Ten.

When I started blogging, ten whole years ago, people were already saying that blogging was dead. They were right. Certainly the blogs on which I formed my idea of blogging were all in various stages of slowing down and winding up. By late 2012, they were all gone – by which I mean that the authors had moved on to other things. Better things, for the most part.

I’ve always enjoyed blogging, although less so lately. Fearing that I might enjoy it a little too much at first, I set myself a very tight schedule of forty-seven posts per year, so as not to start to strong and peter out just as quickly. This one is post number 469. I have something prepared for next week, which will make the round figure of 470 posts in ten years. Then we’ll see what happens. I’ll only continue if I can make the process enjoyable again. I don’t see how I could keep anyone else interested otherwise.

I started thinking I would be writing mostly for my own sake, but that’s never what happens. Writing finds readers, always, and it’s the readers – even if they number in the dozens – who decide where the writing goes. It’s a social exchange, and it didn’t stop being one even after I closed the comments, which the platform could no longer handle without letting through a torrent of daily spam (they since fixed that).

Every year on the blog’s anniversary I post pictures of some of the second-hand books I have acquired in the previous twelve months, a tradition largely centred around the marvellous Downtown Community Centre Book Fair – an institution whose own future is in doubt. The other yearly tradition is the changing of the banner, with new ones produced by Shirley Carran,

Tim Denee,

Dylan Horrocks,

Sarah Laing,

Marian Maguire

and finally Sharon Murdoch.

This year I’ve restored the original artwork by Bert Warter for Bruno Furst’s 1949 books Stop Forgetting, which is where the name of the blog comes from.

One of the things that has made it harder to keep to my schedule this year has been more writing done elsewhere. As well as the usual output for Overland, I’ve written several pieces for the new online magazine Popula, as well as The New Humanist, Landfall Online and the new issue of Sport. I also sat on the jury for the non-fiction section of the Fair Australia Prize, which was a joy. There is no shortage of people doing amazing writing out there which is certainly something that makes blogging seem a bit silly sometimes.

Anyway: here’s the usual brief cavalcade into some of the old books I got and their pretty covers. It begins with a very lavish catalogue of The Queen’s Empire, produced in 1897 by Cassell and Company and sent to every corner of the same. Books like these is how people knew what the world looked like.

The London Illustrated News (of which I already had some collected volumes) was serving this function as late as 1953, and put out this memento of the current Queen’s coronation.

A couple of favourite pictures from within. The Dean of Westminster.

And a colourful portrait of Elizabeth and Charles.

In something of a contrast, thanks to the intercession of a good friend I inherited a box of books about the Soviet Union. Far too many to catalogue here, but here’s a little sampler.

The same friend sent me children’s book about professions, one of my favourite genres.

In 1927, Helen Ryder received the collected poems of Robert Browning (whose name is interestingly abbreviated on the cover, engraved on leather) by the Hutt Valley High School as a memento of her time at the school.

I’m always on the lookout for old histories of New Zealand. I like the front cover of AH Reed’s,

but also his lively author picture at the back.

The find of the year were probably the two volumes of the 1979 Historic Buildings of New Zealand.

In Italy I found the only book I had never read of my beloved humourist Achille Campanile. Tragically, it’s both unfunny and quite racist. I guess there’s a reason why nobody ever bothered to reprint it after 1934.

This little book about George Grosz did not disappoint.

While I have not yet attacked John A. Lee’s political testament

nor these very intriguing little collections of New New Zealand Writing published during the second world war.

Of the execrable The Shadow by Lionel Terry – the killer of Zhou Kum Yung in Haining Street in 1905 – I was mostly interested in the General Assembly Library sticker, and the stamp that declared it withdrawn. There is a whole lot of history in that holding, also in the context of the country’s racist laws targeting Chinese immigration.

Whereas of the cartoons by Gordon Minhinnick collected in Min’s Pie I can mostly say that I don’t get them, but the artwork is lovely.

See if you can work out what this one is about. The date of publication is 13 September 1950.

Finally, I can never resist a classic with a pretty cover.

C’est tout.

Nine.

