Pages & Proofs

  AbeBooks has sold a rare 1931 book filled with paintings of shop signs in Peking. The Shop Signs of Peking, with a preface in English by H.K. Fung and produced by the Chinese Painting Association, sold for £3,615 ( $5,500) earlier in May.  It contains 101 hand-coloured illustrations of the merchant signs with captions in […]

Locus is reporting the death of fantasy, science fiction and mystery writer Jack Vance. The author was 96 and died earlier this week in Oakland, California. He is well known for producing series of novels, including the Dying Earth, the Demon Princes books, the Planet of Adventure series, the Durdane trilogy and the Lyonesse fantasy […]

Liberace Cooks! Of course, he did. Every celebrity worth their salt has a cookbook and Liberace was no exception. Enjoy this gem from 1970 – Liberace Cooks! Hundreds of Delicious Recipes for You from His Seven Dining Rooms. The cookery book is illustrated with pictures of the great man’s home.

Food and music – a good combination. Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand is a former kitchen porter, chef and kitchen washer upper from Glasgow. In 2004, his rock band Franz Ferdinand enjoyed a series of hits and embarked on a world tour. As Kapronos toured the world, he toured the world’s restaurants and wrote about […]

Watch our video to enjoy gorgeous die-cut edition of a 17th century poem called I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tale. This version of the well-known folk tale from England was published by TaraBooks and is s illustrated by Ramsingh Urveti.

I love this signed photo of Arthur Conan Doyle. The Sherlock Holmes author has a phenomenal handlebar moustache and must have preened it prior to having the photo taken. While we’re talking about the great man, here is a video of Conan Doyle from 1928 discussing his famous detective with an appearance from Doyle’s dog. […]

Well done to English PEN for a successful charity book auction of annotated first editions last night. The sale raised £439,200 for English PEN’s campaigns for freedom of expression, reports the BBC. A rare first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with annotations and drawings by author JK Rowling, has sold for a […]

Virgin boss Richard Branson has revealed how he was heavily influenced by Luke Rhinehart’s Dice Man books in the early stages of his business career. The original Dice Man novel, a fictional memoir, was published in 1971 and it tells tells the story of a psychiatrist who makes decisions according to the throw of a dice. The […]

In the New York Public Library, you will find an exhibit of the real Winnie the Pooh animals: Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, Tigger and Pooh. The animals belonged to Christopher Milne, son of the author, A.A. Milne and the books were donated to the New York Public Library in 1987 by the publisher of the Pooh […]

The book receiving the most attention in the UK is not Dan Brown’s Inferno but a book about poverty – This Boy: A Memoir of Childhood by Alan Johnson.  The author was Home Secretary from 2009 until 2010, and has been the MP for Hull West since 1999, but this memoir is all about his […]