Bishop Peter Knight Walker - RIP

Yesterday I went and collected one last lot of books that had belonged to Peter Walker, onetime bishop of Ely. He'd been a customer of mine since I started the business, and had given me much encouragement in the beginning. He died last week, after a couple of days' illness, at the age of ninety one.

I was first referred to him in 1978 when I left the fulltime ministry and came to live in Cambridge. He interviewed me and as I still wanted to help out in the Church he arranged I should help out at a local parish, St George's Chesterton. I was "honorary assistant curate" and used to do a bit of preaching and taking services. When I felt I could no longer carry on doing this the bishop was still supportive and caring of me. Incidentally, the person who took over the hon. assistant curacy from me was one Rowan Williams, then a lecturer in Divinity at the University.

When I started my own business in 1983 Peter Walker became a customer almost immediately. He gave me a good bit of advice after receiving a few catalogues - that I was selling some good books too cheaply, which helped me look more carefully at what I was doing. When he retired in 1989 he sold me the vast bulk of his books. His study at Ely was huge, and it was full of interesting material. I've seen many first-rate clerical and episcopal libraries and his was amongst the best.

In retirement he bought fewer books, and as he moved away from the diocese we lost touch for a few years. He hadn't wanted to be stepping on the toes of his successor. Latterly he moved back to Cambridge, to a tall thin house off the Barton Road and he got into the habit of asking me in once or twice a year to buy his surplus books. Space was limited, so he needed to keep his library under strict control. I always wondered about the suitability of the house. Not only was there not much room for books, but three storeys seemed a lot to cope with on aging limbs. But he and his wife Jean did cope up until this last year when they moved into more suitable accomodation.

Peter's great passions were the New Testament, Augustine, Bishop Bell of Chichester, and poetry. I have never seen so many copies of the Greek New Testament as there were on his shelves yesterday, all heavily annotated. As to Augustine, he used to buy every edition that came out, and every book about his work. It was these that had mostly made up the books he'd been selling me over recent years. Yesterday's collection contained all of these elements.

A shy man, but very caring, whenever we met he never failed to ask after me and Rosalind and the business, and to share some of the insights of what he happened to have been studying recently. I shall miss him, and I suspect that many others will as well.

Paris

We set off for Paris on the Eurostar last Tuesday evening. Because of the heavy snow in Kent and northern France it started a little late and had to travel more slowly than usual. This meant that we arrived in Paris ninety minutes late and it was nearly 1am before we got to our hotel near the Montparnasse-Bienvenue Metro station. The Montparnasse Novotel was very comfortable (apart from there being no hot water one day), and quite convenient, the Metro station being a crossing point for several lines.

Wednesday morning our first task was to get to Boulevard Montmartre to pick up the four day Paris Passes we had paid for in advance from the Hard Rock Cafe. We walked the last couple of Metro stops along the boulevards and got the feel of them. Cold but bright.

I am not sure I would bother about the Paris Pass again. It cost us €139 each. For that you get entry into around 60 sights and free public transport. But how much can you do in four days? I reckon we used it in nine paying attractions, which would be around €90 in entry fees, and we did use the metro a lot, but not to the full value. We were never going to get as far as Versailles or any other of the far out places, especially in the winter. The only advantage was that we did not have to queue for tickets at any of the museums. Next time I would just go for any deal going on transport and leave it at that.

Anyway, having got the pass we wandered south to the Louvre, had a snack (expensive), and spent most of the afternoon there. Previously I had only spent about an hour there. This visit was much longer and we did justice to the wonderful collections, though we didn't see everything.
Next time I reckon we need to spend another day to see the bits we didn't see at all - the Egyptian galleries, Etruscan, French painting, the oriental and the Islamic.

We ate our main meal that evening just down the road from our hotel. I gave up on my squid, cooked so badly that a bicycle inner tube would have been easier to chew. Our debit and credit cards then failed to be accepted. I don't know what one is supposed to do about using them abroad. If you try and tell the banks before you go they are not interested, but the minute you try to use the cards they block the transactions. No marks to the Royal Bank of Scotland or the Co-op Bank.

