pumpkinstrokemarrow

So visiting the second hand book shop at the top of Ryde was pleased to come across a copy of Pope's Iliad and Odyssey, heroic poems of the Ancient Greek variety. Along with a duplicate Arden 'Love's Labour Lost' (£2), a learned monograph about Aldous Huxley - including a chunk on Huxley and Lawrence, the latter being a topic of present interest on which I shall report in due course and a slim volume of essays by Huxley which I have never read and which I do not think I have ever owned. But the ageing mind can't be too sure about such things. All in all, a good haul.

Particularly when we come to open the Pope, which had been sold, probably more than a hundred years ago by Whiteley of Westbourne Grove. The book is inscribed by one Gladys Courtenay. The same page tells me that 'Arthur Cohen := Friendship & Love' and 'Gladys Courtenay := Friendship & Love'. In pencil. The things that people got up to before they had Facebook and Twitter. There are also various instructions in pencil, in more than one old fashioned hand, to turn to various pages. So on page 20 there is the rather incomplete instruction 'get your hair cut'. On page 127 the inscription 'Reggie Courtenay is a beastly little fool'. Another hand has crossed out Reggie and inserted Gladys. On page 260 'you have got big legs and arms like your mother'. And after a short sequence of directions, on page 562 'sold again'. No doubt I shall find other gems as I work my way through.

I note in passing that not only do the Courtenays deface their books, they also do not bother to cut all the pages and some of the pages look to have been cut, very messily, with a finger rather than a knife. Clearly not brought up to have a proper respect for books.

Turning to the matter itself, a much livelier read than I remember from the Rieu version I read as a child. Presumably takes more liberties with the original in order to squeeze it into rhyming couplets. Two comments so far relative to 'The Neibelungenlied'. First, the Iliad has a much bigger place for gods. Second, it has a more modern attitude to heroic violence - despite having been written getting on for 2,000 years earlier. That is to say, that it is not really a good thing even if it does involve some admirable qualities like bravery and make for a good story.

I have been puzzling over the illustrations, which appear to be small line engravings, a lot of them of updraped men and women. Was it these that made the book popular? The puzzle is, that the illustrations are printed along with the text. In which case, according to my understanding of printing science, they have to be woodcuts. You can't print engravings along with letterpress, the two processes of ink transfer being entirely different. Was it some sort of lithographic process? I shall have to find someone who knows more about these matters than I do.