The publisher most associated with paperbacks in the UK is Penguin Books who, changed British reading habits forever when they published their first ten titles in 1935. The ten included literary fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Eric Linklater, crime stories by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and the first Penguin book “Ariel” by André […]
Category: 20th-century items
Tom Hanlin: Scottish miner and bestselling novelist whose work was praised by John Steinbeck
Scottish literature has a strong tradition of novels of working-class life by working-class authors. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘A Scots Quair’ (1932-4), William McIlvanney’s ‘Docherty’ (1975), James Kelman’s ‘The Bus Conductor Hines’ (1984) and Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1993) are among the classic works of Scottish proletarian literature. The only two Scottish novels that have won the […]
Initial success : J. R. Hartley and other authors who use initials
In 1983 the best-known author in Britain was not a bestseller like Jeffrey Archer, Roald Dahl, or Fay Weldon but J.R. Hartley the author of “Fly fishing”. The book was featured in an advert promoting the Yellow Pages telephone directory. “Fly fishing” was the object of a quest round second-hand bookshops by an elderly gentleman. […]
Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” was originally published under a pen name
It is just over sixty years since the death of Sylvia Plath on February 11, 1963 at the age of thirty. Less than a month earlier she had published the novel ‘The Bell Jar’ under the pen name Victoria Lucas. This rare edition, the initial print run was only 2000 copies, is currently being exhibited […]
Pen Names: Doris Lessing to Jane Somers
When you ask yourself why a writer might choose to use a pen name, what springs to mind? Perhaps you think of the famous female writers of the nineteenth century, like the Brontë sisters, for whom publishing under their real names would have risked not being published at all. Or you think of it as […]
“Mark” a short story by Saki
Our blog generally features short pieces on the Library’s collections and associated activities but as it is the holiday season we thought we would post a very short story. The story and its author are featured in our current exhibition “Pen names” which explores authors who publish books under assumed names. The author of the […]
The many names of Laurence James
The National Library of Scotland is a Legal Deposit library, which means we build our collections by requesting a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. Thanks to Legal Deposit the Library is home to probably the largest collection of popular fiction in Scotland. If you are interested in crime, romance, westerns, […]
“Christine Strathern imbues this romantic story with all her own abiding love for her native Scotland”
The Scottish author Nancy Brysson Morrison (1903-1986) is chiefly remembered today for her novel ‘The Gowk Storm’ a story about three daughters of a Scottish church minister. First published in 1933, the book was reissued as part of the Canongate Classics series in 1988. Morrison’s first two books were published by John Murray and the […]
Ian Rankin and the Missing Person Case of Jack Harvey
In 1993, the novel ‘Witch Hunt’ appeared in bookshops. But who was the author, Jack Harvey, seemingly a first-time novelist? Given his now familiar status as the biggest-selling contemporary writer of crime fiction in the UK it is hardly a secret. But at the time this was not an easy mystery to solve. Harvey was […]
100th Anniversary of One of the Greatest Poems of the 20th Century
October 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Arguably the most influential poem written in English in the 20th century, it marked a turning point in modernist literature. Although the poem’s origins arose in the desolation of post-World War I Europe, its myriad themes still resonate today through their […]