I can no longer remember where I first came across Daniel George. I think that his collection Alphabetical Order was the book I discovered first, at one of the dusty used bookstores (long since vanished) in downtown London, Ontario. His books now occupy a shelf in my apartment dedicated to reference books with no practical purpose, next to Hugh Kingsmill’s Anthology of Invective and Abuse, Logan Pearsall Smith’s Treasury of English Prose, and D. B. Wyndham Lewis’s collection of bad poetry The Stuffed Owl. These are not books that one takes up to find anything in particular; they are collections of delightful curiosities, and Alphabetical Order is one of the best of the genre. Opening the book at random to the letter S, you find an extract from De Quincey on “Spitting,” a poem by James Thomson on “Solitude” (“Hail, mildly pleasing solitude, / Companion of the wise and good”) and an eighteenth-century remedy for a “Sore Throat” (“Take Millepedes, Sows or Hogs Lice alive, and sew them up between the foldings of a Piece of Linnen, and apply them to the Throat in the form of a Stay, which is to be kept on all Night”).

Anthologies of miscellaneous literary passages experienced a kind of vogue in the middle decades of the twentieth century, stemming ultimately from the Renaissance traditions of the commonplace book or the florilegium; surviving commonplace books by writers such as Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden show that writers of the era still found it practically useful to compile short passages from other authors for their personal reference. In the age before Google, reference books of this sort were an essential aid to research in literature, with scholars relying on books of quotations, concordances, and thematically ordered collections of extracts to supplement their memories of a large body of literature. The kind of anthologies that Daniel George or D. B. Wyndham Lewis published, though, are something different: these books employ all of the techniques of literary and philological scholarship, but use them purely for entertainment. George’s book Lonely Pleasures, a collection of essays and book reviews, features a formidable mock index, a parody of scholarly precision (“Acton, Lord, and atomic power, 255 . . . Adam, his eldest daughter’s hat exhibited, 85 . . . Eliot, T. S., his feet among those I have sat at, 14 . . . and the bottoms of his trousers, 257 . . .”) But to understand the point of the satire we must recall that, in the days before computers, the mock index of Lonely Pleasures would have been done by hand, and would have been just as time-consuming and painstaking to produce as the index of a scholarly work of history. Somebody, probably Daniel George himself, sat down with the page proofs of the book and compiled a full twenty pages of mock-serious index references, almost all of which are little jokes rather than descriptions of the principal subjects of the book. A selection of the stranger index entries from Lonely Pleasures is printed on the back of the book jacket as a promotion for the book’s buyers; somebody thought the joke was funny enough that it would help to move more copies.

All of this gives the impression of a rather eccentric man, a person of formidable learning and indefatigable scholarly energy that he expended upon the pursuit of amusing trifles. Daniel George was tireless in producing anthologies of excerpts from his reading: there are nine volumes of literary miscellany, produced between 1932 and 1964, arranged loosely according to themes (A Book of Anecdotes, A Book of Characters, or A Peck of Troubles, which collects jeremiads and laments on the various ills that afflict humanity). The breadth of reading represented by the collections is impressive, but the largest number of excerpts come from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with familiar names like Burton and Jonson appearing alongside more obscure figures such as Joseph Glanvill, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Coryat. In other words, these are not simply books for the bedside table: you will make no headway unless you are alert enough to read passages of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose and poetry in their original orthography, alongside passages of untranslated Middle English and French.

Daniel George was the pen name of Daniel George Bunting (1890–1967), who came to the literary world late in life: he had served with the Queen’s Westminster Rifles in the First World War, and later “invented wheel-discs for motor-cars, sold gas appliances, and managed an engineering firm.” It was only in his forties that Bunting began writing, befriending literary figures of the day such as Catherine Carswell, Rose Macaulay, Holbrook Jackson, and Rupert Hart-Davis; he was eventually hired as a reader and editor for the publisher Jonathan Cape, where he worked from 1940 to 1963. In this period the position was a prestigious one, in which he oversaw the publication of some of the most important authors of the day. Ian Fleming described Daniel George as “the last guardian of the ark of the covenant in English literature . . . heaven knows what will happen to the language and particularly to mine when the Almighty taxi one day runs you down.” The historian C. V. Wedgwood relied upon him to read her two-volume history of the English Civil War in manuscript, with George correcting from memory her references to the poetry of the time. By the time of his retirement from Jonathan Cape, a rival publisher described him as “the most widely read man in the world.”

