Books in TV Shows

[HUGHJAMPTON]

name='CaptainWaggett']A library book with a loose dust jacket? I wonder when that ended

Just after this episode



Surprising how many people discarded the dust jacket altogether back then.

[cornershop15]

name='HUGHJAMPTON' date='29 May 2010 - 03:15 PM' timestamp='1275142530' post='433045']

Surprising how many people discarded the dust jacket altogether back then.

There might be some truth in that, Hugh. My father was like that with books, and even the weekly issues that formed encyclopedias by the likes of Purnell. He appears to have thrown away the front and back covers for The British Empire, for example, but kept those for History of the 20th Century. Years later, I would do the same for The Movie series, from the early 1980s.



A few years ago, I had a brief correspondence with an eBay seller who was auctioning his father's complete set of The History of Rock. I was all set to buy the volumes but he had to ask his father, at my request, if the magazines were intact (i.e. with front and back covers), and they weren't, so I had to wait for another opportunity. It's probably a generational thing. Some people didn't just throw away covers in those days, but destroyed thousands of programmes as well. Fortunately, this wasn't one of them ...

Roger Moore in 'The Saint'



In the 1964 episode Jeannine, directed by our Mr. Moxey, Simon Templar is seen reading Les rempart des beguines (1951) by Francoise Mallet-Joris:





On the left is the poster for the 1972 film adaptation starring Anicee Alvina and Nicole Courcel.

The story is about a girl who has a lesbian relationship with her father's bisexual girlfriend

[cornershop15]

Well done, Hugh. I probably spotted that book when I watched the episode but it's a couple of years since I've seen it.



In Special Branch: A Date with Leonidas (1969), Detective Superintendent Wensley Pithey stuns Greek terrorist Damien Thomas by opening a parcel

that looks identical to the one containing the bomb that murdered ill-fated Detective Sergeant Michael Beint. Inside is this book by Lawrence Durrell:

"It's a book called Bitter Lemons. All about Cyprus."



L-R: Det. Con. Keith Washington, Damien Thomas, Wensley Pithey, Det. Con. Michael Keating and Derren Nesbitt as Det. Chief Insp. Jordan.



Hey, look what I found. The same cover is featured on it's Wikipedia page:



First Edition, 1957

[Gerald Lovell]

Judgement Day



I assume DANGER MAN is not passing judgement on the book he's reading while keeping an eye on ex-Nazi scientist Guy Deghy:





It seems to be this 1963 edition:

[cornershop15]

Excellent stuff, Gerald I watched that episode of Danger Man only a couple of weeks ago and remembered your post.



Starting to get concerned about Hugh, who has been equally brilliant at the Books and Records (on screen) threads. He's been away longer than me.



I have stored a few more discoveries during my own absence, either in folders or in the memory. This is again from an Armchair Thriller story,

The Chelsea Murders, which starred Dave King. Here though, it's Guy Gregory who is seen at the local library looking through one of the books:

Even during normal viewing, I couldn't resist going into 'screencap mode' and so kept stopping the picture to have a better look. Seconds later, the unfamiliar Guy hands the mystery tome to Librarian Fiona Mathieson, but I was none the wiser as I could only make out the last word of the main title. However, after her customer (and admirer) has left, Fiona decides to take a sneaky peek at the book and all is revealed - for about half a second! It's Edward Lucie-Smith's Waking the Dream - Fantasy and the Surreal in Graphic Art 1450-1500 (first published in 1975):

I found this description via a Google search, from a now defunct website called 'Jahsonic, a vocabulary of culture', on it's Fantastic Art page:

The tradition of the grotesque is particularly alive in prints. The fantastic is especially suited to the graphic medium, and it is possible to track almost its entire history in etchings, engravings and woodcuts. A fine book, The Waking Dream: Fantasy and the Surreal in Graphic Art 1450-1900 charts this progress through Holbein’s Dance of Death, the macabre prints of Urs Graf, the engravings of Callot, seventeenth-century alchemical prints, scientific, medical and anatomical illustration (I adapted the embryonic development diagrams of Ernst Haeckel for my drawing Species/Gender), emblems, the topsy-turvy world popular prints, Piranesi’s Prisons (which influence my architectural fantasies), Rowlandson, Gillray (whom I studied for guidance on how to draw caricature for drawings like my Seven Sins) , Goya, Fuseli and Blake, and into the nineteenth century with Grandville, Daumier, Meryon, Doré, Victor Hugo’s drawings and Redon. The tradition continues with the Symbolists and Richard Dadd, Ensor and Kubin, through to Surrealism, which recognised many of the artists of the grotesque and fantastic tradition as precursors. It is via Surrealism that much of this work has come to be appreciated. In the twentieth century this type of imagery has permeated culture, and is found everywhere, in diverse art forms including: the satiric installations of Kienholz, the drawings of A. Paul Weber, the cartoons of Robert Crumb, the animated films of Jan Svankmajer, photographs by Witkin, plays by Beckett, science fiction by Ballard, fantastic literature like Meyrink’s The Golem, Jean Ray’s Malpertuis, the art and writings of Bruno Schulz and Leonora Carrington, films by Lynch, Cronenberg and Gilliam; all are part of a spreading network of connections, the branching tentacles of the grotesque. -- Paul Rumsey via http://www.angelfire.com/pa5/rumsey/artist.htm [Dec 2005]

I don't know how long I will be able to keep this sudden burst of activity going but I've achieved a lot today. Still a lot of catching up to do.

[cornershop15]

The Horse: Its Treatment in Health and Disease

Edited by Professor J. Wortley Axe (1905)

Read by Dora (Gillian Blake) in the Follyfoot episode The Bridge Builder (1973):


This is one of the nine beautifully-bound volumes in a set that's still available, more than 100 years later:

Classic Bindings Ltd. - The Horse

[cornershop15]

Mrs. Warner's revolving bookstand in 'Children of the Stones': Into the Circle

Mrs. Warner was played by Peggy Ann Wood, credited as Peter Ann Wood in the next episode!

When Katharine Levy and Peter Demin meet for the first time at the post office, she is seen with this book:


I can't identify it but the cover can be seen to better advantage below David Niven's book.
Yes, that really is his autobiography, The Moon's a Balloon (1973), and I am fairly confident
that the Dennis Wheatley novel near the bottom right corner is Desperate Measures (1974):

Further evidence: The publication of that edition, according to the description on eBay, was
1976, which is when the programme was filmed. Frustratingly blurred, but the shapes match.

[cornershop15]

In the Public Eye episode The Windsor Royal (1973), Alfred Burke is assigned by Guy Standeven to spy on his wife, Jean
Channon, who he suspects of having an affair. The enquiry agent follows her to a Windsor tea shop, where she is joined
by the much younger Richard Eden, who presents her with a book containing T.S. Eliot's manuscript for The Waste Land:



Compiled by his widow Valerie and published in 1971:

The Windsor Royal of the title was actually a rose, beloved by Raymond Francis. This episode was filmed in 1972, exactly 50 years after The Waste Land was first published. More information about "the most influential poem in modern literature" here:

When the New York Public Library announced in October 1968 that its Berg Collection had acquired the original manuscript of The Waste Land, one of the most puzzling mysteries of twentieth-century literature was solved. The manuscript was not lost, as had been believed, but had remained among the papers of John Quinn, Eliot's friend and adviser, to whom the poet had sent it in 1922.

If the discovery of the manuscript was startling, its content was even more so, because the published version of The Waste Land was considerably shorter than the original. How it was reduced and edited is clearly revealed on the manuscript thought the handwritten notes of Ezra Pound, of Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, and of Eliot himself.

In order that this material might be widely available for study, the poet's widow Mrs Valerie Eliot prepared the present edition, in 1971, in which each page of the original manuscript was reproduced in facsimile, with a clear transcript facing pages. Mrs Eliot also included an illuminating introduction, explanatory notes and cross-references, together with the text of the first published version of The Waste Land, thus completing the evolution of the most influential poem in modern literature.

(From the Faber and Faber website)

The Waste Land - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[theuofc]

From Screen Two: The Man From The Pru, starring Jonathan Pryce as William Wallace, who was accused of murdering his wife Julia, on the 20th January 1931, 80 years ago from this coming Thursday.

Hmm. I haven't seen this show. Is Wallace reading this prior to the dirty deed or in prison, assuming he was tried and found guilty? If he read Aurelius before the deed, it certainly had no effect on him.

[theuofc]

Surprising how many people discarded the dust jacket altogether back then.

