rare books

[Dust Jacket Collector]

45 minutes ago, other ranker said:

I hate to see this thread slipping down the list. I bought this book this week. I know GWDJ has it on his site. I am chuffed to find it for £22!

 

An excellent buy, OR. The last copy I saw was sold by Harrington's for £650! A lot nicer than the original in it's plain text jacket. I think the image depicts Sassoon winning his MC.

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, Dust Jacket Collector said:

An excellent buy, OR. The last copy I saw was sold by Harrington's for £650! A lot nicer than the original in it's plain text jacket. I think the image depicts Sassoon winning his MC.

 

   Hookway Cowles will not go down in history  as the greatest of illustrators. Intriguing that he died "Bona Vacantia" in Islington.in 1987.  My favourite illustrated by him  is:

 

 

(Thanks to Classic Crime Fiction for the pic.)

 

              A topic popular among many during the Second World War with regard to BLM

Edited 13 June , 2017 by Guest

[other ranker]

Has anyone seen a 1918 copy of 'The Breaking Of The Storm' by C A L Brownlow for sale in the last ten years? Its been on my want list for 20!

[Dust Jacket Collector]

3 hours ago, other ranker said:

Has anyone seen a 1918 copy of 'The Breaking Of The Storm' by C A L Brownlow for sale in the last ten years? Its been on my want list for 20!

There was a copy for sale on eBay until recently. I think the seller was 'Dilapsus' and it was £95 if I recall. Sadly no jacket which I've only ever seen the once. I found it to be an excellent account although some have been less enthused.

[Resurgam13]

I wish it had been mine to sell, but sadly not.

 

Kind regards,

Geoffrey

("dilapsus")

[Dust Jacket Collector]

30 minutes ago, Resurgam13 said:

I wish it had been mine to sell, but sadly not.

 

Kind regards,

Geoffrey

("dilapsus")

Sorry, Geoff, I was sure it was you. Mind you I often buy a book twice now having forgotten I already have it.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Dust Jacket Collector said:

Sorry, Geoff, I was sure it was you. Mind you I often buy a book twice now having forgotten I already have it.

 

       let's hope you do not have that problem with inscribed first editions of Graves/Sassoon and vice versa- It is when one has 2 presentation copies of the same book to the same person that provenance can be a bit tricky.  (Yes, I have seen it done!!)

[barkalotloudly]

On 30/07/2017 at 15:44, other ranker said:

Has anyone seen a 1918 copy of 'The Breaking Of The Storm' by C A L Brownlow for sale in the last ten years? Its been on my want list for 20!

i have a copy somewhere, it is the sort of book that should you come across it in a second hand shop i would imagine it would be quite cheap i think i paid about 5.00 for my copy { it is quite a small book blue covers i think, quite thin} certainly not up to Gale Polden standards  

[Cymro]

I just bought a nice copy of "How I escaped from Germany" by Lt Walter Duncan. It's been on my wants list for a while but has proved very elusive. At 25 pounds not too expensive either.  Well pleased!

[Dust Jacket Collector]

Just back from the Lewes Bookfair. Usually I come away empty handed but today produced this little gem - a 1st edition of Haig's Despatches in it's dust wrapper. Not that unusual you might think but this copy is nicely inscribed by Haig to his publisher J. M. Dent.

[Resurgam13]

I've had this battered copy of Haig's "Cavalry Studies : Strategical and Tactical" for some time - it was sold as Haig's personal copy, passed down to his son, but I wish I could be sure!

[Dust Jacket Collector]

I think you can be sure it was Haig’s - that ‘DH’ looks authentic to me.

[other ranker]

I bought a book called, 'The Gates Of Kut', by Lindsay Russell printed by Cassell in 1917. It is a novel based in Kut at the time of the siege. There is plenty about who the author was on google, but I cannot find a record of one for sale anywhere. I paid £4 for it.

The owner must have been connected to the Kut campaign somehow as there are newspaper clippings of obits of people who were and other articles stuck throughout it. The owner was Hamilton F Duncan LCC. Does anyone know who this is? Have found a gem?

[Guest]

54 minutes ago, other ranker said:

I bought a book called, 'The Gates Of Kut', by Lindsay Russell printed by Cassell in 1917. It is a novel based in Kut at the time of the siege. There is plenty about who the author was on google, but I cannot find a record of one for sale anywhere. I paid £4 for it.

