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7th March

Have you noticed how rare books seem to be like London buses & come along in pairs? Having sought Von Unruh’s ‘Way of Sacrifice’ for years 2 copies turn up within weeks of each other. Unfortunately I bought the first one which cost twice as much as the later appearance. Also having bought Herbert’s ‘Mons, Anzac & Kut’ with the jacket glued to the front another copy appears on ABE 2 days ago (sold very quickly). Again I hadn’t seen it before. The most startling instance occurred a few years ago - a jacketed copy of Sapper’s ‘Mufti’ not seen before or since came up on ABE only to be followed 3 days later by another copy - in this case the earlier one was 10x cheaper, thank goodness! There must be a secret place where they wait for a partner before venturing out together.

4th March

The A P Herbert below is unfortunately only the US 1st which is scarce but not nearly as rare as the UK ed. which I’ve never seen. (Maggs has a jacketless copy for £185 at the moment). It came from Royal Books in Baltimore who kindly included their latest catalogue. In it are 2 books by one Jim Thompson?? which can be yours for a mere $80,000! That’s just 1000 times more than they charged me for the Herbert. I think I’ll stick with the War! I’ve also just acquired the latest Kipling bibliography by David Richards. I’ve long been a Kipling collector and this has extensive listings of his Great War output. Unfortunately half of the book is on CD, including all the pictures. Presumably this was to save on costs but as the book is £125 they haven’t succeeded. Some of the illustrations show the most appalling copies, even my modest holdings could have improved on them.

27th February

A batch of European works that feature in Hager & Taylor’s 20 most significant novels of the Great War in their book ‘The Novels of World War 1 : An annotated bibliography’. I’ve appended their list to my Top 20 memoirs page. All this comes from my new high spec pc with Windows 7 which I was told wouldn’t run the old software but which so far it’s doing very well - if only I could remember all those myriad passwords!!

24th February

The US edition of the D. H. Lawrence novel ‘Kangaroo’ was supposed to go with the UK 1st which I’d bought on Ebay. Unfortunately neither the book nor a refund of my money ever arrived & the seller has gone strangely quite. Still that’s the first book ever to have gone awol in some 10 years of buying over the net so I can’t complain. Fabulous image on the Ackerman supplied by Dave Golemon. I’ve also relocated the image of Von Unruh’s ‘Way of Sacrifice’ to it’s correct place on p.29 and with a better image. A lucky find on ABE!

21st February

Firstly a welcome to Dave Golemon from Texas who’s sent in some splendid jacket images which will go up over the next week or so.

I’ve only just found out that one of my favourite bookshops closed over Christmas - Biblion in Gray’s Antique Market in London. A multi-dealer outlet it started in Bloomsbury some years ago & whilst not the cheapest place to buy books there was always the finest of collections on display. At this rate there won’t be many left soon. The web is all well & good but you only find what you’re looking for - no serendipitous buys.

I was about to hit the ‘add to basket’ button when I saw the “Trooper Bluegum” below on ABE only to notice just in time that this is all that is left of the jacket pasted inside the book - how disappointing is that!

18th February

Back from snow-bound France. The Hook below is to go with my newly acquired set of the Merchant Navy vols. of the Official History. Having also bought the reprint of the rare Occupation of the Rhineland vol., it informs me that the series has even more volumes than I’d thought, there being 12 volumes on the History of the Ministry of Munitions which takes the total to 109 (only 63 more to get!) . Does anyone know of a definitive listing? Most online bibliographies miss out some of the series. I’m about to change computers so lets hope this software is compatible with Windows 7!! (The desk pictures have gone to the Stats page)

7th February

The Ebay book finally sold for 4x the price of a similar copy on ABE!!!! Below I append a picture of THIS editors desk - staged? Well just a little. I’m always fascinated by the journey’s made by the books that come my way. A recent set of the Official History - Seaborne Trade has just arrived. Originally sold by a London Bookseller it made it’s way to Stockholm to spend most of its time in a Naval Library there. It then travelled to Frankfort where it acquired another stamp and it’s now made its way back to England. I’m sure there’s a thesis to be written in there somewhere.

