Letters

Both Stephen Allen and Robin Kinross overlook that the reason books come to have waves on the fore-edge is that high-speed printing and binding involve setting the ink and drying the glue with heat, and not enough time is allowed for the paper to condition during these operations (Letters, 21 November and 5 December). This means that the cockling that is inevitable stays with the paper, which is left gasping for air and moisture. You would think that after binding, it would settle down and lay flat but unfortunately paper, like many living beings, can never quite get rid of the stress and the waves do not go calm, retaining the distortion. It is known as paper hysteresis (‘lagging behind’).

Wavy fore-edges in books have little to do with publishing conglomerates or hot-melt adhesives. The latter were already in use when I was a student at the London College of Printing in the 1960s, though only for mass-market paperbacks; casebound books would almost universally have been sewn. The adhesives back then were not usually water-soluble; made from hoof and hide, they were kept gently bubbling until polyvinyl acetate arrived.

The problem actually stems from the increasing use of presses fed from a roll of paper, rather than printed on sheets. The way these presses were originally designed, for magazines roughly twice the size of an octavo book, means that books almost always have short-grain pages while magazines, where it matters less, had long grain.

Robin Kinross modestly omits to mention that he himself, as the proprietor of Hyphen Press, has had ‘books printed and bound elsewhere … by firms that still understand the workings of paper and glue’. Alas, neither British printers nor large publishers have been shamed into following his example. Frank Kermode, writing about a two-volume edition of Housman’s letters in the LRB of 5 July 2007, complained of needing both hands to hold the books open: ‘If you release the pressure they snap shut.’ But reviewers can disapprove as much as they like: it would take readers withholding their custom to create more than a marginal market for properly bound books.

Consortia of academic libraries, on the other hand, have large budgets and the power to act in concert; they have already forced concessions on open access and publishing fees. Yet they seem content to buy even reference works that are barely usable when new and will be difficult to repair after heavy use. Durably bound books comprise multiple ‘sections’ of sheets folded in half, sewn together and cold-glued. Unless the thread fails, a page wouldn’t fall out unless it was torn completely. When a book is damaged, the thread can be removed, individual pages repaired, and sections resewn. (Hot-melt is difficult to remove from sections without tearing the paper.) Many old books in university libraries will have been rebound several times in this way. I currently have on my desk a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Hume from the Bodleian. It is a ‘perfect’ binding: the pages are simply stacked on top of each other and glued together at the back, and fall out easily when the glue fails (it is difficult to reattach them properly). The glue of course is hot-melt; it is only because the book is so thick that it will lie flat (and only in the middle pages). It costs £157.50 new.

‘To the studios’ may be the words that appear again and again in Frank Auerbach’s paintings, as Inigo Thomas points out, but they are not the only ones (LRB, 5 December). In To the Studios IV (1983), the inscription ‘GD MRNG’ appears at the right-hand edge, framed by two streaks of paint in what could be seen as Auerbach’s version of a speech bubble. This is a condensed version of ‘Good morning’, which, according to Isabel Carlisle, was uttered by the American surgeons who were the painter’s neighbours. One of them is shown descending a staircase beneath what may well be the sole example of reported speech in Auerbach’s oeuvre.

Hal Foster writes about the members of the Bauhaus in exile (LRB, 5 December). There has, he writes, been ‘a recent shift in modernist studies towards … diaspora over nation’, and he gives an account of the Bauhaus diaspora as it extended from Europe to America via the UK.

What might a truly diasporic view of the Bauhaus look like? We could begin with Stella Kramrisch’s Bauhaus exhibition of 1922 in Calcutta. That connection would extend to an exhibition from 2013, The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde, led by the Dessau Bauhaus but with many South Asian scholars contributing. In 2019, the centenary of the Bauhaus, exhibitions were held at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto with a focus on exchanges between Japanese culture and the Bauhaus, and on the roles of Takehiko Mizutani, and Iwao Yamawaki and his wife, Michiko Yamawaki, who were Japanese students of Bauhaus. In China, a new museum at the Chinese Academy of Art houses a Bauhaus collection in Hangzhou.

In Australia, we ourselves staged two exhibitions and published The Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, which told the story of the arrival and impact of Bauhaus ideas and methods, imported by émigrés, exiles and refugees. The rise of fascism delivered three Bauhäusler to Australia. Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack is relatively well known for having taught the first colour seminar at the Weimar Bauhaus and for his avant-garde experiments with light. Georg Teltscher (later George Adams), was associated with Oskar Schlemmer’s theatre workshop, and helped to create the Mechanical Ballet of 1923. Both featured in the 1938 show at MoMA in New York. Like Hirschfeld-Mack, Teltscher was among some 2500 men who were deported from the UK as ‘enemy aliens’ in 1940. Teltscher returned to Britain and eventually worked in Nigeria. The third, Gertrude Herzger-Seligmann, is more obscure and trained in the weaving workshop. Alongside these three our Antipodean diaspora included members of the second generation of the Bauhaus, notably the architect Harry Seidler, who as a teenager was deported as an ‘enemy alien’ to Canada and subsequently trained with Gropius, Breuer and Albers before settling in Australia in 1948.

Bill Lancaster mentions his friend John Walton’s search for the first fish and chip shop in England and that he discovered a likely candidate in the East End (Letters, 24 October). This location is supported by The Epicure’s Almanack, Ralph Rylance’s comprehensive guide to eating and drinking in London, published in 1815. Reporting on Shoreditch, Rylance noted: ‘Here are Israelitish butchers, fishmongers and cooks. The latter exhibit in their windows fish fried, or rather, perhaps, boiled in oil until they look brown and savoury.’ The book’s modern editor, Janet Ing Freeman, adds that the food ‘may have been some version of the battered fish fried in olive oil popular among Sephardic Jews, often named as an ancestor of today’s fish and chips’. As for the chips, the earliest mention in English is in William Kitchiner’s cookbook The Cook’s Oracle (1817), though Belgium and France remain locked in furious dispute as to who actually invented them.

Bill Lancaster writes that Kendal, Milne & Faulkner in Manchester and Bainbridge’s in Newcastle share the honour of being the first department store, opening in 1838. It was obviously a good year for retail. That was also the year Edinburgh’s much missed Jenner’s opened in Princes Street.

Jonathan Rée notes that Jacques Derrida went back to the Hebrew Bible in proposing the establishment of cities of asylum for ‘persecuted writers and artists’ (LRB, 10 October). The reference seems to be to Numbers 35:15, but a crucial detail there is that the cities would offer refuge to anyone who has unwittingly killed another person. Leviticus 19:33-34 provides a better biblical precedent for the principles of hospitality and cosmopolitanism: ‘If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ The New Testament goes even further, suggesting that unanticipated rewards might accrue to the hospitable. In the Epistle to the Hebrews 13:2 we read: ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’

To illustrate the obsolescence of battleships in the Second World War, Ferdinand Mount mentions the sinking of the Bismarck, Ark Royal, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Prince of Wales and Repulse (LRB, 5 December). But do Bismarck and Scharnhorst quite make the point, given that battleships played an important part in their destruction? The same was true of HMS Hood. Certainly apposite is the example of HMS Barham, torpedoed in the Mediterranean with the loss of 862 lives.

Being of Malcolm Gaskill’s generation, I recognise his vivid evocation of 1970s back garden fireworks evenings (LRB, 7 November). However, decades later, I find myself siding more now with the protagonist of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem ‘No Explosions’, quoted here in its entirety:

To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life.

‘Hardy must be the first,’ Matthew Bevis surmises, ‘to have smuggled the word “whang” into a poem’ (LRB, 10 October). I don’t know about ‘smuggled’, but Robert Burns used ‘whang’ as a noun in ‘The Holy Fair’ – where the sense given in his own glossary, ‘a large slice’, seems to apply – and as a verb in ‘The Ordination’, cited in the OED to illustrate the sense of ‘beat’ or suchlike:

This day the Kirk kicks up a stoure,
Nae mair the knaves shall wrang her,
For Heresy is in her pow’r,
And gloriously she’ll whang her
Wi’ pith this day.

Is there some contractual obligation, or perhaps an office joke, that Hannah Arendt’s name must appear in every edition of the LRB? My wife and I test how thoroughly we’ve read each issue by checking who has spotted her. I note, for instance, that in the excellent article by Joanne O’Leary about Delmore Schwartz in the LRB of 21 November we are told William Barrett remembered Schwartz dismissing Arendt as a ‘Weimar Republic flapper’.