'Surrealism' in Scarborough

Many universities and public libraries in Britain are getting rid of a lot of their stock. Some of this is picked up by big book warehouses based in obscure industrial estates off ring roads. They operate on a pile ‘em high and move ‘em on model. The books are sold at very low prices but listed with minimal description.

If you don’t mind playing lucky dip or you find the markings in used books have their own fascination anyway, they’re sometimes worth a try. I’ve received perfectly nice and even unexpectedly signed copies in dustwrapper: and conversely books that look like they’ve been through a cement mixer, a sewage plant and a pulping mill one after the other. 

I would rather libraries didn’t have to, or didn’t choose to, get rid of books, but if they do, I’m glad there are places to take them. And I find the “usual evidence” (as the booksellers discreetly term it) of the libraries in the books often has a certain interest. An example is this copy of Surrealism by Roger Cardinal and Robert Stuart Short in the Studio Vista/Dutton Pictureback series (1970). 

The library stamps show it was variously owned by the North Riding/Main Library/College of Education Scarborough; the Yorkshire Coast College/Learning Resource Centre; and the Scarborough TEC/ [Training/Education/Careers]/ College Library, under whose aegis it was withdrawn. There is a mini-history here of further education in the somewhat louche clifftop town, and at each name change the book got stamped again.

These stamps are not only on the endpapers but randomly applied to several illustrated pages, presumably to deter excision. As a consequence, both Max Ernst’s vast eye and a picture of an anteater are additionally captioned North Riding Main Library, as if advertising that these manifestations might be viewed there. Anything’s possible in Scarborough. The Duke of the North Ridings, incidentally, is a character in Charles Williams' War in Heaven (1930), a poet as well a peer, who joins in the guarding of the Grail. 

Scarborough was the favourite resort of the Sitwells when young, and its seaside features (bandstands, punch and judy shows, piers, crumbling hotels) sometimes appear in their prose and verse. For reasons that now escape me, I once pitched an arts project that would have involved bursts of Sitwell poetry being recited to passers-by from hidden machines at street corners and from the wind shelters on the promenade. I can’t think why it wasn’t taken up.

The final endpaper in the Scarborough Surrealism carries a white sticker on a white page, like an improvised homage to Kazimir Malevich. 

(Mark Valentine)