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The "B" Strong Chart and Book
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...
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1930s Polish Folk Dances
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...
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Baron Corvon in a 1970s Look and Learn
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...
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Vintage Photos: Irish Travellers near Belfast in 1958
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...
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Authors and Others: Photographs. A Catalogue
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...
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1930s Abstract Architecture
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,...
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Double Sided Dustjacket
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...
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Henryk Tomaszewski Poster for Hadrian VII
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...
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Alfred Monto-Saldo and Maxalding for Health and Muscles
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...
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Stalag Luft 3 Art and Craft before The Great Escape
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....
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Francis King's Dust Jackets
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...
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Charles Keeping Illustrates Hercules
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...
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Quark/ A 1970s Quarterly of Speculative Fiction
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...
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Vintage Photo: The Human Pyramid
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...
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Robert Lynen A Brave Young Man
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...
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Jan Parker Illustrates Witchcraft and Black Magic
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...
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A Double Slipcase for Quark/
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...
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A Francis King Collection Sold
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...
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Callum James Books: Short List #13
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,...
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Two Wood Engravings by John O'Connor
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...
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