Selected English Short Stories

There is a particular charm to an old anthology, especially one with the briskly confident title Selected English Short Stories. It suggests a world in which someone at Oxford University Press sat down, surveyed the sprawling, eccentric, glorious business of English storytelling, and calmly decided that these were the pieces worth preserving between two covers. No drama, no marketing fireworks, no need to explain itself — just a firm editorial gesture implying that the English short story, in all its wit, melancholy, irony and occasional weirdness, could be tidied into one useful volume for the civilised reader.

Published in 1956 by Oxford University Press, this is exactly the sort of mid-century literary anthology that once populated school shelves, bedside tables and serious households with quiet authority. It belongs to that era when publishers still believed readers might enjoy being introduced to a range of authors simply because the writing was good, the form mattered, and exposure to literature was assumed to be broadly beneficial to the mind. A very optimistic age, in some respects.

The real pleasure of a collection like this lies in the variety. The English short story has always been a rather accommodating form, roomy enough to contain comedy, ghostliness, class anxiety, social embarrassment, moral unease, emotional precision, and those exquisitely awkward moments in which nothing explodes and yet everything changes. Anthologies remind us that literature need not always arrive in the form of a doorstop novel with dynastic concerns. Sometimes all the wit, sadness or unease in the world can be delivered in fifteen pages and a quietly devastating final paragraph.

There is also something deeply English about the short story at its best. It has a talent for understatement, for things left unsaid, for rooms full of tension disguised as politeness, for characters who would rather ruin their lives than make a scene. Even when the stories turn comic or strange, they often retain that unmistakable air of emotional restraint briefly losing control of itself. A volume like this is therefore not just a gathering of stories, but a compact museum of national habits: irony, discretion, discomfort, observation, and the occasional encounter with something unsettling in a drawing room.

As a 1956 Oxford University Press book, it has precisely the right sort of sober dignity. This is not a flashy anthology trying to reinvent literature for the impatient. It is a proper anthology: practical, respectable, and quietly convinced of its own usefulness. One imagines it being set for reading by someone in tweed, or carried dutifully to school in a satchel alongside more alarming obligations. Even now, it retains that mid-century educational seriousness which somehow makes old anthologies more appealing rather than less.

This copy is in Fair condition, which for a book of this kind feels almost thematically appropriate. Anthologies are rarely ornamental creatures. They get opened at odd pages, dipped into, consulted, carried about, pressed into service when someone wants “something short,” and generally treated as working books rather than shrine objects. A fair copy often tells you that it has actually fulfilled its purpose, which is rather more honourable than sitting untouched on a shelf for seventy years in a state of decorative purity.

The image suggests a volume that has seen life but remains perfectly serviceable: a little worn, a little tired perhaps, but still entirely ready to offer up its contents to the next reader. That too is part of the charm. There is something pleasing about a used anthology of short stories. It feels as though it has already accompanied several readers through several moods, which is exactly what short stories are for. They are literature for stolen intervals, rainy afternoons, trains, waiting rooms, and those evenings when one wants the satisfaction of reading something complete without committing to three generations of a family saga.

For the modern reader, Selected English Short Stories offers a double appeal. It is a reading copy, certainly, full of literary variety in compact form. But it is also a cultural object from a vanished age of publishing: the sort of book made with the assumption that good prose would always find its audience, provided it was printed clearly and bound properly. There is a quiet nobility in that assumption.

In short, this 1956 Oxford University Press anthology is a modest but deeply appealing survivor: worn enough to have character, solid enough to endure, and full of the rich, varied pleasures of the English short story tradition. In Fair condition, it remains a thoroughly attractive Crappy Old Books item for anyone who likes their literature concise, their wit dry, and their shelves improved by a slightly battered volume that still knows exactly why it exists.

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