Boomerang books

Every so often I fill a box with books and take it to the nearest Oxfam shop in Haverfordwest. I have to grit my teeth and close the lid before I delve back in and catch sight of titles I feel I can't bear to part with. But I have so many and I want to spare my sons the chore - or indeed the possibility that they too encumber themselves with more volumes than any sane individual should possess. (I have to say that not all were purchased by me in the first place: I  inherited many.)

Once the box has gone, the regret is alleviated by relief at the slightly less jammed shelves. But wait - an email arrives. A volunteer at the Oxfam shop has spotted my family name in a couple of books that languish unsold,  consigned to some dubious limbo to await their fate. Would I like them back? Well, I'm intrigued, and he's taken so much trouble...  so yes. I pay the marked price (£3.50 each) and a little more. 

One turns out to be Evolution in Art by A.C.Haddon, 1895. "Distinguished Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940) carried out important fieldwork in the Torres Strait and New Guinea and is famed for his contributions to the study of the indigenous cultures of these regions." The book is familiar to me from childhood and I had been reluctant to let it go. Well, now it's back.

My father's name is on the flyleaf with the date 1911 (when he was studying anthropology at Oxford); followed by his first wife's name and the date Feb.1921. So he gave it to her around the time she fell pregnant* with my half-brother who was born at the end of October that year
.*(An event which forced their marriage).

The second book is Reminiscences of A Student's Life by Jane Ellen Harrison, with the said half-brother's name in it - no date. I swear I've not seen this book before and would not have let it go if only for the reason that it was printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press in 1926. I think it must have come from one of the boxes of books we filled at The Old Man's flat following his death 2015. See here.

This tiny volume proves hilarious,  being the witty and subversive reminiscences of the blue-stocking classical scholar and free thinker who has been dubbed the First Female Academic: Jane Harrison lived by her intellect at a period when women were all but barred from the halls of academe. Her often acid (but also affectionate) comments on her contemporaries as well as on her family, friends, acquaintances, pets and Yorkshire folk (she was one) are hugely entertaining - literally LOL.

Jane (who was 75 when this little memoir was published) had several romantic attachments to people of both genders but never married and died in 1928 at the age of 77.
See here for an excellent short biography.
Portrait by Augustus John here.

It's probably time to fill another book box but these two won't go into it - for now anyway.