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economy has grown slightly in the last three months of the year. | :00:05. | :00:12. | |
Now it's time for Meet the Author. Argus is a writer, broadcaster and | :00:12. | :00:18. | |
a dealer in rare books, his latest book of lost, stolen or shredded, | :00:18. | :00:24. | |
of missing works of art and literature started like a few years | :00:24. | :00:29. | |
ago as a Radio Four series. We invited him to ask why these | :00:29. | :00:39. | |
disappeared works of the creative imagination means so much to us. | :00:39. | :00:45. | |
You start this book with an account of a famous that of the Mona Lisa | :00:45. | :00:51. | |
and the less, in 1911, stolen as a patriotic act. Thousands went to | :00:51. | :00:58. | |
see the gap left behind, why? Accused got larger to see where the | :00:58. | :01:01. | |
moon police are used to be, than when it was sitting there. The | :01:01. | :01:07. | |
question of why that is is fascinating. But police said, it is | :01:07. | :01:12. | |
as if one of the towers of Notre Dame had disappeared. That is to | :01:12. | :01:18. | |
say the Mona Lisa is cemented into the Louvre in some way. It is bin | :01:18. | :01:22. | |
can keep away complex that such a thing could go away Bostock from | :01:22. | :01:27. | |
the painting point of view it is a fabulous career move. In 1911, the | :01:27. | :01:32. | |
theft takes place in August. The Mona Lisa is by no means the most | :01:32. | :01:42. | |
:01:42. | :01:42. | ||
famous painting. In 1913, when she comes back, she is. The key fact | :01:43. | :01:48. | |
about Frank after his he published very little during his lifetime, | :01:48. | :01:54. | |
his great novels were published by his friend from manuscripts that he | :01:54. | :01:58. | |
left at his death. But the author asked for the manuscripts to be | :01:58. | :02:02. | |
destroyed. They should be lost books, and you applaud his friend | :02:02. | :02:07. | |
for not doing that? He has a perfect conflict of interest. | :02:07. | :02:12. | |
Either he honours his friend's wishes and destroys the manuscripts, | :02:12. | :02:17. | |
or he honours the manuscripts and his respects his friend's wishes. | :02:17. | :02:23. | |
We are talking works of the highest literally Fenebahce literally | :02:23. | :02:28. | |
quality. We don't have the castle and we don't have the trial and | :02:28. | :02:32. | |
less Maxwell saves them. Who cares what the author felt. He could have | :02:32. | :02:40. | |
destroyed them himself, but he did not do so. What about the diaries | :02:40. | :02:45. | |
that could have been destroyed? The Secretary did not destroy them, did | :02:45. | :02:51. | |
you think she was right? Larkin kept a series of diaries for 30 | :02:51. | :02:57. | |
years and there were probably 30 volumes. They were, by all accounts | :02:57. | :03:03. | |
a repository of fantasy, particularly sexual fantasy and | :03:03. | :03:07. | |
bile. Larkin could be extraordinarily rude about his | :03:07. | :03:13. | |
fellow poets, about writers generally, he was racist, | :03:13. | :03:19. | |
homophobic. He used these diaries as a kind of almost getting pass | :03:19. | :03:27. | |
out of a wound. They wouldn't have shown him in a good light. There | :03:27. | :03:33. | |
was a lot and evidence that he showed why didn't he drew -- | :03:33. | :03:37. | |
destroy them himself? Graham Sutherland's portrait of Winston | :03:37. | :03:41. | |
Churchill. Winston Churchill hated it, either he or his wife destroyed | :03:41. | :03:47. | |
it? I sympathise with the Churchills in having destroyed it. | :03:47. | :03:53. | |
It was an image of him that preyed on his mind. Churchill, of all the | :03:53. | :03:57. | |
Englishmen of the 20th century deserved honour and the portrait | :03:57. | :04:02. | |
was designed to honour him, and he felt dishonoured. One is | :04:02. | :04:05. | |
sympathetic to the decision to get rid of it. The difference in that | :04:05. | :04:12. | |
case, it was not his to destroy? wasn't, but it was going to hang in | :04:12. | :04:15. | |
the Houses of Parliament, which was the last thing in the world he | :04:15. | :04:22. | |
wanted. In England, we don't have what the French have, which is a | :04:22. | :04:27. | |
concept of honour. If Napoleon had come back from the Napoleonic wars | :04:27. | :04:32. | |
and they had got somebody to do an image of him and showed him as a | :04:32. | :04:39. | |
bloated, hideous little man full of self worth, heads would have rolled. | :04:39. | :04:45. | |
The problem with that line of thought, art cannot just be a | :04:45. | :04:51. | |
geography, otherwise it would be Stalinism. Yes, I don't mind that | :04:51. | :04:56. | |
that portrait is now gone, it is an emotional thing. It is an opinion, | :04:56. | :05:03. | |
rather than an argument. But I feel it strongly. It is a complex case. | :05:03. | :05:07. | |
You are a rare book dealer by profession, although you were an | :05:07. | :05:13. | |
academic before. You said some were effective shies the object as | :05:13. | :05:22. | |
dealers must now. This is a copy to of your book �14.99. I have not | :05:22. | :05:26. | |
read that because your publisher sent it in the in electronic form. | :05:26. | :05:34. | |
Am I was off for having read the electronic version? I am worse off | :05:34. | :05:44. | |
:05:44. | :05:44. | ||
because I would have got a better royalty! I read about 80% of my | :05:44. | :05:48. | |
books electronically now. It is clear something is happening to the | :05:48. | :05:54. | |
form of the book which is only just beginning. My next book is called, | :05:54. | :05:59. | |
life and death of the book. I am going to argue, ignorantly, I | :05:59. | :06:05. | |
suppose, but in 50 years it will be a very rare sight to see somebody | :06:05. | :06:10. | |
walking around with a bunch of printed pages and a cover on them. | :06:10. | :06:15. | |
I think we are in the last days. For you as a dealer, there is a | :06:15. | :06:20. | |
loss because you sell books, but you also sell manuscripts, letters | :06:20. | :06:27. | |
and all of these things which exist almost exclusively electronically? | :06:27. | :06:32. | |
Writers wrote letters, now they are right e-mails. And someone who | :06:32. | :06:38. | |
deals in literally archives and manuscripts, is, how do you value a | :06:38. | :06:45. | |
letter as opposed to any male? If you buy a hard drive of somebody's | :06:45. | :06:51. | |
computer, and when Salman Rushdie sold his archive to a university, | :06:51. | :06:55. | |
the hard drives of his last four computers were included, will show | :06:56. | :07:00. | |
he played a lot of Super Mario Brothers, because he was very good | :07:00. | :07:06. | |
at that. It also means there are thousands of e-mails, which have a | :07:06. | :07:12. | |
value. On the hard drive they are unique, but they're not unique when | :07:12. | :07:17. |