For women only: Published in 1963, the recipes were culled from the women's page.

Things were very different when Lisbeth Phillips compiled her Recipes From The Guardian in 1963. The Guardian must have been very different too. The introduction reveals that the recipes were gathered from the women’s page of the newspaper, surely just months before those very pages became full of advice on how to go about not cooking. Indeed, it’s possible the wimmin’s movement started right here. The preface pays tribute to ‘…all the clever cook-housewives of this country who are the power behind their husband’s social and business success. As a rough calculation I estimate that during my married life I have cooked about 20,000 meals for family and friends.’ Did she pause, staring at those words, mouthing ‘twenty thousand’ over and over again, bitter tears of despair running down her cheeks? I can find no record of her as an architect of the struggle but it’s nice to think that this book might have kick-started sexual equality.

Putting cookery on the women’s page would be unimaginable today. In the premiership of TV talent it’s men who head the table, although plucky little Nigella always puts on a brave front. It’s the other way round in real life, where the nation’s kitchens are filled with women who have yet to throw off the shackles of the stove and are far too busy to pursue a career in television. It’s only TV fantasy-land that is full of crashing bores crashing pans together and turning food into entertainment. When this month’s books were issued food was sustenance and television chefs were teachers who showed the nation how to boil black and white carrots, roast black and white chickens and make grey soup with the leftovers. Now their job is to thrill, to juggle endlessly with foodstuffs to bring our jaded palettes something tasty.

The Man In The Kitchen, seen here frankly molesting The Woman In The Kitchen.

In fact finding a new angle for re-heated fare has always helped shift units and Malcolm LaPrade came up with a winning title for his 1952 The Man In The Kitchen. Certainly, the chap on the front cover seems to be getting to grips with the essentials but this illustration is actually a clue to the book’s real content. The subtitle is How to teach that woman to cook, where the word ‘that’ tells you all you need to know. It is, in fact, an endless tirade of red-blooded misogyny.

Which brings us to Cooking For Brides, from 1965. The date and the location – Australia – can be taken as mitigating circumstances but even so the title was not, perhaps, guaranteed to chime well with the hopes and aspirations of the rising generation. Those women doubtful of the benefits of wedlock would find little reassurance from the blurb, which states that ‘your future at the stove can be happy and rewarding.’ Not as happy and rewarding as hanging out with a load of surfers and experimenting with drugs, of course, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Once again it’s an irony-free book of recipes with very little in the way of advice for women poised at the threshold of subjugation, boredom and frustration. The front cover illustration says it all.

The perfect wedding gift for any young bride. Trust me.

It’s a pity this book is a one-off. The niche is ripe for development and in these hip new post-modernist times an enterprising publisher could do well with similar titles. Sex Tips for Brides would be a winner, and why stop at the altar? A lot of men I know would be very happy indeed to shell out for books like Ironing for Wives, not to mention Tidying Up After Themselves For Wives and its companion volume At Least Putting The Butter Back In The Bloody Fridge For Once For Wives.

Cookbooks are popular with collectors and all those featured this month are guaranteed to raise a smile as well as throw light on attitudes to food a generation ago. In fact it’s worth remembering that it would be impossible to publish any of these titles today. They show us that times have changed economically as well as socially. Today’s cookbooks assume wealth beyond the dreams of the original readers of these books, which are chiefly concerned with making the most of a limited list of ingredients. What will cookbooks look like in the 2050s?

You can read more about these and many other wonderful old books in Book and Magazine Collector.

Dear diary? Not in this case...

 

 Diaries turn up regularly and are a great buy.  The author need not be well known or even known at all and in fact it’s surprising just how many diaries have no name or address in them. This can be to your advantage as it keeps the price low and dealers are unlikely to have the time to read every line looking for clues. That’s your job. Certain topics such as the sea and exploration do command a premium but can still be excellent value. Whatever happens to printed books a lovely old diary like this one from 1859 will always be i-own, never i-pad.

 It tells a story of encounters with famous politicians mixed in with the mundane doings of every day life and it even has a mysterious ending to boot. Fortunately in this case there’s no mystery about the owner. He was Lord Robert R. Pelham Clinton, the sixth son of the 11^th Duke of Newcastle. Born in 1820 he was MP for Nottingham and a dashing Liberal about town. Things get off to a cracking start on January 1^st : ‘Drank the old year out and the new year in in my rooms with Nell and Dolly’ and within a week he’s off to Paris with one Tommy Scott where he watched the can-can, went to be photographed and bought six pairs of curtains for £21.

151 years old, this Letts's diary is as bright as the day it was sold.

