Britain - The Sunday Times World Library

Britain - The Sunday Times World Library (1961) by J. F. Osborne – The Sunday Times
ISBN: None
Condition: Fair

Britain, 1961. The Beatles were still largely a Liverpool concern, decimalisation was ten years away, most televisions had all the visual subtlety of a grey fog, and the country was still adjusting to the awkward discovery that possessing an empire and continuing to possess an empire were apparently two different things.

Published by The Sunday Times as part of its World Library series, J. F. Osborne’s Britain attempts the modest task of explaining the entire country: its landscape, people, industries, institutions, history and general national character. This was the age when publishers had tremendous confidence in the ability of one reasonably substantial book to explain somewhere containing tens of millions of people.

And, to be fair, they made a decent attempt.

This is Britain before motorways covered quite so much of it, before out-of-town retail parks, before mobile phones, before the Channel Tunnel and before every railway station acquired a coffee shop charging roughly the 1961 price of a small house for a muffin. It captures a country balanced rather intriguingly between the post-war years and the social revolution that was about to arrive.

For the modern reader, much of the pleasure comes from seeing what Britain thought Britain was in 1961. Agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, government, the countryside and the great cities are all treated with appropriate seriousness. Industry still occupies the sort of place in national life that technology companies occupy today, except with significantly more chimneys.

There is something particularly appealing about vintage geographical books because they accidentally become history while nobody is looking.

A photograph originally intended simply to illustrate a British street may now contain cars worth more than the houses behind them. A factory presented as an example of modern industrial efficiency may have disappeared forty years ago and subsequently become luxury flats called something like The Foundry. A perfectly ordinary railway scene may cause grown transport enthusiasts to stare silently at the page for several minutes.

The early 1960s were an especially interesting moment to capture Britain. The country remained recognisably connected to the world of the 1940s and 1950s, yet modern Britain was beginning to emerge. Consumer culture was expanding, television was transforming daily life, immigration was reshaping communities and a younger generation was preparing to make the remainder of the decade rather noisier than its parents had anticipated.

None of this, naturally, prevented serious-looking gentlemen from continuing to stand beside pieces of industrial machinery for photographs.

The book has the wonderfully authoritative tone common to reference works of the period. There is little suggestion that the reader might become distracted halfway through a paragraph and start looking at pictures of cats. You have opened a book about Britain and Britain will now be explained to you.

There are no clickable links. No pop-ups. No videos beginning automatically. No request to accept cookies from "trusted partners".

Just Britain.

In a book.

What a remarkably efficient system.

Its age also makes it useful as an unintentional time capsule. Language, assumptions and social attitudes that seemed entirely ordinary to a reader in 1961 can look noticeably different more than sixty years later. That does not reduce the book’s interest; quite the opposite. Old reference books often reveal as much about the period in which they were written as they do about the subject they were attempting to describe.

This volume should therefore appeal not only to collectors of British history and geography, but also to anyone interested in post-war society, vintage publishing, changing landscapes, old industry or the peculiar pleasure of discovering what was considered completely normal shortly before you were born.

It would also suit anyone nostalgic for a Britain they remember, a Britain their parents remember, or a Britain they have reconstructed entirely from old films in which everyone wears a hat and trains apparently arrive on time.

Condition: Fair. The book is otherwise in good overall condition for its age, but there is a slight split along the inner seam of the cover, which has left the binding a little wobbly. It remains together and usable, and the problem could be very readily reinforced with a small piece of suitable tape if desired.

We have deliberately not performed this small act of book surgery ourselves because some collectors prefer original condition, while others are perfectly happy to introduce a carefully positioned piece of tape and restore order to the universe.

So it is not falling apart dramatically in your hands like an archaeological manuscript exposed to fresh air. It is simply a sixty-five-year-old book whose cover has become slightly less enthusiastic about its contractual relationship with the pages.

A fascinating piece of early-1960s British publishing and a pleasingly substantial snapshot of the country immediately before the decade really got going.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where "Fair" means we tell you exactly what is wrong with it rather than photographing the good side and hoping nobody asks.

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