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Officer’s log book of a merchant West Indiaman engaged in supplying horses and mules to the enslaved African and African-American servicemen of Britain’s West India Regiments - and on the homeward journey bringing back a cargo of sugar manufactured by their enslaved cousins in the plantations of the Caribbean. Both Atlantic crossings were fraught w… Read more…

RH Tawney made a lasting impact promoting equality through the restructuring and democratising of higher education. For more than forty years, from 1905 to 1948, he served on the Workers' Educational Association executive, holding the offices of Vice-President and President. He served on the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, the Edu… Read more…

This scarce volume of confidential and outspoken letters includes many published for the first time allowing Charlotte Bronte to speak with her own voice in spite of her wishes that her correspondence to her friend Ellen Nussey should be burnt. `Men don't seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication - they always seem to think us un… Read more…

Annotated Japanese-English dictionary from Hut 7 by a Bletchley Park code breaker - a colleague of Alan Turing’s - who used this book to assist him in working on intercepted Japanese naval ciphers. 5 inches thick across the spine, this brick of a dictionary takes us straight into the heart of Bletchley Park in the winter of 1944/5 where its owner H… Read more…

A remarkable copy of Mahler’s letters inscribed by his widow Alma Mahler to a close friend of the couple, the bass-baritone (under Gustav’s baton in Budapest in the 1880s) turned Viennese musicologist Ludwig Karpath who has gone on to annotate the book, drawing upon his personal knowledge of the composer. 17 of Gustav Mahler’s letters to Ludwig Kar… Read more…

‘Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good’ - a small archive of original run production scripts from some of Broadway’s most acclaimed productions. All six scripts come from the estate of Harold - Hal - Prince, who produced and or directed such landmark musicals as Fiddler On The Roof, Cabaret, West… Read more…

100 specimens of horse hair taken from manes and tails of horses alongside portraits of the ponies with annotations giving details of each horse and their stables together iwth drawings, paintings,prints and photographs of individual animals. The collection has been compiled through the English counties of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Nor… Read more…

‘The Daredevil Aeronaut’, Vincent Lunardi’s account of his first balloon flights made in Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh in a collection of pamphlets which was owned by a leading Newcastle attorney and Clerk of the Peace, Thomas Davidson, who seems likely to have acquired this book in connection with Lunardi’s disastrous subsequent balloon ascent out… Read more…

British novelist Charles Kingsley’s annotated copy of Fisher’s essays about the political consequences for slavery of the admission to the Union of Kansas and Nebraska as potentially free - that is non-slaveholding - states. Broadly in favour of abolition but attached to the Southern cause by ties of family and birth - Kingsley’s grandparents were… Read more…

Two works devoted to women’s health by Nicolas Culpeper, both quite late though very uncommon editions which may have been issued together. The highlight of the volume is the elaborate woodcut delineating the differences between a foetus and a child together with a large woodcut depicting ‘The Form the Child lies in the womb’. Bound in contemporary… Read more…

Laid into a 1974 exhibition catalogue, a letter from Lucian Freud to the visionary Yorkshire art collector Ronnie Duncan (1928-) whose step-son was married to one of Freud’s daughters. In the letter, written in pencil in Freud’s characteristic almost-childlike handwriting, the artist thanks Duncan ‘(in advance) for the Grouse’ but apologetically bo… Read more…

Avowedly private journal of an English aristocrat, recent Cambridge graduate, Mayfair-resident, avid ball and theatre-goer and, paradoxically, future husband of the socialist and suffragist Ruth St Maur from whose union sprang the 8th and 9th Dukes of Portland. Known by his third given name, Frederick - William George Frederick Cavendish Bentinck (… Read more…

A gift given in the midst of Bletchley Park’s war-winning code-breaking work to a young woman working on the site, inscribed anonymously ‘from all at Bletchley Feb. 1942’. Given the date of February 1942 this seems likely to be either a birthday present or, perhaps, taking into account the phrase ‘all at Bletchley’, possibly a leaving gift for some… Read more…

