Of all the books that I have collected over the years, this one is without a doubt my absolute favourite. I've mentioned before that my place of work is a bookshop, a second hand one, and it's not uncommon for us to get enormous boxes full of obscure or esoteric volumes. Some of them having sat unread for many decades. When something pre-1900 comes in there's always a little buzz of excitement.
Sadly, a lot of the older books we receive have not weathered their hibernation well, and are only good for recycling. This finely bound, beautifully preserved piece of poetic history almost met a similar fate.
I'd had my eye on it from the moment it arrived, and kept watch as it stood unwanted on the shelves for one, two, three, four... six whole weeks. Every day I'd come in and check to see if some lucky sod had managed to pick it up at what was already an insultingly low price, but nobody ever did. Then one day, it was gone.
"Damnit!" I thought, "I was going to have that!"
I asked the guy at the till if he remembered selling it, and who to, in case it was one of the dealers who come in and flip our rarer stock online for a profit. They didn't even remember seeing it on the shelf.
Game over, or so I'd thought - I'd had my opportunity to buy it and now it was gone. The tragedy!
That's what I got for waiting for my 'Last Chance Discount'.
Then a couple of hours later I was emptying a crate of old Jeremy Clarkson books into the recycling bin out back (they aren't good for much else), and I spotted a tiny square of red hidden underneath some cardboard. Could it be?
Sure enough, I pulled the cardboard away and there it was, solemnly awaiting its final voyage to the pulping factory. Someone had obviously been culling old stock off the shelf and tossed it without a second thought.
Needless to say, I bought it there and then - only £1.99, an absolute bargain.
What I love about this book is that even just holding it gives me this incredible sensation of stepping back through time. The poetry contained isn't really to my tastes, almost all in the classic Victorian style of highly strung rhymes and blustery enunciations on the divine. I smile inside a little every time I read the subtitle 'Chiefly Modern'. How drastically society's preferences have changed in the last 160 years.
The inscription always makes me stop and wonder. Who was Mr. J Clark? And the giver of this gift; an Edna, or an Edwina Clark? Were they married, or siblings perhaps? Did everyone in 1857 have such immaculate handwriting?
Everything about it as a physical object - from the Morocco (goat leather) binding, to the gold trim and embellishments, the yellowing pages, ridged and slightly battered spine, even the unmistakable odour of pipe smoke - seems alive with those bygone days.
It's not so easy to tell from these pictures but it is a tiny pocket volume, only five inches in length. In my mind I always picture a gentleman in a waistcoat and thick trousers, perhaps Mr Clark himself, or his next of kin, leisurely leafing through the pages in some sunny meadow far away from the bustle of his urban existence. It seemed natural that I should photograph it surrounded by grass.
This poem is my favourite of the bunch, and there are dozens of big names in there. Wordsworth, Southey, Byron. Maybe because it is by 'Anon', as many of the authors in this book are. Such a simple yet evocative stanza, highlighting what the object itself seems to overpower me with, that knowledge of so many people lost in the winds of time. Mr and Mrs Clark, Anon, even Wordsworth - all leaves to the soil, all merely leaves in a book.
It's my own little fallen star, shrunk to a pocketable piece of space rock, dropped at my feet as if out of the very pages of history.
