Joseph Hone

Jan 22, 2025 | historytoday.com | Joseph Hone

Imagine a beehive. The inhabitants are nasty little things: venal, selfish, and corrupt; greedily buzzing around guzzling honey and flaunting their stripes. Even so, the hive prospers. Then, one day, by a sudden act of God, the bees clean up their act. They become virtuous. And before they know it, the hive is in free-fall. Without vanity, there is no need for fashionable clothing. Without pride or luxury, the construction industry falls apart.

Nov 6, 2024 | spectator.com.au | Joseph Hone

Book Curses Bodleian Library, pp.118, 14.99 ‘I would lend you my copy, but the fucker who previously borrowed it still hasn’t given it back.’ Those precise words were uttered to me by an eminent churchman, more in anger than in sorrow, while chatting at high table about a book he believed I might find useful. Its title has long since slipped my mind, but I remember thinking at the time: who lends a book to a friend and seriously expects to get it back?

Nov 5, 2024 | spectator.co.uk | Joseph Hone

‘I would lend you my copy, but the fucker who previously borrowed it still hasn’t given it back.’ Those precise words were uttered to me by an eminent churchman, more in anger than in sorrow, while chatting at high table about a book he believed I might find useful. Its title has long since slipped my mind, but I remember thinking at the time: who lends a book to a friend and seriously expects to get it back? Few things can be so often borrowed and so seldom returned.

Jul 7, 2024 | historytoday.com | Joseph Hone

Because books are the vessels through which historical knowledge is communicated between generations. Destroy your drafts and personal papers, because one day a graduate student will comb through them looking for incriminating titbits. Pat Rogers’ Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture. Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book. The death of Queen Anne. I would listen at closed doors and follow the court factions. Recently, Mark Goldie. Alexander Pope. Too few. Too many.

Jun 12, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Joseph Hone

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s​ Sonnets, a pamphlet of just 48 pages, was once the holy grail of book collectors. Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money). The book’s value was due not only to its extreme scarcity but to its central role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning.