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The "B" Strong Chart and Book

April 14, 2014, 1:59 pm
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I love these two piece of ephemera, harvested from a box of auction bits and pieces. Aimed at boys obviously and presented with the boy's magazine The Wizard. And if you were wondering what the advice is on 'how to overcome a bully'... basically it boils down to fight back... and includes detailed and diagrammatic information about how to do so!


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1930s Polish Folk Dances

April 14, 2014, 2:32 pm
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Also from a box of ephemera from a recent auction are these gloriously camp images from the 1930s illustrating various Polish Folk Dances. They come as twenty images printed on loose cards and inserted into one side of a card folder and on the other side, loose cards with the music and sometimes lyrics for various polish folk tunes. The artist was Irena Lukaszewicz. A little bit niche I grant you! but what colour and life!







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Baron Corvon in a 1970s Look and Learn

April 17, 2014, 3:55 pm
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Readers from the UK of a certain age, and probably the men to be honest, will get a little frisson of recognition at the banner above, I'm sure. Look and Learn was almost ubiquitous in the 1970s in newsagents, libraries and schools: the educational magazine for kids with lots of pictures to "make learning fun". I was surprised therefore to discover the other day that they had, in 1973, a two page article on Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo. For a moment I couldn't think why it would have appeared out of nowhere but then remembered that Peter Luke's play Hadrian VII was contemporary with this and sure enough the popularity of the play is the hook on which the article is hung.
 
The title is perhaps a little unfair and blunt "The Writer Who Hated Everybody". Look and Learn wasn't the kind of magazine to give bylines but despite a few errors of fact this is clearly written by someone who knows their Corvine apples. And it is worth its paper and ink for the illustrations alone. The one immediately below shows Corvo writing himself as the Pope in Hadrian the Seventh. The image of Rolfe is taken from the same photograph of Rolfe in the study of Dr Hardy at Oxford as was used on the cover of Robert Scoble's recent book, Raven. The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo. The other images illustrate the story of Rolfe falling into the canal that he wrote as one of his three Venetian tales that were originally published in Blackwoods Magazine. How apocryphal the story is we will never know but it seems unlikely that in many years of boating about Venice Rolfe didn't end up in the drink at some point accidentally and as a strong and regular swimmer, getting to the side, pipe still in his mouth, wouldn't have been out of the question. On the whole, a wonderful ephemeral find.




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Vintage Photos: Irish Travellers near Belfast in 1958

April 18, 2014, 7:22 am
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These photographs of Irish Travellers, sometimes called gypsies, that's I have acquired recently, were taken in March 1958. The presence of a policeman in some of them and the date on the captions on the verso being the same on all of them, suggests that these were taken by someone in in official capacity at the Ministry of Commerce land at Tillysburn in Belfast. But if anyone was ever under the impression that the nomadic lifestyle was somehow romantic or 'free' these photographs ought to put them right. The grinding poverty is evident in all these images. I find them both sad and captivating at the same time.










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Authors and Others: Photographs. A Catalogue

April 22, 2014, 2:31 pm
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If you are on my mailing list then you will have already had the chance to look through this latest catalogue and many of you have and thank you for your purchases. However, if you are not on the mailing list (and you have to ask yourself why you aren't as all it requires is an email to say you want to be!) then I am now making the catalogue open to all.
 

...is a catalogue of photographs from the Eileen Clarke agency in London in the middle of the Twentieth Century, most of them taken by Knightsbridge photographer, Clayton Evans. There are some very well known names here as well as many who ought to be better known. It has been a fun selection to catalogue, getting to know a little more about some of these glamorous and interesting people. A number of the images have appeared on Front Free Endpaper before in their own right.

Seriously, if you are not on the mailing list, send me an email and I will make sure you get to hear about catalogues, short lists and new publications as soon as they are released.
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1930s Abstract Architecture

April 22, 2014, 4:06 pm
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In the last week I've put up a couple of posts with work from a folder of material by Gwendolen K Young: patterned papers and book jacket designs. Also in the folder, sometimes on just scraps of paper, are these bizarre and brilliant abstractions, mainly from architectural shapes.








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Double Sided Dustjacket

April 26, 2014, 1:17 pm
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This is why I love being a bookdealer, because of stupid little things like this that I just find delightful. A perfectly ordinary, in fact rather dull-looking book by Belloc, is transformed into an object that tells a story when we discover that on the back of the jacket is another jacket. It's 1945 and paper is still short in the UK and so rather than throw away misprinted dust jackets they simply turn it over and re-use it.


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Henryk Tomaszewski Poster for Hadrian VII

April 29, 2014, 6:06 am
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This image has featured before on Front Free Endpaper some four years ago. It is a poster for the 1969 Polish stage production of Peter Luke's play, Hadrian VII, based on the book of the same name by Frederick Rolfe.

This poster was designed by Henryk Tomaszewski who is widely regarded as one of the best designers in Polish poster design. If you think that's a little obscure and you've never come across Polish posters as almost a genre in their own right then, honestly, spend a little while with Google and you will come away a changed person.

