Henry Gott

   The Scholartis Press is a name of which many collectors, if their interests lie in British publishing of the 1920s and 1930s, will have heard: likewise, perhaps separately, that of its proprietor, Eric Partridge, who carved out a separate (occasionally overlapping) career in lexicography. For some, it may be associated with the early work of a few authors who went on to have substantial literary careers: H.E. Bates and James Hanley are foremost among these, and the only two of its roster whose subsequent status has merited individual bibliographic attention. These two were not alone in getting starts under Partridge's wing: Norah Hoult and Stephen Southwold also benefited from his prioritisation of literary merit above any other concerns. Invariably, the relationship could not be sustained: in some cases, success brought more remunerative opportunities, and they remained on grateful terms, in others a clash of personality brought a more bitter split. In one notable case, a cloud of controversy threatened to subsume not only the book, but also the author and publisher: this was Norah C. James's Sleeveless Errand, the subject of a police raid and then a court case for obscenity, to which John Arnold devotes a chapter.

   The ODNB, in its entry for Eric Partridge, is wrong in declaring the imprint dead after 1931; it carried on until 1935, under the proprietorship of his erstwhile partner, Wilson Bennington. Arnold is attentive both to the afterlife of the imprint after Partridge had, in poverty, left the firm,  including the fate of the physical stock, sold for a pittance to Oxford University Press and a few others, and to Partridge's life beyond publishing. The chapters of his History are very well weighted in this respect, given that lexicography formed the greater part of Partridge's career but is not the principal focus here.

   Similarly, for the Press itself, there is a contrast between constitution and legacy: contemporary fiction formed the smaller part of its list but the great­er part of its subsequent reputation, and it is hard to think that it would merit this sort of attention had it restricted itself to its 'Elizabethan Gallery', 'Eighteenth-Century Novels', 'Nineteenth-Century Highways and By-Ways', or other more fledgling series. Being not quite one thing or the other applies to how as well as what the Scholartis Press printed: Arnold defines it as a 'semi-Private Press', a classification that aligns with the slightly prevaricatory terms of Partridge's early prospectus, where he modifies a 'whole-heart­ed' belief in 'fine editions' to declare that 'the final test of a book is[ ... ] its literary quality, or its historical (or social) interest'. In certain aspects and in certain cases, the output of the Scholartis Press bears comparison with examples of fine printing, and it is instructive to see the list of twenty-six printers used in the course of its list: some of them, the Alcuin and Crypt House Presses for example, more associated with 'fine' than 'commercial' printing.

   The fact that Partridge's publishing needs to be understood in relation to the work of other contemporary presses is primary to Arnold, who has already given us a uniform volume on the Fanfrolico Press of Jack Lindsay and P. R. Stephensen, and has begun work on the latter's Mandrake Press. It was, in fact, as Arnold outlines, through a failed attempt to join Lindsay and Stephensen in their business that Partridge got his start in 'the same kind of enterprise' (letter to a friend, quoted on p. 30). Arnold's works will form a trilogy documenting the publishing exploits (and there is enough derring-do in the respective enterprises to justify that word) of Australian expatriates in London, all with a University of Queensland connection.

   The present volume runs to 450 pages, with a print-run of 650 copies: both of which feel like they should be enough. It will be of enormous interest to the few existing acolytes of the Scholartis Press, and to those curious about the early career of a pioneering lexicographer, but also to anyone interested in the more daring fringes of London publishing in the era, and the relationship with its somewhat more provocative counterpart in Paris. Indeed, if the parallels with the Fanfrolico and Mandrake imprints of his countrymen are those most strongly drawn, the Sleeveless Errand furore formed an association with Jack Kahane' s Obelisk Press, which made a virtue, in marketing terms, of the controversy when it took on publication of the novel across the Channel, and Neil Pearson's bibliography of the Obelisk Press can be counted as a cousin of this work.

   Arnold's volume benefits from a clear rubric and an acknowledgement of the limits to its scope presented by various inelucidable sources of obscurity: 'comprehensive but not exhaustive' is how the author puts it. It is gratifyingly free of the excessive abbreviation of recurrent information, a convenience to the compiler at the expense of the user, sometimes rife in bibliography, and is abetted by an elegance of design, courtesy of Paul W. Nash. The latter has also lent his expertise regarding typefaces: though that is one of the aspects that suggests some more illustrative examples of the work could be provided, outside of the few that pepper the history. Partridge did, after all, aspire after some version of the 'book beautiful', even if he largely eschewed illustrations to the text and, though they are carefully described from the exterior to the interior, a greater feel for the visual aspect of the books would be welcome. Were it a bibliography alone, it might expect to be only on the shelves (mostly there to remain) of booksellers, librarians and collectors working in direct­ly relevant areas, but the superb history broadens its appeal: it is a compelling story of perseverance fed by small victories and failure enforced by twists of fate, which deserves to be more widely known.

'The Scholartis Press' by John Arnold is available from the Private Libraries Association.

Please find full details: HERE