THE POWYS HERITAGE MONOGRAPHS

Chris Gostick
T. F. Powys's Favourite Bookseller,
The Story of Charles Lahr

The London bookseller and publisher Charles Lahr was a larger-than-life character whose various business enterprises and devil-may-care radicalism played an important role in the careers of numerous writers during the inter-war years. A particular friend and patron of T. F. Powys, as well as other members of the Powys family and their circle, he also had close and fruitful associations with such writers as H. E. Bates, Liam O'Flaherty, Rhys Davies, D. H. Lawrence, James Hanley and Kenneth Hopkins.

During the 1920s and 1930s Lahr's Red Lion Street bookshop in Holborn was a magnet for writers and bibliophiles of all stripes, 'a rendezvous for rebels and world-shakers.' But although he features in many of the literary memoirs and novels of these years there has so far been no full biography of this renowned eccentric and 'literary buccaneer'.

Now, in T. F. Powys's Favourite Bookseller, Chris Gostick provides the first detailed synopsis of Lahr's work and achievements, drawing not only on archive documents but on original materials provided by Lahr's two daughters to trace Lahr's often turbulent life, from his birth in Germany in 1885 to his death in London eighty-six years later. Chris Gostick is the author of Lord Jim, Lady Tim and the Powys Circle (2000) in the Powys Heritage Series and is currently completing a full biography of James Hanley. In this monograph he pays tribute to a significant and unjustly neglected figure on the London literary scene.

210mm x 148mm, 32 pp. incl. 7 illus., card covers
ISBN 978-1-907286-01-8                      £6.00