Turner, W[alter]. J., and Shannon, Sheila, eds.

Britain in Pictures. [with] Britain in Pictures: A History and Bibliography by Michael Carney.

1941. London: Collins, 1941–1950. [and] London: Werner Shaw, 1995.

134 vols, plus 7 duplicates, mostly slim 4to, each volume has, on average, 48 illustrated pp. and 8 color plates. Decorative printed boards, dust-jackets repeating the boards pattern (and mostly present in this set), generally a very good set entirely complete with the supplementary volumes (and a few duplicates). The Carney bibliography is in original blue cloth and dust-jacket, as new. A complete listing is available on request.

§ A complete set of this wonderful series, generally with 48 illustrated pages and 8 color plates though some volumes vary. Original decorative boards, some with dust-jackets, This series was begun as an attempt to record all aspects of the British way of life in case the war should irreversibly change it. As a mixture of propaganda and scholastic enterprise, it is surely one of the most amazing products of its kind ever conceived, let alone achieved. The plethora of (now) famous writers and artists who contributed when many (if not most) were still fairly unknown is a tribute to the wisdom and skills of the editors W.J. Turner and Sheila Shannon, and especially the beautiful and brilliant Hilda Matheson, whose relationship with Vita Sackville-West caused Virginia Woolf such intense jealousy. Authors and artists include: Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, Edmund Blunden, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Geoffrey Grigson, David Low, Rose Macaulay, Ngaio Marsh, Bernard Miles, Sean O’Faolain, George Orwell, David Piper, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, and exactly a hundred others. Complete sets are rare; Carney (see below) notes that it took him nearly thirty years to assemble his set. Paul Breman writes: “The acceptable face of jingoism, a splendid record of a bygone age, this series was a calculated attempt to boost flagging wartime morale, but it far outgrew its original scope and lived on through the bleak and even more depressing postwar years of seemingly endless rationing. Conceived (by Hilda Matheson, recruited for ‘special work’ by the Foreign Office in 1939) as a series of monographs, these Collins books add up to a unique picture of life in Britain (when still an Empire—a fact reflected in a series of volumes on the ‘colonies’) in its varied historical, cultural, sporting, technical, environmental, natural, sociological and political aspects. The authors were mostly in their thirties during the war, few of them yet the household names many have since become. . . . A complete series has 141 volumes, and each volume has, on average, 48 illustrated pages and 8 colour plates (the exceptions to this are the nine "One guinea" volumes, and six little anthologies of English poets, which Dorothy Wellesley, probably by dint of her investment, managed to get incorporated in the fledgling series—"these are now by far the hardest titles to find).” In 1995 Michael Carney published an engaging account of the series (Britain in Pictures: A History and Bibliography) which also includes brief biographies of the many authors. Item #124130

Price: $4,500.00