3rd February

The only new book from me is the Blunden Anthology below which is surprisingly scarce in its jacket given that 10,000 copies were printed & the jacket is as thick as cardboard. I’m following a book on Ebay which has already been bid up to over twice the price that a couple of similar copies on ABE are selling for?? Most odd. And there are now 4 volumes of the Official History winging their way to me from around the globe. If you think John Marrin’s offerings are rather meagre these days, look back to his catalogue 36 which I just chanced upon again - more desirable books in one place than I’ve seen since, and all I suspect from the previous collection of one of my contributors!

31st January

As a change from adding new books I’ve attached the picture below. It’s supposedly a corner of the editorial office of Peter Scott at the end of his term as editor of that excellent journal of the Western Front Association, ‘Stand To’, taken towards the end of 1986. I was so envious of the treasures displayed that it started me on converting my existing, largely jacketless holdings, into what you see on this site. It’s clearly a very posed shot drawing largely on the holdings of Peter’s employer, Bertram Rota, showing several books that would later end up in their seminal Catalogue 245. I’ve since managed to find jackets for 4 of them - Richards, Edmonds, Rogerson & Mottram but the Rodker & Vol. 3 of the 1917 France & Flanders remain unclothed. I’ll find a permanent place for this photo somewhere on the site.

28th January

The Mesopotamia vol. arrived 2 days ago - so much for their estimate. Now can anyone now find me the last volume of the set? I see the new Turner Donovan catalogue has the Seaborne Trade set of the Official History. Can’t decide wether to carry on collecting them or not - there are some 97 volumes of the whole series, some exceedingly rare, and I can’t say I ever read them - but then that’s not the point is it?

22nd January

Most of my new arrivals are duplicates of books already on-site. A nice copy of Benn’s’ In the Side Shows’ from ebay but without jacket. I’ve ordered a volume of the Official History from the US and went for the cheaper postal option - it’s on it’s way, estimated delivery date May 28th!! How on earth can a book from the States take so long - deliberately delaying it for that length of time must cost more than sending it airmail. Perhaps they’re waiting for the North-West passage to be free of ice!

14th January

Melting at last & the postman’s been - hallelujah! 3 books from Babylon Revisited.

12th January

Another batch as the snow doesn’t seem to be abating and the postman has not been seen in a week. I think Seaford post office must be full of Great War books for me at the moment.

5th January 2010

Masses of new books to add so it’s just as well we’re all snowed in for the foreseeable future. I see the bookseller Peter Harrington is single-handedly trying to elevate the prices of War books. His latest list has a copy of Sapper’s ‘Sgt. Michael Cassidy’ for an eye-watering £1500. Of Sapper’s 6 War books this is probably the least scarce in it’s jacket, I can recall seeing some 4 copies in the last 5 years, so God knows what he’d ask for the others. And there was I hoping to pick up Men, Women & Guns or The Human Touch for £50 each. Mind you he obviously makes a comfortable living - he lists the supposedly inscribed copy of Austen’s ‘Emma’ for £325,000 which I remember passed through Bonham’s about a year ago for £180,000. I suspect the jacketed copy of Jacomb’s ‘Torment’ below is scarcer.

27th & 29th December

Bloated with too much turkey and Agatha Christie repeats it’s time to add a few more gems from the Vergette-Whitehorn collection.

23rd December

A splendid Christmas present in the form of a whole batch of new images from the Vergette-Whitehorn collection. I shall be putting them on in dribs & drabs over the next few weeks. Which will go someway to make up for the slight disappointment that the V & A will let me photograph their dust jacket collection but not put them on the site without extensive permissions - I’ll address that in the new year.

17th December

Having just finished ‘The Last Veteran’ I was made aware of some startling facts which connect us more closely with distant wars than I’d previously realised. I was 7 years old when the last veteran of the American Civil War died, & only missed by 6 years overlapping with the last survivor of Balaclava. My aunty Mabel, mentioned on the front page, was born in the same year that the last survivors of Waterloo & Trafalgar died! And the last Boer War vet? Well he was around until 1993! Suddenly the Great War seems so much closer.

16th December

Still reading Peter Parker’s excellent book ‘The Last Veteran’ it has reminded me of Dorothy Sayers novel ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’. More than almost any other Golden Age detective novel, the War floods nearly every page. The 2 minutes silence on Armistice day is used to move the body of the murder victim! Sayers herself was well aware of the effects of the War, her husband suffering from delayed trauma as a result of his time at the front. I don’t intend to put many such novels on site otherwise we’d be full of Agatha Christie (Poirot a Belgian War refugee, Hastings invalided back from the Somme) but this I think deserves its place.

The site seems to have been inducted into the Collectors Weekly Hall of Fame (see badge above) a useful guide to collectors on the web.

13th December

The later, Hutchinson, edition of Aubrey Herbert’s memoir comes from the Broad Street Book Centre in Hereford. It’s a scarce book in any condition but the jacket lacks the spine & is glued to the boards. A fine image though.

9th December

Little to add lately apart from the superb jacket shown below on Margaret Skelton’s scarce anti-war novel ‘Below the Watchtowers’ from 1926. The figure holding the sword of Damocles over the decadent throng below could have come straight from a Doctor Strange Marvel comic of the 1960s. It concerns 2 groups of English & German students separated by the War.

1st December 2009

Having found myself a copy of Matthew’s ‘Cornwall Territorials’ it made me think about the survival of some books. This was an expensive volume, 25/-. Given that the average novel cost 6/- in 1921 that makes it equivalent to £60 - 70 today. It can hardly have sold many outside of libraries and yet there are 6 copies on ABE whereas many of the popular novels of the time selling in vastly larger quantities are virtually unobtainable. The vagaries of survival!

25th November

I’m in the throws of what may be Swine Flu but is probably just a common cold so only a paltry offering of new things. Thanks to Tom Donovan for giving me the superb image from ‘Woman Under Fire’ cut from the original jacket. And thanks also to Book & Magazine Collector for mentioning me again in their Christmas issue. Still waiting to hear from the V & A as to wether they’ll let me photograph the British Library Dust Jacket archive covering the inter-war years.

19th November

A superb series of letters from a flyer in the Royal Naval Air Service. Some of the best descriptions of flying I’ve come across particularly for a volume published during the war. I’m reading Peter Parker’s ‘The Last Veteran’ at the moment. An excellent book and with a fine put-down of the tediously po-faced ‘Revisionists’. I never realised that over 30% of the male population aged between 20 & 24 were killed. Still we won in the end so it was all worth it!

18th November

To the new PBFA Military book fair at the notorious Deep Cut Barracks on Sunday. An excellent if remote venue where the highlight was a complete set of the Official History - Medical Services. 11 original and 1 recent rpt. But £1975 so it stayed there! Have also at long last found a signed copy of Anthony Bertram’s ‘The Sword Falls’, the future art historians novel about the devastating effect of the War on a working man’s family. Like every other known copy this was without its jacket. Apparently it was designed by Eric Ravilious but no one has ever seen a copy nor are there any sketches in the Ravilious archives. Remarkable for a book published at the height of the War boom in 1929 and mentioned by Cyril Falls. The Holy Grail for this collector!

13th November 2009

Reading a short story in the Sapper collection below (see Sapper page) I was surprised to read of a strangely modern occurrence. Our clubland hero has parked his car in St. James Sq. but has to leave his dinner engagement early to move it. Apparently parking is limited to 2 hrs so he has to drive it to Waterloo Place otherwise he risks a fine. And this was written in 1927!! I’ll probably read that he gets caught by a speed camera next!

10th November

There seemed to be an emptiness at the Cenotaph this Remembrance Sunday now that the Great War generation has passed away. It was after all built to commemorate that war. I’m extremely thankful that I was there on the 11th November last year when Henry, Harry & Bill made their last appearance. I may go to the Abbey tomorrow for the final service.

Many thanks to George Simmers for digging this rare Arnold Bennett jacket out of the Bodlean Library.

7th November

With the approach of Armistice Day, ABE have produced, with a little help from me, a short guide to the books soldiers were reading in the trenches. See here.

A trip to the Chelsea Book Fair yesterday didn’t yield much, but I noted a copy of Griffith’s ‘Up To Mametz’ inscribed to W.V. Tilsley on John Marrin’s stand - no jacket unfortunately & not cheap at £350. Worth checking some new stock from Peter Harrington on ABE - some 20 jacketed WW1 books which I suspect have come from a collection I’ve seen recently! All rather pricey though!

