The rabbit guy, it turns out, loved Jane Austen.
Last week, the Guardian reported that the large and valuable library of the late Richard Adams, author of the beloved sort-of-but-not-really-a-children’s-book Watership Down, will be auctioned on December 14.
Among the covetable gems of Adams’ collection is a complete set of Jane Austen first editions. A browse through the online catalogue, however, turns up many more mouthwatering tidbits for book lovers: first editions of Dickens, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and George Eliot; a Shakespeare Second Folio; contemporary classics signed by their authors. . . (Find the catalogue here; the Austen books are on pages 36-7.)
Adams was a voracious reader from childhood, long before he aspired to a writing career of his own -- Watership Down, the allegorical and sometimes bloody saga of a group of plucky rabbits in search of a safe home, was published in 1972, when Adams was over fifty. The extraordinary international success of that book and those that followed gave him the money to pursue serious book-collecting.
Although as far as I can recall, her novels are a bunny-free zone, Austen apparently had a special place in Adams’ heart: the auction catalogue quotes from his autobiography, in which he describes his first reading of Emma, when he was a twenty-two-year-old soldier in World War II, as “like a revelation.” The same novel, a perennial favorite, was also one of the last books he read before his death last year, at ninety-six.
“With his undergraduate studies interrupted by war, he found the works of Jane Austen, and particularly Emma, a solace and mainstay – as did thousands of soldiers both before and after him,” his daughter, Juliet Johnson, writes in a touching introduction to the auction catalogue. “And so it went on all his life. To Richard, books were a consolation that broadened your horizons, told you truths about things most people in your life would brush under the carpet or have no experience of, and comfort you when things were bleak.”
The vastness of Adams’ collection apparently surprised his family, and Johnson sounds a wistful note that will resonate with anyone who has liquidated a loved one’s cherished, painstakingly assembled possessions. “It is sad to see so much of it go,” she writes, “but my father would no doubt have taken comfort from his beloved Thomas Hardy, and perhaps have been pleased that after his death these great books will pass to others who will love and treasure them.”
The auction house has valued Adams’ Austen collection at £60,000-£80,000 ($79,000-$106,000). Wanna bet that it will sell for a lot more of the green stuff?