Straight from the props department and everyone's idea of what an old book should look like.

I am sure that another magazine will appear and take its place. After all, book mags come and go, as this month’s book shows. The History of the Works of the Learned. Or, An Impartial Account of Books Lately Printed in all Parts of Europe was the first ever magazine about books. This copy is bound in workman-like parchment over card boards, and looks like a scholar’s copy rather than a work bound for a wealthy man’s library. It was published by Rhodes in London and ran in 12 parts a year between 1699 and 1708.

The Campaign For Real Books is the latest in a long line of ventures designed to spread the word about paper books and to support booksellers and readers. Three hundred years on the enemy is not ignorance or the difficulty of disseminating information; quite the opposite. Humans have become so clever we have found a way to do away with books completely and replace them with ebooks. But is this really such a clever idea?

There are many arguments against ebooks and from our point of view a big concern is their effect on the collecting habits of future generations. If people are not exposed to real books then they will not have a cultural or emotional tie to them and will find no reason to collect them later in life. These wonderful machines (for paper books are machines, they have moving parts) that have carried us through a millennium of development might vanish in the decade ahead.

Well, not if I can help it. I formed Cambo to help independent bookshops stay open. I also intend to speak out against ebooks, to promote paper books and to sponsor book fairs and other literary events. In the future we may even publish paper books ourselves. The main thing is to make sure that paper books are not sidelined by huge media concerns and that the book-buying public are not bulldozed into thinking that ebooks are a better choice.

Accepted by good bookshops everywhere, and you can also use it online.

Cambo members get 10% discount from participating bookshops whenever they spend over £10. There are 125 at the time of writing, selling both old and new books, with more joining us each day. They are all independent sellers, all passionately believe in paper books and all deserve your support. What’s more Cambo is thinking big: in time our newsletter could well become a magazine catering to the needs of book collectors as well as our cousins who prefer new books. Certainly, it will always contain news and articles aimed at collectors. Whether it starts as a few pages or a full size colour magazine depends entirely on how many members we recruit. Our fighting fund will come directly from those £15 subscriptions and the more members we have the more good we can do. That is why I urge readers to sign up today, not just for the discount in your favourite shops but also to be part of a strong, visible and voluble group working to protect, preserve and promote paper books and book shops. Books are the single most important invention in human history and their continued existence is worth fighting for. It has fallen to our generation to make sure they survive, so join Cambo today and make a difference.

Now that I am a company director(!) I may not have time for as much writing but I will do my best to put up an article a month in the new year. That’s it for 2010, however. Thank you very much for reading and please do join Cambo – it’s a great Christmas present for yourself, you family and your friends…

The green copy is from 1840, the red one is 1904.

Sex education still causes controversy  but we may as well cut the budget for it along with everything else. A simple walk to Tesco’s is all the modern youf need to become fully up to speed about the mysteries of the opposite sex.  Nude bodies appear on billboards, 40 feet high, and every shop and supermarket sells daily papers containing images and text that not so long ago would have been classed as hard core porn.  Magazines targeted at teenagers have whole sections on sex including ‘position of the week’ – quite a challenge in the third year of publication, I’d have thought – and anyway most teens cite the internet as the place they receive their sex education. I had a quick look just to check and can report that the net does indeed offer so many detailed instructional films that the rising generation can be left in doubt about precisely what goes where – or not, as the case may be.

‘Erotica’ has been around for a long time but serious instructional manuals are an under valued and over looked sector of collecting and they are also socially important.  Even this century a lot of people were more or less ignorant of the sex act itself, never mind the fore play, during play and after play. There was a huge demand for information and books like Aristotle’s Masterpiece went some way to redress the balance.

It was ascribed to the Greek philosopher in an attempt to create respectability but it is certainly not his work. The earliest copies date from 1684 but earlier fragments in Latin are also known. The plain green ‘3/6’ copy shown here is the earliest, dating from about 1840. The red copy is from 1903 and the work was published virtually unchanged until the middle of the 20^th Century.  There are no illustrations of the sex act but every volume contains plates of cross sections of the womb, complete with a child at various stages of development. It is, in fact, far more of a book for midwives and women in general than a sex manual and the detailed information about delivering babies must have assisted countless millions of women across four centuries. It is also a good example of a subversive text as it was well known and easy to get hold of despite being banned until the 1960s. Sisters, it seems, have always been doing it for themselves.

Plain advice for newly weds, isssued under plain wrapper:

A hundred years later The Sex Factor In Marriage (Williams and Norgate, 1930) was as good as it got and it does indeed go into considerable detail about the physical and emotional aspects of sex. One of the things I like most about it is the restraint shown in the title and cover. Note the ‘In Marriage’, for example. How could it be any other way? Best of all, the whole thing is warily introduced – chaperoned, you might say – by a vicar.

Despite that this book is a revelation. I was expecting it to read like a biology text book crossed with a sermon but in fact about a quarter of it deals with the physical process of sex. She has the best interests of women at heart and goes into considerable detail about the clitoris; stimulation of, not to mention techniques the man can use to ‘control his own feelings until the right moment.’ But the good doctor’s boldest move was to put pleasure on the agenda, possibly for the first time. Just a few pages in we find lover’s lips caressing the nipples, although that was as far south as they went in the thirties. Later she alerts readers to the dangers of monotony by suggesting no fewer than five different positions for sex, which I dare say was quite enough to take any couple up to the end of the war.

Published in 1968. In an attempt to avoid censorship the illustrations of sex positions feature just one person, heaving away at thin air.

