Friday, December 14, 2007

Malcolm Saville's Message of the Coronation

I'm always on the lookout for something a little different to post here to keep things lively and something I've just stumbled across was that Malcolm Saville was invited by the Dean of Liverpool to contribute a message to a souvenir booklet which was to be handed out to every boy and girl who visited Liverpool Cathedral in the Coronation Year of 1953. He also spoke at two children's services on June 3 and 4 of that year.

Saville was clearly very enthusiastic about the Coronation, having written The Coronation Gift Book for Boys and Girls, published in November 1952 and described by the Times Literary Supplement (28 November 1952) as an "unsentimentalized account of the history, meaning and symbolism of the coronation ceremony". The book proved so popular it went through three editions before the crowning of Queen Elizabeth took place seven months later.

Malcolm Saville's 'Message of the Coronation' was printed in the Children's Newspaper for June 6, 1953.

(* The quote from the TLS is from Mark O'Hanlon's biography of Malcolm Saville, Beyond The Lone Pine (Worcester, Mark O'Hanlon, 2001).)
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4 comments:

  1. Andrew Sherman14 Dec 2007, 19:20:00

    I loved Malcolm Saville as a kid and wanted to get a few books for my kid. But when I saw the prices of the reissues I decided to go for the secondhand beat up copies instead.

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  2. Steve14 Dec 2007, 19:42:00

    Each to his own, I guess. I'm keen to read the books as they were originally written, so the restored text is the big draw for me. That won't affect the later stories so much but the early ones were quite heavily edited in their Collins and Armada incarnations.

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  3. Andrew Sherman18 Dec 2007, 18:41:00

    I missed the part about the restored text.

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  4. Steve18 Dec 2007, 19:23:00

    Easily done. The price is relatively high for a paperback but GGB specialises in short print-run books aimed at fans. So the Lone Pine novels all have lengthy introductions examining their publication history and various other bits 'n' bobs as well as restoring the texts and original illustrations.

    All I can suggest is, try the first one and see if you like it. (And if you do like I do, which is buy a couple of books at a time, you can usually qualify for free postage from Amazon, which saves a few pennies.)

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