We are intrigued by a collection of books we are cataloguing in various languages, all bearing the name of E. R. Sands. This gentleman wrote his name in many his books along with his current location, which ranged from Archangel (in the northernmost reaches of Russia) to Paris, Helsinki, Madrid and of course Cambridge, over the course of 1939-55. Our imaginations were further fired by a note we found in one of the books:
“at the present moment I am dragging out a hand to mouth existence…in Bloomsbury, and am fast becoming an efficient Russian Linguist (Russian mind you, not Japanese). How it all happened is far too complicated to describe here. Perhaps we might call it an official wangle and leave it at that…anyway the last month has been by far the most chaotic, pointless and exciting of my butterflyish existence.”
In a different book was another intriguing note with a sketch labelled in Russian: “Comrade Stalin”
Are we onto a hitherto undiscovered member of the “Cambridge Six”?
http://www.plurabellebooks.com
