{"title":"Catalogue Seven","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOur new catalogue is an exploration of the outsider experience. Through books and manuscripts on politics, religion, race, sex, art, literature, music, social norms, crime, punishment and the intellectual life, we investigate the shifting nature of what it means to be an outsider.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"the-sun-spirit-a-visionary-phantasy","title":"The Sun Spirit. A Visionary Phantasy","description":"Fair Oak, near Kingsclere: Privately published by the author. 1931.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLimited edition. Number two of thirty copies, this is one of the twenty four uncoloured copies, printed on Hollingworth paper, the first page printed in red. 385x275mm. pp. [10], 16, [8]. Seven full-page lithographed plates and other illustrations in the text. Original tan half morocco, cloth covered boards. Upper cover stamped in gilt with a figure of nude boy and lettered in gilt. Spine lettered in gilt. Rubbing to head and foot of spine and to joints. Slight marking to covers and some rubbing to the cloth on the lower board but otherwise a very good copy and internally near fine save for some minor toning to edges. \u003cbr\u003eRalph Chubb (1892-1960) \"was both a prophet and paiderast\" (Oliver Drummond, International Journal of Greek Love, 1965). After service in WWI, he studied at the Slade. During the early 1920s, he had some success as an artist and produced three hand-printed books linked by their treatment of sexuality and the male body. The third of these, A Fable of Love and War, introduces us to Chubb's enthusiasm for young boys, an enthusiasm diluted here by his only description of heterosexual coupling. Henceforth women would appear in Chubb's work only as idealised mothers of even more idealised adolescents. In the late 1920s, Chubb's other obsession was the creation of a book which would \"combine poetical idea, script and design in free and harmonious rhythm -- all unified together -- so as to be mutually dependent and significant\". The Sun Spirit is that book, a lithographic reproduction of Chubb's illustrations and manuscript, painstakingly constructed and printed in a very small limitation. It is a curious mixture of autobiography and psychic spirituality drawing on Blake (Chubb's illustrations are shot through with Blake), Dante and the Bible in which the Devil is overcome by a divine vision in the form of a beautiful young boy who might be either Eros or Jesus. Chubb was a fine artist and his lithographs are wonderful. His poetry, however, is overwrought and overwritten but he genuinely believed that our spiritual apotheosis would manifest itself in the form of an androgynous adolescent.","brand":"CHUBB, Ralph","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43105342947519,"sku":"4083","price":5750.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/4083.Chubb_2.jpg?v=1713454780"},{"product_id":"sergeant-batess-march-from-gretna-green-to-the-guildhall","title":"Sergeant Bates's March from Gretna Green to the Guildhall","description":"\u003cp\u003eLondon: George Routledge and Sons. 1873.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst edition. 8vo. 160x100mm. pp. [2 adverts], viii, 184, [2, adverts]. Pastedowns are publisher's adverts. Original illustrated paper covered board with an image of the Union Flag and the Stars and Stripes. Edges and corners worn, paper on spine is torn with loss. Hinges cracked but holding and would benefit from a little repair. Rare, JISC Library Hub locating four copies in UK institutions (BL, NLS, Oxford and Cambridge) with Worldcat adding two more (NYPL and Australian National University) and no copies in the auction records. Front pastedown has ownership inscription of Edgar Robinson who makes an appearance in the book when on 11th November 1872, Bates writes that \"after visiting several places of interest in the neighbourhood of Kendal, I dined at Aynham Lodge, the beautiful mansion of Mr Edgar Robinson\". No doubt Bates sent Robinson this copy to let him know how he'd got on after their dinner together. \u003cbr\u003eIn November 1867, two and a half years after the end of the American Civil War in which he had fought, Gilbert Bates was told that \"No man dare show the Union flag anywhere in the South except in the presence of our soldiers.\" In an attempt to prove this wrong, Bates decided to walk from Mississippi to Washington carrying the Stars and Stripes. Despite the cynicism of (among others) Mark Twain, Bates's 1400 mile walk was a triumph and he published a short pamphlet about it. \u003cbr\u003eIn 1872, a friend bet him that he could not repeat the feat in England, which had, the friend thought, supported the Confederacy (in fact, Britain was officially neutral and kept well out of the Civil War). Beginning in the Scottish borders on 5th November 1872, he had arrived in London (400 miles away) by the end of the month. Walking the whole way in military uniform and with an unfurled American flag, he had become something of a celebrity. He was greeted by huge crowds in the capital where he was escorted to the Guildhall and hung his Stars and Stripes alongside the Union Jack. He gave a speech to the crowds which included these heart-warming words: \"I did not cross the Atlantic for a test, but to prove that I was right when I said the English people respected America\". Indeed. And, what's more, he refused to enforce the bet which he had won. All in all a pretty decent chap.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BATES, Gilbert H.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54812497150329,"sku":"4426","price":950.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/4426.Bates_1.jpg?v=1732789918"},{"product_id":"bump-into-heaven","title":"Bump into Heaven","description":"\u003cp\u003eLondon: The Mitre Press. n.d. [1957\/8].\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst edition. 8vo 183x122mm. pp. 64. Original bright blue cloth lettered in gilt with original illustrated dust jacket. Some very minor marking and rubbing to the jacket and slight soiling to the spine. Internally there is some mild foxing in one or two places but overall a very good copy. Rare in commerce and with eight copies recorded institutionally. \u003cbr\u003eFrieda Harris was, in the words of her husband \"an artist and a good one. She takes her art seriously, in fact works at her painting seven days a week and generally twelve hours out of the twenty-four. She has had an immense output of pictures\". She is best remembered today as a devoted colleague and disciple of Aleister Crowley for whose deck of Thoth Tarot cards she produced the paintings. Both Harris and Crowley were perfectionists and the whole project took five years. Although the pictures were frequently shown in galleries and The Book of Thoth was published in 1944, no complete, full colour pack of cards was produced during Harris or Crowley's lifetime. \u003cbr\u003eHarris's poetry represents the more secretive, private side of her life. The work collected in \u003cem\u003eBump into Heaven \u003c\/em\u003eis spare, simple and spiritual, much influenced by nature, religion, the world of dreams and India which became her home from 1952 until her death in 1962.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"HARRIS, Frieda","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55124576141689,"sku":"4399","price":750.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/P1030545.jpg?v=1748862556"},{"product_id":"the-friend","title":"The Friend","description":"\u003cp\u003ePenrith: Printed and published by J. Brown.. 1809-10.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst edition. 8vo. 255x160mm. pp. 448. Contemporary blue-grey boards, grey paper backstrip, pages uncut. Protected by a loose buckram cover and housed in a slipcase. Repair to spine, joints and to hinges at the gutter. Surface crack to spine, corners slightly worn. Internally very good but with some marking and foxing and a little crinkling to the edges of some leaves. Each issue has the revenue duty stamp. Front pastedown has book label of Mary Elizabeth Hudson and the very discreet label W.A.S. which is William A. Strutz who purchased it on April 13 1965 at Parke Bernet through Seven Gables Bookshop (invoice loosely inserted). An anonymous note mentions a comment made by Mark Reed (the Wordsworth scholar) that the best copy of The Friend he had seen was offered to him by Seven Gables although he didn't buy it. \u003cbr\u003eComplete in twenty-seven issues with the unnumbered \"supernumerary Essay\" issued on January 11, 1810 between numbers 20 and 21. Each issue runs to sixteen pages. Although (as Wise says) the final issue of 15 March 1810 \"ends with the words \"To be continued in the next Number,\" no 'next Number' ever appeared\". Wise, 20, p71. \u003cbr\u003eIn 1808, Coleridge moved, with his family, to Wordsworth's house in Grasmere and began to think about a weekly magazine in which he could begin to set out his thoughts towards a philosophical system, both moral and political. He had high ambitions for The Friend. It would appear weekly and was intended \"for those, who by Rank, or Fortune, or official Situation, or Talents and Habits of Reflection, are to influence the Multitude.\" Dorothy Wordsworth wondered who, after a hard day's work, would have the time or mental space to sit down and wrestle with Coleridge's \"serious thought\" but Coleridge fully intended to bring readers up to his level, not write down to theirs. Given the speed with which each issue was produced and the need to spend a day walking to Penrith to deliver his copy to the printer, there are some lighter touches in many of the issues – even Coleridge couldn't operate at an intellectual white heat all the time. But, in the main, The Friend is serious and difficult. Coleridge aimed at upholding \"those truths and those merits which are founded in the nobler and permanent parts of our nature, against the caprices of fashion.\" If one were searching for an intellectual autobiography of Coleridge, one might perhaps locate it in The Friend for it is here that we see a mental to-ing and fro-ing, something of a struggle and working-out between revolutionary radicalism and a more reflective adoption of tradition, convention and custom. Coleridge described The Friend as \"the History of my own mind\". That mind was vast and the manner in which The Friend ranges over the complexities of politics, philosophy and theology is a formidable testimony to it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55124579516793,"sku":"4457","price":6500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/P1030608.jpg?v=1748875945"},{"product_id":"a-relation-of-apparitions-of-spirits-in-the-principality-of-wales","title":"A Relation of Apparitions of Spirits, in the Principality of Wales","description":"\u003cp\u003en.p. [Trevecca?] . 1780. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst edition. 8vo in 4s. 188x117mm. pp. viii, 134, [2]. Nineteenth century half calf, marbled paper covered boards, slightly bumped and rubbed. Internally a little browned but overall a very good copy of a rare book. We have traced only two at auction, eight copies on JISC Library Hub, and a further five in Worldcat. Tipped in are two manuscript documents (seven pages in total) by Jones himself. The second of these (frayed at the edges with loss of some text), headed \"Edmund Jones his book\" has a pencil note stating that it is the \"Autograph of the author of this book - Edmund Jones\" and was \"removed from a very dilapidated copy of Dorrington's View of the Principles of the Lutheran Churches 1714\". This note, which touches on Lutheran and Calvinist soteriology appears to have been prompted by something in Dorrington's book. The first, longer note (in the same hand) seems to have been extracted from a notebook as it is not complete but it is an interesting discourse on the figure of Gaius mentioned in Acts and two of Paul's Epistles. \u003cbr\u003e\"Edmund Jones was a man of dual personality - fearless in preaching and in founding new churches, a zealous evangelical and a firm Calvinist, yet frightened of apparitions and terrified by bad omens\". (Annie Grace Bowen-Jones, \u003cem\u003eDictionary of Welsh Biography). \u003c\/em\u003eBorn in 1702, Jones's only education was thanks to the local curate. He then spent the rest of his long life (he died in 1793) repaying this by embarking on a punishing regime of itinerant preaching together with the founding of numerous Independent chapels. He was said to be a more enthusiastic Calvinist than Calvin himself and was certainly ferocious in his opposition to the Established Church. However, he is probably best known today for this book. \u003cem\u003eA Relation of Apparitions of Spirits, in the Principality of Wales \u003c\/em\u003ehas been described as \"a farrago of the most astonishing superstitions, in all of which he firmly believed\". It is certainly an extensive collection of tales from the spirit world but Jones's purpose was not to amaze and frighten. It was to \"convince all the Saducees and Atheistical men of the age of the being of Spirits, and of their appearance in the world\" for, in order to believe in the truth of the Resurrection one must believe in spirits \"for why should the body be raised if there is no Spirit of life to dwell in it?\". A mixture, then, of the highly orthodox born out of the wildly unorthodox.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"[JONES, Edmund]","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55124579582329,"sku":"4461","price":3750.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/P1030679.jpg?v=1748875410"},{"product_id":"the-christ-of-the-red-planet","title":"The Christ of the Red Planet","description":"\u003cp\u003eNew York: The Publishers' Printing Company. 1901.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst edition. 