Aun Aprendo: A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of Aldous Leonard Huxley. By DAVID J. BROMER

Abstract

This handsomely produced book, ‘designed in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont by Roderick D. Stinehour’, does not contain a CD-ROM, although it does have some excellent colour illustrations. One of them shows the Blackwell edition of Huxley's Selected Poems 1925, whose patterned paper boards have been reproduced as the background design to this volume's dust wrapper, and this typifies the tact and taste that has informed this whole production. Dr Bromer is a widely respected antiquarian bookseller, and he has taken trouble to identify the questions that booksellers are prone to ask about books, and answer them. He has chosen handsome and well-preserved copies of the books to illustrate as well, which adds to the charm of this volume; most of Huxley's books were designed with some care, and the discerning collector is right to insist on fine examples. He has managed to locate some of the rarest titles in the canon (although not, alas, the splendid pictorial dust wrapper to Alfred H. Mendes' Pitch Lake: A Story from Trinidad, a novel to which Huxley wrote an introduction for Duckworth in 1934, and which is about as elusive as any commercially published novel ever gets); and he is careful over paperback reprints, and many other reissues, which are often neglected — especially, alas, by booksellers. Dr Bromer's research has been exhaustive and exemplary, and he has been particularly effective at obtaining figures for print runs, a hurdle that defeats many bibliographers: it is oddly interesting to know that the English edition of Brave New World Revisited 1959 ran not only to 19,237 copies for sale, but to 113 proof copies as well.