In 1953 Barbara Jones published Follies & Grottoes, a ‘handsome book on a fascinating subject’. It was the first book to look at follies in any depth, and was well-received. Almost twenty years later it was announced that there would be a revised edition, for whilst the first edition was remembered as a pioneering book, it was ‘not a comprehensive survey’. Upon publication in November 1974 (fifty years ago this week) the new edition was judged ‘double the size and more than twice as good’.

Constable & Co. commissioned the first edition after Jones and Ralph Arnold, one of the directors of the publishing house, had become friends – Arnold had given Jones one of her first jobs in illustration in 1938. In February 1953 Bookseller magazine announced that ‘Barbara Jones has completed her long-expected work on Follies and Grottoes – a blend of melancholy, horror, genial extravagance and elegant conceits’.

In 1972 Jones was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to allow her to ‘revise and extend’ two of her books: The Unsophisticated Arts (1951) and Follies and Grottoes. The funding allowed her to travel across the nation to revisit follies and explore the many new ones which she had been made aware of since 1953. The book was originally to be published in 1973 and Constable & Co. plugged it as forthcoming in November 1972, but Jones had so much new material to work with that it would be November 1974 before the book was in the shops. It was priced at a then substantial £10: the reviewer for the Birmingham Daily Post wrote that the ‘mammoth’ book was ‘surely the last word on the subject’* with the caveat ‘as it should be at that price’.

One criticism of the 1st edition was the paucity of images, with Clough Williams-Ellis in The Spectator describing Jones’s ‘rather scratchy sketches’ as ‘starvation rations’. As well as including more follies, the 2nd edition also featured many more illustrations, although all are printed in black and white. These were mainly by Jones herself, but there are a handful by artist friends such as Mary Adshead (above), James Gardner, Bill Howell and Raymond Fieldhouse. Reviewing the new edition for the Times Literary Supplement, Julian Barnes summed up what Jones had achieved: ‘It is wholly thanks to Barbara Jones that the wider public knows about, let alone cares about, the towers, ruins, grottoes, tunnels, and other architectural oddities which adorn the countryside’.

Follies & Grottoes was featured in The Times in November 1974 as one of their recommendations of ‘Lovely presents for lovely people’, and the article was illustrated with one of Jones’s ‘dramatic ink drawings’: a view of the conical folly at Barwick Park (above). The Scotsman gave the book a mention, clearly delighted to find the Pineapple at Dunmore on the cover of the new edition.

Follies & Grottoes has long been out of print, so look out for a second-hand copy if it isn’t already on your bookshelves.

*Apparently not.

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