Yesterday’s book launch at In Certain Places was kindly catered by Prof. Charles Quick, who - one might surmise from this spread - has a bit of a sweet tooth … equally noteworthy is the long table, which Charles made himself. How many university professors can say that.
I put together some introductory comments on the book, which for some reason I did not find time to read out. It strikes me now that this is the Preface that the book never had:
“I have to explain a bit about my background to tell you how I came to write this particular book in this way. By background, I mean my academic or research interests and leanings, which inevitably always end up influencing the way I end up looking at, and seeing whatever it is that takes up my interest.
My root academic discipline was Philosophy, although I have in the years since branched out in other directions. Yet, at the core of what I do always lies a basic orientation to my subject and that has led me to always look at whatever I become interested in with a basic philosophical question in mind – namely, what is it? So, one way of thinking about this book would be to understand it as an outsider’s attempt to figure out what kind of place he suddenly found himself in.
And so this book is not a tourist guide, nor a publication in which you will really find information about destinations, travel connections and places to stay. It is, rather, the writing of a kind of journey of discovery that took place over a period of just over a year – a journey comprised of hundreds of journeys, daily, weekly – through and around West Cumbria. It is also not a book about the people of West Cumbria, nor really of their lives (well, perhaps tangentially so), but instead an attempt to figure out or make sense of the life of the place during its evolution over the last few hundred years. It wonders what makes West Cumbria distinctive as a place.
If you look at the book’s frontispiece, a detail from an old map by a 17th century cartographer named Christopher Saxton, you will see that it is accompanied on the opposite page by one of those deliberately ambiguous pieces of text we call an epigram. ‘It is not down in any map; true places never are.’ The juxtaposition of those words – from Herman Melville – and a 400+ year old illustration, are intended to disarm you, the reader. To suggest, perhaps, that what you will find here between these covers is not necessarily the place that you know (if you are a native), or the place you might expect to find (if you are a visitor to Cumbria). It might even suggest that the place described between these covers is a bit like a figment of my imagination. You can decide.
But there is also some truth in this epigram – ‘West Cumbria’ are words you do not find on any official maps: it has no existence as a region or county in its own right, yet it is all the same (as I contend throughout this book) very definitely a place that is unlike the Cumbria of most people’s imagination. It is, in that sense, a ‘true place’ that is bound together by a shared cultural history and geography. In this respect it also differs from the administrative districts that partly compose it – Copeland and Allerdale – which are clearly not ‘true places’ if they are even places at all.”