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Horn-rims and Baggy Chords

In George Ramsden’s quiet secondhand bookshop, Stone Trough Books, in York, he normally has a publishing job on the go as well. Editing (letters of Siegfried Sassoon at the moment) and book-design absorb him to the extent that he may barely notice when a customer comes in. Indeed, with his horn-rimmed spectacles under a shock of rigid hair, and a manner combining chivalry with extreme vagueness, he has the air of a startled hedgehog when spotted beyond the bookstacks. His series of catalogues – a leisurely fifteen spread over twenty years – are typographically understated, without colour illustration and with only scant recommendation of the books, but nevertheless beautifully designed, as are his own publications. He confesses to being a complete amateur as regards design but his life has become infused with the subject, and he now ponders title-pages, wine-labels, logos on lorries, sheet-music covers, even shop fascias, with an unusual degree of discernment.

I first met George when he was running his shop at the bottom of Camberwell Grove in south London, the target of many a Saturday expedition in the 1980s. It was rather a long haul from Islington, and spirits would sometimes flag as we crawled in a tailback along the Walworth Road, only to pick up again at the sight of Camberwell Green and the thought of Stone Trough just round the corner. Not that we ever received an effusive welcome from the diffident George – but somehow we felt, deep down, that he probably was rather pleased to see us. Indeed if we timed our visit around lunchtime he might lock up the shop and meet us halfway, in the ramshackle basement of a vast and gloomy antiques shop, where we would lunch on Irish stew and a bottle or two of red wine, while business presumably languished back at the ranch – Saturday must, after all, have been his busiest day.

Stone Trough Books was a small two-roomed shop but somehow it stocked everything you had ever wanted to read, and lots of b

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In George Ramsden’s quiet secondhand bookshop, Stone Trough Books, in York, he normally has a publishing job on the go as well. Editing (letters of Siegfried Sassoon at the moment) and book-design absorb him to the extent that he may barely notice when a customer comes in. Indeed, with his horn-rimmed spectacles under a shock of rigid hair, and a manner combining chivalry with extreme vagueness, he has the air of a startled hedgehog when spotted beyond the bookstacks. His series of catalogues – a leisurely fifteen spread over twenty years – are typographically understated, without colour illustration and with only scant recommendation of the books, but nevertheless beautifully designed, as are his own publications. He confesses to being a complete amateur as regards design but his life has become infused with the subject, and he now ponders title-pages, wine-labels, logos on lorries, sheet-music covers, even shop fascias, with an unusual degree of discernment.

