Some thoughts
I’m still working on the publishing things, and have got up to the months the war was breaking out in 1939. The correspondence remains fascinating, sometimes because it’s unintentionally hilarious, and other times it’s shocking, or just desperately sad.
Unintentionally hilarious are letters such as the ones mentioned below, or the recent discovery of a letter to an artist asking him to correct the picture of a woman to remove the moustache she seems to have. Shocking are letters to German booksellers assuring them that writers are not Jewish, or letters from those booksellers asking for a biography and an assurance that the writer is Aryan. The letter I saw today from a Czech Jew, who worked for 20 years in a publishing house but could not now get work anywhere and is asking if they can provide him with employment, is just sad. They couldn’t help, so I have no idea what happened to him.
I suppose this proves the power of archives, these letters seem terribly ordinary, and were straightforward business correspondence largely for the people who wrote them. But every so often they demonstrate involvement in current events, or show how people thought about the issues of the day, and how different their take on life was to ours. The firm published a book on sex education, and were terribly worried about the potential of being prosecuted for obscenity. That wouldn’t happen today, because society has altered so much. It’s one of the reasons this collection is so fascinating, it reveals a lot more about attitudes and the stories of those involved than appears likely from the surface description of it.
Unintentionally hilarious are letters such as the ones mentioned below, or the recent discovery of a letter to an artist asking him to correct the picture of a woman to remove the moustache she seems to have. Shocking are letters to German booksellers assuring them that writers are not Jewish, or letters from those booksellers asking for a biography and an assurance that the writer is Aryan. The letter I saw today from a Czech Jew, who worked for 20 years in a publishing house but could not now get work anywhere and is asking if they can provide him with employment, is just sad. They couldn’t help, so I have no idea what happened to him.
I suppose this proves the power of archives, these letters seem terribly ordinary, and were straightforward business correspondence largely for the people who wrote them. But every so often they demonstrate involvement in current events, or show how people thought about the issues of the day, and how different their take on life was to ours. The firm published a book on sex education, and were terribly worried about the potential of being prosecuted for obscenity. That wouldn’t happen today, because society has altered so much. It’s one of the reasons this collection is so fascinating, it reveals a lot more about attitudes and the stories of those involved than appears likely from the surface description of it.