Saturday, February 18, 2023

The Great Storm



As we start to settle into - hopefully - the cleanup and recovery from the floods and other ravages of Cyclone Gabrielle here in the North Island, it got me to thinking about some of the great storms of literature.



Flooding in Mairangi Bay
[photography: Bronwyn Lloyd (27/1/2023)]


Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, yes, most people have heard of that, but there are some other equally impressive ones which may be less familiar.

There's Daniel Defoe's pioneering piece of journalism recording the progress of the great storm of 1703, for instance - or the shipwreck at Yarmouth in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. John Masefield and Richard Hughes are two seafaring authors who appear to have set out deliberately to challenge Conrad at his own game.

And then, to mention a couple of more recent examples, there's British Sci-fi writer John Christopher's The Long Voyage, an intense and poetic narrative of a ship lost at sea; not to mention (to bring things full circle) the evocation of the UK's great storm of 1987 - which I remember well - at the end of A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance.


Wolfgang Petersen, dir. The Perfect Storm (2000)
Sebastian Junger. The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. 1997. London: Fourth Estate, 1998.





Daniel Defoe: The Storm (1704)

Daniel Defoe:
The Storm
(1704)

Daniel Defoe. The Storm. 1704. Ed. Richard Hamblyn. London: Allen Lane, 2003.

Daniel Defoe was certainly a man for firsts: the first major English novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719); the first substantive non-fiction novel, or 'faction': Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720); and the first 'substantial piece of modern journalism', The Storm, his blow-by-blow account of the great storm of 1703, compiled from numerous eye-witness accounts.



It was, as he described it, "The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time. ... No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it."
Most People expected the Fall of their Houses. ... Whatever the Danger was within doors, 'twas worse without; the Bricks, Tiles, and Stones, from the Tops of the Houses, flew with such force, and so thick in the Streets, that no one thought fit to venture out, tho' their Houses were near demolish'd within.
- Daniel Defoe, The Storm. 1704. The Novels and miscellaneous works of Daniel Defoe. 6 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855. vol. 5: 260-421.
Defoe's book may, unfortunately, have been a bit ahead of its time, given its poor sales, but it remains a lively read, and certainly anticipates the skill with which he would blend factual details with fiction in later works such as the classic Journal of the Plague Year (1722).


Daniel Defoe: The Storm: An Essay (2005)





Phiz: Frontispiece to David Copperfield (scanned by Philip V. Allingham)

Charles Dickens:
David Copperfield
(1850)

Charles Dickens. The Personal History of David Copperfield. 1850. Ed. Trevor Blount. Penguin Classics. 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Here are Charles Dickens's original notes for the 18th monthly part of his most personal and, indeed, largely autobiographical novel David Copperfield, serialised from May 1849 to November 1850 by his London publishers Bradbury & Evans:
Ham and Steerforth. Steerforth in a sinking ship
in a great storm off Yarmouth Roads. Ham goes
off in a life boat, - or with a rope around his waist? -
through the surf. Both Bodies washed ashore together?
No.
a mighty wind.

- John Butt & Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work. 1957. London & New York: Methuen & Co., 1982: 168.
The co-authors of Dickens at Work, the first book to give close attention to the 'notes-to-self' number plans which have survived for some (not all) of his novels, comment thus on his preparations for the portrayal of the great Yarmouth storm:
No scene in the book was given such careful presentation as the storm scene. ... The labour involved ... is conveyed in a letter to Forster of 15 September: 'I have been tremendously at work these two days', he writes; 'eight hours at a stretch yesterday, and six hours and a half today, with the Ham and Steerforth chapter, which has completely knocked me over'. Two days later he told Wills that the 'most powerful effect in all the Story is still on the Anvil'. Thus the writing of this chapter occupied at least four days. [170]

Fred Barnard: The Storm (1872)


Portraying this scene adequately seems to have been a bit too much for the matter-of-fact Phiz, his usual illustrator, so it wasn't till Fred Barnard provided some new pictures for Chapter LV, "Tempest," in the posthumous Household Edition of David Copperfield, that any real attempt was made to show Ham Peggotty preparing to swim out to the wreck in an effort to save the unfortunate souls left aboard.

It certainly seems preferable to Harry Furniss's later version, below, of the 'the last parting' between David and Steerforth - "he was lying easily with his head upon his arm": the one detail Dickens marked "To remember" in the number plan for this chapter.


Harry Furniss: The End of Steerforth (1910)





Joseph Conrad: Typhoon and Other Stories (1903)

Joseph Conrad:
Typhoon
(1903)

Joseph Conrad. Typhoon and Other Stories. 1903. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Joseph Conrad's great novel Lord Jim (1900) hinges on an emergency at sea: not a storm, but a collision between a pilgrim ship bound to Mecca and some kind of floating debris, possibly an entire submerged ship floating just below the surface of the water.

The main character Jim's failure to measure up to the disaster dictates, inexorably, the rest of the tragic action of the story.


Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim (1900)


One can't help feeling, though, that Conrad may have thought that he'd missed a trick by not including, in Lord Jim, the sheer unbridled energy of a Pacific typhoon (the same thing as a hurricane, essentially, except that different names are used for these storms in the Atlantic and the Pacific).

"Typhoon" is not exactly a light-hearted work: it portrays a state of things so far beyond the normal expectation of what might happen, even at sea, that it can literally drive people insane. Nevertheless, it's true to say that it showcases Conrad's trademark irony rather more centrally than Lord Jim.

Just as Jim's romantic illusions about life are the crucial factor that destroys him, so Captain MacWhirr's complete lack of imagination is the thing that saves him and his crew from the immeasurable devastation of the storm. MacWhirr understands objectively that his ship might sink, but he cannot really see it in his mind's eye.

It therefore never occurs to him to do anything but continue with the normal business of the voyage. And so, bizarrely, he and most of the others are saved.


Joseph Conrad: Typhoon and Other Stories (1903)





John Masefield: Victorious Troy (1935)

John Masefield:
Victorious Troy
(1935)

John Masefield. Victorious Troy, or The Hurrying Angel. 1935. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1935.


A Long time ago I wrote a Masters' thesis about the novels of English Poet Laureate John Masefield - or, rather, his early novels: he wrote 23 of them in all.

Victorious Troy is one of the later ones, and one of the few to be focussed entirely on the sea.


John Masefield: The Bird of Dawning (1933)


The first of his purely 'seafaring' novels, The Bird of Dawning:
... is the remarkable story of a crew and the principal hero, Cruiser Trewsbury, between shipwreck and triumph. When their clipper, participant of the annual tea race from China to London, sinks on its home journey, Cruiser takes command of the only boat which escapes the disaster. A gruelling journey of 700 miles across the Atlantic in an open boat awaits the small crew. The discovery, soon to be made, that they have an insufficient quantity of both water and food on board, dashes all hopes. Passing ships which fail to spot the shipwrecked and sharks greedily approaching the boat contribute to the picture of doom. By remarkable circumstances, however, they discover a ship, one of the other tea clippers, drifting on the sea with its crew gone. With the crew back in the race for the coveted price of being the first tea clipper of the season to dock in London ...
The book includes a marvellous set-piece passage describing the effects of a single great wave on a ship at sea. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Masefield to go the whole hog and devote an entire novel to the description of a great storm.

Victorious Troy, published two years later, is:
... Set during the grain race of 1922. ... The ship from which the novel gets its title is struck by a cyclone in the South Pacific and it is Dick Pomfret, the senior apprentice, who valiantly saves the vessel.
- Philip W. Errington, John Masefield: The "Great Auk" of English Literature. A Bibliography. London: The British Library / New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004: 420.
It's certainly far more detailed than "Typhoon", but lacks the latter's focus and psychological acuity. As an unabashed adventure story and rattling good yarn, though, it's well worth reading by those addicted to the likes of C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian.


John Masefield: Victorious Troy (1935)





Richard Hughes: In Hazard (1938)

Richard Hughes:
In Hazard
(1938)

Richard Hughes. In Hazard. 1938. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948.
In 1932 the Phemius, a Holt Line steamship, was caught in a hurricane for six days. Hoping that his captain’s report could be turned into something, the chairman of the shipping line sent a copy to Masefield and then to Hughes, whose first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, had been set at sea. In 1938 Hughes used the incident as the basis for In Hazard, his second novel.
- Richard Hughes, "Securing the Hatches". Lapham's Quarterly (1929)
Once again, this is a case of an author who'd had great success with one description of a storm or a shipwreck, deciding to extend the trope into a complete work of fiction.


Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)


The account of a hurricane at the beginning of A High Wind in Jamaica is justly famous: impossible to forget, in fact. The rest of the novel takes a completely different tack into the psychology of young children left up to their own devices - in a manner somewhat prophetic of Golding's Lord of the Flies - and is also very successful in its own way, but the novel as a whole does seem to separate into these two disparate parts.

In Hazard is not so famous. In fact, the only reason I've actually read it is because I happened to pick up a battered second-hand paperback copy when I was in my teens. It's been damned with descriptions such as "allegorical of the Second World War" or "limited in its range", but I suspect the most of these comments come from people unfamiliar with it.

It may be because I've read it so many times that I practically know it by heart, but it still seems to me a staggeringly good novel. The storm it describes is apocalyptic, seemingly incredible, and yet - based entirely on an actual event, as the quote above records.

It is by far my favourite book among the very few that Richard Hughes gave us. He, too, seems to me a severely underrated writer, who definitely deserves resurrection. There's a good biography by Richard Perceval Graves, published in 1994.


Richard Hughes: In Hazard (1998)





John Christopher: The Long Voyage (1960)

John Christopher:
The Long Voyage
(1960)

John Christopher. The Long Voyage. 1960. London: Sphere Books, 1986.

Before he became the beloved author of such YA classics as the Tripod books and The Prince in Waiting trilogy, "John Christopher" (whose real name was Samuel Youd) was mainly known for a series of grim survival stories, some SF, some not, more or less in the mode of John Wyndham and the early J. G. Ballard.


John Christopher: The World in Winter (1962)


The World in Winter and The Death of Grass are probably the best known of these. Both are uncompromisingly pessimistic, and (indeed) would fit more comfortably into contemporary lists of post-apocalyptic literature than they did into the literary landscape of the 1950s and 60s.

He was by no means a one-note writer, however, and The Long Voyage (known in the US as The White Voyage) is probably my favourite among all of his books.

It depicts a long struggle for survival by a few passengers and crew left on a derelict ship in the North Sea as it drifts ever northwards towards the Arctic Circle. The Shackleton-like spirit displayed by the Captain and (to a lesser extent) by his First Mate is balanced by the careful character depiction of the less heroic others.

It's hard to describe why the result seems imbued with such precision and truth. It's one of those rare novels I always feel like rereading the moment I finish it. It has a curious depressing charm which I can only compare to Philip Larkin's equally bleak A Girl in Winter, a dark background against which the few moments of epiphany shine out with surprising depth.


John Christopher: The White Voyage (1960)





A. S. Byatt: Possession (1990)

A. S. Byatt:
Possession
(1990)

A. S. Byatt. Possession: A Romance. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991.
The Great Storm of 1987 is one of the worst recorded weather events in British history, claiming 18 lives in the UK and uprooting 15 million trees. ...
During a lunchtime weather broadcast, in a moment which proved pivotal to the public's perception of the coming storm, the BBC's Michael Fish made an offhand comment which was misunderstood to mean there was no hurricane coming.
The storm then hit in the early hours before dawn with a ferocity which no one had been prepared for, ripping through the country from the west near Cornwall and advancing with every hour ...
In the late 1980s I was living in the UK, as I worked on my Doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh. I didn't have much access to news, as the television room in my local Halls of Residence seemed to be perpetually occupied by darts fans who resented any attempt to change the channel. But even I was aware of the great storm of 1987.

