Pages & Proofs

Behold, the world’s most expensive shopping bag. Being offered by Peter Harrington, this Andy Warhol creation costs £3,750 and was created for an exhibition in Boston in 1966.   I love the idea of someone buying it and then their housekeeper (because someone wealthy enough to afford it would have servants) picking it up without looking […]

It’s a memorable cover from 1968 but The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley is much more than just a pretty book from the 1960s. This is the book version of an off-Broadway play that opened in 1968 and stretched to a thousand performances.  A movie version followed in 1970 with William Friedkin directing. […]

Fans of Khaled Hosseini should take note of this signed and numbered limited edition of And the Mountains Echoed issued by Bloomsbury. There are just a thousand copies – all with a purple slipcase – in beautiful purple and yellow boards. The lowest current price is £45 with free postage.

It’s that time of year again. Christmas books abound, but what about books from the past? Consider giving a book that cannot be found on the high street or in a supermarket, and has nothing to do with a reality TV show. This selection of vintage Christmas books stretches from 1928 to 1984, includes a […]

The debut episode of Doctor Who was first broadcast on the BBC at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday, 23 November 1963. That was fifty years ago, which may be just a blink of an eye to the good Doctor but I’m suddenly feeling very old. Intended as an educational family show about a time-travelling alien known simply as ‘the […]

It’s always interesting to inspect someone else’s bookshelves and judge, I mean look at, their reading material. Today we offer an insight into the books read by my colleague Jessica Doyle, who is part of our marketing team. Lots of fiction – Austen, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and back up to date with Chabon and Eugenides. You […]

Our latest video concerns the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in what became the United States. Published in 1640, this book will be auctioned by Sotheby’s on November 26. The auction firm estimates the sale price will be between £9 million and £18 million – and anything in excess of £7.5 million ($12 […]

The latest book about books is A Reader’s Book of Days by Tom Nissley – a book that’s a potential literary companion for bibliophiles everywhere. A Reader’s Book of Days details bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. There are almost 2,000 bookish stories to browse […]

The Library of Lost Books, an exhibition of art works created from discarded library books, opened on 6 November as part of the opening festival for the new Library of Birmingham. In 2011, curator Susan Kruse, a Birmingham artist, salvaged 55 old, damaged books and music scores from the library’s discard bins, some of them […]