During the lockdown, I started work on some larger cataloguing projects.  One of them is an extraordinary collection of German Notgeld, the ‘emergency money’ which originated, out of necessity, during the First World War, but which later became a way for towns to try and make some money in the early Twenties (before hyperinflation took hold) […]

This week I should have been singing at Ely Cathedral with a group of friends called the Pearce Singers, a choir which arose some years ago out of those of us who used to sing with Tring Parish Church Choir when we were growing up. Back in the 1980s and early 90s, we would go […]

There’s always a danger in book history when you suggest you may have found the first instance of something, but I wonder: could this be the first blank bookplate, i.e. ones that are pre-printed with ‘This book belongs to …’ that you then fill in yourself with your name? These block-printed covers were produced in […]

Following on from previous blogposts on The Greatest Refreshment, Advent Calendar, and Three Heine Love Songs, I thought I would write a little about another piece of mine, The World to me. Its text is the poem ‘World’ from Carol Ann Duffy‘s 2005 book Rapture, words I had actually wanted to set for a long […]

I suppose I had always been attracted by the idea of having my own bookplate, so when my parents asked me what I would like for my 30th birthday (back in 2005), I suggested having one made. Likewise, I have always been attracted by wood engraving, and so I approached Simon Brett to see if […]

A few years ago, I wrote about an early piece of English lithographed music, from the 1820s. As I said at the time, British music publishers largely neglected lithography in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, but it did serve its purpose well for William Hawkes Smith’s privately-printed music with his own illustrations […]