A Double Sided Dust Jacket Mystery

Here's a recent arrival at Withnail Books: a 1945 novel with a great cover design:

It was evidently a 'plucked from the headlines' affair, as the blurb says: "The Coastal Command kept constant watch over the seas around the coasts on the lookout for enemy submarines and aircraft as well as guarding merchant ships carrying food and munitions needed by Britain. The author skillfully portrays the hazards faced by the pilots and gunners on these missions and of the courage, high spirits and resource with which they countered them!"

What caught my eye though, as I took the dust jacket off to cover it with protective film, was that it had something printed on the other side...

I'd first come across a different double sided dust jacket a few weeks ago, and wondered if it was some kind of weird, one-off printing error. Then I realised it was just a wartime rationing/saving measure: take sheets of jackets that have been printed but then for whatever reason not used, and print on the blank side. I planned to blog about it, but Callum James at the excellent Front Free Endpaper, by pure coincidence, beat me to it.

But this copy of Wings Over the Atlantic intrigues me. Most of the (few) jacketed copies on ABE mention that the wrapper is 'recycled', and one listing mentions the title on the other side: Percy Westerman's The Rival Submarine. This copy evidently isn't the same. In fact, I don't think it's reprinted from a dust jacket at all. When I first looked it at, I thought it might be an illustration of a prehistoric stone on a little hill, but then my colleague Other Adam pointed out that it was someone's back:

I think early history is right though: is that a spear head, perhaps? At the top of the image is what looks like a village of huts, a pier, and a chap in boat...

It can't be a dust jacket though, as it's way too big an image. So what was it? A poster, or print? Does anybody recognise it? For now, it's a mystery.

Anyone for Odds Against Norway?

No, this isn't an early guide to next year's Eurovision. An unearthed cache of World War 2-related books has arrived in the Little Shop, mainly ones which were published not long after (or even during) the event itself. There are some cracking covers here, and a couple of scarce titles. Anyone desperately searching for a copy of Odds Against Norway with a dustjacket won't find another one online at the moment...

Really? A Rather Disturbing Victorian Guilt Trip Advert

One of the most popular posts in the history of this blog was a look at a rather disturbing Victorian children's book, so, for fans of rather disturbing Victoriana, here's an advert I found in a little book of recipes for things like jugged hare and stewed eel. The cover is rather sweet and and decorative...

... but flip open the front cover, and the first thing you see is this:

No messing about from Fennings there. Nice of them to point out that their powder is not heroin, too.

I love the language in these old ads. By the time I'd finished reading this one, I really was ready to try their product...

Is it just me, or does 'Italian Warehousemen' sound like a euphemism for something?

Penrith in the Dandy, 1969 (B.A.P. 02)

Back in the late 1960s, The Dandy was already over 30 years old, but still had Korky the Cat on the front page (Desperate Dan didn't make it onto the cover until 1984, amazingly). Back then, a page each week was given over to a feature called 'My Home Town', where a reader nominated their home, and the Dandy team supplied some relevant illustrations and fascinating facts.

In December 1969, issue 1463, thanks to reader Jacqueline Cherry, age 12, of 22 Inglewood Road (who won a £1 postal order!) it was the turn of Penrith.

Here then, for the first time online, is Penrith in the Dandy...

Being A Bookfairy

I think it might have been the legendary Driff Field who invented the term 'Bookfairy', as in people who pitch out at bookfairs. Having acquired the requisite set of folding tabletop bookshelves, I can now count myself among their number...

Withnail Books has only attended a couple of fairs so far, with the second being this Saturday, down in Preston.

Just a toe-dipping exercise really, with only a few boxes of varied books to see what tends to be popular. So far, there's no definitive answer to that. For example, on Saturday, a couple of nice fiction firsts sold, but not because the buyers were particularly looking for fiction. An Enid Blyton first sold to a lady who simply collected books with Scotty dogs on the cover, and a rare first of Stella Gibbons' A Pink Front Door sold to a lady who (wait for it) used to have a pink front door. But hey, they were happy with them, so it's all good.

Bookfairs can be a good place to buy as well as sell: there's usually a dealer who has something you have a customer for, often meaning that the biggest sales in the room are dealer-to-dealer, before the doors even open to the public. This means that bookfairs are pretty much the last place on Earth that everyone has a chequebook...

A Monster-Sized Book About Godzilla

As the very cool looking latest remake stomps into view on the horizon, one of Withnail Books' current eBay listings is a copy of one of the most lavish single books about Godzilla ever produced. This Godzilla Chronicles — not to be confused with the more recent book of the same title — was published in Japan in 1998. It's a massive brick of a book, 14.5 inches tall, with over 300 pages, packed with photos, including many which have rarely (if ever) seen print elsewhere.

The text is in Japanese, but there's not much of it: this book is all about the visuals. This is now a hard to find book: copies rarely come up online anywhere. It cost the equivalent of over £100 new back in 1998 (20,000 yen), and was a limited, numbered print run, long sold out... so bid now if you're interested (at the time of writing it's going to go to the US for a bit of a steal...).

A couple of bonuses which (I think) originally came with the book are included: a brochure for the (woeful) 1998 Godzilla, and what appears to be a repro of a brochure for King Kong vs Godzilla, complete with a period ad for a TV set on the back. Anyway, feast your eyes (oh, and the metal drum thing in the first photo is a diesel tank off the back of a 1920s petrol tanker lorry):

Bruce Robinson Not Funny: Official

So, a customer who happily bought a first edition copy of Bruce Robinson's novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman last week brought it back, wanting a refund. "It's full of four letter words!" he said, incredulously.

"The front flap says it is 'excruciatingly funny', and that's not true," he continued. "I read the first few pages, and they weren't funny, and I looked at a few pages later on, and they weren't funny either."

After a few beats, I realised he was deadly serious. We had a short chat about how his thoughts on the book were a matter of opinion, rather than a quantifiable fact, and how, as a secondhand bookshop, books tended to be sold as seen with no refunds, especially if the only reason was because he thought it wasn't funny.

"But it isn't funny," he countered, in exactly the same kind of voice Nigel Tufnell used when he said, "But it goes up to eleven."

By now the breathtaking audacity of the man had won me over, and I decided to give him his money back (after all, Withnail Books can never have enough first edition copies of Thomas Penman, and if I hadn't, he'd still be standing there now).

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman *is* excruciatingly funny, in my opinion, though it most certainly is full of four letter words, and many equally rude words with more letters than that, all used to wonderful effect. As reviewer 'A Reader' on Amazon opines:

Bruce Robinson's mastery of descriptive language was so delicious I found myself reading whole paragraphs aloud, to no one in particular, just to hear the words. Selections should be publicly read on Mr. Robinson's birthday by the best British voices available.

Hear, hear. If you're not familiar with the book and want to read a short review, here's what a certain Mr Simon Pegg thinks of it (in brief, he says it's "both moving and side-splittingly hilarious").

It was Robinson's first (and to date only) novel, and it caused quite a splash when it was published in 1998, not only because of the Withnail connection, but thanks to Bloomsbury's fantastic cover design.

After a hardcover which included typography, they took the gutsy decision to go entirely type-free on the cover of the paperback, and just let the utterly perfect photograph (by Matt Harris) do all the work.

Once seen, never forgotten. And as someone who regularly sells copies of the book that I leave face out, I can vouch for its efficacy.

Bruce Robinson is currently trying to get a film version of Thomas Penman off the ground. What a shame this kid is now too old, as he'd be worth casting if only to use this image on the film poster as well.