Personal Contacts

Visits to book fairs and personal contacts with the local booksellers followed on as sources, armed with the essential bibliographies. I got myself on to mailing lists for catalogues and bought that way too. Always thinking laterally I would go for the less obvious shelves like philosophy in Thoemme’s bookshop at the top of Park Street and found a copy of Symbolic Logic in original cloth, now adept at negotiating price.

A conversation in the pub led to this next milestone acquisition. My fellow tenor in our church choir, Charles, put up with some effusive banter from me about my new hobby and then declared that he had a book that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had initialled and given to his brother Skeffington. I put down my pint of beer and asked him to repeat what he’d just said. He did so and added that he had found it in the corn market book stall and paid £1 for it, a copy of Tom Brown’s School Days. If I could find a copy with the same illustrations by Hughes and Hall he would let me have the book in exchange. Well he  didn’t have to wait too long! Here is the book and inscription. 

By this time I had joined the Lewis Carroll Society and on 3 May 1992 I joined them for a meeting at the then President Ellis Hillman’s house in London and took the book along to show them. They nodded wisely and agreeably and the doctor gentleman who I mentioned before diagnosed my condition there and then, with my wife alongside me. I had a kind of bug. In those days it was thought to be incurable. Their faces were grave and playful at the same time.