 There’s no record of whether he claimed it all on expenses but he did take great pains to record all his personal expenditure. Details like this are as interesting as his later notes about supper with Lord Peel (‘A charming entertainment but curious as Lady Emily the only female present’) and hearing ‘Dizzy’ call for the dissolution of Parliament. The Paris jaunt cost him £91 13s which gives some perspective to his spending power although as we shall see he was only just warming up.

 Reading it is a peculiar experience. The neat handwriting reveals its secrets easily and his daily life unfolds in a thousand little details, many perfectly familiar to fans of Victorian literature. He borrows a phaeton from a friend, goes to the Adelphi and catches more trains than Sherlock Holmes. Most entries begin and end with breakfast at Long’s and dinner at Chum’s but fine dining was not his greatest passion. In common with our own sorry bunch of MPs neither was politics. The first mention of anything that might be construed as work is February 8^th when with a supreme effort he ‘went down to the House with Dolly and arrived just in time to divide.’ No, the great outdoors was where Lord C. spent most of his time – just as long as there was a horserace in the offing, that is.

 The man was a prime candidate for Gambler’s Anonymous. ‘Lost £41’, ‘Lost £34’ and ‘Won £90’ are comments that appear day after day, and that’s just the whist. ‘Went to The Turf’ is a sign that the cards are about to come out and a whole host of characters with Wodehousian names appear for rubber after rubber. Hanky, Wade, Ruby Martin, Gippo and – I’m not making this up – Bingo all join in for the nightly raids on m’lordship’s purse. Sums like that would hurt most of us today. In 1859 it must have been a staggering amount of money.

Good grief! If you have a better idea of how much this is worth today, please get in touch.

 As an aside, I should mention that Saint Google suggested several ‘value of money through the ages’ calculators. One suggested that a pound in 1860 would be worth £43 today, which hardly seems credible as a mid-Victorian live-in maid earned just six pounds a year. Lord knows what she would have thought if she could have read Lord Clinton’s entry for Wednesday 2^nd March. He went to the Grand National and saw Half Caste beat  Jean Du Quesne by a head. ‘A charming day’, he writes, casually noting that he won £828.

You can read the rest of this article in this month’s Book and Magazine Collector. 

Diary bought from Eclectica at the PBFA Novotel fair for £25

Pretty ones all in a row.

Whilst printing off a list of local bookshops from TheBookGuide I rather unwisely had a look at the town’s official website. It looks exactly like a brochure from 1972, but not in an ironic self-referential award-winning Brighton kind of way: more a sort of no; this is actually the best we can do kind of way. Happily the town has been racing ahead of its image for many years. It’s three hours from London, inches from Devon and a season away from becoming the next Padstow. Rejoice – the Americanos have arrived.

Even better news is that there’s not a Costa MegaBucks in sight. At the moment the fossil-coast capital strikes a perfect balance between trad and fab. On the first night we had cod, chips and cava on the beach and later in the week watched the sunset over a pricey cocktail at London restaurateur Mark Hix’s Oyster House. We bought warm bread, ground and baked in the town-centre watermill and filled it with crab from the Cobb. The locals look like pirates and talk like farmers but they seem to have adapted well to the challenges of selling traditional feta, tomato and basil pasties for £2.99 a pop.

And guess how much these ones were sold at?

Mary Anning put the town on the map with her discovery of an ichthyosaur in the cliffs in 1818 and local literary connections range from ‘Jane Austin might have slept here’ to the full-blown ownership of John Fowles, Lyme’s most famous adopted son. I wasn’t here for the literature though – I was here for the books.

A break from a job is one thing, but you can’t take a holiday from addiction. I was twitchy for books by the second day and help was at hand in the form of Lyme’s last remaining proper outlet, Sanctuary Books, my new favourite shop. It’s a delightful treasure trove of a place, a mix of antiquarian charm and middle earth strangeness. There are books balanced on every surface, plenty of prints and ephemera and room after room of reasonably priced stock. There’s even a book lovers’ B&B upstairs, a smart diversification in these straightened times. Best of all despite the computer on the desk and a fairly sophisticated net presence it’s the sort of place where genuine bargains turn up as I soon discovered.

Perched on top of a bookcase was a long row of tiny books, some falling to bits and all covered in dust. The one that caught my eye was ‘Teeny-Weenies By The Sea’ but it had no price in it. Neither did any of the others. This is often a sign that the dealer wants to sell them as a job lot and so it proved. £25 later I walked out fully sated with a box of goodies that got better the more I looked at them.

Barely three inches tall they were all from the early thirties and published by Humphrey Milford in three series – the Henny-Penny books, the Tippenny-Tuppenny books and the Teeny-Weeny books. I salvaged about two dozen in collectable condition and all have lovely wraparound art deco boards, plenty of illustrations and decorated end papers to boot. Some of the pictures are coloured in by the original owner but I really don’t mind that sort of thing. Pristine, mint condition children’s books give me the creeps.