23rd October 2009

A trip to Canterbury on Wednesday yielded a few books. Long gone are the days when a town’s proximity to a University guaranteed a plentiful supply of secondhand bookshops. Canterbury now has only 2 of note, the Chaucer & the Canterbury, but both are excellent and well-worth a diversion as Michelin would say. I see that this site is now listed by the V & A no less as a source of book-jacket images. Hopefully it will bring some of these pictures to the attention of today’s young designers.

18th October

Sometimes I think there are only about a dozen of us collecting these books. Tom Donovan has had a copy of Lucy’s ‘Devil in the Drum’ for sale for £75 for several months now. Often described as the finest memoir of this or any other war it’s also extremely rare in its original edition - I’ve only seen it 2 or 3 times in the last 30 years - so very few can actually own a copy. Compare it to say Casino Royale, the first Harry Potter or early Agatha Christies’, all of which turn up regularly at auction but still command over £20,000. I know which I’d rather have on my shelves. Perhaps it’s just as well the millionaire collectors have left our field alone otherwise this lot would never have been acquired!

15th October

A batch of children’s novels from that incredibly industrious novelist Percy Westerman on the Children’s novels page - all courtesy of

Stella & Rose’s Books.

12th October

Only a couple of vols. of the satirical Pepysian view of the War to add, vol. 1 being only a 2nd ed. I recall seeing the last vol. some years ago with a colourful jacket. Also Money’s time with the RFC. One of our contributors is at present with the troops in Afghanistan so our thoughts go out to him for his safe return.

5th October

A batch of new additions are on their way once I have the relevant publishing details, meanwhile a small batch from the internet to be going on with. Just read a nicely illustrated book on children’s war artists ‘When the Comics went to War’ by Adam Riches. Highly recommended.

25th September 2009

I’ve just returned from a most moving ceremony to open the restored Lunette Battery, a Victorian Gun emplacement below Newhaven Fort. For any of you who are down this way and don’t know the Fort I can highly recommend a visit. For a small local museum the quality of the displays is outstanding with particularly fine pieces on the Great War & the Home Front in WW2. Open March till the end of October.

23rd September

Nothing fresh from me at the moment, the 3 new books below were all gleaned from ABE with apologies. I did pick up an interesting Rifleman’s guide to building trenches from Ebay. At over 250 pages I was surprised to find that so much could be written on the subject. With useful data on how much digging should be expected from each soldier - apparently the amount of soil shifted falls off dramatically after 8 hours! Plus a table to show the depth of penetration of a rifle bullet in different materials - some 5ft. In clay!

14th September 2009

If I read one more newspaper article saying that the last veteran of the War has died I shall go mad. Claude Choules is STILL alive - he fought at Jutland. Just because it was at sea doesn’t make his contribution any less worthy of remembrance and because he has lived in Australia for most of his life doesn’t expunge his service in the Royal Navy. Lets celebrate this man’s life while he’s still with us!

10th September 2009

3 new jackets for Sapper’s books - only the non-war ‘Bulldog Drummond at Bay’ is a 1st. I often ask myself why I collect Sapper - even his biographer, Richard Usborne, doesn’t have anything nice to say about him. The aforementioned ‘Drummond at Bay’ although written as late as 1935 under the spectre of the Nazis is still as xenophobic & anti-Semitic as the earlier ones. And as for Drummond & his cronies - they’re little better than heavyweight thugs. I tell myself it’s just for the jackets!

7th September

Several new images from Fons Oltheten who continues to publish Dutch translations of WW1 titles as can be seen on his website -

Dulce-et-Decorum

6th September 2009

Back from a long break in France. Several books here when I returned but most were on the site already - Hutchison’s ‘Warrior’, A variant ‘All Quiet’ which turned out to be published in 1952 & not the 1929 as advertised (I think {Putnam stopped updating the publishing details as the years passed) and a nice 4th ed. of Joe Maxwell’s ‘Hell’s Bells’, same jacket as 5th ed. Some rare Sappers on the way - more when they arrive. An email from Dean Echenberg who points me in the direction of his website of War Poetry.

25th August 2009

A few new additions but nothing more for the next few days. Many books are on their way to me from the far flung corners of the old Empire but the vagaries of the international postal system mean books from Canada take at least 6 weeks by air - perhaps that means by balloon!

