Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

April 2003 Volume 1 (2)

Endpiece

On and off the shelves

Brian Osborne ponders on writers going in and out of fashion, and on one Scottish author he hopes will stay in favour.

The 150th birthday of Scottish Public Libraries, which we are celebrating with the commemoration of the passing of the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act 1853, made me think about fashions in literature - well it would, wouldn't it?

I wondered what was being published in 1853 and like a good retired librarian I turned to the British Library catalogue and entered 1853 in the publication date field. This produced 17,033 hits and I decided that if this article was to get written before the deadline (and one so wants to impress a new editor) I couldn't scan them all. So I looked up some authors who were active in 1853 and found that Dickens published Bleak House, Mrs Gaskell published Cranford and Charlotte Bronte brought out Villette that year.

Not a bad bag but then I thought of all the other thousands of 1853 books lingering, uncalled for, in the stacks of the British Library and from there it was a short leap to think of more modern writers who have gone in and out of fashion.

Here I have to, as they say, "declare an interest."

Neil Munro is slightly more than an interest for me - he has been a major concern of mine for nearly 15 years now and also a modest, but regular, source of income. In what was to be one of my very few good ideas I decided that what the world needed was an annotated edition of Munro's Para Handy stories - and some 40,000 copies later the world seems to agree. (Birlinn, GBP 8.99 if you wish to go out and make it 40,001.)

Fifteen years ago the Pan edition of the Para Handy stories was all that remained in print of an author seen in his own lifetime (1863-1930) as a major historical novelist in the tradition of Scott, Galt and Stevenson. The novels like The New Road had gradually gone out of print and, like so many other writers, in the years after his death his reputation declined. We have seen the same thing happening with Eric Linklater more recently.

In his own lifetime Munro had been attacked by Hugh MacDiarmid (but who wasn't?) for his failure to deal with modern issues and for concentrating on the past history of the Highlands. Whether there is much validity in MacDiarmid's attack is, I think, doubtful but it certainly had an influence on Munro's standing in the Scottish literary canon.

However reputations can rise as well as fall, and Munro's has revived remarkably in the last ten years. Five collections of short stories, five of the major novels, a Munro anthology, and a volume of poetry are now available. The Neil Munro Society was founded in 1996 (Secretary - Brian D. Osborne - now do you see what I mean about "declaring an interest"?) and, proof positive of a revival, there is even a website (www.neilmunro.co.uk).

The most recent evidence of life after death for Munro comes in the publication in February 2003 of Exploring New Roads: Essays on Neil Munro. Edited by Ronald W Renton and Brian D. Osborne (all right, all right, you get the picture!) and published by House of Lochar, it represents the first serious attempt to put Munro in his proper perspective as a major Scottish literary figure.

What is remarkable about the collection is that heavyweight academic figures such as Douglas Gifford and Ted Cowan, respectively the Professors of Scottish Literature and Scottish History at Glasgow University, have contributed to the project. Ten years ago Munro would not have received anything like that degree of academic respectability, nor would his work be seen as appropriate material for a doctoral thesis at Glasgow - which another of the contributors to the essay collection is currently completing. Interestingly enough this PhD candidate is of Polish birth and did her Master's degree in Dusseldorf - interest in Munro is international.

There have been valiant efforts - for example through the Canongate Classics - to make a wider range of Scottish writing available to be read, studied and enjoyed and it is surely essential for the health of contemporary Scottish writing that writers and readers should be able to place today's work in the context from which it emerged.

Information Scotland Vol. 1 (2) April 2003

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Last updated: 12 February 2004