Seton & Mackenzie

Detail of a Seton & Mackenzie Binding

Another point made by Ed Bayntun-Coward (George Bayntun) in his excellent talk last week was how cheap it could still be to obtain old bindings of first rate workmanship by known and named binders – especially nineteenth-century ones.  Here’s an example – a book bought on my recent travels, already given a brief mention below, and now due for cataloguing in preparation for the biggest ever ABA London International Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia next week (link to the right).  A first edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859) – in a contemporary binding by Seton & Mackenzie, with their stamp.  A unique and beautiful object – and bought for under £50.

Seton & Mackenzie stamp on turn-in

I know this confuses some people – so I shall spell it out.  We use ‘contemporary’ to mean a binding made at or about the time of the original publication of the book.  But it’s always as well to verify the facts – to pin down a date more precisely – and it’s also nice to know where the book was bound.  Seton & Mackenzie don’t tell us either when or where.  Recourse to the usual resources and reference books throws up a Robert Seton – or probably two Robert Setons – working in Edinburgh in the first half of the nineteenth-century, as well as a contemporary James Taylor Seton, also of Edinburgh.  The increasingly useful British Library online Database of Bookbindings (link to the right) has three examples of Robert Seton bindings, and a single Seton & Mackenzie example – an undated book of about 1857 apparently published as well as bound by Seton & Mackenzie in Edinburgh.  But nothing biographical, no solid sense of timeframe or personality. 

The Tennyson Binding

So who and precisely when were Seton & Mackenzie?  Some patient archival digging slowly unravelled the story.  I’ll begin with James Taylor Seton (1805-1862), who was born in Edinburgh,  the son of Robert Seton I, a bookbinder active until about 1817, and his wife Margaret Taylor – evidently a daughter of James Taylor, another Edinburgh binder, active from about 1782 until about 1825.  James Taylor Seton took over his uncle James Taylor’s premises at 3 Mound Place in or about 1826 and married Margaret Bowerhill or Bourhill, the daughter of a bookseller in Musselburgh, in 1827.  He evidently soon ran into financial difficulties and the National Library of Scotland is reported to have a Catalogue of books and stationary [sic], being part of the stock of James Taylor Seton, bookbinder, Edinburgh; and of Bourhill & Co. booksellers, Musselburgh. To be sold by auction, for behoof of creditors by John Carfrae & Son, Edinburgh 19-22 December, 1831.

The Idylls of the King

His business continued for a few years at different addresses, but he appears thereafter simply to have worked as a journeyman binder for others – he was so described in 1851.  His younger brother, Robert Seton II (1806-1854), took over the Mound Place premises and evidently fared rather better.  He advertised himself as Bookbinder to the King from 1833 until the death of William IV in 1837, and adding bookselling to his binding activities.  He married Grace Wilson (1818-1903), the daughter of a local merchant, in 1841, in which year he also began to publish books as well as sell and bind them.  By 1851, he was employing twenty men and women.  But then, in July 1854, at the age of forty-seven, Robert Seton died. 

The business continued under his name, presumably under the direction of his widow and with a  certain residual momentum, by now advertising for old books too, until 1856.  Then a decision was made and announced in the press that the goodwill and stock-in-trade were to be disposed of –

“So favourable an opening is seldom to be had. The Stocks are fresh and well-selected; the Business is extensive, and in full operation; the Premises, both in George Street [the book warehouse] and Thistle Street [the bindery], are commodious, well  fitted-up, and admirably adapted for the trade. Meanwhile, the Business is being carried on in all its departments for behoof of Mr. Seton’s family, under the old firm of Robert Seton” (Glasgow Herald, 3 Jun 1856). 

Elegant Bindings

Arrangements for a system of sealed bids for the whole or the individual parts of the business were announced, but evidently no satisfactory ones were forthcoming.   Portions of the stock were auctioned off later in the year – and, at that point, the business was reborn as “Seton & Mackenzie”, advertising under that name “a great variety of books in elegant bindings suitable for Christmas presents” in December 1856. 