I also picked up ‘The Old Books Guide’, an excellent free list of the West Country’s 50 odd shops and dealers willing to suffer visitors. It promised me two destinations in Exeter, the best known being Exeter Rare Books, one of the most bizarrely situated antiquarian shops in the country. It’s in a shopping center. Yes, a bright, soulless, identikit shopping mall, just like the one where you live, complete with Primark, Superdrug and Intersport. When I become Prime Minister all these miserable city centre malls will be forced to contain an old bookshop but this one, sadly, is not the sort of place for bargains. Far from it. In particular it reminded me of one of the adages of holiday book collecting: never buy books about the local area. Regulars will have snapped up the best stuff and the rest you can find for half the price anywhere else in the country.

Far more promising is the intriguing Bookcycle. This registered charity works on the genius principle of asking for donations of books so they can send any appropriate ones to African schools. The rest are sold and the money generated is used to plant trees around the UK – turning books back into trees, in fact. The way it works is clever too – customers are allowed three unpriced books a day and pay what they like for them. The mind boggles but in fact this is a sound business model: it’s a freakonomic truth that in situations like this people tend to give more rather than less. The stock is mainly clean paperbacks but there were shelves of older books upstairs and I suspect that frequent visitors would do well, certainly better than in the local Oxfam bookshop which was typically disappointing.

You can read more about book buying-in-the-field in this month’s issue of the much improved Book and Magazine Collector. Many thanks for your comments, by the way. Apparently there is a way for me to respond to them so as soon as I find out the exact buttons to press I’ll be able to disagree with you live, on-line, in real time mode, and then you can re-disagree with me. I can hardly wait.

Last July Mr. Marc Harrison of Ellwood Books in Salisbury hung up his ‘back in five minutes’ sign and never came back. His takings had slumped by more than £2,000 a month but the culprit was not the intangible recession or the fickle mood of the public. It was the solid and uncompromising form of a nearby Oxfam Bookshop that had opened 18 months previously. The town’s other two bookshops had closed down within six months of Oxfam opening and Mr Harrison famously dubbed the chain ‘the Tesco of the second-hand book world.’

Proof copies at 99p each, anyone? Nope, thought not. Where are the real books?

Fair Trade? He didn’t think so and to Oxfam’s astonishment neither did anyone else. The story made the national press and the slick suits back at HQ soon discovered that their soothing mantra of ‘it’s all for charity so that’s all right then’ no longer worked. It was particularly ineffectual on the second-hand book trade, which, it turned out, had been seething for years and spoiling for a fight. The gloves came off and Oxfam’s core policies, trading advantages and charitable status were given a good going over. All sorts of Rumours emerged: the chain deliberately targeted towns with existing bookshops, for example, and apparently just 20% of their takings reaches the ‘good cause.’

Another rumour was confirmed recently in Book and Magazine Collector by Peter Moore of the PBFA. Many collectors had noticed that there never seemed to be any decent books in the shops. They were certainly donated, but why did they never reach the shelves? The answer lies in a statement issued after the PBFA and Oxfam met last November:

“Members of the book trade, naturally enough, would prefer to see the better books entering the trade rather than going to a charity whose staff, on the whole, cannot have the knowledge to process the books to best effect. To put it simply: Oxfam would prefer to receive £100 in cash rather than a carton of books. As booksellers we would be happy to pay £100 in order to acquire a carton of books.”

I bet. Phil R Shelves? No thanks!

Oxfam’s cushy arrangement to offload all those pesky books at wholesale prices to The Inside Ring of lucky PBFA members is outrageous. Both sides appear to have forgotten the most important part of the equation: us. Book collectors outnumber and outspend dealers hand down, in the light of which might I presume to offer Oxfam a humble petition on behalf of the people who spend millions a year on the very books you seem to find so problematical?

Firstly, we want to see those books. The lack of them makes your shops bland and Lifeless. You have edged out our old haunts, replaced serendipity with homogeneity and locked away the past in a hot glass display box behind the counter. Now you’ve carved out a deal to flog the best stuff from the back door. Those better books are donated by people who trust you to do the utmost, rather than the least, to maximise their potential. It is not an option; it is your duty, and the repercussions of failing in this duty are very serious. A few years ago those very books were on the shelves of the local shops you have replaced. What is so insurmountably difficult about putting them back there so that we can buy them again in that quaint, old-fashioned way? Listing them on line is not enough, by the way – we want to see them, hold them and judge them for ourselves.

