Scarthin Books Cromford
  • Home
  • News
  • Vacancies
  • Cromford
  • Accommodation
  • Links
    • Interest Groups & Meetings
    • Café Philosophique
    • Cromford Community
    • Peak District Pubs
    • Dave’s Diatribes
    • Hungarian Connection
    • Friends & Favourites
    • Exhibitions in the Display Cabinet
    • Authors & Shakers
      • Alison Uttley
      • CWFS
      • Florence Nightingale – a fragment
      • Jerome K. Jerome
      • John Betjeman – A Characteristic Fragment
      • Quentin Blake
      • Richard Arkwright – Still Sitting
      • The D H Lawrence Gossip Column
      • Cromford Cafe Challenge
      • The Good Ship Scarthin Books
  • Scarthin Blog
  • Local Authors

Find Us

Scarthin Books
The Promenade
Cromford
Matlock
Derbyshire
DE4 3QF

01629 823272
nickscarthin@gmail.com

Opening Times

BOOKSHOP

9-6pm Mon-Sat

10-6pm Sun

Closed on XMAS Day & Boxing Day
………………………………

CAFE

10-5pm

(12-3pm hot food)

Parking

Don't be put off by the tucked-away location of the bookshop - there are places to park if you know where to find them:

- along the Prom (free)
- Market Place (free)
- Water Lane (free)
- Cromford Mill
- Cromford Canal

No Dogs Policy (June 2019)

Following several unfortunate incidents and an ever-growing canine population in our corridors, we have decided, with some regret, that it is time to revert to the practice of only a few years ago of asking our customers not to bring dogs into the bookshop.

This policy change has been hard for our staff to
agree, but we think it is the right course of action.

Assistance Dogs are, of course, exempt.

RSS Dave Mitchell’s Tessellations

  • Putting Australia in the Shade; A Lattice Labyrinth employed to Spectacular Effect 13/10/2020
  • A Birthday Card for the 1 in 1500 of us born on 29th. February 03/01/2020
  • March Fools’ Day (Brexit Day) 29th. March 2019 18/01/2019
Quentin Blake

A rare interview with the prizewinning illustrator by Jonathon Sale

Quentin Blake (Downing 1953) is a prizewinning illustrator and children’s author. The town-in-country feel of Cambridge influences his drawings even now

‘You got in by knowing nothing!’ my supervisor, Harold Mason, told me. I took it as a compliment to my independence of thought and reading. (1 hope I was right.) At Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School I was taught English by J H Walsh, who was not a ‘His Master’s Voice’ man but instead tried to cultivate in us a certain spontaneity. He prepared me for Cambridge, and Downing in particular; he knew people in that world. Downing wasn’t very public school; Simon Raven the upper-class novelist was very sniffy about Downing men who wore polo-necks and drank cocoa.

I had been sending drawings to Punch from the age of 14 – and at 16 one or two were accepted at seven guineas each. I didn’t know what to do with the cheque; I didn’t have a bank account. During my National Service I illustrated a teaching pamphlet for soldiers entitled English on Parade. I wasn’t a natural soldier – I lost a platoon on the Isle of Wight – but after National Service I found it hard to get back into writing essays. At Cambridge, I ended up with a 2.1 but managed only a 2.2 in my first year: I hadn’t quite got back into the swing of it.

I had a large room in college from which you could see Dr Leavis arriving on his bike, leaning it against the wall and getting off – all in one movement. I once did a drawing of a rather balloon-like Fellow talking to the gaunt Leavis among the Downing daffodils. Afterwards I drew Leavis with C P Snow for The Spectator at the time of the famous ‘Two Cultures’ row. It was a privilege to be near a mind of that order but we were mostly too daunted to say much! A lot of what Leavis did was very good but he wasn’t interested in his students until they were potential writers and critics. By contrast, Mason’s supervisions were enjoyable; he was more interested in individuals.
The good side of all this was that afterwards one never felt embarrassed about having an opinion that was different from anyone else’s. One could even disagree with Leavis – eventually. Occasionally you’d be invited to the Leavises’ for tea, where you experienced a strange style of niceness, perhaps because they didn’t know how to relate to people. They themselves never smoked but they plied people with cigarettes because they knew people smoked.

Leavis liked to believe that he led the shift of critical opinion towards Dickens, but I think there was a general shift of sensibility anyway. I was fascinated by Dickens and by his illustrators, who were crucial to his career as a novelist. It all began when he was brought in to write the script to a series of sporting prints, resulting in The Pickwick Papers. I’ve never lost my interest, and in 1994 was delighted to be asked to do a set of stamps for the Royal Mail on the theme of A Christmas Carol. Later, I also produced an illustrated version of the book.

Before I came up to Cambridge, Nick Tomalin [the well- known journalist killed in the Yom Kippur war] asked me to draw for Granta. I didn’t do very much, partly because my mind was on Punch and partly because I didn’t quite have the confidence then to relate to the smart students who ran the magazine. But I’m pleased I managed to art direct and illustrate a couple of issues before I went down. An emissary from Varsity, which was edited by Michael Winner, came to invite me to contribute, but I declined: it was being turned into the Daily Mirror.

I wrote optional essays for the tripos about Cezanne and Daumier, but in general my studies didn’t have much to do with my artistic interests. Looking back, though, I think they had a considerable effect. Illustrators are all hybrids of one kind or another and I think that learning to be a reader, knowing something about how writing works was important to me. It has meant that I’m one of not many illustrators ready to illustrate other people’s work as well as their own.

I liked Cambridge and walking around it. I very much enjoyed the feeling of being islanded amid the Backs and Fens. I specially liked that meadow behind the Fitzwilliam Museum – Coe Fen? – with its feeling of being in both town and country. Although I tend to leave out backgrounds from my drawings, that whole atmosphere of buildings and low-lying meadows with trees has appeared in quite a lot of my books. I’ve been hanging around marshes ever since: first Romney Marsh and now in France, where I work in a house in oyster country.

At one Cambridge cinema you used to be able to see Buster Keaton films. He was not only in a direct line from the white- faced clown invented by Deburau; he also knew how to compose the image on the screen. This had a direct bearing on what I do: tell stories in pictures.

I was at Cambridge at the same time as a friend from school, John Yeoman, and we’ve shared a flat more or less ever since. We collaborate on children’s books. Up With Birds!, which he wrote and I illustrated, is just out. We were in Cambridge last month, signing copies at Heffers Children’s Bookshop. Not long ago I received an invitation from the Admissions Tutor at Downing, offering not a place but a lunch. He told me his daughter had read in a magazine that I had been at Downing and thought I must still be there. She was very disappointed to learn that, 40 years on, I wasn’t still in residence!

Quentin’s official website is at www.quentinblake.com/

Social Media

Visit Us On FacebookVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On Youtube

We are now open as usual…

FULL GUIDELINES —–> CLICK HERE

You can also order from us in the following ways:

1) via our own New Books Ordering Website (new releases & selected titles) – CLICK HERE

2) via the new Bookshop .org platform, from which we receive a commission – CLICK HERE

3) by contacting us directly to arrange ordering and posting out your books – nickscarthin@gmail.com – 01629 823272

Book Tokens

We sell and accept both NATIONAL BOOK TOKENS and our very own SCARTHIN VOUCHERS (of any denomination). We can even post them out to you, free of charge

Specialist Stock

Copyright Scarthin Books 2018. All Rights Reserved

Website designed by David Booker | Scarthin Books