Though it mostly affected the south of England rather than Scotland, where I was based, I can still remember those images of whole forests of downed trees. For a dendrophile such as myself, the sight was particularly devastating.



Years later, when I read the sensation of the season, A. S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel Possession, I was very impressed by the way in which she managed to weave the great storm into her preposterously entertaining tale of two nineteenth-century poets' hidden affair, and the nefarious attempts by various scholars to steal all the details for their own devious purposes - a dastardly scheme foiled finally by our two present-day heroes.

The novel has been described as "historiographic metafiction", and it gave rise to a whole slew of - mostly less succcessful - imitations. There was, however, a wonderful serendipity in reading it in 1990 as an obscure graduate student, like Roland Michell in the novel, and to feel the part-fictional, part-truthful events rhyming one by one with my own lofty fantasies of Academic success.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Byatt was influenced by David Copperfield in her decision to set the denouement of her novel during a great storm. But then, who wasn't she influenced by? Her novel may seem less unusual now, thirty years on, given it's been so often emulated, but it remains a wonderful yarn, and certainly one I would recommend to anyone who's not yet encountered it.

At all costs ignore the horribly bad movie adaptation, though.


A. S. Byatt: Possession (1990)





@MonteChristoNZ/via REUTERS: Auckland Floods (31-1-2023)


So will what we've just experienced here in New Zealand go down in history as the great storm (or storms) of 2023? It seems very probable. It's hard to avoid the thought that both the weather forecasters and the civil defence authorities were to blame in not reacting more quickly to the events of Frday 27th January, but they certainly tried to make up for the deficiency in their warnings about Cyclone Gabrielle.

No doubt there are many more lessons for the future to be learnt from all this. For the moment, though, our concentration has to be on starting to repair as much as possible of the damage that's been done. And to mourn for the dead.


Brett Phibbs: Colwill Road, Massey (5/2/2023)


Thursday, February 02, 2023

My Favourite Vintage Bookshops: Auckland CBD


Isabel Coixet, dir.: The Bookshop (2017)


Despite its stellar cast - Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson - and all its undoubted felicities of setting and atmosphere, I'm not sure I'd see The Bookshop as an entirely successful movie. It's a bit too depressing, for a start.

In fact, from my own (admittedly selfish) point of view, its main virtue was awakening me to the existence of Penelope Fitzgerald's writing.




Jason Books

Jason Books
[16 O'Connell St, Auckland CBD]


So, sure enough, next time I was in town I dropped into that home-away-from-home which is Maud Cahill's Jason Books, only to discover - surprise! surprise! - a biography and a collection of letters by the author in question waiting to find me:


Hermione Lee: Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (2013)
Hermione Lee. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Chatto & Windus. London: Random House, 2013.

Reading Hermione Lee's account of her has certainly helped me to understand why Fitzgerald's work tends to fix itself in the memory, and indeed reads like a memorial for an entire era of damp, seedy, post-war British misery.

Oh dear. I'm not really selling it, am I? But then maybe that's the point. Despite that one, career-defining moment when she won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore, Fitzgerald's life was pretty short on triumphs and long on endurance.

After a fairly glittering start at Oxford in the late 1930s, an unfortunate marriage to wartime hero and peacetime drunk Desmond Fitzgerald provided the entrée to a couple of decades of poverty in ever more squalid surroundings.

Her star-studded family, the Knoxes ("she was the daughter of Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and ... a niece of the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, [and] the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox") seem scarcely to have noticed, being far too preoccupied with their own glittering careers to pay much attention to this lone female in the ranks.


Penelope Fitzgerald: The Knox Brothers (1977)
Penelope Fitzgerald. The Knox Brothers: Edmund ('Evoe') 1881-1971, Dillwyn 1883-1943, Wilfred 1886-1950, Ronald 1888-1957. 1977. Newton Abbot: Readers Union Group of Book Clubs, 1978.