Secondly, recruit new staff from the world of old books. Many managers clearly have no idea about edition, condition and pricing; on the other hand a few are making a pretty good job of it. When I last visited the shop in Canterbury, for instance, it looked more or less like a proper bookshop. There were plenty of older books and browsing was how it should be – fun. I’d also like to see Book and Magazine Collector sold in every branch. Turn your customers into collectors and profits will soar. Your volunteers would pick up a thing or two along the way as well: staff who know their stuff shift units.

Thirdly, I like your Grand Ambition. Open more shops. The country needs them, but why not target towns that have recently lost a bookshop?

Walk on by... better books would attract big-spending book collectors.

Some dealers do not mind Oxfam as neighbours but many more do. You should at least test the water by consulting interested local parties. What makes this whole affair so sad is that your shops are almost great. The general public like them, all you need do now is cater for big-spending collectors by letting us buy your better books. Show us the goods! We’ve got the cash – do you want it?

Oxfam’s controversial policies continue to attract comment, most recently an elegant shoeing from novelist Susan Hill who branded the chain ‘bullies and thugs’ in The Spectator. Whatever your views the bright new things of the old-book trade are here to stay and Oxfam, dealers and collectors are All In This Together. Collectors, however, are the foundations of the old-book trade and by far the greatest part of the pyramid that now has the Oxfam empire at the top. With a little effort Oxfam could have our respect, support and admiration rather than our resentment, derision and antipathy. I know what relationship I would rather be in.

What’s your opinion? Is your local Oxfam bookshop the real thing or is it suspiciously free from nice books? What do you think of the pricing? How could the shops be improved? Join the debate and send in a comment here. If collectors feel strongly about the issues I’ll deliver a real petition of your views to Oxfam’s Head Office later in the year!

I’ve touched on this month’s topic before but it’s worth revisiting. In fact at the moment it’s the only thing that matters…

A hundred years ago this little paperback was on the counter of The Waverley Book Store, an Edinburgh antiquarian bookshop run by Robert M. Williamson.

Will anybody want this old paper thing a decade from now?

He’d been a dealer for 30 years when he wrote these wonderful reminiscences about the book world. It is full of his love of books and his tales of thrilling auctions, stupendous finds and undersold bargains make for mouth watering reading today.

It must have been irresistible at the time, too, certainly for one particular customer. On the morning of June 12^th, 1908 a Mr Charles Spackman walked in and browsed the stock. At the counter the bold and fashionable design of Bits From An Old Bookshop caught his eye and he added it to his pile. A century later it turned up in a south coast bookshop and the joys of ownership began again when I found it, along with some little slips of paper inside: Spackman’s book plate, a snipped out obituary of Williamson and the dated delivery label from The Waverley Book Store. Taken together they provide concrete evidence of a book collector’s proud memory of meeting the author and of a happy moment in the world of old books.

I’m a book collector and I know a treasure when I see one. This book will be on my shelves until I die. Until recently we could say with complete confidence that it would then pass safely into the hands of another collector but unfortunately I’m not so sure. I love old books, and so do you, but the cosy old world of cosy old books is heading for a showdown, a title fight to the death that has already begun. A slick silicon upstart with warm electric blood is gunning for books and if it wins the war our lives will never be the same again. The story now is not bits from a bookshop; it’s bits from a computer, the bits and bytes that might well kill paper books forever.

The history of books is long but astonishingly uneventful. The codex format, modern-looking books with pages rather than a long scroll, was established 2000 years ago. For the first 500 years professional scribes and illustrators copied out books by hand until a technological marvel called the printing press came along. A decade ago along came the internet, and once again nothing much happened. All the net did was change the people involved and move the stock from high street to store room. Big deal. Books survived it all because books have a special, unique status. And no wonder: paper books have conquered continents, recorded dreams, toppled governments and inspired generations. They have been, without doubt, the single most respected man-made objects ever created – until now.

Books are fast becoming second best. Gutenberg’s press just sped up the production of the same old thing; this time we’ve made factories full of robots to snap together something very different: ebooks. The next decade will be the most important one in the two thousand year history of the book. Now, for the first time ever, the book itself is under threat. Over the next ten years the public will be asked to choose which we want, carbon or silicon, paper or screens. Ebooks are in their infancy but screens have won the first round and we may have already reached peak book.  Open the newspaper and it’s all bad news: teenagers don’t read, Google have scanned everything and schools are dumping their textbooks.

Book collecting will only survive if new collectors take it up and they will only do that if they have some sort of relationship with books. Will the generation born with a silver screen in their hands ever pick up an old book? Will our scanned in libraries be shut down to save money when the books are all on line, free, forever? Will governments push up the price of paper with green taxes and drive reluctant readers to the screens? All these issues and many more will be raised as we race through the decade and the future of our hobby depends on the answers.

Bakelite radios, hat boxes, shellac 78s, paper books, sugar tongs, ear trumpets...

