Pelican Time: The Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney (1970)

(Gustave Doré)

(Illustrated London News, 1852)

(George Cruickshank)

(‘Preparing for an execution at Newgate, 1848’. Mansell Collection.)

(‘A Spree in a Railway Carriage’, about 1850. Mansell Collection.)

(Gustave Doré)

(From ‘The Day’s Doings’, about 1870. Mansell Collection.)

A comprehensive and no doubt endless fascinating & astounding volume, which I am very much looking forward to reading properly when time allows. All illustrations are contemporary to the period, credited as above.

Pelican Time: Witchcraft by Geoffrey Parrinder (1958)

As one might expect given the sober academicism to which Pelican aspired and generally succeeded, Geoffrey Parrinder’s study of witchcraft is probably the calmest and least sensational book I’ve ever found on the subject.

After running through an overview and analysis of the European witch persecutions, Parrinder subsequently turns his attention to his own area of special interest, Africa, where, after all, the same kind of social & psychological conditions that fuelled belief in witchcraft in Europe through the 16th and 17th centuries remain alive and kicking to this day.

It’s been a few years since I dipped into this one, but I remember it being a pretty fascinating read.

Pelican Time: The Cinema as Artby Ralph Stephenson & J.R. Debrix (1965)

(Cover design by Germano Facetti.)

Though it never ventures far beyond the established canon of ‘classic cinema’ (a canon that admittedly must have seemed a bit fresher in 1965 than it does today, with the addition of such recent bomb-shells as ‘Knife In The Water’ (1965) and ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’ (1962)), ‘The Art of Cinema’ is nonetheless a fine read, and to this day remains a good introduction to the basics of what is taught the world over as ‘Film Studies’. In classic Pelican style, Ralph Stephenson and the excellently named J.R. Debrix strike a careful balance between the abstract and the practical, waxing lyrical about the majesty and power of cinema’s greats, before calming down and telling us about precisely how they achieved the effects they did, right down to the nuts and bolts of where to put the camera, how to get the best lighting and how to work things out in the cutting room.

Reflecting this dual-purpose approach, I find that many of the images and captions in the book’s illustrated section take on a rather poetic quality, which I hope you’ll be able to get a taste of via the scans below.

Pelican Time: Fishlore by A.F. Magri MacMahon (1946)

To be honest, I was kind of hoping this volume would focus more on the cultural, folkloric or mystical lore of fish rather than the more prosaic business of biology, identification, catching and cooking, but no matter - an essential addition to my library nonetheless.

Pelican Time.

(1963, cover design by Bruce Robertson.)

(1960, cover design by Larry Carter.)

(1965, cover design by Hakan Lindstrom.)

(1970, cover design uncredited.)

I always promise myself that, one day, I’m going to find time to read all of the Pelican paperbacks cluttering up my shelves, becoming a man of great (if somewhat dated) wisdom in the process, my mind fully engorged with the collected knowledge and opinion of British academia as it stood circa 1960.

Never happens though – instead I just look at the covers, and pile them on top of all the lurid crime books to make the place look a bit smarter.

To ease the heft of this blog’s current summer downtime therefore, I thought I’d spend a few posts sharing some of my favourites with you, beginning with the above selection – volumes about which I have no particular comment, having not read them. But don’t they look splendid?