Jonathan Cape had founded his publishing house at a propitious time in the history of English publishing. His company competed with Victor Gollancz, the brilliant and temperamental socialist publisher; the Hogarth Press, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf; and Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot worked as an editor. The major publishers competed with each other for prestige but also for sales, in an era when book publishing was still a seriously lucrative business. Gollancz achieved notoriety in the Twenties with his clever marketing: his books were instantly recognizable with their bright yellow dust jackets and the advertising blurbs printed on the back cover (a technique that Gollancz invented). What set Jonathan Cape apart in his environment was his apolitical and utilitarian attitude towards publishing. Cape was not committed to the promotion of a modernist aesthetic like Woolf or Eliot, or to the political left like Gollancz; what Cape wanted was to make as much money as possible, and to steer clear of anything overtly controversial. With a brilliant instinct for the business side of publishing but relatively few contacts in the literary world, Cape relied on advisors to do the practical work of editing and reading manuscripts. Daniel George, with his enormous erudition and easygoing temperament, seems to have been the ideal person to fill this role, giving him an opportunity to put to use his extraordinary literary knowledge without challenging his publisher’s control over the company as a business venture.

Cape’s first publishing venture had been an audacious one: a deluxe two-volume edition of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, an extravagantly written travel book that had gone out of print in the late nineteenth century, republished with an introduction by T. E. Lawrence (the famous “Lawrence of Arabia,” then at the peak of his fame as a celebrated hero of the First World War). The volumes were sumptuously produced and would certainly have bankrupted Cape and his company if they had not sold; they retailed at the high price of nine guineas, then approximately a month’s wages for an average workman. With thousands of pounds invested in the project and nothing left to lose, Cape began bundling up free copies of the book to send to the local newspapers in exchange for reviews. Against everyone’s expectations, Arabia Deserta began selling and became a huge moneymaker for the company, putting Cape in a position to begin building a roster of house authors. Within a few years, Jonathan Cape had become the British publisher for some of the best-known American authors of the moment—Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O’Neill—as well as the wildly popular Mary Webb, a writer of romance novels set in the English countryside.

This was the enterprise that Daniel George managed for twenty-three years, working hard to maintain a roster of successful and profitable authors for the company. Much of his own writing took the form of ephemeral pieces connected with his editorial work: book reviews for newspapers and articles for Jonathan Cape’s house magazine Here and There. It is hardly surprising that George’s busy schedule would have restricted his ability to publish his own writing. What is surprising is that George would publish one book after another, but containing hardly any of his own words. In the many anthologies that he published, George documents a highly personal project of reading and sifting through the poetry and prose of the past, a project entirely unconnected to his professional work as an editor of modern writing—but when he presents the results of his project he has no words of interpretation to offer in summary. George is showing us through a museum of picturesque literary discoveries, but he never tells us what the exhibit is supposed to be about or why the excerpts have been chosen; when we ask about a particular item in the collection, he identifies the author and date and then falls silent, smiling an ironic smile.

This polite reticence makes Daniel George a very unusual anthologist. Most editors of anthologies cannot resist the opportunity to insert themselves into their subject matter: they introduce their collection of chosen passages with a long essay explaining the rationale behind their selection; they intend the authors and excerpts they have chosen to illustrate an historical progression leading inexorably to the literary excellences of the editor himself. In other words, the structure of the anthology lends itself to a pedagogical plan, even if the book is not intended to be used in teaching. Jonathan Cape’s great rival Victor Gollancz assembled two anthologies of religious writing in the 1950s, containing excerpts chosen from an eclectic array of spiritual and philosophical texts (the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, Blake, Angelus Silesius, Meister Eckhart, Dostoevsky, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, and on and on). Gollancz explicitly intended the book as an autobiographical testament, recording its compiler’s views on God and man after a lifetime of searching: the anthology is designed to be read as a whole as though it were “a continuous piece of writing by one hand.” It is startling to juxtapose Gollancz’s impassioned recollections of spiritual struggle with George’s vague nonchalance; in the introduction to Alphabetical Order he informs us that he has forgotten why he chose many of the excerpts in the collection, and that the opinions expressed by the individual writers are not those of the editor.

The exception that proves the rule is a book called All in a Maze, prepared by George together with the novelist Rose Macaulay. The book is a collection of literary writing on war and peace, beginning with the hymn to peace from Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and ending with excerpts from speeches by present-day world leaders at the time of the book’s publication in 1938. Appearing on the eve of the outbreak of another world war, the book was certain to be controversial. The introduction to the volume, written by Macaulay alone, displays a keen consciousness of the moral complexities opened up by this mass of material: treatments of the ethics of war by philosophers and theologians, ancient and modern poetic descriptions of battle, and the letters and diaries of common soldiers, including descriptions of the brutality of the Great War that would have been fresh in the memory of her readers. Macaulay’s own convictions are broadly pacifist; she is skeptical of Christian just-war reasoning and describes the subject of the book in brief as the struggle between “man’s civility and his barbarity.” But she also sees the seeming inevitability of the conflict that would break out the following year. In a postscript added just as the book was going to press, Macaulay describes the current political situation as an “ignoble peace” heralding a “grim and dubious future.”