The owner must have been connected to the Kut campaign somehow as there are newspaper clippings of obits of people who were and other articles stuck throughout it. The owner was Hamilton F Duncan LCC. Does anyone know who this is? Have found a gem?

 

     COPAC identifies the author as "Patricia Ethel Stonehouse", an Australian hack writer of romantic novels, which were bestsellers in their day. Beyond that, it looks like that in turn was one of the pseudonyms she used. The true identity appears to be:   (Taken from Australian Dictionary of Biography online)

Her surviving papers appear to be deposited in the State Library of Victoria.  As to Hamilton Duncan- no real trace-though the use of the letters "LCC" after a name usually indicates that person was an elected member of the former London County Council, though it is possible that he was an officer rather than a member

 

Stonehouse, Ethel Nhill Victoria (1883–1964)

by Suzanne Edgar

This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, (MUP), 1990

Ethel Nhill Victoria Stonehouse (1883-1964), writer, was born on 1 August 1883 at Nhill, Victoria, fourth of twelve children of Robert Stonehouse, blacksmith, and his wife Jane, née Hardingham. Educated until she was 14 at Charlton State School, she claimed to have considered entering a convent. From 1894 Ethel published verse and short stories; she later worked at journalism in Melbourne and joined the Australian Modernist Society of Enlightened Roman Catholics. Her first novel, Smouldering Fires (Melbourne, 1912), concerned the seduction and desertion of a young Catholic woman by a priest. Its controversial theme was to be repeated so often and so violently in her writing as to seem personal and obsessive; she also published the epistolary Love Letters of a Priest (1912).

In London in 1911 she joined the International Modernist Association and the Jeanne d'Arc League; by 1913 she asserted, 'I have only read three books in my life, and have written five'. Stonehouse used pseudonyms, the most frequent being 'Patricia Lindsay Russell'. Her style was polemical, prolix and clichéd: 'There was a long moment, red with pulsing flame'. But it was popular. Smouldering Fires sold 100,000 copies in Australia alone; it ran to eight editions. That year she was in Melbourne, announcing a four-figure income and large publishers' advances for her next romance, Souls in Pawn.

A fair, blue-eyed woman who at 30 still wore long braids that framed her oval face and 'winsome smile', 'Pat' affected a 'child-like simplicity' which could switch to the 'pensive melancholy' evident in her photographs. On 23 September 1914 at St Ninian's Church, Stonehouse, Lanarkshire, Scotland, she married John McNaught Scott with the forms of the Established Church of Scotland. A Harley Street specialist who had treated her consumption, he was then a member of the Australian Army Medical Corps; Web Gilbert sculpted a bust of him. Mrs Scott spent some of the war years in Ireland writing nine more novels. In 1918 she published Earthware in which plot and characterization are more subtle and complex. Much of it again seems autobiographical: a talented authoress, crushed by her insensitive Scottish husband, finally renounces ambition and preserves her marriage. Stonehouse never published another novel.

After the war she and Scott settled at Mortlake, Victoria, a country town in which her early work had been banned. Her last publication was a collection of sentimental poetry, The Caravan of Dreams (1923). People in the district believed that the childless marriage of the Scotts was unhappy. 'Pat' was eccentric: it was said that she fed pet rats and collected chamber pots. After her husband's death in 1942, she lived as a hermit. Seven years later she entered Royal Park psychiatric hospital suffering from 'mental enfeeblement' caused by neglect, a sad outcome for someone who had written, 'O, the trim paths, the prim paths, these are not for me'.

Most of her novels were about women rebelling—against Catholicism, Calvinism, marriage, the English class system—and their settings covered Australia, Britain, India and Indonesia. In her prime, her work had been praised by K. S. Prichard and by the Sydney Morning Herald. While her novels were hastily executed and their reputation did not endure, they had earned her brief fame as 'the Australian Marie Corelli'. Stonehouse died on 1 May 1964 at Mont Park mental hospital and was buried in Footscray cemetery.

