From the Stacks – Hidden Stories from the Welsh Collection

Author in profile: Hymen Kaner

Recent work carried out on the legacy data of the National Library’s fiction collection unearthed several publications from the Romanian born author Hymen Kaner. These publications were flagged due to being published in Llandudno. With very few full catalogue records available for Kaner’s publications, it fell on one of our librarians to ensure that these records were fully catalogued and included within the National Bibliography of Wales.

Through compiling this process, an interesting story arose, of an immigrant Romanian family arriving in Great Britain, firstly to London, then subsequently to Llandudno. At some point Kaner set up a book publishing press in Llandudno, predominantly to publish Kaner’s own work, although works by other authors were also published there. It is unclear how successful this venture became, but the fact that several short story collections, including ‘Ordeal by moonlight’, ‘Hot Swag!’, and ‘Fire watchers night’, were all published commercially and are now within the Library’s collection shows that Kaner had some success.

For a more in-depth look at the author’s history, this website is recommended, which was written by Laurence Worms of Ash Rare Books:

A comprehensive bibliography can be viewed here.

Ian Evans

Shared Cataloguing Programme Manager

This post is also available in: Welsh