I am indebted – and not for the first time – to Dunfermline antiquarian bookseller Larry Hutchison for providing details of a special item from his stock.
Mr Hutchison has assembled a wonderful 580-item catalogue of Scottish literary-related books. Expertly-described sections offer some of the best-known works by our greatest writers and poets, including George Mackay Brown, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Alasdair Gray, Violet Jacob, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean and Naomi Mitchison – though, conspicuously, there seems no place for yours truly!
Joking apart, Mr Hutchison highlights a rare book by the Perth poet William Soutar, Gleanings by an Undergraduate, a 1923 first edition of a work completed while Souter was studying English at Edinburgh University.
Soutar (1898-1943) was the bedridden Perth makar whose Diaries of a Dying Man in 1954 brought lasting fame. He had been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, which eventually saw him permanently confined to bed in 1930 in an extended lower-floor room in Wilson Street. There the former Perth Academy pupil remained for more than 13 years, writing poetry of beauty and entertaining visitors while propped up in bed in a jacket and bow tie, until his death aged 45 in 1943.
Gleanings was his first book of poetry, and he published it anonymously at his father’s expense. During his time at Edinburgh he sent some of his verse to Hugh MacDiarmid, then in Montrose, and was delighted to have been described by MacDiarmid as being in the top 50 contemporary Scottish poets.
In recent times, the Soutar Fellowship and Perth council have promoted a writer-in-residence in the house where he lived and died and which has since become one of the city’s cultural landmarks.
He is also remembered by public art sculptures, a writing prize and by The William Soutar Society. A recently-announced project involves collecting the memories of the last citizens who knew him. And since 2012 Stagecoach have displayed his poems on buses.
Printed and bound by Alexander Gardner of Paisley, and signed by the author, ‘Sincerely yours, William Soutar’, Gleanings by an Undergraduate was written just before his graduation with honours and a year before the onset of the illness that crippled him increasingly.
It is offered by Mr Hutchison for £150 – www.larryhutchisonbooks.com