OMG. I adore the jackets on books. Sometimes I'll buy a book at a boot sale just for the cover. If there are two books, one with and without the cover, hands down I buy the book with the cover.

[HUGHJAMPTON]

Hmm. I haven't seen this show. Is Wallace reading this prior to the dirty deed or in prison, assuming he was tried and found guilty? If he read Aurelius before the deed, it certainly had no effect on him.

You can catch the complete play on YT, which I recommend

Wallace was a devotee of the work, so did indeed read it before the dirty deed, and as a condemned man was allowed to have it in prison.

[theuofc]

You can catch the complete play on YT, which I recommend

Wallace was a devotee of the work, so did indeed read it before the dirty deed, and as a condemned man was allowed to have it in prison.

Thanks, Hugh. It's going to be bone chilling, I can tell.

[cornershop15]

Richard O' Sullivan and Tessa Wyatt in 'Robin's Nest'

In the episode Away from All What? (1978), Tessa is seen reading Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys:


First published in 1975 and soon turned into a film*:


The Choirboys (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

*The Choirboys (film) at the Internet Movie Database

There were also screen adaptations of The Blue Knight, a TV movie starring William Holden (later a series), and The Onion Field.

[Big Figure]

Do fake books count?

I'm thinking of Jason King's Mark Caine novels which featured heavily in Department S, with corny titles such as "From China Most Sincerely".

[cornershop15]

Sorry, Big Figure, I must have missed your post. I don't see why not (the same goes for the Paintings threads). You've reminded me of a capture I did of Yootha Joyce in George and Mildred. It's around somewhere. We've already had a fake book, come to think of it, from The Missing Page episode of Hancock's Half Hour.

This one's real enough. James Aubrey's reading is disturbed in this scene from Another Bouquet - Reprisals (1977):


And here it is. Vanishing Africa by Mirella Ricciardi, first published 1971:

This is the second edition, which came out in October 1974.


A selection of colour and black-and-white photographs, maybe even including the
two or three pages James briefly looks at earlier in the scene, can be found here:

Welcome to Vanishing Africa Ltd

[sisterluke]

As a companion to 'Books in Films', which has gone a bit quiet at the moment, I thought I'd start

a thread for books on 'telly', beginning with Angus Wilson's Late Call in Tales of the Unexpected:





This is from the episode Poison (1980). Andrew Ray is far too worried about the snake that's wriggled it's

way into his bed to think about reading. He got what he deserved! Just look at the state of that book



Any other examples of 'Books in TV Shows'? Comedy and Drama rather than Reality and Chat if that's okay!

Coincidentally, the BBC had serialised the novel in 1975 with Dandy Nichols and Michael Bryant. And jolly good it was too!

[sisterluke]

[QUOTE=Freddy;1835463]Crossroads



Chris Hunter, son of David Hunter (Ronald Allen) turned up one day at the motel, studying at the Sorbonne he had got mixed up with a sort of Baader Meinhoff group (IIRC). In his hand was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

I'm speechless!

[sisterluke]

There might be some truth in that, Hugh. My father was like that with books, and even the weekly issues that formed encyclopedias by the likes of Purnell. He appears to have thrown away the front and back covers for The British Empire, for example, but kept those for History of the 20th Century. Years later, I would do the same for The Movie series, from the early 1980s.



A few years ago, I had a brief correspondence with an eBay seller who was auctioning his father's complete set of The History of Rock. I was all set to buy the volumes but he had to ask his father, at my request, if the magazines were intact (i.e. with front and back covers), and they weren't, so I had to wait for another opportunity. It's probably a generational thing. Some people didn't just throw away covers in those days, but destroyed thousands of programmes as well. Fortunately, this wasn't one of them ...

Roger Moore in 'The Saint'



In the 1964 episode Jeannine, directed by our Mr. Moxey, Simon Templar is seen reading Les rempart des beguines (1951) by Francoise Mallet-Joris:





On the left is the poster for the 1972 film adaptation starring Anicee Alvina and Nicole Courcel.

The story is about a girl who has a lesbian relationship with her father's bisexual girlfriend

You can't help feeling that the people behind these series had their tongues in their cheeks a great deal of the time. Many fans of the Saint like my mother) would have been horrified if they'd known the content of this novel.