Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
20th March 2020
This weekend, at least here in the UK, is Mother’s Day, so I thought I would share something we have here in the office: A hand-coloured etching, inscribed at the head ‘An meine liebe Mama 1786’. To paraphrase the printed greeting below, which is on silk (a window has been cut in the etching, and […]
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27th February 2020
Also in our newly-released Anglo-German catalogue is a copy of the extremely rare first (and only) edition in English of a book by Christian Felix Weiße containing over 50 songs for children, an early appearance for a German children’s book in English. It is also featured in our New York book fair list, available by […]
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10th September 2015
Sometimes, as a bookseller, you come across a book you just can’t find anywhere. You check the title, make sure you’re spelling it right, and still the online databases are silent. But to find two copies of that otherwise apparently unknown book? Well… It took a bit of sleuthing to work out exactly what the […]
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18th May 2015
In my last post before the London International Antiquarian Book Fair next week, I want to share a rather delightful Victorian children’s game, which using rebuses (see my earlier post for something similar from the eighteenth century) and fractions to help teach the cities of the world: The cards are grouped in pairs: one is headed […]
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8th October 2013
Something for Children’s Book Week: Magic Tricks. By the six-year-old Samuel Hopkins (Moscow, 1911), published as a supplement to Svetliachok (“The Little Glow-worm”), a pre-Revolutionary children’s magazine aimed at 4–8-year-olds. It recounts the conjuring abilities of a six-year-old English boy, Samuel Hopkins, with illustrated descriptions of some of his tricks so that the young reader might ‘pleasantly […]
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23rd July 2013
I’m always drawn to books for teaching children to read. This one seems apt this week, with its being so hot: Calo et Lili apprennent à lire, a book specially designed for use in the French territories of the Pacific, published in Nouméa (the capital of the Melanesian island of New Caledonia) in 1962. Aside from the illustrations, by […]
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