Louder Than Words - Women Who Changed The World
As the follow up to Peter Harrington's first women's catalogue, Louder Than Words is really a celebration of achievements by women in all fields. It is difficult to pick out favourites or the 'most important', because in their way they are all important. So we reached out to catalogue creators, Emma Walshe and Theodora Robinson, to ask what they thought and find out what they consider to be the highlights from their catalogue.
Among the women in science Laura Bassi (11), Grace Chisholm (40) and Antonia Maury (108) really stood out for me. Tell us a little bit about them and how you chose the most important female scientists to include in the catalogue.
EW: Bassi and Chisholm are great examples of women carving out space for themselves in STEM disciplines. They’re from different times and different contexts but faced similar challenges as women pursuing scientific careers. University restrictions prevented Bassi from conducting experiments and teaching as she’d have liked, so she worked from home; lack of financial support for female scholars prompted Chisholm to leave the UK for Germany, which had better funding at the time. They and many of the other scientists in the catalogue had to constantly pivot to get where they wanted to go. I always gravitate towards those kinds of stories.
TR: I first read about Maury in “Women of the Moon” by Daniel R. Altschuler and Fernando J. Ballesteros (2019) – a lovely compendium of biographies of the lunar craters named to honour women (at the time of publication, they numbered just 28 out of 1,586 named craters). I was utterly thrilled when we came across Maury’s own copies of these significant publications.
Women have made a name for themselves as travel writers relatively early on. I like the fact that you have a broad range of travel journals from the four mountaineers in the late 19th century (18), "Emily in Paris" in the early 20th century (80) or the travels of three Edwardian women to East Asia (82) - each very different no doubt, but what did they have in common?
TR: These three items all have a certain intimacy to them. To me, they stand out for the candour, honesty of their impressions, and humour – there’s an unfiltered quality to all of them, which would be lost to a certain degree if they were publications.
EW: What Theo said. They’re all so full of sass and life. I laughed out loud reading some of them. You can just tell they’re overjoyed to have the opportunity to travel.
This no doubt takes us to some fine examples of the Suffragette Movement and feminist literature and magazines. Which of them stood out in particular?
TR: My absolute favourite piece is actually an anti-suffrage item (something I don’t say very often!) - the satirical “1981” handkerchief (65), published in 1881, which shows the “terrible” outcome of women’s emancipation in 100 years: female judges, policewomen, scientists, athletes, and academics, to name but a few. What a joy to see all those careers now open to women!
EW: Reading Emily Duval’s account of her hunger strike and subsequent force feeding really got to me. I’ve read similar statements in books and on the internet, but it felt like a very different, raw thing to hold the pages in my hands. I also have a soft spot for the autograph letter signed by Catherine Lane (91), in which she describes Holloway prison as “a gigantic boarding-house without the old cats”.
There are a lot of firsts, some more unexpected than others - from Yolande Bonhomme, the first woman to publish the bible (24) and the first English printed book by a female author from 1595 (15), to the first American to publish a book of poetry, who was also the first Colonial poet in English, Anne Bradstreet, in 1758 (24), and finally the first female graphic novelist who published her first novel in Prague in 1929 (20), and in the same year, the first English language book on Soviet Cinema by Winifred Bryher (30). It must have been rather exciting to discover these - did you know about their importance before you started your research?
EW: One of the best things about working on interdisciplinary catalogues like this is what you learn. I was familiar with Berners, Bradstreet, and Bochořáková-Dittrichová, but not with Bonhomme and Bryher. Plus, during your research you come across a whole host of new names – people who influenced them, people whom they influenced, people who could challenge them for the title of “first” in that field – and the wants list grows...
There are some real landmarks included like Charlotte Lennox's work of Shakespeare criticism, which comes from the library of the first known major female book collector in the UK, Mary Richardson Currer (95), but also Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology from 1934 (44), Mary Butt's Armed with Madness from 1928 making her one of the most important modernist authors of the interwar years (35) and one of the most recent works included, Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race, an annotated copy from 2017 (56). How did you go about choosing them for the catalogue?
TR: It’s a wide and varied selection – many of the authors here are not household names, and, where possible, we’ve picked copies which have something truly special about them. The Cunard, for example, is the dedication copy, so that’s unique.
EW: I am fond of books that preserve connections between people, whether immediate (dedication or inscribed) or distant (ownership, often separated by time and place, but linked through a common interest). We took any chance that we had to select copies along those lines, rather than typical copies of first editions.
Tell us a bit more about the items included in the catalogue that refer to 'Gentleman Jack' (98) and Dr James Barry (10).
TR: These were amazing items to catalogue – the “Gentleman Jack” in particular. It’s a compilation of the first published extracts of Anne Lister’s diary by the son of her bootmaker. Tracking down the provenance for it was a great discovery – there’s a fantastic record in Lister’s diary of the altercation she had with his father over a pair of shoes he had soled. You can really imagine the scene! The Barry item is a lovely pairing of two anecdotal manuscript accounts of the story of his life, which caused quite a sensation on his death. Barry, the first British surgeon to perform a C-section in which both the mother and baby survived, was born Margaret Ann Bulkley but his story was not publicly known until a month after his death in 1865. It was fascinating to learn of him from the perspective of his contemporaries.
EW: Happily, these were two of the first items to sell from the catalogue. It was really nice to see our enthusiasm for them mirrored in the collecting interests of our customers.
Last but not least, there are some fabulous books on art and fashion included, where women established themselves as leaders in their field, with the stylish Sonia Delaunay book (I have to confess I also bid for it, but obviously failed) being a fine example (49).
TR: Yes, the delicate combination of colour and fabric in the Sonia Delaunay volume is stunning. She had such a fresh, innovative approach to fashion in the Jazz age, and her geometric designs are far from the typical flapper girl aesthetic you might associate with the era. The rare inscribed copy of Mary Gartside’s first book was also a great discovery. She was the first woman in the Western world to publish a book on colour and discuss colour theory, but until recently, she had almost disappeared from history. Her work predates that of more recognised and quoted male colour theorists, such as James Sowerby and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
EW: My favourite in this field is French/Mexican surrealist artist Alice Rahon’s book of poetry, a limited edition illustrated by Miró. She inscribes this copy to legendary art collector Peggy Guggenheim (121), who supported Rahon’s early ventures into painting by featuring her work in two landmark women artists shows in New York in the 1940s. What’s not to love?
You can view the catalogue on Peter Harrington's website here > Louder Than Words - Peter Harrington Journal - The Journal
Do you have an upcoming catalogue that you think would be worth featuring in our Catalogue Interview series, please get in touch at info@thebookcollector.co.uk