Jeremy Mallinson.  "Durrelliania":  An Illustrated Checklist of Inscribed Books of LAWRENCE DURRELL and GERALD DURRELL and associated publications, letters and notes in the library of Jeremy J.C. Mallinson.  Privately printed, 1999.  (Available from Jeremy Mallinson, 'Clos Tranquil' Rue de Crocquet, St. Aubin, Jersey, JE3 8BR Channel Islands, UK).  82 pages.  10 photographs.  43 facsimiles.  £12 + postage & packing (paperback)
 
 


Paul H. Lorenz


I must confess that when I was first asked to review Jeremy Mallinson's "Durrelliania" I was extremely reluctant.  I couldn't imagine having anything interesting to say about an annotated bibliography of one person's private collection of inscribed books--but the person was Jeremy Mallinson, who as a young man had taken a summer job in 1959 taking care of the birds at Gerry's newly opened zoo in Jersey and who over the years took on more important roles, eventually becoming the zoo's director.  Rumor had it that Mallinson had a knack for getting more than a signature out of the Durrell brothers and that his collection contained some rare items, so I decided to take a chance.
    When Mallinson's "Durrelliania" arrived in the mail, its significance was immediately obvious.  The front cover is adored with a four-color reproduction of a previously unpublished oil painting by Oscar Epfs (Lawrence Durrell), a painting of one of the barn owls living in the old tower at the far end of the swimming pool in Sommières, while the back cover has a reproduction of one of Gerald's cartoonish self-caricatures complete with a menagerie of cartoon animals.  The pages of Mallinson's checklist are so heavily illustrated with drawings, facsimiles of inscriptions, and photographs that it is easy to forget that this book is actually an annotated bibliography and not a small-scale (approximately six-by-eight inch) coffee table book of Durrelliania.
    While the checklist of the Mallinson collection contains the full text of letters (including a letter explaining why Panic Spring was published under a pseudonym) and of all of the inscriptions, the facsimiles of the inscriptions are of particular interest.  On the page which contains a quotation from the Phaedo (omitted in later editions) of the Poetry London 1947 edition of Cefulû, next to a hand-sketched drawing of the labyrinth, Larry writes, "Human life is a damnable labyrinth out of which one never escapes," while on the title page of the first edition of Key to Modern Poetry, Larry's 1978 inscription asserts that the book "contains lots of inklings about the form of the novels which followed it up."  The inscription in Mallinson's copy of The Black Book asserting that Larry never regretted writing it is accompanied by a heart-shaped serpentine doodle confined in a maze.
    Most of the Gerald Durrell titles in the collection are merely inscribed by Gerry though some of them contain interesting doodles.  The title page of one copy of My Family and Other Animals is an exception, however.  It has a drawing of a young boy (identified as "Then") on one side of the title and a drawing of a grizzled old man on the other (identified as "And Now"), accompanied by a drawing of an owl sitting on a branch which appears to be the sail of a small boat being rowed by a Crusoe-like Gerald to a small island.
    The humor of the Durrell brothers comes through, not only in Gerry's whimsical drawings, but also in the inscriptions which reveal the nature of some of the friendly competition between the two brothers. In a copy of G.S. Fraser's Lawrence Durrell:  A Study given to Mallinson by Alan Thomas in 1968 with the inscription "For Jeremy Mallinson who collects animals as well as Durrells and can even tell them apart," Gerry Durrell has penned, "I have always thought that my brother was a study--thank God not one I have to include in my zoological work."  Below that, Larry signed his name:  "Lawrence Durrell speechless with rage!  1986."  Jeremy Mallinson's "Durrelliania" then is far more interesting than its title at first suggests.  The inscriptions, the photos, and the facsimiles provide insights into the playful character of the Durrells while providing a glimpse of some of the rarer items produced by the Durrell brothers.

Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000):  190-92.

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