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Remembering Ernest Bramah on Penguin’s 80th

Posted: July 31st, 2015 | No Comments »

Penguin paperbacks are 80 years old this week. They were revolutionary – though Allen Lane himself admitted there were antecedents (see my post on Albatross Books and Ella Maillart here).

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The anniversary reminded me that as a kid I used to read my parents old Ernest Bramah Penguins on rainy days. Braham wrote the Kai Lung series, the fictional meanderings of a Chinese itinerant storyteller. I thought these fantastic at the time though today they are tricky to reread and a bit superfluous. They were pure chinoiserie – Bramah never ventured beyond Europe and certainly never to China. That’s OK – many others didn’t too, though Bramah’s Kai Lung stories never quite achieve either the surface charm or the underlying hard edge of Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Chinatown stories that were published slightly later. Bramah, after being rejected by many publishers, finally got Kai Lung into print in 1900. Still, to a young me, there were many wondrous sentences in Kai Lung – “He who lacks a single tael sees many bargains”; “It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one’s time in looking for the sacred Emperor in low-class teashops”. Kai Lung and Bramah, courtesy of Penguin paperback reissues in the 1930s, were staples of chinoiserie reading though today have been almost totally forgotten…

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