Norman Lindsay Does Not Care - an Outburst

A pamphlet found in a Fanfrolico Press book The Antichrist of Nietzsche illustrated by Australian artist Norman Lindsay. Printed about 1927 it is by his great champion P.R. Stephensen who was a friend of Lindsay's son Jack. Stephensen (1901-1965) was known as 'Inky' and was a curious figure, starter of many presses including Mandrake and something of a left wing firebrand who moved to the far right in his middle years. Here he is in his late twenties ranting in full épater le bourgeois mode:

Norman Lindsay Does Not Care
An Outburst
by
P. R. Stephensen

Fanfrolico Pamphlets No. I
Price One Farthing

Why should Norman Lindsay care if suburbia shudders with a horror which is really terror of his stark and ruthless presentation of the image of beauty? Nothing else could be expected, for at this level criticism remains atavistically moral, tribal; and any artist making a vital expression is likely to be regarded as a spawn of Satan, Antichrist, lewd and wicked, abhorrent to all Right-Thinking People. Norman Lindsay does not care how loudly the Good People howl for his suppression. But the Official Art Mob (or Mobs) also dislike him, with the intensity of a fascination which repels as it attracts. And as these quite sophisticated persons officially disown Suburbia, it is difficult for them to damn the man in Suburbia’s phrasing. Yet they must do something about it,

Two manifestoes from The Idler

At Jot we try to print as many manifestoes as possible. Here are two manifestoes from The Idler. One of them is (or was) available on a tea towel from the Idler's  website. The Idler book from 2014  has a friendly and combative interview with Jeremy Paxman and a good article about the history of attempts to shorten the working week, reminding us how working men once had to struggle to get  a 10 hour day…Now we have the amazing Timothy Ferriss and his 4-Hour Workweek but so far no manifesto. The style of the 'Death to Supermarkets' rant is reminiscent of Blast, the brainchild of that well known boulevardier Wyndham Lewis…

More rants and manifestoes to follow.

The Worst Government for 100 years?

This rant on Harold Wilson's Labour Government came from the Wells (Somerset) Conservative Association. It was a one page flyer printed in blue ink and had first appeared in The Daily Telegraph. Anthony Lejeune, a highly competent journalist and author is not gifted with a Wikipedia page but there are traces of his career from a search on the site. He wrote a history of London clubs and has written about Arthur Machen and Fr. Brocard Sewell. He has written about Ernest Bramah in The Tablet which may mean he is a Catholic and almost certainly a book collector…the piece (very slightly  truncated) is very much of its time (circa 1966). Politicians are no longer condemned for wearing the wrong clothes at parties.

The Worst Government for 100 years? by Anthony Lejeune.
Do you remember George Brown on television, flanked by leaders of industry and the trade unions, flourishing his fatuous Declaration of Intent? Do you remember the commentators solemnly telling us that this marked a watershed in the history of British industrial relations? And do you remember any of those commentators apologising to us since for having been taken in by so naive a piece of nonsense? I don't.

Do you remember the National Plan?
I got into trouble with the BBC for treating it, the week it was published, with the disrespect which it soon proved to deserve. I'm still waiting for an apology or even an admission that I was right.

From Private Eye

Have we heard an apology from those who scoffed at predictions that a Socialist Government would mean big tax increases and that "voluntary" wage restraint would soon be followed by compulsory wage restraint? Have we, indeed, heard many apologies from the middle-class voters who argued blandly that a spell of Labour Government would "do no harm"?

We have not. All these people seem as reluctant to admit they were wrong as Mr Wilson himself.

But there is surely cause for apology. The plethora of troubles and distances into which we have been plunged since that black Election Day in the autumn of 1964 ought not to have taken any intelligent person by surprise. They were fully predictable and were, in fact, fully predicted.

Talking Beast 3

The final part of Richard Ince's Talking Beast. A candid inquiry into the nature of homo vulgaris. (London: W. Hodge & Co., 1944.) It is a heartfelt and still interesting polemic from the 1940s. Ince acknowledges as his inspiration (and mentor) Archibald Weir, the Buddha of Marley Common:
 "...it might be supposed that I am a disciple of Archibald Weir.. I am a disciple of no one, preferring to seek truth wherever I discern it. In the East they have a saying: "Where there is no Buddha hurry on, and where there is a Buddha, do not linger." The paradox would certainly have been approved by Weir, who wrote: "I do not seek to formulate tenets or to make disciples. The intent of these books would be frustrated entirely if any such success were obtained among their readers. All that I can wish to offer is assistance to earnest minds in the effort to think for themselves...'