Revenge is, however, a dish best served cold (not, I'm sure, that she would have put it in quite those terms), and it now seems quite possible that their pinchbeck brilliance will live on mainly grace to her own extraordinary group biography of - what's the collective noun for brothers? a bruise of brothers, perhaps - her father and uncles: needless to add, another prize from the shelves of Jason Books.

Does anyone read Ronnie's detective stories or theological musings nowadays - let alone E. V. Knox's volumes of collected skits from Punch? No, it's the world of Fitzrovia, that pre-swinging Sixties era of Dylan Thomas and Mervyn Peake's novels, that Fitzgerald seems to have been foredoomed to chronicle.

My overarching point, however, is that this is just a typical example of the kinds of serendipitous discoveries which seem to arise naturally when one enters the sacred precincts of Jason Books - some allusion to the Golden Fleece intended in that choice of name, perhaps?

Maud has a magnificent eye for quality, and her shop is well laid-out, well lit, and very reasonably priced. It's hard to imagine a more delightful bookish experience than browsing there, in fact.


Richard F. Burton: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (c.1940s)
Richard F. Burton, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 1885. 10 vols. U.S.A.: The Burton Club, n.d. [c.1940s].

Richard F. Burton, trans. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory. 1886-88. 6 vols. U.S.A..: The Burton Club, n.d. [c. 1940s].

I remember Jason Books from decades ago, when it was located at the back of a tiny alley off High Street (just behind the Simple Cottage vegetarian restaurant). It was there that I bought my first set of Burton's complete Arabian Nights, in the edition pictured above.

When Maud took it over from then owner Richard Poore, it moved to an attic in Lorne Street, and then to its present position behind Freyberg Square. In all of its various incarnations, though, it's been a source of wonders.

The Arabian Nights: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Rendered into English from the Literal and Complete French Translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus by Powys Mathers. Introduction by Marina Warner. 6 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2003.
  • Vol. 1: with 8 colour illustrations by Kay Nielsen, 375 pp.
  • Vol. 2: with 8 colour illustrations by Grahame Baker, 424 pp.
  • Vol. 3: with 8 colour illustrations by Debra McFarlane, 424 pp.
  • Vol. 4: with 8 colour illustrations by Roman Pisarev, 424 pp.
  • Vol. 5: with 8 colour illustrations by Jane Ray, 431 pp.
  • Vol. 6: with 8 colour illustrations by Neil Packer, 448 pp.

And, to go full circle, it was there, rather more recently, that I bought the above lavishly illustrated version of E. Powys Mathers' translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus's fin-de-siècle French translation of the Arabian Nights, probably the most entertaining and readable "complete" version available in English.






Hard-to-Find Books

Hard-to-Find Books
[2-8 St Benedicts Street, Eden Terrace, Auckland 1010]


Warwick Jordan's Hard-to-Find Books has an even more complex history, briefly summarised as follows on their website:
The legendary Hard to Find Bookshop (although it didn't have a name then) began in a garage in John Street, Ponsonby in 1983. In 1984 it moved to a shop in Onehunga (now David Tua's boxing gym), and in 1988 to a mainstreet Onehunga location. At one point it expanded to nine stores in five different cities until Warwick realised empire building wasn't really his passion. Even so, he did open one more shop in 2013 ... our Dunedin store which also houses our Internet stock. On June 13th 2018 the Onehunga store closed, opening again on 15th June 2018 at our miraculous new location - 2-8 St Benedict's Street, Eden Terrace, Auckland.
I was a fairly frequent visitor to the Onehunga store, but even more so now that the business has moved uptown to the debatable land between Upper Queen Street and Symonds Street. It's a wonderful source of back-catalogue items: definitely the best bookshop I know for those nagging gaps in your collection.

