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London : André Deutsch, (1955). First edition. Inscribed at length and signed by Fred Bason. Further thoughts of the name-dropping Cockney book-runner, edited and introduced by Michael Sadleir (1888-1957). Portrait frontispiece by Nicolas Bentley. “Practically demands to be read at one sitting, and enjoyed for its sometimes disingenuous gems. It is impossible not the find Mr. Bason engaging” (Vernon Fane in “The Sphere”, 10th December 1955). With Bason’s “Fred (Saturday Book) Bason” bookseller’s address label on rear free endpaper.
Crown 8vo (20cm). 184pp. Original red cloth, blocked and lettered in gilt; endpapers a little tanned; some creasing to first and last leaves, but otherwise a very good and bright copy in the Len Deighton dust-jacket, on which Bason has neatly inscribed “Edited by Michael Sadleir” on the front panel – the jacket also very good.

£50

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Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, (1970). First edition. The third and final volume of Bennett’s masterly analysis of supply and demand in the early English book trade, continuing the story from the death of Elizabeth I to the outbreak of the Civil War. An account of the total output of the press, irrespective of quality – “the nature of the subject matter and the demand it set out to meet”. With chapters on inception; patronage; regulation; piracy; translation; literacy; variety (religion, law, education, medicine, information, arithmetic and science, geography and travel, history, news, literature); printers, booksellers and readers.
Demy 8vo (23cm). [2],xiv,(54),[ii]pp. Original boards; a few edge-spots, but a very good copy in a price-clipped and just slightly nicked dust-jacket – also very good. Occasional pencil marks and notes (in my hand). Bookseller’s label of Henry Sotheran Ltd. on front paste-down.

£25

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Oxford : Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1981. First edition. An indexed checklist of 429 items relating to the book-trade outside London, primarily listed by county. Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publication No.16.
Post 4to (26cm). vi,(38)pp. Original wrappers; just a touch bruised, but a very good copy.

£20

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Faversham : Faversham Society, 1996. First edition. Biographical notes on over 100 individuals in some way connected with the book trade through Faversham’s history – booksellers, stationers, printers, etc. Faversham Papers No. 51.
Pott folio (30cm). (xx),(54)pp. Plates. Original stapled sheets; lower cover a little creased and spotted, otherwise very good.

£20

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Leiden & Boston : Brill, (2018). First edition. The first attempt fully to analyse the books and other printed materials entered for publication in the Stationers’ Register to 1640, but which no longer survive. The author’s estimate of the sheer extent of loss – perhaps 20,000 pieces of printing in all – books, ballads, news-books, broadsides, religious tracts, almanacs, plays, verse, music, etc., are dealt with in turn – perhaps skews our entire understanding of the period. With an extensive and useful bibliography. In the “Library of the Written Word” series.
Medium 8vo (25cm). [xii],224,[viii]pp. Figures and graphs, some coloured. Original yellow cloth, lettered in blue; a very good copy indeed in the dust-jacket – the jacket equally very good.

£25

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Signal Mountain : Summertown Texts, 1998. First edition. A classified and detailed listing of 1,478 dissertations, theses, honours papers, final year projects and other technically unpublished writings relating to the British book trade – with sections on bibliographers and editors, bibliography by period, by region, book production and distribution, libraries, bookselling, paper, watermarks, printing, illustration, presses, publishing, typography, forms, genres, subjects, newspapers, periodicals, authors and much else.
Medium 8vo (24cm). (xx),314,[ii]pp. Original cloth; very good.

£40

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Newcastle upon Tyne : Thorne’s Students Bookshops for the History of the Book Trade in the North, 1975. First edition. A thoroughly researched biographical dictionary of the book trade in the North East, offered together with the extensive 1981 supplement prepared by P. J. Wallis.
Two volumes. Medium 8vo (24cm). xviii,116,[ii]; [4],viii,60,[iv]pp. Illustrations. Facsimiles. Original cloth (the supplement in wrappers); mild spotting of edges, but otherwise very good – the first volume in a very good dust-jacket.

£40

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London : Werner Shaw, in collaboration with Elkin Mathews, 1986. First edition. Both a personal memoir of the years 1938-1945 and the story of the Elkin Mathews business at that time. With much on her husband, the bookseller Percy Muir (the book forming a sequel to his own “Minding My Own Business”), but with sidelights on an eccentric cast of characters including the actress Phyllis Calvert, Rupert Cross, Ian Fleming, Peter Murray Hill, the translator Koteliansky, E. H. W. Meyerstein, A. J. A. Symons, Hugh Walpole, Greville Worthington, etc.
Medium 8vo (24cm). (x),224,[vi]pp. Illustrations. Portraits. Original brown boards, lettered in gilt; slight bruise to fore-edge, but a very good copy in the dust-jacket – a photographic design in sepia monochrome, lettered in orange and white – just faintly sunned and lightly marked, but also very good.

£20

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Tehran : Amate Press, 1973. First edition. Loosely inserted is a 1979 typed invoice on Low’s distinctive Emmington Chinnor notepaper, designed by Reynolds Stone, for three copies of the book, with a genial additional five-line typed message noting that an American bookseller was already charging $20 for signed copies, but that “I still have a few hundred left for the 3,000 printed”. Reminiscences of the well-known antiquarian bookseller – recollections of bookshops in London, Scotland, Ireland and France from the 1920s onwards, memories of many booksellers and collectors, and with brief accounts of both Peter Kroger and Count Potocki of Montalk. With an introduction by Graham Greene – “I don’t know how Freud would have interpreted them, but for more than thirty years my happiest dreams have been of second-hand bookshops”.
Demy 8vo (23cm). (xviii),118pp. Frontispiece by Hanslip Fletcher. Plates. Portraits. Facsimiles. Original terracotta cloth, lettered in gilt; top edge terracotta; orange endpapers, a very good copy in the dust-jacket by Nicolas Bentley – jacket just a touch sunned but also very good.

£40

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Winchester : St. Paul’s Bibliographies / New Castle : Oak Knoll Press, (1995). First edition. The fifteenth collection of conference papers in the “Publishing Pathways” series. Includes essays by Luigi Balsamo (on Italian bookselling in the eighteenth century); Bill Bell (on Smith & Elder); Christopher Edwards (on antiquarian bookselling in Britain in 1725); Simon Eliot (on circulating libraries, book-clubs, etc); Germaine Greer (on Sam Briscoe); Anthony Hobson (on booksellers & bookbinders); Giles Mandelbrote (booksellers and bookshops in late 17th-century London); James Tierney (on advertisements and Robert Dodsley), and William Zachs (on John Murray).
Foolscap 4to (22cm). (xiv),188,[vi]pp. Original pictorial laminated boards; just a hint of bruising, but overall a very good copy.

£25

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Oxford : Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1986. First edition. A study of a dozen Durham bookbinders and booksellers, including John Aisley, Abraham Ashworth, James Dansken, Catherine Waghorn, John Waghorn, William Werdon, and the Durham Insect-Roll Binder. With the separately printed errata slip, explaining the transposition of certain of the plates. Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publication No.19.
Crown 4to (26cm). (xii),(62),[ii]pp. Numerous illustrations of bindings, tools, etc. Original wrappers; a few minor signs of age and use, but a very good copy.

£20

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