Putnam & Co John McNeillie’s first publisher was PUTNAM & CO of London and New York. The man who discovered Wigtown Ploughman: Part of his Life and its young author was Boston-born and Harvard-educated, Constant Huntington (1876-1962). Huntington had joined Putnam (New York) in 1902 and three years later was despatched to run their London office. As his obituarist put it in The Times in 1962, he was ‘a soldierly-looking, strikingly handsome man, patrician in taste, radical in outlook’. He was one of the very last individualist publishers and under his control Putnam almost certainly never published a book he hadn’t read and with which he didn’t personally deal in every detail. It’s not exactly clear when John McNeillie’s book…
Author: andrew
A Note On Previous Dust-Jackets And Illustrators
The dust-jacket illustrations for John McNeillie’sfirst three books: Wigtown Ploughman: Part of his Life (Putnam, 1939), Glasgow Keelie (Putnam, 1940) and Morryharn Farm (Putnam, 1941) were all painted by Robert Vere ‘Robin’ Darwin (1910-1974), a landscape and portrait painter who became principal of the Royal College of Art in 1948. He was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The woodcuts that illustrate A Poacher’s Handbook (Heinemann, 1950), Fresh Woods (Heinemann, 1951) and Pastures New (Heinemann, 1952) and provide the dust-jacket illustrations for those books, were by Barbara Greg (1900-1983) who studied wood-engraving under W. T. Smith at the Slade School c.1919-1920. She subsequently married fellow-student Norman Janes (1892-1980), himself a gifted book illustrator.…
Some Comments On And Concerning John McNeillie’s Work
‘The Poacher’s Handbook is a classic essay in one of the major sub-genres in English Literature, the naturalist’s diary or handbook. Since Walton’s The Compleat Angler, it has been a form that breaks down solemn distinctions between serious and entertaining writing… As for writerly skills they are present in every paragraph: the line of every sentence is let out to the right length and tension. These are the skills, maybe, more associated with the good poet than the prose narrator… No writing, whatever its subject and however unportentous its air, can be excellent without an ethical sense. Here this is lightly carried but Ian Niall is a writer you trust from the first. This is part of the reason why…
Andrew McNeillie
Andrew McNeillie was born in North Wales in 1946 and educated at John Bright Grammar School, Llandudno, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was Literature Editor at OUP for five years until May 2009 when Exeter Univeristy made him a Professor in their English Department, based at the university’s campus in Cornwall. This appointment centres round the magazine ARCHIPELAGO founded in 2007 and a new MA programme closely associated with it called ‘Nature, Writing and Place’. He has two new books forthcoming: a memoir Once due from Seren in May 2009, and a book of poems In Mortal Memory due from Carcanet in February 2010. His first collection of poems Nevermore (2000), in the Oxford Poets series from Carcanet, was shortlisted…