Having found a signed and jacketed copy (at a sadly low price) we can reprint the blurb from the inside flap and also a press-cutting pasted to the rear endpaper. This review from The Field leads one to think this may have been Ince's own copy and the book was reviewed by this horsey magazine because it was about an animal...

Inside d/w flap reads:

Our present world is not, for many, a pleasant place in which to live. The conditions force even the least thoughtful to consider why they are here. People ask: Has western civilisation failed? Has Christianity failed? Is there hope in the Churches? In religion? And, if so, of what kind? Only a fool or a knave could be satisfied with things as they are. Only a fool or a knave could imagine that outbreaks of hatred and the competitive spirit could bring peace or satisfaction. This book by an author who has thought deeply and experienced deeply looks without prejudice or ready-made opinion on the content of our consciousness as it exists today. He has attained a philosophy which brings order out of chaos and a measure of peace out of strife and muddle. 
If you are not satisfied with the world as it appears to you and believe there are better possibilities for every one, you should read TALKING BEAST. It will help you to face bedrock facts, no matter how ugly, with courage and cheerfulness. 

The press-cutting reads:

International Press-Cutting Bureau - London. THE FIELD.
11 November 1944.

'Talking Beast' by Richard Ince.

This is a book, as arresting as its title, which is better read twice than once. It will produce both acceptance and antagonism, according to the reader's mental progress from talking beast to mature human.

Talking Beast 2

Beast of the Earth (Falnama: Book of Omens, circa 1580)

Three more chapters from  the complete text of Richard Ince's 1944 polemic Talking Beast. It was subtitled 'A Candid look into the Nature of Homo Vulgaris.' The title comes from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia 'This Man, this Talking Beast, this Walking Tree.' There is some element in it of Oprah's favourite guru Eckhart Tolle and it is also a sort of prequel to British philosopher John Gray's 2002 classic  Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.

Ince's mentor, also hailing from Marley Common near Haslemere, was the Stoic writer on philosophy and religion Archibald Weir - an early 20th Century follower of Marcus Aurelius. Weir's eldest grandson Nigel Weir, author of Verses of a Fighter Pilot had recently perished in the Battle of Britain and the book is dedicated to the Weir family, especially Archibald.

CHAPTER IV

FROM TALKING BEAST TO COMPLETE MAN

  When we consider the matter it becomes obvious that creation is not an act in time but a process in consciousness. The creator is still creating. Past, present and future have no relevance except as a measure used by space-time consciousness. This thin, tenuous, animal consciousness, evolved out of the unconscious background, enables the living organism to function in conditions known as incarnation. Having no experience or memory of any other conditions, it has to be content to remain a logically-arranged receiving apparatus for sense-perceptions  and messages from the unconscious.
  If we would understand better the relationship between this animal consciousness and the unconscious through which the creator creates, we should study evolution. From amoeba to man we see an extraordinary change.

Talking Beast. A Candid Enquiry..Part 1

Found - a fascinating book by a forgotten writer, Richard Ince (1881 to circa 1960). Although the author of 20+ books he has no Wikipedia page and there is not a lot about him on the web. He mainly looks up through his sister Gertrude's fortunate marriage into the engineering/ industrial dynasty De Ferranti. With her he edited her late husband's papers - The Life and Letters of Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (Williams & Norgate London, 1934). He wrote novels,humorous works, biographies etc., One of his books, a collection of stories from 1926 At the Sign of Sagittarius, makes into Bleiler's Checklist of Science Fiction and Supernatural Fiction. The work we have scanned Talking Beast (Hodge & Co, London 1944) is a sort of self-help slightly ranting philosophical/ religious polemic, of its time with some ideas now unpalatable but a bold, fresh  work. The title comes from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia 'This Man, this Talking Beast, this Walking Tree.' Here are the first 3 chapters...

TALKING BEAST

A CANDID INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE

OF

HOMO VULGARIS

BY

RICHARD INCE

"A shop of shame, a book where blots be rife
   This body is . . .    
   This Man, this Talking Beast, this Walking Tree"

-Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

"To thine own Self be true
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man"

–Hamlet (1, 3, 78)

LONDON          EDINBURGH          GLASCOW

WILLIAM HODGE AND COMPANY LIMITED

1944

DEDICATION

To the memory of Archibald Weir,

to whose life and writings I owe so

much; in the hope that I have not

in this collaboration too seriously

misinterpreted the essence of his vital

message

PREFACE

  This book, written during the years of war seems to me have a pertinent bearing on the conditions of our time. It does not deal directly with reconstruction in the political, or religious spheres, although, I imagine, the unprejudiced reader will come from its disquieting awareness of what is and what be. • It is not concerned with any rearrangement of goods in the market place. It is surely the men and women who stand behind the booths that should claim attention. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, wrote Wordsworth. Life is larger than any religion, any philosophy, any science. And the only experience we can have of life is that which our own consciousness, feeble and flickering, brings to us. All I ask

John Cowper Powys' Bookshop Rant

Found on a late 1960s bookmark from the renowned Holland Park bookseller Peter Eaton adapted from essays of John Cowper Powys in his 1938 work Enjoyment of Literature.
An over the top rant with a lot of incendiary keywords... but a rant would not be a rant if it wasn't slightly unhinged: take it away JC!