The pace and ambition of the publishing side of the firm stepped up – enter Charles Mackenzie (1821-1882).  Mackenzie was born in Dunfermline, the son of Charles Mackenzie and his wife, Elizabeth Webster.  By 1851 he was in lodgings in Edinburgh, described simply on the Census Return as a bookseller’s clerk – presumably to Robert Seton.  And it was presumably he who, along with the widow, Grace Seton, took over the reins after Seton’s death – they became partners in another sense in 1859, when they married.  So there we have the identity of “Seton & Mackenzie”, but that may not be the whole story.  Neither of them had trained as a bookbinder, and I suspect it may have been the elder brother and journeyman bookbinder, James Taylor Seton, who in fact ran the binding department.  He was certainly living in Thistle Street, close to the bindery, in 1861, when the Census recorded him as a bookbinder, by then married to his second wife, Jessie Gentle.

Grace Seton, now Mackenzie, in due course made over her share in the business to her son, Robert Seton III (1844-1905), who remained a  partner until 1873, at which point he left to establish his own bookbinding company at the Aldine Works, 169 Fountainbridge, Edinburgh.  Charles Mackenzie continued to trade as Seton & Mackenzie.  The firm went bankrupt and a sequestration order placed in 1879, although Mackenzie appears to have been allowed to continue to trade.  He was still employing ten men and fourteen women in 1881, the year of the firm’s final publishing imprint.  He died the following year – and the firm with him.

The young Robert Seton went bankrupt at the same time, suggesting that the two businesses were probably still closely interlinked – with perhaps the binding work being subcontracted from one to the other.  In this case, Alexander Whyte, a local wholesale stationer, was appointed to take over  the business on behalf of the creditors.  The winding-up dragged on at least until 1895, during which time Robert Seton moved to London – recorded as a bookseller in Lambeth in 1881, living in Hammersmith in 1891, but returning to Edinburgh, now described as a commission traveller, before his death in 1905. 

Donald Needham

To round off the story, it might have been possible to identify the original owner who took the book to Seton & Mackenzie to be bound, or who bought it from them, or was given it from their range of suitable presents, already bound.  Except that a former owner, named and shamed as Donald Needham, has defaced the neat little red leather bookplate to insert his own name.  Why do this?   

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

So there I shall leave it – the first edition of a major work by our greatest nineteenth-century poet, the first book of Tennyson’s great Arthurian cycle, the defining poetic rendition of our founding myth of the Matter of Britain, in a contemporary hand binding from the Seton & Mackenzie workshop.  And even with my (slightly immodest) mark-up, no-one is going to have to break the bank to buy it.  Priced at so little that I’m sitting here wondering whether it’s even worth taking to Olympia – but form an orderly queue on Stand 84 if you are interested.

Fasque

Fasque

Best story of the week was Ed Bayntun-Coward’s recollection of his encounter with a glamorous woman at a party.  She asked what he did for a living.  Ed replied smoothly that he was an antiquarian bookseller – “What a contraceptive”, she responded, immediately turning on heel and walking away.

Quite how this formed part of his seminar on collecting book-bindings at Senate House the other night I can’t quite recall – but this was an excellent talk in what is developing into an outstanding series.   Informative, illustrated with some stunning images (still slavering over that Restoration binding from Ed’s own collection), mightily impressive learning lightly worn – and above all, fun.  Thank you, Ed, from all of those there – especially the librarian from the V&A, who was full of praise for the ABA and the Institute of English Studies for organising the series and promises to return with even more of her colleagues next month (Paul Goldman on Collecting Pre-Raphaelite Books – Tuesday 12th June).

Ed’s account of a client who has put together a collection of examples of bindings made for some of those great country house libraries, now dispersed and never to be reassembled, gave me pause to think.  An interesting, unusual and charming idea – and, as Ed pointed out, a collection that could still be put together at no overwhelming expense.  I imagine that most of us will have handled plenty of these waifs and relics of a lost age over the years.  There’s at least one sitting right now on my shelf (multiple shelves if we are being honest) of books awaiting cataloguing.

The Huguenot

A little reluctant to admit to my commentator in chief, Mr Steve Liddle of Bristol, that it’s by a nineteenth-century writer of historical novels probably even more difficult to shift than Bulwer Lytton, but – hey, there we are.  Yes – it’s by the gone and almost entirely forgotten G. P. R. James – George Payne Rainsford James (1801-1860).  Known behind his back at the time as “The Solitary Horseman” in reference to his favourite opening trope.  A copy of the three-volume first edition of his The Huguenot : A Tale of the French Protestants (1839), written at the peak of a writing career in which he churned out a novel every nine months or so for eighteen consecutive years.  After that, his bubble to some extent burst – he migrated abroad, first to the United States.  He ended his days, somewhat given to depression and fits of rage, as the British consul in Venice.

