Scholars, Poets, and Radicals: Discovering Forgotten Lives in the Blackwell Collections by Rita Ricketts (review)

Great bookshops often play an important part in the social and intellectual lives of university towns, especially when, besides selling books, they act as publishers. At Oxford, John Betjeman was not one of C. S. Lewis's favored undergraduate pupils (Ken Tynan was); Betjeman later confessed that he "learnt more at Blackwell's than at Marlborough or Magdalen." Benjamin Harris Blackwell came to Oxford in the 1830s and involved himself in the literary life of the city until his premature death in 1855. His son, Benjamin Henry Blackwell, opened the shop in the Broad on New Year's Day, 1879, and was joined in 1913 by his son Basil, who set up the publishing part of the business. The Blackwells were serious minded, patriarchal, idealistic, and enterprising: "In Every Home Books," "More Books in the Home," and "Good Books Build Character" were among the posters they produced. Their bookshop welcomed Paul Verlaine ("The room was bare, lit only by two candles"), Lady Ottoline Morrell in her carriage and four, John Masefield and W. B. Yeats, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis, Isherwood and MacNeice, H. H. Asquith, and, reading Plato in Greek at the top of a step ladder, David Ben Gurion. All of these put in brief appearances in Rita Ricketts's book, along with C. L. Dodgson revealing all in a nightshirt while bending down to pick up a pile of books from the floor, but the heart of the book lies elsewhere.

Scholars, Poets, and Radicals is based on the Blackwell archives, which are divided between the Bodleian Library and Merton College, where Sir Basil was an undergraduate. It is not an orthodox company history, nor a detailed account of the succeeding generations of Blackwells, although the necessary historical and biographical background is sketched in. Rather, its core lies in four chapters that are mainly concerned with one of the shop's employees, William (Rex) King, a remarkable and highly literate man who worked in the business's antiquarian and second-hand department, where he established himself as a considerable scholar. He wrote poetry and was much concerned with religious questions; his journals allow his extraordinary range of reading to be reconstructed and the role that books issued in inexpensive series—Cassell's National Library, Cooke's Little Series of English Classics, and the Temple Classics—played in it. Besides King, another Blackwells employee, Dorothy L. Sayers, is made to stand out, and the archives shed a certain amount of light on her working life. The book concludes with interesting chapters on the firm's publishing side and, in particular, on the Shakespeare Head Press (there is a good account of a visit to May Morris at Kelmscott in 1925). The book is well illustrated, with a generous collection of forty-eight colored plates and a particularly scary photograph of May Morris and her companion Mary Lobb. Rita Ricketts has used her knowledge of the archive to put together an engaging selection of material from it: there is still more to be found out about the business, the town, and the university from the Blackwell family collections.