On Thursday morning we were able to get on line 13 of the Metro at Montparnasse and go directly without change all the way north to Basilique St Denis without changing. Train and St Denis swarming with students. The tombs of the royal families are well worth seeing. During the Revolution an attempt was made to destroy them, and lots were, but someone was foresighted enough to save what he could.





The French were burying their kings there in the 600s, long before our Westminster Abbey was even built. When we came out the weather was freezing, so after a quick walk up the main street of the town we found a brasserie overlooking the cathedral square and had a good (and cheap) lunch.









The afternoon was a bit of a disaster. Rosalind wanted to go Christmas shopping in the Galleries Lafayette. We did go in, and enjoyed the architecture, but the place was too heaving with people to be pleasant. And the clothes prices were high compared with England. So we left and went to have a drink nearby opposite the Opera Garnier. Our own fault for choosing such a place - €16 for a beer and a hot chocolate. Then we discovered that the Opera museum which our Paris Pass should have got us into was closed for renovations, and that the Pass does not give entry into the Opera visit itself.

Late in the afternoon we wandered into the Tuileries Gardens to discover that the Orangerie was open, so we went in there and saw the Monet waterlily paintings. We saw his gardens at Giverny in the summer, so this was good. The rest of the paintings in the Orangerie are part of what was a private collection. Whoever made it had good taste in some artists, but other parts of the collection have not worn well.

After a snack supper we set off at 7 to reach the Opera Comique for an 8pm performance of Lully's Cadmus et Hermione, all booked in advance over the internet. An hour should have been plenty of time. Next door to our hotel was the mainline railway station Montparnasse Vaugiraud. You could go down into this station, along a series of tunnels, under another station, Gare Montparnasse, and twenty minutes later find yourself at the Metro station. We did this, but the train we caught began stopping longer and longer at the various stations and then an announcement was made that there was a problem with the line ahead. So we got out and eventually found a taxi, the driver of which turned out never to have heard of the Opera Comique. However, he did know the whereabouts of the street it is in, so he got us to the Boulevard des Italiens with five minutes to spare. Our seats were in the gods right at the top of the theatre (the French call this level Paradis). The view was terrific, perched so high above the action. Lovely music, lots of dancing, and splendid costumes, especially feather headdresses which gave an Inca look to the protagonists. Usual preposterous plot, involving gods and monsters who appeared out of the ground, but they were all appeased or fought off and there was a happy ending.

We were interested in the language. My grasp of French is such that though I can read it a bit I can never understand more than the odd spoken word. As expected the sung words had all their end syllables enunciated. What we did not expect was the difference in the actual pronunciation of many words. Infinitives for example, had their last syllables pronouced like an English ur rather than as ay in modern French. We wished we knew more about the rules. Was this change because the words were sung, or was it that they were using 18th century pronunciation?

It was a lovely evening. The only caveat to that was the lighting which appeared to be designed to give the full 18th century experience. There was a row of candles at the front of the stage, but not much else. Certainly no spotlights. That would be all very well if the production were taking place in the court of Louis XIV, where the main part of the audience would be quite close to the singers. For us, forty or fifty feet high in a modern theatre the effect was akin to our sitting on the roof of our house trying to see a troup of mice in the garden acting by the light of one candle. It meant that we couldn't really appreciate the lovely costumes properly.

On Friday our first stop was the Tour Montparnasse above the local railway station and once the tallest office building in Europe. The views from the top were good. (Opposite is the National Postal Museum, which we kept passing, but we didn't ever find time to go in.) Then we took the Metro to the Ile de la Cite.

Under the square in front of Notre Dame is a little museum where are displayed in situ the remains of various buildings going right back to Roman times. That was interesting. Then to Notre Dame itself. They must have cleaned the windows as the whole place was so much lighter than the last time I visited. Crowded with tourists like ourselves but still a moving place.






