The Aardvark Blog

The pleasures of selling a special book
30/08/2015

When you run a bookshop, all books - like all customers, have to be equal. One should derive as much pleasure from selling an Agatha Christie, as selling a rare 18th century tome. But we are all human and I confess that I was extremely pleased to sell a rare Duoglott English and Welsh Bible yesterday.

Published in 1850 and bound in a wonderful dark binding ( judging from the less sunned back panel in red morocco leather), the book had superb tooling round the boards, raised bands on the spine and best of all hand marbled page edges. Of all the arcane skills  the ability to marble the edges of book blocks ( which are of course not square as the book edges will curve at both ends) seems to me to be one of the most remarkable.

Something of a strange day yesterday as both bookshop and café were fairly deserted for much of the day, with a bedlem period in the middle. Today by comparison has been flat out virtually since opening. Who can tell.

Forecast for tomorrow looking mixed, but we have a lot of great stalls here and a superb band, so we should all have a great time.