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!

The Abbey (Bookhounds of London)

This week's post is inspired by Geoffrey Ashe's 1970s Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs, recently re-released in paperback. I've an interest in Hell-Fire Clubs, you may recall, so I picked this up on a whim.

Ashe is best known for his Arthurian Legends studies, but he acquits himself well here - though the text does have a whiff of the '70s about it, in much the same way Montague Summers' style and presentation is very much of his era, and dusty, erudite Edwardian upbringing.

Ashe starts with a study of Francois Rabelais, the Renaissance writer, humanist and religious scholar. Among the tales told by this fantasy and satire writer is Gargantua and Pantagruel, two scholarly and valiant giants. They fight battles against invading armies, defending France against giants, drown Paris in a bath of urine (delivered by Gargantua, standing atop Notre-Dame), delivers sermons against the evils of moral restraint, defend a judge who decides cases by rolling dice, and get up to no end of trouble.

Gargantua ends up co-founding the Abbey of Theleme. During the war against the giants he befriends the monk, Friar John, who comes to the giant's attention because John is the only monk who leaps to action when giants attack. All his fellow monks resort to prayer; John takes up a massive cross and uses it like a club, winning many victories.

After the war, Gargantua offers to make John the head of his order, but John refuses. He says he can't govern himself, so how can he lead others? Instead, he asks that the giant help him found his own order. This Gargantua does, and soon the former Friar has his own Abbey on the banks of the Loire, where young men and women both are welcome, so long as they are pretty and amenable. They all live in luxury, surrounded by art and beautiful things, and are allowed to study whatever they like.

All their life was regulated not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their free will and pleasure. They arose from bed when they pleased, and drank, ate, worked and slept when fancy seized them. Nobody woke them; nobody compelled them either to eat or to drink, or to do anything else whatever … In their rules there was only one clause: DO WHAT YOU WILL. 

All of which brings me to:

The Abbey

Cosmopolitan Soho, the 'square mile of vice,' holds London's red light district, thousands of foreigners, and Wardour Street, the cinema industry hub of London … (Bookhounds of London)

Through the centuries, the houses of Soho have been the homes of the great as well as the infamous. It is difficult to say exactly when the neighborhood first became the haunt of vice it is today. The change was gradual. But by the twentieth century, the names of its denizens were more likely to fill the calendar at the Old Bailey than the pages of Debrett … (Soho: London's Vicious Circle, Arthur Tietjen.

The Abbey is the informal name of a smoky, down-at heels Beak Street den, just off Regent Street. It is nominally owned by John Fitzhugh, who claims he can trace his family line back to the Conqueror. In reality it's more of a commune, with people coming and going all the time. Usually young, always pretty, seldom virtuous, the Abbey's people are well-known in Soho for offering a warm bed and food to anyone who, like them, are pretty but lack funds. They're well-read, talented, and generous.

The only one of the group not young and pretty is the man they all call Pantagruel, and he's also one of the few to have been there from the beginning. Pantagruel is (in game terms) a Rough Lad with intimate Streetwise knowledge of Soho. If they need cocaine, they send Pantagruel to get it. If they need someone to throw an obnoxious person out of the Abbey, Pantagruel's the bouncer. If they need bail, Pantagruel brings it. The big fellow's a remarkably scholarly Rough Lad, and has the same Special as a Catalogue Agent, which makes him a useful person for Bookhounds to know. Pantagruel's always on the lookout for new things to add to his collection, and willing to make a trade. Nobody knows his real name, and he seems oddly reluctant to share it.  

John Fitzhugh, Jamaican-born Grace Gibbons and artist's model Rebecca Lattimore are the three founders of the Abbey, and the only ones apart from Pantagruel who remember the old days, when the Abbey was more of a tea room for soldiers on leave from the Front during the Great War. It's been a while since the War, but none of the three seem to have aged a day. Fitzhugh is still the same slim, trim, Bright Young Thing he was when the Abbey opened its doors; Grace the dancer who knew Harlem back when the Cake Walk was still popular; Rebecca the model beloved of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, & Gravers. Restraint is completely foreign to them, and they slide in and out of popularity, as they constantly get thrown out and banned from Soho nightclubs for outrageous behavior. It takes a lot to get thrown out of a Soho nightclub ...

The Bookhounds know the Abbey as a constant source of income, and trouble. The Abbey's shifting population are good spenders, but they're also expert grifters and shoplifters. They have to be watched every minute they're in the shop, or they'll steal the books, the bookshelves, and the carpets the shelves were standing on. Give them ten minutes, and they'll take the floorboards too. Pantagruel usually makes good any damage, but it may be a few weeks or months before he gets around to it.

Hooks & Terrible Secrets

•  Are the founding trio, and Pantagruel, vampires? Possessed by evil spirits? Cultists? There's got to be some reason why they never age, or show any signs of wear & tear. Some former Beak Street scholars go on to dazzling, short-lived careers - the novelist who never publishes anything after his spectacular debut, or the musician who has one great night and then falls by the wayside. Why should that be?
•  Whenever the Abbey's people go missing for an evening, people say they're having a pint at the Crown. This pub, mentioned by Charles Dickens in his novel Nicholas Nickleby, closed in 1921 and long since demolished. Where are they going, really? Is there still a Crown, somewhere in the shadows of Beak Street?
•  The coppers at the Police Section House on Beak Street know the Abbey very well, and have nothing good to say about its founders. It's said that once, when Fitzhugh got particularly angry about some incident or other, he made half a cow appear in the unmarried men's quarters, and then disappear an hour later. Nobody figured out how he did it.  
•  Every so often, the Abbey hosts a party or an art installation, to raise funds. People who go to these parties are allowed to go wherever they like, and do whatsoever with whosoever, so long as all parties are willing. However some of those who go say they meet people at those parties they never expected to see. On one notorious occasion, eighteenth century gentlemen bandits 'Captain' James Maclean and his partner in crime, William Plunkett, showed up to rob the place, only to vanish entirely when they ran outside to make their escape. Perhaps they were actors playing a skit, as some claim, but one partygoer swears blind he watched the pair dissolve into thin air. On another occasion, in 193[insert year here], a young Salvador Dali attended an art show - a Dali who claimed not to know or remember anything after 1924. Whenever the Abbey throws another bash, people place bets on what strange thing will happen next.

Enjoy!