21st August 2009

I’ve put in a new page for Erich Maria Remarque - just the 3 novels dealing with the War - German, UK & US 1sts with some contemporary reprints. It makes the previous page a little less crowded. Prompted my the arrival of the William Kermode jacket from Ebay on a 1931 reprint.

20th August 2009

A whole batch of jackets from a new contributor, Roger Joye. That still means that over the last two and a half years I’ve only heard from some 30 or so fellow collectors. There must surely be lots more of you out there with some interesting material. If you’re still thinking that the pictures are used for some nefarious purpose please be re-assured that the site is for information only.

18th August 2009

Came across this set of Lord Beaverbrook’s history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force on Ebay. Not a very good picture unfortunately but seeing all 3 vols. together is unusual, vol.3 being rather scarce. I shan’t be buying it however - £795 seems a trifle steep!!

17th August 2009

As you can see my attempt to add a second counter has placed it over some existing text. Moving it has so far defeated me so I may be forced to remove it. Came across yet another jacket for the early UK issue of Remarque’s ‘All Quiet’. It’s supposed to be the same year as the 1st but I won’t receive it for several weeks so can’t check yet.

14th August 2009

A rather tatty copy of Tank Commander Mitchell’s ‘Tank Warfare’ came today. He was in charge of the first English tank to meet a German one in single combat. At first I thought the book was meant for a young audience but it’s just his plain style. Full of interesting tank lore. I’ve put a new counter on this page as I assume most regulars have this page bookmarked.

12th August 2009

3 more books from Tom Donovan’s collection. I was looking at his copy of ‘One Mole Rampant’, that rare tunneling memoir which must be one of the most sought after books amongst WW1 collectors. Issued in a private edition of only 300 copies I’m wondering if it ever had a jacket. Tom’s copy looks so bright I’m sure it must have done. Worth going to George Simmers Great War Fiction blog to see his rendition from the Trafalgar Square plinth of a new 1000 line poem.

10th August 2009

A milestone reached - 10,000 hits, but it’s taken over 2 years! Perhaps there aren’t that many of us collecting these books. Strange really when you think that the Great War produced some of the most powerful literature of the 20th Century. There are probably 100 collectors of Stephen King or P G Wodehouse to every 1 of us. Maybe I need to sprinkle names like Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton around the site to increase the hit rate!! Have added a new page for Australian Pictorial bindings (mostly thanks to Nick Fletcher). See below.

7th August 2009

A few more books from Tom Donovan’s Collection. If you’re interested in a definitive history of the Indian Cavalry Regiments he has several copies of a new work on the subject.

6th August 2009

A fascinating little pamphlet from Ebay this morning ‘Tricks for the Trenches’ published in 1915. They mostly involve matches & coins with a few card tricks. I’m trying to picture the average Tommy, knee deep in mud and dodging the whizzbangs trying to lay out a few dry matches on an upturned crate to do these tricks! On the day of Harry Patch’s funeral I wonder what he would have made of them.

26th July 2009

Broadcasting House on Radio 4 this morning brought in Jay Winter to speak about the passing of Harry Patch. Barely mentioning the last Tommy, Winter used his time to promote the revisionist agenda. He trotted out the usual line about most of the memoirs being written by Officers and so were not really representative of the actual mood of the troops. This has always seemed to me to be a fallacious argument. Admittedly they were better educated and so more able to express in print their true feelings, but their sensibilities would have been the same as their men. Given that their generally elevated financial positions would have to some extent buffered them from the effects of the depression of the late 20’s, one would have expected them to be less disillusioned than the common soldier! Perhaps if more Tommies had written their memoirs the revisionists would see things differently. Harry Patch was never in any doubt about the awfulness of War!

25th July 2009.

And now Harry Patch has gone. All three men who were at the Cenotaph last November have passed away this year. Hopefully a National memorial service will swiftly be arranged - it’s the least the Government can do.

An excellent new book on dust jackets has recently been published - Faber & Faber : Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Joseph Connolly. Faber 2009. Whilst only covering the output of a single publisher it shows a wonderfully varied selection of jackets. Only 2 are Great War related but as one of those is Lucy’s ‘Devil in the Drum’ I’m not complaining - and I thought I had the only copy!

I must once again express my thanks to Tom Donovan who has allowed me to photograph some more of his excellent collection - they’ll be appearing over the next week or so.