The Oxford Book Of Italian Verse

The Oxford Book of Italian Verse (1952) by St John Lucas – Clarendon Press – Good Condition – Ex-Library Copy

There are books that spend their working lives being hauled in and out of libraries, dropped into bags, read in the bath, returned late and eventually retired looking as though they have survived a minor war.

And then there is The Oxford Book of Italian Verse, which appears to have spent its library career being treated with almost suspicious respect.

Edited by St John Lucas and published by the Clarendon Press, this substantial anthology gathers centuries of Italian poetry into one suitably serious Oxford volume: a grand procession of Italian literary culture from the medieval world onwards, presented in the original language for readers prepared to confront poetry without the safety net of English translation.

Which may, in this particular copy’s case, explain a few things.

The book was formerly part of Coulsdon and Purley Public Libraries, yet it shows remarkably little of the battering normally associated with a long career in municipal circulation. There is a neat white reference number on the spine, but otherwise it has escaped most of the usual library indignities: no obvious battlefield of stamps, no exhausted binding, no air of having been carried around Croydon in a succession of damp shopping bags.

One possible explanation is that generations of borrowers saw the title, opened it, discovered that the poetry was actually in Italian, and quietly put it back.

This cannot, of course, be proved.

But the evidence is compelling.

Inside lies the rich tradition of Italian verse: the language of Dante, Petrarch, Renaissance courts, lyric poetry, religious devotion, love, death, politics and all the other subjects that poets have been insisting require several carefully arranged lines since civilisation began.

Italian is particularly well suited to poetry, having the unfair advantage of sounding musical even when somebody is merely asking where the railway station is.

In the hands of great poets, it becomes something considerably more formidable.

This is not a modern “greatest hits” anthology with cheerful introductions and little explanatory boxes reassuring the reader that everything is going to be fine. It belongs to the older Oxford tradition: scholarly, dignified and entirely confident that if you have picked up a book called The Oxford Book of Italian Verse, you probably know what you are doing.

There is something wonderfully imposing about these mid-century Oxford anthologies. They were designed not merely to be read but to occupy a shelf with authority.

You did not buy one because you fancied a quick poem before bed.

You bought one because somewhere in the house there ought to be an Oxford book of something.

Published in 1952, this edition also has the pleasing air of post-war academic publishing: solidly produced, intellectually serious and entirely free from any concern that a book might need to explain itself in marketing language before being allowed into the world.

The anthology offers a broad historical sweep through Italian poetic writing, making it useful not only as a collection of verse but as a literary reference work for readers interested in the development of the language and its major poetic traditions.

For anyone studying Italian literature, it provides the sort of substantial old-school anthology that can lead to either enlightenment or the sudden realisation that one’s Italian vocabulary is not quite as extensive as previously believed.

This copy is in Good condition, though in practical terms it presents considerably better than many ex-library books of comparable age.

Its library origins are still visible, most notably through the clean white reference marking on the spine, but there is little evidence of the rough handling that often accompanies institutional use.

Indeed, it remains in very good overall physical shape, which raises the charming possibility that it spent much of its public-service career patiently waiting for a borrower who never quite arrived.

Perhaps someone borrowed Dante.

Perhaps someone borrowed a phrasebook.

Perhaps this remained on the shelf, watching them go.

There is no ISBN, because this edition predates the modern numbering system and comes from an era when books were expected to identify themselves using such archaic methods as titles, authors and publishers.

Ideal for collectors of Italian literature, students of poetry, Oxford anthology enthusiasts, speakers and learners of Italian, former librarians, or anyone who appreciates books whose institutional past has left them with more character than damage.

Also suitable for readers who enjoy the peculiar melancholy of an ex-library book that may have spent decades publicly available while almost nobody felt brave enough to borrow it.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where the poetry is Italian, the library markings are surprisingly civilised, and we cannot prove nobody ever checked it out, but we have our suspicions.

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