[Sir Arthur Bryant, historian and biographer of Samuel Pepys.] Seven Autograph Letters Signed and four Typed Letters Signed to publisher Philip Dosse, regarding reviews in ‘Books and Bookmen’, and his writing a multi-volume biography of Dr Johnson.

See his entry in the Oxford DNB, the revised version of which describes his pre-war Nazi sympathies. The recipient Philip Dosse was proprietor of Hansom Books, publisher of a stable of seven arts magazines including Books and Bookmen and Plays and Players. See ‘Death of a Bookman’ by the novelist Sally Emerson (editor of ‘Books and Bookmen’ at the time of Dosse’s suicide), in Standpoint magazine, October 2018. The present collection of eleven items totals 17pp (fourteen pages in autograph and four typed), in various sizes from 4to to 12mo. Each letter is on either one of his London or Salisbury letterheads, but in some the addresses are substituted, so that in the event only two are addressed from London. In the first letter (12 May 1974, typed) he states that he has been ‘working day and night to get the first volume of my Life of Dr. Johnson finished by the end of this month’ (the book remains unpublished), but that when he is ‘less driven’ he will be ‘delighted to review an occasional book’ for Dosse. In the next letter (17 November 1974, autograph) he states that his ‘first volume on Johnson - “The Ascent of Parnassus” - won’t be appearing now till next summer or autumn, as I wasn’t satisfied with it and have spent this summer rewriting it. Its successor - “The English Socrates” - will have to wait till the following year. I thought the review of John Wain’s book excellent.’ In the next letter (30 December 1974, autograph) he complains that it has taken the Post Office ‘more than five weeks’ to deliver the copy of John Terraine’s ‘The Mighty Continent’, sent for review by Dosse. In a subsequent letter (14 May 1975, autograph) he apologizes ‘that the slowness of my recovery from my fall should have so long delayed my doing what you so kindly asked me to do’. He has written a first draft of Terraine’s book, but is ‘not yet satisfied with it’. He is however enclosing a review of ‘what I consider to be a very unusual and perceptive volume of verse - a view I share with John Betjeman - by Louise Stockdale (The Hon Lady Stockdale) called “Waiting for Charon”, which seems to me to merit far more notice than it is likely to receive in the scanty columns of our current literary press’. On 30 September 1975 (typed) he thanks Dosse for asking ‘who I would like to review my Thousand Years of British Monarchy. Two people who were very keen that I should publish it are Eizabeth Longford and Dr. A. G. Dickens’. In a long autograph postscript he apologizes for ‘the untidiness of the script and for not having it retyped, but in the pandemonium of my move - I have myself manhandled more than 10,000 books and carried them to their new shelves, in the past four weeks’. A letter of 31 October 1975 (autograph) states that he is sending a copy of ‘my attempt to tell the essentials of our history in 35,000 words’. A week later he asks Dosse to arrange for a review of a book by ‘an old friend’, William Seymour’s ‘Battles in Britain’. ‘It is a very fine piece of work, readable, accurate and, as military history should be, admirably clear. If the idea of my doing it appeals to you, there is no need to send me another copy, as I have one.’ At the end of the same month, November 1975, Bryant thanks Dosse for his generosity over the advertisement for Bryant’s book, adding ‘The more I think about it, the more impressed I am by your achievement in making “Books and Bookmen” what it is - a great literary forum at a time when our literary cultural heritage seemed almost destroyed’. On 3 January 1976 (autograph) he sends a review of Margaret Lane’s book on Dr Johnson, and enquires whether the Athenaeum club subscribes to ‘Books and Bookmen’: ‘I have not seen it on display there. If not, I would like to write to the Librarian suggestion [sic] that, as the leading book-reviewing magazine, apart from the Times Lit. (and far superior to that!) now in England, it should certainly be in the Athenaeum library. The same applies to the R.A.C. and the Beefsteak, of both of which I am members, though I imagine Pratt’s hasn’t much place for monthly magazines, at least in these inflationary days.’