752. A New Year's Letter about Books

At the beginning of 1928, Charles Ricketts wrote a note to Sydney Cockerell to thank him for bringing home a quotation. He then began to list the books he was reading or had read from a series published by Kegan Paul:

Do you keep in touch with the To-day and To-morrow series Kegan Paul. I find them most cheering & entertaining, some of them. Daedalus, Icarus, Tantalus Cassandra are remarkable. Platos American Republic & Narcissus most amusing. Even cranks like old Vernon Lee and Sylvia Pankhurst come out well. I have been greatly entertained by Haldane’s End of the World in his last book Possible Worlds.
[Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 3 January 1928: BL Add MS 52746, f 152]

J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future. 
A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923.
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1923

The To-Day and To-Morrow Series was a popular series of books that speculated on various topics about what the future would look like. Scientific research and social developments were extrapolated, suggesting, for example, that the world and humanity would be transformed by radio or space travel.

Ricketts referred to several volumes:

J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future. A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1923;

Bertrand Russell, Icarus or The Future of Science. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1924;

F.C.S. Schiller, Tantalus or the Future of Man. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1924;

F.C.S. Schiller, Cassandra or The Future of the British Empire. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1926;

Douglas Woodruff, Plato’s American Republic. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1927;

Gerald Heard, Narcissus. An Anatomy of Clothes. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1924;

Vernon Lee, Proteus or The Future of Intelligence. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1925;

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Delphos. The Future of International Language. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., [1927];

J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds, and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927.

Ricketts was not the only enthusiastic reader; James Joyce also read the volumes. He borrowed them from Sylvia Beach's bookshop/lending library, Shakespeare & Co, and used them to find words for Finnegans Wake (see the article by Robbert-Jan Henkes and Mikio Fuse on Genetic Joyce Studies).