How cool are the covers on these 1930s aviation magazine.

Such a colourful book from 1931, The Story of Siegfried with these brilliant full colour plates by Peter Hurd who I haven't come across before.

From 1887, everything you wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about Victorian plumbing or, "the best means for effectually excluding noxious gases from our houses."

This is an extraordinary beast of a book, published in Paris in 1904 and almost every other page is a stunning chromolithograph. The story of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

A nice little group of Noel Coward items. Both the books are signed and the second signature on "Cavalcade" 'and Jeffery' is by Jeffery Amherst, "long time travel companion and sometime lover" of Coward: a scarce evidential scrap of a same-sex relationship from the 30s.

Thursday at the shop. Just a few seats still available.

The first edition of one of the best and most loved childrens books of the last 50 years. Most were sent to school libraries to be covered in labels and stickers and passed from grubby hand to grubby hand. Not this one 😍

From the 1830s this French natural history by Lacepede is stuffed full of hand coloured plates of fish, toads, snakes and the rest...

First words spoken to me today by a customer: "Hello, I've just done something very distressing" !! 👀

I ❤️ Patreon book parcel day. @pfieldbookshop.bsky.social Look at the size of that waist!

This is one of the sweetest #ThingsThatFallFromBooks for a while.

Amazing patterns on a leather binding like on this 1901 Works of Tennyson are called tree leather, sometimes flame leather. The technique uses an acidic solution which is run over the leather to make the patterns.

Sometimes with intsitutional and commercial histories, the physical form of the book can tell you almost as much as the contents about how the institution sees itself... herewith, at over 1000 pages and nearly 3.5" thick is the History of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Have spent the morning in Middle Earth, which isn't a bad place to be! #tolkien

Over 400 postcards in a huge album. Hours of fun with this lot!

One of the things I love about being a general bookseller is being able to display an original photograph of Steven Tyler from Aerosmith (signed by the photographer), underneath a first edition Dickens and a book of images of Papal costumes...

A talk on an amazing woman of magic and words Florence Farr (actress, producer, musician and head of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) coming to a bookshop near you... She stood up to Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats wrote poetry about her. DM to book a seat.

About to pick up this entire pile or recently priced books and carry it through the shop to the "to be shelved shelves", yes that's right, in one go! #bookshopskills

The whole 9 yards... or in this case the whole nine volumes of The Oxford Sherlock Holmes.

Victor Klemperer was a Jewish professor of philiogy and his diaries are volumimous and fascinating, said to offer one of the best accounts available of daily life under the Third Reich.

Reggie Oliver is known as a writer of plays and ghost stories, but also as a biographer of his aunt, Stella Gibbons who wrote "Cold Comfort Farm". This copy was given by Oliver to the raconteur and bookcollector Barry "Dame Enda Everage" Humphries and bears his bookplate.

As y'all went nuts about the Plutarch I expect you will loose your minds over the complete Cicero's Letters to Atticus in 6 volumes.. with the index! Oh yes!

Loeb classics are a perennial favourite but it's been a while since we have seen such a wonderfully complete set of a multi-volume work like this: Plutarch's "Lives" in 11 volumes!

Always a delight to get a bundle of New Naturalists in. The superb jackets often overshadow how serious the series was as genuine natural history written by top ranking experts

Are you planning the Beltane Sacrifice... ahem... the May Day celebrations for your local village? Need some pointers?

The oscar winning screenwriter and playwright Ronald Harwood, and the nobel prizewinning playwright Harold Pinter were best chums and shared a love of cricket. So no surprising to find a gift to Ronnie from Harold of one of Neville Cardus's books!

An extraordinary collection of "Welcome Aboard" pamphlets from American warships spanning the 70s, 80s, and 90s. 135 of them in total!

Continuing with the stocktake and finding more fun things I had forgotten about... here a collection of monologues from 1918 which belonged to the renowned actor Donald Wolfit. Worn & battered as it is, maybe it was tucked under young Donald's arm at his early auditions!

AI is a long way from taking over the world...

And whilst we are on signed postcards from great women, here is Ellen Terry returning a postcard with a requested autograph suggesting maybe the recipient could send a trifle for a theatrical charity in return.

To all appearances a signed photo by glamorous actress of stage and screen from the 1930s Dorothy Hyson... and indeed it is. But it is also signed by a WW2 codebreaker from Bletchley Park who was part of a team that broke the German 'Floradora' code. (Hint: it's the same person)

Just acquired these achingly cool guides to "Alternative London" by Nicolas Saunders from 1970/1. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Doing a bit of Saturday stock-taking... always nice to find little pockets of stock one has forgotten about like this collection of books by (and all signed by) Lavinia Greenlaw.

The instagram of its day: bookmark shaped postcards.

Viz 355

Just to prove that people will write books about... everything!

Good morning... it's another leathery one here.

Three 18th century medical texts just listed...

From 1844, all six volumes of Charles Knight's "London" in full leather. A really chunky set full of engravings and these beautiful folding lithographs too.

A marbling moment...

A foredge painting of Paul Revere's Ride, a full leather binding by Bayntun of The Art of Beatrix Potter, a scarce copy of Operations in Waziristan 1919-1920, and some copper trench art napkin rings... nothing if not eclectic on ebay!

We await the arrival of a host of golden poetasters for our Dead Poets Salon and Open Mic, where tonight we will be invoking the shade of Dorothy Wordsworth (and yes, I do feel the decor is appropiate).

Today in #InterestingButWellLovedBooks is this cookbook produced by The Farmers Weekly. "Farmhouse Fare" is full of lovely noms but I confess I am not convinced by a Gooseberry Salad with turnip tops!

A very scarce 1814 "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte" to his "Retirement" on Elba. In other words written and published before his death. Still in the simple binding it was issued in over 200 years later. Not entirely convinced by the portrait tho... that's quite the wandering eye!

A rather juicy lot of leather at rather good prices added to our ebay shop yesterday!

Just spoke to my somewhat baffled looking assistant about that well known modernist early 20th century novelist cum alternative comedian Virginia Wood... what is WRONG with me today!

Just attempted to list Oliver Dickens by Charles Twist... more coffee needed methinks!

When an engraving has been pressed against the page facing it for 200 years, sometimes a ghost image appears. This is called 'offsetting'

There's been a lot of leather polishing recently... from 1898 this is Mahan's Life of Nelson in 2 vols bound in full calf leather. This was 2nd prize in "Modern Subjects" at Edinburgh Academy!

We are doing well for nice Dickens this week. A first edition of Nicholas Nickleby in what looks like a contemporary binding. The pages on which the illustrations were printed were different paper to the text and get notoriously foxed in almost every case.