Tomaszewski is being celebrated for his centenary year at the moment and the above is one part of a display of reproductions on the avenue by the entrance to Warsaw's Lazienki Park. I'm indebted to my fellow Corvine, Miroslaw Miernik for sending the photograph and for think of us here at Front Free Endpaper.

[A piece of Corvine pedantry and one of the things that distinguishes a true Corvine from a mere hanger-on of coat-tails: Rolfe's book was titled Hadrian The Seventh and Peter Luke's play used the Roman numerals in Hadrian VII, mix up the two near a real Corvine at your peril!]
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Alfred Monto-Saldo and Maxalding for Health and Muscles

May 2, 2014, 7:38 am
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I have been enjoying myself today cataloguing a number of physical culture, bodybuilding and health magazines from the 1930s. This one is an advertising brochure for the slightly disgustingly names Maxalding System by the preposterously named Alfred Monto-Saldo (actually A. M. Woolaston). His system, it seems will build your muscles, prevent headaches, end constipation and make you fit. He offers up as proof, his 21 year old sone Courtlandt Saldo who, according to the blurb began Maxalding at 16 and 5'3" and is now this fine strapping 6' young man. Another photo inside also features Courlandt, presumably at 18 doing that bizarre and slightly horrific thing that bodybuilders can do with their tummies.
 
If you fancy looking like young Mr Saldo yourself then many of the exercises and other information is reproduced on this wonderful present day website.



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Stalag Luft 3 Art and Craft before The Great Escape

May 3, 2014, 1:18 pm
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As a devotee of The Antiques Roadshow I am often presented on my television screen with artworks from the trenches of WW1 or POW craft work from the Napoleonic wars right up to the Twentieth Century. The above is my favourite from a small collection of photographs showing an NCO's Arts and Crafts Exhibition at Stalag Luft 3 during WW2, famous as the scene of The Great Escape, and it strikes me that all these amazing artworks and objects might still be floating around somewhere, perhaps in Germany, like the ones that turn up on The Roadshow here in the UK: traded with a guard, given as a present to a German visitor, left behind at the end of the war and acquired somehow...







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Francis King's Dust Jackets

May 6, 2014, 9:10 am
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Francis King died in 2011 after a long and prolific career as one of the UK's best twentieth century novelists. He was openly gay from the 1970s onwards and there are gay themes and characters throughout his novels. The Domestic Animal (1969), pictured below, even has the rather disingenuous blurb on the back, "... this is not merely another homosexual novel...". A number of his titles have now found a new life with the wonderful Valancourt Books in Richmond Virginia but many are still only to be found on the secondhand shelves.
 
Not only was King writing gay interest novels and stories, he was also writing right through the period that interests us most here on Front Free Endpaper when it comes to jacket design and so it is hardly a surprise to find his jackets making an appearance. Not all are credited but many are now scarce, including the Donovan Lloyd jacket, below, for King's first novel To The Dark Tower. Bigger names also illustrated his covers including Osbert Lancaster in very recognisable style providing a cover for the pseudonymous The Firewalkers and a detail from Duncan Grant used as a cover for A Domestic Animal.








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Charles Keeping Illustrates Hercules

May 7, 2014, 1:40 pm
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It's a mystery to me why, although we rightly celebrate (and collect) the works of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Harry Clarke and so on... the book illustrators of the mid-twentieth century are virtually unknown and hardly collected as such at all. (I exaggerate of course, there are galleries which keep work of this period and collectors who buy the original artwork when they can but I really don't know many who actually collect books in this field) In my, very humble, opinion one of the very best of these has to be Charles Keeping (1924-1988) whose work has been seen on Front Free Endpaper before when we had some illustrations from a book by Rosemary Sutcliff. And today I came across these wonderful examples in The Twelve Labours of Hercules by Robert Newman, a Beaver Book from 1973.







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Quark/ A 1970s Quarterly of Speculative Fiction

May 9, 2014, 3:12 pm
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In 1970/1 four issues only of this paperback 'review' were published in New York edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker. It billed itself as "a new quarterly of speculative literature and graphics... the editors have tried to display the finest work of both new and established authors, whatever its imaginative substance, structure and texture." It was closely linked with the New Wave of SF but I have written a little about that previously I discover by searching my own blog. I have had a tatty copy of Quark/1 for years and never come across any others. Always in the back of my mind I fancied having the whole set but never quite got around to organising that. Then I came across a set for sale at an unusually reasonable price, all four at once, so I bought them and they arrived today looking like they've never been read. They are fast becoming my new favourite thing. The excitement of being young and creative in the 70s just zings off every page.




