Pages & Proofs

Published in 1976 by Kestrel Books, here is a rare book for Easter – a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams, with a remarkable fore edge painting of a scene from the story. Don Noble was the artist who supplied the watercolour artwork on the fore-edge. John Lawrence was the book’s illustrator.  A fore-edge […]

We know John Huston as the influential movie director who gave us The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, Key Largo and The Misfits. But before Huston broke into the movie industry as a screenwriter, he was set upon becoming an author. While living a rather wild life in Mexico, Huston wrote a play called Frankie […]

Plug the name of Fritz Wegner into AbeBooks and our booksellers will show you some lovely artwork from this Austrian-born illustrator, who plied his craft in London. Born in Vienna in 1924, he studied at St. Martins School of Art from 1939 to 1942. Aside from publishing work, he also designed stamps, magazines and commercial […]

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist credited with helping to develop African literature, has died at 82. Achebe wrote novels, poetry and essays, and is most famous for his first novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10 million copies and is one of the great novels of the […]

Tributes are being paid to British horror author James Herbert, who died on Wednesday at 69. He is most famous for writing The Rats but he penned more than 20 books and, according to reports, sold more than 50 million copies around the world. I have a distinct memory of reading The Rats in the […]

The American writer Philip Roth celebrates his 80th birthday today. Did you know there is a Philip Roth Society? No doubt, they will be raising a glass to the author. Founded in 2002, the Philip Roth Society is an organization devoted to the study and the appreciation of the writings of Philip Roth.  Its goal […]

This is a unique reading list – these books were all written by librarians and most of them were recommended to us by librarians. If any profession is well qualified to write books then librarians truly fit the bill. Librarians are loyal customers of AbeBooks and we tend to listen when they speak. But it […]

Over at the Publishers Weekly blog, PYxyz, Gabe Habash highlights a book that time that forgot – a Brazilian edition of The Shining by Stephen King from 1977. It’s not exactly scary and doesn’t seem to convey the novel’s content. About a month ago, I was searching for something Stephen King-related to put on this […]

This Guardian list of the 20 most beloved characters in children’s literature, as voted on by children aged 5-12 in the UK, is heartening. There are a few I don’t recognise, and a couple for which complete media saturation can be blamed, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that children are still reading, and […]

This issue of The Independent lists their selection of the Ten Best History books: Necropolis: London and Its Dead By Catharine Arnold From Roman burial rites to the horrors of the plague, from the founding of the great Victorian cemeteries to the development of cremation and the current approach of metropolitan society towards death and […]