NEWS RELEASES
A Fitting Tribute to Southwater Literary Legend
12th December 2006
In 1675 a man was born in the hamlet of Southwater and, like many before him, he went to London to learn a trade and earn his fortune. By the second decade of the 18th century he was making his name in the publishing world when he teamed up with the literary star of the generation, Alexander Pope.
From then on, Bernard Barnaby Lintot’s fame was secured as, over the next five or so years, he published Pope’s translation of the Iliad. The work would transform the century’s view on the status symbol. Prior to the Iliad, size did matter; folio was the size to publish quality books; after it, quarto. Head and tail pieces were now part of the narrative; decorative initial letters were part of the story rather than just pretty additions. As for capitalisation, this work made popular the idea that capitals should not be sown like wild seed but used only for the start of each sentence and proper nouns.
From now on, Pope and Lintot were inexorably linked, either through further joint publications or through Pope’s attacks on his former publisher. However, with the success of the Iliad, Lintot’s fortune was made; all he had to do was maintain and improve it, which he did through further publishing adventures. His logo, the Crossed Keys, became a symbol of quality and authority. By 1730 he had semi-retired from the trade and moved back to Southwater and Horsham.
His son Henry carried on the trade, as did his granddaughter Catherine before retiring in the 1760s when she married Captain Henry Fletcher, a Director of the East India Company and a relation of Christian Fletcher who would find notoriety with the Bounty. Today, the Fletcher family still have landholdings in Southwater but Lintot has been forgotten in the village of his birth.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Southwater rapidly grew as major housing developments took place due to the economic expansion brought about in part by Gatwick airport. The village, which at the beginning of the 20th century had grown on the back of the brick industry, had now become all but in name a town, but one without a centre. Horsham District Council has created a new GBP 26 million development - a new square with a mixture of civic, retail and social functions.
The new Square, whose completion on 15th December 2006 is being marked with the unveiling of a bronze iguanodon, needed a name and so “Lintot Square” was born. The Square is a modern development drawing on, in part, themes from the Georgian period with its sense of the human scale. It is also home to the brand new Library, thus showing faith in the power and importance of the book in the 21st century.
Fittingly, the first exhibition in the Library is a display of some of Lintot’s publications, including the subscriber and trade edition of the Iliad, drawn from the collections of Horsham Museum which has been acquiring Lintot works for a number of years.
For further information contact Jeremy Knight, Curator of Horsham Museum, on Tel: (01403) 254959, or e-mail: jeremy.knight@horsham.gov.uk