With their celebration of ordinary people’s lives, Mackenzie Crook’s ‘Small Prophets’ and Little Toller’s recent reissue of L. P. Jacks’ ‘Mad Shepherds’ are a match made in heaven, writes Sue Brooks.
I have been a fan of the independent publisher, Little Toller, since it was launched in 2008. Looking out for favourite authors in the Monograph series — the small hardbacks that are so sweet to handle — and alongside them, the reissues of Classic Nature Writers in a stylish soft cover format. Great care is taken with the reissues, to match a painting or photo to the subject and select the person to write the introduction. Robert Macfarlane for Edward Thomas’s The South Country, Charles Rangeley-Wilson for H.E. Bates’s Down The River, Iain Sinclair for Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside, and so on.
I have nineteen Little Toller books to date, and many have become old friends. In the Spring of 2026, I heard about the one which would become the twentieth. Front cover painting by Samuel Palmer. Introduction by Mackenzie Crook. Author’s name L.P. Jacks. Title — Mad Shepherds.
Yes. It is Mackenzie Crook of TV fame, especially — if you like that sort of thing as much as I do — the Small Prophets series that came to an end in February. The timing was perfect, and, if I’m honest, the reason for the excitement about the book. Of L.P. Jacks I knew nothing, but trusted Little Toller’s judgement in such delicate matters.
Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (October 9th 1860 – February 17 1955) was a philosopher and well known speaker on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the nineteenth century. Mad Shepherds was published in 1910 when he was living in a small village on Bredon Hill in the Cotswolds, feeling very much at home — a peasant among peasants. Getting to know the local people, meeting them in the pub, honoured to be trusted with their stories. Remarkable people: gifted, insightful, fiercely independent with a strong sense of moral purpose — philosophers in their own right. Snarley Bob is present on the first page in a pencil drawing by a contemporary artist. The angry, brooding face of a shepherd who was more at home with his sheep than any human, with the exception of a handful of men and one woman whom he revered. The extraordinary love and attention given to the individual qualities of each sheep created a breeding programme that made the local farmer Perryman rich and famous. Snarley Bob had no interest in reward other than the celestial guidance he received in the art of becoming a Good Shepherd.
Mystic communion with the stars, intense love of nightingales, slipping easily into what could be called “altered states” with a little alcohol; an implicit trust in his own knowing, not learned from books, but from direct experience. There are deeply moving passages leading up to the death of his friend, Shepherd Toller, recounted by L.P. Jacks in the voice of Snarley Bob’s wife which have an epic quality. Mesmerising as epics are meant to be.
Mackenzie Crook loves the larger-than-life characters and the reverential, unaffected way in which L. P. Jacks celebrates them, and laments the many millions of “ordinary” men’s and women’s stories that have been lost to the past. Exactly so. There is nothing “ordinary” about Snarley Bob, nor about Small Prophets‘ Michael Sleep who has captured the imagination of thousands this year. They seem to inhabit a parallel universe which we can enter freely. I go back to the book — the moment when I picked it up for the first time, and it settled so comfortably into my hands. The painting of a shepherd sleeping with his flock below a crescent moon — that visionary, mysterious evening landscape Samuel Palmer loved — and there it was again. An invitation and a promise.
Mad Shepherds — Small Prophets. A match made in heaven. Brought together in the fallow period when the TV series is waiting TO BE CONTINUED. Thank you Little Toller.
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Published by Little Toller and with a new introduction by Mackenzie Crook, ‘Mad Shepherds’ by L. P. Jacks is out now and available here (£13.30).