'Never Without the Company of Books'

Edmund Blunden’s personal library of some 10,000 volumes is now in the collection at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The university purchased the books in the nineteen-eighties from the poet’s third wife, Claire Blunden.

Blunden (1896-1974) served for almost two years on the Western Front, took part in the engagements at Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. He is best known for his Great War poetry and prose but was also a prolific critic who devoted books to Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Edward Gibbon, Keats, Thomas Hardy and Shelley, among others. Blunden was instrumental in restoring the critical reputations of William Collins, Lamb and John Clare. Heavily represented in the Ohio University collection are signed volumes by his friends, including Robert Bridges, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon. In his essay “Bringing Them Home” (The Mind’s Eye, 1934), Blunden writes:

 

“I cannot profess to be a genuine collector of books, I know nothing of positive bibliography; small books, I call octavos, and large ones quartos. Folios I seldom carry home, out of a growing sympathy with my weary body. But so far as my preferences in size and weight are satisfied, I am a willing rescuer of books.”

 

Blunden distinguishes a reader (like himself, like me) from a collector. The latter may be perfectly respectable but is just as likely to be a book-snob, showing off trophies on a shelf or a cynic, acquiring books as “investments.” Blunden’s biographer, Barry Webb, devotes a chapter to “Book Collecting” and says the poet was “never without the company of books.” Webb writes:

 

“He collected for two reasons: to build up a ‘working’ library and to rescue volumes he felt others would ignore. He believed that an adequate library of English literature could be established without paying more than sixpence a volume in 1920 – a price he allowed to increase to two shillings and sixpence in 1930 and ten shillings in 1950 – and by this means he created a library of 10,000 volumes by 1965.”

 

I’ve known collectors who never part with books, regardless of their literary value. Theirs is a warehouse aesthetic. The volume of their volumes is a source of pride, and any dreck will do if it fills out the shelves. Hoarders are not collectors and usually are not even readers. The largest personal library I’ve ever seen was also the most comprehensive, tastefully selected and well-used. It was, in Blunden’s sense, a “working library,” not a vanity project to impress visitors. With the owner’s death, the collection has been dispersed. To his credit, Blunden was not a packrat or dilettante but read and reread what he accumulated. In “Bringing Them Home” he writes:

 

“The resourcefulness of those who have made books through the centuries often makes me forget the serious business of reading, and a book comes home simply because it took my eye in some way. Later on, I endeavour to square accounts by examining the author’s share, and in this way I have made the acquaintance of far too many hands.”

 

Here is Blunden’s poem “In a Library” from Choice or Chance (1934):

 

“A curious remedy for present cares,

And yet as near a good one as I know;

It is to scan the cares of long ago,

Which these brown bindings lodge.

In black print glares

The Elizabethan preacher, heaping shame

On that ubiquitous gay hell, the stage;

And here’s another full of scriptural rage

Against high Rome. Fie, parson, be more tame.

This critic gnashes his laborious teeth

At that, whose subtlety seems no such matter;

This merchant bodes our economic death,

The envoy hastens with his hard-won chatter;

Age hacks at youth, youth paints the old town red—

And in the margin Doomsday rears his head.”