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A little more Albert Wainright
  This gorgeous roundel is, of course, by the one and only Albert Wainwright, whose art work has appeared here on numerous occasions and about whom we published a book a while ago. My collaborator on...
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19th Century Lenormand Fortune Telling Cards
 Madame Lenormand was a fortune teller in the early 19th century who was wildly famous as these things go at that time! She was perhaps the best known fortune-teller of her day and her main stock in...
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Films and Filming Magazine
Films and Filming which ran from 1954-1990 never made this claim for itself but no one can be in any doubt that this was a magazine for gay men when, for much of it's time such things were either...
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1937 Post Office Recruitment Film
A Job In A Million from Somethin' Else on Vimeo.Thank you to Cosmo who, in the comments to the last post, provided a link to this little classic, a 1937 Post Office recruitment film made by the GPO...
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Book Catalogue Covers
In the past we have had a look a the front covers of book catalogues by a number of different booksellers including, of course, Jacqueline Wesley. It's always interesting to see what images booksellers...
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Halcyon by Pierre Herbart illustrated by John Harrison
Halcyon by Pierre Herbart, translated by Agnes Mackay and illustrated by John Harrison. Published by John Lehmann in 1948. Not a very valuable book but you can nearly always rely on John Lehmann for...
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Hamlet by Twins in the 1970s
I mentioned that we might be seeing more from Films and Filming; in their day they represented a gay 'eye' looking at the cinema of the time and so today they are great for discovering little-known...
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1950s Scout Magazine
The illustrator Pierre Joubert and the photographer Robert Manson pretty much had the image of the Scoutisme movement in France sewn up between them in the early and mid-twentieth century. These late...
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Theodore Wratislaw. Fragments of a Life
Theodore Wratislaw. Fragments of a Life by D. J. Sheppard. With this publication from Rivendale Press one of the last obvious biographical holes of the 1890s is finally plugged. Wratislaw was one of...
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Todd Pratum's Collages
Bookseller Todd Pratum makes collages out of spare scraps of book paper. From what he says, I don't think he would claim any great art in them but I have been rather enjoying looking through them......
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Films and Filming: Second Haul
Strange to say that two days after I came across the first pile of Films and Filming magazines blogged a few days ago, I was in yet another bookshop and there was another small selection. There will be...
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Fernando illustrates Lost Dorsai by Gordon R. Dickson
I must have read my way through every last book in Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai series when I was a teenager or close enough. Even at the time I think I realised that the military strategy that formed...
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Austin Osman Spare at Atlantis Bookshop
 The venerable but never stuffy Atlantis Book Shop in London, right by The British Museum is currently hosting an exhibition to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the death of Austin Osman Spare,...
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The Quite Difficult Book Quiz
2016 has been a pretty shit year in lots of ways. I studiously avoid politics on this blog but it can't be denied that this year has brought some fairly dismal surprises for anyone of a liberal and...
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London Gay Pride: 69 Stonewall 79
Last year I found a rather wonderful collection of gay pride stickers from the London Pride Week of 1979 which was billed as Stonewall '79, being just the 10 year anniversary of the Stonewall riot....
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Book Ephemera #1: Cassell and Grant Richards
In the course of many years of book-life I have accumulated quite a pile of ephemera that relates to books and publishing. This is the first of what is going to be an ongoing series of posts on this...
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Vintage Swimwear...
The other day I started another occasional series for the blog: Book Ephemera and I numbered it #1. The other occasional series is Things That Fall From Books which I think is now up to #19. I can't...
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To the Mothers of the Eagles...
I have found many things inside books but perhaps nothing quite as haunting and moving as this long letter from the mother of a dead RAF officer in WW2. She is writing, on the day of his burial in the...
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Callum James Books: Occult Ephemera
I have just issued a short catalogue of ephemeral items relating to the occult. The list contains a little group of very diverse pamphlets and booklets on occult themes and then most of the rest is a...
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Things That Fall From Books #20: Folk Magic
Of course we are all used to the notion of birth stones now but I found it interesting that someone took the trouble to write out this list of stones for the months of the year with their supposed...
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