It being bright and sunny we then walked all the way round the next island, the Isle de St Louis and had lunch in a nice little restaurant.

Back on the Isle de la Cite we visited the Conciergerie, the prison where victims of the Revolution were kept while on trial and from whence they were taken on tumbrils to the guillotine. Worth seeing for the great hall which acted as a guardroom in the middle ages.





Then south off the island to the Left Bank so see again the Musee du Cluny (Musee du Moyen Age) where the famous unicorn tapestries are. We couldn't go to Paris without seeing them again. Also there at the moment an exhibition of Czech religious sculpture well worth seeing.


















At the end of the afternoon we wandered through the shopping streets and I spent some time in a huge bookshop, Gibert Joseph, near St Michel. I love French books. They are so attractively designed. Wish I could read them.

Saturday first thing we went to the Musee d'Orsay. At present they have on an exhibition of the works of Gerome, a rather fun nineteenth century French artist. I came across his work a couple of years ago when I acquired a book about him, so an exhibition of the actual work was great. Gerome did a lot to propagate a certain sort of Orientalism in western art. He also painted classical scenes, some in gory detail. In the exhibition there is a typical pair of his. The first shows in the arena of the Colosseum a group of Christians praying, with a lion and several other big cats emerging from a tunnel, about to see them. The second picture shows the beasts being driven back into the tunnels after the spectacle is over. The sand is strewn with the blood and body parts of the Christians. Quite spectacular.

While we were in the upper parts of the Musee we could see a blizzard outside. Across the river the Tuilleries Gardens rapidly became white. After lunch we walked through this whiteness to the Metro and set off for the Pompidou Centre. The station we came out at debouched straight into the bricolage basement of a department store. It was one of the biggest hardware departments I have ever seen in any shop. Heaven. Having seen the Pompidou Centre I wished I had stayed in the shop.

Our final evening was spent looking at little shops off the Boulevard St-Germain, where we bought a little oil painting as a gift for a nephew's 21st birthday. We ate crepes at a Breton restaurant near our hotel.

The news of Eurostar was that some services had been cancelled on the Saturday and that passangers without tickets should not bother to turn up, but as we did have them we went to the Garde du Nord on Sunday morning to see what would happen. And the 8.07 did run. It wasn't even particularly full, and we got in to St Pancras only about a quarter of an hour late. There was a bit of snow in the fields near Paris, but not near the coast. Kent had most snow of the places we went through.

It was a good few days, but we are still exhausted from all the walking.

Promised End, Arts Theatre Cambridge

Last night we attended Alexander Goehr's new opera, Promised End, at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. Brought by English Touring Opera (ETO), it is based on extracts from Shakespeare's King Lear, selected by the late Frank Kermode (though Goehr did not like all his selections and modified them).

We weren't sure whether or not we ought to go to this opera. We are quite traditionalist - my favourite operas are by Mozart and Puccini. However, I did think that we ought to support the ETO as we usually go to its productions when they come to Cambridge and it seemed like chickening out to avoid this just because it was likely to be not quite our taste. Unfortunately not many people thought like us and so the theatre was less than half full.

What to say about the opera itself? Well, the set and staging were good. The orchestra, the Aurora, was placed at the back of the stage behind an elaborate gauze curtain, coming into view occasionally as the lighting changed. They played what must be quite a difficult score very well.

Being only selections from a four hour play, the action is episodic, the whole opera lasting less than an hour and a half, but with the help of a good plot summary in the programme and knowledge of the play, it was fairly easy to work out where one was.

However, it was not at all easy to work that out from the words, at least half of which were completely incomprehensible. This was not the fault of the singers, nor were they drowned out by the orchestra. The problem is Goehr's method of setting them to the music. He'll have a few words sung slowly, to a few notes, and then cram the whole of the rest of the sentence into a couple of bars and a couple of seconds, so there's just an incomprehensible babble. Sort DAH, DAH, dahdahdahdahdah. In the short term the way round this would be to have surtitles. That does not really though address the fundamental problem, the bad setting.