Select Bibliography

• P. Hay (ed), Meeting of Sighs (Warrnambool, Vic, 1981)
• British Australasian, 20 Mar 1913, 29 Oct 1914
• Everylady's Journal, 6 July 1913
• Book Lover, Sept 1913, June 1917
• East Charlton Tribune, 26 Feb 1898
• Mortlake Dispatch, 4, 7 June 1913, 23 June, 25 Aug 1920
• Punch (Melbourne), 5 June 1913
• Table Talk, 5 June 1913
• Bulletin, 26 June 1913
• Herald (Melbourne), 18 Aug 1914
• private information.

[keithmroberts]

Somewhere on line, probably Archive there is a copy of the LCC book that lists all emplees who served.

 

Keith

[RaySearching]

3 hours ago, keithmroberts said:

Somewhere on line, probably Archive there is a copy of the LCC book that lists all emplees who served.

 

Keith

 

On Line  here     London County Council in the Great War 1914 - 1918

 

Also on Find My Past

London County Council Record Of War Service 1914-1918 - Findmypast

https://www.findmypast.co.uk/.../london-county-council-record-of-war-service-1914-...

Each record is an original transcription from London County Council s roll of employees that had served during the war The amount of information listed varies but the London County Council Record of Service records usually include a combination of the following information about your ancestor Name Soldier number 

 

Ray

[other ranker]

Thanks for all the work that has gone into the replies above, but has anyone seen the book before for sale?

[Dust Jacket Collector]

22 minutes ago, other ranker said:

Thanks for all the work that has gone into the replies above, but has anyone seen the book before for sale?

No

[RaySearching]

A Novel Idea ?

Reprints available for £14.05 Here

[Dust Jacket Collector]

These little gems came today and they don't get much rarer. 7 of the 12 volumes of the History of the Ministry of Munitions. 250 copies of the over 50 individual parts were printed between 1918 & 1922, some of which were bound up into 12 volumes. They are marked 'Confidential : For Official Information Only' and distribution was restricted to Government Departments and the like - these came from the Ministry of Aviation library. Much as I rail against the dissolution of our National Archives I can't resist benefiting from it.

I wonder if the individual parts were perhaps distributed to the various agencies involved in Munition production ; the bound volumes being reserved for the Government libraries.

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Dust Jacket Collector said:

These little gems came today and they don't get much rarer. 7 of the 12 volumes of the History of the Ministry of Munitions. 250 copies of the over 50 individual parts were printed between 1918 & 1922, some of which were bound up into 12 volumes. They are marked 'Confidential : For Official Information Only' and distribution was restricted to Government Departments and the like - these came from the Ministry of Aviation library. Much as I rail against the dissolution of our National Archives I can't resist benefiting from it.

I wonder if the individual parts were perhaps distributed to the various agencies involved in Munition production ; the bound volumes being reserved for the Government libraries.

 

    Probably not.  I have an incomplete set that came from Maurice Hankey-  contemporary buckram-gilt, like the vols (not the rebinds) in your pic.  Pretty much the same. Mine have no evidence of any previous "ex-lib" existence in any government  library. Although not quite the intellectual and aesthetic challenege of earlier centuries- "Royal Binder A", etc- all vols. I have seen have been bound the same, suggesting the government binder (ie the one that did FO and HO at least). I think the LSE set is the same- will try to look later

[Dust Jacket Collector]

The two rebound volumes aren’t from the Aviation library and look as if they’ve been made up from more recently acquired parts - various marks on them suggest they’ve been through the hands of a certain chap in Brighton.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Dust Jacket Collector said:

The two rebound volumes aren’t from the Aviation library and look as if they’ve been made up from more recently acquired parts - various marks on them suggest they’ve been through the hands of a certain chap in Brighton.

 

   Intriguing- the typeface of  of the original bindings in consistent with Whitehall bindings of all sorts that I have seen across the years (Including confidential stuff done for non-government work, as well,of course, as confidential or secret govt. stuff as usual.    The rebinds look to me like typical Riley Dunn and Wilson library jobs. Recent rebinds?  Most of this stuff in that blue binding and typefaces is from mid Sixties through to early Eighties- when RDW made pots from rebinding public libraries and then Margaret Hilda stared shutting them all down again.

[Dust Jacket Collector]

Thanks for the info, Gibbo. I’d love to read the Isherwood but having just spent a small fortune on the Munitions set it’ll have to wait. It’s so short-sighted of Academic presses - price the book at £20, get it into bookshops and they’d recover their costs in no time.

[other ranker]

Well done DJC. I know you have been looking for these things for a long time!