Ten years from now Bits From An Old Bookshop will have been captured and changed from paper into fizzing electrons and if the public are happy about that then we will have lost the battle. When there’s nobody left to appreciate a binding or care about condition or pay extra for a first edition then our books will become worthless clutter like shellac 78s and worn out clothes.

On the other hand the future isn’t written yet. More education means more culture which means more book collecting. Let the screens spread! Let a cheap, durable sliver of silicon find its way to every home and hut on the planet so that a billion new readers will one day pick up a real book, an old book, and think – ‘I wonder.’ If that’s the case then ebooks could lead to a golden age of book collecting where limited supply pushes up prices and a new army of collectors treasures books like never before.

And it all depends on what happens this decade…

Our generation of collectors has an important part to play in this. Are you worried about ebooks? What should we do while the public decide whether they still want to bother with paper? Please leave a comment below.

The Royal Dream Book, 1859. No named publisher. Just 13cm by 8cm, this little beauty was designed to attract young ladies with bright red cloth binding, gilt edges and neat size. The 'Royal' in the title means only 'best'.

There you are, gracing your half-friends with your presence, surrounded by people you’ve never met and hope to never meet again, looking at artless photographs of the two of them and listening to stuff like: ” …and this is me at the front of the boat with the island in the background – or is that the mainland? – and look! there’s the man from Birmingham with the shorts! and I couldn’t find my sunglasses…”

And as it turns out you’re expected to provide a soundtrack of approving ahs and ooohs as payment for the privilege. I was all for blowing cover and jeering at it all, unravelling the care and making the thousands they’d invested in the experience valueless but my girlfriend at the time would have chucked me – we were at her sister’s – so I just sank my teeth into the holiday wine and asked polite questions about any snap featuring big sis in a bikini. The sight of her ten feet tall was something to behold and the more I asked the longer she hung about on the wall. It made a bad evening barely bearable. 

And that was that. It never happened to me again as I don’t often meet those sort of people. What sort? The wrong sort, obviously. But years later I discovered something even worse. Other people’s holiday snaps are personal, embarrasing, cringingly self centered but other poeple’s dreams… How could anything be more private? Why share them? I don’t want to know. I don’t want an invitation to that private landscape where your ego and id fight it out in fancy dress using cyphers for weapons and codes for conversation. I’d rather hear bowel talk, hospital dialogue, wet-eyed confessionals than listen to stuff like: “…and then I was on this boat, right, with some kind of island in the background, or land anyway, and there was this man from Birmingham there wearing these shorts and I couldn’t find my sunglasses…”

The central image is less than five centimeters across and shows the young lady dreaming of a suitor.

Dreams are so private the stories are kept from the tellers, forgotten as soon as told and wrapped in misremembered subplots. It was all very different before Freud woke up the world. When this book was first published in 1859 every flickering image had a solid, immutable meaning. Then as now, books like this were aimed squarely at the gullible female, as the beautiful gilt image on the front board shows. The frontispiece inside shows the scene in more detail and it is signed ‘Lizars’, the great Edinburgh engraver who produced all the plates for the Naturalist’s Library. The wealthy girl is asleep and in her mind’s eye she sees herself with a man, urging her forward to marriage, symbolized by the wreath. Every girl’s dream, of course – but what sort of man would it be?

This book has the answer and it all depends on your other dreams. Ducks are good – ‘ It indicates that you will be very fortunate in the choice of a lover…’ but peaches are terrible, denoting deceit in love. Dreaming of stinking mackerel means you will never marry your present sweetheart but if you dream of being in bed it signifies a hasty marriage, ‘probably before the end of next month’, which must have been a worry to younger readers. 

Another one for the ladies. This was first published in 1901 - the year after Freud's rather heavier take on the matter, 'The Interpretation of Dreams'. This reprint dates from 1929.

Happily for us, dreaming of books is also good news. If the dreamer ‘ is in the family way it betokes the birth of a son who will rise to great eminence by his learning.’ See where all those books get you to? I was particularly interested in this entry because in his introduction to bookseller David Low’s autobiography With All Faults Grahame Greene admits to dreaming about books. An enthusiastic collector of early detective fiction, he claims that he used to dream of them in nice condition but that recently he dreamt only of poor, shabby copies. What does it all mean?

Now I’m not one to burden you with my private life but guess what I dreamt about last night?

And they were in superb condition, thanks.

There are no copies of the first book on line anywhere and none on COPAC either.

The  yellow Pearson’s book was written by Professor P R S Foli and there are a few copies  here. That one in the wrapper isn’t the same book but looks pretty good for the money, despite the loss to the wrapper – it’s 80 years old after all.

The white illustration is printed on a separate piece of paper and then stuck onto the boards. All the rest is printed directly onto the boards.

