‘A secret house’: Waugh’s private library

One of the twentieth century’s most strident satirists, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was also a determined book collector, amassing over 3,500 volumes in his ‘mania’ for collection. His collection reflects a lifelong bibliophilia which extended to all aspects of the book trade: typesetting, bindings, papers, private presses, calligraphy, and rare books.

His published letters, diaries, essays and novels demonstrate his abiding interest in books, not only as the stock-in-trade of the working novelist, but also as a combative reader and book owner. Waugh’s pugilistic opinions on prose style, ethical codes, and social mores can be seen paralleled in his equally strongly-held, and revealing, views on the physical book, its housing, and care.

In particular, his sense of ‘absolute possession’ over his library can be read as a controlling and regulating impulse allied to that of the satirist. In private and public writing from the Second World War onwards, Waugh the collector is simultaneously consumer, producer, and cultural combatant, and his careful assemblage of a library at odds with mainstream reading culture proffers a striking example of the situated case of individual reading crucial to understanding the place of books in the contested cultural landscape of the twentieth century.

Naomi Milthorpe (PhD. ANU) is Lecturer in English at the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. Her research centres upon interwar comic and satiric fiction and alternative modernism, particularly in the work of Evelyn Waugh.

She has published on aspects of Waugh’s fiction and reading, most recently in Affirmations: of the modern and in the edited collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence (EUP, 2015).

In 2015 she will take up an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, with a project titled Evelyn Waugh in the Library.