As I’ve told my wife so many times I just can’t help buying books and now I’ve discovered why. It’s in the genes as both my Great Great Great Grandfather and Great Great Uncle (both named Charles Lowe) ran ‘The Great Book Mart’ in New Street Birmingham from around 1855 to 1903.
I’m putting together pages with some of their bits and pieces like fliers and signed books they published plus miscellaneous newspaper cuttings. Unfortunately the firm came to a sudden end as shown below.
Trying to scan documents for the above has been proving difficult as I’ve only had an A4 scanner up to now. I set out this week just to buy an A3 scanner and ended up with an all singing, all dancing wireless scanner/printer/fax/phone with 3 media drawers etc. but it still won’t let me stack up a pile of books to automatically feed through and scan. Am I asking too much? I’m sure it must be possible which reminds me of my Sony C7 Betamax Recorder which had a Betastack. This allowed you to stack four tapes with either a different recording on each or twelve hours continuous recording apart from the two minute tape changeover when the most important bit of the film usually happened! This was almost completely mechanical and I was really pleased to find this site about it. I still have it all in the loft somewhere.
More original artwork scans next week when I have mastered the new scanning beast but in tribute to Violette Szabo G. C. whose medals were sold at auction this week I’ve rescanned G105 ‘Carve Her Name With Pride’ signed by the author R. J. Minney. 
Monthly Archives: July 2015
Mark Peppé etc.
This weeks original artwork is the Piccolo 1972 edition of ‘The Foxhole’ by Ian Southall with cover artwork by Mark Peppé. Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to get a good photo with my camera and the colours are no where near as washed out as they appear. I think a visit to the library to use their photocopier is called for again.
I recently picked up a copy of ‘Make and Share’ from the HECTOR CLUB which was started by the charity ‘Help the Aged’ I have only found the one title so far but I have added a few of the club badges plus details of a competition winner and his ‘wonderful’ prize!
I recently featured the original artwork for a couple of slightly salacious covers for Caldwell titles by artist Hans Helweg. Helweg painted many titles for PAN and one day I’ll get around to putting them all on one page but he also did a two/three covers for Piccolo featuring ‘Oggy the Hedgehog’ The reason I put two/three is in two of them if definitely states Hans produced the covers and illustrations but in the third he is only credited with illustrating the contents.
Peter Charles artwork etc.
This weeks original artwork is by Peter Charles It is the cover for ‘The House At World’s End’ by Monica Dickens. There were three other titles in the ‘World’s End’ series published by Piccolo in the 70’s all with cover artwork by the same artist. Any information on Peter Charles would be gratefully received.
I’ve also been checking up on other pages that have been on the site for a while and realied I’ve been a title short on one of the Alfred Hitchcock pages namely ‘Stories Not For The Nervous Book 2’ which I’ve now rectified.
Another page I’ve now updated was showing the four titles in the ‘Rogue Herries’ series by Hugh Walpole with covers by John Raynes. I’ve added later editions with photo covers but not really too sure if I like them.
…. and finally is this a record for a first edition of ‘Casino Royale’ on eBay?
Alan and Alice In Wonderland
As I’ve mentioned before over the next few weeks I’m showing some of the original cover artwork I was luck enough to purchased recently. One of them was by Alan Lee and I’ve put it on a page along with one I already had which we are pretty sure is by Alan although not signed. I hope to be able catch up with Alan to get him to sign them for me.
On July 4th 1862 Charles Dodgson is supposed to have told his tale to Alice Liddell in a boat on the River Isis. This tale ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was first published in 1865 and has never been out of print for 150 years. PAN as usual decided to do something odd with their numbering and published it as G1 in 1947 and again as GP1 in 1948 but what happened to G2 to G100? It was published as a Piccolo imprint in 1973 and 1977.