Ha! Older and wiser now, I always adopt the correct proceedure which is to simply snatch it up the nanosecond it hits the table. If someone is looking at a book you want, feign complete indifference. Once, I engaged an enemy in conversation about how many  books he had, and how there was no room in his house for any more, and that he never read any of them, until he unconsciously put down the book he was holding, which I desperately wanted to have. Anyway, I asked the old chap about the book and we fell to chatting and then he asked me what I collected. 

For once I was at a loss for words. I’d only been into books for a year or so and I wanted to own everything I saw. I quite liked crime fiction but there was a lot of it about, far too much to collect it all. I quite liked natural history but this was even worse, there were entire fairs devoted to it and once again I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. “Well – books” I said, rather unhelpfully.

This is just about nice enough, factoring in the content and inside condition which is perfect.

Years later when people asked I was able to make a proper, book collector’s response. I collected bibliomysteries, crime fiction books to do with the book world. I made quite a collection and then got about as far as I could go without robbing a bank or murdereing the old gits who had the last ones I needed and wouldn’t part with them. Also, I was getting a bit worked up about them and becoming rather obsessed. In fact I was turning into the sort of person who looks upon kind, wise and benign pensioners as old gits and dreams about killing them. So I knocked all that on the head, chucked away the wants list and started to collect – well, books.

I do have some criteria, of course. For a start they need to be in extremely nice condition. I don’t buy anything after 1980 or and I don’t buy rebound, recased or even repaired books. I try to avoid common books and I certainly don’t go anywhere near popular authors or ‘highspot’ books. For a long time now I’ve sought clean, tight, bright books on pretty much any subject. And sought isn’t the right word, or the right way to do it. I don’t seek out books or want certain books or carry around lists or badger dealers for books or trawl the net for books. Why bother? There are millions of lovely old books out there.I just walk into rooms full of them and see what there is to buy.

Look! This book has the word 'gay' in the title!

The book we met over was an old children’s book. He had a much nicer copy already and I couldn’t afford it. I don’t collect children’s books either, but it just so happens that I’ve bought a few this month so here they are.

The first one was given to Elsie Blan, of Croydon, in January 1902. Although published by The Religious Tract Society it is not in fact stuffed full of the god stuff and you should always look at RTS books carefully. The vast majority are perfectly normal takes on whatever the book happens to be about yet some dealers price them very low because they assume they are simply sermons or overtly religious. ‘The Child’s Companion’ was an annual. This is number 78. It’s interesting for the contents but the most remarkable thing about it is the condition. It’s a ‘time machine’ copy, fresh as the day it was made and I cannot resist books in truly fine condition.

The second one only made the cut because it was mispriced at £15 – way too low – and because the inside is in perfect working order, which is unusual for books like this. It’s a ‘moveable’, a pop up book from the mid 1930s, published by Strand who also issued the more common ‘Bookano’ titles and perfect copies of books like this are hard to find. The fragile tabs are often broken and the folding parts worn away; this one is still all intact.

As for the last one, well, the jokes just write themselves. It’s astonishing to think that any attempt to make this book now would land everyone involved in jail. I love it and it was a steal at a fiver, despite the nicks to the wrapper. A lot of dealers seriously underestimate the value of Blyton reprints. Blytonians are mad and will pay fortunes for firsts and that extends to early reprints of early titles like this one. Buy them on sight if they’re cheap.

There are no copies of the first two titles on the net at the moment. The Blyton title is here although a quick glance suggests there are no copies with wrappers.

You would have thought that we’d absolutely love the places and want to live in them but no, book collectors don’t like libraries because librarians don’t like books.

There are no stickers or stamps on these beauties. The first is from 1934 and very difficult to find.

It’s one of the main qualifications for the job. Have you ever watched one at work? As soon as they get their hands on a book they start beating it up, stamping it and punching holes in it and sticking things on it and wrestling the wrapper into sticky plastic. They write on it with their biros and markers and shove strips of magnetic plastic down the spine. Sometimes their allies rip the book from its proper home and lash it into some sort of extra strong binding made of plastic covered card. This happened a lot in the sixties and seventies, notoriously in places that should have known better, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum library and even at the British Library.  All in the name of preservation, you understand. 

Those angry scribbles and sly defacings are all books have to contend with at the moment but things are going to get a lot worse. Pretty soon librarians will be licking their lips, rolling up their sleeves and tooling themselves up for the ruck of their lives. Google and others are busy scanning every book they can get their hands on and turning it into a digital library. It’s going to be wonderful. Before long all the text will be searchable in ways we can’t even imagine now. Thousands of lost treasures will turn up. Text-analysis software will slip through the system finding unattributed works by famous authors and many works of genius will turn out to – ahem – closely resemble obscure works by unknown hacks. Gaps in biographies will be filled, forgotten discoveries rediscovered and our knowledge and understanding of literature, science and the arts will expand exponentially. Things will never be the same again; we will soon be unlearing details about authors, revising our opinions and rewriting the history books. Google will deliver a golden age of research and discovery that will keep academics busy for decades.