In the sixties various other books, some censored, pushed at the boundaries of the permissive society and paved the way for the blockbuster that brought bondage, cunnilingus and ‘foursomes and moresomes’ into the open. In 1972 the provocatively titled The Joy of Sex arrived, featuring those now legendary illustrations of a bearded man and his equally hirsute partner actually, you know, doing it. There are countless editions and it’s hard to think of a more influential book but a first edition can still be had for under £50. It’s mild stuff by today’s standards but of course the modern world has changed its mind about sex; it now looks elsewhere for repression. The recent reprint from Mitchell Beazley no longer contains the passage about sex on a motorbike. It’s been replaced by one on phone sex. The sexual police have retired – but the Health and Safety Army are alive and vigilant. Be careful out there.

The results of Richard Joseph’s bookfair questionnaire will make for interesting reading. The good news is that there seems to be a slight increase in the amount of fairs around the country. When they started in the seventies bookfairs were mocked as the poor cousins of the shops; they may well turn out to be the rich uncles, saving the trade from ruin. Dealers meeting to offer their stock in one central location makes perfect sense. I went behind the scenes at my local fair to find out more.

Dealers come from as far as the Cotswolds to take part in the lively Lewes bookfair. Now in its twentieth year, organiser John Beck works hard to keep it vibrant and busy. When I arrive two hours before opening time the tables are already out – each dealer gets a 12 foot pitch – and a few early birds are busy spreading out the baize cloth and grappling with collapsible shelves.

The set up: getting ready leaves little time for examining other dealer's stock.

Alan Gibbard is a book fair regular and exhibits all over the country. How does he rate the Lewes Fair? ‘I think it works very well. For a one day provincial fair it’s as good as any you’ll find. I bring plenty of local material – books on Sussex and so on – and it always goes well.’

Opposite Alan is Andy Weeks, of booksonlinebrighton. As his trade name suggests he sells on the internet but still depends upon fairs for a lot of business. “We’ve established quite a few contacts at Lewes. We’ve brought along three or four books for one customer today, an avid fisherman, and some for another one who collects Percy Westerman. We’ve been doing Lewes for about seven years now and it’s one of our more successful locations.” It has also inspired him to set up a bookfair in Hassocks, just north of Brighton.

Another dealer with interesting stock is Chris Clemas. He shows me a lovely copy of The Book of Bond, apparently by ‘Bill Tanner’ but actually written by Kingsley Amis. With a very fine reversible dust jacket this is a real bargain at £55. How did he price it? “ Abe, eBay, old catalogues and personal experience. There aren’t many nice copies around at the moment so I made mine the cheapest and hopefully that will do it. I price things cheaply at the fairs because if people have made the effort to come along they deserve to find something and also because you’ve only got the one day to sell it.” True to his word there are several rows of half price books and he adds, “If you bring the right books at the right prices they’re bound to sell.”

These are wise words. Dealers typically have about six hours to sell their wares and that doesn’t allow much time for customers to mull things over. Every book has its price and at fairs it needs to be lower than elsewhere. As Chris concludes, ‘At the end of the day I want some empty boxes, some happy customers and some money.’ His wish came true – the Bond book went to a top London dealer an hour after the doors opened.

Rita Zimnol always shows good books in very nice condition.

Across the aisle Rita Zimnol is putting the finishing touches to her impressive display of art books. She specialises in the ascetic and has come from Twickenham to do the fair. “I do the big ones at Bloomsbury every month and this one compares very well. I just don’t believe the net is adequate for buyers or sellers – you can only find what you know exists. There’s the joy and serendipity in finding something you love but never knew about at a book fair. Once you get people into them they realise how interesting and exciting they are.”

This is a good point. All collectors began to collect because they saw, held, read and admired old books. If fairs die out along with the shops it’s hard to see where new bibliophiles will come from. Book fairs need to be supported like never before which is why I’m very pleased to meet Tony Mulholland. He runs the popular fair along the coast in Rye and has also started a PBFA fair in Folkestone. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t share the view that fairs are in a terminal decline. “People love to come and haggle over books. They can talk to the dealers who also learn a lot by talking to collectors and you can read the market in that way and adapt what you bring. It’s the personal element.”

Books plus: Tony Mulholland, seen here giving some disney items a go on his stall.

Bookfairs need our support more than ever and to make this happen it is crucial to get the new breed of internet dealers to participate. They should make every effort to display at their local fair in order to meet customers, build up contacts, learn more about pricing and sell some stock. Convincing these hundreds – thousands, perhaps – of part-time hidden dealers to get out of the spare room and into the church hall will be key to the continuing success of the trade. The lively social scene with gossip from the book world is an essential part of becoming a seasoned dealer. Who’s just bought a van load of new stock? What shops are worth going to? What online listing sites are a waste of money? You’ll learn more in a day on the trade side of the table than a year on the public side so if you do trade only online talk to your local fair organiser about booking a table at the next event. It could be the best thing you ever did and you’ll be helping keep the hobby alive for the next generation of book collectors.

The next Lewes bookfair is on Saturday 9th October, 10am-4pm, at the Town Hall. Tel 01273 477555.

The Folkestone Book and Ephemera Fair is at The Grand Hotel on Saturday 23^rd October, 11am – 5pm. Tel 01763 248400.

The Mid-Sussex Bookfair is at The Adastra Hall, Hassocks on Sunday December 5^th, 10.30am – 3.30pm. Tel 01273 233274.

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.