A ponderous tome of chaste entertainment and moral instruction, The Quiver ran at over 1,000 pages per yearly issue and must have cost a pretty penny in its day. But then the purchaser would barely have needed to secure any other reading material, as the publication appears to have aimed to sustain every aspect of a family’s intellectual and spiritual needs for its natural shelf life of twelve months.

I came upon a pristine copy of the 1899 edition at the Downtown Community Fair. I bagged it for $2. There is no market for these once prestigious class markers, which were printed in London and shipped to every corner of the empire to bludgeon readers with their colonial values.

(The 1899 Quiver opens with a story entitled ‘Lady Doctors in Heathen Lands.’)

There are no markings on my book, therefore no hints of its ownership history. When did it come to New Zealand? Who owned it, and did they keep it in the family? The Downtown Community Fair relies on charitable donations, so it seems likely that it was passed on by descendants of the original owners. The lack of bookshop stamps or prices written in pencil on the frontispiece supports the theory, while the absence of signs of mould suggests it spent the last century on a shelf inside a well-ventilated home, as opposed to inside an attic.

If I could tell you exactly why I care about these things, there would be no need for me to keep a blog.

It’s nine years this week since I started doing this, and there are some traditions surrounding my anniversary posts that I must honour. The first is a brief catalogue of my second-hand book acquisitions. Of which The Quiver is one.

I am literally writing this from inside a section of the astonishing home library of a friend who’s hosting me for a few days. I have work to do so I’m not allowing myself to browse the shelves. It’s hard. It’s also making the few treasures I collected over the years look pathetic. But then I am a false collector, pretending to fill holes in a library that doesn’t exist. Whatever am I going to do with an 1889 copy of the Morse commercial code know as Unicode?

The purposes of these codes was to save on the cost of sending telegrams by reducing complex sentences to single words. They were the URL shorteners of their day, if you like. I open my 1889 copy of the Unicode at random. It says that Secretio is short for ‘Leaving by train arriving at London Bridge at –,’ while Rigesco means ‘I sympathise deeply with you in the loss you have sustained.’ I sympathise, but I still want to save on cable costs.

I trade in useless knowledge. Like this 1969 issue of Popular Mechanics that instructs readers on how to create a small tornado inside their television sets.

Or yet another issue of This Is New Zealand, my beloved series of promotional books used by local businesses to impress their foreign contacts and clients. This one is from 1979 and is emblazoned with the name of New Zealand Cements Holdings Limited, which nowadays trades as Holcim. It will require a future post

Or there are the golden-era science fiction books I always pick up, regardless of the likelihood of my actually sitting down to read them – or, in most cases, re-read them, since what I’m doing here is slowly rebuild the library of my teenage years, which I dismantled in various stages before I left Italy.

But then there is always an actual treasure. This year, it’s this 1938 guide to the ‘Maori names of New Zealand train stations’, which is to say, to the Māori names of most places.

The guide originates from contributions made over the years by Māori readers to the remarkable New Zealand Railways Magazine, and was compiled by its most prolific writer, James Cowan. Some of its knowledge may have been superseded, but equally it’s a document that retains some value due to the time and circumstances of its production.

***

There is another tradition I must honour at this time of the year, and it’s the changing of the masthead. It’s time to farewell Marian Maguire’s beautiful design

Which followed on from two consecutive years of Sarah Laing’s

Who was preceded by Tim Denee.

And Dylan Horrocks.

And three times Shirley Carran.

All of whch originated from the flash card illustrated by Bert Warter for Bruno Furst’s 1949 books Stop Forgetting, whence the name of the blog.

Only to welcome a contribution by the splendid Sharon Murdoch. Thank you Sharon!

***

I always know where to begin, but seldom know when to end, which may account for the fact that this blog still exists. This year it was a struggle, at times, to keep going, just as it was painful to close the comments section, due to it being suddenly overwhelmed with spam. (I will however as soon as I can restore old comments – including Megan Clayton’s wonderful poems – which are currently hidden but not deleted.) Then in the winter I decided to embark upon a serialised reading of Dante, which is also a school memoir of sorts – because the world needs more memoirs! – and that project, indulgent as it is, has helped restore the pleasure of writing on these pages which I simply couldn’t do without.

Thank you to those who read any of the posts this year. The time you spend here is the other thing I couldn’t do without.

Finally, as is also customary: the last year of posts in clickable mosaic form. Cheers.