What a history of human excesses a second-hand book-shop is! As you 'browse' there– personally I can't abide that word, for to my mind book-lovers are more like hawks and vultures than sheep, but of course if its use encourages poor devils to glance through books that they have no hope of buying, long may the word remain!–you seem to grow aware what a miracle it was when second-hand book-shops were first invented...it too often happens that the books an ordinary man wants are on the 'forbidden shelves'. But there is no censorship in a second-hand book-shop. Every good bookseller is a multiple-personality, containing all the extremes of human feeling. He is an ascetic hermit, he is an erotic immoralist, he is a Papist, he is a Quaker, he is a communist, he is an anarchist, he is a savage iconoclast, he is a passionate worshipper of idols. Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind.

It is for this reason that a bookshop--especially a second-hand bookshop--is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reactions. And just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority.

In a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altarwhere all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can takerefuge! Here, like desperate bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. A bookshop is a powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drug store of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

Of all the "houses of ill fame" which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with his minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.

Rant against War (Charles Richet)

An impressivee  rant against war by the Nobel Prize winning French scientist Charles Richet published about 1925 in his book Idiot Man or The Follies of Mankind (L’Homme Stupide.) A now rare and undeservedly forgotten book in which Richet seems to see ahead to all the millions of deaths in wars of the next 90 years...

When I evoke the vision of war–bloody, cruel, hideous war– burning, shuddering pictures instantly swarm into my mind, so numerous and vivid that I am dazed by them.
Thanks to war, the proofs of human ineptitude are so blatant that any words could only weaken them. But I shall do my best to dam this overwhelming flood of ideas and to calm my indignation.
It is futile to reiterate that war means death, death, and yet again death. But it is not these countless deaths that are my chief charge against it. After all, we must all die someday. A little sooner, a little later, what does it matter?
There are fifteen hundred million human beings on the face of the globe, and glorious war of 1914–18 was only able to destroy fifteen millions. That's nothing, for these fifteen millions represent a mere fraction of mankind; one per cent, which is next to nothing. Two years of increased fertility will make up for this holocaust. And I am almost tempted to use the words of Napoleon, who murmured with a kindly smile as he gazed on all the corpses which his vain glory had piled up on the field of Eylau: "One night in Paris will make up for all of this."

And now, among all the peoples of Europe, there reign hatred, abuse, outrage and calumny; with cries of anger, vengeance, and fury which blacken the soul. War stirs up all the base, fierce instincts peculiar to man; man who is baser and fiercer than the jackal or the hog. Everything low, vile and bestial is given full rein. A vain mountebank like Wilhelm II, a brainless old brute like Hindenberg, are worshipped as gods by a hundred thousand imbeciles. All justice scorned; all falsehood exulted; all pity insulted. The whole of humanity wallowing happily in blood and slime, and finding therein some obscure, perverse joy more hideous than a noble grief. 
Apparently man, in his quest for that which will at once injure and degrade him to the utmost, has finally succeeded in attaining the maximum. He has bent all his energy, all his cleverness, all his passion to this painful task. And with great success. The result has been splendid. During five or six thousand years man had tried his strength in continuous, but comparatively bloodless little wars,. But these were sketchy, childish efforts, mere preludes to the magnificent work accomplished in 1914–18...

Carry on, comrades! Keep it up–keep the ball rolling! Here you are at the dawn of the new era. For this war is only a truce. Wars will break out anew and our grandchildren will see still more glorious massacres; they will undergo more acute and prolonged suffering.

Forward! Bon appetit! Perfect the art of killing. There are still splendid things you may invent; you have still greater heights to scale. Strain every nerve! Toil on! A few years hence you will achieve superb results.
Shed the last vestiges of timidity! However great your savagery, your imbecility will far surpass it; and compared with it your savagery will be as a reed beside the Eiffel Tower.

Pitiful humanity has fallen so low that men kill without hating each other (the phrase is from Bossuet) and they no longer fill me with pity, but the black shame. Yes, in my inmost being, I am humiliated because I belong to this vile animal species, the most foolish of all created things.