Quite a few rants
ago (Shot Down in Flames, April 7th) I commented on the absurd
number of non-fiction titles published on the same tired old subjects. One
inevitable result of this, due solely to the ignorance of publishers, is that
many such titles are hopelessly out of date. It is quite extraordinary, for
example, the number of angling guides that are published that still recommend
fibreglass rods, when fibreglass as a rod-building material was superseded by
carbon fibre in the early 1980s. Occasionally one comes across a book that is
not so much out of date as completely out of time, and one wonders how the hell
it ever came to be published. One such is this offering, with two chapters on pigsticking by Brigadier C. R. Templer, published in 1973 by
the aptly named London outfit Gentry Books, which I picked up cheap in Exeter
one time:
What on earth were
Gentry thinking of? Who did they think was going to buy the book, other,
perhaps, than Prince Philip? Dead people? Unsurprisingly, my copy is stamped
‘Withdrawn from Devon Library Services’. I suspect it was donated to them by
the author himself. Born in Assam in 1898, Major-General James Gordon Elliott
was an Indian Army man until his compulsory retirement in 1948
following Indian independence the year before. In his later years he settled in
Exmouth, where he penned this guide, which is actually a pretty good one, but
just so wonderfully anachronistic.
