Reactionary Materialism: Book Collecting, Connoisseurship and the Reading Life in J. C. Squire’s London Mercury

The London Mercury attained popularity and notoriety as the leading anti-modernist voice of the early 1920s. It reached more than 10,000 circulation by presenting itself as a voice of reason in an age of critical anarchy, and its material form communicated seriousness of mission, tasteful restraint, and allusion to the great Victorian quarterlies. This chapter argues that, through a combination of economic necessity and editorial eccentricity, the Mercury went on to posit solid, material objects—particularly fine and rare books, but also collectible furniture and historic churches—as loci of stable value. The Mercury shored up its readership by appealing to rare and fine book enthusiasts and the businesses that catered to them. Combined with its literary partisanship, which began to appear increasingly reactionary, this emphasis on high-end textual materiality implicitly but powerfully posited reading as an activity of the leisured and educated, book-buying as a hobby for those with ample disposable income. Its ethos of value-in-the-object reached its reductio ad absurdum in the early 1930s, in two special issues on book production and typography, in which the magazine effectively became an advertiser-cum-trade-journal for London’s high-end printing concerns.