Aun Aprendo: A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of Aldous Leonard Huxley (review)

This handsomely produced book, ‘designed in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont by Roderick D. Stinehour’, does not contain a CD-ROM, although it does have some excellent colour illustrations. One of them shows the Blackwell edition of Huxley’s Selected Poems (1925), whose patterned paper boards have been reproduced as the background design to this volume’s dust wrapper, and this typifies the tact and taste that has informed this whole production. Dr Bromer is a widely respected antiquarian bookseller, and he has taken trouble to identify the questions that booksellers are prone to ask about books, and answer them. He has chosen handsome and well-preserved copies of the books to illustrate as well, which adds to the charm of this volume; most of Huxley’s books were designed with some care, and the discerning collector is right to insist on fine examples. He has managed to locate some of the rarest titles in the canon (although not, alas, the splendid pictorial dust wrapper to Alfred H. Mendes’ Pitch Lake: A Story from Trinidad, a novel to which Huxley wrote an introduction for Duckworth in 1934, and which is about as elusive as any commercially published novel ever gets); and he is careful over paperback reprints, and many other reissues, which are often neglected — especially, alas, by booksellers. Dr Bromer’s research has been exhaustive and exemplary, and he has been particularly effective at obtaining figures for print runs, a hurdle that defeats many bibliographers: it is oddly interesting to know that the English edition of Brave New World Revisited (1959) ran not only to 19,237 copies for sale, but to 113 proof copies as well.

There are, however, one or two aspects to the work that are a little disappointing. The approach to information is rigorously schematic: this is entirely correct, but the result sometimes leaves the reader feeling a little short changed. One example: an early anthology, Oxford Poetry 1918, is properly described, with the transcription of the title-page reading ‘Edited by T. W. E., E. F. A. G., and D. L. S’.’ (an appropriate use of the ‘Oxford comma’?): but we are not told whose identities were concealed by these initials. T. W. Earp is easy enough to guess, and D. L. S. (perhaps a little unexpectedly) is Dorothy L. Sayers; but E. F. A. Geach would defy most readers, I suspect. More significantly, Jonah — the black tulip of Huxley collectors, printed in an edition of about fifty copies for Christmas 1917 — is described in so laconic a way as to be palpably frustrating. A full census of known copies would perhaps have been a little too much to ask (although it would have been fun to try), but to have no indication, at all, of the recipients seems an opportunity lamentably missed. (A start: when Bertram Rota and Percy Muir jointly bought Lady Ottoline Morrell’s library at Garsington, they tossed a coin to determine who would be allowed to choose the first volume: both badly wanted Jonah, in those days of completist — as opposed to high-spot — collectors, a very marketable object indeed. The winner glee fully plucked the pamphlet from the shelf: but the friendship remained untested, for a second copy fell out from the pages of the first.)

‘Aun aprendo’, by the way, is Spanish for ‘I am still learning’: the title of a Goya drawing of ‘an old, old man, bent double with age and infirmities’. The phrase was used by Huxley as the title of a commencement (or, for English readers, ‘graduation’) address to the Happy Valley High School of Ojai, California, in 1951. Bromer’s description of its first publication is impeccable.