Pages & Proofs

We’re seeing tremendous interest in the books of Marthe McKenna (1892-1966) after the New York Times ran an “overlooked” obituary. A nurse, McKenna, who was Belgian, spied on the Germans for almost two years in World War I. Her book I Was a Spy! became a massive bestseller after the war. It’s still in print […]

Probably the best book about a bookshop is 84 Charing Cross Road, but what about fiction? There is actually a mini-genre of novels set in bookshops dating back 100 years to the books of Christopher Morley. Romance, mysteries, and tales about life-changing events seem to be the main themes. John Dunning, who still owns an […]

In our latest AbeBooks Behind the Bookshelves podcast we go beyond Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle to recommend books set in London. From a genre-defining non-fiction book about Arsenal to fictional descriptions of the immigrant experience by Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi, we cast our eye across a wide selection of books. For more […]

Alexander Jamieson was an 18th century schoolteacher who wrote textbooks on the side. His books included A Grammar of Universal Geography, A Grammar of Logic and Intellectual Philosophy and the Mechanics of Fluids for Practical Men, and you can be excused for giving these three a miss. But you cannot turn your back on Jamieson’s […]

 Alexander Jamieson was an 18th century schoolteacher who wrote textbooks in his spare time. In 1822, he published a memorable Celestial Atlas that contained engraved illustrations of constellation maps overlaid with imagery from the Zodiac and ancient mythology.

Today’s LGBT genre is vibrant, accessible, accepted and intertwined with the likes of memoirs, young adult fiction and graphic novels. It was a long journey to reach this point. At first, homosexuality had to be hinted at and could never be explicit. It was disguised in everything from vampire tales to philosophical fiction. Countless gay […]

The latest episode of AbeBooks’ podcast series Behind the Bookshelves features an interview with Marysa de Veer of Otter Bookbinding. We met Marysa at the 2018 ABA Rare Book Fair in London, and she was kind enough to explain how she keeps this traditional skill alive and also describes the skills required to restore, preserve […]

April 1940. Britain’s darkest hour as the country braced for invasion by German forces. Prime Minister Winston Churchill took the extraordinary step of printing and distributing 14 million leaflets, titled Beating the Invader, featuring instructions on what to do when German troops reached British soil. The key messages were quintessential Churchill – “Stand firm” and […]

Take a video tour of some of London’s finest bookshops from Chelsea to Chiswick, from Bloomsbury to Charing Cross Road. We highlight high-end antiquarian specialists, sellers of general used books and community bookshops.

Meghan Markle is not the first divorced American to marry into the Royal Family. In 1936, King Edward VIII revealed that he intended to marry an American socialite and divorcee, and this sensational news rocked Britain, taking the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Wallis Simpson was the Baltimore-born woman at the eye […]