Stamps (Greece, Kenya, Uganda)

 

One of our D of E boys (we have two. They're small and moppetlike and will probably grow up to be Prince Charming) brought me these this afternoon. I was upstairs in the office and they were downstairs, apparently trying to kill themselves through the simple expedient of emptying shelving onto their heads. It's easily done - on Monday, someone gave us 1,000 books to value and sell, and the stockroom's turned into an Indiana Jones set, built entirely out of hardbacks. 

Since they seemed happy enough killing each other with books, I just gave a little speech about how if anything in the shelving David'd just emptied looked "sort of old, but good old, not rubbish" (oh, the language of the antiquarian), to bring it upstairs to me, and re-ascended to my office haven - two staircases up, heating on max. Enter Moppet 1, five minutes later, bearing an album full of five hundred times more than the above. 

They're beautiful. I am not a philatelist. But I'm very willing to learn...

Wesleyan Methodist Bookplate (1912)

 

Methodist bookplates are the best. I have one awarded to my great-great aunt, as a child, in 1908. This dates from four years later, awarded to a little girl (or boy, I suppose - possibly a He-Evelyn) in Carlin How, a village in Cleveland with (apparently) a thriving Methodist tradition. If the website is to be believed, Evelyn must have been one of the first children to receive a prize from this church. 

Ex Libris (1623 - 2009)

 

Modern bookplate, published by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 

Foyles bookstamp (1930s)

 

Foyles (W & G Foyle, Ltd.) was founded in 1903, moving to the above address in 1929. The air of menace and hostility conveyed in the bookstamp was probably quite intentional: under the late Christina Foyle (and her predecessors),  the shop's atmosphere and practice were as follows:

Foyle's long refused to take orders by phone and until this decade banned cash registers and calculators, insisting that all reckoning be done by hand. Though famed for her determination and a gaze that could flash with impatience, Miss Foyle spoke in a high-pitched voice that one listener likened to the sound of someone who had just inhaled helium.

Finding the book you wanted from the ramshackle stacks in the dimly lit and chaotic shop was known to be such a trial that a competitor created bus stop posters saying, ''Foyled Again? Try Dillon's.'' Volumes were shelved by the names of their publishers rather than by their authors, and guidance was hard to get from the poorly paid staff, who often were newly arrived in London and had limited knowledge of English. A customer who once asked for ''Ulysses'' was told he had gone to lunch.

For decades Miss Foyle maintained a system of purchase that required obtaining a receipt and getting in line three times before finally reaching the desk where the book waited. In a much repeated comment, one survivor said, ''Imagine Kafka had gone into the book trade.''

[source: "Christina Foyle, 88, Queen of the London Bookstore, Dies", The New York Times, 11 June 1999. pub. at http://bit.ly/cpKAxz ]

Today, Foyle's still operates on five floors at 119 Charing Cross Road, and outclasses its competitors - even if Kafka's still in charge of the layout.

Cover art (1977)

Cover artwork from a handmade book, 1977. Author was a playwright and writer of farces (I really, really love this). The book is a first edition, obv, and signed by the author.

1940 bookplate - "John Farmer, Wrexham, Nov 1940"

Found in a copy of Wrestling Joseph (Marjorie Bowen,  London: The Religious Book Club, 1938). The book is a study of the life of John Wesley (and is currently for sale at the Oxfam Bookshop in Stratford...)