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Vintage Photo: The Human Pyramid

May 11, 2014, 11:28 am
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I've seen quite a lot of photos over the years of boys and men in this kind of pursuit: attempting to make the most interesting and daredevil shapes out of themselves. This one struck me as interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is something that you can't see from your computer screen but the original photograph is a lot bigger than usual, it was printed more the kind of size that you would use for a school team or class photo. The second unusual thing about this one is that they are cheating (kind of). You can see that the main group aren't exactly gymnasts of great skill and daring but rather are posed on a set of parallel bars with two of them even used to mask the uprights. A nice effort though and the dog is a nice touch!
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Robert Lynen A Brave Young Man

May 14, 2014, 12:26 pm
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This is one of those times when a small slip of paper among a pile catches your eye and leads you to a story, almost like it wants to be found. The young chap in the photo above is pictured in a still from a film. It took a little tracking down because the card is Dutch and has the Dutch title of what is actually a French film from 1932 that translates into English as The Red Head. The guy in the photo is just 12 years old, he was the son of artistic parents, living in Paris he was 'discovered' by filmmaker Julien Duvivier. This was his first film but he made a number and had a career on the stage as well.

He was, it turns out, an exceptionally brave young man who, at the start of WW2 joined the French resistance and used his acting career as a cover for his activities. But he was discovered, arrested, tortured and interned by the Gestapo. After two escape attempts he was executed by firing squad. This brave young man was only 23 years old. Next week he would perhaps have celebrated his 94th birthday.
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Jan Parker Illustrates Witchcraft and Black Magic

May 16, 2014, 3:46 pm
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I picked up a paperback today that promptly fell apart in my hands. It's a 1971 Hamlyn paperback by Peter Haining called, "Witchcraft and Black Magic". Haining somewhat blotted his copybook with non-fiction works with his two books on Sweeney Todd and Springheel Jack, which is a shame because he was a very competent author even if, in this instance, the text is simply journalistic. But it wasn't the text that drew me most but the illustrations. They are by Jan Parker and have a brilliant mixture of Bosch and Dali and Munch... and so much else. And the book is packed with them: this is only a small selection. Parker doesn't appear in my reference books about twentieth century illustration so I'm unable to provide much more information about him or her.










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A Double Slipcase for Quark/

May 17, 2014, 10:06 am
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One of the best things about having a blog all of your very own is that if you want to show-off: you can. You may remember my mentioning a while ago the pleasant surprise I had on buying a set of all four Avant Garde 1970s speculative fiction paperback reviews, Quark/, that they were in nearly unread condition. So with two hours and a pile of board, glue, book cloth, marbled paper and a bundle of sharp implements, I've made this double slipcase for them, of which I am inordinately proud.
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A Francis King Collection Sold

May 17, 2014, 10:39 am
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It sometimes happens in bookselling, if you are lucky, that whole collections can be kept intact. I recently bought this great collection of books by and ephemera about Francis King, most of them signed and inscribed, and I was delighted to sell it the whole collection before the collection was complete. However, it seemed that I'd done enough work to merit finishing off the catalogue for browsing only.

King died in 2011 and as often happens in the years or an authors old age and just after their death, their renown is not as great as it has been and it can take a short while for people to begin to appreciate them again. I'm sure this will happen with King and I'll be delighted to see it when it does. His work is always keenly observed and more often than not taken from the people, incidents and settings in his own life. In fact, this drawing from life once got King into extremely hot water when the former labour MP, and then friend of the author, Tom Skeffington-Lodge, recognised himself in a somewhat unkind portrait in the Mss of one of King's books, A Domestic Animal. The edition had been printed and review copies sent but publication day hadn't been reached. Skeffington-Lodge called his lawyers and the whole edition had to be pulped. One of the real rarities in this collection is a signed copy of one of the escapees from the pulping machine.

Although I can't offer any of these items to you all to buy this time, I do hope that you will enjoy browsing the catalogue here:

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Callum James Books: Short List #13

May 18, 2014, 5:53 pm
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Every now and again Callum James Books releases a Short List to people on the mailing list. This list is usually somewhere between 20 and 40 items long and is a varied and eclectic mix of books, ephemera, photographs and other items that may be of interest to you if you like this blog.

Some time after each short list is sent out the items in it may go on sale in various quarters of the Internet but only if they haven't been snapped up by people who got in their first because they are on the mailing list.

All other catalogues are available through the website but these Short Lists, of which the thirteenth was issued today, never appear on the website. So, what I'm saying is, obviously, if you want to be on the mailing list and to get details of these as they appear, just send me an email using the link to the right and I'll happily put you on the list.
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Two Wood Engravings by John O'Connor

May 23, 2014, 6:10 am
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These two wood engravings arrived today. Very pleased with both of them and I only bought them through the good offices of a Front Free Endpaper correspondant so hat-tip to Stephen for his help. They are 1990s prints from 1950s blocks by John O'Connor and printed by Johnathan Stephenson at the Rocket Press in Oxfordshire.
 
O'Connor comes with quite the lineage being a student of Eric Ravilious, John Nash and R. S. Austin at The Royal College of Art in the 1930s. He became a teacher himself at a number of art colleges ending up as a visiting lecturer at St Martin's College of Art in London. He was a very active illustrator throughout a long twentieth century career, working well into old age.


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