As for the librarians, well, they’ll be looking to their Governments for their grants and salaries, their stipends and expenses, their new wings and new binderies and new miles of shelving. And sooner rather than later those governments are going to look at that free billion-volume always-open pan-global fully-searchable library in the sky and say - 

Well, as we’ve gone all democratic and blog like, perhaps you should have some input. Choose one:

A) ‘Absolutely, old chap. Books, eh? Couldn’t agree more. Got to keep ‘em looking neat. How much do you need?’

B) ‘Ah, those old paper books. They’re all on line now, yes? Every single one? Then why on earth am I paying you to – ?’

These two titles are American; the second is a 'paperback original', ie, a paperback first edition. The book was not published in hardback first.

If you can’t decide, here are are few other thoughts that might focus your mind. Firstly, there’s a slow motion economic disaster unfolding throughout the century. And secondly, this round of scanning is only the beginning. The quality and precision is only going to get better, and more thorough, and the question ‘Why am I paying you to keep the paper versions?’ is going to be increasingly hard to answer. Worse, the people making the decisions will not have our cultural memories of paper, our love of it. To our generation paper is stuff you respect at all costs. To those raised on screens it’s very muchly second best.

Before long questions like this will need to be answered. I suspect that within the next decade a minister is going to turn our books over to the librarians once and for all. 

Hey ho. Bet you wish you’d never popped round now. But cheer up – these are knotty problems and I might be wrong. In fact I want to be wrong.

Many thanks for your comments, by the way. ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ is the one I’m pinning my hopes on. It’s a good point. Every new method of distribution leads to an increase in the appreciation of that media, not a decrease. Why should that not be true for reading, and books, and book collecting?

Business as usual next week – cheery stuff about beautiful old books. In fact I might well do a quick ’show and tell’ of some of the ones I’ve bought this year and explain what it was about them that caught my eye.

Because no matter what happens I will never, EVER, stop buying old books!

There is just one copy of the first book here. Don’t buy it – it’s overpriced and a dreadful read anyway.

‘Dewey Death’ by Charity Blackstock is a good read and there are many editions to choose from here

Book three is also dreadful and also hard to find, there are just two copies here.

That fabulous pulp is a cracker and a steal at less than a fiver, you can find copies here.

In November 2006 I started writing a book about the end of paper books. I called it The Library of Death and I had no difficulty finding an agent. After all, somebody was going to write the first book about the end of paper books and the first one to hit the shops was bound to sell on the back of all the publicity the ebooks would get.

Not even the indestructable Sexton Blake can stop the death of paper books. Here he is in 1929, confronting Miss Death.

When I started to write it you couldn’t buy an ebook in the UK. The Sony reader was only avaliable in America and Japan. Nobody took what I said seriously. I interviewed plenty of people and they all said that ebooks would never take off and that people would always prefer paper books. A futurologist from New York thought that it would take fifty years for paper to die out. Richard Joseph, of Shepperds Guide, said he thought that in the future paper books would be more in demand, not less. Incredibly, all of them said that the readers were too expensive or that they would hurt your eyes or that the battery would run out. Various other people ‘hoped’ that paper would always be appreciated and waxed more or less lyrical about the texture of the experience, the intimacy of the process and the cultural memory of the medium. Whoo hoo.

Interestingly the only person who agreed with me was not a book man. He was a record man. He’d seen vinyl go from all there was to a barely remembered irrelevancy in just twenty years and he knew precisely what I was talking about.

The agent sent it off in November 2007 and pretty soon it was clear that it was ‘thanks but no thanks’. Several publishers said that they simply didn’t agree, as if their personal opinions were enough to prevent the firm making money and a few simply didn’t like the style, which was fair enough. The first book about the end of paper books, and all the juicy publicity that will go with it is still up for grabs, by the way.

Because I was right. Books are dead. They’re still with us but the writing is on the silicon wall. Today’s teenagers choose screens over paper all day every day for the simple reason that it’s better. Great big clunking text books and guide books and how-to books and reference books and, yes, novels are an embarrassement next to a wafer thin colour reader linked up to the internet.

Not enough bodies in second hand bookshops is causing hundreds to close down each year. Will anybody collect books a few decades from now?