G. P. R. James

As he wrote to a friend,  “Why is it that I write too fast for that slow beast the Public?  Is it because I rise earlier?  or because I do it every day and cannot do without it?  There are four and twenty hours in the day are there not?  Seven for sleep, four for dressing and feeding, four for reading, five for exercise and pleasure and four for writing.  I cannot write less than five pages in an hour, which gives at the above calculation six thousand pages in a year of three hundred days”.

The Huguenotwas popular enough in its day – a perennially popular theme in this country – and his four hours a day reading represented some fairly diligent historical research. 

Fasque Bookplate

A contemporary review in The Gentleman’s Magazine speaks of “a succession of striking adventures narrated with great spirit and taste” and offers high praise for the heroine, La Belle Clemence, who “possesses virtues which ennoble her beauty”, while the hero Albert is drawn with much “attention to truth and nature”.  And here it is in a rather attractive contemporary binding, probably Scottish, of half calf, boldly tooled in the compartments and with some very delicate chevron-like waves in blind on the broad bands.  Inside there is the plainest of plain bookplates – a single engraved word, “Fasque”.

Sir John Gladstone

And here we have it – that great and still-standing mansion some miles to the north of Montrose sold to that merchant prince and not yet a baronet, Sir John Gladstone (1764-1851), for £80,000 in 1829.  Born in Leith, a fortune made from corn, sugar, cotton, shipping and real estate in Liverpool – and of course the father of the future four-times Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898).  

John Gladstone Inscription

We tend not to think of John Gladstone as a book-collector – although here’s his ownership inscription in another book published over forty years earlier, again from the Fasque library.  But whether he was a great reader or not – I somehow doubt it – the conventions of the time and his fierce political and dynastic ambition would have demanded all the appurtenances.  The house – and a fitting library.  The Huguenot was evidently bound in the style of the day to grace it – and grace it for many years it certainly did.  The remaining portions of the library were sold off by the Gladstone family as recently as 2008.

William Ewart Gladstone

The book was published in 1839, the year that Macaulay first picked out the young William Ewart Gladstone as  “the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories” in a review of Gladstone’s The State in its Relations with the Church, which was largely written at Fasque.  It was also the year that the future “People’s William” married Catherine Glynne

Catherine Gladstone

– and the couple spent most of the long parliamentary recesses at Fasque until the death of the increasingly demanding and bitter John Gladstone in 1851. 

I can’t prove that either of them ever turned to G. P. R. James for a little light relief – but humour me in believing that they did.  W.E.G. wasn’t going to be reading Disraeli on his holidays after all.

Harper’s Repository of Arts

Booksellers’ labels – or book-trade labels in general, if we include bookbinders’ tickets and the various other varieties we come across – especially the older ones, always add a little bit of extra interest to a book and an extra little challenge to the diligent (or perhaps merely desperate) cataloguer.  There are now a number of websites catering for this particular byway of bookish study, but what is almost always completely lacking is any sense of context.  Pretty pictures, but nothing in the way of background.  No details of what books the labels have come from (and all too often they have been extracted, destroying the narrative thread).  And again all too often, there is nothing in the way of information about the bookseller (or bookbinder) in question.

Harper’s Repository of Arts – coloured label

Here’s one, or in fact two – the same man, two slightly different designs – I came across the other day.  A book bought in Edinburgh on my travels.  Simply lettered, Harper, Stationer & Bookseller, Repository of Arts, Cheltenham.  Found in a copy of the three-volume first edition of Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi : Last of the Tribunes (1835) – the fancy-cut coloured engraved label in the first volume, the plainer and slightly less informative design in the second and third.  This may suggest that Harper was using up an older or perhaps cheaper stock of labels in the volumes less likely to be opened on his shelves –

Harper’s Repository of Arts – plain label

and this raises another question, because although Harper was a bookseller, his Repository also functioned as a reading-room on the High Street of then so-fashionable Cheltenham.  I rather suspect that these three volumes in their elaborately tooled and delicately marbled contemporary calf bindings weren’t  sold by Harper, but formed part of the Repository’s stock of fashionably bound reading matter for the spa-going classes.