I first met George when he was running his shop at the bottom of Camberwell Grove in south London, the target of many a Saturday expedition in the 1980s. It was rather a long haul from Islington, and spirits would sometimes flag as we crawled in a tailback along the Walworth Road, only to pick up again at the sight of Camberwell Green and the thought of Stone Trough just round the corner. Not that we ever received an effusive welcome from the diffident George – but somehow we felt, deep down, that he probably was rather pleased to see us. Indeed if we timed our visit around lunchtime he might lock up the shop and meet us halfway, in the ramshackle basement of a vast and gloomy antiques shop, where we would lunch on Irish stew and a bottle or two of red wine, while business presumably languished back at the ranch – Saturday must, after all, have been his busiest day. Stone Trough Books was a small two-roomed shop but somehow it stocked everything you had ever wanted to read, and lots of books you didn’t realize you wanted to read until you saw them there, lined up in their faded dust-jackets, their titles and authors inviting you in. They were marshalled in a way that led you on from one author to another through friendships, influence and association. You could browse for hours, and often did, coming away with a small hoard of voices to keep you going until the next visit: it seemed so stupid while you were there not to buy a hardback of Vita Sackville-West’s garden book to replace your dog-eared paperback, and a couple of Iris Origos. George, who had served three years’ apprenticeship at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Mayfair without imbibing any of the positive sales pitch practised there, always looked faintly surprised that you wanted to buy anything at all, and seemed loath to take your money, but if you persevered you could build up quite a library for yourself. To this day, the casual browser at Stone Trough need have no fear of being browbeaten into buying anything: as George himself puts it, ‘Some booksellers are persuasive recommenders – it’s a huge gift. I find it very difficult to sell books verbally. Things tend to go better if I walk away from the customer.’ The atmosphere was quiet but friendly, more like a house than a shop. If it was very quiet and there was no need to keep an eye on things downstairs, George would say, ‘Why don’t you come upstairs and see Edith?’ Then you would be led up to a lovely room lined from floor to ceiling with Edith Wharton’s library, recently purchased from Maggs. It contained some 2,000 volumes but was incomplete, and it was George’s mission for many years to fill the gaps, tracking down volumes from far and wide that contained her bookplate or inscription, and restoring them to their rightful position. (In 1999, mission accomplished, he was to publish the complete catalogue of Edith Wharton’s Library, with an introduction by Wharton’s biographer Hermione Lee.) When not hunting down books or selling them, George founded and played trombone in a rollicking jazz band called Baggy Chords, much in demand at parties. George’s vagueness was legendary, however. Once, after a particularly lively gig, he reported sorrowfully to the exhausted members of the band that he could not ferry them and their equipment home, as his car had been stolen from the road outside. He had overlooked the fact that he had recently traded in his old vehicle for a less dilapidated model, which was all the while sitting exactly where he had parked it. Many were the cries and lamentations when George shut up shop in Camberwell Grove to migrate to York, but within weeks he had found premises at 38 Fossgate, in the heart of York’s second-hand book world, and within months he was fully installed in a space which looked remarkably like the last, though there was no room for Edith – she was moved to the house where the family now live. Part of the gravitational pull to Yorkshire was the proximity of Rupert Hart-Davis, living in a congenial haze of pipe-smoke and anecdotes in the Old Rectory at Marske-in-Swaledale amidst his library of 17,000 books and his collection of pictures. Old rectories could be said to be the leitmotif of George’s life: he himself lives in one, which resembles in some respects those of Reynolds Stone at Litton Cheney and of Rupert Hart-Davis: books everywhere, various publishing projects simmering away in different rooms, the lingering trail of wood smoke, paintings and prints on every wall. Stone Trough’s catalogues have specialized in the libraries and collections of distinguished bibliophiles: A. J. A. Symons (1991), John Gere, and the writer-and-photographer partnership of Olive Cook and Edwin Smith (2003) among them. But it was Hart-Davis who provided the catalyst for the first book under the Stone Trough imprint when he invited George to publish a collection of his tributes to writers, Praise from the Past. There followed an edition of Christopher Isherwood’s early letters, bought at auction, and in 1997 the bibliography of Christopher Logue, an altogether more extravagant production, with colour tip-ins of his poster-poems. By this time George Ramsden had met George Mackie, the inspired former designer at Edinburgh University Press, whose influence can be seen in this and subsequent Stone Trough publications. Stone Trough Books is almost a one-man band: George does the typesetting and design which is fine-tuned by the printer/binder Smith Settle (the printer, incidentally, of this quarterly), in addition to the usual publisher’s tasks of arranging printing and distribution. The very pleasing results are available on-line and by mail order from George himself. He can publish exactly what he wants to, when he wants to, and is beholden to no one; he keeps his initial print runs small but has been known to reprint titles such as George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book. The list is as idiosyncratic as its publisher, pursuing the byways rather than the highways of literary life. Bensoniana and Cornishiana is one of his more wilfully eccentric publications, soon to be reissued with a dashing new dust-jacket by Mark Hearld, whose design for Timothy d’Arch Smith’s memoir of managing the Times Bookshop in the 1960s propelled it off the shelves at such a rate that it is now out of print. Bensoniana comes sparkling from the notebooks of A. C. Benson. Cornishiana collects together the often baffling and unwittingly droll remarks of Blanche Warre-Cornish (1844–1922), the wife of an Eton beak, an apparent paragon of respectability given to making the sort of pronouncements that stopped people dead in their tracks in that less enlightened age. ‘Tell me,’ she asked a young lady, ‘whom would you rather have had for a lover, Shelley, Keats, or Byron? I’d give all three of them for one wild half-hour with Rossetti.’ She was fond of dispensing advice: to a friend who had just arrived (uncomfortably) on the shores of southern Africa, she wrote an encouraging letter: ‘In all disagreeable circumstances remember the three things which I always say to myself: “I am an Englishwoman.” “I was born in wedlock.” “I am on dry land.”’ Another of my favourite titles is The Bronze Horseman (1999), a translation by Robert Powell-Jones of a handful of Pushkin’s finest poems together with his novella ‘The Shot’. Powell-Jones, whose early death exemplified Cyril Connolly’s dictum ‘Who the gods wish to destroy they first call promising’, provided a witty and illuminating introduction, and John Bayley a foreword. One learns a great deal about the irrepressible and unimaginably gifted poet from this slim volume (in his youth, egged on by his friends, he would extemporize verse lying flat on his back on the billiard table of his club), and if you ignore Powell-Jones’s entreaty at the end of the Introduction to ‘learn Russian. It is not a difficult language, you could pick it up in months, and you would be spared the translations’, you will read here his remarkably successful versions of some of Pushkin’s lesser known works. Work in progress at Stone Trough (when not manhandling quantities of books, sorting, pricing and shelving, bent double over boxes), now revolves around editing and annotating letters written in the last ten years of his life by Siegfried Sassoon to Mother Margaret Mary of the Convent of the Assumption, his confidante in all things spiritual and quotidian. These will make their appearance in two volumes over the next two years, and then, who knows? But whatever appears between the covers will be unusual, enlivening, and beautiful to behold and to hold; of that you can be certain.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Ariane Bankes 2005


About the contributor

Ariane Banks works as a publisher and editor, and can never resist buying three books for every two she reads.

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