Bohemia in London
dust jacket
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| Author | Arthur Ransome |
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| Illustrator | Fred Taylor |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chapman and Hall |
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Publication date
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September 1907 |
| OCLC | 5973192 |
Bohemia in London (1907) was Arthur Ransome's seventh published book, and his first success. The book is about literary and artistic London in the 1900s, and the area of London covered is Chelsea, Soho, and Hampstead. He had moved to London in 1901, and first lived in Chelsea. It was published by Chapman and Hall in late September 1907. An American edition was published by Dodd, Mead of New York in 1907, who also published it in Canada under the imprint of the Musson Book Co of Toronto. A "slightly bawdy" ballad had to be omitted for North America. A second edition was published by his new publisher Stephen Swift Ltd (Charles Granville) in 1912, before Granville absconded. A new edition was published by the Oxford University Press in 1984.
Ransome himself wrote that it was his first book that "was not altogether a makeshift". In 1906 he was approached by Stefana Stevens a "clever young woman" who worked for Curtis Brown, a London literary agency founded in 1899. She was later an authority on Middle Eastern folklore, and as E. S. Stevens a popular romantic novelist. He was having tea with Cecil Chesterton at the St George’s in St Martin’s Lane, when she leant across the table and said:
It did not take much thinking about; he sketched a synopsis the next day and two days later Curtis Brown had a contract for him with the publisher Chapman and Hall, whose office was also in Henrietta Street; and to his “further amazement” the unwritten book was also sold to Dodd, Mead in New York, for "respectable royalties" in both countries. He worked in Chelsea and the London Library. He went off to Cartmel with crates of books and had more sent by the London Library, and "settled down at Wall Nook to be Hazlitt, Lamb and Leigh Hunt all rolled into one." As illustrator he selected Fred Taylor, impressed by his black-and white poster of a newsboy used to advertise the bookseller W. H. Smith.
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