First edition of Rienzi (1835)

No-one then more fashionable than Bulwer Lytton of course.  After the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, he was the pre-eminent historical novelist of the day.  Rienzi was a great hit and went on to have a curious afterlife.  Picked up on by Richard Wagner, it inspired his 1842 opera of the same name – his first great success.  And it was at a performance of the opera, with its odd tale of the charismatic demagogue and man of the people, at the Linz Landestheater early in 1905, that a fifteen-year old Hitler appears to have had his moment of epiphany.  “In that hour”, he is reported to have said later on several occasions, “it all began”.  The overture to Rienzi became the theme tune to the Nuremberg rallies and Hitler later obtained Wagner’s manuscript – a manuscript now lost, perhaps among his most precious possessions with him in the bunker.

Deatil of the marbling on the binding of Rienzi

A little chilling – and somewhat difficult to suppose that Samuel Charles Harper (1789-1859), proprietor of the Cheltenham Repository of Arts, could have foreseen any of this, but he was known in his time as a liberal and radical activist, and it may well have pleased him to insert Bulwer Lytton’s slightly inflammatory political tale into his genteel reading-room.

Harper – to fill in his background – was born at Stepney to the east of London, the son of a cleric and schoolmaster, the Reverend Thomas Harper (1763-1832) and his wife Ann Bacon, who had married the previous year.   He was apprenticed to the London  printer and stationer John Pitts in 1803 and became a freeman of the Girdlers’ Company in 1811, at that time living in Brewer Street, Golden Square.  He married Mary Ann Harris (1795-1875) of Cheltenham at some point in the ensuing years, became an auctioneer and appraiser, probably in addition to his other activities, and had certainly moved to Cheltenham before 1821, when an early partnership with David Banbury was formally dissolved.  He began a modest publishing career in the 1820s, producing mainly local material – Thomas Dudley Fosbroke’s  A Picturesque and Topographical Account of Cheltenham, and its Vicinity (1826), for example, or Harper’s Cheltenham Directory & Guide (1844).  

Harper’s Repository of Arts and Reading Room was established at 350 High Street by 1826 and, after a few years at 93 Winchcombe Street, Harper returned to the High Street at no. 318.  In these busy years he was variously described as printer, publisher, bookseller, stationer, auctioneer, appraiser, insurance agent, etc., and in 1834 he founded The Cheltenham Free Press and Gloucestershire Herald.  The 1841 Census simply recorded him as a newspaper proprietor, resident at 318 High Street with his wife and eight children.  His financial success is vouched for by his subscribing for £2,500 worth of shares in the Cheltenham, Oxford, and London and Birmingham Union Railway in 1837.  By 1840 he had added another string to his bow by becoming Deputy Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages for the district of Cheltenham.

The newspaper and book side of his multifarious activities were handed over, probably in the late 1840s, to his son, Alfred Harper (1823-1901), who later became a London journalist, while Samuel Charles Harper continued to act as an auctioneer from his house in Bath Street, remaining the Registrar until his death in 1859.  There was a minor local scandal a few years ago when his abandoned gravestone was found on the disused Honeybourne railway at Pittville – apparently just dumped there when the old parish cemetery on the Lower High Street was cleared by the borough council in 1965.  A poor way to honour a man who must have been an important and well-known figure in nineteenth-century Cheltenham.

We have the book, we have the labels, and now we have a little context.  No doubt you can read Rienzi on a Kindle – in fact I know you can.  But it won’t be Samuel Charles Harper’s copy – and it won’t recreate a life, a time and a place in nineteenth-century  Cheltenham for you.  This is history you can hold in your hands.

The President’s Snuff Box

The Living Room at Tooting Towers

Old friends are always welcome round here at Tooting Towers, but so are new ones – especially when they come bearing gifts.   Quite what might have been said about me in advance to our guest the other night, whom I hadn’t really met before, I dare not speculate.  But she arrived with a shiny silver snuff-box clearly labelled “President” – not, as it turned out, engraved especially for me – but the brand-name of a variety manufactured by Poschl and described as a traditional English snuff, an excellent everyday snuff, and even a “refreshing pinch discreetly balanced with flavoursome, eucalyptus oils … this snuff leaves a lingering freshness in the nose”. 

