas Kinsella's Another September (Dolmen, 1958), with an autograph letter from the author to Clodd inserted, 'I am afraid I can't be of any real assistance about out-of-print books, especially as I heard from Mr. Michael Freyer of the Brown Jacket bookshop that you have been in touch with him', £500; and Robin Skelton's Remembering Synge (Dolmen, 1971), inscribed to Clodd's friend and author Kathleen Raine, 'who heard it in its beginnings', £120. Here is Heaney's first book, Eleven Poems (1965), inscribed to Clodd, 1981, and with an autograph letter, 'I see from a recent copy of –The Times” that it is now worth £100. I wish I had one myself!', £3,500. A 1978 Heaney Christmas card, Christmas Eve, is signed by the author, 1982, and accompanied by an autograph letter, 'I have not enough cards left out of the last couple of years printing to do a swop. I am sorry, but I like to keep four copies of things now. One each for my children and my wife', £2,000. J.B. Yeats is represented by such items as Sailing Sailing Swiftly (1933), inscribed to Thomas McGreevy, £2,500, and Ah Well (1942), inscribed to his sister Lily, £1,500, as well as In Sand (Dolmen, 1964), with the ownership signature of another Clodd author, Edgell Rickword, £85; W.B. by The Land of Heart's Desire (1894) in George Russell's copy, £1,000, Poems (1895) in May Byron's, £1,000, The Tables of the Law (1897) in John Dowden's, £2,500, Early Poems and Stories (1925) in Forrest Reid's, £225, Collected Poems (1933) in Dorothy Wellesley's, £75, and Collected Plays (1934) in Edmund Dulac's, £120, as well as Selected Poems (1932), inscribed by A.E. to Ruth Pitter, £275, and Blake's Works (1893) ex Eva Gore-Booth's collection, £2,500. 'Others' include Brian Coffey, Patrick Kavanagh, Derek Mahon, Flann O'Brien (a first edition of At Swim-Two-Birds, £5,000), Vincent O'Sullivan, John Millington Synge (Edmund Gosse's The Playboy of the Western World, £85) and William Trevor.

The next Clodd catalogue we may look forward to from Maggs will be of 'prose writers', including 'good groups' of books by Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, Baron Corvo, Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, Nornan Douglas, Malcolm Lowry, George Gissing, William Plomer and Henry James. Scheduled for the spring, if it is as generous a memorial to its subject as the first he will have been well served.