"What have the British done better than anybody else? They do not surpass all other peoples in tennis, I think, or cookery or opera. But if we turn our attention to books written for the pleasure of children, we may perhaps venture the thought that this is a genre in which we have outclassed every other nation. Moreover, a remarkable number of the best children's writers have lived in Oxford, and a good many of these have taught or studied in this University. It was on the banks of the Thames that Kenneth Grahame (who is buried in the Holywell Cemetery) heard the wind rustling in the willows; it was from Oxford that Alice entered Wonderland; it was in Oxford that the hobbits came to birth; it was in Oxford that the door opened to Narnia. But the man whom I now introduce has paid this place a greater tribute, for he has evoked Oxford charmingly in his books and made it, one might perhaps say, one of the characters in the story.

Charles Kingsley, in The Water Babies, seems to have been the man who created the story pattern which takes a child or children into another world and sometimes brings them back to the real world at the end. It was followed by Lewis Carroll in both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and subsequently in Barrie's Peter Pan, by C.S. Lewis, and lastly by the man whom we see today. Our honorand differs from his predecessors, however, in using his fictive universe as a means of probing the nature of the human spirit. Socrates believed that he was often put straight by the guidance of a daemon; our honorand, for his part, imagines every human being, young or old, being visibly accompanied by a daemon, and uses this conception as a means of drawing the character of our inner being into open view. Accordingly, while delighting countless children he has also attracted and challenged adult readers. And so as Horace called himself master of the Roman Lyre, let us salute the celebrant of Oxonian Lyra.

I present a most skilful weaver of tales, Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman, CBE, former undergraduate and now Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, to be admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters".

Is Toad of Toad Hall bipolar?

And do Badger's attempts to put a stop to Toad's motoring escapades have anything to do with Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud? Peter Parker in the TLS finds the answers in two annotated centenary editions of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.

ABE have compiled some of the best summer (US) reading lists of the year

Stephen King's 7 Great Books For Summer are listed in Entertainment Weekly with an Australian author the top read

Shatter

Michael Robotham

Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson

The Tourist

Olen Steinhauer

Drood

Dan Simmons

Dog On It

Spencer Quinn

Handle with Care

Jodi Picoult

Little Dorrit

Charles Dickens

Literary walks: Daphne du Maurier

The UK Times retraces the haunting landscape of Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall

“We can never go back again, that much is certain,”wrote Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, a novel that is nevertheless about returning (of the dead to the living and to the places where they still live), which has inspired legions of devoted readers to retrace Rebecca’s footsteps. I am one of those fans and in the course of writing a book about du Maurier - and Menabilly, the mysterious Cornish mansion that inspired Manderley - I have been walking the same paths as she did, trying to follow the ghosts that haunt her landscape". More here.

Ten of the best births in literature From Tristram Shandy to The Secret Scripture in the UK Guardian

Bookride blog reports the high price of some photobooks

"One of the victims of this recession has been photobooks. However like real estate in Britain and America they had become grossly overvalued and a correction was due. There were 3 big photo auctions in May and, whereas none bombed, results were lacklustre. Dealers tended only to be buying on commission and collectors only shelled out for stuff in exemplary condition.

Some surrealist items did well (the 1936 photo collage book 'La Septieme Face du Dé' by Hugnet made £10000 in it s Duchamp covers) and others badly --rude boy Hans Bellmer's not uncommon 'Les Jeux de la Poupée' failed to make its £40K reserve. Bailey's book turned up in 2 sales on the same day. Christies copy in a repaired box and lacking the cardboard throwaway insert made a punchy £4375. At Bloomsbury the gavel came down almost simultaneously at £1800 on a lesser copy ('missing lower cover and cardboard packing sheets stamped 'To be thrown away', the box with some marks and splits at edges.) Below is our original late 2007 report on this groovy book. It is hard to imagine the circumstances in which one would find a fine copy--but if one were found, even in these borassic times it would surely make £10,000+. Perhaps Lord Snowdon, the unsaleable photographer, still has his copy-- pristine because too nasty too touch with its pics of lowlife criminals and thugs. Possibly, like Churchill's Graham Sutherland portrait, it was destroyed.

David Bailey's Box of Pin-ups Current Selling Prices $6000-$12000 /£3000-£6000

Much sought after and valuable book from the mid 1960s before kaftans, bells, patchouli and psychedelia. I can remember as a teen seeing it in the shops and thinking it was expensive (£10?); there must have been quite a few printed and they got bought by the affluent and many got broken up and pinned up on walls of their kids -- the exact purpose for which they were intended. Of the few sets I have handled, quite often the photos had been taken down and put back in the box - with the pinholes at the corners as the evidence. In this auction description they have tape marks:

David Bailey's Box of Pin-ups. Description: A set of 36 portrait photographs (halftone prints), sheets 370 x 320mm., printed captions on versos, 15 (list available) with small tape marks at top corners, loose as issued in original box, upper cover with title, notes by Francis Wyndham and portrait of Bailey by Mick Jagger, lower cover with a repeat of Mick Jagger by Bailey, both cardboard packing sheets stamped "To be thrown away" present, the box with some marks and splits at edges, folio, Sixties style recorded and defined in a select gallery of movers and shakers from the worlds of music, fashion, art, photography, advertising, film and the stage. "Glamour dates fast, and it is its ephemeral nature which both attracts Bailey and challenges him." The text on the reverse of the image, penned by Francis Wyndham, cites Shrimpton as the inspiration behind this homage to visual culture: 'I want to do a book about images', said David Bailey, 'Jean's an image'".

I had this volume in the 1960's and gave it away when we left Oxford in 1976 -sob!

Robert McCrum in the UK Guardian wonders What will the literary archives of today's authors look like?

"A generation of word processing means the archives of 21st century writers will be very different to those of their predecessors. About five years ago I published a life of the great English comic writer PG Wodehouse. In the process I accumulated a filing cabinet full of (to Wodehouse scholars) priceless photographs, audio tapes, documents and photocopies. During these last few weeks, in a belated mood of spring cleaning, I have been trying to organise this chaotic mass of paper into some kind of order to facilitate an eventual handover of the material to the British Library, which is where the main body of the Wodehouse papers will be held in years to come.

Coincidentally, last week I had a visit from Jen Tisdale from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin in Texas, one of the world's great literary archives. Jen isn't an archivist - she works on the press and public relations side of the Center - but her visit (and my struggles with my Wodehouse files) opened up a line of speculation about the future of such materials. What, I wonder, will the literary histories and biographies of the future look like? Will the great libraries store and catalogue computer disks? Archives are already logging entries for film and video; where once it was essential to be able to read the chancery script of Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscripts, will it now be necessary to have an MA in the decoding of Microsoft Word? A PhD in email correspondence techniques?" More here.

ODD BOOK TITLE

Racing Axemen: A history of competititve wood chopping in Australia by J Preston Melbourne, Hawthorn, 1980

Debbie campbell of the NLA reports locations here, and also lists SLV's manuscript for this book here.