Over four decades, the London Review of Bookshas grown into Europe's leading literary magazine, publishing book reviews and essays - interspersed with letters, poems, and stories - every fortnight. However, in the words of its founding editor, Karl Miller, it began life as just 'a small paper', and its evolution has bred countless stories. After all, it takes an awful lot of gossip, scandal, ideas, mistakes, feuding, parties, shamelessness, ingenuity, arguments, courage and ample correspondence - with towering contributors and ever-disappointed subscribers alike - to make a reasonably interesting paper twice a month.
London Review of Books: An Incomplete History invites readers behind the scenes for the first time, reproducing a fascinating selection of literary artefacts from archives and personal collections. Encompassing letters, notebooks, drawings, postcards, fieldnotes and typescripts from the magazine's first four decades, many of them never previously published, this intimate collection brings a unique slice of Bloomsbury's heritage alive. Fragments by legendary authors such as Angela Carter, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Sacks, Edward Said, Martha Gellhorn, Jenny Diski, and Kurt Vonnegut - alongside heroic letter-writers and unlikely contributors - are contextualised with captions and backstories by LRB writers and editors, as well as introductory essays by Mary-Kay Wilmers and Andrew O'Hagan.
The result is an idiosyncratic account of forty years of intellectual life, which sheds new light on great careers, famous episodes and some of the history going on in the background: a testament to the power of print in the new information age, and a must-have for literature lovers everywhere.
