Alexandra Reza’s review of Adam Shatz’s new and nuanced book on Frantz Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic (March 8), quite appropriately warns of the pitfalls of reducing a polemical yet complex figure such as Fanon to a one-dimensional caricature, in order to serve a particular political agenda, while ignoring what would complicate the preferred narrative advanced by the thinker’s acolytes.
There is something especially telling and ironical about Fanon that would no doubt shock and dishearten many of today’s pro-Palestinian protesters who look to him as the revolutionary hero who created the anticolonialist paradigm that animates their protests. In Irene L. Gendzier’s Frantz Fanon: A critical study (1973), Fanon is shown to have had a great admiration for Jean-Paul Sartre’s intellectual evisceration of antisemitism, as put forward in the latter’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946): a commitment to the fight against antisemitism that is conspicuously absent from the vast majority of those who invoke Fanon as an intellectual and revolutionary icon – to say the least.
Karl Marx lived long enough to say “Je ne suis pas une Marxiste” in reaction to some of what was said and done in his name. We can only wonder how Fanon would have reacted to today’s Fanonistas, who in large measure have conflated anticolonialism with antisemitism.
Historic book prices
A few years ago readers of the TLS mentioned, or rather complained about, the exorbitant prices of academic books (Brian Vickers, Letters, March 25, 2022, and Jesse Norman, Letters, April 8, 2022). But today’s readers in general appear to be too decent to talk about the rising prices of books.
Centuries ago the price of a play-book arose from about six pence in Shakespeare’s time to two or three times as much by the end of the seventeenth century. But no publishers appear to mention prices in their books before the Restoration (no readers, either).
To the best of my knowledge, as far as the history of play-books is concerned, the third edition of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, published in about 1664, is the first instance of announcing its price. The title page bears “Price I s.” beneath the imprint. There are only two more examples. One of them is “Price, one Shilling” at the bottom of the title page of Gesta Grayorum, published in 1688, and the other is “Price one Shilling Six Pence” at the end of the very long imprint of “The Tenth Edition” of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady, published after 1691.
Few non-dramatic books before and after the Restoration appear to state the price on the title page. A rare example is Theoremata Theologica, compiled by Robert Vilvain and published in 1654. It states “Price at Press in Sheets 3. s.” between rules above the imprint.
When and by whom this practice was started is not certain. But no doubt it was a new strategy f