Diodorus Siculus. The Library of History. 12 vols. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967, 1976, 1977, 1989.
  1. Books I-II: 1-34, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1936)
  2. Books II: 35-end, III, IV: 1-58, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1935)
  3. Books IV: 59-VIII, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1939)
  4. Books IX-XII: 40, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1946)
  5. Books XII: 41-XIII, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1950)
  6. Books XIV-XV:19, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (195
  7. Books XV: 20-XVI: 65, Trans. Charles L. Sherman (1952)
  8. Books XVI: 66-95, XVII, Trans. C. Bradford Welles (1963)
  9. Books XVIII-XIX: 1-65, Trans. Russel M. Geer (1947)
  10. Books XIX: 66-110, XX, Trans. Russel M. Geer (1954)
  11. Books XXI-XXXII, Trans. Francis R. Walton (1967)
  12. Books XXXIII-XL / Index, Trans. Francis R. Walton & Russel M. Geer (1967)
Josephus. Works. 9 vols. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961, 1966.
  1. The Life / Against Apion, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1926)
  2. The Jewish War, Books I-III, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1927)
  3. The Jewish War, Books IV-VII, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1928)
  4. Jewish Antiquities, Books I-IV, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1930)
  5. Jewish Antiquities, Books V-VIII, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray & Ralph Marcus (1934)
  6. Jewish Antiquities, Books IX-XI, Trans. Ralph Marcus (1937)
  7. Jewish Antiquities, Books XII-XIV, Trans. Ralph Marcus (1943)
  8. Jewish Antiquities, Books XV-XVII, Trans. Ralph Marcus & Allen Wikgren (1963)
  9. Jewish Antiquities, Books XVIII-XX / General Index, Trans. Louis H. Feldman (1965)
Polybius. The Histories. Trans. W. R. Paton. Introduction by Col. H. J. Edwards. 6 vols. 1922, 1922, 1923, 1925, 1926, 1927. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, 1968, 1972.

I once horrified Bronwyn by buying a huge mountain of Loeb Classics Greek Historians from the Onehunga shop. I hope the guy who sold them to me was joking when he said that this would guarantee his wages for the next week, but who knows?


David Grann: The Lost City of Z (2009)
Grann, David. The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon. 2009. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2010.

Another, rather odder experience was my attempt to find a copy of The Lost City of Z in the Hard-to-Find branch in Dunedin. I can't quite remember why I was so anxious to read it - I guess I must have just seen the film - but I knew that if it was available anywhere, it would be available there.

And sure enough, it was! That's the great thing about Hard-to-Find: the sheer critical mass of books they stock make them the best place to look for particular troublesome items.

The funny thing came when I whipped out my Society of Authors membership card, which came with a list on the back of 'participating bookstores' in their 10% off for struggling writers scheme. Hard-to-Find was listed among them, and I'd used it many times at the Auckland store.

"Society of Authors? Is that even a thing? I mean, I've heard of the screenwriters guild and so on, but - did you make it up yourself?" asked the young lady serving at the counter that day.

"No, no, it's a real thing," I expostulated. "It's affiliated with PEN International."

"What's PEN International?" she riposted.

At this point I felt I'd better quit while I was ahead. Nice to know that someone working in a bookshop had so little interest in the people who actually produce the goods she was selling, but I guess it's good to be reminded of our collective insignificance from time to time.

It was pretty funny at the time, though. I'm sure she remained quite unconvinced by all my attempts to prove that there was such a thing as the Society of Authors, and the whole thing does sound a bit nerdy when you really come down to it ...


Jack Stillinger, ed.: The Poems of John Keats (2009)
Stillinger, Jack, ed. The Poems of John Keats: The Definitive Edition. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1978.

I've bought a slew of books - fiction, poetry, travel - from the new brick edifice in St. Benedict's Street. It's now almost as choked with stock as the old Onehunga shop was. The above edition of John Keats was a very pleasant addition to their number. Honestly, you never know what you're going to see when you go in there, which is another good reason for rationing myself to occasional visits.