A Brill Calendar: July 17

Few people devoted to great writing fashioned the taste of succeeding generations as brilliantly as Ernest Percival Rhys (July 17 1859 – May 25 1946).

When publisher J. M. Dent invited Rhys to edit a series of inexpensive books with the potential to outlast trends & fashions – in an effort to combine best-sellers with ever-sellers, Rhys, (of Welsh stock, a poet, literary critic, editor and bookman) was already well over forty. It was like him to propose for the name of the series ‘Everyman’s Library’; after the protagonist of an English morality play, adopted from the earlier Dutch ‘Elckerlyc’, dealing with Man’s struggle with death and eternal life.

It is seldom that a publisher’s ambition was so towering. A few years after the reign of Victoria, Queen & Empress, the cultural confidence of the British Commonwealth, at that time hardly challenged, encompassed the planet. Dent & Rhys planned a universe of one thousand titles; the first coming off Dent’s presses in 1906, when King Edward VII was showing the world what leisure and elegance is all about.

Ernest Percival Rhys died after two world wars had run their destructive course; and it is seldom that a connoisseur with the mission to fathom the expanse of the world’s literature reached his aim as completely; just a meagre 17 out of the proud 1000 were still awaiting their launch on May 25 1946.

It is said that Goethe himself coined the concept ‘Weltliteratur’. As a notion, ‘world literature’ hasn’t always been with us; and it should be noted that a first volume in the Penguin Series of paper-bound ‘pocket-books’ appeared on shelves of stationers and book-sellers thirty years after the initiative of Messrs Dent & Rhys. The rise of English language and literature to the status of the world’s prime second language took its time; a great story in its own right.