It isn't that the music itself is bad. Alright, it is very "modern" but I can take a bit of that. But Goehr doesn't manage to make for a comprehensible work, which is a pity.

So, a flawed evening's entertainment, though not in the way I was expecting. I expected to hate the music but quite enjoyed that. It was the suppression of the text that was so disappointing. Never mind, it will take me back to the text of Lear, and that will be a good thing (unless it drives me to suicide, miserable play that it is).

Is CAMBO a Good Thing?

There has been a lot of excitement recently in certain parts of the press and amongst some booksellers I know about CAMBO, The Campaign for Real Books.

I won't go into the details - you can look them up yourself. The general idea is to encourage the continued use of books printed on paper, as opposed to books distributed via electronic media such as the Amazon Kindle. The incentive for book readers is that if they join they will be able to claim a discount of 10% for purchases over £10 from participating bookshops.

What is in it for book buyers? I am not sure. With a subscription of £15 per year to belong to CAMBO you would have to spend £150 each year before you started seeing any return for your outlay.

And what is in it for booksellers? They lose 10% on every sale over £10. If enough customers join CAMBO and the booksellers really begin to feel the discounts, then I suspect prices will go up to compensate. And face it, the sort of people who were going to spend £150 or more a year on books would be spending that money anyway.

In the end it is not campaigns like this that will ensure the survival of the paper book. It is profit. That is what publishers are out to make, and if they find that there is more profit in ebooks then ebooks it is that will win out. I suspect that the paper based book has largely had its day, but that its demise will be slow at first. There will always be some call for paper printed material, probably at the very low and the very high ends of the market, and specialised genres such as picture books for young children, but Kindles and the like will win out for the majority of books eventually.

I had a play with a friend's Kindle recently. It is alright, I suppose, and if I were a commuter perhaps it might be useful. It has some nice facilities, like a built in dictionary. It has some awful ones. It will read your book aloud to you, but without any punctuation, so it sounds like stream of consciousness and is hard to make any sense of. It doesn't reproduce colour pictures.

My verdict on the device was that if in ten years time it has become a bit more sophisticated - proper sound, colour reproduction etc - then I might consider having one. And I might have to, if publishers have moved out of paper publishing. But I will still have on my shelves the thousands of books I have already acquired over the years, and will continue to enjoy them.

Will I join CAMBO as a bookseller? I might, if I think my customers will take advantage of the discount and buy more books.

But am I enthusiastic about the project? Not very. It seems a bit luddite in the face of inevitable progress. The interesting thing will be to see what is made of the £15 subscriptions that people pay to join. If, as is promised, the money is used to do such things as sponsor book events, offer prizes for authors, shops and others in the book trade, and generally promote paper books, then that might be a good thing. If it mostly goes into salaries and administration then the only people to gain will be the promoters of CAMBO. Time will tell.

NEW LOOK WEBSITE

I have two new developments to report. The first is the different way the books are displayed on the website. It should not make any practical difference to customers searching for and ordering our books, but underlying what you see are files which can more easily be accessed by Google, which should help our books to be more widely findable.

Having said that, there appear to be a few problems at present with the uploading of our files, and as I write I suspect that half our stock is not showing on the website, but no doubt such teething problems will disappear over the next few days. George Lund has worked very hard on the project, and no doubt will kill this particular problem with his usual speedy ruthlessness.

The second development is one which a week ago I would have been ashamed to admit to, but which I'm now revelling in. I've discovered Twitter.

Not that I had not heard of it. It is hard to avoid any news report on any dramatic occurence in the world which does not these days acknowledge the part Twitter has played in the dissemination of the reports from the ground. However, it was associated in my mind with silly people following the inane ramblings of empty-headed so-called celebrities.

So when a couple of bookselling colleagues whom I respect admitted last week that they "twittered", I was somewhat surprised, but, holding my nose somewhat I ventured onto the Twitter website to see what on earth it had to do with anything serious.

And was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, you can "follow" the musings of your show-biz heroes, if that is your delight, but more to the point, one can give out and receive useful snippets of information about news, and business and all sorts of other things. I am now following such institutions as the British Library, the New Scientist magazine, the Guardian newspaper science pages, Scientific American, some booksellers, and some cycling related activities.

From the point of view of Lund Theological Books I think being on Twitter will enable us to quickly post small items that in theory could go on this Blog, but which in practice have been too little to bother with posting on the blog, which tends to be used for longish ramblings, such as our holidays. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so you can make a quick point very easily.

Over the last month or so we have made various offers of discount on sections of our catalogue. This has been mentioned on the home page of the website as and when appropriate. From now on, any special offers, which may last only a few hours at a time, will only be announced on Twitter. There is a link at the bottom of the our home page, so it won't be difficult to check them out.

I hope also that customers will interact with the business via messages on Twitter. Comments, questions, complaints, compliments, are all welcome, and will be able to be seen by all comers.

They tell me this is the twenty-first century. You are welcome to join me in stumbling around its foothills.

More Culture

In Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood Mrs Organ Morgan complains about her husband - "With Organ Morgan its Organ Organ Organ all the time." With us the last few weeks its "culture culture culture all the time".

A week after hearing Handel's Messiah in Trinity College Chapel we were back there last Thursday to hear Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Its lovely music and the student choir and orchestra did justice to it. Not sure how the relatively scantily clad soloists endured the cold though. It was worse than the previous week, and that was bad. Still, we did get a free glass of wine to cheer us up in the interval.

Saturday we went to London. My sister in law had managed to buy tickets to the opera at Covent Garden and then discover that both she and her husband had arranged to go to watch rugby matches in different parts of the country - so she gave us the tickets for Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina'a Slippers.

We made a day of it, walking first the few hundred yards along the Euston Road from Kings Cross station to the British Library where there's an exhibition on the history and development of photography. Their own holdings are enough to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject and there is a broad range of stunning and intriguing imagery. And lots of early camera equipment too. The story was told of some early photographer who went to Egypt and had the bright idea of having a small caravan like structure which was his darkroom and equipment store. The locals he travelled amongst were convinced this was where he kept his harem.

Then we tubed (is that a real verb?) to South Kensington to see the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Stunning. It looks like thirty million pounds well spent. We had about two hours and I reckon saw about a third of the exhibits. In the nineteenth century the V&A must have had collectors out plundering Italy, for half the stuff in the first section we saw appeared to have come from churches in Venice and the Veneto - tombs, sculptures, well heads, the whole east end of some chapel.

Further on are medieval altar pieces and other religious artifacts, none of which I can remember their having on display before. Left, detail of the St Margaret Altarpiece, Germany around 1520.








There were some old favourites though, like the Luck of Edenhall (left), a piece of Syrian glass from the time of the crusades, with its own leather carrying case, and the Becket Chasse (pictured above).

Then we ran out of time and had to go and eat, which we did in a Polish restaurant near South Ken tube station which we think is the same one we first ate in around 1973. I had Kartofflen, a sort of potato and onion and bacon tart, with a mushroom sauce. Very good.

Then to Covent Garden, where the seats turned out to be in the Amphitheatre, a steeply raked section a dizzying forty or fifty feet above the stalls. The Tsarina's Slippers (no, we hadn't heard of it either) is a delightfully silly piece, with plot which is partly Feydeau farce and partly Last of the Summer Wine, about a young blacksmith whose young lady won't marry him unless he provides her with a pair of slippers just like the Tsarina's. His mother, the local witch, and eligible widow, is wooed by the Devil and several local men, including the father of the young lady. In one scene the witch is visited by several suitors in turn, and every time the next chap arrives the current one is hidden in a sack. When the son arrives home he drags the sacks out, thinking they contain either coal or his tools. Subsequently, on the way to commit suicide in despair of winning his girl, he finds the Devil in what he thought was his tool sack and forces him to take him to St Petersburgh where he persuades the court to give him a pair of the desired slippers. All then ends happily ever after. The Royal Ballet is involved too, as there are a couple of dance scenes in the second act.

