During the Second Spanish Republic (1931 - 1939) the government of Catalonia was granted far greater autonomy and, alongside the improvements it made in health, education and civil rights, came an explosion of cultural activity. One individual involved in this growing Catalan cultural assertion was the painter, sculptor, engraver, musicologist, teacher and illustrator of the book in the photographs, Abel Vallmitjana (1910 - 1974).
In 1932 Vallmitjana was one of the founders of the Catalan group Adlan (Amics de l'Art Nou, Friends of New Art) that aimed to promote contemporary avant-garde art. One of its main achievements was to stage an exhibition of twenty-five of Picasso’s paintings that the artist himself had a strong hand in selecting. It was originally held in Barcelona in
1936, before traveling in the same year to Bilbao and Madrid, and successfully re-introduced Picasso to the Spanish public, who had seen little of his work since the beginning of the century.
The Spanish Civil War (1936 -1939) led him to emigrate in 1938 to Venezuela, where he continued to be an eminent figure in academic, literary, artistic and folklore circles.
In his later years, Vallmitjana made several documentaries and also illustrated many books. He remained actively involved in art till the end of his life, attending shortly before his death, the inauguration ceremony of the Museum of Modern Art that he had established in the Library of Arezzo in Tuscany, Italy. After his death, the city placed in his honour his bronze sculpture The Sister and the Wound.
The book in the photographs is a 1968 Catalan translation of The President by the Guatemalan, and Nobel prize winning, author Miguel Angel Asturias.
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Despite being one of the Victorian era’s most popular writers of romantic fiction for young women, since her death most of the 200 novels penned by Annie S. Swan (1859 - 1943) have gone out of print and little scholarly research has been carried out into her work or life. Although on the publication of her novel Aldersyde (1883) she received a letter of appreciation from Lord Tennyson and praise from the prime minister, William Gladstone, who proclaimed it “beautiful as a work of art” for its “truly living sketches of Scottish character,” not everyone was a fan. Her critics thought she depicted a sentimental and parochial view of Scotland that according to fellow Scottish author Margaret Oliphant “presented an entirely distorted view of Scottish life.”
If Swan failed to leave a substantial literary legacy, she still deserves recognition for her achievements in the political sphere. She not only wrote many novels on the suffragist movement in Britain, but also stood for election in 1922 shortly after women were given the vote by the Representation of the People Act 1918. Even though she failed to get elected, she went on to become one of the founding members of the Scottish Nationalist Party and served as its Vice President.
The book in the photographs is a new edition of her novel Sheila published by Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier.
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The British author and philosopher, Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950), may not be the most well-known member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, but he was certainly one of its most influential. Arthur C. Clarke wrote of Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men that “No book before or since ever had such an impact on my imagination.” Others he influenced include: Stanislav Lem, Bertrand Russell and C. S. Lewis. He also won critical acclaim from such prominent and diverse figures as: Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill.
Throughout his fictional work Stapledon meditated on the concept of the supermind, genetics and, especially, the conflict between man’s higher and lower impulses. In the novel Sirius (1944) these themes are infused into a fictional biography of a dog that has been engineered to have human intelligence.
As a canine with exceptional brainpower, Sirius offers a unique, and often humorous, perspective on humanity from the standpoint of both an alien outsider and one of its members. It is, therefore, with naivety and extraordinary insight that he marvels at mankind’s many wonderful achievements in science and the arts and recoils at its hypocrisies, vanities and sadism.
Throughout the novel this turmoil between the conflicting sides of human nature is one shared by Sirius who, while seeking deeper spiritual growth through knowledge, is not immune from acting on his more base desires. This attempt to wrestle with and reconcile his wolf and human halves is a struggle that eventually leads to a maddening sense of loneliness, despair and alienation.
The book in the photographs was published by Penguin Science Fiction in 1964. On the cover is Paul Klee’s In The Land of the Precious Stone, Woldemar Klein Verlag.
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While most of its contemporaries have fallen by the wayside or been merged into larger houses, independent publisher Peter Owen continues today, sixty-four years after it was started by its eponymous founder with just £900 and a typewriter. The simple strategy that lies at the heart of its continuing success seems to rest on Peter Owen’s personal taste in literature as: when it comes to selecting the books he will publish he says “I have to like them. If I don’t like them, I won’t do them.”
In particular Peter Owen likes international fiction. He is responsible for drawing attention in the English speaking world to the work of writers such as Anaïs Nin and, most notably, Hermann Hesse. Although it may now seem remarkable, he explained that in the fifties “No one had the foresight to get into Hesse, they didn’t even know he existed or know who he was” – despite his having won the Nobel prize in literature in 1946.“ He was also the editor of Salvador Dalí’s only foray into fiction and today he continues to champion non English speaking writers, such as Tarjei Vesaas.
He also appears to have a knack for hiring the right people. Describing her as "the best bloody secretary I ever had” his first editor was Muriel Spark, before she found fame as an author.
The books in the photographs are two English language first editions published by Peter Owen: This Business of Living (1961) by Cesare Pavese and Botchan (1973) by Natsume Soseki.
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