Blog posts of '2015' 'April'

Tucked inside a rather nice copy of Cecilia Anne Jones’ Under the King’s Banner: Stories of the Soldiers of Christ in all Ages, c 1880, (Gardner, Dalton & Co: London, 5^th edition), I found this little, four-page tract entitled Little Angel, by Eva Travers.  It contains the story of six-year-old Angel whose poor, widowed mother tells Angel, on Christmas Day no less that there is no food left and that she and her five siblings must starve.  “Oh, dear children” cries Angel’s mother “pray with me to God to help us, for I do not know where to turn for help”.  So Little Angel, on her way to school (yes, school, on Christmas Day!) stops to pray in the peace of a church and appeals to God for help and food.  Upon reaching home at the end of the day, she finds the dinner table laden with bread and meat and puddings. Her mother explains to Angel that a lady had heard her praying and, moved by God, sent a Christmas feast.  “She was God’s Angel to us. Let us praise Him, my children.”  The tract ends with a general appeal to children to pray and, if they are not themselves hungry for food, they will be hungry “in soul” and should be "God’s little servants, giving aid to others”.  There's even a wee engraving of Little Angel, praying and crying, in church. Such moralistic, Christian tracts were ten-a-penny in the late 19^th century, usually preaching Victorian and Christian values in the most unsubtle ways.  Eva Travers, who also wrote hymns and a range of other tracts and Christian works, was a prolific author of such stories.  This particular tract is No. 13 (one is tempted to think ‘God help us!’ here too) of a series called Little Tracts for Little Readers, which could be ordered by booksellers from the publisher (in this case Morgan and Scott of 12, Paternoster Buildings in London) for 3 shillings and sixpence per thousand. The book in which I found the tract is of similar ilk – highly moralistic, evangelical tales of “Christian soldiers”, martyrs and saints (incidentally the publisher of the book, Gardner, Dalton & Co, were based in the same places – Paternoster Buildings – as the Tract’s publisher).  I rather pity the poor children to whom the book and tract were given to read but no doubt it was done with love and the best of intentions.

Do you know how a bookworm might eat a conjugated leaf? Or what a stippled edge is? Or What cocked, shaken or starting books are? These are the sort of terms which litter descriptions of old, second hand and collectible books in booksellers' catalogues and, of course, on on-line book-selling sites.  Potential customers may ask, often in a sheepish or apologetic manner, what these terms mean. There's no reason to be embarrassed at not knowing though- these are terms that have evolved through use, and sometimes misuse, over many years and in many different part of the world. It's a language that can take a lifetime to become comfortable with and few genuinely master it.  And yet, if you like to indulge in buying beautiful old books from auctions, booksellers' catalogues or on line, it's important to understand the descriptive terms used or you might end up disappointed, or paying way over the odds for something you didn't really want in the first place, or so confused and put off that you miss out on a genuine bargain or that deeply desired book. Most booksellers are steeped in such booklore and only too willing, indeed keen, to share their knowledge with others but it is a sad fact of modern secondhand and antiquarian bookselling that there also some, especially on-line, who only purport to professional standards and probably know less about the books they are selling than I do about particle physics.  Understanding a little behind the language of booksellers will help book buyers spot the fly-by-night sellers who too often think because they have no evidence of an earlier printing, the book in hand must be a first edition. (If you want to try a little test, follow the link below to search results on ABEbooks (one of the best bookselling sites by the way) for first editions of Frank Richards' Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius (chosen for no other reason than I happen to have a copy in front of me right now).  Richards' plummy adventure story for boys was published in its first edition by Charles Skilton Ltd in London in 1952, yet you will see among the results a number published by Hawk Books in 1992. Some of the sellers offering the Hawk Books edition give enough information in their detailed descriptions for the savvy buyer to spot that they are not first editions.  At the time of writing however, only 9 of the 13 books returned in the search results appear to be genuine firsts. Search for First Editions of Frank Richards' Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius on ABEbooks. Some of the terms we frequently use in our book descriptions here at BookAddiction appear in our Glossary of Book Description Terms which we've added to our blog today.