175x120mm. pp. xviii, 138. Original red cloth, lettered in gilt to upper cover. Some marking and soiling to boards, rubbing to edges and slight fraying to head and foot of spine. Internally very good and overall a nice copy of a book which is rare in commerce, no copies appearing in the auction records. \u003cbr\u003eEleanor Kirk (1831-1908) was an extraordinary woman who wrote curious books. Married three times, she was a tireless campaigner for the rights of women both in the private sphere where (following her own experience) she supported women who left abusive relationships, and in the public sphere where she was a devoted suffragist. But as well as seeking to improve the lives of women in the here and now - she advocated a form of non-licentious free love as an antidote to what she saw as \"prostitution in so-called married life\" - she was a devoted advocate of the spirit life and notions of immortality. Her religious ideas were a strange brew of mainstream Christianity, astrology and New Thought syncretism. Towards the end of her life, Kirk became convinced of the truth of her encounters with the extra-terrestrial and \u003cem\u003eThe Christ of the Red Planet \u003c\/em\u003eis an account of her astral travels to Mars. The epigraph to the book quotes St Paul:\"Whether in the body, or out of the body, I knew not\" and a cloud of unknowing appears to hang over this bizarre work. But then, as Kirk herself makes clear, it hangs over her own mind too: \"To see and yet not to see; to know and not to be able to explain, either to myself or others; to be constantly possessed by a consciousness of distant phenomena without fact or data, is not a very comfortable mental state for one aiming to be logical, and desiring above all things to be honest and the reverse of imaginative. But this has been my condition ever since I can remember\".\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KIRK, Eleanor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55124579647865,"sku":"4482","price":300.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/P1030699.jpg?v=1748875128"},{"product_id":"the-dangerous-sports-club-an-archive-of-manuscripts-and-books","title":"The Dangerous Sports Club: An archive of manuscripts and books","description":"Various . From late 1970s.\u003cbr\u003eDescription:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA small collection of books and manuscripts belonging to David Kirke, the founder of The Dangerous Sports Club (DSC). Starting with a bungee jump on April Fool's Day 1979, the DSC went on, over the next decade or so, to embark on high profile, hazardous acts such as skiing down a mountain on a grand piano (an attempt to do the same with a double-decker London bus was banned), hang-gliding from active volcanoes and early BASE jumping. The collection is as follows: \u003cbr\u003e1. Notebook (196x128mm). Bound in quarter leatherette and red cloth. 316pp of manuscript. The contents of the book have become detached from the cover but this was David Kirke's principal notebook and so was heavily used. The front free endpaper describes it as the \"Aviation notebook\" and under Kirke's address in Oxford is written \"Large Reward for Return\". The notebook has a large number of names, addresses and telephone numbers. These are from across the world as Kirke plotted his global adventures and tend towards the rather grand: there are couple of princesses, a dissolute Marquess (Jamie Blandford), James Hunt and plenty of smart addresses plus some very dangerous contacts indeed, not least Jimmy Savile listed with his Stoke Mandeville Hospital phone number. \u003cbr\u003eBut the real interest of this book is Kirke's extensive notes for his dangerous sports projects. There are long entries about the Himalayas and clearly something was planned involving aeroplanes but we can find no record of a completed event. There are diagrams and sketches by Kirke including some sort of balloon and a catapult (based on a medieval trebuchet) for launching people into the air. This dates the book to around 1988 when the catapult idea was conceived for a (never made) Japanese television show. However, the invention eventually led to tragedy when, in November 2002, at an event run by an offshoot of the DSC, an Oxford undergraduate was killed when the mechanism misfired. By then the DSC's great days were behind it, but this accident seemed to mark the end of a culture of risk and danger and the beginnings of a new age of caution, health and safety. \u003cbr\u003e2. Notebook (178x110mm) bound in red cloth with white label on front cover on which is hand-written History of the Dangerous Sports Club: Agreements. 24pp of manuscript (the rest of the book is blank). The first entry dated  headed Minute Book. Dangerous Sports Club Film Co. and then sets out the minutes of a meeting on Monday June 8th [1981] which established the \"Film Company\" to publicise the DSC and arrange for the making and distributing of films and television programmes about the Club's activities. The last entry is dated December 1982 by which time it has become clear that the Film Company had disintegrated amidst personality clashes and financial chaos. There seems to have been much talk about television rights and raising money for film projects but in the end the largest sum paid out was to their lawyers. \u003cbr\u003e3. Notebook (178x130mm) bound in green corduroy cloth. 