Pages & Proofs

Elizabeth Taylor is one of those forgotten literary talents who deserves more exposure. It’s good to see the BBC and David Baddiel giving her some attention to mark the centenary of her birth. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont remains her best known book. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1971 (V S Naipaul’s […]

A rare Agatha Christie book has sold for £40,000, reports the Daily Mail. The high price is all because of the dust jacket, which carries an early image of Christie’s Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. The 1924 copy of Poirot Investigates was originally priced at 37 pence and the Daily Mail claims this is a record […]

Screenwriter, director and author Nora Ephron has died at the age of 71, her publisher announced on Tuesday evening. She had been suffering from leukaemia. She wrote the screenplays for When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, and her books were Crazy Salad, Wallflower at the Orgy, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections and […]

Feast your eyes on a copy of Scouts in Bondage complete with a dust jacket. A rare sight indeed. Geoffrey Prout’s adventure tale from the 1930s has gone down in literary history for its infamous title. Prout also wrote a book called Trawler Boy Dick so there could be a trend here. Scouts in Bondage […]

One of the most famous literary groups included two pioneers of modern fantasy fiction – J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The Inklings – one of Oxford’s many literary legacies – liked to down a few pints of bitter  at the Eagle and Child pub, while debating the merits of magical wardrobes, talking lions, orcs, hobbits […]

Last night I learned there was another Winston Churchill while reading Peter Clarke’s new biography (Mr Churchill’s Profession) on the writing career of this famous politician. Aside from the iconic British statesman, there was also an American novelist called Winston Churchill whose career overlapped his namesake’s. The American Churchill published his first novel, The Celebrity, […]

To celebrate the opening of Wimbledon, here is The Art of Tennis by William T Tilden II from  1922. Yes, I had to look him up too. ‘Big Bill’ Tilden was a star in the era of long trousers. I was wondering how they got the grass stains out of those white trousers but then […]

Cosway bindings are traditional leather bindings with miniature paintings inset into the book covers. They are named after Richard Cosway, the English miniaturist portrait painter from the Regency era. These bindings were not introduced until the early 20th century and were probably invented by the legendary bookselling firm of Henry Sotheran, or at least popularised […]

You are going to love this video of a die-cut edition of a 17th century poem called I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tale. A well-known English folk tale published by TaraBooks, this edition is illustrated by Ramsingh Urveti – an award winning artist from India who is quickly gaining an international reputation.  There are […]

I read every single Famous Five book and every Secret Seven book as a child, so it was easy to write this feature about Enid Blyton. I have to ask whether she is an anachronism because so much has changed in children’s fiction since her heyday. Does the fact that she has sold hundreds of […]