Bloomsbury Festival: Harold Monro and The Poetry Bookshop Celebrated 18 and 20 October

Bloomsbury Festival Event 18 & 20 October 2018

Tickets available from the Bloomsbury Festival Box Office

A Poetic Revolution: 

The Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury

A scripted programme of readings and music celebrating the famous 

Poetry Bookshop which opened in Bloomsbury in 1913 and helped to define a radical new poetry in the opening decades of the 20th Century.

The Music Room, 49 Great Ormond Street, London WC1

Wednesday 18th and Saturday 20th October 2018

6pm

With live music from the pianist Mihaly Berecz who plays Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin which was started in 1914, the year after the Poetry Bookshop opened.

Readers: Jean Woollard, Mark Unwin, Sarah Chatwin, Nicholas Murray, Michèle Roberts

  

A Note on the Poetry Bookshop

The Poetry Bookshop opened at 35 Devonshire Street, WC1 (now Boswell Street) in January 1913 and in 1926 when the lease expired the shop moved to new premises at 38 Great Russell Street opposite the British Museum. It finally closed in 1935 three years after Harold Monro's death.

The best account of the Bookshop remains Joy Grant's Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (1967). See also The Poetry Bookshop 1912-1935: a Bibliography (1988) by J. Howard Woolmer which reproduces many title pages and Poetry Bookshop posters, some in colour.  Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984) by Penelope Fitzgerald and Val Warner's Virago edition of Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose (1982) are invaluable. The opening chapter ("The West End Front") of Nicholas Murray's The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: British Poets of the First World War (2011) gives an account of the literary background to the shop's opening.