As well as their textual content, I often find a delight in the incidentals of second-hand books, including not only ownership signatures, inscriptions and marginalia, but the chance workings of time and wear, the preserved signs of the volume’s history. Here is a book, for example, which has been stamped on its top page edges with the legend ‘PLANET LIBRARIES/STREATHAM HILL’ .
This name is at once alluring. You imagine one library for each of the luminaries in the solar system, perhaps even themed for their tutelary deities. Looking for romance? Troll along to the Venus Library. Want a war book? Off to Mars. In the mood for melancholy? Riffle the shelves at Saturn. After the uncanny? Make your way to the Pluto Institute. I picture Streatham Hill harbouring within its purlieus all these edifices in suitably arcane architecture, embellished with astrological signs, the sort of peculiar temple some Machenesque wanderer might encounter.
Possibly the residues of Planet Libraries on and in this book are one of the few surviving souvenirs of its existence. Alas, at some point its label has been inexpertly torn out, and the stock transferred, it would appear from rubber stamp imprints, to the more prosaically named Link Libraries Ltd of Epsom and Surbiton in Surrey. Even so, the result of this banishing of the planetary influences has created, on the fixed front endpaper, a remarkable work of abstract art, looking like some burst of exotic blooms.
The book in question is Goring’s First Case (1936) by Peter Kippax, a decent enough Golden Age detective yarn set in Norwich, and in particular around the Cathedral Close. The character of the city is conveyed well. The author’s name sounds vaguely Wellsian, as if he might indeed be an interplanetary emissary. But in fact Kippax was one of the pen-names of W.F. Morris, later the author of the First World War thriller Bretherton (1938), and similar imaginative yarns featuring questions of identity and allegiance. It is quite a scarce title and I would want it even if it was in impeccble condition, but all these markings greatly add to my pleasure in this particular copy of the book.
The Planet (and Link) Libraries are examples of the many private lending libraries which flourished in Britain particularly in the interwar period. Most settlements of any size had at least one, even moderate-sized villages. Golden Age crime fiction novels, and tales of village life, occasionally feature characters changing their books. There is an aside in a Saki story, though I forget which, where his peevish female protagonist is irritated because her page has brought back from the lending library, not the racy and somewhat scandalous latest novel en mode, but a much worthier and duller book of a similar title.
Despite the advent of public libraries and of mass-produced, and cheaper, paperbacks, some of these private circulating libraries were still in business in the Nineteen Sixties and even into the Seventies. I have another book with a label from the New Era (Fiction) Lbraries, which has its first issue date in 1967 and the last that is clearly identifiable in 1970.
As far as I know, these provincial and suburban libraries have never been fully studied, but they are an interesting aspect of social, cultural and commercial history. There were big chain store libraries too, but probably the majority were these much smaller affairs, run by a sole proprietor, with occasional assistance. Fiction and the Reading Public by Q.D. Leavis (1932) discusses the reading tastes of those who use such libraries, in a rather haughty fashion, but is not directly about the actual purveyors. As well as providing a rapid flow of literature, particularly novels, they were also a meeting place and gossip corner. It would be an enjoyable if elusive pastime to track down their histories, and locate their premises, or whatever is left of those.
(Mark Valentine)