Ozona President Snuff

Although old-fashioned in many ways – not to mention a repository of most of the bad habits known to mankind – I’d never really thought of myself as a snuff-taking sort of chap.  But a first attempt (it’s what that little hollow between your thumb and forefinger is for) shot a blast of menthol and nicotine straight through the nervous system to the brain and gave a moment of truly unparalleled clarity to whatever it was I was trying to say at the time.  Agog with surprise, as regrettably they tend to follow the First Lady’s example in not always hanging on my every word, the ladies – I should say at this point that we are currently blessed with two entirely beautiful and exotically-named house guests, Adélè and Freya – followed suite in turn.  Voted a success all round – how much cheaper, more acceptable (and presumably legal) than smoking.  Perhaps its hour has come.  I can’t wait to produce the snuff-box at a suitably dramatic point at the next ABA Council meeting, where clarity of thought, even momentary, is an elusive chimera much to be desired.

But that was not all.  It was the second gift that really impressed me.  A set of three CDs from the British Library called The Spoken Word : British Writers (2008) – old BBC recordings, clipped of pronunciation, crystal of enunciation, of some of our finest writers talking or being interviewed about their life and work.  Such intelligence, such high purpose, such seriousness, such wonder from the old Home Service of the BBC.  Radio 4 it is not.   

The Spoken Word

The rich Scottish burr (no more) and exquisite diction of Arthur Conan Doyle talking about the origins of Sherlock Holmes.  The booming depth of Arthur Machen talking about Chesterton, Dickens and Thackeray.  Chesterton himself.  The dulcet debutante of Baroness Orczy.  Kipling on our having nothing but our words to tell the present how the past was.  Somerset Maugham on the consolations of old age – “I no longer mind what people think of me”.  The bonhomie of P. G. Wodehouse and the genesis of Jeeves.   The fascinating and very lovely (if slightly disembodied) voice of Virginia Woolf.  The oddly down-to-earth Tolkien.  Rebecca West with the thought that neither the avant-garde nor modern furniture had actually changed a whit in her entire lifetime.  Evelyn Waugh.  Graham Greene with immense modesty on the obstinate failure to come alive of certain characters in his books.  The glorious giggle of Nancy Mitford.  And on and on it goes, Daphne du Maurier, bluff Ian (“I’m not in the Shakespeare Stakes”) Fleming, William Golding, and many more.

This is wonderful – how has it taken me so long to know about it?  Go out (or stay in) and buy it right now.  Play it to your customers.  Listen.  Enjoy.  Perfect.   Jackie – you can certainly come again.

Eastern Seaboard

 

Claude Cox Old & Rare Books

A painful entry into Ipswich the other day as the car slammed into a pothole in one of the building-site car-parks on the fringes of the town centre.  Shriek of anguish from the president as his always suspect back went into spasm.  Needed a sit-down, a cup of coffee and a healthy dose of pain-killers before heading on to the entirely splendid  Claude Cox Old & Rare Books in Silent Street.

Very disappointed to miss Tony Cox who was elsewhere on Easter Saturday – my fault for not planning ahead properly, but this was after all  primarily holiday rather than a buying trip.  The First Lady left me to explore the multiple rooms of this ancient house while she went shopping for our Easter Sunday family lunch.  The shop packed to the rafters with all manner of interesting things.

Lots of private press and art of the book material of course – typography, bibliography, printing history – this has long been the place to come to for that, and generous amounts of local history too, as well as a deeply impressive array of the publications of William Pickering.

But so much else besides.   A first edition of Coriolanus takes my eye – not the Shakespeare version but the other one – that produced by James “Seasons” Thomson at the time of the internecine Jacobite rising.  A great success in the eighteenth century and often welded together with scenes from Shakespeare in contemporary performance.  Very happy to buy that – and, hey presto, what’s on the same shelf but  a contemporary eye-witness account of the Jacobite rising by “An Impartial Hand”.  That too is added to the pile.  Anne has by now returned, wards off a local dog taking too keen an interest in our potential Sunday lunch – and adds a couple of books to the pile herself.  A fruitful hour at very modest expense.   

Harwich Old Books

Still in considerable pain from the back, so the remainder of plans for the day are curtailed, but we do detour to Harwich as we head home for London.  There we find  Peter J. Hadley at Harwich Old Books in Market Street.  A pleasant half-hour there – the mainly modern stock gleaming and in pristine condition all round.  A purchase or two and an interesting conversation with Peter on the future of the trade, the difficulties we all face in this changing world. 

Peter J. Hadley

An unusual thought from him on the cost of housing and the impact of young collectors necessarily living in considerably smaller accommodation than their parents were accustomed to  – no room any more for the large old-fashioned collections – collecting will necessarily become more highly focussed – but he remains optimistic enough.  Still a place for proper bookshops and for booksellers like him who do get out and about with energy looking for the material.