I spend thousands a year on lovely old books and I’m not going to stop doing that; indeed, the whole point of this blog is to encourage you to do the same. Unfortunately I suspect that soon books will be just another cultural artefact like sugar tongs, teapots or doorknobs. Collecting them will appeal to a tiny minority and seem ludicrous to the other six billion because paper books will quickly lose their status once the readers really take off.

And it gives me no pleasure to say “I was right,” even though I was right. I had 2020 as the absolute last date for paper books being the norm and everything is right on track. Just two dominos are yet to fall. The first is the price of readers, which will soon fall rapidly, in the same way that electronic calculators cost the earth when launched and eventually became essentially free. The second is what nobody else has realised yet – except me and the record man. It is this: It isn’t up to you.

Borders has gone and Amazon report that the sale of ebooks is fast catching up with that of those old, heavy, paper versions.

Vinyl wasn’t broke, in the same way that paper books are perfectly adequate now, and have been for 500 years. There is no reason for anyone to switch to another technology unless they’re forced to do so. Record companies got together and simply began to limit the supply of vinyl. If you wanted to hear the songs, you had to buy the CD – which was on special offer, sir, with two extra tracks, madam, and a free booklet to boot. Soon publishers will begin to limit the supply of paper books and to make them more expensive ( the trees! the ink! the oil!) More and more people will give up and switch to a screen. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself this question. When was the last time you bought a record? 

Books are dead.

Am I right? I’ll have more to say on this next week, but in the meantime I’d like to hear your thoughts. Will books continue to be collected or will they vanish from the public’s conciousness as they fade away? 

There are no copies of the first item for sale on the net at the moment.

R T Campbell’s excellent ‘Bodies In a Bookshop’ is here. They are mainly re-issues.

‘Death Of  A Bookseller’ is also a brilliant read. You can find one here.

Oh, hang on – that’s us. Or it was, in 1939 when this book was published. The meaningless greeting of ‘How d’you do’ is dying out now but some things never change. The past may be a foreign country but although our national costume has become more casual there’s been no similar fall in the standard of national pastimes like binge drinking. Today those bright red faces are hidden under baseball caps but the superior sneer hasn’t changed one bit.

That 7/6 on the spine is a sight to cheer all collectors - it means that the book is almost certainly a first edition. it was the standard price all through the twenties and thirties.

This excellently self-aware dust wrapper hides an equally enjoyable book which is indeed a look at strange customs around the world. It’s packed with photographs and plenty of  fascinating tidbits. Some of the weird stuff is well known now – Maories rubbing noses, Japanese bowing – but one in particular caught my eye . ‘In the Sudan the European must not be suprised if the local magnate spits in his face.’ I’d never heard of that one and I doubt if the passage of time has altered the custom one bit. In fact I’d go as far to suggest that this particular ‘hello’ is more popular than ever and still absolutely crammed with heart-felt meaning.  

Of course, strange customs are all around us even here at home. Collecting books, for example. Is it a normal, rational thing to do? The rise of ebooks will make paper books obselete and once that happens new collectors will be thin on the ground, to say the least. Next week I’ll be looking into this knotty subject in more detail. It’s of great concern to every one who loves old books, not just collectors but also the trade. 

Which brings us to booksellers, and you’d have to travel very far indeed to find a tribe with stranger customs. I mean, what a life. Out they go each day on a buying spree, trudging grimly from bookshop to charity shop, flea market to boot fair, cursing the whole time and cuffing children and pensioners aside. They dream of Casino Royale and Famous Fives but each day is a living nightmare of Davinci Code paperbacks and Walter Scott sets done up in scuffed leather with one vol missing. Nevertheless they end up gradually filling a bag with interesting looking stuff based more on hope than expectation. Back home it’s straight onto abe (“Abe? Sorry? What – oh, abe. No, no – I never use it…”) and the cursing redoubles as they realise that everything they’ve bought is already listed, often for less money than they bought it for just minutes ago. Until – bingo! – they type in one like this and find there are no copies already on line. Hurrah! The swearing turns instantly to singing, the clenched fists unfold into rubbing palms and the scowl turns briefly into an avaricious leer. When there’s no other copy listed they can ask what they like for theirs, and reason seldom stays their hand. £50? £100? Why not £200?

One for the office wall. No matter what your job, it can't be as bad as cleaning the crap from a whale's intestine by - well, let's hope it's blowing, not sucking.

This explains why a lot of books on abe are so ludicrously, fantastically, fatally over priced. Once some ignorant fool starts a snowball of greed nothing can stop it, because sooner or later another one of the abebrigade finds the same book and wearily types it in. Hello – what’s this?  Only one copy listed? And look, it’s worth £200! Brilliant!

In an inspired moment of commercial genius on it goes for £190. That should mean a quick sale…

And so on.

You can find two copies of this book here. 

Bought for £4 in A and Y Cumming, Lewes, in January 2010.