50pp of manuscript. It is undated but, with its references to email addresses and websites, is from this century and certainly postdates the DSC heyday as it appears to deal mainly with the day to day running of a property. However, there are little DSC asides by Kirke such as the observation that \"the only saloon worth drinking in is the last chance one\". \u003cbr\u003e4. WARHOL, Andy. Andy Warhol's Exposures. London: Hutchinson. 1979. pp[256]. Inscribed on title page, \"To the dangerous sportsclub love Andy\". There are two quick heartshaped sketches on the same page. Beneath the title is written \"(But probably the only book in my whole collection I would call vulgar. D(avid) K(irke)\". Black cloth and original illustrated dustjacket in plastic cover. This extensively illustrated book is Andy Warhol's hymn to the New York 1970s beau monde and their spiritual home, the nightclub Studio 54. The link between Warhol and the DSC was Tim Hunt, one of the Club's founders, who later became an agent for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.\u003cbr\u003e5. LYSTER, Martin. The Strange Adventures of the Dangerous Sports Club. London: The Do-Not Press. 1997. pp164 [10]. Paperback from David Kirke's collection and with Kirke's marginal annotations. These are essentially a series of crosses in pen or pencil. At the end of each chapter he counts up the crosses and then writes (for example) \"33 errors\". Each cross is an \"error\" and, helpfully, Kirke tells us that there are 401 errors and a further seven in the opening twenty line profile of Lyster. Kirke (who seems to have made enemies easily) was doubtless aggrieved that Lyster had got in first with his book. Kirke had a contract for a book from Penguin but he never delivered and so Lyster's is the only book length account of the DSC. \u003cbr\u003e6. LAVIOLETTE, Patrick. Extreme Landscapes of Leisure. Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport. London: Routledge. 2016. Paperback. pp. xx [2], 204. Inscribed on the half title \"Dear Captain K... And Professor Marsh bien sur. Happy reading, writing and so on. Much love Paddy xoxo\". Although ranging widely on the subject of hazardous sports and adventure tourism, this academic book contains a chapter on the DSC and takes, as its front cover a now famous photograph of a man dressed in top hat and tails, holding a bottle of champagne and jumping off Clifton Suspension Bridge. This was David Kirke who, was making, on 1st April 1979, the first modern (and western) bungee jump. The clothes were crucial. With hindsight, the DSC looks like one of the last hoorahs for a type of English madcap adventure. Smartly dressed and expensively educated (the DSC was formed by a group of public school Oxford undergraduates) young men charging off, not to the colonial jungle, but to far-off mountain tops before throwing themselves off. With no empire to run, the sons of empire had to invent their own moral spaces to colonise. Also crucial was the choice of the Clifton Bridge for their first adventure. Well known as a UK suicide spot, throwing oneself off the Suspension Bridge is an act of desperation. And there was a dark, satirical, side to Kirke's antics: by doing the seemingly impossible, he was also saying the impossible, commenting on a world that was becoming tamer, safer and more constricted before his eyes. But there was also an element of anarchic performance art in Kirke's DSC. We see this in the machinations over filming the Club's activities and it is no surprise that Warhol and the DSC should have been linked (however tenuously). Although the DSC's taste for danger has fallen out of fashion, Kirke's strange relationship with fame (he claimed he didn't want publicity but for a while he seemed to go everywhere with a film crew) seems very modern. He would have been an Insta sensation. The pose of the DSC may have been reactionary but, in truth, they were very avant-garde reactionaries.","brand":"KIRKE, David.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55124579975545,"sku":"4508","price":3000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/files\/P1030673.jpg?v=1748864219"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1484\/0910\/collections\/tyndale-to-trans.jpg?v=1773053623","url":"https:\/\/voewoodrarebooks.com\/collections\/catalogue-seven.oembed","provider":"Voewood Rare Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}