The Guardian critic slated the production. I got the impression she wanted the whole thing transposed to a tractor collective in Soviet Russia. That would have ruined it. The eighteenth century peasant and court costumes were delightful and Tchaikovsky's music is just right for this light piece.

On another subject, you may or may not have noticed that I have a link on the home page of the website to a list of vestments and clerical garments I am selling. They mostly belonged to my recently deceased father in law, though a few were mine. It would be nice to find homes for them.

Handel, Handel, Handel, Purcell/Handel, Handel

We've had a positive feast of Handel this last ten days. For a start English Touring Opera brought five operas to Cambridge, performed one per night over a week. We went to three of them.

We started on the Tuesday with Flavio. Like most Handel operas is has a very silly plot, involving a chap killing his fiance's father for having slapped his own father in the face. Honour is more than love, you know. And a king who falls in love with someone else's girl (who is the sister of the man who does the killing). The king sees the error of his ways in the end and lets her marry the man she loves. Kings always come short in Handel's operas. The singing was good of course, and that is what one goes for.

Next night we saw Teseo. That was a mistake. An even sillier plot - far too complicated to summarise but if I tell you that there's a prince who is pretending not to be himself, and his father the king who at one point tries to poison him, thinking he is a rival, and Medea, who in all the works she occurs in is always a bad lot, and various people who want to marry (including the King of course who comes short at the end). But it wasn't the plot that was the problem. It was that we had seen this very production within the last 18 months or so, and it is now a bit tired. Not all the singers were the same, and they were all right, but it was a bit of a tedious evening.

Thursday we had off so we could miss Tolomeo. We've seen it before, and it all takes place on the shore of some miserable island where everyone gets shipwrecked at various times and no-one recognises anyone else, and they fall in love with the wrong people and they try to murder people they shouldn't, like their brother. Tolomeo is the rejected son of Cleopatra. She never appears (probably put off the sea after Actium) but is a malevolent force behind all the action. So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.

Friday we heard Alcina. That's one adapted from Ariosto, where a wife comes (in disguise of course) to an island to rescue her husband who has been ensnared by the wicked enchantress Alcina, a sort of Circe character. Ruggiero, the husband is as wet as a fresh plaice, but he was sung beautifully by a most ravishing young New Zealandish singer, Wendy Dawn Thompson, who I would go a long way to hear again. Of course she should have been a castrato, but they don't seem to make them any more, which is a pity.

Saturday we didn't go to see Ariodante. That's another opera adapted from Orlando Furioso, but there isn't much adaptation. The characters are called Ginevra, Dalinda, Polinesso, Ariodante - and Donald. I can't remember the passage in Ariosto, but I am pretty sure he wasn't called Donald in the original. Nor was he a Presbyterian minister. I expect he was a king. But that is the extent to which Handel has adapted the original.

The main reason for not going to Ariodante was the fact that we already had subscription tickets to an Academy of Ancient Music concert at West Road, the University concert hall. This turned out to be the highlight of the week for me. In the first half Carolyn Sampson sang music by Purcell. In the second half she sang works by Handel. She is a magnificent singer, with real presence. (Next night we heard her again on Radio Three, singing from Westminster Abbey.) It would not worry me if I never went to an orchestral concert again. The human voice is what moves me, not artificial contraptions, however well played. But of course Carolyn Sampson's recital would not have been half as good without the orchestra behind her. Her Let the Bright Seraphim from Sampson, was a duet/duel with the trumpet. It sent shivers down my spine.

We had a rest for a few days, and then went to Trinity College last night to hear the Music Society put on the Messiah. It wasn't perfect, but it was good, and in some parts very good, with some cracking good young soloists. It was cold though. Apparently Trinity are cutting down on the heating bills by turning it off. With that great quadrangle they should put in some ground source heating, and a few solar panels on the roofs wouldn't come amiss either.

Anyway, a good week, music wise.