Small collects: Holding Mr Eliot

Moving into my 'forever home' has involved a lot of unpacking of boxes, many of which have been packed for a very long time. I'm nowhere near finished, nor have I organised everything that I've unpacked, which has resulted in a modicum of chaos (if there can be such a thing). Over the last year I've worked on a  project to make a material, handwritten archive of my (meaningful) Facebook posts, something I call my 'Facebook Yearbook', and that crazy task is almost finished. Today I came across a post I wrote in February 2025 and realised that it should be part of the 'small collects' post series that I started here during the first Covid lockdown and will now continue as I wrangle the hoard of treasures collected, bequeathed and discovered through what I now think of as my amazing bibliographic life, now that I'm entering the third trimester of it (cross fingers I am lucky enough to get a good run of it). So what follows is an extended version of the original FB post. 

Sometimes I'm just gobsmacked by my life. 

I've been unpacking so many boxes of books (SO MANY) and today I pulled out a box from my Rosemary Dobson era. She was – is – an amazing poet, and I was her one-morning-a-week helper for many years. When she died I helped her family sort her papers and books and they generously let me choose some things for myself. 

I went to NZ recently for the Wellington Rare Book Summer School for a masterclass with Tara McLeod and Sydney Shep, and as usual I took a book to read in the spaces between wifi access, and it was Steven Carroll's A World of Other People, which is the second of a trilogy that hinges upon TS Eliot. It's about a woman in London at the end of the Blitz who knows 'Mr Eliot' from church and finds herself fire-watching with him. Carroll cleverly weaves the story around Eliot's poem 'Little Gidding', which was published at that time (1942). He even describes her holding a copy of the printed booklet: 

She unties the string and slits the packaging with a knife. The item inside is wrapped in newspaper and that is sealed with tape, and it's with  annoyance that she eventually extracts the thing. A book. Well, not even a book, really. Too small. A sort of pamphlet. And with a curious title, 'Little Gidding'. If it's a place, she's never heard of that either. But who could have sent this? Then her eyes fall on the name of the author, in smaller print, above the title: T.S. Eliot. And the further mystery of why on earth he should have sent it to her is only partly resolved when she opens the book and reads the inscription inside: 'To Iris, who was there, T.S. Eliot.'

[Carroll, S, A World of Other People (Fourth Estate, 2013), 152-53]

I won't give spoilers, only that you should read the book to find out where 'there' was. 

It was astounding to encounter this pamphlet on my return from NZ, within weeks of reading the novel, and it really brings home the material research done by Carroll. There's a good chance that he did his research in the UK, but the State Library of Victoria has a set of all four pamphlets, so he may have stayed closer to home for his inspiration. 

My copy has three things written on the flyleaf: the price of the book, the name of the person who bought it, and my handwriting that documents where and when I got the book, all three in pencil, because no-one sensible should use ink – especially biro ink – on something valuable, and the owner was a sensible woman. 

It wasn't Rosemary Dobson, but her sister, Ruth Dobson OBE, who eventually became Australia's first woman ambassador. She probably bought the pamphlet when she moved to London in 1946. Little Gidding is the final of Eliot's 'Four Quartets', each published separately over six years and then brought together as an American publication in 1943. 

The letterpress cover printing is simple and elegant, only very slightly embossed, which is what we call 'kiss-printing'. 

The thread used to sew the pamphlet-stitch (yes, that's the bookbinding term) is a clean salmon colour on the inside but dulled to a smoke-brown on the outside surface, and the pinky-brown cover stock is dulled on the exterior and faded on the spine, as befits a publication that has lived on a tight shelf of books in a bright, and also probably smoky, room. The text paper has also browned a bit, but I'd say it's typical of the quality available during wartime. 

Artifacts like these are 'material witnesses' to history. They give me a thrill when I come across them, whether being lucky enough to own one or encountering them in libraries. 

I know that TS Eliot's stature as a poet makes this publication particularly precious, but there are many old books out there that can tell us more about their era/lives/owners via their production processes – and scars – than they do by their contents. This is the core of material bibliography –  it's like book archaeology. 

I have plenty more 'treasures' on my shelves and hanging around in my studio. Hold that thought, and keep yourself and your material histories safe in this era of plunder & chuck.