An interesting vellum bound handwritten early text in very good condition. Attractive limp vellum binding, sound if a little discoloured. Remnants of spine supports laced into velum cover remain visible as are remnants of previous ties close to foreedge. Spine hand titled in brown ink ‘Ronda in Logicum’ [Logical Cycle]. Front endpapers cracking ove… Read more…

This handwritten letter on Metropolitan Police Office headed paper dated 8 th Feb 1895 is written by Melville Leslie Macnaughton or Mac as he liked to be known who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1889 when the killer known as Jack the Ripper was still thought to be active in the Whitechapel area of London. Macnaughton was actively involved in the… Read more…

A personal account book belonging to Henry Collingwood Selby (1748 -1839) of Swansfield House, Alnwick and Holy Island covering the period circa. 1777 -1797. Page after page records his observations and his financial dealings with the great, good and notable persons of the area. Names and places are peppered throughout. Money is lent to Dr Thomas P… Read more…

A scarce copy in good condition, 56 leaves of engravings, rebound in a later full calf. Boards lightly marked, 5 panel spine in good condition titled in gilt over red ground. Endpapers clean front and rear. Full page b/w engraved title page by Hukett in good condition. Contents include a list of subscribers’ names, characters and abbreviations made… Read more…

Ernest Shackleton's Heart Of The Antarctic Nimrod Expedition frontispiece signed by 16 crew members including the expedition leader Shackleton himself, Adams, Mackintosh, etc. Other signers include, in alphabetical order: Jameson Adams; Bertram Armytage; Philip Brocklehurst; Bernard Day; Ernest Joyce; Alistair Mackay; Aeneas Mackintosh; Eric Marsha… Read more…

Manuscript first draft from 1844 of the humorous book of illustrations that would become Roget’s 1850 publication with Ackermann that visualises mathematical terms or, as he describes it in the published title: Familiar Illustrations of the Language of Mathematics. Son of the philologist Peter Mark Roget, John Lewis would go on to edit his father’s… Read more…

Scarce cheap edition of Rochester’s poems with 9 crudely executed plates. Bound in contemporary sheepskin with wear to the head and tail of the spine; two volumes in one; two frontispieces and 7 further plates. Bottom 4cm of the first title page replaced with an old paper graft, losing the imprint which fortunately survives on the second title page… Read more…

Congratulatory letters to Sir Alfred Stanley Fordham K.B.E., C.M.G. (1907-81) who was educated at Eton and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge  before joining the Foreign Service and becoming a career diplomat. He was Vice-Consul in San Francisco in 1932. Other stations in his career included Lima (1933–1936), Guatemala (1936–1943), Los Angeles (… Read more…

A ‘late’ Turing paper in which the scientist refines the conceptual framework around his ground-breaking and eponymous creation, the ‘Turing Machine’ It was in 1936 that Alan Turing famously proposed an imaginary device which would manipulate symbols on an infinite strip of tape. With the simple set of rules by which this device operated, Turing wa… Read more…

Inscribed first edition of Well’s first non-scientific book which relates twelve topical conversations with an imaginary uncle. The subjects covered by the authorial stand-in called George and his uncle include fashion, the resemblance of ideals to interior decoration, the art of being photographed, the agony of having to listen to a near neighbour… Read more…

One of the overlooked gems of Europe pictured in an artist’s tour journal of his exploration of Belgium and Holland in 1850. Robert Taylor Pritchett (1828-1907) would later become a favourite artist of Queen Victoria and illustrate Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle but in these images we accompany the young traveller from Dover (seen looking up from th… Read more…

RESERVED Seemingly unique surviving copy of this 1804 work intended to teach arithmetic to young women. The author William Butler was quite prolific but this 1804 imprint intended for ‘the use of his own Scholars’ does not appear to be held in any library; the 1809 edition is recorded but OCLC but records no library holdings. Presumably printed in… Read more…