Editor's Note: This is a the second in a series of posts by Harry Lee Poe (and later by James Ray Veneman) about their experience with creating and publishing The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends. Enjoy.

When Jim Veneman agreed to work with me on The Inklings of Oxford, he said I would have to give him a list of every photograph I needed for the book. Not only that, he wanted to know which photographs were interior shots and which were exterior shots. Not only that, he wanted to know which shots would be taken from the east, the west, the north, and the south. He asked several other things, but by then my eyes had glazed over. This fellow had obviously never heard of the Kodak instamatic camera: point and shoot! Didn’t he own a flash? Finally, he wanted the completed text of the book before we went on our photo shoot to Oxford.

The most important resources for me in writing the book were the diaries of C. S. Lewis and his brother W. H. Lewis, and the letters of C. S. Lewis only recently edited by Walter Hooper. Most of what we know about the Inklings as a group comes from these sources with the occasional letter of Tolkien also giving light. The chatty letters and diaries tell us the places where the Inklings liked to spend time or had to spend time. They also tell us how they felt about these places and how they felt in these places. The list of the places to include in the book came primarily from these sources. So many other places could have been included, and Inklings scholars will wonder why certain places were neglected. In the end, a choice to include one place meant a choice to exclude another place.

We have included a number of places in this book that Lewis and Tolkien fans will have read about but never seen. As difficult as our selection process was, the other books had even greater limitations on them because they were not intended to share equal billing of text and images. Among my favorite spots that are included here are the air raid shelter at the Kilns, Cuckoo Lane, all of Tolkien’s houses in Oxford, the houses where Lewis lived with Mrs. Moore before they bought the Kilns, the Eastgate and Mitre hotels that shared equal status with the Eagle and Child as a favorite haunt of the Inklings. Beyond the usual places associated with Lewis, I wanted to include more about the other Inklings. We show the places associated with Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, Gervase Mathew, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, and Christopher Tolkien, as well as the Lewis brothers and Tolkien. I did not think the book would be complete, however, without some mention of some friends who were close at hand but never Inklings; such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, Sister Penelope, Austin Farer, and Joy Davidman.

I wrote the text in a little over a month. It flowed easily. I had rehearsed the narrative for years. For some time I had collected first editions, letters, and other ephemera related to the Inklings, and when Prince Caspian was released to theaters, I began exhibiting my collection at public libraries and universities. In developing the collection for exhibition to a broad public with no particular knowledge of Lewis and the Inklings, I had developed the narrative for the book.

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Harry Lee Poe, author of The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends, holds the Charles Colson Chair of Faith and Culture at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. The author of many books and articles on how the gospel intersects culture, Poe has written numerous articles on C. S. Lewis and co-edited C. S. Lewis Remembered.

Editor's Note: This is a the first in a series of posts by Harry Lee Poe (and later by James Ray Veneman) about their experience with creating and publishing The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends. Enjoy.

Do we really need another book about the Inklings? We have Humphrey Carpenter’s fine book published in 1978. Since then Colin Duriez and Diana Glyer have written two fine books. I suppose I wanted to do this book for the same reason that Lewis wrote children’s stories. He wanted the kind of stories he wanted to read, and I wanted a book that evoked the town where the Inklings lived. I wanted a book that I could flip through on a cold winter’s night and travel again to a place I had known and loved.

I wanted a book that I could not do by myself. I wanted a picture book that compelled the reading of the story. I wanted a book that would introduce the casual reader to a group of fascinating people who had an important impact on culture and who were bound together by friendship. I wanted a book that might encourage the casual reader to pursue the books by the Inklings after seeing the movies. I wanted a book that might influence a few people to move on to Carpenter, Duriez, and Glyer.

On the other hand, I wanted a book for all those people who have read The Lord of the Rings over and over. I wanted a book for all those people who learned to read by way of The Chronicles of Narnia. I wanted a book for all those people who learned how to explore critical questions of faith by reading the apologetic works of C. S. Lewis. I wanted a book that would give all the Tolkien and Lewis fans a glimpse into the world where they lived and worked. I wanted them to see where it all happened: a landscape every bit as magical as Narnia and Middle Earth.

If the book has an inspiration, it would be C. S. Lewis: Images of His World by Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby. Published in 1973, the book includes text by Kilby and photography by Gilbert. When I first saw the book in 1975, before I knew who C. S. Lewis was, I wanted to find out more about Lewis because of the images of Oxford that filled half the book. I suppose I became aware for the first time of how powerful images can be in disposing a person to draw aside and attend to something. I decided to learn more about Lewis because of the pictures. That may sound shallow, but I am a human. Shallow is what we do.

I urged a number of different friends to do this book over a ten year period, but no one seemed to want to do it. I would never have ventured it, except I wanted to do a project with Jim Veneman, the professor of photo-journalism at Union University where I teach. I had marveled at Jim’s skill as a photographer for many years. Then one day we fell into conversation about Tolkien and Lewis whom he also admired. By the end of the conversation, we had talked each other into proposing the project to Zondervan where we found the enthusiastic support of Bob Hudson and David Frees.

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Harry Lee Poe, author of The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends, holds the Charles Colson Chair of Faith and Culture at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. The author of many books and articles on how the gospel intersects culture, Poe has written numerous articles on C. S. Lewis and co-edited C. S. Lewis Remembered.