Enough for the day – I have to head home for a lie down.

The Beccles Bus

Beccles

A few days away by the sea with family and friends.  Intended as a complete break rather than anything else – but scope for the odd excursion.  Investigation at the town bus-stop (and friendly assistance from those awaiting expectantly there) produced  the sparing but hopeful information that there might be an occasional bus to Beccles (although no-one appeared to have any direct experience of it).  But – hey presto, eventually one turned up.  A slow cross-country route down narrow lanes.  Just a handful of passengers joined en route – and not one of them young enough to have pay for a ticket.  Average age seemed to be about ninety-three.  Those that could, touched themselves on board with their electronic passes – while the driver cheerfully helped out those that didn’t know how or could no longer manage.

Besleys Books

And at last we arrive in the very pleasant and slightly sleepy Suffolk market town of Beccles.  And the sun comes out.  Time enough for a late-ish breakfast and then I wander along to Besleys Books in Blyburgate. 

Piers Besley

Piers and Stephen Besley both on parade – and delighted to see me making good on a promise to get round the country.  A proper shop – four rooms of books – general antiquarian, gardening and natural history, illustrated books, the arts and a smattering of most other things besides.  Nothing overpriced. Swoop immediately on such a pretty set of James Sargant Storer’s Antiquarian Itinerary (1815-1818). Have a cup of coffee and a chat with

Stephen Besley

Stephen on his earlier career as a computer programmer – not such an out-of-the-way preparation for running a bookshop these days.  Also the economics of book-fairs.  Leave him to some customers and wander around from room to room – the pile grows.  Delighted with the former Ipswich Public Library copy of the first edition of Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1880) – not a prepossessing copy, to be sure – but this was just how Ipswich read it, just how it was meant to be read, misbound section notwithstanding  – and it’s one of his best.  A Michael Arlen (unjustly neglected these days) in a fabulous twenties dust-jacket.  Just as happy when the parcel arrived a few days later.  Thank you both for an enjoyable hour.

Back to the pretty Old Market Place to find a bus back to the coast.  Perfect timing – they appear to be precisely the same passengers on the trip back (or perhaps some of them never got off).  Manage to link up with family and some very old friends for a jolly evening.  A splendid day.

Book Bags

Doctor Zhivago. Embroidered canvas book-clutch by Olympia Le-Tan

I suppose it should have been the combination of the words Olympia and Books that led me to it – only one meaning for us of course – the biggest-ever Olympia Book Fair coming up next month (link to the right).  But in fact it was the First Lady pointing out to me (in my still newish and slightly reluctant rôle of ABA fashion commentator – see Invasion of the Uggs and The Whole Art of Dress below) an article in the Evening Standard – yes, we still have an evening newspaper in London – how quaint and how civilised is that? 

Portrait of a Lady. Embroidered canvas book-clutch by Olympia Le-Tan.

The online version of the story, The £1,000 Book Bag by Karen Dacre (link to the right), rather misses the point by not illustrating the bags.  I of course immediately assumed that these were rather special conservation-standard bags for carrying around our most rare and expensive books – but no, so wrong – these are the latest fashion accessory for the bag-ladies of the celebrity world.  A range of designs (titles) of clutch-bags and minaudieres (if these are in fact different things) by hot-designer-of-the-moment, Olympia Le-Tan.  You see where the confusion arises.

Psychology. Embroidered canvas book-clutch by Olympia Le-Tan

As to the merit or otherwise of the bags themselves I hesitate to comment.  Out of my depth.  But I do know a thing or two about dust-jackets and on looking at Ms Le-Tan’s website (link in the blogroll to the right) – I was struck by the number of, what shall we say, rather undistinguished jacket designs.  Great books don’t always have great dust-jackets of course, but some of these ‘titles’ aren’t all that great on either front.  As far as I know, the ABA wasn’t consulted on the matter – but as many of the bags are now sold out, I thought we might be able to help out with some suggestions for a fresh range – who better to ask than the world’s best and most experienced booksellers?  It’s the very least we can do for someone so enamoured of books that she has named herself after our number one book fair.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. 1932.

So – a competition of sorts – results to be posted on the ABA website.  The hunt is on for the best dust-jacket designs ever.  Nominations are invited from you all – and there may be extra points for books that have an extra resonance for the fashion conscious.  Do let us have your thoughts and suggestions.  Anyone else for Huxley’s great satire, Brave New World?