Sunday 8 December 2019

Edmund Curll (Bookhounds)

Once again, this week's inspiration comes from Geoffrey Ashe's The Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs, the gift that keeps on giving.

Edmund Curll is the kind of bookseller whose success your Hounds long to emulate. Born in 1675(ish), to a moderately respectable family, he apprenticed to a bookseller in the 1690s, and thus began his meteoric rise to fame, fortune, chicanery, and pornography, more or less in that order.

His early career was yellow journalism, in that it was entirely invented and existed only to start arguments. Clickbait. He'd work in conjunction with others like him, publishing cheap papers and pamphlets, capitalizing on current affairs. If a witch trial captures public attention, print some quickie cash-grabber taking her side of the case, while your partner in bullshit prints a denunciation of same. By doing so, you grab both ends of the market at the same time, and, if you can keep the argument going long after the witch hangs, you can keep the money rolling in for weeks after the actual incident is no longer news. The filthier the better - Archbishop engaged in sexual relations with a cow, that sort of thing.

He also had a good line in pseudoscience, publishing cure-all pamphlets and medical remedy books. Of course they bore no relation to actual scholarly work, but scholarship's boring - and Curll wanted to sell.

He had no scruples whatsoever. Johnathon Swift never wanted his Meditations on a Broomstick to see the light of day, and certainly not under Swift's own name, so Curll stole the book and published it. Curll would publish any old rubbish and put the names of famous men on it, to drive up sales. His favorite trick was to publish manuscripts already in print elsewhere, without seeking permission from the author or the publishing house, and often the ensuing controversy and denunciation only helped to publicize Curll's books.

Another beloved cash cow of Curll's was the unofficial biography published after some great man's death, when they couldn't retaliate with troublesome lawyers. He became so notorious for this that the House of Lords passed a law specifically to protect themselves: nobody could write about, or by, a Lord without permission.

He didn't escape unscathed. Swift poisoned him with an emetic, and the schoolboys of Westminster School, outraged at his unofficial biography of their headmaster, lured him into an ambush and beat him silly, wrapping him up in a blanket and thrashing the package with sticks. However despite all this he emerged as venomous as ever, and went on with his back-alley tricks. he had a special, enduring, rat-like talent for publishing, and publicity. Once, when he was put into a pillory, he salvaged something from the wreckage by publishing, and selling, self-promoting pamphlets, which he sold to the crowds who came to see him pilloried.

His final years were spent writing and publishing the Merryland line of  pornography. A Compleat Set of Charts of the Coasts of Merryland, Succors from Merryland, that sort of thing - the female body as a kind of strange and exotic land, to be explored by bold adventurers.

Curll's greatest achievement was to outlive his critics. He eventually died, publishing to the last, in December 1747, in a shop in a little alley off the Strand, in the City of Westminster, which used to be called Curll's Court.

All of which brings me to:

Let's All Go Down The Strand


The Bookhounds know Harry Box as a bumptious little fart who just can't keep his mouth shut for longer than five minutes, a minnow among sharks, bottom-feeder in the murkier, algae-flecked puddles of publishing. However he has a remarkable knack for ferreting out gossip, and he makes the leap from book scout to publisher. He gets his own printing press - God alone knows how, or where from - and publishes the most outrageous, scandalous and thoroughly disreputable biography of a recently deceased grandee, who according to Box's account cut a broad path through the demi-monde of Paris before the War.

It sells. O God, how it sells. The Bookhounds can't keep enough of it in stock. Lawsuits follow, but that doesn't seem to stop Box, who has something else on the go, an equally scandalous biography. Where does he get his material? The children of the dead man are very anxious to know, and will pay quite a handsome figure to find out.

If the Bookhounds go in search, whether on the family's account or for reasons of their own, they discover something unusual. Box's press isn't the original press. The printworks are given printed pages to work from, but these printed pages are of a very old-fashioned type - the sort that hasn't been seen since the 1700s.

Box is keeping his actual printworks in some Strand cellar, away from hidden eyes. Now, why would he want to do that? Where did he find this odd printing press - and how is it that this press somehow knows what to print, without needing to be told?

Enjoy!


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