On one occasion in his life, it seems, Daniel George’s encyclopedic literary knowledge proved to be profoundly useful and timely. The thematically arranged excerpts in All in a Maze are not merely a collection of pretty baubles but a series of interventions in a continuous argument, published at a unique crossroads in European history. But it was Rose Macaulay who took it upon herself to connect the dots and to state the political and moral implications of George’s material, even though she was not the principal author of the book (the title page says that it is by “Daniel George, with some assistance from Rose Macaulay”). Macaulay’s introduction states matter-of-factly that George did almost all of the work of assembling the collection; she herself located only a handful of excerpts before running out of energy for further research. Surely Daniel George, who had been a rifleman in the Great War, had some ideas of his own about the subject of war and peace; he may or may not have concurred with Macaulay’s pacifism, but there is no way to know. According to Macaulay’s introduction, however, Daniel George does hold sole responsibility for all of the book’s footnotes.

Finding lengthy passages of Daniel George’s own writing is surprisingly difficult. Besides one book of poetry that he published early in his literary career, there is only his single book of essays, Lonely Pleasures, consisting of short articles and book reviews written in the 1940s and 1950s. Few of the pieces exceed three or four pages; one gets the impression of a workmanlike attitude towards writing, capable of generating precisely the number of column inches required for the occasion at hand. A tone of levity predominates: serious topics are rarely broached, whether political, religious, or philosophical, and if broached they are quickly dismissed with a little joke. In aggregate there is something oppressive about all of these clever, vaguely impersonal little essays; it is like making small talk at a party with a person one doesn’t know and will never meet again.

George is at his best when sharing his wealth of literary and bibliographic knowledge: he is the ideal reviewer for newly published reference books, and in a multi-part review of the new Oxford Book of Quotations he is able to discourse for pages about the minutiae of the editors’ attribution and choice of quotations. His most characteristic essays deal with his expertise in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, with a long series of pieces on textual issues in Shakespeare. But the greatest surprise to the reader is seeing, at the end of each short essay, the date of its original publication. A large number of the pieces were written during the war or in its immediate aftermath, but one would have no idea from the content of the essays: the war is never mentioned, not even to lament the rationing of paper or the other material hardships that affected the book trade. There is something chilling about reading a learned two-part disquisition on “Tudor Times” only to discover that it was originally printed in the final months of 1941. “Perhaps after the present war we shall have better fiction,” mused George on September 27, 1940, at the height of the London Blitz. By my reckoning, this remark is the only reference to current events in Lonely Pleasures. The mock-serious index at the back of the book contains one entry for “war,” but it is for Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

One gets a different picture of George from reading the book-length poem he published in 1933, To-Morrow Will Be Different—now a scarce collector’s item even by the standards of an author whose entire life’s work has gone out of print. The poem recounts “the journal of a human heart for a single day” (in the words of the opening quotation from Hawthorne) in a style obviously influenced by Eliot (“Frail September sunshine / Falters over the lawn / Towards dew-drunk sagging chrysanthemums / Yellow as logs new-sawn”). In other words, the book is George’s version of Ulysses written in the style of The Waste Land, a combination that had become a cliché even at the time. What is strange about the poem, though, is the mood of exhaustion and resignation that permeates it. This is not merely an imitation of Eliotian fatalism; the speaker seems to imagine the failure of his poem and its descent into obscurity even as he is writing it. “Life is dull and I’ve read all the books,” the speaker complains, and later: “I want a library I want to fill. / Damn! I can’t be bothered. / It was feeble anyway, / Second-rate, like all I’ve done.” Whether or not this self-criticism is meant to be taken at face value, it seems to correspond to a real dilemma that he faced: having absorbed so much historic and contemporary literature, when it came time to write something of his own he was paralyzed by the knowledge of all that had already been written. My suspicion is that George would have been more surprised than anyone else if To-Morrow Will Be Different had been a great success.

All this seems like a devastating indictment of Daniel George: a failed poet and frivolous essayist, apparently uninterested in the great historic events taking place around him, his own character and opinions an unknowable cipher. Who would bother to revive this nonentity? Yet George’s anthologies have given me great satisfaction over the years. They are resplendently useless, implacable in their resistance to any practical function that one might wish to impose upon them. If you are looking for information on some particular subject, you will never find it. What you find instead is the record of one man’s lifetime of reading, an insight into the particular paths that helped him to build up this particular collection of attractive objects. To those who share some portion of George’s bibliomania, it inspires a strange affection for him.

The erudition that Daniel George possessed is an ambivalent and incomplete kind of knowledge. Bibliographic and literary knowledge does not guarantee personal wisdom; good aesthetic judgement does not guarantee good moral judgement. We like to imagine that the literary and artistic figures we admire were also admirable as people, that when we listen to Bach or read Henry James we have a window into the soul of another human being, whose distinctive viewpoint and character we may come to know. However well this may work with our favorite creative artists, it doesn’t work with a man like George. Whatever his character may have been beneath the polished exterior, whatever distinctive point of view he may have had in his private life, it is too late to recover it now. At some point in his career he decided that his legacy would not be an original contribution to discourse, but his work as a bibliographer and collector. In this capacity Daniel George has no need to bare his soul. He simply shows us some of the beautiful things he has found. Sometimes that is enough.