Archive

No, not Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr Zhivago. His father, Leonid, who was an artist. This is a copy of the edition of Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last major novel, printed and published in England, away from the Russian censor, in 1900. It is the first complete edition to feature Pasternak’s classic illustrations. It was decided […]

A version of this review appeared in The TLS in June 2021. It is 75 years since the tragic death of Friedo Lampe, the disabled gay writer who survived the Nazi era only to be summarily shot by the Red Army just days before the end of the War.  When, within months of coming to […]

I’ve always been interested in English printing abroad, or foreign-language printing in the UK. Here’s a nice example of the latter, from 1769 (rare, too; I presume it must have been printed in limited numbers): The author, Carl Gottfried Woide (1725–1790), who hailed from Leszno (German Lissa) in Poland, served as preacher to both the […]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about language guides, and so thought I’d share another one I find particularly fascinating: This is the first edition of a book published by the Head of Modern Languages at Shrewsbury School in 1939: ‘Conversations about the New Germany—on and off parade’ (dust-jacket). The illustrations are by Phyllis […]

The following article was published in The Book Collector in Spring 2020, and is reproduced here to mark the fifth anniversary, this week, of setting up We Love Endpapers on Facebook (now with over 6000 members, and counting). I can be fairly precise in pinpointing the time and place when I first fell for a […]

I have fond memories, back in the early 90s, of visiting Stuttgart on a school language exchange. One thing I took away from that (apart from eating Black Forest gateau in the Black Forest) was discovering the German punk band, Die Toten Hosen, in particular their then recent album Learning English, Lesson One, which is […]