"Bookshop Memories" is published in 1936 by the English author George Orwell. As the title suggests, it is a reminiscence of his time spent working as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop.
In October 1934 Orwell's aunt Nellie Limouzin recommended him for the job, as part-time assistant at Booklover's Corner in South End Road, Hampstead. The shop was run by her friends the Westropes, who also provided him with accommodation. He was job sharing with Jon Kimche so that he worked at the shop in the afternoons, having the mornings free to write and the evenings to socialise.
Kimche recalled Orwell never sitting, but standing in the middle of the shop "a slightly forbidding figure" who probably resented the idea of selling anything to people. Kimche retained the image of "a very tall figure almost like de Gaulle" with a small boy looking up and buying stamps from him. [1] Peter Vansittart recalled visiting the shop as a child with the "slightly ungracious assistant" trying to sell him a copy of Trader Horn in Madagascar. [2] Kay Ekevall, who established a relationship with Orwell after meeting him at the shop, recalled "I saw this new assistant and thought he was a great asset because he could reach all the shelves nobody else could without hauling a ladder out!" [3]
While working in the bookshop, Orwell was working on the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and was able to draw on his experiences. Many commentators have pointed out that the bookshop in the novel bears little relationship to Booklover's Corner. [4]
The essay first appeared in the November 1936 issue of Fortnightly . [5]
Orwell describes the irritating behaviour of bookshop customers - first edition snobs, oriental students, vague minded women and "the kind of people who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop". The shop had various sidelines including typewriters, stamps for collectors, horoscopes and Christmas novelties (Orwell was particularly amused by an invoice for these that included the phrase "2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits"). However, the main sideline was the lending library, which to Orwell shed a new light on readers: "In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones."
In conclusion, Orwell says that he would not wish to be a bookseller full-time, mainly because it is a job that tends to give one a distaste for books.
Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results.
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. Its target audience was the middle- and upper-class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated—and it exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London. The first part is an account of living in near-extreme poverty and destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM militia of the Republican army.
Coming Up for Air is the seventh book and fourth novel by English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. He delivered the completed manuscript to Victor Gollancz upon his return to London in March 1939.
The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the English writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II. The second half is a long essay on his middle-class upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, questioning British attitudes towards socialism. Orwell states plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism, but feels it necessary to point out reasons why many people who would benefit from socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong opponents.
"Shooting an Elephant" is an essay by British writer George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in late 1936 and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on 12 October 1948.
Eileen Maud Blair was the first wife of George Orwell. During World War II, she worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London and the Ministry of Food.
A Clergyman's Daughter is a 1935 novel by English author George Orwell. It tells the story of Dorothy Hare, the titular clergyman's daughter, whose life is turned upside down when she suffers an attack of amnesia. It is Orwell's most formally experimental novel, featuring a chapter written entirely in dramatic form, but he was never satisfied with it and he left instructions that after his death it was not to be reprinted. Despite these instructions, Orwell did consent to the printing of cheap editions "of any book which may bring in a few pounds for my heirs" following his death.
Jon Kimche was a journalist and historian. A Swiss Jew, he arrived in England at the age of 12, becoming involved in the Independent Labour Party as a young man. In 1934–35, he worked with George Orwell in a Hampstead bookshop, Booklover’s Corner, and later managed the ILP's bookshop at 35 Bride Street, near Ludgate Circus. As chair of the ILP Guild of Youth, he visited Barcelona in 1937, where he again met Orwell.
Jack Common was a British socialist, essayist and novelist.
Museum Street is a street in the Bloomsbury area of the London Borough of Camden, England. To the north is the British Museum, hence its current name. The street is populated by cafes and bookshops to appeal to the international museum-going public. To the north is Great Russell Street. To the south are Bloomsbury Way and New Oxford Street. The nearest tube stations are Tottenham Court Road and Holborn to the southwest and southeast respectively.
"Decline of the English Murder" is an essay by English writer George Orwell, wherein he analysed the kinds of murders depicted in popular media and why people like to read them. Tribune published it on 15 February 1946, and Secker and Warburg republished it after his death in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1952.
In 1949, shortly before he died, the English author George Orwell prepared a list of notable writers and other people he considered to be unsuitable as possible writers for the anti-communist propaganda activities of the Information Research Department, a secret propaganda organisation of the British state under the Foreign Office. A copy of the list was published in The Guardian in 2003 and the original was released by the Foreign Office soon after.
The "London Letters" were a series of fifteen articles written by George Orwell when invasion by Nazi Germany seemed imminent, and published in the American left-wing literary magazine Partisan Review. As well as these "London Letters", PR also published other articles by Orwell.
"A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" is an essay by the English author George Orwell. In it Orwell encourages the public-spirited action of planting trees, which may well make up for the harm people do in their lives. The essay was first published in Tribune on 26 April 1946.
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, who has been declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.
Evelyn N. Anderson (1909–1977), was a journalist in the UK. Born Lore Seligmann on 13 May 1909 to a German Jewish family, she joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) while a student in Frankfurt in 1927. She abandoned the KPD two years later over its sectarian attacks on the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and subsequently joined a small left-wing SPD fraction, the Leninist Organisation, later known as Neu Beginnen. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, she left Germany for Great Britain, where she and her husband Paul Anderson (1908–1972) became members of the small group of socialist exiles from Nazi Germany in Britain that included Julius Braunthal and Franz Borkenau.
"The Art of Donald McGill" is a critical essay first published in 1941 by the English author George Orwell. It discusses the genre of English saucy seaside postcards that were sold mostly in small shops in British coastal towns, and particularly the work of its prime exponent, Donald McGill. Orwell notes the role of this type of humour as a rebellion against convention in society and states that, despite the vulgarity, he would be sorry to see the postcards vanish.
New Writing was a popular literary periodical in book format founded in 1936 by John Lehmann and committed to anti-fascism.