‘Community effort’: Local boaters rescue works of late poet Val Warner from Clapton skip

London’s barge-based bookshop Word on the Water has acquired the book collection of the late poet Val Warner after it was rescued from a skip by members of the boating community.

Warner died in Clapton in late 2020, but despite her friends and colleagues informing the executor of her estate that her papers and manuscripts should be archived, many of them were found alongside her books.

In December 2021, photos of the overflowing skip near Chatsworth Road were posted in a boaters’ freecycle group on Facebook.

Members of the group organised to save the collection, with one visiting the skip at 1am to waterproof it using bin bags. 

The following day, the boaters packed the surviving books into a rented van and transported them to Granary Square, the home of the book barge, which had offered to take them on.

As they sorted through the items, CVs, ID cards and letters revealed the identity of their former owner. 

Val Warner was a poet, editor, scholar and translator, who died in her house in Hackney in reportedly ‘tragic’ circumstances.

Her friends and colleagues Patricia Craig and Prof. Michael Schmidt had informed the authorities that her papers were destined for the Cacarnet Archive in Manchester’s Ryland Library. They were not informed of their disposal, which Craig describes as “a disaster and a disgrace”. 

Her papers are thought to include correspondence with contemporary poets and academics, as well as manuscripts of Warner’s various unfinished novels. Whilst some will inevitably have been lost, everything that has been rescued will go to the archive. 

Meanwhile, staff at the book barge are sorting through the salvaged books and introducing them to the stock of the shop. The collection consists of literary criticism, mythology and modernist literature, including works by D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. 

The collection also includes rare James Joyce poetry books, one of which has since travelled to Japan, as well as a copy of one of Warner’s own poetry collections, Tooting Idyll, complete with her notes, scrawled on tin wrappers and enclosed within its pages. 

According to Warner’s will, the books were to be donated to charity.

One of the owners of Word on the Water told the Citizen: “I hope that helping to keep a bookshop open, while it’s not exactly charity, is something that Val might have been pleased had happened, and it keeps the books from being destroyed or from just sitting in a cellar in a box.”

One of the boaters involved in the rescue mission, Aren Ock, described the events as “a boating community effort”, and said “it felt like a great privilege to be able to do this for her”.