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Song of a Boy by John Holland
This is a lovely book which I have had before, but not for a while now, so I was delighted to acquire a copy again today. Song of a Boy by John Holland (Privately Printed, London: 1939) is a mother's...
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Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone Illustrate Greeks and Trojans
Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone have featured here before, twin sisters who lived together with their mother for the whole of their lives and worked as a team (their brother said they were like one...
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Albert Wainwright Jacket for Castle in the Sun by Brearley
On Friday I posted the black and white illustrations by Albert Wainwright for this book by Hilda Brearley. Unfortunately, at the time I didn't have a copy of the dust jacket. I've since found this...
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Found Photos: Sly Blue Speedos
About fifteen years ago I was living in South East London. On a swelteringly hot day in the summer I was coming home from walking a friend's dog in the park when, at the top of a dusty cul-de-sac, I...
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Beautiful Glass
I've recently been helping sort through and catalogue a huge collection of books on glass and every now and again as you flick the pages things leap out at you. This might be the first time that glass...
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Photo Collection Odds
When I buy photos for my 'vintage swimwear' collection, I like them to be primarily of, you know, swimwear or to have some connection. But I'm not strict about this. Many are the photos that are in...
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Eike Von Stukenbrok
Eike Von Stuckenbrok - The Beauty of a Dyslexic Mind from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.The Blessed Eike Von Stuckenbrok has featured a number of times on Front Free Endpaper and I make no apologies...
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Some More Vintage Swim Photos
Three rather nice photos for the collection arrived this morning. Two of them even properly qualify for the vintage the swimwear theme. Having said that though, the team photo at the bottom is rather...
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Last One From The Collection...
... for a while.This is the last in a series of photos for my collection that I bought recently and which have been dropping on the mat under the postman's hand over the course of the last week or so....
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Jean Cocteau Drawings
As a boy in my mid-teens I found myself in possession of an ex-library copy of Jean Cocteau's The White Book. I would like to think that by ex-library I mean a withdrawn surplus book but sadly I think...
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Sir Allen Lane: 50 Years in Publishing
I adore book and publishing related ephemera. So imagine my delight this evening when these two fell from inside a book I was looking at. This is the invitation and the menu from a dinner at the...
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"My Four Year Old Could Have Done That..."
... well probably not! I'm not a subscriber to this view of twentieth century art but I was struck today by the images in the King Penguin book, Children As Artists by R. R. Tomlinson. The title...
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Clanland: Men in Kilts
In the 1930s-1950s the train companies in the UK were great ones for issuing books. Perhaps the most famous, because of it's association with John Betjeman was Metroland but this kind of promotional...
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Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde: Two New Catalogues
Two new catalogues at the same time! Each is a short list of books related to one particular author, that is, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde. These are not lists of rare first editions and holograph...
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A New Statue by Stuart Sandford
A little while ago the British artist Stuart Sandford caused something of a stir with his life-sized statue Sebastian, using a professional male fashion model (called Sebastian) in his underwear...
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Mystery Patterned Paper
This piece of paper was used to create a makeshift dust jacket for a book, I guess sometime in the 1940s or 50s and it didn't separate from the book until 2014 so it did a pretty good job. But it's a...
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Vintage Photos: A Selection
None of these belong to me I'm afraid, although I did help the bidding along on a number of them. The first five photos are from the ebay shop of the wonderful Chuck who, God knows how, manages to...
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Fidus in Die Schönheit
I recently acquired a run of the pre-ww1 volumes of a German magazine called DieSchönheit simply, 'Beauty'. It was a haven for Nacktkultur, the early twentieth century German movement which, in large...
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Male Nudes in Die Schonheit
More from the early twentieth-century German magazine Die Schonheit which was an organ for the early naturist movement. One of the most noticeable features is the significant amount of male nudity...
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Faber and Faber Covers: Thom Gunn & Stephen Spender
There's nothing that would much more kindle the flame of my typographically inclined heart than a collection of mid-20th Century Faber & Faber poetry books. The fact that these are by two great...
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