One of the things about working in the Oxfam bookshop is that you don’t often get chance to really look at the books.

For a start, there is always a mountain of incoming donations to sort, and sift, assign, and price, and display.

Then there are the collections we need to build up to make a good table or window display – if the title fits put it in the box and keep on going.

And then there is making the shop look good, and then, and then, and then.

So, looking in detail at books is a rare pleasure and often outside the shift hours.

This is the story of one book and the people involved in it – at least as far as I can find out.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. Not a first edition – that was 1927 – but the 1931 edition illustrated by Clare Leighton (and owned by someone called Leopold Horwood.)

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I would like to tell you a bit more. Though not about Leopold as I can’t find anything about him…..

This is the American writer’s second novel and he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. (The commercial success he got from the book meant he could give up being a French teacher and concentrate on writing.)

It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar, who witnesses the accident , then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die. ( Wikipedia)

Meanwhile, as they say, Clare Leighton was born in 1898 (died in 1989) and lived her early life in the shadow of her older brother – her family’s nickname for her was the bystander. (That must have helped her self confidence.)

(He was Roland Leighton and despite being described as rather cold and conceited by his friends, he fell in love and got engaged to Vera Britten and was immortalised in her Testament of Youth.

He died aged 20 in the World War One and his grave has one of his poems to Vera inscribed on it.

But this is not about him, but his sister. We have one of her woodcuts hanging about our coat rack.

She did her first training at Brighton College of Art – which is the only link I can find to Deepest Sussex but it will get a mention when the book goes on sale as we like a local link.

(Clare Leighton met the radical journalist H. N. Brailsford in 1928,and they lived together for several years because his wife refused him a divorce.

But when the wife died in 1937, leaving the way clear for the couple to marry, he suffered an emotional breakdown, destroying his relationship with Clare Leighton who left for a new life in the US in 1939 and eventually became a naturalised American citizen.She never married. )

She had a fascination with the countryside and her woodcuts are often of rural people and scenes.

One of her most famous books – The Farmer’s Year – was published by Longmans Green which also published The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

And that is the only connection I can find between Leighton and this book. Perhaps she owed them a favour, or was asked by a very nice member of staff or perhaps she did a deal with them.

It is just that if you look at these images they jar slightly and though dark, like most of her woodcuts and clearly by her, they don’t seem to work – at least not for me.