Endpapers

The distant, and mostly poor relation of the book cover, endpapers are something of a lost art in the world of modern mass market publishing. Technically they fulfill the utilitarian role of hiding the messy binding of the hardback covers. However, in many cases the endpapers themselves were of a high artistic quality and it is always worth exploring what lurks beneath the faded covers of those tatty volumes in second-hand bookstores.
Of particular interest to me are the 20th century patterned papers by artist-designers such as Ravilious (see Everyman), Bawden, Piper, Sutherland and Nash (see illustration right, Crocus 1925). As well as these luminaries, other less well known designers were producing exceptional work in a variety of techniques: an example of which would be the marbled paper of Tirzah Garwood Ravilious. Also, if you have a selection of old Ladybird books in the attic, you can use the endpapers to date them. For some other fine examples of endpapers take a peek at Drawger, and Penguin Book's Blog, also Persephone Books, although their 'what women want' justification is a tad odd.

Published in 2001, Christopher Woodward's In Ruins has for me become one of those books that I feel a yearning to reread at least once every year. Effortlessly beautiful prose that seamlessly stitches the closing scenes of Planet of the Apes ("Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!") to the competition that led to the magnificent poem Ozymandias ("My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"), Woodward's book explores the enduring appeal of ruins through a myriad sequence of anecdote, history, literature and art. I defy anyone to read the sequence that describes the variety of plant life found in the Colosseum in the 19th century and the explanation of how it may have got there without being moved. This is history writing at it's very best: encapsulating a whole era and civilisation with one perceptive and inciteful connection.

What does the modern tourist see when he or she walks around the sand blasted, health and safety roped modern 'ruin' equipped with their audioguide? History repackaged, cleaned up, preserved in an archaeological limbo. When Paul Nash stumbled across the fallen stones of Avebury he made a visceral connection with the place, a connection you would struggle to make in the Avebury of today (the stones are now upright, tidied up, spic & span), they are (horror of horrors) 'educational'. Woodward's contention is that ruins are organic, living things, they are fleeting and should be allowed to decay. Let the Colosseums of yesterday become the building stones of today, enjoy them while you can, but let them grow old (dis)gracefully.