City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN IDO not like going abroad, and am ashamed to say I have never been to Venice. But so many cultivated people have talked to me about it that I have accepted an invitation to stay with friends there next week. My inferiority about not having been to Venice has been so great that I have even pretended to 'art historians' that I have been there in order to avoid further conversation about it. The problem is, what to wear. I'm told this is the height of the season. Some of the nicest people in Europe will be lying on the Lido. I went to an off-the-peg shop and asked for the right clothes and they advised white evening dress with a red cummerbund. I went to another and they suggested a grey tropical suit such as hot clergymen wear. I'm going dressed as an American by way of compromise.
NECROPOLODEON
Last week I went to an Odeon cinema in the evening, and the next morning to a funeral service in a crematorium. 1 could not help recollecting the remark made to me by the Rev. Colin Stephenson, Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene, Oxford, when he said, referring to the macabre 'good taste' of so many crematorium chapels, that 'it was the perfect end for some- body who had spent his life in the cinema.' The similarity of decoration struck me at once. I came a little too early to the service and could not enter the chapel because another service was going on, so 1 stepped into the 'General Waiting Room' of the crematorium. There was no indication of Christian belief anywhere about ^ brown walls, leather- upholstered office chairs, suitable for executives, and some pictures on the walls which looked like travel posters from which the names of the pldces had been cut off. To add to the effect of a travel agency the table was littered with pamphlets, such as 'Cemeteries or Playing Fields?' But after all, I suppose the place was in a sense a travel agency. 1 prefer the slower route.
SEMPER IDEM
The handsome new centenary volume published by those distinguished persons, both long dead, Messrs. Chatto and Windus, turns my mind to the wonders of British publishing. I think my favourite firm is Rivington's, who publish only school books and perhaps a little theology. Their office in King Street, Covent Garden, is almost as though it were lit by gas. Long rows of empty shelves stretch back almost to Long Acre. The catalogue is all the old favourites whom readers will remember. Godfrey and Siddons, North and Hillard, and so on. Where are Godfrey and North and Hillard and Siddons? Do their widows still draw royalties in some forgotten spa? I do not know. But I do know that the typography and format of Rivington's books have changed so little since the genera- tions ago when their authors, in cap and gown, taught incipient admirals and generals, that they have come right back into fashion. If you look at a Rivington book today it might have been 'laid out' by one of our smartest post-Festival typographers. I put the Racing Calendar in the same class—a specimen of unaltered typography and first-class printing.
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